Bang Page 22

  Eight hundred feet. Five hundred feet.

  Cuauhtémoc pushes hard on the rudder until his toes are bloodless. He levels the plane and then loses it as the shifting load throws him off course. Rights it again. Loses it again. Rights it again and again and again, the stall horn blaring with each successive spin. He mixes the fuel rich and then shoves the throttle in full to the red nub, his blood pressed from his fingers to his knuckles. In his mind he anticipates the pain, the memory of his first crash outside of Matamoros. In his left hand, a death grip on the wild yoke that’s bruising his palm.

  “Please,” he says over and over again.

  His controls turn mushy as he angles the nose down to gain speed and control. He idles the propeller as if recovering from a stall, but there’s only two hundred feet left between him and the ground. His shadow spreads across the dirt. It’s then that he takes his hands from the controls completely and covers his face with his arms.

  It’s the cocaine that wakes him up, his surface wounds dusted with it. His right shoulder is carved by crushed glass pushed through his flight jacket. Out the windshield, the rest of the tempered glass falls a piece at a time to the datum right in front of him. One hundred yards ahead, the wild-burning rot of a blackened engine separated from the aircraft mid-flight.

  He looks around, studies the wreckage from inside the cockpit. The pile of cocaine behind him miraculously crushed the port side part of the aircraft but not his own side. The back of his seat is shredded, the stuffing pouring out from the plastic, but his torso is somehow still intact. The glass on every instrument is shattered except the spherical glass of the whiskey compass bobbing east, then north, then east again.

  His brain is abuzz with cocaine. His eyes shift between the altimeter, the yoke, the gushing pain in his boot, the broken wing, back to the altimeter, back to the gushing pain in his boot. The broken toes, all of them like one single pile of hurt and not individual pains with their own unique injuries.

  He presses down too hard on the pointed, brass-bracket toe of his boot and his split nail makes a cracking noise— inaudible to the ear but audible in the way it resonates in the nerves, in the skin, pinging up and down his spine so he thinks he can hear it. It feels good now in this beautiful, ticklish, numbing kind of way. From his toes pours hot blood into his boot. Hot blood that would alarm anyone else, but to Cuauhtémoc it is even more comforting than the pain—that constant that tells him he’s still alive. The pain in his toes tells him he’s not paralyzed. The pain everywhere else tells him that his body is damaged but still functional.

  He unbuckles his belt. He pulls off his cocaine-dusted jacket, his hat too that keeps the headphones from pulling out his hair. He breathes through his shirt collar. Blood on his sleeve. He dabs it to his face. A stinging cut right beneath his eye. He dabs it again. Looks at the blood. He jumps from the cabin and limps off on broken toes toward the culvert off highway I-10 going east-west.

  Fifty yards out from the highway, he looks back. A great cloud of cocaine powder dusting out into the wind like one oblong sheet of cascading snow. He looks at the sight from that distance, takes a second to soak it all in. Five hundred pounds, it must have been. Two hundred and twenty-seven kilos at ten thousand dollars a kilo. Over two million dollars, not including the plane. It smells like gasoline or ether. Something chemical.

  It’s then and there that he makes his decision or, rather, his decision has already been made for him: there’s no way he can ever go back. No way he’s ever going to repay his cartel the money. No way he’s ever going to see his brother again.

  His feet firmly planted in Texas, on the asphalt of I-10, he’s got only two choices now: east or west. He chooses east.

  Against the twilight, he spots a Love’s truck stop glowing in the distance. The sun sets gold and all the June bugs come out. They swirl around the halogen bulbs of the truck stop awning, that white light making the oil-stained concrete below sheen green like the desert does under the moon. Time crawls about as slowly as Cuauhtémoc does, and the sun disappears, leaving only the day’s heat rising in watery layers over the road against that dark light that hangs around as if the sun never left at all. Even in those waves you can see the June bugs fly in on the shimmering, moonlit crescents that water up until they’ve found their place in the heat agitated pattern of bugs under the bulbs. It seems as though all of the critters of the desert come to this place for rest at night, even Cuauhtémoc.

  You can hear the dry halogen buzz cooking the glass, cooking the bugs beneath the glass. They fall to the concrete once they’re burned. They fall on crisped, crooked wings. They fall slowly like drying pieces of ash, their greasy bodies strewn about the concrete.

  Cuauhtémoc limps under the awning with the heat of the road in his boots. His wounds buzz with a wet heat all their own. Like the kind that comes from a rope burn or a hand caught too long on the iron. He squashes the bugs under the soles of his boots, and they pop like grapes. They spread wet until they’re mixed into the oil streaks on the ground. Cuauhtémoc moves along as gingerly and crooked as an old man. Over the green sheen of the concrete. Over the tire smudged yellow paint of the curb. Over the glossy faux granite tiles and into the convenience store.

  “Do you have a shower?” he asks the attendant, a middle-aged woman. Her nametag says Lizabeth. Blue eyes, box-colored blond hair. Vertical wrinkles over her upper lip.

  “Five dollars,” she says. “For the towel.”

  “That’s fine,” says Cuauhtémoc, dusting the cocaine from his clothes, trying to make himself presentable. She rings it up on the machine with the nub of her pencil, completely under-whelmed by the spectacle of Cuauhtémoc.

  The cash register springs open and Cuauhtémoc opens his billfold filled thick with Mexican pesos.

  “Do you take these?” he asks her. She points to a little yellow sign at the register with the nub of her pencil. It advertises bus fares to northern Mexico from this station: Zaragoza, San Miguel, Coatlitli, Ciudad Juárez, Torreón, Monterrey, Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Tijuana. Beneath that it says AMERICAN DOLLARS ONLY. Beneath that it has a conversion fee calculator glowing digital red. In one column the American flag, in the other the Mexican flag. Both electric displays are broken. They read digital 8’s across the board.

  Cuauhtémoc takes a wad of cash from his wallet and hands it to her. “I don’t need change,” he says. He thinks about the plane again. He thinks about all that money he owes Jimmy.

  “Can’t do it. Sorry. American dollars only.”

  “Could you make an exception?” he pleads with her, the blood bloating the seams of his boots.

  “Can’t make any exceptions for no one, mister.”

  “It’s been a long day,” he says.

  “You got a credit card?” she says in her west Texas twang. “Or a debit card?”

  “God—jeez, miss. Just—I’ll give you all the cash in here. Will that do?”

  “How much is it?” she says, clacking her lacquered nails on the counter, the little nub of a pencil about ready to click open the register.

  “It’s about four hundred dollars,” he lies.

  She thinks about it for all of half a second before she says, “I can make an exception this time. Fifteen minutes, hot water.”

  She hands him a towel and a plastic door tag with the number nine on it. “Shower four,” she says and blows on her nails.

  The towel is so bleached that Cuauhtémoc can feel the fibers squeak in his fingertips.

  He walks into the stall and tries to unbutton his plaid shirt with all the precision left in his fingers. He tries to unbutton his jeans, unzip his fly, cradle the heel of his right boot to pull it away with both hands, but he only pulls harder at the strained muscles in his abdomen that shoot out a fatigued twitch. He falls and slaps his palm against the cool, beige hexagonal tiles of the showering room, the veins on the back of his hand flush with blood. His toe creaks. His arms bleed. Time moves slowly over him.

  “Ten minutes,” yells
the woman from the doorway.

  Cuauhtémoc pulls himself up, turns both diamond-cut acrylic knobs at the same time so that the water pours hot and clean onto the crown of his dry head and then over his clothes and then over his aching body. He watches the water swirl pink down the drain, and he cries. He cries and cries under a shower that’s so hot it puts a chill in his nerves.

  AUTODEFENSA

  EVERY MORNING ARACELI WATCHES the buzzards ride the thermals in the far distance. She’ll wake to a halo of three or four circling in the sky, but it’s not long before another dozen join the circle, their numbers growing as the sun shoots high, every other star in the sky fading to blue.

  In the mornings the men of the autodefensa (the militia) will patrol the three sides of the little pueblo just off the highway on which Araceli and the Canadians were captured. They’re always looking for narcos. Or for regular people like Araceli. People to ransom. People to help them perpetuate their way of living. Separate from the government, separate from the cartels. Their own municipal government. Their own military. Their own war machine.

  On the fourth side of the compound, the east side where the buzzards fly, there’s nothing but desert. Nothing coming from that side. Nothing leaving either. But that doesn’t keep Araceli from dreaming.

  Weeks go by and Araceli’s left hand slowly loses its color. The nails on her fingers go from pink to yellow. Her fingers go from blue to black, the dry gangrene spreading. She wraps it in the ripped tail of a blue shirt she finds under her cot. A child’s shirt. Cookie Monster on the front. There were many children, once, in the compound where Araceli is kept. A small, two bedroom house. Toys, videogames, teething devices everywhere. Now there are only two children left: a brother and sister, ages six and four, who the militia says Araceli is responsible for.

  Araceli is separated from the Canadian couple who are held captive in another house, the woman’s screams piercing the night sky so loud it’s as if it comes from everywhere at once. Who knows what terrors she’s seen? Who knows what her husband has watched her do?

  The brother and sister and the four walls of the house are Araceli’s world. And every day Araceli, the brother and his little sister go through their little routine.

  The children come find her outside, on the porch, watching the buzzards in the morning. Then they all watch the planes landing, ten miles east of there, in San Miguel once they’re tired of the buzzards. When the planes come, this is a sign that Araceli is supposed to make breakfast. Every day Araceli gets the same question to start the day. “What’s wrong with your hand?” The brother is worried that the blackness of it will hamper Araceli’s abilities to make them breakfast.

  “It’s blue,” she says every morning.

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m related to Cookie Monster,” she’ll say. She’ll show them the blue shirt wrapped up in her palm.

  “Really?” the little girl will ask, day after day. “How much related?”

  “Just a little related,” she’ll say. “I got my hand from my grandfather’s side.”

  “Is Cookie Monster that old?”

  “He ages well.”

  And the brother will nod as if he understands. The little sister will want to ask more questions, but she’ll look to her nodding brother. She’ll stare back between Araceli and her brother before nodding herself. Sage wisdom given from an adult.

  They’ll all sit in silence and watch the buzzards. And then Araceli will cook them breakfast, as she’s supposed to. Araceli always asks them her same questions too: “What happened to your parents?”

  “They’re gone,” the older brother will say.

  “Where?”

  “To heaven.”

  “To heaven?”

  “They’re dead,” the little girl will say to settle the manner. The little girl loves saying this. It’s her part. It makes her feel important. It completes their routine. Until the day it doesn’t. This morning. When Araceli decides to walk away.

  She cooks breakfast before the sun comes out, the stars bright in the black sky. She leaves the breakfast on the tiny plates the brother and sister eat from. She listens to the trucks from the autodefensa tearing up the cool, damp road outside. She fills a pink Bonafont tank with cool water she’s boiled the night before from the Rotoplas tank that catches rain. And then she sits outside with the tank in her lap, looks into the wild nothing. Sand, wind, stars. And, of course, the buzzards circling even at night.

  In the distance she can see the light pollution of San Miguel. No road between here and there. Just sand.

  She takes the first step. In her left hand just the rag. In her right hand the five-gallon jug of water. The cold of night spreads across her back, sweat bursting hot from her pores before chilling across her open skin. She swears she can hear the earth groaning underfoot as if it’s about to swallow her whole. She looks up into the night. Concentrates on that velvety blackness, the sky and everything in it her good luck charm. She looks up into the heavens as she disappears, forever walking home.

  SKY BURIAL

  ATÓMICO LICKS JUNE’S FACE one last time before she dies. Of their three bodies, the dog’s body is the healthiest. He’s healed nicely by now. A blue sheen to his black coat, his eyes full of energy, his jowls full of blood. No evidence of the butcher’s knife on him anymore except for a faint line that runs through his coat where his fur cedes to scar tissue. He licks June’s scar as she peers out from behind it, a certain softness to her eyes as she stares at Uli. I know you’re going to do this but you shouldn’t.

  As Uli pivots from her bedside to prepare the heroin, she watches him, her head stock-still, her glassy eyes moving inside her skull with the glowing flame of the candle reflected in the black of her pupils. Uli takes a straw and shoves one end into a tiny glass of ice water. He puts the straw to her flaky chapped lips. He only feels her stale breath cold on his knuckles as he waits for her to sip. She just stares at him with her unblinking eyes, her mouth wide open.

  “I’m trying my best,” he says to her, cooking the heroin in a spoon.

  He puts the glass of ice water down, reaches over her to adjust her pillows. “Does your back hurt?” he asks her. “Which way should I shift you?”

  She cuts him a look that says, Who are you kidding? Be done with it already. Then she looks toward her dog. That is the last thing she wants to see. Not Uli.

  Uli watches her lift her heavy, shaking arm to rest her palm on the crown of Atómico’s head. Her lips move ever so slightly.

  “A drink of water?” he asks her.

  She just moves her lips as if she’s praying, closes her eyes as if she’s sleeping. It’s only once the needle’s in that her eyes roll back, she disappears into the flesh of her mask. The dog keeps licking her until she’s cold. And then he lies beside her, licking at the smell of her breath that still hangs about the air after she’s gone.

  Alma digs her long fingers into his pockets, fishes out the last lottery ticket with June’s name on it. She kisses him on the neck.

  “Is it done?” she asks him

  “I think so,” he says.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “It’s done.”

  “And the groceries?”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “But not tonight,” Alma says. “It’s dangerous tonight.”

  “They’re in my house.”

  “Your house is haunted now,” she says as if warning him. “You stay here.” She unbuckles his pants.

  “Not tonight,” Uli says.

  “You’re not in the mood.”

  “How much money do you think it’ll be?”

  “A lot,” says Alma, reassuring him, kissing him on the neck again to show him he’s done well.

  Uli feels repulsed by the wetness of her lips. “She was going to die anyway,” says Alma.

  “Do we bury her? How do we prove she’s dead?’

  “I’ll make arrangements,” says Alma. “There’s nothing mo
re you can do.”

  That night an army of men—not soldiers—rolls into his neighborhood on a cloud of diesel fumes. They move the boulders out from the road so that the trucks, ten of them in all, can flow through. They go house-to-house, kick in every door as if looking for something or someone.

  Autodefensa? Cartel? Scrappers? Uli wonders. They break in but they take nothing with them. They’re looking for someone, he thinks. If they find June that would be a clean disposal. At least it would look natural, he thinks. He left the shoelace on her bicep. He had the decency to pull the needle from her arm, and he feels good about that.

  Uli watches them from Alma’s kitchen window as they creep toward him, block by block. Hordes of skittish dogs escape from the homes and flood out into the street as the men kick the doors down. The dogs run wild through the complexities of the neighborhood. Packs fight with packs. The men fight with each other as they try to decide, driving through the mass of animals, whether to shoot the dogs or not.

  The matter is finally settled when a shot rings out. On the other end of a silver pistol a boy no older than twelve years old stands in front of a white pickup. His hand is so firm around the handle of the gun that his rosary tattoo dances with the undulations of the muscle beneath his sweaty skin glowing in the headlights. He squeezes the trigger a second time and then a third, but the dogs don’t scatter.

  From Alma’s kitchen, just a half-block away, Uli can see a silhouette of the boy’s face. A pre-teen by the size of his lanky frame, an apple face with dark oval eyes. His bullets ricochet once, twice, a third time against the pavement. No dog that Uli sees falls. Instead, the dogs begin to surround the boy, squeezing around him like a tourniquet of flesh. The boy’s trebly voice rings out before his legs are taken from beneath him, and he’s buried by their hunger. Across the way, even Atómico runs out to join the feast.

  As the boy is torn apart, as the trucks back out of the roads and crash between boulders and curbs and houses as they retreat, Uli catches himself admiring the sight of Atómico’s filed teeth, sharpened to tiny blades, tearing at the boy’s flesh— teeth perfectly suited for dog fighting. He’s proud of the spring in Atómico’s step. Proud of how he’s nursed the animal back to life. Proud, too, that soon his investment will bring him money.