Bang Page 14

  A hush fell over the room. And then a rumble of voices began to surge.

  The crowd of dog fighters and betters and gangs descended on the bookie, demanding their money back, demanding that he should be hung from the rafters, demanding that he should be shot. And it wasn’t long before the boy, frightened for his life, yelled out, “It was them!” with what he thought was his last breath as he pointed with that same extended finger to the bald boy and June. “They fixed it! They’re demons. They had it fixed.”

  The F.U. Mordida backed away a step at a time, but the crowd descended on them hastily. It did not take the F.U. Mordida but a couple seconds to give up June as a peace offering. As the rest of the F.U. Mordida fled on foot, the crowd carried June, who fought every step of the way, to burn her alive. Fire, the crowd agreed, was the only way to kill evil. And it was well known by then that June was evil—the proof was printed in the papers.

  June remembers the smell of it more than anything. She remembers the fire, blistering hot and fueled by trash. It peppered the air with its chemical scent that she could still smell long after they’d thrown her, head-first, into the blaze. That was after her brain went fuzzy and everything went cold.

  She fell asleep just as the bottles started crashing around her, the beer fizzing up and burning sloppy-wet all over the ground. The hot air fell heavy in her lungs, each breath a sour-sweet sickness in her belly.

  A bottle hit her square in the forehead, spilling its contents all over her bloody face. The rest of her body burned while her nerves froze. She remembers she put her hand to her head. She didn’t even notice the big toenail of her foot turning to ash. Blood all over her palm. Another dull crack at the base of her skull and then beer pouring everywhere. Hiss and spray. Everything sweltering. And then darkness.

  As June walks through sunny San Miguel now, her wagon in tow, she feels her facial scar tightening in the summer heat. She cranes her neck back to see Uli struggling to keep up, one foot slower than the other.

  “You’re going to break that,” she says to him, motioning with her hand toward his foot.

  “Think it’s already broken,” he says.

  “It’s not. You’d be wailing like holy hell if it was.” June slows down just a beat, lets Uli catch up. “You know, it’s kind of a miracle you didn’t break anything in that crash. Looked bad. Everyone heard about it. You’re practically a celebrity.”

  “I’m not a celebrity,” says Uli. “Celebrity means you’re rich.”

  “Infamous then,” says June, trying to lighten the mood.

  “What good does that do me?” says Uli, visibly soured by his pain.

  June wonders if she’s pushing him too hard. No, she thinks. He has to learn. No use babying him. “Maybe get you some friends,” says June, feeling her scar tighten on her face again.

  “I have friends,” says Uli. “In Harlingen.”

  June doesn’t know how to tell him, yet, that he’s not going back to Texas. He’s never going home.

  A shadow delta blots out the sun. A jet streaks overhead. The sky rips apart at the seams again. From the west, June spies a thin layer of diesel smoke rolling in under the low pressure of the same front pushing sand into the clouds. The smoke hangs there on the horizon like radiation fog, separating the land and the sky. Won’t be long, she thinks, before the army pulls in. Maybe next week. Maybe the week after. She remembers the last time they did. Nobody left their homes for weeks because of the curfew. Everyone who went out was arrested or shot. Every dog was simply shot.

  “Would you say we’re friends?” says Uli, pulling up beside her and taking a hold of the wagon.

  She looks down at his feet, still gimpy. There’s a tightness to the way his ankles bend that makes her want to pick him up, haul him on her own back.

  June smiles at him and says, “I’d say you owe me. I hardly know anything about you.”

  “Well, what do you want to know?”

  A long silence passes between them before he says, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s play a game. Two truths and a lie. Do you know that one?”

  “Everyone knows that one,” says June.

  “All right, then. I’ll tell you two truths and you guess the lie. One: I didn’t really crash in a plane. Two: I think your Sex Pistols shirt looks like a joke. Three: I think you’re kinda cute.”

  At this June blushes, but there’s an anger too that blooms under her skin. She feels her scar again. Who does he think he is to play with my feelings like that? What a horrible thing to say, whether it be true or not.

  She tightens her jaw, feels her teeth grinding to a click. She feels herself shutting down. Feels the scar over her face tightening again, that rage boiling beneath her skin.

  “You don’t know me that well,” she says all too calmly as she gets up in Uli’s face so that he has to step back. His eyes go wide. The wagon handle clangs on the ground.

  “You don’t get to tell me that you think I’m cute. You don’t get to tell me whether I’m worthy of your affection or not. I’m here so you don’t fucking kill yourself. Because this city is dangerous, it’s fucked. And you’re fucked if you don’t know how to survive in it. And all those planes crossing overhead, you see them? They’re going to drop little leaflets—today or tomorrow—that say they’re going to shoot the shit out of this place. And if you don’t have anyone here holding your hand like a baby, by the time they do, if you don’t have anyone here to keep you from fucking dying, then you will die. And that’s on my conscience. And that’s why I’m here. Not to be your plaything. Not to be your friend. But to keep you from getting killed until you can take care of yourself. There’s no going back to Texas, understand? Those old friends you’ve got? They’re gone. That old life you used to have? It’s done. Your family too. There is no Texas anymore. There’s no Mexico anymore. There’s San Miguel. And there’s everyone who lives in it. And that’s it, understand?”

  “Yes,” whispers Uli.

  “Learn then. And shut the fuck up.”

  June can feel Uli shrinking before her. She watches him silently break down. He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t move a muscle. He just presses his eyes closed as if willing himself to disappear.

  June feels a lump in her throat. She thinks back to the woman he asked about this morning. She thinks of how many ways that woman might kill him.

  June’s in the right, and she knows it. Nobody else is going to tell him these things.

  She spits in the dirt. “Fuck,” she says to herself. “I’m sorry,” she whispers to him. She reaches into the small of her back, pulls out her pistol, and presents it to Uli. “I’m going to let you hold onto this,” she says in a calm voice not unlike the one she spoke in before she snapped.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” says Uli. He takes June’s gun in his hand like a moon rock, like something from another planet.

  “You’re supposed to hold it.”

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Do you know how to shoot it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, does it really matter if it’s loaded or not?” says June as she pivots away from the spot where she’s standing and walks off toward the east with the wagon in tow.

  She leads, he follows.

  That day, June and Uli scrap everything they can find in silence: sloan valves, coaxial wire, romex wire, telephone wire, electric lines, plumbing lines. They scrap old, abandoned buildings and even some buildings yet to be abandoned. There’s an auto body shop that smelts the copper for one hundred and fifty pesos, which June happily forks over. She tells Uli that that’s more than a fair price. “Never pay more than two hundred and fifty to smelt anything under fifty pounds,” she says.

  The auto body shop uses a brake drum as a mold so that the cooled copper comes out in heavy twenty-pound disks that clang once they’re knocked from it with a rubber hammer.

  June and Uli collect three disks in all, the last disk smaller than the first two. They wheel them in their wagon toward t
he scrapyard on the Eje Central, which is a long twenty-minute walk from the auto body shop. The Eje Central cuts through the middle of the city. It connects to the other end of the periférico, where the scrapyard and graveyard sit like twins outside the city limits, exiles leaning one against the other.

  There’s a chemical haze pouring from inside the junkyard that screens out the sun and filters the light so that it gives the street a pale, blue kind of tint. On the walls of the scrapyard, there is graffiti layered over graffiti stretching for blocks in each direction.

  Ash billows down from the sky in flaking layers, wave after wave, onto a ruddy blue attendant’s booth near the base of the wall. A trash fire crackles off in the distance. A crooked man with sinewy arms slides back the shattered Plexiglas window behind white, wrought-iron bars. He sits on a simple, wooden chair. He’s seventy or eighty by the depth of the veins on the backs of his hands. He’s wearing a large, white-collared shirt dinged to a crisp beige, black slacks faded to green that are cut like something from another era. Too boxy, too pleated.

  “What do you want?” says the man to them through a little hole in the Plexiglas.

  “We’ve brought you some treasure,” says June, a certain familiarity in her voice as if she knows him.

  The old man smiles, pulls the Faro cigarette from between his lips.

  The man closes one eye to keep the smoke from stinging it and almost whispers, ever so softly as if in jest, “A treasure? All that for me?”

  He eases his way down the small ramp while calculating his price.

  “My name is Chente,” says the man to Uli.

  “I’m Uli. This is June.”

  “I know June,” says Chente with a wink.

  “Fifty pounds of copper,” says June to Chente, cutting the pleasantries.

  “Looks it,” Chente says to Uli now. “Is that number right? Fifty pounds of copper?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Uli, unsure what Chente is trying to pull here.

  Chente takes his time examining the disks. He picks one up and pulls something from his pocket to strike against it, something that looks like a cube of steel, but darker. Pyrite maybe. Or polished flint, Uli guesses.

  Chente mumbles to himself after each strike. “Alloy,” he says to himself and tosses the disk aside. He picks up another one. “Alloy. Alloy, alloy. This one too.” He takes his tool and strikes each disc, looking for some color of spark or another. “Still alloy,” he says striking them all again with a smile. Chente drops all of the discs to the ground before turning to June.

  “I’ll make you a deal. Two thousand pesos for everything.”

  June looks shocked at this number.

  “Before you say anything, let me say this: this is good copper,” Chente says, “but not perfect copper. And two thousand is what I can pay. Or you can haul this back to where you found it. Try to bargain and see what happens.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” says June.

  “There’s solder in it. I have enough soldered copper.”

  “Only a sliver of it is soldered. Most of it’s wire. Besides, it’s untraceable. None of that invisible ink in it. Can’t get better than that.”

  “I’ve got enough of that.”

  “We’ve already smelted it,” says June.

  “I’m not arguing anymore. Fifteen hundred now. Take it or leave it—it’s still a good price,” says Chente, his eyes wandering off toward something behind them.

  Uli looks in the same direction as Chente. A military cruiser passing by, a unit of soldiers hanging onto the sides of the vehicle as it slowly manages its way over potholes in the road outside the scrapyard, the sound of their equipment jangling against the sheet metal and roll bars with each bump.

  “That’s not what it’s worth,” says June.

  “Fourteen hundred then,” says Chente defiantly.

  “And a peek around the yard to sweeten the deal.”

  Chente has to think about that for a moment or two. He scratches the top of his head with his thumb, his cigarette still clasped between his index and middle finger on the same hand. A tiny sliver of hair singes at the end of the cigarette’s cherry.

  “Okay. Okay, done,” says Chente.

  He goes back to his booth for a receipt, which he writes on a waiter’s ledger that looks to Uli as if it might have been stolen from a restaurant, deep, orange grease stains on it.

  “Sign this,” says the old man. He puts the receipt in front of June.

  Uli says, “If you don’t need more of what we’ve brought you, then what do you need?”

  “Grade one copper,” he says.

  “Solderless?” asks Uli.

  “You got it,” says the old man.

  “And the look around the junkyard?” says June. “To sweeten the deal.”

  “Deals been made,” says the old man.

  “I just have a few things that need repairing. I’m sure you wouldn’t miss a few spare parts.”

  “How sweet are we talking?”

  “Some refrigerator parts. Nada más,” says June.

  “Whatever you can carry,” says the old man with his foot set on the wagon to anchor it in place. “That means whatever you can carry.”

  To Uli, the scrapyard is beautiful in its own vile way. From all of the things nobody wants, the homeless of San Miguel have built a city of used bricks and metal; they’ve paved makeshift roads with flattened cardboard that meanders like veins. There are structures on top of and between the mounds of debris, tiny homes that shoot up black plumes of smoke that pepper the air with the tang of burnt rubber.

  Uli looks around but there’s no human to be seen. Just a pack of dogs slinking around the periphery of one of the mounds of trash.

  As they walk, the dogs mirror their every step. June takes her gun from Uli and shoots out a warning shot that cracks no louder than a firework. A little cloud of dust drifts where the bullet strikes the earth. The dogs scatter every which way. Uli, shocked, looks at June and then looks ahead toward a pile of latex dolls with a little shrine at the base of it, unlike anything he’s ever seen before.

  The shrine itself is aglow with Christmas lights and dripping candles shoved into the necks of brown and green glass bottles. There are sun-bleached photographs crisp and flitting in the wind. There are drawings too and pieces of tin cans ripped from oil canisters with scenes scrawled over them that Uli can’t quite make out. There’s a knife shoved into the ground in front of the altar, and a network of slack beads cover a statue of a skeleton woman holding a scythe and wearing a crown of white roses. The scattered dogs, regrouping now, look on from a distant hill at June and Uli closing in on the shrine.

  “Why are we here? What are we looking for?”

  “Another dog,” says June. “But a big one. A loner.”

  “But why?”

  “To make money with. Loner dogs are alpha dogs exiled from the pack. Not quite good enough to be the alpha dog but not quite weak enough to be killed off. They’re strong, violent. They make for good protection. Especially scrapyard dogs. We’ll sell it. We’ll turn a profit.”

  “What’s with the gun then? Why are you shooting? Are we supposed to shoot the dog?”

  “You’re supposed to scatter them. The one that doesn’t scatter is the loner—the other alpha. Alphas don’t scatter. They fight you.”

  “Well, where’s he at then?”

  “I’d take a guess that he’s just over that hill there,” says June, pulling the ears back on the gun to reload a bullet into the chamber.

  She points the barrel at the ground, squeezes off another round. The birds in the sky flitter in all directions. The dogs can be heard skittering around them, the noise of their paws slapping cardboard and dirt eclipsed by the crackling sound of a roaring fire growing louder the closer Uli and June come to round the mound of latex dolls. They feel heat on their faces. Black diesel smoke screens out the sky until the wind shifts directions and the sun beams down onto a pair of glistening eyes.

  Be
fore them they see a single black dog, not unlike their own, staring them down with a mouthful of razor sharp teeth. His back arched, his ears pinned back against his skull as if ready to lunge.

  “Don’t move,” says June with the tiniest of whispers. She moves to reload her gun, and the dog barks at her as she pulls the spring to load the bullet into the chamber.

  The guttural growl from the back of the dog’s throat fills the air.

  Uli’s eyes look past the dog to the smoke drifting out toward the cemetery. Between two, tall billows, he can make out the shapes of people surrounding a burning corpse. Black flesh on the ground. Burnt plastic in the air. The smell brings to Uli’s mind the same liquid reek of the car explosion he tried so hard to wash from his hands. The people are covered in blood. The charred meat in their clenched fists is like the same blistered flesh of those bodies holding hands.

  There are more than a dozen people cutting charred flesh from a dead horse that’s burning over an open flame, fire blooming from the horse’s ribcage where the heat has eaten its way through the body. The horse’s bloody tongue hangs from her head. Her teeth grow black with smoke passing over her face.

  Just then the sky rips overhead. First, one plane. And then the chopping beat of another. And then another and another. In their wake fall thousands of pale, green leaflets over the center of San Miguel. The leaflets ride the breeze toward the junkyard, where they circle overhead in the thermal cycles of the fires burning below. Uli and June wait for one to fall, keeping an eye on the dog all the while, that gun in June’s hand.

  “There’s your sign,” says June.

  “What sign?” asks Uli.

  “That they’re coming. I told you they would,” she says and watches a rasping leaflet burn in the sky over the mare, turning to ash before ever hitting the ground and then flying off toward the cemetery.

  ROT