Bang Page 16

  “Enjoy,” says the mechanic, passing Iván a mug as he starts in on his own.

  “My grandfather used to make these,” says Iván, “when he was hungover in the morning. I never understood how it worked.”

  “They say it’ll give you the shits,” says the boy, “but not me, I’ve got a gut of steel. Ask anyone. I eat anything.”

  So say all Mexican men, Iván thinks as he takes a sip, the milk steaming over his face in the cool morning air. Yesterday I was there, today I’m here, tomorrow I’ll be gone, he thinks as he eases his creaking knees into sitting position. The calf comes back around now to fight the mechanic for his share.

  Though the sky is high, the clouds are low. A stratus stretched solid over the sierra so you can only see the impressions of the hills, the darks of their shadows tinged blue by the rows of agave planted along the slopes. All those plants for what? thinks Iván, getting drunk off the cane alcohol. If not for tequila, then for sotol or raicilla or whatever the fuck it is they drink around here. The alcohol makes him bitter, angry. The skin around his collar turns red as the cloud mist cools the sweat bursting from his pores.

  Out of the fog, on their own cloud of diesel smoke, a caravan of army trucks floods down the road. They come, one after the other, their tires kicking up dust along the stretch. The caravan must be eighteen or twenty trucks long, each truck painted in dark green digital camo, with black tarps half-pulled over the arched skeleton haloing the truck bed where the soldiers sit. As they pass, the truck suspensions creak over the pot-holed dirt road. All of the men wear black masks, except for one soldier in each truck who rides standing upright, maskless, just behind the cabin, his rifle at the ready, his finger fully flexed over the trigger housing.

  “Where’s the war?” asks Iván sarcastically.

  “Something like that,” says the mechanic, not quite hearing him, pulling long and hard at the cow’s teat, trying not to get kicked. “Calderón’s little war. Peña Nieto’s war now. But who are we really kidding—the Americans told them both who to fight. If it’s anybody’s war it’s the American’s. We just die for it. Anyway, the government is sending all of those soldier’s to Juárez. Take back control of the city. And all of the little cities around it.”

  “Who says they’re not under control?’

  “The president,” says the mechanic, shifting knees now.

  “But none of those cities are really under control, if you know what I mean. They run themselves. They pay taxes to Mexico City, but that’s about as Mexican as they get. The cartels give them more utilities than the government can. Right now, Sinaloa and Juárez are fighting each other and the government is trying to kill both those cartels with the army. But I can tell you right now that’s not going to happen.”

  “Why is that?” asks Iván.

  “The people aren’t going to have it. They depend on the cartels. A lot of people are going to die. Even the papers say so: there are a lot more cartels than Sinaloa and Juárez. Another one will take their place. One cartel can control the routes, the army can control the roads, but nobody is going to control the sky. And every one of them has a fleet. You’re going to see a lot of people die soon. The dope has to go where it has to go. You can’t fight supply and demand. Routes will change, people will die, Peña Nieto can say he tried. End of story.”

  “They’re headed west?” asks Iván.

  “They’re headed everywhere. Soldiers kill anything that needs to be killed,” says the mechanic.

  Iván is aware of his own breathing now, the sound of it cut by the fizzing noise of the mechanic filling his mug. And then suddenly there’s the cutting chirp of a Nextel phone just beyond the corner of the garage.

  Iván’s chest is slick with sweat. He looks toward the direction of the sound. A boy in the Pemex parking lot with a phone in his hand. The boy speaks into it. Iván just hears the staccato of his little voice more than anything. Iván takes a swig, staring heat into the boy. He looks him right in the eye and gives him every dark thing in his heart. Iván thinks if he weren’t so comfortable right now, he’d take the boy and stomp his head bloody into a fucking curb.

  TREAD

  IT SEEMS THAT EVERYONE SAW IVÁN leave but Araceli. The truck tires were the first to break fresh dirt after the army caravan flattened the road under their cheap tire treads. Iván simply disappeared into the fog as it dissipated in the morning. That truck, Araceli thinks, another part of her husband gone.

  At least Iván left her things: a small stack of bills and her bags, which the hostel guards kept behind the desk. Araceli begs the receptionist for another night, if only to regroup. Three days, two nights, says the placard over the counter. The receptionist listens as Araceli pleads her case. Stolen truck. No medication. Araceli leaves out the fact that she’s low on money.

  In the back of her mind, Araceli thinks the receptionist could be related to the internet café lady. Same build, same bone structure. Same by-the-book demeanor—that little piece of shit twinkle in her eye that screams late checkout fee.

  Araceli ends her plea just as the lady finally grasps the placard. Three days, two nights, it says. No exceptions, although of course that means exceptions for Americans. Or French-Canadians. Or lonesome girls traveling from Texas. Exceptions for white folks, tourists. Not Mexican drifters.

  Araceli pleads her case again. “I’m from Texas, you know. I’m only half-Mexican,” she lies.

  “I don’t make half-exceptions,” says the lady behind the counter.

  Araceli sniffs hard at the dry air. Composes herself. She collects her bags and walks out in search of a pharmacy.

  With each step she feels the little wad of bills brushing inside her pocket. Money comes and money goes, she thinks. She’ll make more of it.

  She starts at the end of Potrero’s one long street and shuffles all the way to the other side. As she passes the opened garage door of the auto body shop, she sees both mechanics passed out drunk on the concrete floor next to a cow laying on its folded legs. The back door to the garage is wide open, a baby calf peering in from the patch of field out back.

  In the wind she swears she can hear that little chirp of a Nextel phone. She wonders if her mind is playing tricks on her. She thinks she needs some water, some food. But more than anything, she needs her medications, which she hasn’t taken in days.

  Past the Pemex station there’s a crossroad. Araceli stands there for a long while with her bags, unsure of which way to go, when she spots the French-Canadian couple she sold blunts to zipping down the crossroad on a motor bike. She watches them pull into a fueling bay at the Pemex, their pale skin aglow from the sun and wind and sand. The man says some words to the gas station attendant as the girl hops off the bike to stretch her legs. To Araceli it looks like a good bike but a cheap one. Some sporty thing a college student would buy to impress his girlfriend.

  The French-Canadian man, a sickly looking twenty-something, waves from his perch on the motorcycle. Araceli drops her bags to wave back, her little rotting finger throbbing something awful as she lifts it above her heart. She makes as if to hobble toward them, but the man motions for her to stay put. The attendant puts the gas cap back on. The girl—also sickly looking by Araceli’s standards, just a whisper of a woman— hops on back and, before Araceli can pick her bags up again, they’re making their way toward her, that whiny little engine sputtering in the low-oxygenated air of the sierras.

  “Greetings,” they say to her in their lilted English. Araceli remembers Iván made all of the deals but this one—she sold to the Canadians. They could barely string their Spanish together, and her English was only slightly better. They did the deal in English.

  “Greetings,” she says, mimicking his sound.

  The man makes this face at hearing his words thrown back at him, unsure whether Araceli is mocking him or not.

  “How are you?” she says to him.

  “All good,” says the man. “Heading to Camargo today for Feria and then up to El Paso from
there.”

  “Camargo?” she says, her eyes full of hope. She looks at the tiny slice of pleather seat behind the whisper of a woman. Enough to fit herself, she thinks. Space for one more on the back end of the tiny motorcycle. She tries hard to remember her Mexican geography. Camargo—Chihuahua—west.

  “West?” she says to the man with pleading eyes.

  “Exactly,” says the man. “Northwest. You waiting for a bus?”

  “Pharmacy,” she says.

  “Pharmacy? Are you unwell?” asks the Canadian man.

  “Unwell,” says Araceli, spitting his word back at him again.

  “Bandages? Antibiotics? Medicine?” says the man.

  “Medicine!” says Araceli, excited at having recognized this word.

  “There’s a pharmacy the next town over. It’s just a mile from here. I could get your medicines and bring them back with you.”

  “I go with you,” says Araceli, dropping her bags now and kicking them to the side with her good foot for dramatic emphasis.

  The woman scoots forward on her seat. She pats the little slice of seat behind her.

  Araceli hops on. The suspension creaks. They ride off into the dry air, Araceli’s hair flying out behind her like a thousand tiny whips rasping in the wind.

  THE LOTTERY

  ULI WAKES UP ONE DAY to find that he’s been in Mexico for a month and a half. He looks out of the bedroom window. Darkness outside. It’s six in the morning, July 17th, by the date on his busted Timex watch. He checks that date against the thirty-five tick marks he’s scribbled in the back of his father’s Bible, one slash for every day he’s been in San Miguel. In the upper right corner of that same page, another set of tiny slashes for the days he spent in the hospital in Matamoros right after he crashed the plane. At the bottom right corner, the number 50 for the days he’s given himself to decide whether or not his family is coming. He’s nearing that number, he knows, but there’s no real way of knowing how many days he might have been in the hospital. He guesses it was about twelve days. He remembers those days were nested one inside the other inside the other. That hospital morphine haze never really left his brain. Or his body, for that matter.

  Every day he wakes up like he does this morning, paralyzed in his own bed, held hostage by the various aches that come out at night to cripple him. Every morning for Uli is a struggle to move. His body is sixteen though he feels like sixty-three. Uli wonders what sixty-three is actually going to look like for him. When he feels the pains in his feet, his thighs, his neck, his legs, he imagines the way his body might further deteriorate. He imagines himself curled like a pretzel. A crooked spine, a hunched back, a sinuous slant of a person.

  Maybe it’s that image in his mind (like a portent) or maybe it’s his wanderlust or maybe it’s his desire to push beyond the parameters of the city (as if his healthy body were out there somewhere, waiting to be found), but Uli makes up his mind, this morning, that he’s leaving San Miguel.

  He flips the pages of the Bible to the back where he keeps his money, stuffed between the pages of Revelations and where baptisms are recorded. Eight hundred bucks left from what he’s made with June. Might be enough, he thinks. He stacks the bills and then restacks them. Hides them between Revelations again so that they make the Bible’s spine bulge, the glue starting to rip away from the binding.

  Uli looks out the window and imagines himself running serpentine through the boulders in the street, his feet expertly navigating the potholes and slippery sand and crumbling asphalt as if his body were never broken. He imagines what it would feel like to be whole again. He tries to remember what that runner’s high felt like. Like he might be able to run forever. Like he might run all the way to Juárez—through Juárez, through El Paso, down I-10, all the way home. Unstoppable.

  Uli gets out of bed, pulls on his increasingly oversized jeans and his grey San Antonio Spurs shirt that fits too tight around the collar. He slides his sockless feet into his too tight shoes. Cold sweat between his toes. He gingerly walks past June, asleep on the couch, and eases himself out of the too creaky front door. He disappears into the still-dark morning. Just the glowing sodium lamp—the only one still working along the street—outside Uli’s house buzzing against the dim glow coming from the windows of that woman’s house across the street.

  In the middle of the street, Uli puts the open palm of his left hand up against a boulder to ground himself. He swings his right leg back and forth. Then his left one. As he watches the shadows move behind the closed curtains of his neighbor’s home, he feels the blood-bright pain inside the complexities of his knee. He feels, too, the ant-like swarm inside his capillaries—in his toes, his heels, his calves. He stretches his quads before pumping his right knee into the air. Then his left. Then his right a second, third, fourth time the way he used to do right before a race.

  He’d like to follow with lunges, but he worries he’d never get back up again. He just wants to run. Wants to feel the wind on his skin. Wants to get drenched in that warm sweat that only comes from the entire body working in sync, every muscle working with cartilage working with bone working with blood working with the heart pumping to the edge of explosion.

  He takes off at a dead sprint toward the end of the street. A streak of hot pain jolts from his heel to his heart. He runs through it. There’s a clicking in his knee only audible through the feeling of it in his bones.

  He listens to the click, like a second hand marking the passage of time over the booming whoosh of his heart. Each click comes as a new threat: a snapped ligament or a ripped joint. Should I stop? he wonders. No, he thinks. He runs through it, listens to the staccato of it that grows louder the harder he pumps his legs. He hears the slap of his cheap shoes on the pavement, then the pushed air of his lungs starting to burn, then the sound of blood in his head again, then that clicking. The feeling of his body working in sync—fiber to fiber, muscle to muscle, nerve to nerve. His skin drinks in the wind. He runs as if compressing time, as if every click in his knee were a second closer to home.

  Uli knows if he’s going to leave he’ll need more money. And then he’ll need to disappear.

  Tonight, he thinks. After we’ve sold the copper. Or tomorrow morning. That might work just as well. When June is asleep. A morning like this morning. He’ll slip out. No goodbyes. Nothing. Just disappear. Easy, he thinks. A clean break.

  If he’s honest with himself, she’s weirding him out more and more these days. She keeps carrying that gun in the small of her back. Keeps talking about that dog that got away—that cursed thing that came out to greet them the day of the burning mare in the junkyard. Says she wants to go back for it. Says she knows how to catch it this time. Moreover, he’s beginning to hate June’s morning music ritual as petty as that seems.

  She’s always humming something that sounds like Hendrix, maybe. Or Clapton. One of Uli’s father’s records that she listens to real low on his father’s Fender amplifier in the living room, her head beside the speaker, her eyes closed like she’s dreaming.

  Uli knows she means nothing by it, but he can’t help but feel like she’s taunting him, mocking him for his claim to his father’s house (or at least the pieces of his father that used to belong to him). Those records, that amplifier. Like portals into a past in which June never belonged. He knows she feels this too because whenever he catches her humming she always shuts down and shuts off. Like it’s some big secret that she listens to his father’s music. But Uli wonders if she might shut down for another reason too.

  Like all Mexicans that Uli’s ever met—including his father (especially his father)—June acts like Hendrix is still alive, like Clapton never got old, like the Beatles never met Yoko. Uli thinks that like all Mexicans, she hums those songs because she’s embarrassed of singing them aloud. Too self-conscious of her own English. She sings in the shower sometimes, and Uli gets a kick out of that. The words are never right.

  Slowing down a bit in his run, Uli thinks about leaving again. A little
weight comes off his heart thinking about June singing out loud. Singing that Hendrix song (or Clapton song) like she means it, like no one is judging her.

  Just up ahead, the rasp of drunk laughter tearing into the morning air. The road is clogged with a military convoy halfparked in the road and half-parked up on the sidewalk. Uli ends his jog and looks inside the vehicles as he passes, hundreds of soldiers sitting under their green, digital camo tarpaulins in the backs of long truck beds. The trucks themselves are giant vehicles with long benches over the wheel hubs, two parallel benches full of soldiers (sitting shoulder patch to shoulder patch) facing each other. The floors inside the truck beds are strewn with emptied cellophane Takis wrappers and caguama-sized beer bottles. The women soldiers are busy applying make-up in their compact mirrors. Blue eyeshadow. Purple lipstick. The men are pot-bellied and red-eyed in their morning drunkenness. They look like they haven’t slept in days. Uli gets the vibe that they’re all supposed to stay put under their tarpaulins, but there’s a group of young soldiers, around his age, lining up at a makeshift taco stand that’s set up shop alongside the convoy.

  There’s the smell of a butane flame like the rotten synthetic air leaked from a soccer ball. There’s the smell of tortillas warming on a comal. The smell of coffee and corn oil too.

  Toward the end of the convoy, a small group of officers drinking inside a bar that Uli’s never noticed before. Its sign boasts LONDON PUB up above the threshold. It is, possibly, the most depressing thing Uli’s seen in San Miguel. The officers look at Uli as he passes. One of them drunkenly barks at him before falling out of his chair.