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  “I’ll remember that,” says Cuauhtémoc, Lalo’s eyes suddenly severe. “You all right?”

  “You know, they probably already know the money is missing,” says Lalo. “In fact, I know they know. It’s just a matter of time before they track us down.”

  “Well, all the more reason to get this deposited quickly,” says Cuauhtémoc, walking toward his plane on the airstrip.

  Just as Cuauhtémoc pivots away, he’s grabbed by both shoulders. A sting in his bicep where his jacket is pulling on the wounds that haven’t quite healed. Lalo’s sour breath is upon Cuauhtémoc now. His crazy eyes stare deep into Cuauhtémoc’s own gaze. “Hey, listen. I know you don’t have to come back. You’ve got more than enough money to break free. But you should come back. Your brother is still alive, you know. Here, in Mexico. Not far. I saw him. I met him.”

  “Bullshit,” says Cuauhtémoc, visibly angry now. He feels his blood pressure rising. His arm itches.

  “I could show you where he’s at. But you have to come back for me. And my daughter. Can we make that a deal?”

  “He’s dead,” says Cuauhtémoc.

  “He’s not,” says Lalo, squeezing Cuauhtémoc’s bicep hard. “He’s not. I know you think that he is, but I know someone that’s watching out for him. A woman I see sometimes. He’s alive.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I have a picture,” says Lalo.

  From his front jean pocket he pulls out a charcoal sketch on the back of a love note signed by someone else, not Uli, but the portrait is undeniably of Uli: the same flat head, the same tiny mouth, that hair that grows out (not down) like a paint brush, those close-set eyes, that too-big forehead.

  “Where did you get this?” asks Cuauhtémoc.

  “I told you already. A woman I know. Here,” he says, his one hand holding onto Cuauhtémoc’s shoulder now as the other hand expertly folds the sketch back along its creases, placing it in Cuauhtémoc’s hand. “I can only help you as much as you help me.”

  “Okay,” Cuauhtémoc says, feeling the weight of the sketch in his hand. He doesn’t look down at the paper. He just looks Lalo in the eyes.

  “You come back. You come back, and I’ll show you where he’s at,” says Lalo, uncurling his fingers to free Cuauhtémoc from his grip. “It’s all coming to an end soon. You have to trust me. Come back for us. If not for me, then for my daughter.”

  That’s the last time Cuauhtémoc sees Lalo with two feet on the ground.

  Cuauhtémoc has learned to sleep between heaven and earth in the cockpit of his own plane. On two pieces of cardboard, he’s drawn, in pencil, an E6B slide rule. It allows him to calculate, given the direction and speed of the winds aloft, the proper wind correction angles, the true air speed of the plane and the amount of fuel burned, among other things that make it possible for him to set the plane on course, set its pitch, power and trim and doze off with an alarm clock in his lap, the earth rolling beneath him. All of his numbers taken care of, he can let the controls go and relax.

  This morning, the whirling propellers rattle the frame. They rock him to sleep with the sun flooding the cockpit, the warmth soaking into his clothes.

  Behind his shut eyelids, he sees blood red. He dreams of nothing at first, just watches the purple iridescent swirls take shape. He quiets his brain by pinching his arm. A little pain to keep his thoughts centered on one thing.

  When he feels dizzy, he knows his equilibrium is off and the plane is tilting. He opens one eye, looks out the windshield. The nose is too high and the stall horn spurts. He adjusts the trim on the rudder to get it flying straight, to keep those clouds over the same scratch in the windshield. He levels the plane by picking a spot out in the distance—a cloud, a tower, a mountain top—and keeping it in the same spot on the windshield.

  He opens both eyes, watches that scratch stay just above the top of the clouds in the distance. He watches it for a long time. Makes sure it keeps still. He adds fifteen more minutes onto the alarm clock, checks his numbers once more, checks the scratch in the window again, messes with the trim just a smidge, and closes his eyes for good until sleep overwhelms him again.

  The cold air frosts the tips of his eyelashes, and this gives him bad dreams. The skies are cold. The drugs make it worse. His nerves are jangly beneath his skin, raw like sickness spreading from the limbs in. Nicotine burns at the tips of his fingers. In his nose, the sweet rot of a stinking wound. When he touches it he remembers the prick of Jimmy’s knife in his septum from last night. Jimmy’s blade full of cocaine.

  No sleep on my watch.

  Jimmy likes Cuauhtémoc high like he likes everyone else around him high. Cuauhtémoc does everything to fit in, does everything to go unnoticed and he never sleeps. Nobody sleeps in the safe houses, especially not the sicarios, the murder artists, who are perpetually high. Everyone drinks and smokes and fucks and snorts, and Cuauhtémoc does too. And all the while, he can’t wait to get back up in the sky again, can’t wait to be alone, like he is now. Can’t wait to sleep.

  The sun is the only natural thing left for him, the only thing that keeps him going. When he feels the sun on his skin, he imagines those same rays hitting his brother in San Miguel—two brothers under the same sun. Wherever he is, they’re both beneath it. And sooner or later he’ll find him. He swears he’ll find him. Lalo gives him hope.

  Everything depends on Lalo now.

  A squall line of wind jolts Cuauhtémoc from sleep. He sits upright in his seat, realizes he’s freezing. He pulls the cabin heat on until he feels woozy. He lets the sun and the carb heat unwind his cold nerves. His body relaxes but the adrenaline keeps his brain high.

  When he closes his eyes again, his thoughts start to scatter. He imagines the whir of the engines outside, a buzzard flying beneath his shadow, a sweating bottle of Topo Chico mineral water, the bathroom of the safe houses he’s lived in, all of his things in a single satchel, a bottle of shaving cream and a new razor from the drugstore, too many condoms, the smell of a woman, the sour taste of her kiss, too much alcohol and not enough food. A girl in his dream looks like all the other safe house girls. Thin, faded. He only loves them because he has to, and even when he does, he wonders how many dead men they’ve slept with already.

  In his sleep, Cuauhtémoc’s altitude sickness builds. Hypoxia. A mixture of nausea and happiness like laughing gas, like grove sickness—pesticide sickness. In his mind he can almost smell the oranges. The ripeness of the blood from his father’s stomach fresh in the wet earth, the vomiting of poison.

  He sits with his boots dug into the rudder pedals, opens his blood-shot eyes and glances at the creosote below. He stares out over the cowling at Texas on the other side of the river. He’s imagined it a million times, what it would be like to fly out that way and never come back. He knows what would happen if he did. His brother would die. His mother too. Revenge killings. That was the deal he made.

  He thinks on that, huffs a short, stale breath. Pins and needles up and down his arms.

  Just over the engine cowling, the sun sets high over the scrub brush below. Off to the northeast, the night-flooded caldera shimmering like so much black glass in the moonlight.

  He sets the carburetor mixture rich to bleed off altitude. He yaws south by the rudders and drops the nose fifteen degrees or so. The dive angle sets his engine braying, a surge of air cooling up into the cowling. He concentrates on the power of that engine. Knows it can pull him to earth quicker than he’d like to admit. He waits a second before pulling the red throttle shaft out to idle. The propeller swings low and slow just over a thousand RPMs. The whiskey compass in the windshield does its little dance.

  A flock of buzzards fly in a ring over some rotting carcasses below. Cuauhtémoc gooses the throttle to rev the engine a little, some sound to get the birds scattering. The whistling wind slips past the air frame. The largest buzzard pulls away first. It flaps its lazy wings in long, slow strokes before it pirouettes into a dive. The other buzzards follow suit. They couldn�
�t fall even if they tried, thinks Cuauhtémoc. But the plane falls. It slips down from the stratosphere, pulling the wind behind it, those carcasses getting bigger in the windshield and that whistling pitch getting louder, a high whine like a tuning fork on glass. And then the pressure builds like a needle in his ear. The bodies grow bigger. As the birds scatter, the carnage they’re circling appears below the spot in the sky where they flew.

  Nine men strewn pell-mell along Highway 2, their blood coagulating like oil in the sand. A quarter mile south, toward San Miguel, a candy-orange Ford Lobo with its rack of headlights shot, its mostly burnt-out diesel engine smoking greasy black in the sun.

  Cuauhtémoc hovers just over the scene. He levels out and eases the throttle, dumping full flaps to bring the plane to slow flight. He circles maybe a dozen times or so, the propellers loping slow as he glides down into ground effect. He bleeds off a little altitude with every round, trying to make out the faces of the dead. But that’s the thing with the dead: they never look anything like themselves.

  It’s only by the boots that he can recognize one body spilling out of the driver’s side of the orange pickup. Purple boots. Maybe ten miles out, a procession of Jeeps from San Miguel, hauling ass toward the smoke. Cuauhtémoc eases in the throttle. Leaves the flaps down to pop him up, give him more lift to climb quicker. Even from that high up, he swears those boots are moving.

  SAFEHOME

  CUAUHTÉMOC ALWAYS GREASES THE LANDINGS. If the winds are strong, he lands in the desert north of Obregón, on a sand strip outlined by burning tar barrels, desert oak and split saguaro cut lengthwise to catch the neon sun. But if the winds are calm, Cuauhtémoc lumbers his aircraft, an aging M20J, onto a neighborhood street in Lomas de Poleo just inside Ciudad Juárez. All of the homes abandoned. Everyone gone from the drug wars.

  The neighborhood landing always warrants thirty degrees of flaps, the elevators popped low with the shimmy damper extended full to the hook and bolt, no further slack to give. The flexing tension of the wire pings up and down the length of the aircraft as it descends. You can hear it ringing like a bell in the sky from both sides of the border. From one hill, the Mexican army looks up with silent admiration for the pilot who can grease such a landing. From the other hill, the Americans look down into the city with a fixed gaze as if willing the cartel plane to crash.

  Cuauhtémoc dives in at an angle, on a slip stream, with his left rudder pushed full to the carpet and his ailerons turned fist-over-lap so the plane falls fast and loud, the up-gush of wind roaring high through the idled propellers, the plane like a vulture descending crooked into the remnants of the neighborhood. Five hundred feet, four hundred feet and he’ll kick out the rudder to right the plane just before impact. He’ll land it clean and free onto a street named Nahual, where the crumbling tar-gravel and rock splatter up against the nickel-plated underbelly of the plane behind the thrust of the cooling twin flat-eight Lycoming piston engines still revved to a thousand RPM.

  The wingtips, forty-eight feet from one tip to the other, scrape along the thresholds of the houses on either side of Nahual Street. The power lines roll up and stretch over the bump of the cockpit. All of the birds move to either end of the line, unimpressed at the smoking four hundred and fifty horsepower engine threatening to suck them in. The driver, too, waits unimpressed at the end of the road.

  The driver is always the one asking questions. The driver is both Cuauhtémoc’s ride home and his interrogator, his friend and his enemy. How was the flight? Any messages to be relayed? Any peculiarities along the way? Are you sure? Are you sure? he’ll ask. Cuauhtémoc knows the routine, and he knows better than to incriminate himself on what he did or did not see from the skies.

  The driver is always different but more or less a variation of the same man. Mid-thirties, severely overweight, reeking of Delicados and cheap sex and Tommy Hilfiger cologne. Probably named Chuy, which is short for something. Cuauhtémoc can never remember.

  From his cockpit, Cuauhtémoc can see the driver sitting back in his pleather-covered seats, drumming his nicotine fingers on the steering wheel of the truck. He listens to the American radio pouring in from the station on the hill. He checks his watch and waits for the engines to cut. He checks his hair in the mirror, perfectly lacquered with Tres Flores brilliantine. He cracks his spearmint gum. His breath smells like Swiss cheese.

  Cuauhtémoc purges it all from his mind before his boot even touches the ground. He forgets the bloody road leading up to San Miguel. He forgets the private strip in Sweetwater, Texas, called Fraley, where he made his drop of cocaine. He purges his memory of looking down on Interstate 20 running east of El Paso. Those burning cars. Hot, greasy, diesel smoke pouring black up into a plume that screened out the sun and painted the whole scene wispy in shadows of smoke. That familiar burnt-orange Ford Lobo—the one he’d ridden in so many times before from the airstrip—gushing from the under-carriage. Blood and oil and gasoline in the sand. A body pouring out from the driver’s side wearing purple boots. Cuauhtémoc knew, even from the sky, who those boots belonged to. He purges that name from his mind too.

  He plants his foot on the running boards of the white Dodge Durango at the end of Nahual street and climbs into the passenger seat.

  “Any peculiarities?” the driver asks him, cracking his spearmint gum.

  Cuauhtémoc glosses him over. They’ve never met before. “No,” he says.

  Cuauhtémoc keeps a stolid face, but his hands give him away, his finger pulling at the long, puckered scar on his left arm where it was cut the night he was deported from Texas, the night he was kidnapped and forced to fly cartel planes.

  Cuauhtémoc says nothing as he eases his body into the passenger seat of the car. He turns down the radio and clicks it to the AM band. Texas High School Football. Westlake vs Copperas Cove. He takes the driver’s Stetson from the dash and drapes it over his sun-wearied eyes.

  “I can’t understand English,” the driver says.

  “I know,” says Cuauhtémoc softly and lowers the brim.

  The engine turns over and the driver pulls out onto a side road. The driver expertly weaves through the boulders strewn pell-mell about the streets that keep the police from navigating the neighborhood and keep the military out too.

  Cuauhtémoc closes his eyes and feels his neck fuse with sweat to the hot pleather headrest. His mouth is dry. His bones are aching. The driver takes Cuauhtémoc the long way to the safe house, which looks like all the other safe houses in Juárez. A squat, pale-brown one story. Bad foundation. Meandering cracks in the walls that split jagged in the cold months like sweeping bolts of lightning.

  Desert wasps make their home in the seams where the warmth escapes. They breed and die. They shred up the adobe with their lives until the house takes on the fragile look of a cracked egg, or like tempered glass about to shatter.

  Cuauhtémoc eases his aching body from the comfort of the pleather. He moves to turn off the radio, but it’s already off. He walks around the fender and slaps the numbers tacked on the wall of the house just for kicks. 410. All of the safe houses end in 10—2810, 510, 4510. Cuauhtémoc commits every safe house address he’s tried to bring down with the slap of his palm to memory.

  The door opens. Darkness pours out from the threshold. A wiry little man with ropy muscles lays out the flat of his hand. Cuauhtémoc and the driver hand over their chirping Nextel phones like they do every time.

  The little man puts them in an oversize Ziploc bag and says, “I hope all is well.”

  Cuauhtémoc’s eyes try to adjust to the musty darkness inside, but he’s nearly blind. He can only feel the little man’s words on his neck now, a plume of smoke that cools just above the shirt collar and hangs there at the volume of a whisper. The driver follows behind.

  “All is well,” says Cuauhtémoc to no one in particular, and the door shuts behind him.

  Inside, there’s the too-sweet smell of perfume and sweat. There’s the honeyed sound of women’s voices, soft like leather
—the lilt of beauty queens or beautiful liars who say they’re beauty queens. There’s the knock-knock-knock of their heels against the tile, tiny women who seem almost weightless as they glide.

  They appear to Cuauhtémoc behind the iridescent patches of light that burn away from the center of his gaze, his pupils fully dilating in the dark. All of the women look the same to him. He wonders if he’s met any of them before.

  On the long table in the living room, there are silver bowls of cocaine, an RCA universal television remote, a polished pistol reeking of Hoppes 9 oil, a sweating beer, a half-finished ham torta sandwich with a bag of Sabrita potato chips.

  “All is well?” asks the little man again.

  Cuauhtémoc takes a bite of the sandwich and a swig of the beer and repeats, “All is well.”

  Lalo lies unconscious in the safe house tub, his hair still tinged with the sulfury smoke of burnt diesel. His hands are smoked black and his eyes are two fiery coals peering out with a thousand-yard stare. He’s barely breathing. He’s soaking wet in his clothes: a blue, pearl snap shirt, a pair of Wranglers, a pair of purple Larry Mahans that have all but cracked the fiberglass tub wide open. Along the inside of the tub there are long black arcs where the heels have scuffed in the struggle. The leather of his boots bloat about the same time his skin does. His fingers turn white and puffy in the water.

  Cuauhtémoc’s face turns ashen at the sight of Lalo—this man he’d purged from his mind only thirty minutes ago. A million thoughts course through Cuauhtémoc’s brain just then, but none louder than the questions.

  “What happened? What’s going on?” says Cuauhtémoc. He acts just as surprised as he should be, though of course he’d seen this coming from way down the pike.

  There’s a doctor sitting on the toilet in a white coat, R.M.P. embroidered on his lapel. Across from him there’s a boy with blue tattoos up and down his arm, these beautiful Chinese dragons with red eyes. The boy is wearing jeans rolled up to his calves and a plastic green rosary that dips in and out of the pink water of the fiberglass tub. He seems to be holding Lalo down or at least guarding him.