Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Bimbo truck jounced down into Santa Cruz without incident, and ended up tucked away in a big, dark warehouse crawling with scorpions and geckos. Dancy teased a brown lizard while the gang transferred the loot into the trunk of the Park Avenue and Morales’ pickup. Ramos noticed and pointed her out to Martillo, who suddenly stepped in front of her. “You know, if they bite you, your flesh starts rotting and nothing will stop it. You just rot and stink.”
“Well that’s pretty charming,” she pointed her gun at the bright-eyed lizard and said, “Bang, bang, you little rotter.”
The Buick and pickup eased out of the building, down the wide dirt streets that were almost deserted during the late siesta, and through the main plaza. On the outskirts of the village, Martillo pulled into a bamboo corral surrounding a palapa restaurant on its own stretch of rocky beach. It was getting late in what had been a fairly hectic day and they would fill up on seafood before heading up towards the highway to Tepic. “Nothing like a big plate of shrimp to celebrate a bank opening, muchachos,” Martillo grinned.
“Unless it’s a big mother jug of Tequila,” Regalado chimed in from the back seat.
“No drinking!” Martillo said with some force. “We’ll party it up when we get back up to Huajimixtli.”
When they entered the restaurant, ducking under the frayed fringe of palm leaves, Dancy took one look at the clean blue water roiling around the rock outcroppings and was gone. She trotted down through sand as fine and gray as cigarette ash, heading for the water, dropping her clothes as she went. She kicked out of her panties on top of a black stone breakwater and did a flat racing dive that jarred Ramos with a memory that made him glad Martillo couldn’t see the front of his trousers.
She stroked out through the low waves, diving and basking like a dolphin. Martillo stared at her like the rest, thrown off-balance again by her sheer shameless bravado. He turned to see his men and the waiter gaping like guppies. He punched Santiamen’s shoulder with the heel of his hand. “What the hell are you guys staring at?”
They all started guiltily and Morales lamely offered, “Well, there might be sharks out there, you know.”
Martillo threw a dark look out to sea, where Dancy was heading back in a rolling backstroke, her breasts cutting above the water between each sweep of her golden arms. “They’ll just have to take their chances,” he muttered.
As she came out of the water, the gang tried to look at something other than Dancy stretching and idly toweling off with her shirt. The waiter had fled to the kitchen in terror. She pulled the shirt on and toyed with the buttons, walking up towards the palapa. At the eaves she turned and looked out to sea, putting a further strain on the elaborate fiction that nobody was watching her. She was back to being a sex object, big balls or not. Especially when the muscles in her butt bunched as she went up on tiptoe to point out a graceful little ketch beating around the point of Punta Mita. Martillo glanced at it, a pretty thing with raked masts and transom rounded like an old schooner. But mostly he was wishing she’d get dressed. At least put her jeans on.
She buttoned up the wet shirt, which clung to her salaciously, a pajama top effect which did little to set Martillo at ease. She walked over by him and said, “You know what would be even better?”
Having no idea what she was talking about, he said, “Putting on your pants?”
She shook her wet hair impatiently, eyes wide and flashing. “Pirates,” she said.
Back at the ruin, the promised whoop-up turned out to be about as downhome and heartfelt as Dancy had expected. The women seemed as jubilant as the men, probably relieved they’d made it back. Dancy suddenly realized that while drug trafficking was probably no more than some vague agribusiness in their minds, robbing a bank was a desperate and dangerous enterprise.
There had been work under way on the “plantation”: the bombed-out huts now almost completely replaced with temporary sheds of palm, cane, and bright orange and blue plastic tarps. Pretty videogenic, Dancy thought, looking down at the shiny plastic shapes amid the green sheen of jungle leaves. The huts themselves would probably be rebuilt in a month or so. Too bad it wouldn’t be as easy to repair the main house. Looking at the scorched blocks of stone jumbled among remains of walls and stairs, the chunky Indian women squatting by fire pits made from marble floor tiles, Dancy felt a sudden sad realization that Armando’s aerie would never be rebuilt, would just be one more inexplicable stone ruin in a country already full of them. It had been such a proud gesture, such a male upthrust…it had been, in its way, its own civilization. And now she watched the gang yahooing around the ruins, waving plastic gallon jugs of Tequila, shooting guns into the night, toking huge reefers of fragrant lime-green pot, grabbing at the women, drunkenly singing along with the Mariachi and cumbia tapes on the boom box…barbarian hordes. But it wasn’t those tough, desperate men with weapons that had brought this house down, she thought. This level of ruination was out of their league. She looked at the bacchanal going on in what had been once been an elegant ballroom and thought, “Cherchez la freakin’ femme.”
She walked through the party and into their private quarters, where Martillo, Ramos, and Santiamen were sitting around a table drinking and handling the money. They had put all the jewelry in a box, which Ramos handed to her with a graceful panache. She knew none of it was worth much except the wedding rings, but trickled the sparklers through her fingers, and clenched up fists full of necklaces. “So shall we share these with the women?” she asked.
Martillo looked blank, “What women?”
“The Indian women who cooked your supper and are outside right now, entertaining your troops,” she snapped.
“Well, sure,” Martillo could tell he was treading near some bizarre gringa peeve, but had no clue what it might be. He waved an expansive arm, “Good idea.”
She came up to the table and fanned a few stacks of bills, then broke them open and threw them into the air. She scrubbed handfuls of them against her face and stuffed bunches into her cleavage as the men watched impassively. “How much would you say?” she asked. “How much did we get?”
“We could have counted it pretty easy before you started bathing in it,” Martillo grumbled dotingly. He conferred with Ramos a minute and declared, “Maybe about 100 millions.” He waggled a hand in approximation, “Mas o menos.”
“Millions!” Dancy yelped. “No, wait, how much is that in real money?”
“In gringo money,” Martillo stressed heavily, “Maybe thirty, thirty-five thousands.”
Ramos mumbled something that made the other men laugh. “He’s right,” Martillo said, “It wouldn’t even buy enough cocaine to get us laid in Acapulco.”
“Speak for yourself, lover.” She had been kicking at the empty wallets and purses dumped on the floor and suddenly bent over to pick up a man’s wallet of very smooth pigskin. She snooped inside it in idle curiosity, recognizing the driver’s license photograph of the slim, white-haired retiree she had taken it from. Poking in the card slots, she ran across a bill folded very thin. She pulled it out and unfolded it into a crisp hundred. The men watched her, witnessing one more manifestation of the golden girl to whom money flew like a pet bird.
She sidled over to where Maldonado and Regalado were sifting through a big heap of pot and quickly rolled the bill into a perfect joint. She put it in her mouth and instantly had a light, Regalado cupping his meaty mitts around a kitchen match. As the century joint went around, everyone took a hit, even Martillo, a very infrequent smoker. Regalado and Maldonado were in ecstasy over it, grabbing it from each other and taking exaggerated drafts. “This is the mother of all cigarettes,” Regalado crowed, “Twenty thousand mothering pesos a hit!”
Martillo grinned at that, then looked at Dancy as she pulled up a chair beside him. “They are very good men and I love them,” he said, “But they are simple. They think they’re high rollers smoking up a quarter million pesos, but they’ve made fifty times that much in a single afternoon in the heroin trade.”
Dancy flipped the ends of her hair, “I spent more than that on this haircut. But it’s fun. What’s the price of a symbol?”
“That’s it. A symbol. Just like shooting up a town. But seriously, it’s not that much money.”
“Earning something or getting gifts is one thing. Just walking up and taking what you want it something else, don’t you think? We’ve got a saying, stolen fruits are the sweetest.” She turned to look at him and saw in his eyes the weight of what she’d said.
He held her with the hooded look, but just said, “Yes, bandida mia, they certainly are.”
She touched his forearm and started to say something, then smiled instead, “I don’t know about Acapulco, but around here you can get your ashes hauled for a fistful of pesos. Just shoo your pals outta here a minute.”
The men left, snickering and toasting the health and fortitude of the couple with deep swigs of Tequila and suggestive slurps on joints. She stripped quickly and started tossing money onto the bed. Martillo, pulling off his pants, watched her dumping the bags out and tossing loose bills around, her body in the center of a whirlwind of cash. She flopped on the bed, tossing banknotes into the air and burrowed into them like a gerbil. “It’s all ours for the taking, Marty.”
She was getting very excited and Martillo hastened to get to her. She thrashed in the cash, looking up and throwing handfuls of bills in his face. “Come right on in! Money talks, it walks, in runs down your legs like a rotten little reptile!” Martillo had no idea what she was raving about, but could sense her rising excitement and knew what to do about it. He dived into the bale of loose money and grabbed her to him. “Cash discounts to sailors!” she yelled, “Hormone improvement loans! You may already be a wiener! We’re talking trash, cash, and gash!”
Afterwards Martillo was wrung out and she was slathered with sweat, bills clinging to both their bodies. She started sticking bills on herself, at first idly, then in earnest, selecting purple 50,000 peso notes for her torso, blue 20,000’s for her arms and red 5,000’s for her legs. She got up and paraded in front of Martillo, upholstered in pesos, humming “She Works Hard for the Money”. He stared at her, shaking his head and wondering, and not for the first time, just what the hell he’d gotten himself into. It’s too bad she never knew it, because she’d have gotten a kick out of it; Martillo assumed she was a typical American woman. He’d heard they were tough and horny and money-happy, but he hadn’t expected to find those claims to be understated. She posed provocatively in front of him, slyly stripping off the bills. He was thinking, “Gringas! Damn!”
When she had covered herself in bills in front, she used the huge old mirror to plaster her rear. Then she started a slow, anti-inflationary striptease, peeling the bills off her, revealing small patches of skin. Cocking her rump at Martillo she pulled off a fifty with excruciating precision, singing, “Money, it’s a gas. Share it, wear it, ain’t no skin off myyyy ass.” She peeled a fifty off the indentation in her left cheek, kissed it and tossed it at Martillo, lying naked on a pile of banknotes, hands behind his head. She continued dancing and prancing, humming to herself as Martillo reached down and picked up the bill. He held it up to the light, staring at it as if he’d never seen money before. He grimaced, then grinned, at a very old memory and stretched both hands up, holding the bill overhead between his fists. Then he creased it and passed it under his nose like a cigar, bloodhounding the scent of her out of the faint odors of sweat and ink. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
When he opened his eyes, Dancy was standing in front of the mirror, plastered in bills, wearing the bandoliers and striking poses with the burp gun. She turned reluctantly away from her reflection and stared at Martillo. In a soft voice she said, “Where have you guys been all my life?”
His only answer was a shy smile and the slow, purposeful elevation of his cock. Dancy shucked off the guns and ammo as she walked over to him and dropped to her knees over his legs. She picked up two violet fifties and wrapped them carefully around his stiff, still-sticky shaft, crooning, “Money, so they say, is the rooty-toot-toot of all evil today.”