Read HCC 115 - Borderline for Free Online

was going to materialize, she was going to be able to accept it. She was
     in the right sort of mood. Not sick, not ready to fall on her face, and not sober.
    At the corner she saw that she was still on Carleton Boulevard. So far the street
     had been good to her, having supplied her with good food at Giardi’s and good gin
     at the cocktail lounge. She saw no valid reason to desert Carleton Boulevard. She
     crossed the street and stayed with Carleton, heading toward more bright lights.
    The bright light section was the approach to the border. She saw small shops selling
     souvenirs of Mexico, which impressed her as odd items to purchase on the Texas side.
     Other shops offered to convert dollars to pesos. She still had Mexican money in her
     purse, money from Mexico City which she had never bothered to reconvert into dollars.
    Now, evidently, she would have a chance to spend some of it, some of those one- and
     five- and ten-peso notes. A peso was around eight cents, she knew, and it was hard
     to think of a bill worth eight cents as being legal tender in anything but Monopoly.
     She stopped by a streetlight to take her wallet from her purse and go through the
     Mexican bills in one compartment. She had eighty-six pesos, or $6.88. She wondered
     what she could buy with eighty-six pesos. Not very much, she decided. But she knew
     they took American money in Juarez, just as they had in Mexico City.
    They didn’t even stop her at the Customs shed. She could understand that; the only
     thing you could smuggle profitably into Mexico was gold, and she could hardly carry
     gold in a handbag. Cars were a profitable smuggling item as well, since Mexico had
     a hundred percent import duty on them, but she was on foot. The Customs man smiled
     at her and motioned her on through. She took a few dozen steps and she was in Mexico
     again.
    Ciudad Juarez, she said to herself. Big deal.
    There were no cigarettes in her sterling silver cigarette case. She found her way
     to a stand that sold junk jewelry and souvenirs and cigars and tequila and, finally,
     cigarettes. She looked at the display and pointed to a pack labeled
Delicados
. A Mexican with a drooping moustache handed her the pack and she gave him a one-peso
     note. Surprisingly, he returned some Mexican coins in change. She looked at them oddly,
     wondering what they could give you that was change for eight cents. She dropped the
     coins in her purse, opened the pack of cigarettes and filled her cigarette case. She
     lit one, drew on it, inhaled. It tasted exactly like any American cigarette.
    In flawless English, the Mexican asked her if she would like to buy a packet of filthy
     pictures.
    Sober, she might have stalked away haughtily. Sober and still married to Borden Rector,
     she would certainly have done so. But she was drunk and divorced and hunting for excitement.
     While she could imagine more exciting fare than filthy photographs, she didn’t want
     to miss any bets.
    “Filthy pictures,” she said. “How filthy?”
    “Very filthy.”
    “What do they show?”
    He told her, in perfect English, what the pictures showed. He would never have dreamed
     of using the equivalent Spanish words in a woman’s presence, not even if the woman
     were a prostitute. That was an interesting thing about using a foreign language, Meg
     thought. You never quite realized how dirty the dirty words were.
    “How much?”
    “A dollar,” he said.
    She looked through her purse. “Ten pesos,” she suggested.
    It was a deal. The man would have taken five pesos, as it happened, but Meg was not
     particularly concerned about saving pesos. She gave him the bill, took a small manila
     envelope, and left the stand. She kept walking until she came to a public park with
     green benches. She found an unoccupied bench, sat down on it, and opened the manila
     envelope.
    The photos were filthy, all right. She looked at each of the dozen in turn, and when
     she had finished she went through the batch