Ask for Me Tomorrow

“She will, too,” Jenkins said gloomily. “Unless I get out before she does. I always had a weakness for fiery women, but now I think I’m over it.” He took a sip of beer, grimacing, as though the stuff had the bitter taste of regrets. “I have to shake this town. The cops, the immigration boys, Emilia’s relatives — I can’t walk around the block without being hassled. My only chance is meeting up with a well-heeled sucker at one of the American bars. Funny how Americans who wouldn’t give each other the time of day in Chicago or Louisville become bosom pals over a couple of drinks at the Domino Club. Well, all I need is the right bosom.” Jenkins turned and studied Aragon carefully for a moment. “It’s too bad we know each other. It cramps my style. I prefer to deal with strangers.”

“I bet you do.”

“Friends are murder in this business... I wouldn’t mind another beer if you were offering any, laddie.”

“I’m offering.” Aragon opened another can. “How did you get mixed up in something as big as the Jenlock Haciendas project?”

“Innocent-like. I mean, I didn’t walk into it. I just stood there and it grew up around me.”

“Is that what you told the magistrate?”

“I tried to. My Spanish isn’t too good. Maybe he didn’t understand me.”

“Or maybe he did.”

“It was true, so help me. I’d been hearing plenty of talk about how Baja was due for a big boom as soon as the new highway was finished. I borrowed some money, rented a jeep and went down to have a look-see. Well, the boom’s on now and it’s big, so I was right about that. The wrong part was the location and B. J... To this day I don’t know how I managed to get lost. But I did. And that’s how I arrived at Bahía de Ballenas. Ever hear of it?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Well, there was B. J., living in a super-deluxe motor home and looking like money. A bunch of money. It went to my head. No drink ever invented could go to my head like that. It wasn’t like getting drunk alone and sleeping it off. B. J. stayed right with me. Every idea I came up with, he came up with an improvement. Then I improved on the improvement, until finally there it was, Jenlock Haciendas, bigger than both of us. I didn’t have sense enough to be scared. I was not only out of my league, I didn’t even know what game I was playing.”

“It’s called fraud.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Me, Harry Jenkins, who never wrote on anything he didn’t swipe from a hotel lobby, suddenly had his name on a fancy letterhead. Me, who never had more than a couple of hundred bucks in his pocket, was suddenly throwing money around like there was no tomorrow. It was the longest drunk a man’s ever been on — and not a drop of liquor, so to speak.”

“What sobered you up?”

“Tomorrow,” Jenkins said. “Tomorrow came. If it was the longest drunk, it sure as hell brought the biggest hangover. I won’t be over it until I get out of this place.”

“Where’s B. J. now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“I’m a lousy guesser. Look at my record.”

“Try.”

“I kind of guess he’s dead.”

“Why?”

“Some people make out okay in the Quarry but B. J. wasn’t the type. First off, he was the wrong nationality. He kept demanding his rights and bail and habeas corpus and a bunch of stuff they never heard of in this country and wouldn’t care if they had. Second off, he was a rich boy, spoiled rotten. He never had anything but the best all his life, and suddenly there he was with nothing but the worst. There we both were, only with me it didn’t matter so much. If sheepshead is all they give me to eat — hell, I eat it. B. J. threw up just looking at it. Oversensitive he was, and then some. Bled like a stuck pig if he got the slightest scratch. And scratch he did, laddie, scratch he did. The mosquitoes had a banquet on him every night. You could hear them flying around laughing as soon as the sun went down. Call it buzzing, humming, hissing, whatever. Down here they laugh.” He added with a touch of nostalgia, “One thing you could say about Jenlock Haciendas, we never had any mosquitoes there.”

“Why not?”

“No water. Tons of sea water but no drink water.”

“You should have thought of that before you started thinking of building a bunch of haciendas.”

“Oh, we did. B. J. said it was no problem. All we had to do was build a desalinization plant to take the salt out of the sea water. He put up the money, and I mean large money. He wanted the best. Me, I never heard of a desalinization plant before, but by God, suddenly there I was with the wherewithal, so I started building one. You know what I’d do if I had it to do all over again, laddie?”

“Tell me.”