Chapter 3
On the Road (Again)
Disclaimer: You all know the drill. I don't own Sands or El or anything related to OUATIM except several movie ticket stubs, the score, and an unhealthy obsession with the characters.
Rating: R for language
Summary: El and Sands make their way to the town of Villa de Cos.
Author's Note: According to my atlas, Villa de Cos is a real place, however I have never been there, and I know nothing about it. So I am taking liberties with it and its people -- but in a good way, I hope. Apologies to anyone this may offend.
Unrelated to the Story Note: All right. Now I know I've been spending too much time thinking about our lovely, corrupt Agent Sands. I go to Olive Garden for dinner tonight, and the waiter brings our food and asks, "Lasagna?" And I have to actively restrain myself from raising my hand and saying, "Me. Me, that's me." Not a good sign, you guys...
So then I decided when I got home I would post my new chapter. :-)
****
Ramirez gave them lunch. Sands was eager to be on the road, but turning down a free meal was on his (very short) list of things to never do, so he was willing to stick around for a little longer. He even managed to smile and thank his host, and he thought he sounded pretty sincere about it, too.
He would never tell El, but he had hated Puerto Vallarta.
It had been inevitable, really. For months he had built up the city, put it on a pedestal in his head. He had thought of it as his haven, his refuge, the one place in the world where he would be safe, and free. Where he would, for the first time in his life, be happy. Instead, Puerto Vallarta had been one big disappointment. Circumstances had forced his hand, but he had not been sorry to leave.
He supposed, had he possessed both his eyes and twenty million pesos, he would have felt differently about the city.
By two o'clock, they were on the road. Ramirez had been happy to see them go. Dying by slow degrees was only making him surlier than normal, and his attitude had been grating on Sands' nerves. He was actually glad El had come when he had – he wasn't sure how much more of Ramirez's doom and gloom he could have taken.
And then he suddenly realized something. In taking up with El again, he had traded one sourpuss for another. Maybe this wasn't such a good deal, after all.
Then he gave a mental shrug. What the hell.
El drove with the radio on, and some chirpy Spanish song bleated from the speakers. Sands reached over and felt along the console until he found the volume dial and switched it off.
He could almost see El's scowl.
"So," he said brightly, "how long until we reach your lovely little town?"
El said nothing, and Sands sighed. So they were back to this. El driving and himself the silent passenger. How little things had changed.
The miles unrolled beneath them. Sands dozed, letting the sounds of the world wrap themselves softly around him, trusting his instincts to wake him should something arise that needed his attention.
Instead what woke him was El's voice, sounding rather uncertain. "We have much to talk about," the mariachi said. "So I will answer a question if you will answer a question. Does that sound fair?"
"Oh my Christ," Sands swore. "Look, I'm not Mister Secret Agent Man anymore, and you never were. So cut the crap. What do you want to know?"
"Why didn't you stay in Puerto Vallarta?"
"I did stay in Puerto Vallarta," Sands said testily. He was annoyed at having his nap interrupted. It had been months since had gotten a good night's sleep, and he was sick and tired of being tired all the time. "Until some of the local folk got wind of the fact that the CIA was looking for me, and tried to turn me in for the reward."
"Tried," El repeated.
"Well, I'm here now, aren't I?" he snapped. Honestly, sometimes El had all the intelligence of a retarded four-year old.
"When was this?"
"Six months ago."
"You don't look like you've been on the run for that long."
He smirked. "That's because apparently a surprising number of senoritas take pity on blind men in this country."
A long silence greeted this comment, and he couldn't help it. He burst out laughing.
"What is so funny?" El demanded.
"I can just see the look on your face right now," he said.
El made one of those noises that meant he didn't know what to say. Sands always liked hearing him make that sound. It meant he had said something that hit home, something that made El think – which wasn't an easy thing to do. El was an uncomplicated man, and profound thoughts sat uneasily on him. The mariachi saw things in very clear black and white, and Sands enjoyed forcing El to consider things from different angles, and see the gray in the world. It was only a pale echo of his glory days of manipulation, but hey, he would take whatever he could get.
"What did you do in Puerto Vallarta before you had to leave?"
"None of your goddamn business," he retorted.
"Fair enough," El said. "Maybe you want to know what I have been doing."
"No, I really think I don't," Sands said. At the moment, all he wanted to do was sleep. "Whatever happened to your strong, silent act?"
After that, El didn't say anything.
****
El would probably laugh to hear it, but since leaving Puerto Vallarta, Sands had actually imagined meeting the mariachi again.
It was true. He had a vivid imagination, always had. Which was a damn good thing now. He needed every bit of help he could get, to make his way through the world now that he could not see it. But as long as he could create a mental picture of a place in his head, he managed to do all right. He had been in twelve towns over the last six months, and in three of those, and possibly a fourth, no one had even known he was blind.
So, he had imagined running into El. Different ways, in different places. Usually in some manner that involved him having the upper hand, and laughing at the mariachi. He still had not forgiven El for what had happened in Puerto Vallarta, the thing that had made the mariachi leave. Some days it felt good to imagine a little belated revenge for himself.
But of all the ways he had imagined meeting up with El again, it had never been quite like this.
It pissed him off that he had been reduced to this. Running and hiding from the very men he had meant to screw over. Well, fate had decided that he was the one to get royally screwed, a good old bend-over-and-grab-your-ankles screwing, and now nothing was the way it should be.
The CIA, instead of looking fruitlessly for him while he laughed at them from the safety of Puerto Vallarta, was hot on his trail. He had narrowly escaped them twice already, evading them only through sheer luck and the fortuitous aid of sympathetic townspeople. But luck had a way of running out, and sooner or later he would encounter someone more mercenary than himself, and then he would find himself in the custody of his hated former employer.
And he would never admit it aloud, but Sands was terrified of that fate. The only thing he had now was his freedom. Every day that he got by on his own was proof that Barillo hadn't broken him, that he was still in control. If the CIA got their hands on him, he would never be free again. He would spend the rest of his miserable life in a little white padded room, drooling and waiting for his next dose of meds, too doped up to even remember he was blind.
The thought made him shudder.
"Cold?" El asked, his voice clearly indicating he knew this to be a stupid question.
He wondered if El had any idea who they were dealing with. CIA agents were not people to fuck around with. Then again, he couldn't really expect El to know that. The only CIA agent El had ever known was himself, and he was hardly the typical agent.
"Why are you helping me?" he asked. "You could hide from them better on your own, just tell me to go fuck myself. Or maybe make an anonymous phone call, tell them where I am."
The chains on El's jacket jingled as he shrugged.
Sands didn't like that shrug. He would have preferred a snappy retort, maybe a punch in the mouth. He didn't want El to lack an answer.
Maybe, he thought, this was the man's way of repaying him. After all, he had saved El's life at Escalante's hacienda, and El knew it.
The funny thing was, what El didn't understand, was that the mariachi owed him nothing. For if he had saved El's life at the hacienda, El had surely saved his, as well.
They had never talked about it, what happened on that day. In fact, during the week they had spent together in Puerto Vallarta, they had hardly spoken to each other at all. Sands did know, however, that El didn't remember much of it. That was good. For El.
He remembered. Too much. Staggering from the courtyard, forced to cling to the mariachi, struggling just to breathe. The doctors told him later his lung had collapsed, and he had not been surprised, not one bit.
The drive to the hospital had been a nightmare. El had kept fading in and out, and the car had made dreamy loops across the road. Sands had done his best to keep them from plowing into anything, but it wasn't like he could see where they were going, and his grip on consciousness had not been very strong, either. He hadn't even cared much that he had been leaning on El like the world's bloodiest loverboy.
But El had done it. Somehow they had gotten to the hospital, and there Sands had finally given up and fainted. Just before his release from the place, a nurse had said that if he had been any slower in getting there, he would have died from blood loss.
He had not told El that. Some things were better kept to oneself.
****
Villa de Cos sounded just like every other sleepy Mexican town Sands had been in. Dusty, noisy, full of old cars that belched smelly exhaust, and people who talked loud and laughed louder. El lived in a small house in the center of town, on a busy street that probably never quieted, even in the middle of the night.
One thing, however, set this town apart from all the others: Music. Every street had its own unique beat, and the sound of guitars mingled with the clearer tones of a piano, and the brass of a trumpet. A kid rode by on a bike with a jingling bell, bawling out the words to a popular song at the top of his lungs. And he was not the only one. People sang inside their homes, inside their cars, and even walking across the street. Everyone in Villa de Cos, it seemed, lived their lives to music.
"Well, I see why you decided to live here," Sands drawled.
El made an exasperated sound. The trunk of the car slammed shut. "Hurry. I don't want anyone to see me. I parked behind the house, but anyone could have seen me arrive."
"I thought you were staying out of trouble these days," he mocked.
"I am," El said. "I want to stay that way. I don't want them to see you." Then he added, "Or to know I am back."
Sands nodded. He understood this perfectly. "Everyone in this place has their own song," he said, as he followed the jingling sounds of El walking up to the house. "I always imagined if I had a theme song, it would have a lot of brassy horns, and a pounding bass backbeat."
"Really?" El used his smartass tone, the one that surely went with a cocked eyebrow.
"Oh yeah." Sands grinned. He walked into the house, stumbling just a little on the stoop. El shut the door behind him. "Can't you just hear the horns wailing when I walk into a room?"
"Well, I do hear something wailing," El muttered, then added something even more unkind in Spanish.
"I heard that," Sands said.
El said something else, but Sands ignored him. He was focused on the room he was in, listening hard to the sounds of the house, feeling how far the walls were from where he stood. It was a skill he had honed considerably over the last twelve months. Walls and solid objects seemed to emanate an invisible signal, he had discovered. He could sense those signals, if he tried hard enough, and use them to create his mental picture of the room. Then he could navigate it with enough confidence that he didn't have to stick his hand out in front of him like a fucking blind man.
Right now he could tell he was in a small kitchen. They had indeed come in through the back door. Appliances hummed to his left, water dripped from a faucet to his right, and something lay directly in his path a few feet ahead -- probably a table and chairs.
"Do you even speak Spanish?" El asked again.
"Well, what do you think?" he asked back, unable to believe he was having this conversation, unable to believe he was even here at all. What on earth had happened to his desire to do it all himself? Why the hell was he here?
"I don't know," El said.
"Of course I do." And in flawless Spanish, Sands told El all about the mariachi's ancestry, filthy peasants descended from dirty goats and born out of wedlock. He paused, then added that El himself needed a bath and wasn't even a very good guitar player if he couldn't play slide guitar.
When he finished, there was a breathless silence while he waited to be punched in the nose. He could hear something, but he couldn't tell what it was.
It took him a moment to realize El was laughing, a nearly soundless laugh.
"I stand corrected," El said. "Where did you learn to speak it so well?"
"Living here," Sands said. "But when I got the assignment to come here, I went out and bought some Berlitz language tapes. I listened to those and I watched a lot of bad soap operas on Telemundo."
El laughed even harder.
When he was sure El wasn't laughing at him, Sands allowed himself to relax a little. He even laughed a little himself.
For the first time in six months, since this whole miserable affair with the CIA had started, he began to think that maybe things would turn out all right, after all.
****
Author's Notes: The music Sands hears in his head is, of course, "Sands Theme" from the OUATIM score, music written by Johnny Depp.
Also, this chapter contains my all-time favorite line of Sands'. Prizes will go out to anyone who can guess which one it is.
Final note. I'm writing ahead again on this story, and I've discovered that it's turning out to be a lot more angsty than the first one was. So my question to you all is: is this a good thing or a bad thing? Do you want to see this? What it means in story terms is that the action has taken a bit of a back seat for more character-driven relationship stuff. I know not everybody wants that, so I thought I better ask now, while there's still time to change the story. So let me know your preference, and I'll do my best to see that it happens. But you know how it is with these two boys....they don't always do what they're told.