Bang Page 20

  The doctor checks Lalo’s pulse, consults his watch and then produces a capped needle from his breast pocket.

  He plunges the needle through the denim into the fleshy part of Lalo’s thigh. Lalo’s eyes spring open, the black of his pupils spreading like ink to chase the green of his iris away.

  “I only fly planes,” says Cuauhtémoc to the little man staring up at him.

  The little man rubs his eyes and says, “We need to know who else. We know you were close. We need to know who.”

  “I only fly planes,” says Cuauhtémoc. He says it again and again. He keeps repeating it like it might change something.

  Of course, Cuauhtémoc knew these things happened, but he never dreamed he’d ever be part of it. He knows what’s coming, and Lalo knows too. Everyone looks down on Lalo in the tub. The air is static. Lalo refuses to look anyone in the eye or speak for that matter.

  “I need you to tell me where it’s at,” says the boy with blue tattoos into Lalo’s ringing ears.

  He grabs Lalo by the neck. Lalo coughs deep and raspy from the diaphragm. He looks at Cuauhtémoc finally. Cuauhtémoc looks away.

  “Where’s the money?” the boy asks Lalo, tired and aggressive like he’s asked him a thousand times before.

  Lalo swallows his own voice.

  “Where’s the money? Where is it? Who has it? Tell me,” says the boy with a cool, unnerving calmness. A whisper. A plea. “Tell me. Where is it? Where is it?”

  Lalo’s eyes stay open beneath the water. They only close right before a giant, pink glug escapes his lungs and clouds the tub with a rolling boil. Lalo’s hands grasp the sides of the tub. His index finger points at the boy, then the ground, then Cuauhtémoc standing by the doctor.

  The doctor waits a beat or two and then raises his hand. “That’s enough,” he says.

  The body is still. The doctor rubs his eyes and puts a plastic device over Lalo’s mouth that makes him puke up water until his teeth chatter, until the color returns to his lips.

  “You’ll get us those names,” says the little man as he leaves the bathroom. Cuauhtémoc and Lalo are left alone. Everyone knows what Cuauhtémoc knows already.

  Lalo’s eyes are still dilated wide, the adrenaline in his veins faster than the cortisol.

  “Don’t say anything,” says Cuauhtémoc to Lalo, and Lalo nods his chattering head.

  Lalo points his index finger to the mirror over the sink, and Cuauhtémoc looks up at it, presses his thumb to the glass to check if there’s a space between his thumb and its reflection. It’s flush. It’s a two-way mirror.

  Cuauhtémoc turns off the lights and lights the votive candle over the toilet with the single match left in his ruddy matchbook. Saint Rita. Cuauhtémoc places the candle between him and Lalo. He produces two crushed Faro cigarettes from a soft pack in his breast pocket and puts one behind his ear, puts the other at the corner of Lalo’s mouth, the bent cigarette jumping up and down, up and down with Lalo’s chattering jaw. Little flecks of tobacco fall from the end of the cigarette and rest on the surface tension of the water.

  “How long has it been since you ate?” Cuauhtémoc asks.

  “Long,” says Lalo.

  “What do you want?” Cuauhtémoc says. He rubs his eyes.

  “Please,” says Lalo.

  “Chinese food?”

  “Please.”

  “That’s good,” says Cuauhtémoc, lighting his own cigarette from the flame of Saint Rita’s candle. The smoke casts shadows on the wall. “That’s good,” he says again and takes Lalo’s cigarette by the filter to light it with the cherry of his own.

  He places the cigarette back into the corner of Lalo’s mouth. It’s wet, so it burns better at the top than it does at the bottom. Lalo takes quick puffs to keep the fire from going out. His mouth fills with hot smoke. He coughs and coughs, unable to get a breath.

  To Cuauhtémoc, it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen.

  Some people said Lalo was queer but others said he was just like that—purple boots, those games he used to play. That one he used to do with a ten-dollar bill.

  He’d stick it in a urinal, a cantina urinal, and then go back to the bar and drink with Cuauhtémoc and watch, observe, take note of everyone who stepped inside to take a leak.

  He liked to take bets with the bartender: who’d be the one to reach in and fish it out? The thought of it amused Lalo to no end, his little giddy chuckle amplified by the half-emptied glass at his lip that made him look retarded.

  Every so often, a patron—a nice elderly woman or a vaquero or someone—might pat Cuauhtémoc on the shoulder and say, “So nice of you to take your brother out. He looks better every day,” or “Lucky him to have a brother like you. How is he doing as of late?” to which Cuauhtémoc would say, “fine, fine,” and end it at that.

  Lalo would take little swigs and then laugh again to himself. He taught Cuauhtémoc to laugh in those days. Cuauhtémoc would laugh only when Lalo was right about who’d take the bill from the urinal. Almost always, somebody would pay the bar with the piss bill and the bartender would know (Lalo would smell it just for proof) and the matter would be settled. If the bartender won, Lalo would cover five percent of whatever the cantina was paying the cartel that month in collections. But if Lalo was right, the bartender would pay five percent to Lalo on top of the standard fee. It was usually a wash, the odds favoring the bartender, which is why the bartender kept betting against Lalo.

  For Lalo, the kicks were enough, and when he won, he’d always split the earnings with Cuauhtémoc, which is how they got talking about money in the first place.

  This was in the beginning, when Cuauhtémoc was still new. Ever since Lalo had captured him, Cuauhtémoc had been lonesome in that briny way—sulking, scared, stone hopeless. For all of the lore he’d heard growing up in Texas about the Zetas and Sinaloa and El Golfo, with all their evil ideas and all of their evil ways, he’d never expected a narco to look like Lalo, who was more silly than scary and a little bit stupid too.

  Within the cartel Lalo was an outcast, like Cuauhtémoc, and this made them brothers in a way. They both felt paralyzed by their circumstances. Their loneliness hurt and throbbed like a bruise. It was only when Cuauhtémoc thought of escape, of going home, that his body felt at ease. Cuauhtémoc could sleep when he dreamed of escape. He ate, he breathed, he laughed knowing that everything he did, every cent he made in this line of work, would all be put to use someday—not too far from now—once the cartel imploded and he’d find his family and go back home to Harlingen.

  When they drank, he and Lalo mostly talked about how Cuauhtémoc planned to go back to his old farm in the orange groves and dust the crops until he bled black in the nose. He told Lalo about the June bugs and cicadas that come every so many years and the smell of all that chlorpyrifos raining down from under his plane like urine. He told him of other smells too. The smell of his mother’s pozole stew boiling hot on the kitchen stove. The smell of tobacco drifting in off the breeze from the grove master’s cigarillo, wet like rain but sweet like autumn.

  “Work on a farm like a fucking slave?” Lalo would say to Cuauhtémoc. His lecture was always the same. “That’s your big dream?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s the problem with paisanos, Cuauh. We’re still slaves. Even in Texas, Tucson, wherever. We make El Norte run and we bring this country to its knees. But at least there’s some dignity to destruction. Some dignity in living here. It’s nice for a little while, don’t you think? But eventually, I’ll leave this too. We’ll both leave it, you and me. Before this cell implodes. That’s my plan, anyway.”

  “How?” he asked Lalo one time. And Lalo looked at Cuauhtémoc almost surprised, as if he didn’t expect that question or at least the audacity of it. It was only one word—how— but between them both it was the most dangerous word. It was the bridge between dreaming and doing. How connected them at the brain. How was the end but also the beginning of everything. And suddenly, it was out that they wer
e both planning, scheming against El Jimmy. They would both leave their cartel, escape it which, of course, carried its own obvious dangers. El Jimmy still knew where his mother and Uli were. It was the thing that kept Cuauhtémoc from simply taking his plane and flying off into the north. It was this fear that kept him coming back, day after day, to the desert strip or the little road in Lomas de Poleo.

  “Out with it, then,” said Cuauhtémoc, as excited as ever. “How? How?”

  Lalo’s answer was simple. “A lot of cash.”

  “How much?”

  “A lot. More than we could ever make.”

  “From where?”

  “From everywhere,” said Lalo, and he explained how he kept his money in one place but never on him. He kept it in the base of the aluminum-lined false steering column in that burnt-orange Ford Lobo he’d drive across the border into Texas, that hollow space where drugs were kept and stored. Safe from the prying eyes of X-rays, gamma rays, whatever rays reflected off the aluminum sheet inside the steering column. Other drivers drove that pickup too, but the money was still safe. Everyone knew that to steal from the cartel was a death sentence. And of course, everyone talked about the stash in that steering column, but nobody knew who it belonged to, so nobody dared take it. The other drivers assumed it was a test of sorts, of loyalty or something.

  Lalo got a kick out of that. He loved the idea of his money traveling to all the places drugs went, the places he might go some day after this: Houston, Wichita Falls, Oklahoma City, Tuscaloosa, Raleigh, New York, Montreal.

  “Come with me,” Lalo would say, and they’d make plans together. They dreamed of fancy hotels, fancy dinners, Buchannan’s Single Malt Scotch, never having to work for El Jimmy or anyone else again.

  Lalo told him that when it was his turn to drive the Lobo, he always checked on his money and it was always there, packed against the back of the column down by where the Freon hit the A/C vent. The bills were always cold, and he liked to fan them in his face. The smell, like plastic.

  Cuauhtémoc remembers Lalo telling him all of this. And he remembers asking again, “But how? So, you have a lot of cash. But what do you do with it?” Cuauhtémoc remembers that crooked index finger on Lalo’s hand and how it waved the bartender over with just the tiniest motion that night in the bar, the windy heat of June slapping hard against the window panes.

  Lalo took a hundred-peso bill from his wallet, looked off toward the cantina bathroom, and said to Cuauhtémoc, “Let me show you what honest men will do for money.”

  In the bathroom, Lalo busts his chin on his way toward the porcelain lip of the toilet. He hurls and hurls, his voice splattering echoes inside the toilet bowl that rattle out at the tiled corners of the ceiling. Nothing comes up. A beaded string of spit arcs from the fleshy part of his lip to the clear water below.

  Cuauhtémoc hooks his arms under Lalo’s and pulls him up so he’s kneeling. His chin sluices bright red. It meanders in streaks like jagged lines and stops at his collarbone. He looks as fragile as an egg and just as pale. That incredible voice, that incredible noise.

  “Don’t talk,” says Cuauhtémoc, “Don’t speak.”

  He takes the Chinese food from the ledge of the bathtub and places it on the floor.

  “Don’t eat,” he tells Lalo.

  They look at the mirror and then look at each other. They see themselves. Lalo, the boy he used to be. Cuauhtémoc, the man he might become—the bloody mess, that pulp of a person. He looks at Lalo the way you might look at a car wreck, the way you might observe it and rubberneck because you don’t want it to happen to you. He observes Lalo begging. Cuauhtémoc swears when it’s his time that he won’t beg.

  “Please,” says Lalo shivering in his cold clothes. “Please,” he says reaching for the food, and Cuauhtémoc lets him have it.

  He nibbles at the breaded chicken. He can’t keep anything down.

  Inside the tub the ashy cigarette from Lalo’s lips, snuffed and bloated at the filter, spins slowly under the drippy faucet.

  Cuauhtémoc takes off his shirt and ties it like a scarf around Lalo’s neck. He pats him dry with the tail of it. He grabs him by the shoulders and blows out the candle.

  The sodium lamps pour in through the window and light up half the tub orange. In the dark, the other half is blue. Lalo’s skin is yellow, his torso cut in half. The water is green, the same shade of green Cuauhtémoc remembers so well from his childhood.

  He eases Lalo’s head into the water and closes his eyes. Lalo wraps his legs around Cuauhtémoc, and Cuauhtémoc lets his mind drift back in time. The warmness of Lalo’s escaping breath. Like Texas heat in the summertime.

  Cuauhtémoc lets his mind go elsewhere. He imagines walking barefoot in his old backyard or what he considered his backyard at one time. It’s where he played anyway, he and his little brother. It’s still teeming with sounds. The tick of the heat in his ears, the tick of the insects flapping from one tree to the other, ruining everything he’s ever worked for.

  Behind his closed eyes there are the cicadas too, seventeen-year-old cicadas humming pitch perfect in the shade of the orange tree branches. You can’t see them, but they’re there. And they’ll die eventually, like all the other critters and crawlers and men and women in the grove—all poisoned by the pesticides.

  Lalo moans and Cuauhtémoc brings his toes to a point. He’s flexing his calves, he’s bringing his body up two or three inches to the tree. He pulls down a switch and plucks a cicada from the branch. He pinches its humming legs between his fingers and dangles it away from his face, as far as his arm can reach, staring at its molting body. The cicada feels the same way it did when he was seven—the last time he handled a cicada—like a sliver of metal but undeniably alive.

  He remembers how he and his brother would make them fight. How he’d clip their wings and set them off against each other in a dirt ring like oversized ants. Being flightless made them hostile. They circled for a long time before they attacked one another. They made them carnivores, he and his brother.

  It was always a quick death. He remembers how placidly his little brother watched as one cicada would split the other open, the broken one’s exoskeleton flaking like bits of fish food. And they’d talk over it just like teenage boys might talk over cigarettes or old men might talk over dialysis at the Harlingen Scott & White down the road—what is the worst way someone can die?

  His little brother would always come up with the funny deaths: ants, getting killed by a hooker, getting killed by ants and a fire and a hooker at the same time.

  When it was Cuauhtémoc’s turn, all he could think about was shriveling to death, sloughing away like that bug—molting, beautiful and iridescent like that cicada drying in the dirt.

  What a slow death, he thinks. How cruel children can be. He thinks of the cicada and thinks of the drivers and thinks of Lalo and thinks of himself. Disposable, just like everything else. He’ll molt under hot dirt eventually, somewhere in the world. In his mind he can see their skin sloughed off by zip-ties or bullets or fire. He’s suddenly conscious of his own scars all over his body: the puckered red blips of skin around his wrists from when he was kidnapped in Matamoros, the pink laceration over his arm when he was made to fight gladiator-style at midnight, the serrated, bead sutures across his clavicle from when he crashed a plane for the first time with his brother.

  He opens his eyes and sees that face underwater. Perfectly still. Perfectly at peace. He imagines plucking each scar from his body to lay them over himself. He thinks he can remember what it felt like to be flawless at one time.

  COMFORT

  ULI HASN’T SEEN THE MAN with the purple boots in weeks. It’s August 1st by his Timex. He buys June’s heroin from another one of Alma’s friends, a guy who looks like a younger version of Chente. Same broken smile, same watery eyes. He introduces himself as Sapo. Uli thinks he tries too hard to be cool.

  Sapo wears sunglasses indoors. When he meets June he shows her new places to shoot. He says her veins w
ill collapse if she injects too often in the same place. He shows her the veins between her toes, behind the knee, on the side of her hip. He makes love to her without looking her in the face. Sapo asks Uli if he wants to join in. He asks: Where are you from? How did you get here? Do you have any family? Uli always answers: deported, plane, one brother somewhere out there. Sapo smiles at this. Uli wonders, when he leaves Sapo and June to their business, if Sapo has killed anyone before, if there is a murderer under his own roof. Just pay him what you owe him, he thinks.

  Uli doesn’t hate Sapo but he hates the way he leaves with their money. And today, Uli decides that he’s going to spend a little of that money too.

  He takes what little he has stored between the pages of the Bible—his escape money—and spends it on love. Because even when you’re out of work, the body still craves.

  Uli sleeps with Alma only to be close to someone, not because he’s attracted to her in any way. Under her dress, she’s bloated and saggy from childbirth. Her belly is a constellation of greasy stretch marks that reek of petroleum jelly and cocoa butter.

  Before today, he didn’t even know she had a baby. It’s a five-month-old. Alma tells Uli that her name is Alma too. Uli tells her that he’s never heard of a baby named after her mother before. Alma ignores everything he says. All business. She takes him by the hand and pulls him through the dark hallways of her house to her bedroom. Stale air. A cut of light that makes its way through the black-out curtains. A queen-sized bed with a floral pattern comforter. No sheet. Just bare mattress and the licorice-like scent of Fabuloso cleaner coming from the bathroom. Uli wonders if this isn’t her real bedroom but her professional one, if that’s what you’d call it. Her office? he thinks.

  She examines Uli before starting. “This is standard procedure,” she says. “You do it before taking anyone into your bedroom.”

  The baby is asleep in a crib off to the right of the bed.