IV
Tijuana hadn’t changed much in the two years I had been away. Still the same six or seven hundred feet of dusty and dingy street running between two almost solid rows of saloons—perhaps thirty-five of them to a row—with dirtier side streets taking care of the dives that couldn’t find room on the main street.
The automobile that had brought me down from San Diego dumped me into the center of the town early in the afternoon, and the day’s business was just getting under way. That is, there were only two or three drunks wandering around among the dogs and loafing Mexicans in the street, although there was already a bustle of potential drunks moving from one saloon to the next. But this was nothing like the crowd that would be here the following week, when the season’s racing started.
In the middle of the next block I saw a big gilded horseshoe. I went down the street and into the saloon behind the sign. It was a fair sample of the local joint. A bar on your left as you came in, running half the length of the building, with three or four slot machines on one end. Across from the bar, against the right-hand wall, a dance floor that ran from the front wall to a raised platform, where a greasy orchestra was now preparing to go to work. Behind the orchestra was a row of low stalls or booths, with open fronts and a table and two benches apiece. Opposite them, in the space between the bar and the rear of the building, a man with a hair-lip was shaking pills out of a keno goose.
It was early in the day, and there were only a few buyers present, so the girls whose business it is to speed the sale of drinks charged down on me in a flock.
“Buy me a drink? Let’s have a little drink? Buy a drink, honey?”
I shooed them away—no easy job—and caught a bartender’s eye. He was a beefy, red-faced Irishman, with sorrel hair plastered down in two curls that hid what little forehead he had.
“I want to see Ed Bohannon,” I told him confidentially.
He turned blank fish-green eyes on me.
“I don’t know no Ed Bohannon.”
Taking out a piece of paper and a pencil I scribbled, Jamocha is copped, and slid the paper over to the bartender.
“If a man who says he’s Ed Bohannon asks for that, will you give it to him?”
“I guess so.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll hang around a while.”
I walked down the room and sat at a table in one of the stalls. A lanky girl who had done something to her hair that made it purple was camped beside me before I had settled in my seat.
“Buy me a little drink?” she asked.
The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.
“Yes,” I said, and ordered a bottle of beer for myself from the waiter who was already hanging over my shoulder.
The beer wasn’t bad, for green beer; but at four bits a bottle it wasn’t anything to write home about. This Tijuana happens to be in Mexico—by about a mile—but it’s an American town, run by Americans, who sell American artificial booze at American prices. If you know your way around the United States you can find lots of places—especially near the Canadian line—where good booze can be bought for less than you are soaked for poison in Tijuana.
The purple-haired woman at my side downed her shot of whiskey, and was opening her mouth to suggest that we have another drink—hustlers down there don’t waste any time at all—when a voice spoke from behind me.
“Cora, Frank wants you.”
Cora scowled, looking over my shoulder.
Then she made that damned face at me again, said “All right, Kewpie. Will you take care of my friend here?” and left me.
Kewpie slid into the seat beside me. She was a little chunky girl of perhaps eighteen—not a day more than that. Just a kid. Her short hair was brown and curly over a round, boyish face with laughing, impudent eyes. Rather a cute little trick.
I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.
“Hooch.” She grinned at me—a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons of it.”
“And besides that?”
I knew this switching of girls on me hadn’t been purposeless.
“I hear you’re looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.
“That might be. What friends have you got?”
“Well, there’s Ed Bohannon for one. You know Ed?”
I shook my head.
“No—not yet.”
“But you’re looking for him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe I could tell you how to find him, if I knew you were all right.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said carelessly. “I’ve a few more minutes to waste, and if he doesn’t show up by then it’s all one to me.”
She cuddled against my shoulder.
“What’s the racket? Maybe I could get word to Ed.”
I stuck a cigarette in her mouth, one in my own, and lit them.
“Let it go,” I bluffed. “This Ed of yours seems to be as exclusive as all hell. Well, it’s no skin off my face. I’ll buy you another drink and then trot along.”
She jumped up.
“Wait a minute. I’ll see if I can get him. What’s your name?”
“Parker will do as well as any other,” I said, the name I had used on Ryan popping first into my mind.
“You wait,” she called back as she moved toward the back door. “I think I can find him.”
“I think so too,” I agreed.
Ten minutes went by, and a man came to my table from the front of the establishment. He was a blond Englishman of less than forty, with all the marks of the gentleman gone to pot on him. Not altogether on the rocks yet, but you could see evidence of the downhill slide plainly in the dullness of his blue eyes, in the pouches under his eyes, in the blurred lines around his mouth and the mouth’s looseness, and in the grayish tint of his skin. He was still fairly attractive in appearance—enough of his former wholesomeness remained for that.
He sat down facing me across the table.
“You’re looking for me?”
There was only a hint of the Britisher in his accent.
“You’re Ed Bohannon?”
He nodded.
“Jamocha was picked up a couple of days ago,” I told him, “and ought to be riding back to the Kansas big house by now. He got word out for me to give you the rap. He knew I was heading this way.”
“How did they come to get him?”
His blue eyes were suspicious on my face.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they picked him up on a circular.”
He frowned at the table and traced a meaningless design with a finger in a puddle of beer. Then he looked sharply at me again.
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He got word out to me by somebody’s mouthpiece. I didn’t see him.”
“You’re staying down here a while?”
“Yes, for two or three days,” I said. “I’ve got something on the fire.”
He stood up and smiled, and held out his hand.
“Thanks for the tip, Parker,” he said. “If you’ll take a walk with me I’ll give you something real to drink.”
I didn’t have anything against that. He led me out of the Golden Horseshoe and down a side street to an adobe house set out where the town fringed off into the desert. In the front room he waved me to a chair and went into the next room.
“What do you fancy?” he called through the door. “Rye, gin, tequila, Scotch—”
“The last one wins,” I interrupted his catalog.
He brought in a bottle of Black and White, a siphon and some glasses, and we settled down to drinking. When that bottle was empty there was another to take its place. We drank and talked, drank and talked, and each of us pretended to be drunker than he really was—though before long we were both as full as a pair of goats.
It was a drinking contest pure and simple. He was trying to drink me into a pulp—a pulp that would easily give up all of its secrets—and I was trying the same game on him. Neither of us made much progress. Neither he nor I was young enough in the world to blab much when we were drunk that wouldn’t have come out if we had been sober. Few grown men do, unless they get to boasting, or are very skillfully handled. All that afternoon we faced each other over the table in the center of the room, drank and entertained each other.
“Y’ know,” he was saying somewhere along toward dark, “I’ve been a damn ass. Got a wife—the nicesh woman in the worl’. Wantsh me t’ come back to her, an’ all tha’ short of thing. Yet I hang around here, lappin’ up this shtuff—hittin’ the pipe—when I could be shomebody. Arc—architec’, y’ un’ershtand—good one, too. But I got in rut—got mixsh up with theshe people. C-can’t sheem to break ’way. Goin’ to, though—no spoofin’. Goin’ back to li’l wife, nicesh woman in the worl’. Don’t you shay anything t’ Kewpie. She’d raishe hell ’f she knew I wash goin’ t’ shake her. Nishe girl, K-kewpie, but tough. S-shtick a bloomin’ knife in me. Good job, too! But I’m goin’ back to wife. Breakin’ ’way from p-pipe an’ ever’thing. Look at me. D’ I look like a hophead? Course not! Curin’ m’self, tha’s why. I’ll show you—take a smoke now—show you I can take it or leave it alone.”
Pulling himself dizzily up out of his chair, he wandered into the next room, bawling a song at the top of his voice:
“A dimber mort with a quarter-stone slum,
A-bubbin’ of max with her cove—
A bingo fen in a crack-o’-dawn drum,
A-waitin’ for—”
He came staggering into the room again carrying an elaborate opium layout—all silver and ebony—on a silver tray. He put it on the table and flourished a pipe at me.
“Have a li’l rear on me, Parker.”
I told him I’d stick to the Scotch.
“Give y’ shot of C. ’f y’d rather have it,” he invited me.
I declined the cocaine, so he sprawled himself comfortably on the floor beside the table, rolled and cooked a pill, and our party went on—with him smoking his hop and me punishing the liquor—each of us still talking for the other’s benefit, and trying to get the other to talk for our own.
I was holding down a lovely package by the time Kewpie came in, at midnight.
“Looks like you folks are enjoying yourselves,” she laughed, leaning down to kiss the Englishman’s rumpled hair as she stepped over him.
She perched herself on the table and reached for the Scotch.
“Everything’s lovely,” I assured her, though probably I didn’t say it that clear.
I was fighting a battle with myself just about then. I had an idea that I wanted to dance. Down in Yucatan, four or five months before—hunting for a lad who had done wrong by the bank that employed him—I had seen some natives dance the naual. And that naual dance was the one thing in the world I wanted to do just then. (I was carrying a beautiful bun!) But I knew that if I sat still—as I had been sitting all evening—I could keep my cargo in hand, while it wasn’t going to take much moving around to knock me over.
I don’t remember whether I finally conquered the desire to dance or not. I remember Kewpie sitting on the table, grinning her boy’s grin at me, and saying:
“You ought to stay oiled all the time, Shorty; it improves you.”
I don’t know whether I made any answer to that or not. Shortly afterward, I know, I spread myself beside the Englishman on the floor and went to sleep.