Angels in Heaven

for.
    Jorge beamed at us and asked us if
everything was all right. We said it was maravilloso and asked him the
same thing. He said igualmente, but there was one little thing—he hoped
it was all right—but we’d lost Billy.
    “Lost?” I said incredulously. “You
mean like mislaid? Did you look under the seat? How about the glove
compartment?”
    “All I know is I stopped where the
señor wanted me to and off he went, and ten minutes later some child opens the
cab door, hands me a paper bag, says the sehor’s taken off and I better do the
same, which I did,” said Jorge.
    “I can’t believe it,” I said.
    “After all we did for that mother,” Doris said.
    “Wonder what’s in the paper bag?”
Benny said.
    “Probably his fingers,” I said.
    Jorge got the bag from the track and
passed it to me. I looked at it with unfathomable dislike.
    “Go on, open up,” Doris said. “It
won’t bite.”
    “Unless it’s his teeth,” I said.
    I opened it. Inside were a note and a
souvenir. I took out the note. It was scrawled in pencil on a second paper bag
that had been tom down one side and flattened out. Sara and Benny gathered
around and we all read it together:
     
    Vic—sorry as hell but I got no choice
with this much money involved. Don’t worry about me, I got friends, I’ll make
out. Take care of yourselves. I’ll be in touch when I get back and explain all.
DO NOT LOSE THE ENCLOSED IT IS ONE GOOD LUCK PIECE THAT WORKS.
    Adiós, abrazos, and muchas gracias,
yore ol’ pal Gray Lobo.
    Kisses to Doris. Happy landings.
     
    I looked at Benny. Then I looked at Doris. Then I looked at Jorge. Then I took out the souvenir, a heavy statuette about five
inches high, painted black, portraying some Mayan deity, I guess, a goofball
with protruding ears, squatting on his heels. I’d seen a million similar in the
windows of souvenir stores in Mérida. I placed its value optimistically at
$2.99.
    I hefted it—or is it him?—in one hand
and wondered if I could throw it far enough to hit the cactus Jorge had
modestly retired behind to commune with nature. I finally pocketed the damn
thing, I could always give it to someone I didn’t like for Christmas as a
paperweight. Then I started feeling around in the bag again and finally turned
it inside out.
    “Now what are you looking for?” said Doris.
    “I just thought there was an outside
chance my old pal Money No Object might have included a blank check.”
    Jorge came back and asked us the
equivalent of Now what, folks? As if we had any choice. We could hardly go back
to Mérida and track down Billy and then massacre the little fucker, could we?
So we climbed back into the truck, and Jorge replaced the hammocks, and off we
went again.
    After a while I simmered down
somewhat.
    After a while I surprised myself by
dozing off for an hour.
    More hours passed, about three of
them.
    We stopped for gas somewhere outside Cancún,
then drove into and then straight out of town. I wanted to stop and let a doc
or a vet have a look at Sara, but she insisted she was all right and it would
be foolish to take the chance and anyway she could have it looked at in a day
or two. Jorge stopped again, this time for twenty minutes or so, as we were
leaving Cancún. About twenty minutes after that, the truck started jolting
again. This time when it stopped and when we’d all enierged stiffly, we found
ourselves in a deserted, peaceful grove of trees deep in the rain forest
somewhere. It turned out Jorge’s last stop had been for more provisions. Since
we had over three hours until we were due at the rendezvous with Dan, we got to
have our picnic after all. I was the only one with the intelligence to even
think of keeping a close eye on the encircling underbrush for any herd of
starving pumas who might want to share our ham sandwiches with us, or us with
the ham sandwiches.
    Afterward we lay around on the
blankets we’d stretched out, and Jorge snored and Doris wrote in her diary and
Benny stared at his chess set and I rued the day and counted killer ants and
watched it get dark and then watched it get darker.
    It was just on eleven when we started
off again, with Sara in the front this time as there didn’t seem to be any
reason for her to face the discomfort of tunneling back into the womb again.
For me, it was no discomfort; not only is a womb a nice place to visit, but
it’s not a bad place to live in either.
    The moment Sara had climbed up into
the cab, she rapped loudly on