Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [82]
Though a big window fan sucked the cigarette smoke out of the cantina, the drain holes in the concrete floor smelled of stagnant water and spilled beer. R.C. could also smell the ammonia-like reek of the long stone trough in the baño, which had the words SOLO PARA URINAR painted over the open door. Most of the electrical lighting in the cantina came from the neon Dos Equis and Carta Blanca signs above the bar; but there was a purple stain to it, from either the gathering of the dusk in the streets or the tarnished glow inside the clouds west of the mountains, and the faces of the men drinking at the bar had the garish characteristics of cartoon figures. For R.C., the drinks the mulatto had bought him were coming at a high cost. His head was ringing, his heart was beating faster than it should, and the atmosphere around him had become as warm and damp and suffocating as a wool cloak.
Why was he having these thoughts and mental associations and seeing these images? he wondered.
The mulatto wore a smoke-stained, greasy wide-brimmed leather hat with a leather cord that flopped under his chin, and a leather vest without a shirt and striped suit pants without a belt and boots that had roweled spurs on the heels. Locks of his orange hair were flattened on his forehead; his eyebrows formed a solid line; his square teeth and the bones in his face and the thickness of his lips made R.C. think of a hard, compact gorilla. The mulatto filled his mouth with mescal and gargled with it before he swallowed, then pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his chin. “What’d you say you was doing here, man?”
“Trying to get my tire fixed,” R.C. said.
“Yeah, me, too, man. That’s how I ended up on a street full of puta. Getting my tire fixed. That’s good, man. You ain’t been in back yet?”
“I’m here ’cause a guy gave me a ride here.”
“You want a ride, there’s a chica out back will buck you to the ceiling.” The bartender set a plate of sizzling onions and sliced green peppers and skillet grease and tortillas in front of the mulatto and went away. The mulatto rolled a tortilla full of onions and peppers and started eating. “Put something in your stomach, man. But don’t drink no more mescal. You look like you been on board a ship in a bad storm. Hey, Bernicio, give my friend some coffee.”
The bartender filled a cup from a tin pot that sat on a hot plate by the line of liquor bottles on the back counter. R.C. lifted the cup to his mouth, blowing on it, hardly able to swallow because it was so hot.
“What kind of work you do, man, besides drive around in Mexico and have flat tires?” the mulatto asked.
“I buy and sell livestock.”
“Wild horses, huh?”
“Sometimes.”
“For dog food?”
“I don’t know what happens to them.”
“You guys have shot most of them, hombre. There ain’t many left. Where do you go to shoot them now? On the street of puta?”
“I’m just the middleman.”
“You’re wearing ironed blue jeans and a clean cowboy shirt with flowers printed on it. You got Tony Lamas on your feet. You got a shave and a new haircut, too. You’re down here for puta, man. You ain’t been buying no horses.”
“I’ve got me a girlfriend here’bouts, but I don’t call her what you just said.”
“When you’re in the sack with a woman, hombre, it’s for one reason, and the reason has got one name. Don’t feel guilty about it. It ain’t natural for