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  She takes out the little square of satin from her side satchel and rubs it with her hand the way the sheriff is rubbing the crown of the dog’s head.

  The sheriff breaks his gaze, looks down. He asks her, “What’s that?”

  “Satin,” she says in English, reaching over the table for the puppy. The sheriff takes the puppy from his lap and hands it over to Araceli who places it in her lap. She takes a safety pin from her dress and pushes the sharp end through the middle of the cloth before pushing it once more through the fabric of the puppy’s collar so that the square hangs off the puppy like another one of his tags.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  Araceli knows that to tell the truth to the sheriff would make her seem foolish, simple. She’s superstitious. So what? Everyone knows you use dogs to find people. They find everyone eventually.

  Outside of her home, Araceli says to the sheriff, “It’s just satin,” without explaining anything further. She puts the puppy’s feet in the dirt and lets it wander out into the groves. She feels the intense stare of the sheriff’s eyes on the nape of her neck. She knows he’s wondering, What crazy woman is this? Which is how she knows she’s alone in her search. She knows, already, that she’s going back to Mexico. She’s going to find her family. She already knows where they are.

  That night, Araceli hobbles down from her trailer to the truck parked next to it. She hops into the cabin to release the creaky pull-lever that sets the hood groaning, the rusted spring-loaded hinges pushing against the pull of the hood clasp just behind the grill. At the sound, she feels a pang of anger well up in her chest at the thought of having to explain all of this to Sampson. Of course, the plane would be their first concern. Her family would come second. But this is not going to happen, she thinks. I’ll be gone long before that.

  At this, her disparate angers and fears and hopes fuse into a single knot in her throat as she looks into the smoke-blackened engine compartment, that chemical smell—either from the truck or the trees—wafting up into the air again. She knows she’ll have to work fast. She’s resigned to it: she’ll work through the night.

  The skies are dark. There’s a purple tint to the air. A flock of the tiniest birds she’s ever seen glide in the shape of the wind. They blot out the moonlight.

  From the hangar, Araceli borrows a funnel, a can of belt dressing, a gallon of distilled water, a bottle of DOT 5 brake fluid, a bottle of steering fluid, a bottle of 5W-20 engine oil and something called Magical Mystery Oil which says on the red bottle that it can fix anything. Araceli carries it all to the rusty Ford Lobo in a plastic grocery bag, except for the bottle of Magic Mystery Oil which she carries in her arm like a baby, like something precious that can’t be trusted to the inferior carrying capabilities of plastic.

  She places it all, including the mystery oil, on the ground just under the driver’s side fender.

  Araceli takes the key, hidden under the driver’s side mat, and sticks it in the ignition. She kicks the emergency brake pedal on the floor before trying to turn the engine over. She gives it a little gas. Just a series of clicks. Nothing. Araceli hops from the truck and rounds the fender.

  In front of Araceli, just a mangled mess of rust and dust, the complexities of the engine compartment like the map of a foreign land she barely remembers.

  She’s worked on engines before—when she was younger and her slender fingers made her an asset to her father’s farm— but her memory is hazy. She stopped working on cars the day she didn’t have to anymore, which is to say the day she married Eugenio, although he barely knew his elbow from his asshole, let alone a wrench from a socket.

  Araceli never let on that she knew how to fix his mistakes. Partly to shield his own fragile male ego, but also because she held out hope, however slim, that he might throw in the towel and buy them a new truck someday.

  She looks at the engine and tries to remember everything she learned from girlhood, tries to remember how to unfuck up her husband’s handiwork.

  Araceli starts with the radiator right in front of her. She takes off the service cap and pours in half the gallon of distilled water. She takes the funnel and pours the quart of oil into the engine next. She takes the same funnel and moves to the separate compartments of cylindrical steering fluid and brake fluid. She unscrews the bottle of Magical Mystery Oil with the hem of her dress and throws the cap to the ground. With the fabric, she stops up the mouth of the bottle, turning it upside down to soak into the fabric. She smells the oil—synthetic like gasoline but also fragrant like laundry detergent. She pauses for a second, a kind of reverence she gives the moment, before taking the hem and cleaning the spark plugs under the disconnected leads of the distributor. She lets the oil dissolve the carbon deposits one by one, taking her time until the plugs shine like silver in the morning light. She blows on the leads, connects them. She pulls them away, douses them with Magical Mystery Oil before reconnecting them again. She lets the bottle sit at the corner of the engine compartment and, with belt dressing in hand, she observes her handiwork. She rounds the fender again, cranks the ignition.

  The engine turns once, twice before it catches and purrs to life, the dried, stiff fan belt letting out a high squeal as it flaps along in its serpentine pattern. Araceli hops out of the truck to spray it with the belt dressing until the noise dies away.

  She pulls the bottle of Magical Mystery oil from the engine compartment and kisses it. She takes it and splashes a healthy sluice over the vibrating engine that’s moving so fast it’s all a blur. Araceli watches the red beads of oil hit the engine before rippling into a splash with the vibration, exploding outwards into a fine mist that colors the air an aspirated shade of pink. The air in front of her turns iridescent. She loves the chemical smell. She splashes the oil over the engine again and again like a priest splashing holy water over a congregation. The pistons sing. Proof, Araceli thinks, that anything can be brought back from the dead. Even her sons, her husband, her entire world if she’s patient enough.

  On slow mornings like this—most mornings are slow these days—Iván sometimes stands in front of the vanity and wonders if he isn’t the only thing that’s aged in Hotel Luna. He stands in front of the mirror this morning and checks for any new gray hairs, any new wrinkles that have appeared overnight. He’s only 60 but he thinks he might look a decade older. His photographer’s hunch has made him a full inch shorter than his former 5’5’’ frame. He’s narrow in the shoulders. He has a little belly. He wears square bifocals whose temples have broken off long ago and have since been replaced with green twine that he’s attached at the hinges and looped behind his ear to keep them on. Though he doesn’t know it, his clothes belong to that time-capsule as well. He wears the same green sweater that he bought with his first check as a photographer for a magazine called Extremo in the mid-eighties. The brown buttons on his beige shirt and brown pants have either chipped or fallen away. He makes up for that slouchy, sloppy way his clothes hang on him by ironing the creases of his pants and shirt to death. Everything about him suggests he’s clean but washed out, completely dried up in every way.

  He sits down behind the faux marble counter of the hotel to read the day’s news. But as soon as he does, Iván glances up from his paper and stares at the plague of grackles perched along the streetlamps and powerlines and frayed banner string that cut up the sky of Matamoros. He hates those birds for the noise they make, but he hates them more for being untethered. He lays his paper down and gets up off his own perch behind the counter in his five-bedroom hotel and steps outside to feel the heat rising up from the pavement into the soles of his cheap Tres Hermanos brand sneakers. He throws his hands together into a single palmy clap, the sound of which ricochets from the concrete squat single-stories across the street and trebles out with a long, electric waaaaang that sets the birds up from their perch, all of them in unison. They take off into the sky like a long, black cloud overhead. Just the flapping of their wings. And then that sound that Iván so much longs for
—silence, if only for a little while.

  He soaks in the quiet the way he does every morning. He closes his tired eyes and exhales and then, as if resigned to his own fate, he walks back into Hotel Luna—that hotel which he never wanted in the first place, which he inherited from his mother immediately following her death ten years ago and holds him every day like a rat in a cage.

  To Iván, everything around him is a time capsule of when his mother was still alive: the counter; the too-large, mahogany vanity that takes up the short wall perpendicular to the counter that gives the tiny foyer the optical illusion of being bigger than it really is; the pale, green doors that seal off each bedroom; the digital cash register from the 80s that just won’t die; the brass hooks screwed into the wall behind the counter with four-sided Enfield keys hanging from each one except the last one, which has Iván’s old plastic Diana camera hanging from a leather strap.

  He’d stopped shooting right after his mother died but made it a point to keep that camera around, if only to remind him of who he is or, rather, who he was at one time in his life: a photographer with a beat and a budget and a plastic lens which distorted everything but through which he saw the world that his mother tried her entire life to keep him from.

  As a boy, Iván had spent three quarters of his childhood behind that faux marble counter. His mother had her various reasons.

  At first it was sun-exposure (too much of it). And as he grew into a teenager, it was the gang violence she saw on TV. And as he grew older still, it was the general violence of Matamoros, which could be escaped but couldn’t be denied—the images were on every newsstand around their hotel. And it was in this way—when Iván went to buy a Coke for his mother, say, or when (often) he’d sneak out to buy a Playboy for himself— he also came to know these images, love them even, because along with the violence came stories and details about the world around him.

  He’d buy one copy of every crime magazine he could get his hands on. His favorite, by far, was Extremo. He loved it not because the stories were particularly good or the violence more or less graphic than in any other magazine, but because each issue came with a sensuous centerfold that he’d quickly rip from the stapling, fold into an impossibly tiny square, and stick behind his driver’s license in his wallet. Instead of buying Extremo and Playboy, he could get two for one. There was a new woman every week to masturbate to in his room above the hotel, hating himself for finding any pleasure at all in the women that had been chosen for him by some crusty editor whose taste was 70s Americana. Aqua Net hair spray, Lycra everything, bad eyeshadow that came in all colors of pastels.

  It was during one of Iván’s typical mid-morning masturbation sessions that the reality of his situation dawned on him. He was in his early 30s, unmarried, childless, careerless and still under his mother’s thumb. Something had to change.

  It was in that desperate moment, with his pants around his ankles and this faux french maid with blue eyeshadow looking up at him from the glossy page, that he flipped over the image and found, to his great surprise, a classified ad on the back. Extremo was in need of a photographer. And Iván decided, then and there, that he would be their man. Never mind the fact that he’d never owned a camera. Never mind the fact that he’d rarely left his block. Never mind that he would finally, probably, have to meet the man who chose these centerfolds and shake his crusty little hand. He was going to do it. And so that day he borrowed the teal Diana from his cousin, Erica, she’d won it at a carnival in Dallas and accidentally kept it in nearly pristine condition due to the fact that it was the worst camera she’d ever owned and had thrown it in a shoebox under her bed and forgotten about it until the day Iván called and didn’t so much ask to borrow it as demand it from her.

  She warned him in advance. Everything about the Diana was plastic. The casing around the camera was made from two molds that clicked together and so it suffered light leaks that would expose the film. The plastic lens distorted everything in front of it, and even when you got the right angle, the edges of the photograph would blur. She told him that he would waste more film than any money he could possibly earn, but this was assuaged by the simple fact that the Diana Erica handed over came with three rolls of 35mm film previously unused, along with a black, narrow strap that seemed to hug Iván’s shoulder as if it were custom made.

  Because the Diana was a horrible camera, no amount of skill could enhance the outcome of any one photograph. But for Iván, the entire exercise came as natural to him as if he were a seasoned photographer. At the very least, the result was the same: plastic, dream-like photographs whose blurry edges gave the impression that each subject wasn’t already dead but in the process of dying. While other photographers’ cameras professionally snapped and whirred alongside him at any given scene, a simple plastic click sounded from Iván’s camera. Often, it would happen that the flash of another camera or the intensity of the street light above or the headlights of a passing car would leak into the casing, exposing the film inside. Streaks of orange would cloud the photograph, occasionally appearing just above the body. These were the ones Extremo loved the most. They always wrote about how their photographer could capture souls right as they were departing the body, that orange haze (always consistently there) proof enough. And it was in this way that Iván made a name for himself in crime reporting, his photography always maintaining that impressionist quality that became the style of his era.

  He was fearless—or stupid as some in the industry said—in that he was willing to photograph any corpse in any part of the city at any time of the night. No questions asked. Such was his loyalty to Extremo for ripping him from the Hotel Luna that had imprisoned him for the better part of his life. He never made much money, but it was enough for him to live on as long as he had the free room above the Hotel Luna, where he slept only when he had to.

  To this day, he does not know which published photograph set someone off on the dark path of revenge. He does know, however, which one ended his career. Truth be told, he’d never thought of photographing murder as particularly humiliating to the corpse or to the corpse’s living family, for that matter. He only saw those murders for what they were: murders and nothing more, nothing less. In his heart, he knew there was no art to what he was doing. No redeeming quality or skill to those photographs. Just reporting. Just a cheap camera. Just a way to get out of the Hotel Luna.

  It should have come as no surprise, after having worked in the industry for more than ten years that eventually the gore would find its way to the other side of his lens and grip him as it had so many other photojournalists in Matamoros.

  He remembers that it was his mother’s body that ruined his career. He remembers the smell more than anything. That familiar iron rot that permeated so many murder scenes he’d photographed before. That dampness tinged with the sweet smell of his mother’s perfume, like lilacs in the air. That same smell by his bedside of so many nights of his childhood. That same sweet lilac that was always thickest behind his mother’s perch behind the faux marble counter of Hotel Luna. He put his camera down that night and crawled into the bed beside her, 70 open knife wounds in her flesh, and put his opened palm over every single one as if to try to stop the blood that was already congealing on her skin. He whispered something to her that he no longer remembers. If anything, he remembers heat of camera flashes on his skin once his colleagues arrived. The slick of the blood on the side of his face.

  From inside Hotel Luna, Iván watches a hawk boy no older than ten—the street eyes of the Zeta cartel or the Gulf cartel or the Juárez cartel, he can’t tell which one anymore—snap pictures of something with a cheap HTC One phone camera. Iván knows the boy well or, rather, he’s seen the boy countless times over the last few years. He’s seen the boy age day by day, seen him go about his morning routine: photograph the street, then photograph the cars on the street, then photograph the license plates of the cars parked on the street, then photograph anything worth seeing on that given day—a busted water pipe, a
traffic accident, a fist-fight in the Soriana grocery parking lot three blocks down, limes rolling everywhere—and uploads it all to the cloud for someone to see.

  Araceli doesn’t know it yet when she returns to Mexico looking for her sons, but everyone on that side of the border wants a piece of what they did. It’s in every paper on both sides of the border. Depending on which newspaper editor has which gun pointed to his head, every paper writes a different version of the same story. Some papers say it was the Zetas who shot down a Sinaloa cartel aircraft. Other papers say it was the Juárez cartel reviving their trade routes with rookie pilots. The Mexican government claims to own the official, historical truth about what happened, which is that their military shot down an unnamed cartel’s plane about to enter American airspace—let it be a warning to those that might try to undermine the Mexican state.

  Nearly every article concludes by saying that one pilot is at large and the other is at a Matamoros area hospital, under surveillance of the Mexican authorities. In one newspaper, there’s a grainy border surveillance photograph of Cuauhtémoc scrambling from the aircraft just after it crashed. In another newspaper, there’s a picture of the wreckage. As Mexican news goes, everyone believes what they need to hear. And because of this, everyone in Mexico seems to be looking for Araceli’s sons too. Their mother knows none of this because she’s kept the pickup’s radio off to save the battery.

  Araceli gets to north Matamoros when a plume of smoke breaks from under the edges of the rusted pickup hood. The smell of gasoline pours in from the A/C vents as she skids along the curb toward the Hotel Luna.

  Across the street, an elementary school. So many faces pressed to the window looking down on her. At the corner, another boy with a Nextel phone snapping pictures.

  Araceli hops from the pickup, coughing up smoke. A trickle of blood streams from her nose. She wipes it away, hobbles toward the pickup bed on her bad foot. She reaches over and pulls out her little duffel bag filled with clothes.