Dejected, I headed back to my motel room and watched some more crappy Mexican soap operas until I started going stir-crazy. I could even feel my fetus growing bored. Everyone kept telling me how wonderful the beaches are, so I took a tiny hand towel from my room and headed out there. I laid down in the sizzling sun and tried to relax. Some kindly older couple offered me a squirt of their suntan lotion. I would’ve preferred a sip of their gin and tonics. This was the exact situation booze was perfect for, but I couldn’t touch it. The idea of no booze for roughly two hundred and sixty more days—if, God willing (God forbid!), the pregnancy really went to full-term—made me incredibly antsy. Then I realized that I was down to my last twenty dollars. I knew that if I didn’t get that goddamn card by tonight, Johanna would have to loan me yet more money.
When I returned there around four, for the first time the secretary greeted me with a big smile: the orange-and-purple FedEx envelope had finally arrived. Inside was the little plastic card—I was reconnected to the power source that electrified us human machinery. The first thing I did was take it to the bank and withdraw the maximum amount of money—six hundred dollars. Rushing back over to the consulate, I paid Johanna all the money I owed and offered her an equivalent amount as a gift.
“We aren’t allowed to take gifts,” she said, “but I got something else for you—welcome to America.” She handed me my new passport as if it were a high school diploma.
I then called Vinetta. She said she had hiked up the hill and knocked at the door of the mansion until her knuckles were raw and the kids were crying. No answer. Then she headed back to her pickup in the parking lot with all seven kids and sat there “for two goddamn hours and didn’t see that old gimp nowhere.”
Eventually she “gutsied up” and went inside the Blue Suede. There was a big memorial photo of Snake on the wall along with a brief obituary in the
Memphis Daily News
. She said it stated that he had been accidentally killed after he and a group of companions went to the hilltop and shot off some rounds to celebrate the end of their annual Elvis contest. So much for the bogus hunting accident.
Soon after she entered, Minister Mo Beaucheete tapped her on the shoulder and nervously warned her that she should ske-daddle before someone accidentally shot her.
“You didn’t ask him where Mr. Carpenter went off to?”
“Yeah, he said Carpenter was lying low until the sheriff finished up investigating Snake’s death.”
“Just keep looking for him,” I said.
“Please don’t ask me to do that.”
“If you don’t get that address, it’s all over,” I said for the second time. “Simple as that.”
“Oh fudgsicle!” she blurted, and hung up.
The next day, my fifth in Mexico, although I was able to buy some basic comforts and decent grub, my life was still on hold. Without any recourse, I took a cab to the airport, hoping that I might be able to locate the taxi thief myself. One by one, I asked all the drivers about my dear friend Magdalena. No one knew who I was talking about. It appeared she was a one-time scam artist and with me she had found the perfect mark. Late in the afternoon I returned to the hotel.
The next morning Vinetta happened to catch me by phone at the motel and she said she was sorry. A beautiful home, Floyd’s death, none of it mattered. She just couldn’t hike up that hill, knock on that door, or sit in her truck with seven kids a minute longer. It wasn’t fair to them. She was going batty, and was afraid she might start whacking them.
I was about to yell at her about my own sacrifices and how we had come so close, but I knew I’d just be whipping a dead horse. As I contemplated leaving Mexico right then and there, I thought about how it was moments like this that divided exceptional people—who were rich—from the mediocre masses with their sad, steady pittance. I was once a good goddamn reporter. That ditsy couple were somewhere in this
ciudad
and, goddamn it, I was going to find them!
The first thing I did was go to a local bookstore for the most detailed map I could find of the city of Puerto Vallarta. Carefully I scanned the names of the swirling lanes and byways around the oceanfront streets. Taking a break and feeling relaxed for a moment, I suddenly remembered the con woman humming “Feliz Navidad.” The phrase was in the street name!
I asked the clerk on duty if he knew a street near the ocean with the words “Feliz Navidad” in it.
“Not quite,” he said, and opened my map. He pointed to a broad street that ran along the ocean toward the south end of town—Costera a Barra de Navidad. Bingo! It was only around ten a.m. I was about to grab a cab when I realized that I might actually bump into the kid and kidnapper. God usually gives you only one chance, if that, to get things right.
I needed to be prepared, and that meant having a good camera, something I now lacked. After spending the past four days bumming around town, I knew where to find a good photo shop.
I could’ve bought a digital camera for as little as eighty bucks, but since I was hoping to take pictures that would fetch a six-figure fee, I asked about their top-of-the-line model—a Canon 20D was going for fifteen hundred American dollars. I also grabbed a lens that ranged from seventeen to eighty-five millimeters for an additional two grand and a four-gigabyte compact flashcard along with some accessories. Putting the entire purchase on my shiny new credit card, it came to nearly four thousand dollars I didn’t have.
“What exactly is your return policy?” I asked as an afterthought.
“You have one week to return any item, provided you have the receipt and it’s in the same excellent condition as when you bought it,” the clerk said, handing me the merchandise in a bag. “Also, your money is usually mailed back to you within several months.”
The store closed at seven-thirty.
I stopped at a small café called Rosa’s Bakery and bought a late breakfast to go and a sandwich for later. Bringing it all back to my hotel room, I carefully opened the boxes and delicately removed the Styrofoam shapes that secured the camera and lens. While eating an egg, potato, and jalapeño burrito, I studied the instruction manual and honed my skills as a photographer.
At about two-thirty, I dumped everything into a knapsack and hailed a cab. I was off to hunt for big tabloid game. Before getting in, I showed the driver my map of the city, pointing to the stretch of road far away from the annoying
turistas
and ubiquitous time-shares. Indeed, by all accounts it was where a loving couple might find optimum privacy. He nodded yes, and I got in. His radio blared as we drove along. It was only about three miles away, a rural isolated stretch of road, nowhere near the place Magdalena had brought me. Soon he started looking up at street signs trying to figure out where the hell we were. Twice he stopped and asked to see my map.
After roughly thirty minutes of driving, though—
nada
. Soon we spotted a sign for another town, Aguacate. We had gone too far. I told him to turn around. He sped back north for about ten minutes before we spotted the first home in a while. In the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, was a small yet attractive bungalow. As he sped by it, I saw a red light from an old tail-fin car sticking out of a narrow driveway. A moment later, my driver suddenly hit the brakes and his horn. A skinny blonde in tight blue jeans was dashing across the road with a rugged tattooed guy in tow.
“Fuck you!” the guy who looked like a trashier Tommy Lee shouted as we sped past.
Turning back in my seat, I saw them heading toward the cozy little house. The best image I had seen of her was from a tiny high school yearbook photo that had run in all the papers. It might’ve been her, I wasn’t sure. Still, it was my best bet. I told the driver to pull over.
“You want me to turn around?” he asked.
“No.”
If it was them and they were smart, they might have actually posted a video camera on the highway. Surveillance equipment was now cheap and easy to install. If they saw the same car coming back down that empty road, it’d tip them off. I had to go on foot and stay out of view. Still, I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to be stranded, so I told the driver to wait for fifteen minutes. If I wasn’t back then, he should leave.
“Señorita, you don’t want those people to see you,
sí
?”
“Yes, but I’ll need a ride later, so if I pay you now, can you pick me up later?”
“Where?”
“Down here. But don’t go anywhere near that house.”
“When should I come back?”
“Around six p.m.,” I said, figuring that if I made it that long without miscarrying, I’d have just enough time to return to the photography store and fill out the refund form.
“So I will wait fifteen minutes first and then leave if you don’t come and I return later?”
I confirmed this as I counted out twice the fare as well as a sizable tip. Then I got out and headed back, walking along the very edge of the road. If it wasn’t them, I had only fifteen minutes to confirm it and get back to the car, or I’d be stuck out here all afternoon. As I approached the bungalow, I remained vigilant for anything that might look even remotely like a video camera. What I finally did see compelled me toward silent ecstasy. A dusty pink land yacht was moored in their driveway—Carpenter’s old Cadillac.
Looking through the powerful lens of my camera, I surveyed the house for any signs of bodyguards or security devices—nothing. All I could see were that the drapes had been carefully pulled. There was no stirring, nor sound nor lights, from within. The isolated structure was positioned between a remote highway and a steep incline—landscaped in indigenous foliage to reduce erosion. The vast and yawning Pacific Ocean was just waiting for all to topple right in. It was a smart location for Roscoe as it was on a bluff with windows on all sides, a clear panoramic view.
As I edged toward the ocean side of the house, I realized it had a back door that gave direct access to a beach about a hundred feet down. There was adequate shrubbery around, but it all came down a single question: on which side of the house should I position myself, the front facing the road or the back of the house near the sultry blue waters?
Seeing them several minutes earlier returning from their midday constitutional—probably after a feverish morning of fucking—I hoped that their next appearance would be out the back door, where they had full privacy.
Scampering like a lizard along the thorny plants and perilous rocks behind the house, searching for that perfect vantage point, I soon angled myself to gain the best hidden view of that rear door. A sparse clump of bushes with small, sharp-edged leaves was where I found cover. There I softly snapped the branches of neighboring shrubs, creating a decent blind for my secret mission. This was something I hadn’t done in a while. Inasmuch as I was more of a journalist, the writerly end of the paparazzi, someone else was usually assigned to do the protracted photographic stakeout. As the minutes ticked, I became reacquainted with this tedious side of the job. By two o’clock, after the first hour in those thorny bushes, I had drunk half the water and wished I’d bought suntan lotion. After the second hour, though, while eating the chicken and jalapeño sandwich, I was chewed down by an army of ants and finished off by an aerial assault of black flies. Just a smidgen of insect repellent would’ve made all the difference. Small blue-bellied lizards and occasional snakes slithered by. I passed the time by playing memory games, trying to revisit parts of my past where I had made bad pivotal decisions: job opportunities I had missed, guys who had been interested in me and I’d dismissed, men who swiveled up to the air-conditioned economic pyramid points while I squatted, sweaty and bug bitten, shrouded in thorny foliage. At four o’clock, after sneaking out of my rat hole to take a leak in another thorny bush, I returned to my nest and wondered if my nice new iPod was still in my bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen where I’d left it. It took me forever to download all those songs on it.
I tried sleeping, but it only made me more anxious, so I started scratching my fingers through that hard and arid dirt to submerge myself even deeper in the hot earth. Soon I felt as though I was digging my own grave, and without thinking I laughed at my little joke. The one thought I kept consoling myself with was that massive encampment of paparazzi still outside of the Scrubbs house in Memphis, while I was all alone here at the heart of the story, south of the border.
Sometime around five o’clock I drifted into a shallow sleep … until I felt something wiggling through my hair—a small snake had slithered up next to me.
As it started approaching six, I dreaded that this was going to go into a two-day operation. The rendezvous site where I was supposed to get picked up was roughly ten minutes down the hill. I was intent on staying here as long as I could. After hours of lying in that scorched, itchy earth, I felt cramped and dehydrated. I began to fear that I was jeopardizing my little pregnancy. It was around this time that I spotted what I thought was a vulture circling high overhead, ready to finish off me and my baby. The huge brown bird quickly descended, passing low over the ocean, then soared high up like a roller coaster. Later I found out it was a ferruginous hawk. When I tried pointing the camera, I realized exactly how heavy and unwieldy it was. Taking it in both hands, I braced my elbows against my knees and pointed it as the raptor sailed down along the rolling surf. Digging its talons into the glistening waves for just a second, it managed to yank out a huge fish. I snapped pictures as the fish writhed and twisted before it finally broke free and splashed back into the sea. At least I could sell something to
National Geographic
.
The bird glided around in the limitless sky, swooping down again, looking for a more manageable prey. Just as I positioned my camera again, I heard a sharp click behind me, like the trigger of a gun. Totally naked under a gleam of sweat, Roscoe had pulled open the back door and was stepping outside holding a smoldering spliff. He too was staring over at that distinguished cousin of the penguin and pigeon.