“I suppose I can do that,
sir,
” Gatlin said, clearly offended by Tolley’s imperious tone. “Though I’m afraid that trained valets are in somewhat short supply in these parts.”
“No experience necessary, Chief,” Tolley said, smiling. “I’m quite capable of training my own help.”
“Yes, well, some of our committee members are headed over the border tonight for a touch of legal libation,” the mayor interjected nervously. “A little cantina called Las Primorosas. Perhaps we’ll see you over there, gentlemen.” He moved his entourage along.
“What’d you do that for, Tolley?” I asked.
“You heard how he spoke to me, Giles,” Tolley said. “How filled with contempt he was. I was simply exercising my own leverage, which is my money and my family name. I needed to remind him that I’m his employer. A notion that drives manly men like the chief wild.”
I introduced Tolley to Wade Jackson.
“If I may give you some advice, son,” Big Wade said to him. “The mayor is mostly harmless. But I don’t care who your father is, or how much money you have, you don’t want to fuck with Chief Gatlin. He’s smart, and he’s mean as a snake.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Jackson,” Tolley said. “And I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Now, if you boys will excuse me,” Big Wade said, “I’m headed south of the border myself tonight. I have a date with a bottle of mescal and a pretty señorita. You come on down to the paper in the next couple of days, kid,” he said to me. “I’ll show you around, get you set up with that Leica.”
“I like him,” Tolley said as we watched Big Wade lumber off. “And as for you, old sport, haven’t you certainly come up in the world! What’s this about the
Chicago Tribune
? Why, not an hour ago, we were discussing the terms of your employment as my valet.”
“
You
were discussing the terms of my employment as your valet, Tolley,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you I was going to get a job on the expedition as a photographer?”
“Indeed you did, Giles,” Tolley said, “and I don’t know how you did it. But this calls for a celebration. Let me buy you a drink at Las Primorosas. You do know what that means in Spanish, don’t you, old sport?”
“No.”
Tolley raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. “The beautiful girls!”
“I thought you didn’t like girls, Tolley?”
“Wouldn’t lay a finger on one,” he said. “But you never know what other opportunities for love lurk in the dark shadows of old Mexico.”
I realized as Tolley and I made our way down the dirt main street of Agua Prieta, that this was the first time I’d ever been out of the United States. And though we were only a hundred yards or so over the border, I already had the clear sense that truly I had entered a foreign land. It was Friday night and the street was crowded with vendors and hucksters selling food and trinkets, sex and cockfights. There were Indians dressed in brightly colored costumes, and beggars, some of them diseased or missing limbs, gaunt slinking dogs and street urchins. There were bars and cantinas and dance halls on every block, many of their doors open to the cool night air, so that tinny Mexican mariachi music and warm, smoky, perfume-and-tequila-scented air spilled into the street.
A young boy sidled up to us. “Hey, gringos,” he whispered confidentially in English, “you wish to go to the whorehouse, meet pretty girls.”
“Ah, not tonight, young lad,” said Tolley. “Perhaps another time.”
The boy tagged along behind. “You wish to see a senorita make love with a donkey?” he asked.
Tolley stopped, seemed to consider. “
Hmmmm . . .
A donkey, huh?”
The boy shrewdly sized Tolley up.
“Fifis,”
he whispered. “You wish hombres?”
“Now you’re talking, young lad,” said Tolley.
“Speak for yourself, Tolley,” I said. “I’m going to Las Primorosas.”
“Alas, perhaps later, little man,” Tolley said to the boy. “Right now we’re in dire need of refreshment.”
“For only one American dollar,” the boy said, “I take you to Las Primorosas.”
“We’ll find it on our own, thanks, kid,” I said.
“For only one American dollar, I show you the whole town,” said the boy, waving his arm expansively.
“Enterprising little bugger, aren’t you?” Tolley said. “I would give you a dollar just to leave us alone.”
The boy held out his hand.
Tolley fished a dollar from his wallet and handed it to him.
“Follow me, señors,” he said. “I take you to Las Primorosas.”
“Hey, wait just a minute,” Tolley protested. “I thought we made a deal.”
“What’s your name, kid?” I asked.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Lead the way, Jesus.”
A soft yellow light fell through the doorway of Las Primorosas. Inside wide plank floors were polished to a smooth scalloped patina, reflecting the flames from candles and gas lanterns. A mariachi band with strings and horns played at one end of the cantina and a few couples danced. A number of men sat up at the bar, quite a few Americans among them. Others sat at tables drinking with the Mexican whores, who wore gaily colored off-the-shoulder dresses with low-cut bodices and bright paper flowers in their hair. I waved to Wade Jackson, who sat with a pretty Mexican woman in the dim light at the end of the bar.
We took a corner table and ordered beers and shots of mescal. When the drinks arrived, Tolley lifted his glass. “Well, Giles, here’s to your new position.”
“You know what else, Tolley?” I asked.
“What?”
“Today is my birthday.”
“Well, damn, why didn’t you say so, old sport?” Tolley said. “This calls for a real celebration! Although I have a suspicion that French champagne might be hard to come by in this establishment.”
“I don’t care about champagne, Tolley,” I said, “but I do have a favor to ask you.”
“Anything,
mi amigo.
”
“Stop calling me old sport, would you? I’m younger than you are.”
“Just an expression, Giles,” Tolley said with feigned hurt feelings. “Everyone uses it these days in the halls of the Ivy League. Haven’t you read
Gatsby
?”
“Yeah, but Fitzgerald was using it ironically.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Giles,” Tolley said, “you don’t need to lecture me about Fitzgerald’s use of irony. I’m an English major myself, you know.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to you, old sport. Happy birthday and all that rot. And congratulations on your new position.”
I drank the shot in one quick toss as I had learned to do with whiskey back home. It was the first time I’ve tasted mescal, and I could feel the raw heat of it going down my throat, spreading through my stomach like a small depth charge, burning its path to my brain. To think that several hours earlier I’d been as low as I ever had in my life, feeling so sorry for myself that I had almost given up and headed back to Chicago. Now I had my first real job as a photographer, it was my seventeenth birthday, and I was sitting at a corner table in a Mexican cantina, an exotic new world of color, light, and smell, listening to lively mariachi music, watching the musicians and the pretty girls, the couples dancing, the men laughing at the bar.
Two of the girls came over to our table and pulled chairs up beside us.
“Unless you have a brother, sweetheart,” Tolley said to the girl beside him, “I’m afraid this is going to be a very short relationship.”
The girl next to me was real pretty. She had a broad face and high cheekbones, smooth brown skin, and shiny black hair pulled back from her face. She had large dark eyes that seemed to shine in the candlelight. She leaned against me so that I could feel the softness of her breasts on my arm . . . she smelled like flowers. She whispered something to me in Spanish.
“I’m afraid I don’t speak Spanish,” I said. “But I’m going to learn.”
“For five dollars I will make you very happy,” the girl said in English.
I have to admit something: I’ve never been with a girl before . . . not that way. Annie and I talked about it plenty of times, but she wanted to wait until she was married, and so all we ever really did together was kiss, and touch each other a little. And though some of my college buddies used to go down to the red-light district in Chicago, I never really liked the idea of paying money to make love to a girl. I guess I’m kind of a prude that way. And now suddenly I got real shy. “Maybe we could just dance first,” I said to the girl. I stood up quickly and offered her my hand.
I could tell right away that the dance steps I know from back home . . . like pretty much everything else from my “old” life . . . were just not going to work with this music. But I like to dance and I wanted to learn. The band members nodded and smiled at me as they played, amused by my clumsy efforts to follow the girl’s steps. “Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of it,” I said.
The girl laughed and rearranged my hands, drawing me closer. I could feel the fragrant heat radiating from her body like a warm spring wind, her softness. “Yeah, I definitely think I’m getting the hang of it. Don’t you?”
The girl stopped dancing and I felt her grip tighten on my arm. “I am new here,” she said. “If no men take me to my room, the
patrón
will turn me out. Please, would you come with me after this song? For five dollars I will make you happy.”
So, at the end of the dance, I followed the girl out the back door of the cantina, which opens onto a courtyard. On the far side of the courtyard was another low adobe building, with a number of doors all painted different colors. She led me through the door painted yellow, and into a tiny room where she lit an oil lamp on a green wooden table. In the dim smoky light of the lamp I could just make out a single iron bed frame with a thin straw mattress covered by a rough woolen blanket and a lumpy pillow covered in a gunnysack. It was not exactly a romantic setting. The girl sat down on the bed and gestured for me to sit beside her.
“I don’t even know your name,” I said.
“Magdalena.”
“That’s real pretty. I’m Ned.”
“You must give me five dollars now, Ned,” she said. “And I must go to give it to the
patrón,
and then I will come back.”
“All right.” I handed her a five-dollar bill and she left the room and I sat alone on the bed. When she came back, I stood up and she reached behind her back and began to unhook her dress. I guess I got shy because I put my hand on her arm. “No, that’s all right,” I said. “Let’s just sit here and talk for a minute. Then maybe we’ll go back in and dance some more.”
“You do not find me pretty?” she asked.
“Sure, I do, I think you’re real pretty,” I said. “But I just thought we could talk first for a few minutes. How is it that you speak such good English, Magdalena?”
And so we sat side by side on the bed and began to talk. And soon the girl was just a girl again instead of a whore. And I was just a fellow instead of a customer. And then we were just a couple of kids talking. She told me that she had grown up outside the small village of Bavispe in Sonora. She told me that her family were peons on a hacienda whose
hacendados
spent most of their time in Paris, which, she explained solemnly, was a city very far away across the sea. The
hacendados
had survived Pancho Villa’s sacking of their hacienda in 1913 because they were out of the country for the duration of the revolution and President Obregón had restored their property to them in 1920, although their land holdings had been greatly reduced in size by the new laws of the government. But they were still very important ranchers in the state and their lands had steadily increased again since the end of the revolution. The current
hacendado
was a son who had come back from Paris to live in the hacienda with his French wife and run the family ranching operations. All this the girl told me, and that she had three brothers and four sisters. She said that her father worked as a blacksmith in the village and her mother as a domestic in the
hacendados’
house. That from the time she was a very small girl she had worked with her mother in the house, and that there, due to the kindness of the
hacendado
’s wife, she had learned to speak both French and English. There was not always work on the hacienda for all the children of the peons, and when they reached a certain age, the girls were encouraged to marry or to move into the cities or border towns to find work. One day the padre came to the hacienda and the girl’s parents told her to pack her bags, the padre had found work for her. The priest took her away, brought her here to Las Primorosas. Money changed hands. Of course, her parents did not know what kind of work she was doing in the border town, and the girl would never tell them. In this way, the priest had brought a number of village girls here over the years, their shame assuring their silence. Magdalena told me that she had only been here a few weeks, and she was afraid that the proprietor was going to put her out because she did not do as much business as some of the other, more experienced girls.
“Oh, I bet you’ll get the hang of it,” I said, and then I realized how stupid this sounded, as if we were still discussing my dancing. “You’re real pretty.”
She blew out the lantern and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “Are you certain that you do not wish to lay down with me?”
“No, that’s all right. Maybe another time.” And I gave her five dollars more to keep for herself.