Bang Page 17

  Uli watches as the officer rocks on the ground like a beetle on its back, the whites of his eyes rolling manic in his head. He stares into the sky, then at the convoy, then through Uli as if he were either an obstacle or a ghost before barking again, trying to get some reaction from Uli that Uli doesn’t know how to give.

  Nothing, nobody can stop the lottery, and everyone knows this. Not the soldiers in the streets, nor the autodefensa people’s militia that came before them, nor the narcos who came before them. June explains that the lottery is an institution older than San Miguel, which is to say older, even, than the Spanish presence in the region. The Mexican soldiers in the street respect the lottery just as the Spanish soldiers and priests did five hundred years ago, just as the Raramuri tribe did sometime before that. And as far back as anyone can guess, it was the Raramuri themselves who invented the lottery.

  June explains that the Raramuri believed in human sacrifice. They believed that the Devil wasn’t necessarily evil. Occasionally, the Devil would collaborate with God to bring the people to heel, and only through human sacrifice could the Raramuri salvage their lives from endless torment. So, the lottery was invented. Human lives were given up for the common good. And the system was fair in that it was supposedly random. June thinks it was then, as it is today, designed to dispose of undesirables and enemies in the community and surrounding regions. And just like then, it pays dividends.

  June guides Uli toward the centro, which is where he found himself the first day in San Miguel when he went looking for Atómico after he’d escaped. They walk past the highway bridge that separates his neighborhood from the next one, that pocket of San Miguel where the police station, the butcher shop and that crowd of people (smaller now, but still there) can be found. Uli remembers that same cat fishing his paws inside a bucket of blood. He remembers that same old timer with his ladder and copper screws. Those plaques resting on the ground full of names: the soon to be sacrificed.

  A group of soldiers, just arrived in the city, watches at the periphery of the crowd mostly comprised of women and children. Uli assumes that, like his father had, all of the men have gone north. To Texas, Arizona, California. There’s a certain buzz in the air. Above the hub-bub of muddled, middle-aged voices, there’s the cutting whine of a child bowled over in pain at having struck her toe along the curb leading up to the police station. As if in solidarity, other toddlers whine too for no apparent reason other than to have their voices heard.

  As the hub-bub reaches a fever pitch, the old man with the copper screws drags his ladder outside from the tin awning of the police station and begins to climb it. There’s a collective rustling. Women, all around Uli, reach into their bras, handbags, shoes, sleeves, pockets to produce little white sheets of paper like the ones Uli had seen that day he went looking for Atómico.

  June produces her own little slip of paper from the small pocket in her jeans.

  “What are those?”

  “Official betting slips,” says June, looking out for the man about to climb his ladder. “I bet on the small list every time,” she says, unfurling the official, water-inked slip. In the sunlight, Uli can see that the watermark is of the city seal of San Miguel. A set of laurel leaves, a Spanish coat of arms that looks too elaborate to be real and the name of the city, San Miguel.

  “On the small list are the nobodies,” says June. “The everyday people. There are two lists. The first list is made up of the big wigs, which include mayors, generals, public figures—those kinds of guys. And then the small list, which is mostly made up of ordinary people. Like us. The small list pays more. Twenty to one. But the big one pays ten to one. Still not bad if you’re sure the mayor’s going to die, or something like that. These days, those plaques are just hitlists, really. The names of the people the cartel is going to kill.”

  “What would you have to do to end up on a cartel hitlist?” asks Uli.

  “Steal product, steal money from them. Petty stuff.”

  “Well, who did the killing before the cartels arrived?”

  “Everyone,” says June. “Some men even killed their wives, if you can believe that. Did it for the money.”

  Uli is not sure if June is joking or not, if any of this is real or not. “There’s someone to kill every week?”

  “Every six weeks is more like it. Social cleansing. The cartels always have someone to kill. Everyone lets it happen. Everyone says, ‘let the delinquents kill themselves if they want to.’ I think that’s why the army doesn’t intervene. Anyway, it works like this: the cartels put the names up on their blogs and then those same names are put up on a plaque for all the public to see in San Miguel. You buy a slip of paper for five pesos that gives you one shot at guessing who you think will die. You only get one shot, one name. But the catch is you have to put a date on your slip. If that person dies within one week, before or after that date, you win. If not, you get nothing. Get it?”

  “And what’s with the screws? The plaques?”

  “The city makes a big show out of making the deaths official. The man goes up there with a plaque and crosses out the names in red so it’s public—official. If you win, you go see him. He handles the show pretty much. That’s his job. They always give that job to an old person. He does the slips, the payouts, the climbing up the ladder to take the old plaques down and put the new ones up. He’s also in charge of raising the odds if a name’s been up there too long. That gets more people to come and bet if there’s a big payout.

  “What’s the longest a name’s been up there?” asks Uli.

  “About seventy weeks,” says June.

  “Who’s name?”

  “Mine,” she says.

  And before Uli can even say anything to her, a hush comes over the crowd.

  A woman scolding her toddler quickly snaps her neck to where everyone else is looking. All eyes focus on the old man climbing the ladder. Silence. Just the sound of his feet creaking up the rungs, those two large plaques knocking against each other as they dangle below him from a line of rope.

  The women shuffle their feet backward as the old man swings the plaques around the front of the ladder to keep them away from his body.

  At the top of the ladder, there’s a can of red paint and a brush. He calls out the small list—all of five names and their corresponding death dates—in his shaky, old man voice before striking through them all, one by one, with red paint. All of them are crossed off but June’s.

  Uli looks at her. The scar over her face. Those watery eyes. He can’t help but think of how easy it would be. There’d be money in it at least. From the corner of his eye, he spies the gun in the small of her back. Takes a breath. Watches the show.

  Some women cheer, others send up a breathy air of exasperation, their tongues clucking as they wait for him to put up the new list.

  There are eight names in total on the new plaque. Of course, June’s name is up there too. Most every other name is unremarkable except for two. CHENTE VASCONCELOS, the junkyard scrapper, and ARACELI URIAS, Uli’s mother.

  “Shit,” says June.

  Uli looks at his mother’s name up on the plaque and for a moment that’s the only thing in the world he sees. He feels June slip away more than he sees her. She pulls her wagon past the police station, past the bridge, past the Oxxo convenience store on the other side of the bridge, hauling ass hell for high leather to get where she’s going. Or, at least, where Uli thinks she’s going. To get her copper scrapped before Chente can push up daisies and leave them broke forever. To get her money. To get her car. To drive off wherever she thinks she’s going to drive off to.

  Uli thinks about running after her. But instead he pushes through the crowd and asks the old man with the ladder just one question: “How much for June?”

  In the north end of San Miguel, in a colonia named Huasteca, there’s a shuttered Spanish mission that’s never been scrapped. The mission is the only solid structure in a long road of rusty, corrugated tin structures. Auto body shops, crack ce
ll phone stands, bakeries.

  The look of it is like something carved from a single slab of rock. White-washed adobe squared off at the top into a single curved gable inlaid with a Virgin Mary figure, open palms at her sides. At each side of the hammered patina door there are two busted, circular windows guarded with crossbars. Over the door itself, a mangle of padlocks.

  June produces a small, black, rolled rag from her back pocket and unfurls it over the ground beside the church door. Inside the rag there are a set of allen keys and various handled needles. There’s one needle with a sharp curve and another one with a slight curve. Another that’s bent like a bunch of waves coming in off the ocean and another with a sloped “P” that’s worn thin around the top. June expertly wields the lockpicking tools into the complexities of the pins and gears shielded behind the padlocks and camlocks and rim latches all hanging from the door, one lock over the other. They shine in their sloped deformities from being struck so many times, nobody able to hammer them with brute force off of the door.

  The locks clack open, one by one by one, as June picks them and pries them from the door with a steady, steely efficiency. She holds each lock as if weighing them in the center of her palm before dropping them, slack wristed, to her feet so that they clack along the bricks. It takes only twelve minutes for June to shove the church door open.

  A cool draught makes its way from inside the building out into the warm July air. It smells stale and old. Darkness pours over them as they cross the threshold.

  Inside the church, the altar is still intact. There’s some tagging but not a lot. Mostly it looks like time has worn down the structure all by itself. There are electric lights in the iron chandeliers overhead and a single copper pipe that runs the length of the building. A wall brace. The pipe bolted into the corners at the roof and the wall. Exactly what they’re looking for.

  By the thickness of it, Uli guesses it might be seventy pounds of copper altogether. Enough scrap to feed them for a month, just that one piece. At least enough scrap to feed them while June’s dog recovers to fighting strength. Not that she’s too keen on the idea of fighting him just yet.

  “Let’s make some money,” says June, swinging her wagon through the aisle between the pews. She parks it to the left of the altar. In the corner, a stack of purple, lent rags four feet high. On top of the stack there’s a cord of decorative golden rope laid in a coil. June unspools the coil. She snaps a segment of it to test its strength. It pops with a dry rasp, the dust from the fibers flying into the air.

  “Might bring the brace down,” she says to Uli. “It’s long enough.”

  “Cord is a cord. I don’t see what length has anything to do with it.”

  “You double it up. Make it stronger. Like this,” she says and loops the cord in two. She ties the loose, tasseled ends of the cord into a weighted knot, which she uses to thread the space between the brace and the wall. She throws the knot and misses three times before she gets it through, the weighted plush cord falling the twelve feet back to the ground with a soft thud on the concrete.

  With the rope fully wrapped around the copper pipe, she turns her back to the wall with the slack of rope over her shoulder and pulls with all her weight. No dice.

  “It’s gotta be quick,” says Uli, “or you’ll bring the whole thing down.”

  “I got it,” says June, a glare of frustration flashing from her eyes through that fleshy mask.

  Uli grabs a fistful of slack rope and pulls with June, the tonal stress of the tension sounding all along the length of the rope, but the copper brace doesn’t even budge.

  “Maybe a hammer?” says Uli.

  “No. That won’t work,” says June.

  “Well, hell, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe one more try,” she says. “We’ve got it here. We just gotta get it. I’ve got one more thing,” she says.

  “Pull it from both sides?” asks Uli, ready to throw an extra cord of rope over the brace at the other end of the wall to pull along with June.

  “No,” says June. “We’ll get it from one side first. Then we’ll get the other side. Easier to fight one bolt than two.”

  “Makes sense,” he says, eager to let June try her thing so they can get onto his idea.

  Uli puts his hand inside his jean pocket, feels the lottery ticket there.

  He watches June tie the rope around her waist. She pulls hard with her back, tightening the rope again. Her feet angle along the steps that lead up to the busted altar of the church, the crucifix hanging heavy over her as Uli steps back to the opposite wall. When she pulls, the faintest of cracks appear around the brace’s bolts before the wall shatters with a flurry of tiny fissures.

  A wind pushes through the church’s open doors. The powdered adobe from the wall, loose now, pours off into the breeze. It slicks about the church’s corners, the pews, past Uli and then out into the street.

  As June leverages herself further up the altar steps, a look emerges on her face. A mixture of relief and pride and hope as the groaning bolt comes loose from its mortar. The brace comes undone. It swings down from the wall that clang like gold in their ears. In that split second, she looks to Uli as if to say I told you so. But also as if to say, we’re going to be ok. And its then that Uli looks from her head to her hand, the rope going slack in her fist as the wall crashes down onto her.

  A strong gust pushes over him. The adobe grit stings his face. He half-expects to see a pool of blood, to see June just a pulp in the ground. But when he opens his eyes, he sees a thousand tiny skeletons at his feet instead, some of them no bigger than his thumb but others as large as full-term babies. A few of them still have skin over their bones, mummified in the earthy clay.

  To Uli, the sight feels like an ugly portent, but also like some sliver to a larger truth. Of all the ways this church could have come down throughout the centuries (of all the people these skeletons could have revealed themselves to) it’s him now watching this light fall on their crooked limbs, their death undoing June’s life with the very weight of their existence.

  He’d heard of this kind of thing before, from his father, but he always thought it was lore. A tall tale. Stories of priests in colonial times who would get Indian women pregnant. They’d hide their mistakes in the walls they built, figuring nobody would tear down a church. Not ever. Abortions, newborns—it didn’t matter. They were all buried.

  Uli looks at all those baby skeletons scattered at his feet. Bones as white as the dust. A skull, a rib cage, a femur. And then he sees June’s blood spreading under all of it. That little slip of lottery paper burns in his pocket as he digs and digs, wondering if she’s made it, knowing (if only in the back of his mind) that even the darkest secrets find the light of day.

  ALMA

  EACH BREATH FOR JUNE is like drowning in a sea of pain. She hunches over the bathroom sink, hissing through her teeth. Her hot breath fogs up the bathroom mirror. She can feel a crunching in her abdomen when she exhales. Hiss-wheeze, hiss-wheeze go her lungs. She feels Uli’s eyes on the exposed layers of flesh beneath her peeled scar. The cool condensation on the mirror slowly disappears (and then reappears with her breath) in front of her as she works to glue herself back together.

  Pale, blistery flesh hangs down from her cheekbone. She peels back a mucous-wet sliver of scar tissue just above the corner of her lip. She looks at her mouth in the mirror. She doesn’t look at her blood. She can’t stand the sight of it. She doesn’t feel the two separate pains of her broken ribs and of her lacerated face. She only feels one pain throbbing all over her body.

  “Give me—” she says to Uli, breathing hard now, “—the glue.”

  She waits for it with her flat palm outstretched.

  Uli, leaning in the threshold of the bathroom door, hands her a small tube of Resistol and a towel. They’d go to the free hospital but it’s full—it’s always full. Glue will do the trick. She knows it.

  Her eyes water as she holds her breath just long enough to squeeze a line fr
om the tube along the pink edges of her scar. She has to work fast before it dries. She makes an arc around the bone of her cheek. And then she peels the layer of flapped skin up with the tips of her fingers and puts it flat over the arc of glue. She exhales a long, hot breath. Her eyes water again. She pats her skin dry with a ragged towel. From the mirror in front of her, June cannot tell what’s a tear and what’s glue.

  She leans on Uli who helps her from the bathroom to the bedroom. She lays herself down on the bed. Hiss-wheeze, hiss-wheeze. She says to Uli, “I’m drowning.”

  She looks to him for consolation but only catches his eyes falling on her pistol resting on the nightstand. He puts his cool hand over her forehead. She only sees his wrists now. She closes her eyes.

  “Just another minute or so,” says Uli.

  June knows the glue package says thirty seconds to dry on wood surfaces. Twenty-five seconds on aluminum. It doesn’t say anything about flesh.

  The pain comes and goes in waves. When it comes, her legs go up and down. She holds her rib cage. She puts her hands over Uli’s hand. In her head, she can almost hear bones crunching, the sound more imagined than audible.

  “I’m drowning,” she says to him again.

  “You’ll be fine,” says Uli.

  “You have to go,” she whispers.

  “Where?”

  “To get the money. Before he’s murdered.”

  Within a block of the scrapyard, a single federal cop with his car lights flashing. A pack of nota roja photographers snap away at the body, crowding the cop out of his own scene.

  Uli dumps his wagon. The wall brace rolls to the ground.

  Chente is shirtless outside his attendant’s booth. There’s a belt tied around his neck, looped at the other end to the handle of the door. His belly is a map of busted capillaries and purple veins that sprawl like the naked branches of a tree over his abdomen. The belt cinches his neck so that his head is cocked at an awkward angle.

  From a distance, Uli can’t make out whether Chente’s eyes are closed or not. The dead body is more real than anything he’s ever seen. More real, even, than the car bomb cadavers.