Angels in Heaven

uncrossing his long legs and then
laboriously crossing them again the other way around, “one way to make yourself
sick, a doc told us—and it makes me sick just to think about it—is, pardon the
vulgarity, darlin’, to actually eat shit, and I don’t mean take a little abuse
from the mother-in-law over your drinking problem, I mean eat shit. Which,
somehow, Willy managed to do.”
    “Probably a welcome break from
Mexican prison food,” I remarked, always seeking the mot juste.
    Jeff ignored me.
    “So Willy gets sick. The
leathernecks, using a one and a half ton they’d rented in San Diego and driven
down in, hijack the ambulance taking Willy to the hospital in a narrow back
street by cutting it off suddenly. One marine sprays the engine and rad of the
ambulance from the front so it won’t be going anywhere, while the other one
shoots out the lock on the back door, then shoots off the chain attaching Willy
to his bed, which is also attached to another poor sick mother and his bed. This second guy takes one look at the ferocious madman with a face painted
in black, red, and green stripes who is shooting bullets everywhere and
screaming and hollering, and he promptly passes out.”
    “Holy cow, who wouldn’t?” said Doris.
    “Holy cow is right, darlin’,” said
Jeff, pinching her cheek in a friendly fashion. “So. They grab Willy, and all
pile in the truck and take off for out of town where the Cessna is waiting,
warmed up, in the middle of a field somewhere. They climb aboard, chuck a
grenade at the truck—because why leave a useful thing like that behind for the
grease-balls?—their term, not mine, darlin’—and after one stop for refueling
somewhere along the line—where, they never told me—they made it back to a ranch
outside San Diego. And that’s all she wrote.
    “Well, almost all,” said Big Jeff. “I
had a card from Willy the other day saying hello, and he’s now living in a cave
near El Paso with a girl, her two kids, four cats, two dogs, eight, at last
count, rabbits, a burro named Jane Fonda, and a hand loom.”
    For once no mot juste came to
me.

CHAPTER
TWELVE
     
    By the time I did finally come up
with le mot juste, Jeff, having devoured everything on Pepe’s snack
platter except the design, was long gone, and Sara, after three of those anejo doubles, was well on her way. I must confess that I too, after eight or so
Mexican beers, which are somewhere between half and twice as strong as ours,
was beginning to feel the first hint of that old familiar glow back behind the
peepers.
    After our pleasant interlude on the
Rocamar’s patio, we strolled down the hill toward the center of things, pausing
briefly to watch two of the local basketball teams in action at one end of the
large town square. In another corner hordes of kids who should have been long
in bed by our stuffy standards were disporting themselves at a row of tabletop
soccer games. As we were wandering by, Benny and I somehow got challenged into
a game by this urchin who must have been all of seven and who had one arm
immobilized in a full plaster cast that was covered with the usual scribblings
penned by his pals. Benny and I protested vigorously that it would be too cruel
even to contemplate such a mismatch, but to make the cheeky little devil happy,
we finally inserted our five pesos in the slot that released die ten balls, and
a small but noisy crowd of ragamuffins began to gather around us. Me and Ben
agreed in a whisper to take it easy on the poor kid, because after all, we
didn’t want to completely humiliate him in front of his gang, so we’d let him
score a goal or two accidentally on purpose.
    I guess we took it a little too easy
because he beat us in the first game 8-2. Then Benny and I withdrew slightly
for a strategy conference; what we decided was to prohibit the little hustler
from using his broken arm to help. See, although he of course couldn’t grip any
of the handles with his broken arm, the cheater was using it to nudge a row of
men over from time to time. Having straightened that out, we really bore down
during the rematch, the final score of which was 9-1, and the one goal we did
score he scored on himself trying a flashy back pass.
    “Well, you can’t win ’em all,” Doris said unnecessarily as we slunk ignominiously away into the night in the general
direction of the pizzeria. “Some guys can’t even come close.”
    “Win, lose,” I said witheringly. “Is
that all you can think