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  “Well, what the fuck didn’t happen?” he says with a heavy, pensive kind of exasperation. “The short of it is that the air routes have all but stopped. Our turf has shrunk. What’s that expression you Americans say—writing on the wall? We’re fucked. We’re just business people, most of us. We didn’t ask for the war to come to us. But now that it’s here, we have to look at our options. So, here’s the hard truth: this cell is not part of the Juárez cartel anymore, understand? Officially it is, but it isn’t. It’s all going to implode. The game is this: we need capital. To get that we need to move product. To do that we need an American pilot.”

  “Why an American pilot?”

  “Because we need an American accent. You get where I’m going with this?” says Jimmy.

  “You want me to talk on the radios.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You want to fly analog: an American pilot with an American accent taking American vectors from a class C American airport with an American transponder and radio frequency flying Mexican product.”

  “You’re sharper than you look,” says Jimmy, that little bitch cackle of his ringing out at the top of his smoker’s cough. His eyes are visibly excited now.

  He leans forward in his chair just as Dolores places the coffee in front of him. He ignores it. All he can see is Cuauhtémoc now.

  “Do you have an American plane?” asks Cuauhtémoc. “None of that would work without an American tail number.”

  “We have a few,” says Jimmy, a little too over eager. “I noticed from the photograph that you were flying a Pawnee.”

  “I can a fly high-wing or low-wing. Doesn’t matter.”

  “We used to have a lot of Cessna 172s with American tail numbers. Brand new ones, but all of those got scrapped. We used to fly into small municipal airports, class D or E. Didn’t matter so long as they didn’t have towers or security. We’d unload right there on the tarmac, leave the planes. We could afford to buy ten more the next day.”

  Just then Cuauhtémoc remembers those rows of planes at Harlingen field, the airport where he trained with Sampson’s son. He remembers a row of Cessnas parked back by the fence, all of them plastered with orange stickers layered over the windshields—tickets for each day their parking fee hadn’t been paid. Cuauhtémoc remembers that the planes were parked there so long that the flight base operator called the sheriff out, asked what he should do. “Soon as these folks come back for what they left I’ll be collecting some major income,” the operator told the sheriff. Nobody had the heart to tell the man that nobody was coming back for those planes. Back then, Cuauhtémoc could only guess at what he saw, which is that they were scrap planes. Everyone treated them as such.

  “I’m glad you were able to see our doctor,” says El Jimmy. “I heard your arm took a slice.”

  At this Cuauhtémoc lifts up the sleeve of his shirt to show Jimmy the damage. Eighteen stitches to his bicep. Another eleven on the heel of his palm.

  “Did the doctor give you a timeframe for recovery?”

  “A month or two. The good thing is that they were clean slices with a sharp blade. Not too deep. No tearing.”

  “You should have never been out there in the gladiator fights. Between us chickens: Lalo is a little bit desperate. For his daughter, understand? He’s stressed, which makes him a bit of an idiot sometimes. He didn’t know you were a pilot. You should have told him.”

  “He didn’t ask,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Of course, he didn’t. Can you still fly? I need you to fly,” says Jimmy.

  “What do you want me to fly?” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “I thought you said you can fly anything. Prove it then.”

  “When?”

  “Right now. Tonight. You fly for me and you’ll get out of this alive. I promise you.”

  He pounds his palms on the table, grabbing hold of the corners of it. His cigarette falls from between his fingers, embers and ash fanning out across the cold tile. The cigarette rolls in circles around the filter’s axis.

  Jimmy locks eyes with Cuauhtémoc. “Hey, look at me. Look right here: I promise you. I’ll get you out of this alive.”

  The contract is remarkably simple: Cuauhtémoc flies product for El Jimmy’s cell and so becomes a salaried underling of his. Because they’ve spared his life, Cuauhtémoc agrees to throw half of what he’s paid into Jimmy’s pot for preparations. If a brick goes missing, Cuauhtémoc dies. If a plane goes missing, Cuauhtémoc dies. If Cuauhtémoc goes missing, they find Cuauhtémoc (wherever he’s at in the world) and Cuauhtémoc dies. They promise him that if they can’t find him, they’ll take next of kin, which Jimmy emphasizes by giving Cuauhtémoc a jailbroken iPhone loaded with dozens of pictures of his mother: in the streets of Matamoros, cranking something under the hood of his father’s busted and smoking truck, talking to a strange man with her oversized bags in his hand, smoking a cigarette on a bed as she stares at the ceiling of some room Cuauhtémoc doesn’t know.

  Cuauhtémoc doesn’t ask El Jimmy how he found her. All he knows is that they haven’t found Uli yet, and there’s some hope in that.

  He wonders about this new life. What it entails, how long he has to do it. However long, he guesses. There’s no real choice here. No way out. The main thing is to stay alive. Cuauhtémoc knows he can’t find his brother if he’s dead. He can’t keep his mother alive if he runs. He’s trapped. And knowing that he’s trapped, a silent rage boils deep inside him not unlike that same rage he felt that night in the killing fields or that same rage he feels toward Lalo now for bringing him into this in the first place.

  That night, Cuauhtémoc makes a promise to himself: if they kill his mother, he’ll kill Lalo’s daughter. He stokes that rage, lets it bloom, keeps it glowing as he prepares for the flight that will save his life. His mother’s and his brother’s too.

  In the bathroom of Jimmy’s home, he stands under the hot pour of the showerhead until his skin feels like rubber. His pink sutures sing with pain as blood fills his wounds.

  When he’s done, there’s cold water that he splashes from the faucet onto his face. There’s electricity and heat and gas. He gets to thinking about how strange it is to him—all of these things that could bring a house down to its foundation, and we invite it all into our homes. Cuauhtémoc soaps up, thinks of a million ways to kill Lalo’s daughter.

  Over the toilet seat rest his new things: a plain white cotton T-shirt, some black Wrangler’s jeans too stiff at the crotch, a pair of white socks, a pair of dark brown boots.

  Once he’s dressed, he steps into the dark of the house. He follows that darkness to the open door just off the kitchen, where his eyes adjust to the desert night, which is darker than dark. Like stepping into nothing.

  He puts his hand out in front of him, and he can’t even see that. His feet only know where to walk by the silver arc of pickup headlights that spray across the ground. He imagines disappearing into the darkness, running off into the desert. They’d never find him.

  As he walks, out in the far distance Cuauhtémoc sees a floating city. Which one? He couldn’t say. He squints. Just in front of that, the silhouette of something very big. The stars too bright now, silver pins in a purple, plush cushion.

  It’s midnight by the Big Dipper’s position in the sky. Cuauhtémoc blinks. Looks at the silhouette again. A very large plane appears, right in front of him, against the night like a ghost out of thin air, like some kind of David Copperfield trick. The plane is bigger than anything he’s ever flown before.

  El Jimmy’s sour, ashy voice rings out from behind Cuauhtémoc’s ear. “Can you fly it?” he says.

  The sound jolts Cuauhtémoc from his thoughts. “I don’t know,” says Cuauhtémoc, which is, of course, the wrong answer.

  “You must fly it,” demands Jimmy, suddenly severe. “You said you could fly it.”

  Cuauhtémoc looks back, but there’s nothing there. Just darkness and the voice ringing out, “Show me you can fly it. Show me. Show me right now.”


  From the darkness, a hand takes hold of Cuauhtémoc, leading him by the shoulder with a soft tug. The tips of Jimmy’s fingers gingerly pull along the seams of Cuauhtémoc’s sutures.

  Cuauhtémoc follows his pain into the darkness. Just under the wing of the colossal plane, he can already tell that he’d be lucky to get it off the ground. At the wheels, a red puddle of hydraulic fluid dripping from the impact cylinder to the tread of the tires and then into the dirt. At the connecting joints between the wing and ailerons, there’s a lot of gleaming, painted rust. On the leading edge of the right propeller, there are so many nicks and dings from the desert sand and stone that have flown up behind the propellers and shredded the plane to pieces.

  Jimmy’s voice softens when he asks Cuauhtémoc, “Do you think it will fly?”

  Cuauhtémoc, surprised by the question, says to Jimmy, “It hasn’t flown before?”

  “We’ve never seen it fly,” says Jimmy.

  “Where did you find it then?”

  A long silence between Cuauhtémoc’s question and Jimmy’s response. “Bought it.”

  “From?” says Cuauhtémoc, emboldened now by his aviation expertise. They trust him, which gives him a little courage.

  “The ejército.”

  “The army?”

  “Well, yes, a former general in the army,” says Jimmy in this guttural tone, slightly embarrassed at the fact. Cuauhtémoc wonders how a cartel buys a plane from the very army they’re fighting against.

  “What kind is it?” asks Jimmy

  “A Beechcraft King Air,” says Cuauhtémoc. He points at the tail. “If it weren’t painted, it’d say it right there. I’m sure there’s a pilot’s operating handbook somewhere inside that’ll prove me right.”

  “It’s old?”

  “Very old,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “If we steal an American tail number and repaint it could you fly it into Texas?”

  Cuauhtémoc doesn’t answer just yet. He works his way around the aircraft, Jimmy close behind. Beyond the port side wing, a dozen pickups filled with men watching his every move.

  “Mechanically, I think it will fly. But not to Texas. Not yet,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “Cuauhtémoc, I trust you. You are honest, I can tell. But can you fly this tonight?”

  “I can try,” says Cuauhtémoc as he makes his way around the plane once again, Texas on his mind. He opens the door to the cabin.

  The pre-flight ritual for Cuauhtémoc comes flooding back from memory. At the rodeo corral he never thought in a million years he’d live to do this again. His broken body tries to recreate, from muscle memory, every part of the pre-flight check.

  He slips the steel elevator lock from the yoke shaft, tucking it into the back seat pocket behind him. He knows he’s supposed to keep loose things latched down lest they become flying projectiles on impact. Sampson’s son taught him that. He never forgets that one.

  Cuauhtémoc swings his body into the cockpit, eases the cotton shirt on his back into the pleather seat cushion. The cushion lets out a little wheeze of air under his weight. He lays his toes into the hydraulic brakes over the rudder pedals. He tests their pressure.

  “Needs more red,” shouts Cuauhtémoc to Jimmy in English, a momentary lapse of memory. His body is in Mexico but, behind the yoke, his mind is in Texas.

  “More red?” says Jimmy back to Cuauhtémoc in English, a slight tone of embarrassment at the sound of his accented voice.

  Cuauhtémoc is impressed with how comfortable he feels behind the dials and knobs and switches. He knows where everything is. The fuel mixture rod is still red and the throttle rod is still black. Most everything else he can guess at.

  He sets the fuel mixture rich by pushing in the red rod. He throttles to neutral by pulling out the black rod. He flips on the master switch to listen to the whirring magnetos swimming in perfect sync behind the faux wooden panels. He rounds the DG to the nearest tenth by the whiskey compass on the windshield. He cranks the engines with a turn of the key. Both propellers wheeze. They let out black smoke that looks orange in the headlights of the trucks surrounding the plane as if the smoke were on fire. Cuauhtémoc thinks the engines on each wing are rough, but they work. Beneath the radio deck, he flips on the landing light and then the strobes, which are burnt out but flickering on the port side wing. The light makes the propellers dance and warp as if he were looking at them underwater. The port side engine coughs hard, and Cuauhtémoc instinctively leans the mixture, pushes the throttle with his toes spread out over the tops of the rudder pedals to burn off the carbon deposits. And like a charm, it works. The engines roar to life. The engines sing now, and in the dancing strobe light of the wings Cuauhtémoc can see a few dozen bodies jumping out from inside their truck cabins to watch the spectacle, all hopes placed on him. Weirdly enough, his anger dissipates, if only for a moment. He looks at those bodies piling out to watch him and feels, for maybe the first time in his life, a certain value to himself, to this newfound position of importance. Everything rides on this, he thinks. He feels proud. Eager to please.

  With all the engine gremlins coughed out, the air gusts hard over the desert sand. There’s a deafening whoosh that vibrates the length of the airframe, right up to the yoke where Cuauhtémoc imagines those grains of sand gritting under his fingernails.

  He flips on the avionics switch and there’s a squelching noise blaring from the headphones lying next to him. He looks out the windshield once again. All of the men out of their trucks now, the whites of their eyes flashing in the strobe. Cuauhtémoc looks from them to that city on the horizon. Beyond that, the border lights of Texas.

  On the ground, he aligns the plane to zero degrees on the whiskey compass and digs his toes into the rudder. And without giving so much as two thoughts to the whole process—about how to take off on a sand strip or how to coerce an aging plane into the sky—he shoves the throttle in full to the chrome gilding and pops the yoke back into his chest to keep the front wheel from digging into the earth. The plane eases from its idled position. It goes fast, faster. Cuauhtémoc rides that pocket of air until the plane violently shakes. It’s only when he’s reached seventy knots that he shifts the plane’s lumbering weight from the ground to the wings and lifts the main wheels off the ground to hover in that pocket-bubble called ground effect until eighty knots, ninety-five knots, and the wind shakes the tips of the wings, and you can see the turbulence spiraling down by the patterns made in the sand. Whap-whap-whap go the blades cutting air. And then silence. That split second when everything swims in sync and the thing is airborne, ready to stall and yet still climbing skyward, another silver pin among the stars.

  In the air, the engines groan as Cuauhtémoc pushes toward cruising speed. He looks down toward the earth, and there they are still. All those men waiting like idiots. A fellow thief, for all they know, flying their plane, and all of them standing around hopelessly looking, watching, waiting for him to land.

  There’s a hubris that overwhelms Cuauhtémoc when he sees Texas. I could go, he thinks. But who knows if he’d even make it? Who knows if there’s even enough fuel in the wings?

  For the first time in his life he feels truly powerful. He’s in control of his body again, of this machine. He leans the mixture till the engines gurgle, too little fuel. He puts some mixture back in to keep the engines running clean. He cuts the throttle back, the tailwind doing all the work now, and he whispers to the plane, convincing it to stay cool if only for just a little longer. That’s fine, he says to her, right there. Right like this. That’s fine.

  A thousand feet up, and he kicks the left rudder crosswind to land. At the turn again he feels the winds shake the plane, and the lift spreads goosy over the wings, the plane dropping suddenly as if the landing gear has been knocked out beneath him. The wings buckle on a pocket of invisible wind that rattles the airframe before setting him right again on a downward slope to land. A lump in Cuauhtémoc’s throat now. A nauseous rocking in his stomach like it’s a fishbowl
filled with water, the only thing keeping him upright, and the plane drops again. He aims the nose at those silver arcs cutting the desert. All of those men standing in and around the headlights. And then he watches those arcs grow bigger and brighter, the plane descending toward the earth.

  He sees Texas out in front of him again, rising in the windshield. He thinks to himself, Last chance—do it, do it!

  Out of the windshield, everything is falling apart before his very eyes. He notices a loose rivet bobbing at the nose of the plane, just in front of the datum. That gives him all the excuse he needs not to go to Texas. The plane groans again.

  Cuauhtémoc dumps in ten degrees of flaps, then fifteen, then twenty until he’s falling steady at seventy knots. He listens for the squeal of the stall horn. He pushes the throttle, checks his rate of descent. Carburetor out, gas switch set to both engines, undercarriage down, fuel mixture rich, primer switch locked, seatbelts and switches on.

  His hands are so tight on the yoke that his sutures bead bright with blood, little speckled dots appearing on his white cotton shirt.

  As the plane slows, there’s the ripping sound of air. The northern winds dumping over the wings that push him firm to the earth like an ant crushed under foot into the ground—the entire sky is above him. He rolls along the ground, set to plow right into those silver arcs cutting the desert air. And he thinks about it—he thinks about killing all of them. One swipe of the propeller, and it’d be done. He imagines those trucks shredded like tin cans. He imagines Lalo’s daughter resting in the bed of one of them. He imagines how that might feel before his feet crush the brakes, and he can feel his body pressing hard against the seatbelt. All of the blood rushes to the front of his body. It leaks out from every open wound in his skin.

  GIG

  ARACELI WAKES UP THIS MORNING the way she wakes up every morning: by the burn of her thirst. She clutches her throat with an open palm. She swears that this will be the day she finally gets her diabetes medication.