Bang Page 10

  “Doesn’t seem like I’ve got much of a choice,” says Uli.

  “You do,” says June, her eyes going sad now. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need it. But seeing that I didn’t blow your head off— and that you got my dog sliced up—I think you owe it to me. Think of it as seed money: Give me what you have now and I’ll get you double that. Maybe triple.”

  Uli spits in the dirt, watches the sand absorb it as soon as it hits the ground.

  They set off east toward the sounds of downtown San Miguel. There’s the low rumble of a highway nearby, the sounds of car horns and street vendors too. The noise of life happening. Along the way, June points out every home she’s ever squatted in. They walk into some of the homes. Others they just pass by.

  In one home, there’s a room full of flies swarming over a molded dinner left out on placemats over a plastic table. In another, there’s the static blue of a television never turned off. In another, there are sheets of paper spread out over a kitchen counter. Some kid’s homework, someone’s bills. All of the homes are stripped clean of the copper pipes and wires in the walls. There’s adobe and plaster all over the ground. And that’s the first thing June teaches Uli: money is all around them. In pipes, in wiring, in car parts, in sink faucets—anything that can be scrapped or pulled or gouged from the walls.

  June says the whole city used to be a factory town, a maquila town. There were expendable jobs, expendable labor, expendable people before the drugs came in and San Miguel’s militia started fighting back. The autodefensas took everything over. Then the cartels took everything over. Then the autodefensas again. It went back and forth, back and forth like that until everyone left—the maquilas too. There were three maquilas in all: one that built American televisions, one that built Chevy transmission parts and one that built toaster ovens for cents on the dollar. Newly deported and recently arrived people in the town needed jobs, and for those jobs to keep going, the factories needed scrap: rubber, copper, steel and aluminum. The scrapping was good for a while, but the factories relocated closer to Juárez. June says there’s only one scrapyard still open, and that’s where Uli and June fit into the equation.

  “Scrapyard still needs the metal, and we give it to them. Simple as that.”

  “How well does it pay?” asks Uli, hobbling along on his bad feet. His arches are tight. There’s a throbbing in his right big toe.

  “Enough,” says June.

  They walk in the road, between boulders and burnt-out cars, until they come across the aftermath of a car bomb which stops them in their tracks.

  A jeep filled bumper to brim with barbed nail shanks and fertilizer. The smell of the bomb still hangs peppery and damp in the air. Every breath is like inhaling mud.

  They can smell the fertilizer from fifty yards out. The barbed nail shanks are strewn much further. The nails twinkle in the morning light, a silvery constellation against the oil-streaked pavement.

  Uli bends down, ever so gingerly, and picks up one of the nails. He holds it in his hand, imagines the way it might have sounded. All that metal striking pavement at once.

  The further they walk, the denser the nails are scattered. Uli walks tiptoe to keep them from puncturing the soles of his cheap shoes. His arches tense, his right big toe throbbing.

  Beside the Jeep there are two greasy, charred bodies shimmering in the morning light, the silvery nails riddling the length and width of them. The skin of their palms are fused together so that the bodies look like they’re holding hands. One of them has a golden wedding ring. The other one has a platinum band that’s somehow maintained its luster through the blast. Their legs are matte, covered in debris and flies that crawl about the slivers of blistered tissue puckered beneath their burnt and shredded clothes. The flesh of the man’s ears has melted into his shoulders. He is wearing a plaid shirt. She is wearing a navy blue dress. The clothes are the only way you can tell them apart, where one body starts and the other begins.

  By Uli’s foot, there’s a warped prosthetic. No telling who it belonged to—the man or the woman.

  Uli touches his busted foot to the prosthetic foot. He looks up to June, her eyes peering out from inside her fleshy mask of scars.

  “Cartels and autodefensas,” says June, picking up the prosthetic by the ankle and swiping it in long arcs in front of her to displace the nails scattered on the ground.

  “Which ones you think they were?” asks Uli.

  “Probably narcos. Or a narco and his lady friend.”

  Uli looks at the bodies and tries to guess who they were, who they might have been. Husband and wife married fifty years. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Man and mistress. No telling. Uli looks to where the man’s head is supposed to be.

  Beneath a puckered blister of flesh, a set of gleaming white teeth barely visible in the charred skin of the corpse. Just then he sees June nearing the body, the collar of her shirt pulled up over her nose.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “The rings,” says June.

  “You can’t be serious,” he says.

  “Just trust me,” says June, laying her hand over the man’s ring to find the best angle to pinch at it, drag it off without touching the corpse. She does this for maybe ten, fifteen seconds, before deciding that there’s no elegant way to do it. She pulls at it. The flesh builds up behind the platinum band as June tugs. She shakes the flesh to the ground. Then starts in on the woman’s body, the golden ring.

  Uli falls to his knees and feels the arches in his feet burn. He hurls. He feels his diaphragm rattle between his ribs. It’s as if all of the wind is pulled out of him and then pushed back into him again.

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  THE HACIENDA DE SAN SEBASTIÁN is a desert ranch of twelve thousand hectares situated halfway between Ciudad Juárez to the east and San Miguel to the west. The northern outposts of the property are made up of a chain of low hills that cut highway 45 in half just south of Samalayuca in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The southern outskirts of the property make up part of the Área Natural Protegida de Medanes de Samalayuca, a federal nature reserve. As a nature reserve, it’s the last thing to be guarded by any one of the cost-cutting (money-embezzling) Mexican federal entities and, thus, the perfect place to put a Juárez cartel airstrip.

  It’s accessed by a desert road so straight and smoothed by sand that you can’t even tell you’re moving if not for the sound of the engine pulling you along, the dirt gliding underneath like an endless ribbon. Big sky. Low horizon. Lalo always dreads coming here. He has to bring his daughter every time. Boss’ wishes. The daughter’s too, though she only comes for the ponies that seem immune to heat stroke.

  Lalo drives up past the stables and wonders what kind of evil shit bred those ponies—white feet, short necks, all shriveled up like they’re about to die but they never do. The devil couldn’t have thought up something uglier.

  “Ponies!” Lalo’s daughter shouts on cue. Her tiny, sloppily lacquered fingernails curl around the door handle as Lalo eases the truck past the gates.

  “Goddamnit, Carla! What’d I tell you about opening the door when the car’s still moving?”

  “I saw him do it, so I did it,” she says.

  Lalo looks into the rearview to get a look at Cuauhtémoc. Cuauhtémoc’s entire weight is shifted to one side, his hands on the door like he’s about to make an escape.

  “Mr. Cuauhtémoc is a little simple in the head,” says Lalo to his daughter. “You’re smarter than that. Don’t be like him.”

  “Is that why he likes to ride in the back?” she sneers, all sugar and brine in that way only twelve-year-old girls can be.

  “Mr. Cuauhtémoc just gets sick up front is all,” he says.

  “What happened to his arm?” she asks.

  “Mr. Cuauhtémoc had an accident, but Mr. Jimmy is going to make him all better now, isn’t that right, Cuauhtémoc?”

  “That’s right, sir,” says Cuauhtémoc sheepishly, easing up on the door now.

  “
You’re not too good in the kitchen, huh?” says Carla to Cuauhtémoc, pointing at the slash along his arm.

  “You can open your door now,” says Lalo, breaking her line of questions. “Go pick out a pony to ride while me and Mr. Jimmy try to help our friend, Mr. Cuauhtémoc. Don’t run out from my sight, okay?”

  “Okay!” she says, jumping from the front seat of Lalo’s pickup. Her feet thud against pavement, a little spray of dust carried off into the wind. Her entire body pulls at the door to swing it closed. Lalo turns from his daughter to Cuauhtémoc, the half-smile still plastered across his face.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “You’d do it too,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “You were going to make me shoot you in front of my daughter.”

  “You wouldn’t have shot me,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Like hell I wouldn’t have. How far did you think you were going to get? Like, really fucking tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Like, man, I’m trying to save your life here, and you’re about to pull some shit. On my boss’ property. With my daughter in the front seat. Are you fucking simple?”

  “You told your daughter I was simple.”

  “Was right then,” says Lalo. He steps out and opens Cuauhtémoc’s door, grabs him by the arm and says, “Don’t try any dumb shit anymore. I’m your only friend now, right? So don’t fuck this up for me.”

  “I didn’t ask for this,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Neither did I. I wish I could tell you that enough, brother.”

  “I’m not your brother.”

  “Then I’m your God, understand? I’ll end you. Or we could make this pleasant.”

  “Let’s get on with it then,” says Cuauhtémoc and plants a foot on the ground and then the other.

  They both walk gingerly, in sync, leaning on one another to keep Cuauhtémoc from falling. The distance between the pickup and the ranch house feels like a mile that Lalo would drive if it weren’t for El Jimmy’s peculiarities about tread patterns in the sand outside. His boss likes the earth outside his house clean, trackless, the way nature intended for it to be. Lalo limps along and looks toward the airstrip behind the ranch house, the airplane grave yard just a few hundred feet past that. Seventy or eighty aircraft, big and small, burning out there in the desert. Most of them are caked with dust on one side, the static vents and pitot tubes clogged. Some of them are riddled with bullets. Most have been scrapped for parts. The biggest one is a DC-3 that looks like the next hard breeze could blow it all apart. On the ground, there are black and red puddles of steering and hydraulic fluid, oil and gasoline.

  Past the planes, on the north end of the property, there’s a stampede of ponies—eighteen or twenty—pushing dust through the air like a great fog coming down from the hills. Behind them, one of Jimmy’s vaqueros is hauling ass, trying his best to corral them. Lalo imagines all of those wild things cutting loose toward him. He imagines the sound of all that flesh, galloping in and out between the wings and bodies and struts of the aircraft in the graveyard. Hooves and flesh and metal. An endless rumble and jangle, like what the earth might sound like were it to open and swallow them whole.

  “Why are you staring out that way?” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Just picking out a horse for my daughter,” says Lalo, ducking into the shade of the awning. The front door of the ranch house opens before they can even knock.

  Before them stands Lalo’s boss, El Jimmy. He’s looking fatter these days though much more like his younger self, like the man who recruited Lalo.

  Lalo feels like it’s been twenty years or so since he’s seen Jimmy smile like that, even if those teeth are someone else’s. Perfectly straight veneers. His green contacts that make his eyes look manic. An old man’s faux hawk haircut, like all the Euro soccer players wore in the early 2000s. He looks taller than what Lalo remembers, or is it the heels of his boots?

  “Come, come!” says Jimmy backing into the living room of his house now.

  There’s track lighting everywhere. Steel and concrete too. The modern aesthetic of it shocks Lalo once again—from the outside, a ranch house; from the inside, a sterile loft of sorts that could have been ripped out of the late 90s.

  Along the walls are oversized and overstuffed pale beige leather sofas, like the kind you might find in the waiting room of a dialysis clinic or at a discount furniture store. In the middle of the floor, where a coffee table might go, there’s a giant, two hundred gallon cast-iron pot, like the kind used to melt sugar cane pulp down into molasses and then into sugar bricks. It’s filled with coins and bills: the preparations Jimmy likes to talk so much about.

  The first thing Jimmy asks for is Cuauhtémoc’s wallet, which Lalo produces. Jimmy splits it open and takes all of eight dollars from inside and tosses it into the pot.

  “Small price to pay for your life,” he says to Cuauhtémoc and invites him to sit on the couch in front of a seventy-inch wall-mounted TV that makes everything glow in blue and white hues. El Jimmy connects his laptop via Chromecast to the television. On the screen, in front of Cuauhtémoc, is a picture of him taken by a security camera from the Mexican side of the border. That same picture is the one being used as propaganda by the Mexican government, the one that’s been plastered all over the papers in recent days.

  “New clothes, same face,” says Jimmy with a smile now, looking between the screen and Cuauhtémoc. “Tell me that’s you, boy.”

  “That’s me,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Were you the only one in that aircraft?”

  Cuauhtémoc looks to Lalo. Lalo nods for him to respond. “I was,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “So, you flew the plane.”

  “I can fly anything,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  At this, Jimmy smiles. “I didn’t ask that, son. I asked if you flew that plane.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m a little thirsty. I’m not thinking right,” says Cuauhtémoc. “Yes. I flew that plane.”

  “How rude of me,” says Jimmy. “I didn’t offer either of you anything to drink. I don’t do alcohol myself. Some water?”

  “Please,” says Cuauhtémoc, eyeing the glass tank in the corner next to the television.

  El Jimmy moves slowly across the room. He picks up a clay mug, blows into it to dust it out. He looks as if he’s about to say something but decides against it. The sound of water in the mug is like liquid silver in the air to Cuauhtémoc.

  As soon as Cuauhtémoc’s handed the mug, he downs the water with two fierce gulps. Water dribbles down his chin and into the collar of his shirt.

  “Another glass, please,” he says to El Jimmy.

  At this Lalo puts his hand over his face. A look of surprise comes over Lalo’s face as El Jimmy gets up almost as soon as he’s seated again and takes the clay mug back and forth between Cuauhtémoc and the glass tank, buying Cuauhtémoc’s loyalty one glug at a time.

  Later that afternoon, Cuauhtémoc finds himself sitting at the end of a stained red oak table in Jimmy’s kitchen. There’s an elderly woman in a simple, cotton skirt and blouse stoking a fire inside an old-timey kitchen range made out of enough cast-iron to crack the tiles it’s resting on. Cuauhtémoc guesses the range is original to the property. It looks completely out of place in the modern aesthetic of it all.

  “¿Un cafecito?” she asks him.

  “Sí, por fa,” says Cuauhtémoc to the woman.

  She smiles in this suppressed way, her lips drawn wide, as if to suggest that she’s not supposed to talk to Cuauhtémoc more than she’s allowed. She turns her back to him and pulls out a top-crank German coffee grinder from a cabinet above her head. She measures out the coffee by the palmful, her hand going wrist-deep, back and forth, into this burlap sack of whole beans. Cuauhtémoc looks out the kitchen window just over her shoulder to see Lalo leading a pony by the reigns, his daughter proudly in the saddle with his oversized Stetson dominating her head. Their shadows run long on the ground, the hottest part of the da
y already over. A ring of sweat drapes Lalo’s shoulders. Every once in a while, the pony starts licking at the salt on the back of his neck which makes Cuauhtémoc chuckle to himself.

  Cuauhtémoc notices the graveyard of planes in the close distance. He’s momentarily startled by the loudness of the grinder sawing away at the beans. Jimmy’s boots pound over the tiles behind him. He slaps Cuauhtémoc on the back with the flat of his palm as he moves to the other end of the oak table and says, “Dolores, café, por favor.”

  “Casi listo,” the old woman says from behind him with that same flat smile. From his vest pocket he pulls out a matchbook and silver cigarette case filled with Gauloises.

  “Cigarette?” he says to Cuauhtémoc.

  “Just the coffee.”

  “We can speak in English. I want to hear your English. Have you eaten?”

  “Lalo took me out for some chilaquiles this morning.”

  “Tst—chilaquiles. I have some Pan de Muerto. It’s out of season but I always have some on hand. Dolores makes them with fresh eggs.”

  “I’m good. Just the coffee, please.”

  “Suit yourself,” he says.

  Dolores puts the percolator on the range. The smell of coffee and ash fills the air. “You take cream with your coffee?”

  “Just black,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  At this El Jimmy smiles. “Tan americano. You said you were from Texas?”

  “South Texas,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Harlingen.”

  “I know Harlingen,” says Jimmy taking a slow drag from his cigarette.

  “We used to have a supply house off Highway 83. A little town called Weslaco just to the west of Harlingen proper. It was a ranch out there—some private property impossible to get a search warrant for. We rigged it that way. We used to drop loads out there in the pasture and then circle back, get more product, drop again. Day and night. That was before the Zetas and the Sinaloa war and Calderón and all that. We flew everywhere. We were like Pan Am,” Jimmy says with a smile.

  “And that was just my cell. This one.” “And then what happened?” says Cuauhtémoc.