Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Page B

him tug a bandanna from his right hip pocket, wiping his face and neck while he walked.
    Luz was kneeling in the middle of the little graveyard. The shooter walked over to her and stood quietly, noticing how her hair clung to the back of her neck and how her brown skin shone from sweat and sunlight. After a minute or two, she rose, and Danny could see her saying something to him. The shooter nodded and they talked, at first not smiling, then smiling a little as they came slowly down toward the Bronco.
    When they were twenty yards out, Luz stopped and gathered a handful of flowers, asking the shooter to hold them while she got settled in Vito. He looked slightly uncomfortable clutching flowers, and when he handed them back to Luz, one fell from his hands and blew into the ditch on a gust of morning wind. Luz said never mind, but he retrieved the single yellow flower and held it out to her. As Danny started the engine and headed toward the beach, Luz was bending toward the flowers and smelling them. The shooter watched the road ahead, and smiled.

    By the number of Tecate bottles on the table in front of them, Danny guessed the hombres in the Teacapán beach restaurant had been drinking beer for a couple of hours, since late morning, maybe. The men had pulled a Dodge pickup close to where they were sitting and had the doors swung open with the truck radio pounding like the heat itself. The hood on the truck was raised, and one of them had apparently been working on it, judging by the oil and grease on his light cotton shirt. Danny could smell gasoline and concluded that he’d been fiddling with the carburetor.
    There were eight of them, drinking and sweating under the thatched roof, laughing too loudly for whatever the occasion might be, fingering their machetes lying on the table. One of them set a beer bottle on the blade of his machete and flipped the bottle end over end into the air, trying to catch it on the blade when it fell. The reach of his intent far exceeded his skill, and the bottle broke on the tabletop. His compadres laughed.
    Luz whispered the Mexican word for drunks— “borrachos.”
    The juggler looked over at Danny, Luz, and the shooter, mean little sneer on his face. The song blasting from the truck radio had something to do with nortearnericanos, something about what rich, sloppy jerks they were and how poorly they treated the migrant laborers stooped low in the fields of their truck farms. Danny picked up that much.
    Within two minutes, all eight were looking at Danny, Luz, and the shooter, talking in the way drunken men all over the world talk. Get two or more of them together— Mexican or otherwise—get them drinking a little, and the testosterone seems to obtain a multiplier effect from alcohol and numbers. Here in a thatched roof bar on the coast of Mexico, an extra dimension of the thing called machismo was sprinkled over the hormones and mob bravado.
    It was the kind of situation where you think, God, I’m glad I don’t have a woman with me, especially a pretty one. But Danny did, and she was Mexican and she was with two gringos, and that just complicated things even more. Danny was watching the shooter’s face and could tell he didn’t like what was going on, either. But he was staying quiet, drinking his beer, keeping one foot against his knapsack under the table.
    “Hey, gringo, got a match?” Oily Shirt was leaning backward toward the shooter, speaking rough English. The shooter looked at him for a long moment, then reached in his left breast pocket and took out the silver lighter.
    “Oh, no, amigo.” The bormcho laughed and switched over to Spanish, black hair falling partly over his face. “I no longer need a match, I have found it—my butt and your face.”
    Evidently the shooter didn’t understand, since he continued to hold the lighter toward the Mexican. The entire table of them was roaring with smart-ass laughter now. They’d found someone to ridicule, someone so old and