Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dancy didn’t mind living in ruins. The helicopter attack had dramatically reduced the Gavilan standard of living, but she found them still comfortable enough. In fact, the post-apocalyptic ambience reinforced the wildness that was coursing through the shambles of what social structure she’d ever had. The men, who had not actually lived in the aerie in its prime, found the basement and bombed-out galleries nicer than their previous quarters, especially after a little custom remodeling.

Santiamen had hauled a mattress into the immense tile shower stall that was all that remained of the master suite and apparently enjoyed sleeping in the echoing hell he created by hanging a blanket over the door and playing “Los Bukis” albums at distortion levels on his portable tapedeck. Regalado and Maldonado had turned the charred library into a combination of adolescent wallow (thoroughly plastered with crude smut and religious posters) and an impregnable redoubt fortified with stones and sharp stakes, bristling with guns, and heaped with ammunition. They sat up nights smoking weed and jabbering about bringing women in for their entertainment, but it was unlikely anyone would come near their position after dark for fear of drawing their hair-trigger, if scramble-brained, attentions.

Martillo, of course, would have been happy shacked up with Dancy in a trash-masher. They’d settled into a small room that had been a wet-bar/pantry off a covered downstairs porch. It was a quiet, open-air life that Dancy enjoyed. They ate on a rosewood table with an unobstructed view of the valley and green hills opposite, lounged in huge Yucatan hammocks, keeping drinks cold in a small propane refrigerator that had survived the holocaust. The “bedroom” was windowless, but had wide doors and Martillo had hauled in an implausibly ornate five by eight foot mirror to cover one wall. A “matrimonial” size mosquito bar turned their bed into a filmy fortress of fornication.

Dancy would get up when the gamecocks crowed and walk out on the porch; shivering naked in the pale jungle dawn, looking out at the moist trees, the waterfall up the canyon, perhaps even a deer or riding mare grazing across the valley. She would make coffee and drink it while swinging in a hammock. Sometimes Martillo would come out and join her there, and they would have the agile, rocking hammock sex that she enjoyed. Then they’d snooze under a soft cotton rebozo until breakfast time, when two older women slipped in to leave eggs, beans, tortillas, and plates of diced tropical fruit on the table.

After sunset they would eat game and rice and quesadillas by propane light or candles, then sit and chat over drinks in the warm darkness, perhaps play dominos or listen to Torres strum his guitar and sing sad old ranchero songs, some of which Dancy knew from a Linda Ronstadt album. She’d found out Torres was quite a Ronstadt fan and sometimes sang “Desperado” or “Lush Life” for him, which would plunge him into melancholy smiles and hours of musical tristesa.

The musical moments, the gang hunkering around a dying courtyard fire to listen and sip tequila, brought out a side of Ramos that amazed Dancy. The normally tight-faced torpedo would be obviously moved while Torres played, his creased face relaxing to the sad songs, uncharacteristic half-smiles drifting over his thin lips during lighter tunes. He called Torres “Maestro” any time there was a guitar in his hands and after one of the evening serenades he grabbed him by the nape and held him a minute telling him what a great player he was for an Indio–as close as he would ever get to an emotion.

As the men started turning in Dancy and Martillo would retire to the golden haze of their mosquito bar and get serious about hammering out the physical aspects of their relationship, Then she would sleep; deep, black and dreamless, Although Martillo often lay awake, troubled but unmoving; dark, blank eyes sifting the blank darkness.

The lack of amenities didn’t bother her much. She didn’t miss the electricity at all and the lack of plumbing only meant she did her business in the outhouse, which she found campy, and her bathing in the stream, which she found delightful. Her time in the Sierra had touched off an explosion of a blood fever that had always laid buried inside her–“The Call Forwarding of the Wild”, as she told an uncomprehending Martillo–but now she was feeling another side of the highlands, a peaceful solitude that she couldn’t identify, but responded to deeply, like an old slow song on the radio. I’m going native, she thought; a few more months and I’m gonna round up old Cheetah and head straight for the hills. But even as she said it, she knew it was just a recess from what was really happening, that she hadn’t yet hit the bottom of the tank of feelings and events she’d plunged into. That didn’t bother her any, either. For once in her life she didn’t mind waiting.

For Martillo they were halcyon days whenever he was in the mosquito tent, or alone with Dancy anywhere. He was a stone-gone moondog and honeymooning her brains out. But whenever he was with his men, or thought of business or the future, he plunged from gold pink clouds of glory to black stone ruins of despair. He didn’t really know how to run things, and things had changed anyway. No cash was coming in, even from underlings who owed for delivered goods. And the new deals had vanished in a fog of detached conversations and unreturned calls. He was not being recognized in the trade and nobody from the echelons in Guadalajara would contact him. The contacts he did have were from people demanding to know what had happened to Armando and why, and from people being very hostile about his planned moves into their distribution territory. There was no respect in their voices. Martillo seesawed between a guilty despair and wanting to take a drive into the city and bust a few chops.

To Dancy, it was no problem at all. She pointed out that they still had vehicles, weapons and desperate men at their disposal. “It all seems pretty obvious,” she said, laying in a hammock to enjoy the night breeze while buffing her nails. “We go down to Buenas Peras, that little town Armando took me for lobster dinner that night, and rob that bank.”

Martillo, who had been squatting on his heels on the porch and leafing through statements from bank accounts that he couldn’t seem to access, turned on the balls of his feet to stare at her. Well, he finally thought, it’s certainly an idea. Intrigued, he pulled a stool over to where he could look into her face and asked her why they should rob a bank. Of course she had that one covered.

“Because that’s where the money is.”

Martillo nodded at the power of that logic. Then asked, “But why Buenas Peras?”

Continuing reasonable, Dancy said, “Because that’s where the bank is.”

He had to hand that one to her, too. He got up and walked out to the porch to think, so he didn’t hear her say to herself, “Besides, you know how I always admired Bonny and Clyde.”

To Martillo, it had the tones of the inevitable. Not just the bank robbery suggestion, which should have occurred to all of them before she thought of it, but that Dancy would be coming up with the ideas. He walked back in and sat down on the stool. He said, “I don’t like it.”

She kept looking at her nails, said, “What’s not to like?”

“This,” Martillo said, “Before you came into my life, I had a nice house, a good car, a good boss, a good job, a simple life. Now my boss is dead, by my hand–a sin and crime–my job is gone, my house is blown up, my life is crazy, and all I have is a desire I can’t seem to put out. What have you done to me?”

Dancy laid her nail file on her thigh and gave him her full attention. “Look sweetie. Before I ran into you frito banditos, I had a millionaire father and husband, lived in luxury. Now I’m out her in the bulrushes without even any cosmetics and no idea who’s at Wimbleton.”

“But you have something to go back to, I don’t. This is all the life I have.”

“You know what? I don’t want to go back. I kind of like banging around the jungle with a bunch of drugs, guns and studs.”

“I like it, too.”

“So? Let’s go do some crimes.”

“Are there any others you prefer?”

“Well, let’s see. Forcible gang rape comes to mind. Since we have a gang and all. Maybe a side of sodomy.

“Well, we’re just international drug terrorists, but we’ll try to keep up.”

“You’re doing fine, so far.”

“But for how long?”

“I’d estimate about forty five minutes nonstop last night. But who counts?”

“I mean before you get tired of me?”

“Come on, now. I told you, Marty…I’m with you. I’m your girl.”

“But for how long?

“For now. What else it there?”

“Tomorrow. The next day.”

“Ah, yeah. The land of Mañana.”

“I can’t stand the thought that tomorrow I could lose you. I have known that thought, and I can’t stand it.”

She gave him a long look, trying to read what he was talking about. She reached out and brushed back his bangs and said, “Lighten up, Stud. Tomorrow you could be dead.”

She was shocked to see him change. A somber Indian cast fell across his face, a seething expression. He jumped up from the bed, pacing the room like a panther. flexing his muscles with tension and emotion. One of the things Dancy had first noticed about him was that he never flaunted his body; quite the contrary. Now he strutted, his musculature bulging and shining with sweat. She could see on his face what other men must have seen in the ring, a defiance of death itself, of life itself.

“Impossible!” he hissed, “Look at me. I am alive. I will stay alive. The best men in the world tried to beat me down. I crushed them all. They’ve tried to kill me, but now they’re dead, aren’t they? And I am still alive. I dance with death every day, but I call the tune. If you could see me for who I am, you would know it.”

He went into a fighter’s attack, punches whirling almost too fast to see, ducking under an imaginary flurry of blows, riding his toes, throwing the hard leather of his bare hands. Dancy stared at him, biting her upper lip. He was naked power and damage, all right, a tornado of tough brown flesh. He stopped and gasped, eyes searching wildly. Light as a kitten, he bounced in front of a massive carved hardwood wardrobe and started punching it. Dancy’s eyes widened as she watched him moving in on the splintering wood, throwing from the knees, hooking explosive shorter punches up with a machinelike bunching of shoulder muscle. Her nostrils flared and she leaned forward, wanting to feel the wind from the blows, to grasp a tricep as it shot out a fist, to jump on his back and ride him. She was completely wired when he turned from the ruins of the wardrobe, his chest heaving, washboard belly pulsing, hands bleeding. And very wet. She flopped back on the bed and held out her arms and he was on her and in her so fast she lost her breath.

“Your the living end, Marty,” she whispered in his ear. “You are the man to beat.”

Santiamen was leaning on the parapet below their room, pausing in his silent nightly prowls to keep a watch on the watchmen. He sensed Ramos beside him, heard him light a cigarette. They stood together, watching shadows flicker on the curtains and listening to the sound of splintering mahogany. “She must be teaching him to smash up furniture,” the big man drawled.

Ramos grunted, “Next she’ll have him playing tennis.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight                                                                Chapter Thirty