“If it was me,” Russell said, “I’d tow it back to the docks and tell everybody what a hell of a fight it put up. I’d claim a world record for the cowfish.”
The miles rolled by and the rain kept falling. The clouds looked low enough to poke with a cue stick. The Colorado was booming under its bridge too and close to spilling its banks. About twenty miles farther we came on the Navidad, also running fast but not as high as the rivers behind us.
We pulled in at a café in Schulenburg. The parking lot was full and the place was crowded and smelled of cooking grease and sweat and mud. When we told the waitress we were from Houston she said we’d left there at the right time. She’d heard on the radio that every bayou in town was over its banks and flooding the streets. “You’da waited till tomorrow to get out of there,” she said, “you’da needed a dang boat instead of a auty-mobile.”
We ate hamburgers and fried potatoes and bought packs of cigarettes and four ham sandwiches in waxed paper to take with us. Buck had a whispered conversation with the fry cook at the kitchen window and I saw him slip the man a dollar.
Russell took over the driving, and as we wheeled out of the parking lot Buck said that according to the cook there was a certain drugstore in a town called Flatonia about fifteen miles down the road where a fella could buy himself a pretty good brand of medicine. We made the stop and fifteen minutes later we were on the road again with both flasks full of hooch and a quart bottle besides.
By late afternoon the rain finally quit and the clouds began to break. The countryside was changed. The Spanish moss had vanished and the pineywoods played out. The oaks shrank. The land opened to grassy ranges and began to gain slow elevation. Pecans and cottonwoods stood thick along the streams.
The towns got farther apart and the radio stations were now fewer and more regional in their programming, less big-hit ballroom and more plunk and twang. Shitkicker music that had us yelling “Yeeeee-haw!” in derision. But a lot of Mexican stuff too, with plenty of accordion in it, which we all kind of liked because it reminded us of coonass music. Buck spelled Russell at the wheel and Charlie handed out the sandwiches.
At sunset the sky was almost cloudless. We passed around one of the flasks, doing away with that soldier slow and easy. As the darkness deepened, a few bright stars began to clarify. The waxing moon was high behind us. The night was fully risen when we saw the glow of San Antonio dead ahead.
An hour later we were winding all through the center of town, with me doing the driving again, crossing and recrossing the river, taking in the sights and sounds of a loud and lively Friday night. The whole town smelled of Mexican cooking, reminding us of La Belleza, a Mexican restaurant in New Orleans we all liked, and the spicy aromas stirred up our appetites.
We drove through several neighborhoods where everybody was yammering in Spanish and the store signs were all in Spanish and if you didn’t know better you’d have thought you were someplace south of the Rio Grande instead of more than a hundred miles this side of it. Then we came to a part of town with plenty of white faces and turned onto a long crowded street of one café after another with names like the Lucky Spur and Rio Rita’s and Fat Daddy, all of them loud with string band and boogie-woogie. We figured it for the main goodtime drag. Charlie spied a restaurant called the Texican in the middle of the block and said, “Right there’s where I want to eat.”
There was a ready parking spot near the restaurant but I passed it up in favor of one at the far end of the street. It was something Buck and Russell had taught me—always park on a corner facing an intersection. It allowed for a fast getaway either straight across the street or in a fast right turn, whichever seemed the wiser course at the moment. It was how we parked even when we weren’t on a job, a matter of professional habit.
They took their pistols out from under the seat. Buck checked the magazine of his .45. Then pulled back the slide far enough to see that there was a round already snugged in the chamber. He reset the safety and slipped the piece under his coat. Russell unlatched the cylinder of his .38 to check the rounds, then snapped it back in place with a fling of the wrist. It was another rule of theirs—better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it, because you never know, especially in a strange town. I didn’t see the need for carrying heat just to get a bite in a restaurant. Besides, it was a hot night and I didn’t want to wear a jacket. But I knew the rules and so I put on the coat and slid the bulldog in my waistband behind my back. Charlie had already got out of the car and was browsing at a clothing store window.
We walked back to the Texican and went inside and settled ourselves in a window booth. The place was run by an American with red hair and a faceful of freckles but all the waitresses looked Mexican and the radio was tuned to a station putting out a steady stream of the ranchero music we’d gotten to like so well. The waitress came and took our orders. While we waited for the food we drank cold bottles of cola and watched the people going by on the sidewalk.
The food was wonderful. Charlie declared her chicken enchiladas the best she’d ever had, and Buck and Russell said the same about the pork tacos.
“According to a famous old Spanish writer,” I said, “hunger makes the tastiest sauce.” I was going pretty energetically at a plate of roast kid.
“That’s one of those things nobody ever thinks to say till they hear somebody else say it,” Russell said. “Then it’s ‘I know that. Why didn’t I say that and get all famous?’”
“When this guy was in prison,” I said, “he’d sometimes go without eating for a day or two, so that on the days he did eat he’d be so hungry even the slop they fed him tasted good. He’d imagine he was dining at a lavish banquet.”
“Some imagination,” Buck said. “The shit I ate in the joint, I couldn’t even imagine it fit for pigs.”
“Nice talk for the supper table,” Charlie said.
“Say the Spanish guy was in prison?” Russell said. “What for?”
“His biography wasn’t specific. For ‘financial irregularities,’ I think it said.”
“I get it,” Russell said. “He was a thief.”
“Like some others I could mention,” Charlie said.
“World’s full of them,” Russell said, scooping up a mouthful of refried beans with a piece of tortilla. “Always been, always be.”
We wiped at our watering eyes and sniffed noisily with the effect of the chile sauces. Buck paused in his eating to blow his nose. “Jesus,” he said, “this stuff is great.”
While Russell took care of the bill at the register, Buck went to talk with the redhaired owner. Charlie and I went out on the sidewalk and smoked and eyeballed the passing parade of folk. A minute later Russell came out, swirling a toothpick in his mouth. He nudged me and nodded at a pair of cute girls staring out at us from a passing car. Charlie didn’t miss it, and gave him a dig of her elbow hard enough to make him wince. “Hey!” he said. “I thought Sonny might get something going with them is all.”
She stepped away from him, folding her arms tight over her breasts the way a miffed woman’ll do, and he whispered to me, “Jesus, eyes in back of her head.”
Buck joined us and said there was a good hotel a few blocks north of where we were. “We can go on over and call it a night,” he said. “Or we can have us a drink or two first at a speak at this other hotel down the street from where we parked the car. Place called the Travis. It’s got a poker room. Tell you what, if nobody’s got any objection to me using the travel money for a stake, I might could make us some jack.”