Out here, row crops planted since the war had pushed the valley’s once-ubiquitous apple orchards back to rolling acres and narrow barrancas where the steep slopes of the redwood foothills began to flatten into furrowed farmland, better-suited for irrigation ditches that watered endless rows where leafy greens were bringing in more bucks per acre than Bellflowers and Newton Pippins and Granny Smiths ever would!
For one thing, the Studebaker was clean, if a bit rusty around the chrome, with no telltale smears of the region’s rich topsoil spattered across its fenders. For another, like all gunmen, this shooter had parked facing out; he could make a speedy getaway from here or from anywhere else he’d ever parked his automobile. If he had business to attend to here at the bar below Hildegard’s whorehouse, or in one of the rooms upstairs, it wouldn’t take him half a minute to run to his car and hit the road.
He’d missed the weekend carloads of soldier boys getting trained how to shoot North Koreans — they’d all headed back toward Fort Ord: loud youngsters, always drunk, pimply, stopping for a quickie if they’d failed to find any gash. They’d all leave Watsonville to weave down the dark and narrow Coast Highway toward the army base built on massive dunes just northeast of the Monterey Peninsula.
I spotted the shooter as soon as I walked into the joint, even before I took a seat at the end of the bar near the front door. He was a Mexican, of course, like almost everyone else in the room, but he was wearing neither the dungarees nor the overhauls of the campesino, nor the dusty white outfit sewn from flour sacks sported by los viejos, old men, single old-timers too bent and broken to chop lettuce anymore or work at any of the other stoop labor that the growers depended on.
Much of the campesinos’ meager haul, of course, eventually crossed this polished slab in front of me where the stocky gal pouring drinks — Hildegard herself — slapped down a shot of Four Roses and a glass of whatever was on tap before she grabbed a few quarters from those I’d dug out of my pocket before I’d parked my butt on the stool.
Take it easy, Nelson, she mouthed at me.
I wouldn’t say the guy I’d tagged as the shooter was dressed like a pachuco — for one thing, he wasn’t flashy; he wore a suit that didn’t make him look any sharper than the fieldworkers standing or sitting along the bar. But the tan gabardine outfit with draped trousers pegged at his ankles did cover a smooth leather holster. I could tell it sat against his white shirt where the fabric was bunching beneath the lapel of his jacket.
Also, his two-tone Western boots, shiny brown-and-white leather, were luxuries none of the farmworkers in the place would have wasted money on. Cash like that could buy some necessary relaxation down here in the barroom or some relief upstairs with the chamacas whom Hildegard’s customers kept busy from sundown to almost midnight — and even later on weekends.
The main reason I picked the shooter out was that he, at least the guy I’d made as the shooter, didn’t look at me even for an instant when I came in through the front door. All the other drinkers had at least given me a side-eyed peek as I walked in; some glances had been bored, some had been hostile in a macho sort of way. The pistolero, however, didn’t turn his head, didn’t glance at me in the mirror, or didn’t, in any other way that I could discern, check me out.
I knew immediately that he’d instantly sensed everything he needed to know about me — and about every other man doling out quarters to Hildegard as she patrolled her beat behind the stick. He focused on no one. Hildie pocketed some cash from pitiful little stashes on the bar and nodded the other customers toward a beaded curtain that led to the toilet and to the rickety stairway to the rooms upstairs.
As I was on my second Four Roses, Blue Ribbon back, Hildegard came up to me for a good hard stare. Like every barkeep, she was polishing a smudged glass — one of those squat cocktail glasses that you can’t tip over because they’re wide and weighted at the bottom even when they’re empty — with a rag so soiled that no customer in his right mind would have noticed on purpose unless he was eyeing it to use as a fly swatter.
“Hey, amigo,” Hildegard whispered loudly enough that the guy to my right had to act like he couldn’t hear, “Maruca’s workin’ tonight!”
“Why you telling me?”
“’Cause you and Maruca could be making some sweet music upstairs instead of you and the gunsel down the bar making a lot of racket down here.”
I nodded; I understood.
A minute or two later, a beefy fieldworker, still tucking a short-sleeved cowboy shirt into his Roebuck jeans, six-inch cuffs rolled tightly up over the tops of his work boots, came out through the beaded curtain and headed for the front door. Maruca followed him, sidling into the barroom, where she saw me and smiled. She then strode to the jukebox and slipped in a couple of nickels. She played “Bell Bottom Trousers,” the Moe Jaffe version, but no one made a move. Then, with her second nickel, she played Lalo Guerrero and his band harmonizing on “Los Chucos Suaves.” Maruca was a Filipina close to my age who thought she still looked like a teenage señorita. She sashayed — and that’s the right word; that’s exactly what she did, shaking her skinny hips like a hoochie-coochie girl — right up to where I was sitting.
“Hey, mister,” Maruca said. She knew my name all too well. “Hey, mister,” as she waited for me to light her Lucky Strike, “you wanna screw?”
I put my Zippo flame to her Lucky. I did want to screw, but not right now. I wanted to keep an eye on the shooter sitting a few feet down the bar. Killing this vato was what I needed to do as well as wanted to do. Maruca could wait for another time.
“Maybe later,” I said loud enough that Hildegard flashed her tired-looking eyes at me, then at the gunman.
“Maybe now!” Hildie demanded.
Maruca grabbed my arm and started to pull toward the string of beads hanging beneath the hand-painted sign that read Baños. “He still be here when we come back, bud,” Maruca said.
Hildegard nodded in agreement. “Más tarde!”
Maruca, having figured out the whole scene, gritted her teeth, nodded, and walked away, not sashaying the slightest bit. She walked along the bar until she reached the pistolero who was so obviously paying no attention at all to me or her or Hildegard. She whispered in the guy’s ear and he whispered something back and slowly, slowly he stood and followed the woman across the room and through the strands of beads. I could hear their footsteps starting up the stairs. Goddamn him all to hell.
After the Lalo Guerrero tune ended, I crossed to the Seaburg jukebox and popped in a coin of my own. Following a quick look at the selections, I pushed a couple of buttons and put on another Lalo special, “Marihuana Boogie.” I went back to my drinks, made sure my shoulder holster was sitting comfortably beneath my armpit, and sipped my beer.
I waited.
A few minutes later I heard Maruca’s footsteps coming back down the stairs. She passed through the doorway, looked at me, and nodded at someone behind her on the steps. Then she walked to the other end of the bar. Ordered three fingers of aguardiente. Our drink.
Hildegard gave her a glance, then gave me the evil eye. “I told you, Nelson. Take it easy.”
The shooter walked back into the room. No one had taken his place at the bar so he returned to his stool and nodded at Hildegard for another cerveza. As the bartender turned to grab a cleaner glass, the shooter looked at me for the first and only time.