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  Uli has never been naked in front of a woman before. Or a baby for that matter. He wonders what happens if the baby starts to cry. Does he get his money back? Does Alma tend to the baby? Do I tend to the baby? So many uncharted waters he has to navigate. This is all a little more stressful than he thought it would be.

  As Alma handles him, he looks over the room quickly, planning his escape. On the other side of the bed there’s a nightstand with a doily type thing draping off of it, a stack of children’s nursery books in English atop that. On the TV, in the corner of the room, a framed wedding picture of Alma and some strange man Uli’s never seen before.

  Uli looks at the baby. I can’t do this.

  “Come here,” says Alma and pulls him by the waist with her hot little hands. He’s never noticed how mangled they look. Like his grandmother’s hands, soft and pink and slanting to the left. He tries to look her in the eyes but he only sees the baby’s features in Alma.

  She says to him, “You must be a Sagittarius. Always living with your eyes open, even when you’re making love.”

  “I don’t know any other way to make love,” he tells her, which is the truth, and she laughs at this. Uli feels good that he made her laugh. He calms down a bit. Stares at the doily for a little while.

  “I’ll show you,” she says and takes his wrist. She skids his clammy hand awkwardly from her neck, to her floppy breasts, full with milk, to her abdomen, to the spade arc wrinkles of her C-section belly button, to the stubble between her legs. She makes him keep it there even though he doesn’t want to.

  She says, “Kiss me on the neck.”

  So he does.

  She says, “Say something.”

  Uli doesn’t know what to say.

  She pulls on his hips and they rock. He feels awkward, animal-like. He wants it to be over. I’ll be quick, he thinks. He feels himself throbbing inside of her.

  She says, “Not yet, baby. Not yet. Think about something else. Think about the wheels on the bus going round and round.”

  Uli starts singing that nursery rhyme in his head. He looks over to the nursery books in English on the night stands. He looks over toward the crib. Little Alma throws her arms wide and Uli look at her eyes, like drops of champagne.

  “Keep going, keep going,” she says.

  “Think about something else, anything else.” Uli makes a list of things he has to do today:

  Buy a chicken (a live one)

  Buy a tank of water

  Buy a case of Cokes

  Buy a bottle of multivitamins, a bottle of antibiotics, a bottle of deworming pills, a bottle of Percocets—he’s getting into the dog fighting business now, he and June and Atómico. June knows everything about dog fighting but she’s only half-lucid these days. Uli thinks he can do it alone, if he’s given the tools. And, of course, the dog.

  Alma pulls hard on his hips. Instant guilt.

  Uli lies on top of her, palms down on the floral print comforter. He’s looking at the baby looking at him. He’s reminded of the wall that crashed down over June. All those skeletons with their eyelids leathered by dust.

  “She sneezes sometimes and wakes herself up,” says Alma.

  “You think she was watching?” he asks

  “She wouldn’t remember,” says Alma. What if she thinks I’m her dad? thinks Uli. The thought makes him laugh. Desperate for conversation, to move on from what they just did, Uli thinks about telling Alma about the church wall that fell on June, but decides against it.

  “She was looking at you,” Alma says.

  Uli can feel Alma’s gut working into the curve of his spine now. He’s never had straight posture and now he’s glad she can’t see it—how the buttons of his spine meander to the left and then the right.

  For all that can be said about Alma, no one can say she doesn’t love herself. She loves every grease burn on her arms, every acne scar between her breasts, every crooked finger on her broken little hands that somehow healed slanting left.

  Alma catches him looking at her fingers and draws them in to make a crooked fist.

  “What’s the matter?” asks Uli.

  “Oh, they’re bashful,” she says.

  Alma remembers, in this sliver of a moment, that her father used to say that when she stared at his foot for too long. His big toe missing. He’d always stick it beneath the covers of his bed.

  “Oh, it’s bashful,” he’d say. It was chopped off by an overzealous captain in the Mexican army. This was the early 90s and it wasn’t a secret that her father was a Zapatista sympathizer. Half of whatever money he made on the coffee plantation he gave to the Chiapas independence movement, and he raised his family on rice and stale sweet bread, which his wife would mash up in milk and serve as a porridge of sorts. There were more guns than chickens on her father’s plot in Acteal and, although the Mexican military rolled in at random one day, searching high and low for guns, they could never find them hidden in the dirt floor beneath their family bed. His neighbors called him lucky, but he called himself religious. He swore by the scapular that slicked to his back when he was working hard in the sun, that brown ribbon that hung between his shoulder blades with a different cardboard saint attached at each end to keep away all evil. Saint Rita and Saint Francis of Assisi.

  Some said that her father was hiding a giant tank beneath his bed. Others said that Subcomandante Marcos himself was hidden there. Many jokes about her father’s sexuality and his toe were made in the barbershops and cantinas of Acteal until one day it was rumored in the halls of government in Mexico City that Subcomandante Marcos himself was, indeed, under her father’s bed. At which point everyone stopped laughing.

  The military trucks sailed into the village of Acteal on a black sea of diesel fumes and dirt. Everyone was massacred. They shot the men, they stabbed the women, they stabbed the children, they stabbed the babies inside of the women. All over Mexico pictures of the town were shown. An example was made of Acteal, a lesson to be remembered. Everyone was killed except for Alma, who jumped into a water well and sobbed for days, her city burning all around her.

  The echo from the well drove the soldiers crazy. They all believed the crying came from the sound of ghosts coming to haunt them for their evils. This went on for three days until a soldier of the most ordinary kind found her.

  From the neck down she was like a prune, her skin peeling off in layers that reeked of pus and mold. It was because of the smell that none of the soldiers touched her, except one desperate little man. This lonesome soldier who packed her up and took her north to San Miguel before dying some years later, though not before giving her a baby before he did. That’s mostly what he left her. Her house and the scars on her body and every misshapen bone in her hands. And this baby that eats everything.

  Next to Uli, she fingers her father’s scapular hanging between her breasts. “You know, you never go to Hell if you’re wearing one of these,” she says to Uli.

  “If you die wearing one, you mean,” he says.

  “You know your catechism.”

  “Catechism is a joke,” Uli says, trying his best to sound cool.

  “Do you want to tell me a joke?”

  “Sure,” he says. He only knows one joke: “Will you remember me in an hour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you remember me in a day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you remember me in a month?”

  “Yes.”

  “A year?”

  “Yes,” she says again.

  “This is not a funny joke.”

  “You’re not going to remember me in a year,” Uli says.

  “Yes I will.”

  “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “See,” he says, “it’s only been ten seconds and you already forgot who I am.”

  June’s ribs are still cracked, but her face has stopped bleeding, the glue having worked its magic as promised on the package. Still, June cannot stand not to be under sedation. Uli h
as taken to doing the injections himself. He knows that if she breathes too quickly, too choppy, she’ll develop pneumonia. So, he tries to sleep on the floor beside her, never really sleeping. Just listening to her breathe.

  She’s snoring these days, which means she’s getting better. Long, legato trills at the back of her throat that sound impossibly soft, as if her palate were made from cotton or something softer.

  It’s in these moments, late at night, that he thinks of that little side satchel his mother used to carry full of fabric samples. He listens to June’s damp breath and tries to feel satin on his fingertips. From there he makes a game of it: feels the satin and then tries to smell the cornhusk blunts she’d keep in her pocket. Smells them and tries to feel the critter-soaked earth beneath his bare feet, the heat driving all of those bugs wild in their inescapable thirst. He feels them jump up to scour the soles of his feet, bathe themselves in the salty sweat of his flesh. He hears the south Texas cicadas’ pulsing screech. The sun like a thousand needles in his skin, every pore opening to some ray of light. And then his own thirst ignited. Uli, just another critter of the earth.

  In his lucid dreams, Uli sees Alma’s face. Do I love her? he wonders. Is there a God?

  No, he thinks. Of course not. Although there’s time and she takes it. There’s money and she takes it. There’s fear and she takes that away too. Which is to say Alma brings order to his life, a cycle to each day which begins for Uli when she turns her porch light on, which means she’s open for business. Alma segments his life, but with June everything is one endless day, one endless game of survival. And he’s done playing it.

  The longer June stays up on the plaque, the higher the stakes on her life will be. A thirty-to-one payout by now. In two weeks it’ll be thirty-five-to-one. Of course, everyone is looking for her. Even the soldiers that the military sent in to patrol the city. In the papers it says they’re going door-to-door, room-to-room, looking for someone, and everyone knows who. But no one has searched this area of San Miguel yet. Alma says because of the boulders it will be the last neighborhood to go.

  “We can end this anytime,” she says to Uli. “She’s dying anyway.”

  He keeps that thought in the back of his mind. An ace up his sleeve—kill in case of emergency. Of course, he couldn’t do the deed himself.

  It’s June’s breathing that wakes him, that dissonant hiss of her vocal cords rasping ever so softly. Uli kneels beside the bed. Her eyes flicker open-shut.

  “Easy, easy,” he says, and reaches for the shoestring to tie around her bicep. “Breathe,” he whispers. He wipes the sleep out from his eye with his left hand while his right goes back to search for the lighter.

  He feels the cold barrel of the pistol pressed up against his temple. June looks down on him.

  The hammer falls. Click. Nothing. Click. Click.

  It takes a moment for Uli to find his bearings, that dissonant wheeze growing faster and fuller. Does she know? Of course she knows. He’s surprised to find that the sound of labored breathing is coming from his own body, June’s breath steady now as she pulls the trigger again and again and again to no avail. He knows there are bullets in June’s gun. What he doesn’t know is why it would jam like that. No corrosion that he can see. No dust in the barrel from his vantage point, staring straight down it toward the glint of a half-loaded bullet catching light from the window.

  He takes his luck as a sign, takes it as permission.

  “Why would you do that?” he asks her, emboldened now, the loaded needle in his hand.

  “You,” is all she can say. “You. You,” before dropping the gun onto the bed, her hand wrapped so tightly around the pistol grip that an impression is made on her palm, slanted lines in red. Her eyes flicker open-closed. It’s the last thing she lets go of as the heroin enters her veins.

  THE ENDLESS FALL

  PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE IS THE TERM mechanics use when things fall apart; when propellers warp out of shape; magnetos whir out of socket; ELT’s short-circuit and die; pitot tubes get stopped up with rain or bugs; altimeters spin like pinwheels behind their circular vacuum glass, as if they were haunted by any one of the sundry poltergeists that plague planes, those gremlins that make them dip or shudder or suddenly stall and fall from the sky, no more elegant or sophisticated than a rock dropped from the heavens.

  Jimmy’s mechanic knows when it’s about to happen, even when there’s no hard evidence to prove it—no dripping valves or knocking engines or rattling air-frames or loose rivets or tight yokes or cracked ailerons. Of course, every machine comes to an end.

  Pos, ni modo, thinks the mechanic. Like a doctor curing a dying patient, the mechanic can only do what he can do. Science has no place for feelings.

  Cuauhtémoc runs his hands all along the nickel underbelly, searching for dings or dents to foul the air spoil. He runs his hands, too, along all the leading edges—the curved bend of the wings, the raised dorsal fin of the rudder, the variable pitch propellers which have been replaced, not a knick or dent to throw them off balance in rotation. He checks the elevators at the back of the plane. Up-down, up-down they go with a full-fisted push on the trim tab outside the left edge of the elevator inside the cockpit. The twin yokes inside the plane bob with the pressure, as if a ghost pilot were in the seat tugging and pulling, the rudder groaning and flexing as Cuauhtémoc pulls on that too to test its full range of motion. The pinions are all safely attached. The hydraulic brakes are all filled red with fluid. The engines are greased with oil. Everything is perfect. And with a kick to the strut, a good luck precaution more than anything else, Cuauhtémoc enters the plane and clicks on the master switches one magneto at a time until they’re all whirring in sync.

  “Clear!” he shouts to the mechanic, who crosses himself twice more and then steps back, watching the propellers sputter to life, chopping angrily at the slanted wind that brings with it plumes of dust that redirect in the propellers and scrape angrily along the polished nickel of the fuselage.

  From the sound of her, she’s a living, breathing beast, all of the desiccant pouring hot from the cabin heat vent so that Cuauhtémoc’s throat goes dry, the desiccant sucking the moisture from him. Cuauhtémoc closes his eyes and cuts the engines to a thousand RPM’s, testing the magnetos, one at a time, listening for the rough, cutting sounds of carbon deposits not yet burned away from the spark plugs in the engines. He feels the rumble of the propellers and imagines all the metal beneath him turning to flesh. The belly of the plane is filled with bundles of cocaine, some of it strapped down behind him too. The seat is pushed fully forward so his knees crush the yoke. In front of that, just the empty skies that roll on forever toward Texas.

  On the landing strip, he lines the plane up against the wind. He digs his toes into the brakes and pushes the throttle in full until he can hear loose gravel pinging against the sheet metal of the plane, the dust piling wildly around him.

  He keeps his toes dug into the brakes above the rudder pedals to keep the plane stationary and pulls the yoke into his chest to keep the front wheel off the ground to execute the soft, short field takeoff. Flaps at thirty degrees. Throttle at full RPM. He lets go of the brakes and it isn’t fifteen counts or so before the plane is hovering in ground effect, that bubble of air that keeps him suspended just thirty feet or so off the ground while he picks up speed by the meter. He hovers at seventy-five knots before he eases his yoke back just a smidge at a time. His plane is over-weight, and he knows that it could stall at any given moment. He fixes the trim tap to push the nose down, to keep his speed up, and not long after that that he’s just a speck in the sky.

  He flies over the Chihuahuan desert, San Miguel just a blip in the distance. On the dash, Lalo’s water-bloated leather wallet. Cuauhtémoc looks inside the wallet for the thousandth time. No credit cards, no driver’s license. Just a picture of a pretty woman cut out from a magazine, a prayer card from someone’s funeral and some twenty-peso bills.

  He throws the wallet out the window, watches
it flay open in the wind and spiral to the ground. All of the bills explode from the wallet about a thousand feet down. Cuauhtémoc watches the bills float in a patch of windless sky. Just the sound of the engine in his head, the sound of his guts churning around his bones. Hope welling up inside him as he looks down, his brother somewhere down there.

  Cuauhtémoc cools the engine just to get a little closer. He sees a lot of people. A lot of soldiers too. None of them his brother. Miles upon miles of empty streets. He thinks he could land somewhere inside the city. He could tell his boss there was engine trouble. He could run away forever, get lost in that maze of lights burning bright against the desert. He wonders if El Jimmy still has eyes on his brother. Did he ever? How did Lalo find him?

  Don’t be stupid, he thinks. Fly on. Get the load delivered. Live another day.

  Cuauhtémoc dials a number into the VOR and then pushes the throttle in. Not ten minutes later, somewhere over Texas, a loud boom jolts the plane on its axis and a great plume of fire pounds loose from the right engine, charring the port side of the plane with a greasy jet of black smoke that sputters and bursts as it’s fed from the wings. Cuauhtémoc reaches down to the right of his leg and cuts the pump to the port wing by pulling the fuel lever from BOTH to LEFT. He idles the throttle and the plane starts to yaw before rolling. He cross-controls with full right rudder and full right aileron. The smell of fuel fills the cabin. Buzzards on open wings shoot up past the catapulting plane.

  One thousand feet and the plane loops over as the giant pile of cocaine behind Cuauhtémoc shifts and slams into the wall, sending the plane wobbling with the load’s momentum. The bang sounds throughout the airframe, the plane jerking about the skies like a jug of water slid across a table. Fast-slow like that. Chaos.

  Outside the windshield, earth turns over sky. The negative pressure pushes and pulls at Cuauhtémoc’s eardrums so he can’t even tell what’s up and down anymore. He thinks about Lalo’s wallet hurtling to the ground. He thinks on those bills scattering as he watches the altimeter dialing backwards. The stall horn squeals as the wind scatters out along the wing’s airfoil.