Bang Page 12

  There’s a black market she knows of at the back of an arcade nearby. She has the money to buy her medicines, but wonders how much the drugs will set her back. She needs a bottle of Glyset, a bottle of Amaryl and a bottle of Amitriptyline.

  This morning, she thinks back to those pills she left behind. She knows exactly where she put them.

  She uncaps a bottle of Topo Chico mineral water on her night stand by pulling her wedding band under the cap and rolling her palm forward to peel it off. She lets the carbonation fizz drift up the neck of the bottle and then drinks it all in one go.

  She lines the empty bottle up against the baseboard opposite her bed like she’s done with all the other bottles she’s downed. She counts her days by the number of empties along the wall, all of them filled with her cornhusk cigarettes. This morning she starts on bottle eighty-five, which makes three weeks drinking four bottles a day since she’s been in Matamoros. Three weeks that her truck’s been broken down. Three weeks since she’s last seen her sons.

  She lights a cigarette, her three hundred and thirty-seventh by her calculations, and parts the curtains to the window that looks out onto her blue pickup parked in the street. She checks the clock on the nightstand. Five in the morning, which makes it one hour until the food stands open, which makes another two hours before the boy that Iván’s hired comes by with his little rag of shitty tools to work on the truck.

  Araceli has a good mind to go out and fix the damn thing herself. She’d do it if her nerve pain weren’t killing her. She thinks about her sons, thinks about her medications. She knows exactly where her sons are going to be. That thought calms her a little. No rush. They’re grown now—they know how to get to San Miguel.

  On Calle Ejido, Araceli walks into the first arcade she sees. There’s a cashier at the entrance, a Chinese man lighting a Faro cigarette with the blue flame of a votive candle, the Virgen de Guadalupe. There’s the rich spice of smoke and cologne in the air.

  The cashier lowers the candle from his face, nods for Araceli to come in. He knows she’s here for the black market, the entrance of which is located by the pinball machines via a staircase that leads down into the market itself.

  Araceli follows the rattle and clang of the pinball machine toward the back of the arcade. A pair of brothers, the only patrons of the arcade, bang their tiny fists against the Plexiglass of the single working pinball machine by the stairs. Araceli can see their hopes pinned on the sway of a steel ball that curves along a lit sprung peg that jolts up and down inside the glass— no telling which way the ball will roll. What a life.

  Araceli descends the stairs at the back of the arcade that lead to the black market, the fayuca, which is all fluorescent and bleached concrete, an endless maze of counterfeit clothing, counterfeit shoes, leather goods, DVDs, home appliances, tables filled with knives, rotting meat unchilled and bleeding in the open air behind glass cases full of gelatina and melting wedding cakes. It’s like night and day—the arcade and the fayuca. There is everything here, and everything is abundant. Araceli feels her chest swell with hope. She looks for her medicines.

  She weaves in and out of booths of fortunetellers, Freon vendors, rosary makers and blaring televisions. At the end of a row, there’s a Jensen speaker blasting Hank Williams from inside a cracked Fender amplifier, the bass turned up so loud it pushes air all the way into the black particle-wood dens. Araceli feels the noise in her sternum as she walks by. At the end of another row, a neon yellow cardboard sign dances from the air pushed by an electric fan. The sign says Viajes a Texas. Cowboy Cuntry. Viajes a Virgenia también. Más barato, bien barato. Next to the sign is a small, dingy operation with a simple wooden sign: Medicinas.

  In the medicine booth, there’s a woman sitting behind a cheap desk, the kind you might find in a mechanic’s shop or a church office. There’s a phone on the desk that’s disconnected, its line coiled tight into a roll beside it. There’s a stapler, a receipt book and a box of unsharpened pencils. A sham consultation office or doctor’s office or whatever it’s supposed to be.

  Araceli fixes her hair before she approaches the woman who has the phone receiver winched between her head and her neck.

  “Hello,” says Araceli to the woman.

  The woman looks up at Araceli, staring daggers. Then she points to the phone as if motioning, Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something?

  Araceli looks down beside the phone, the cord still tightly coiled. Disconnected.

  “Uh-huh,” says the woman into the receiver. “Uh-huh. Perfect. I’ll call you right back,” she says.

  “Hello,” says Araceli again.

  “Get to the point. We’re very busy here at Medicinas.”

  Araceli looks around as if to confirm where she’s at. The black market? Yes. She’s in the black market.

  “Very busy?” asks Araceli.

  “Yes,” says the woman in this mock-professional tone. “We have everything you need. Blood thinners, steroids, antibiotics,” she says, launching into her spiel.

  “I get it,” says Araceli cutting her off.

  A slight look of embarrassment comes over the woman’s face now.

  “I need Amitriptyline. Do you have it?”

  “We have everything,” says the woman behind the desk, staring daggers once more as if Araceli is intentionally trying to stump her.

  “How much?” asks Araceli.

  “Depends on your dosage,” says the woman, looking smug now.

  “Five hundred milligrams.”

  Hesitation. “Just a second,” says the woman trying her best to discretely connect the phone now to a line that runs into the concrete floor.

  From the receiver, a clicking sound and then a dial tone. The woman punches some numbers. Araceli can hear the distinct, buzzy sound of a man’s voice picking up on the other end of the line.

  “Amitriptyline,” says the woman into the phone. “Five hundred,” she says. “Yes. That’ll do.”

  Araceli reaches for the bills in her pocket but decides against taking her money out in public. Instead she reaches for the cornhusk cigarette resting in the far corner of her pocket. Her last. She takes it out and puts it to her lips.

  “Do you have a match?” Araceli asks the woman.

  “Is that a cigarette?” the woman asks her, a look of mild disgust on her face.

  “Yes,” says Araceli sheepishly.

  “Tobacco?”

  “Yes,” says Araceli again. “What else would it be?”

  Just then a motorcycle roars up to the back entrance of the medicine stand. A brief flash of daylight as the back door opens into the stall. Some steps just inside the little gut-alley behind the stall leading up to the street.

  An older man appears behind the desk, his gray head of sweaty hair lays plastered to his scalp. He rests his helmet on the cheap desk.

  “Five hundred,” he says to Araceli, walking toward her with a case of Amitriptyline under his arm. Farmacia Benavides brand.

  The woman takes Araceli’s cornhusk cigarette from her mouth to examine it closer. “Look,” she says to the motorcycle man. “Like a baby tamal.”

  The woman looks to the man. A knowing glance between them.

  “Can you make these?” says the woman to Araceli. “Do you need a job?”

  Araceli thinks for a while before plucking the cigarette back from the woman’s hand. “Yes,” she says, plucking her box of drugs from the man’s arms too. “In fact I do.”

  Araceli wishes her sons back as much as she wishes for her husband back. She thinks if she had to choose, she’d choose her husband to die. If she had to choose herself over everyone, she’d choose herself. She feels deep down in her gut that she might be given the choice, which keeps her in Matamoros working steady out of indecision, going nowhere for fear of the wrong choice, a bad move, a single fatal error.

  It happens, every morning, that she wakes up at five and runs toward the bus station. No food in her belly. Just two tenpeso coins in her pocket jingle
-jangling in the dead of darkness. Nobody sees her this early except that hawk boy always on the corner talking into his phone, reporting what he sees. Always there.

  He watches Araceli sweat, her unsteady foot landing on the pavement so closely in time to her good foot that the pair of them together sound like the slowed down syncopated clop of a horse’s hooves.

  She’ll sit in the terminal of the Estrella Roja station for five or seven minutes, staring up at the departures list, before a look comes over her face. Araceli reasoning with herself. She’ll count her coins, and the morning bus will leave. And she’ll hobble back toward the hotel, the hawk boy’s eyes trained on her all the while.

  She’ll sit in her truck and cry till daylight. She’ll pop the hood when the sun turns orange and take a look, shake her head. Nothing to be done. Everything burnt inside.

  She’ll count her money again, over and over, until the sun bursts bright in the chemical air of dawn. Exhaust smoke, kitchen smoke, factory smoke piling high as the cars build up on the bridge. She’ll count her coins again and go to work. A skipped meal here, another there—It all adds up, she thinks. Her hunger makes her proud. With every step she thinks, Today will be the day I find my sons. She’ll believe it too.

  She’ll think, in these long mornings, that for all she knows they’re still in the city. Although, deep down she believes they must be in San Miguel. She knows it—and so she’ll work another day.

  Araceli will go to the black market to work where she gets her medicines. The woman at the desk will always say to Araceli, “new stack,” pointing toward an empty pallet behind her. On the pallet a cardboard box. Two sacks to the left and right of a chair positioned in front of a picnic table. Araceli will simply say, “Good,” before she gets to work, ready to be rid of the woman, ready to work in silence for the rest of the day. She’ll position herself, legs straddled, behind the picnic table with the remnants of yesterday’s work: a marijuana grinder—a clipping machine used to cinch the ends of a blunt—and a razor blade used to scrape the leftover marijuana into new piles to be used in the next batch, and then the next.

  She’ll start by taking a handful from each sack beside her. A palmful of marijuana buds to her left, a stack of dried corn husks to her right. She’ll put both piles at opposite ends of the table, the cinching machine in the middle. She’ll listen to Hank Williams playing in the next stall over and grind the marijuana bud to the music, grind it to a fine dust that she’ll segment into lines with the razor. She’ll take the cornhusks and strip them lengthwise, taking the razor once again and cutting long strips in halves, then quarters. She’ll take the razor and scrape it beneath the marijuana dust and dump it into a segment of corn-husk and roll it between her middle fingers and thumbs until packed tight. She’ll lick it to make it hold and then take a nicotine adhesive that she’ll paint over the length of the seam to make it stick. She’ll put the blunt into the cinching machine to crush the ends together until they fuse under the pressure. And with the razor she’ll lob off the crushed ends to make a perfectly round blunt, the ends of the cornhusk thrown back into the palm grinder to cut the marijuana even further. She’ll earn fifteen to twenty pesos more—a peso a blunt—if she stretches the marijuana this way. So, she’ll do it often.

  Each day she’ll work steadily, efficiently. Until one day she slips, taking her eyes off her work when she sees a man bring in a carburetor just like hers into the stall across from medicinas.

  The salesman, a skinny, coal-eyed boy, shakes his head of curly hair at the sight of the part and talks with the customer a while. Araceli watches him produce a milk carton from under the table with a hole in the side of it, a bottle of glue funneled toward the bottom near the red pop-off cap. She watches the salesman put a silver pipe into the side of the milk carton. That’s about the time she presses her left index finger beneath the blunt cincher.

  Blood boils hot beneath her nail bed. It spills in a steady stream onto the table in front of her.

  Araceli applies pressure around her finger with the grip of her fist. She backs up out of her seat in shock. No, she thinks, sit down. Calm down. Slow your heart rate.

  There’s nicotine glue in the palm of Araceli’s hand and by squeezing the wound with her fist, she makes it sting something fierce. Araceli’s first thought goes to infection. Hydrogen peroxide, she thinks. She fumbles with her slick hands inside the various cabinets that make up the back room of the medicine stall. She goes through the system quickly in her mind: top row for medicines, middle row for herbs, bottom row for surgical supplies.

  In the bottom right cabinet, she finds a small packet of cotton gauze, a roll of surgical tape, a pair of scissors. Where the fuck is the hydrogen peroxide?

  She opens all the corners first and then starts in the middle of the cabinet grid and works her way out. Bottles of pills, bottles of crushed leaves, band-aids, wooden tongue depressors, ointments and creams, until finally she finds the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide behind a giant brick of marijuana.

  Araceli pulls both the brick and the hydrogen peroxide from the cabinet. She thinks about it for a minute. No, she says to herself, that’d be stealing. And what would you do with it anyway? The sight of it almost takes her mind away from the pain. If it weren’t for the steady drip onto the ground, she could have admired that brick all day.

  She cracks the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and douses it over her hand. The whole mess roars to a fizz, that silvery smell in the air. Over her bloody nail, she rolls a piece of gauze that blooms red under the pressure of the surgical tape. Three rolls in a spiral fashion from the knuckle to the nail. Three rolls back the other way to keep it snug. One more layer of gauze. Two more spirals of tape.

  She hobbles on her bad foot around the table, her shoes making prints in the blood on the concrete. No matter, she thinks and picks up the brick once again. It must be ten pounds. Eleven maybe. Split the right way that brick could be worth its weight in gold.

  Under the hood of her pickup, Araceli cuts the crown off the hydrogen peroxide bottle with surgical scissors. She punches three close holes in the screw-on cap and one large hole in the side of the plastic crown by grinding the tip of the scissors into the plastic and turning the finger slots one over the other. She takes her materials and lays them to the right of the engine compartment: her new make-shift carburetor, a roll of surgical tape, the scissors and the tiny jar of nicotine adhesive. She tears out the old carburetor with a hammer and her weight, the sound of groaning metal flexing along the tensile points. The plastic rivets squeak. Araceli hammers and pulls, hammers and pulls again only half-sure that she’s pulling at the right part. Her bloody, greased hands burrow into the maze of fan belts and fuse boxes, her knuckles scraped raw by the cast-iron V6. When the carburetor finally gives, there’s the stinking, sweet smell of fuel in the air.

  The circular hunk of metal lands with a crash on the sidewalk behind Araceli. The hawk boy cuts her a glance. She cuts him one right back. The boy backpedals on his haunches, his phone click-clacking onto the pavement. The sound is satisfying to Araceli. She turns back to her work and straightens out the bent fuel line.

  She pushes the aluminum fuel line into the side hole of the bottle’s crown, her blood pouring in driblets from her finger to the fan belt below. She takes the roll of surgical tape and makes an air tight seal between the gaps in the plastic and the aluminum, lacquering the tape with the nicotine adhesive. She rolls another strip of tape over the lacquer. She makes a debris screen by stretching the surgical tape into a grid pattern over the top of the opened crown. She makes a seal, too, in the same manner between the bottle cap and the V6 engine.

  “Iván!” she yells, waving her bloody finger at him through the glass. “Come crank the engine.”

  Iván comes out to turn the key and black, chemical smoke pours from the starter clicking into gear. There’s the sound of the spark plugs lighting, the leads firing in staggered sync with the fuse box then a clicking rattle like the sound of a ticking clo
ck.

  “Give it gas,” she yells to Iván.

  He pushes the pedal down, and the fluid from the aluminum fuel line drips into the crown of the bottle. He cranks again as the fuel filters down into the screw-on cap, pours through the holes and makes its way into the engine. Combustion. A tiny flame leaps from the taped seal, melting it around the bottle cap.

  “More gas!” yells Araceli, blood trickling down her arm now. “More. Give it! Keep the pedal down!”

  Another chemical blast of smoke and the engine roars to life, the pistons jumping up and down inside their aluminum cage. The engine warms, the fan belt turns, the lights blast their weak light over the ruddy pavement as the hawk boy watches and speaks into his little phone.

  THE BURNING MARE

  ULI STANDS AT THE BATHROOM SINK with his hands under the faucet trying to wash the greasy smell of the death from his fingers. There’s hot water in the bathroom, thanks to June who has installed atop the roof a gravity-fed Rotoplas rain collector. She’s also installed a cheap boiler that burns through a tank of gas a week. Uli says there’s a leak in the line, but June says his showers are too long and that’s the problem. He reasons to himself that they can afford it now. They fetched a couple thousand dollars between them from the rings. Enough money to eat, buy the dog his medicines, shower however long he wants. He gave June her cut of the money. He should enjoy the return on his investment. He turns the faucet hotter.

  Uli doesn’t know what he wants to do with his money yet. He’s thinking about saving up to cross over into Texas from Ciudad Juárez. His father used to cross there. It’d be one way to get home. For now, he puts his chunk of money in the back of a Bible he found under his father’s bed—the last place June would look. June keeps her money somewhere too. Uli doesn’t know where yet. She says she’s saving up for a car. Something Chinese, something cheap.

  At the sink, Uli feels the water on his skin. He needs his shower like he needs his morning bottle of Coke. He loves the waste of it—a shower in the desert—but mostly he loves the feel of the heat in his muscles, his pain melting into his heated flesh.