The Spanish Inquisition

Men come up to her, even when she's with me, and say, "Wasn't that you at The Bronco Saturday night?" Or lines like, "Didn't I dance with you at The Outrider? Didn't I see you before? What was your name, sweet thing?" She really turns heads. Men notice Teresa. They remember her.

Guys say, "What's a knockout señorita like her doing with a skinny goat roper like you?" Trying to pick a fight. It's why I've always had to watch out. Why I've always carried my pistol in the glove box of the truck, loaded. And it's why I wonder what I'll have to do when The Spanish Inquisition comes to town. The thing's not over yet, no matter what Teresa says.

Teresa is what's called Mex-mix or mix-Mex. Half and half. Blue-black hair that's down to her waist when she lets it loose and great big, deep, dark-brown eyes. Perfect complexion. Skin like a polished peach. When I first saw her, she was decked out like a cowgirl in boots and a pair of jeans they must've stitched with her already inside.

It was down in Santa Cruz County, where I grew up. It was a spot down there called The Steak Out, one of those saloons with bullet holes in the roof for color; that's where we met. I used to rodeo, and this was after the rodeo, last fall. I'd lucked out and taken a prize, and when I came in late, first this giant ugly woman that hangs out there hooks her arm through mine and says. (continued on page 124) Spanish Inquisition (continued from page 102) "Hi, darling, where've you been all night?"

The place's packed, and everybody I know or don't know's in on the joke, watching for me to get eaten alive. So I give this woman a great big smack on the mouth, which stuns her so severely I make my getaway.

I squeeze in quick to a place at the bar. Then I look down where the bar elbows, and there's Teresa, fighting men off. She's wearing one of those Western shirts, cut like a man's but made for women, and it's silky and white, so she stands out like a pearl. And every time she moves, it clings to her in a new and interesting way, so I get eyestrain trying to watch her without turning my head. I carry my heart around in my mouth half the night, watching her dance, watching her breeze around, one man after another taking a throw at her and coming up empty. Later on, here she comes right up beside me to the bar. She doesn't look at me, just leans there, waiting for the bartender.

Then, out of the blue, she says, "You been looking at me all night."

"So what?" I tell her after I take a big gulp. "So's everybody."

"So everybody else is asking me to dance."

"I'm too shy for that," I tell her.

She likes such a remark. She gives me a long look then, those big, dark eyes. "I liked the way you handled Big Billie," she says, finally.

So, to make a long story short, I played hard to get for another five minutes, which is just my way. Then I asked her to run off to Mexico with me, and she said she would. We were both kidding. That was it, really. She told me right off she only acted wild, and I told her I only acted bold.

She was living down in Tucson, so I moved there and in with her. I went to work up in San Manuel, down in the mine—a chute tapper, which is pounding big rocks into little rocks so they'll go down the chute. It's hard work, but the money was awful good. Then I made foreman of the team, which made sense, because they always promote the one who least deserves it, and so I was making more than a hundred a day on bonus. Our expenditures took off like a rocket. New furniture, new pickup; we bought a house on the northwest side. Then the copper industry went to hell. They said it would happen, but nobody believed it. So the union went on strike, and I went, too.

Inside of one month, we ran through what little we'd put aside. Cutting back was harder than walking on one foot. And I couldn't find a job, because people were afraid to hire miners when they knew we'd go right back to the mine as soon as we could. Unemployment checks kept us from sinking clear under, but I worried that Teresa'd start thinking she'd joined the wrong parade.

Then Teresa says how she used to hire on with the movie companies that used to come to Tucson. I tell her I'm not the sort to have a woman support me, but she says, "Larry, don't worry about that; it's not really work." She said it wasn't like a steady job. She said it was fun.

So I said, "Ok, see what you can get."

It was her and her friend Victoria who used to hire on as extras. Victoria is mix-Mex, too, so they both worked the Westerns as Mexicans or Indians. Victoria was her roommate before I came along, and we all lived together for a couple or three weeks. Victoria isn't pretty the same way as Teresa, but she can look real good, and she's got a quick head. We had something happen once, then maybe once again. It was more like friends getting friendlier; Victoria gets lonely, and she got lonely once when Teresa went home for the week to Yuma, and again when we were just talking one afternoon. But it was nothing more than that; we both knew it.

Anyway, she calls up Teresa and says there's a job opportunity with some movie company, so they go out to see about it, and later on, Teresa phones me. "We both got the job," she says. She doesn't sound too excited about it.

"What do you have to do?"

"I don't know yet for sure."

She was at Victoria's, and they were having a couple of margaritas and going over their part of the script.

"Does it look good?"

"Yeah. In a way."

That's all she'll say. She comes home around suppertime, a bit dazed—they'd each gone through five or six margaritas.

"How much does it pay?" I ask her. She tells me how much, and it seems like mucho for an extra. "What do you have to do? Jump off a cliff?"

She tells me it's nothing like that. "I play an Indian. We both do. It's a movie about Spanish conquistadors looking for the seven cities of gold. It's called The Spanish Inquisition."

"Inquisition?" I ask her what that means.

"I don't know. It has something to do with converting the Indians to Christianity."

"Good for you," I put in then. "A religion movie, and you're Catholic, even though you're lapsed."

I'm trying to be funny, but she doesn't even smile. So I tell her the whole thing sounds awful damn simple for all that money. She says maybe it isn't enough money. She's not sure what she'll do. She left the script at Victoria's, and she's tired and doesn't want to talk about it anymore. "I have to get to sleep and get up at four, because it starts tomorrow and they always start early and it's way down south of Sonoita."

I ask her the name of the company, and she says it's Cibola Productions and that they've done lots of pictures. She wouldn't've told me that much if I hadn't asked.

Then, in the morning, she's up and gone before I know it. So I sprawl around the house all day, wondering if she'll call, but she doesn't. She comes home after dark and says she's dog-tired. She wants to shower and clean off the rest of the make-up and go straight to bed.

I wait till I hear the water shut off. Then I push open the door. I like to watch her towel herself. Women look so beautiful when they're just out of a shower. She does, her black hair all wet and slick, and the way she bends, getting the teeniest fold across her navel when she runs that towel up and down her legs. She's got one of those long, thin-waisted figures that are full on top without being too full and not too wide across the hips. She's smooth all over, like when they finished making her, they took and cinched up her skin to make it fit perfect, like the way they put those plastic grips on pliers by slipping the plastic on hot so when it cools, it snugs up firm. She likes her body. She likes having me watch her. It's a game we play, and here I've been lunking all day, building up my energy.

(continued on page 142) Spanish Inquisition (continued from page 124)

But she looks at me tonight like she's real tired and I'm not wanted, and she tells me I'm letting out the humid air, that it's good for her complexion. She's never said that before, so I stand there another minute, and she gives me a couple of scowls.

Then I see these marks on her back when she turns, long, red lines, not real plain but there.

"What marks?" she says and turns quick to look over her shoulder in the mirror. She looks for a long time, and she doesn't say anything.

"So what are they?" I say finally.

"Whip marks."

That's what she says and goes to wrapping up all her hair in the towel, like that's all that's needed to be said on the subject.

But my interest is pretty damn aroused by now, and I say, "Who's been whipping you, T.J.?" I call her T.J. a lot of the time, because her middle name is Juanita. "Is that what they did today?" I ask her.

I figure it's a straightforward enough question, but she gets angry all of a sudden, like I'm asking something dumb, trying her patience. She flings on her robe and cinches it up tight and pushes past me. "It didn't hurt," she says. "It was just make-believe."

I follow her into the bedroom and ask her, "With or without your shirt on?" I have to ask this. It's the next thing to ask.

She sits down on the bed and just glares at me. "What is this?" she says. "Why are you being so suspicious?"

"Look," I tell her. "You haven't told me square one about this whole damn picture. I sure as hell don't recall you saying anything about being whipped. And I don't care about that per se. What I care is, was your shirt on?"

She gives me a little smirk. "Indians don't wear shirts."

I never felt more like hitting her. "Whatever the hell they wear," I said, "were you wearing it?"

She gives me a long, long look. Then she says, "Yeah, I was wearing what the Indians wear, which is nothing. So what? That's what they're paying me for."

I go around the room swearing, telling her I don't want her undressing for strangers like that, telling her to give them their damn money back, that isn't how I want her to earn money.

"Aw," she says finally, "it's no big deal if I show my tits."

"It is a big deal, T.J."

"No, it isn't, and I don't like you thinking it is. No one else thinks it is."

"Look," I say. "What happens when they make this picture and it starts showing here in Tucson? Think about that."

But she's too mad to think about it. We go around and around, and I get hotter and hotter while she gets colder and colder.

I leave. I figure if I stay, there'll be a hell of a mash-out. I drive down to a tavern. I stay there till I'm the only one left except for the bartender, and she's a woman, so I can't talk to her much. What I tell her is, my lady is in a movie. She says, "What movie?" So I tell her, and she says, "That's kind of funny, because the Spanish Inquisition happened in Spain and Indians weren't involved."

That stays with me. But I'm too tired to think about it. I go home and hit the sofa, dead as a stump the whole night, and wake to an empty house. Teresa has slipped right out without waking me. And first thing, sitting in the kitchen, thinking with a clear head, all of a sudden I remember Victoria telling me how she'd done a skin movie once, when she needed money. "Simulated," she called it, not the real thing. I remember that, and at first it's like it has nothing to do with what's happening now. But then the two things—that and what the bartender told me—sort of come together in my head like two pictures laid over each other.

I jump up quick and dial Victoria's number but get no answer, so she's left. Then I poke around, and first I find a note saying, I'll be back tonight if you want to talk. Then I find it, on the phone pad, that one word Cibola, with a number.

So I give a call, and this sweet little female voice answers and I tell her Victoria Leon's little brother just got hit by a car and's in the hospital, so I have to get in touch with her right away. She tells me there's no way to reach them by phone. "They're shooting way down at someplace called Saddleback Mountain. It's not even a place. I don't even know where it is."

"I do," I say and hop into my pickup and tear out.

Saddleback's a big snaggletooth of a hill, like a cow's molar, about 50 miles from Tucson, sticking up out of the San Rafael Valley, which is a wide tongue of the Mexican grasslands that licks about 20 miles over the border. Down there past Sonoita, it's all rolling pastureland, all gravel roads, open country where I can let her out and fly, which is what I do. Every once in a while, I come to a low-water bridge, and the road dips and the truck squishes down, bumper banging, and then leaps up like it might take off and flip clean over. But I don't slow down. I'd been all over that country as a boy and know it like a cat knows its own rear end. There's not many people, just cows and coyotes and wetbacks sneaking around. I see only one old geezer, mending a fence, with his pickup sloped into the ditch, barely off the road, so I have to hit the brakes and spin around it. He straightens up and gapes and shakes his head as I go barreling past.

Then I see Saddleback off in the distance, and my sweat goes cold and my brain goes that way, too, calculating. I don't have plan one. I'm not even sure what I want. It gets tricky. I don't even know for sure what she's done yet—except that she's done it behind my back because she didn't think I'd like it. That's all I've got to go on, but I'm worried sick she's done what I'm afraid she's done or is about to do it or is thinking of doing it, or even that she might let it happen or might simulate it to the point where it doesn't make any difference whether it happens or not. It all boils down to that. If she's willing to pretend there's no difference, then there isn't any difference, and she knows it, or else why would she pretend she wasn't even pretending?

This gets so confusing, the truck comes to a dead stop, and I sit there trying to figure it all out. In the first place, I figure I'm pretty much in love with her. But I'm not so sure I want to be. I keep seeing all these men, like the men who always watch her when she's anywhere and always try to take her away from me, only these men are sitting in a movie theater, watching her up on the screen and saying, "Don't I know her? Didn't I see her just last Saturday?" I think that, and I know the next thing they'll think is, If that dude she was with lets her do that, he hasn't got any jurisdiction over her. That's the whole problem. I start moving again. I figure I've finally got my real purpose sorted out.

There's a fork in the road, and one way leads right up to the mountain and dead-ends there in a little arroyo, with cotton-woods and oaks along the wet-weather creek and big rocks and sand holes. It looks like a Western-movie set, so I figure that's where they'll be, and they are. I drive up and there's a herd of vehicles gathered—a U-Haul truck, a Winnebago so big you'd think they had to airdrop it, a couple of pickups and one bright-red little sports job.

I pull in just short of them and get out. It's one of those clear, hot days with the air so dry and thin, you wonder if you're breathing anything. It makes me feel giddy. I can feel my stomach spinning around like it wants me to forget the whole deal.

But I go crunching up that brown-gravel road, and then the big guy steps out of the Winnebago. I might've figured they'd have a watchdog, that I'd have to take care of him first.

He's about as big as the motor home, built like a beer keg, with his head like a little beer mug set on top. Yellow curly hair like foam, two piggy little eyes and a smirk.

"You must be lost, pal," he says. "And found the wrong place."

"Not me," I say. "I'm not lost."

"Well, maybe you'd better get lost. This is a private party."

I go on back to my truck and jump in and drive up to where he's still standing there and lean over and tell him I'm just turning around. He gives me a curt little nod.

I let the truck roll on past him. I'm still leaning over on the seat, and before I straighten up, I pop open my glove box and take my gun out and lay it on the seat. It's a Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum with a six-inch barrel and walnut grips, all blue-black steel. If you don't hold it right when it goes off, it'll kick up and plant a nasty bruise into that webbing between thumb and forefinger. I found that out the first time I fired it.

By the time I get back to him, I've got it right up against my leg, with my finger on the trigger, and I stop the truck again and smile at him.

"Sure you don't want a little company?"

"No chance."

"What if my friend here wants to talk it over with you?"

There's one thing about pointing a gun at someone like that. You know if you ever stop pointing it at him, you'd better put a heap of territory between him and yourself P.D.Q., because it's the same as telling him he ain't so tough when tough's the only thing he's got. I can see it in his eyes.

"Your friend's a lot bigger than you are, runt," he says. "And he's bought you plenty of trouble."

I get out and have him pull up his shirt to prove he doesn't have a weapon. I don't let him within ten feet of me. If there's one thing I learned watching movies, it's that the guy with the gun always stands too close to the guy who doesn't have one. I have him walk ahead, and we start up into the arroyo.

You could say it's a scenic little hike. About a quarter mile. A four-by-four could maybe make it, and I think if these guys have a jeep or something up there, I'll heist it.

This big fella keeps talking to me. "You're biting off a pretty big wad, pal," he says. "What the hell you want up here?"

I tell him to keep quiet and stop calling me pal.

There's a little stand of desert willows and beyond that an old adobe homestead all crumbled down, and beyond that is where they are. We go around the side of the old house and catch them by surprise.

This next part, it's like when you're expecting something and then it happens and it still surprises you. It's like when we used to say somebody would get caught sometime in the blast area down in the mine. You carry these two pictures of it around in your head. One is of what you want it to look like and the other is sort of what you know it will look like. Then, when you actually see it, it's not at all like what you were expecting, and it's not like what you wanted it to be. It's somehow different, kind of like a dream; not exactly a surprise, but all the ways of dealing with it you thought you had figured out ahead of time sort of leave you.

That's as well as I can tell about it, so there's nothing else to tell except the truth, which is that they're all there, and she is, too, she and Victoria and two other girls. None of them has any clothes on at all. I see them, and the feelings going on inside me all stand up together like it was a fire drill. And then, for a minute, a big ache swallows up everything inside me and makes me hollow, and I can't even breathe. There aren't any lungs left.

All around, there's men; that's what gets me. There's men with cameras on their shoulders and men with earphones and some holding big sheets of aluminum, for some reason, and some men doing nothing but standing around. I mean, there's a couple more women, too, but mostly it's men. And there's a bunch of them, a half dozen or so, wearing shiny, Spanish-style armor and those helmets with bright-red plumes coming out the top.

They all see the gun first. There's the same general look on everybody's face. These two other naked girls try to cover themselves, like they've suddenly got modesty. I don't really see this, though, because I'm just looking at Teresa, and she's looking at me like she's seeing a ghost. Then, I don't know, maybe for a second she feels what I'm feeling, because there's a sad look comes into her eyes, and her arms fold up like she's ashamed, too. But then she passes on through that. Mad comes into her eyes, and her hands end up on her hips.

"Larry, you asshole bastard," she says.

I try to say something and find out my mouth has quit operating. It's the strangest thing: For a moment, nothing at all happens, like they're all just waiting to see what I'll do next.

Then there's this one guy, in a Hawaii Five-o shirt, and he shouts, "Who is this guy? What the hell's he doing on my set?"

He's wearing tan shorts and black cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, like he's Howdy Doody, a real dandy with feathers stuck in his hatband and big blade sunglasses over his eyes. I feel like ignoring him right away.

"T.J.," I say, mild as I can. "Get your clothes on."

"Hey!" the leader says, snappish, like a little dog.

"Get your clothes on," I tell her again. "You, too, Victoria."

Victoria has been standing there, giving me a tired frown; but when I say this, she only shrugs and starts over to where there's a little camp table set up. Teresa, though, she doesn't move. She just glares at me. "Why?" she says, real scornfully.

Her hair's all tangled and her feet are set apart, and her skin's just glistening, and she's breathing hard, with her nostrils flared and her eyes flashing at me. She's so beautiful in that moment, these guys all look at her. And I don't know what to do. I just stand there. For a second, which seems like an hour, nothing happens. Buzzards make slow circles way up in the blue sky over Saddleback Mountain. Something goes tick-tick-tick-tick off in the trees. I feel a little ribbon of sweat slip down the side of my face.

Finally, without knowing I'm going to, I say, "Because I love you, honey."

But still she stands there. She looks like some wild animal that's been cornered and won't give in yet, not without a fight. Then Victoria comes back, and she's got their clothes in a bundle and she says, "Come on, Teresa. I'm telling you."

Teresa looks at me for another second, which lasts an hour. Then, finally, like what she's really doing is agreeing to fistfight me, she says, "All right."

Things happen fast then. There's a general attitude among everybody else that I ought to have my gun taken away from me. But nobody's sure of how to start. The big guy's puffing and swearing. Howdy Doody wants to know who the hell I am, and he starts screaming at me that I'm a madman, walking in there and interrupting his movie. Finally, Victoria tells him I'm Teresa's husband. It's sort of the answer to everything. "That's all I need," he says. "A husband."

So we head down the trail. "Don't try following," I yell back at them. "There's nothing I'd like better than to shoot a few of you assholes." I'm feeling pretty cocky. But when we get to the truck, I get it rolling P.D.Q.

Then I don't feel cocky anymore.

It gets quiet and stays quiet for half the drive back, until I try telling her she's violated my trust.

She's sitting between Victoria and me, and she says, "Oh, yeah. You two want to talk about trust?"

I take a look over at Victoria. She smokes her cigarette and won't look at me.

"Yeah, she told me," Teresa says. "Because she couldn't keep it behind my back, like you."

"Men and women are different," I try telling her.

"Yeah," she says. "You're different, all right. You're a two-faced, self-serving son of a bitch."

"Yeah?" I say. "And so's every damn male human being in the world, then, and that's the whole problem. You've got to beware of us every damn minute of the time."

"Amen to that, brother," she says.

"So why do you want to show yourself off like that? Just for the money?"

But she won't say anymore, so I won't, either. It's a standoff, both of us saving our ammunition.

We have our talk-out when we get home, sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Scotch between us. "It wasn't the money, was it?" I say. "T.J., how in the world could you do something like that?"

She looks at me across the table. She's still plenty roughed up, but then she gives a shake to her head and looks me square in the eye and says, "It was the safest I ever felt."

Then she gets a look like something just occurred to her and, all of a sudden, she's not so mad anymore. "It's something," she says. "There've always been men who looked at me like I was naked in their minds. That's what's scary. This was embarrassing at first, but it wasn't scary. After about a minute, I felt more normal than I ever did with my clothes on. Does that make any sense?"

I don't say anything to that, because right then, I'm afraid that things can never be the same between us. I'm not mad anymore, either, only hurt and ashamed, like it had happened to me instead of her. It's like a switch thrown to another circuit. A whole flood comes rushing up, real tears, and it rims out right even with my lower eyelids and teeters there and then starts spilling over.

T.J. looks at me like I've got ants all over my face. Then she says, "Aw, honey, don't cry. Sweetheart. Baby, I'm still all yours." She comes around behind my chair and puts her arms around me. She wraps her arms around my head like a bandage. I can smell the make-up and dust and her sweat. Her skin's hot on her neck, and her breath's hot. I want right then, in spite of everything that's happened, just to take her into the bedroom and love her like there's no tomorrow. She knows it, too. I feel her mouth press into the top of my head. She starts tugging at my hair with her teeth. Then she comes around and sits in my lap, and then I can't even remember what I was thinking before. It's not a truce, it's just a plain lay-down of all weapons.

So pretty soon, we're in the bedroom. At first, I'm worried that it might be different, that she'll be changed. But it's not so, until we're in the middle of it, when I take a breather and she says for me to speak Spanish.

"Say everything you know," she whispers to me. "Speak Spanish to me."

So I say, "Esto es para las chiquitas," which sort of means, "This is for pretty girls," and Teresa says, "Más, más, que me estoy calentando mucho" because she knows Spanish like a Mexican.

So I go on, saying everything I can think of. I start getting into it. I start getting the accents right. I start putting some color into it. Finally, I'm saying the same thing over and over, but it doesn't matter. I just keep saying it until we're through.

Then we're lying there, and I'm wondering which one of those Spaniards it was she turned me into but thinking maybe it wasn't so bad, when all at once Teresa says, "We'll have to go see it when it comes to town."

"See what?" I say. Then I know, and my heart takes a leap.

"The Spanish Inquisition," she says. "We'll look for it when it comes. We'll see if they kept me in it. The scene where I'm whipped."

I think about this. I picture it. I know a movie's not the same as the real thing. It's worse. Men will see her up on the screen, then they'll see her in real life and they'll think things. I start thinking then how I'll have to be ready.

"I like to watch her towel herself. Women look so beautiful when they're just out of a shower."

"She gives me a look. 'Yeah, I was wearing nothing. So what? That's what they're paying me for.'"