Bang Page 7

  Iván appears in the threshold of the Hotel Luna. He waddles toward the truck with a heavy bucket of water he carries with both arms between his legs. He shouts over the street noise in Spanish, “Step away, lady.”

  Araceli bristles at that—lady. She can tell by the way Iván carries himself, by his soft hands even, that he’s the kind of man that doesn’t know what he’s doing, but she stands back anyway.

  He runs around to the driver’s side door, releases the lever to pop the hood. Flames leap up into the diesel-blackened air. He throws the bucket of water over the flames. There’s a giant explosion at first, a fireball into the sky, and then a darker, jet-black cloud of smoke that escapes from the spot where the carburetor caught fire, so much gasoline leaking out into the street.

  “Line’s busted,” says Iván proudly to Araceli.

  Araceli stands in the threshold of the Hotel Luna door, screening her eyes from the smoke.

  “Easy fix,” he says. “You’re lucky your battery didn’t explode. A lot of heat under that hood. But it’s an easy fix— the carburetor, I mean, which is melted, I mean. You spray some sealant on the line. Take the carburetor out. I could do it for you.”

  Araceli hates the man already. She thinks he’s an idiot.

  She shifts back and forth between her good foot and her bad one. It occurs to her then that she’s back in her mother country, but she doesn’t feel that yet. It’s been years since she’s seen a Mexican flag waving from any kind of building. And now she’s shadowed by one hanging above the entrance to the school across the way. She knows that she should feel something, but she feels resentful more than anything. Resentful she has to be here, resentful of her sons she might never see again. Resentful of her husband and the life he gave her. Resentful that of all people she has to meet, it’s Iván that is the first to welcome her home, although what is home anymore? If she’s honest with herself, she’s never felt home anywhere in her life.

  She feels Iván’s eyes scanning her head to toe. She watches him look at the Texas plates on her truck. She takes a blunt from her pocket and lights it.

  “I can fix it myself, thank you very much,” she says.

  “Mind if I ask where you’re from?” says Iván, desperate for small talk.

  Araceli curses her luck. To be stranded is one thing, but to be stranded with a talker is a whole other thing. “Says right there on the plate,” she says to him, wiping her nose of blood. She feels the spins coming on.

  “But where are you really from?” he asks.

  “Does it matter?” says Araceli, surveying the engine damage herself. She knows he’s wrong about the line. Maybe a small leak but it’s the carburetor that caught fire. She can smell that much, even through the blood in her nose.

  “Lady, you’re bleeding,” Iván says to her.

  Araceli dabs her hand over the spot just under her nose. She wipes away the blood, then puts her wet hand into her dress pocket. A wad of cash in there—everything she’s saved, everything she’s brought with her.

  “You need to lie down,” he says.

  “I know what I need and don’t need,” says Araceli. She feels a fresh wave of nausea take hold of her.

  “Come,” he says, holding out his arm.

  Araceli hesitates before grabbing hold of it.

  “Your truck is fine right there. I own this place. Casa de huéspedes. Used to be a hotel, now it’s a guest house. It’s my house, but I rent out rooms. I can show you the cleanest if you want.”

  “You get a lot of business?”

  “Mostly migrants coming through. They stay with me until they cross,” he says.

  At this Araceli begins to feel a slight pang in the pit of her gut. What have I done?

  She feels the wad of bills in her pocket and calculates how long she can stay at the Hotel Luna. She’s guessing twenty bucks a night (twenty-five maybe) by the looks of the place.

  “Here,” says Iván, taking her bag. “You don’t even have to climb the stairs. It’s on the first floor. Right here. I reserve this one for my lady customers,” he says with a wink. He produces a damp cleaning rag from his back pocket and puts it in her hand. “For the blood,” he says and points to his own nose.

  He places Araceli’s bag just inside the threshold of her room.

  “Can I get you a drink of water, lady?”

  “I’m Araceli,” she says. “Yes.”

  “I’m Iván. Where you driving from?” he asks before heading for a glass water tank just inside the living room.

  “Harlingen,” says Araceli.

  “Not too far from here,” he shouts from the water tank by the counter. “About thirty minutes.”

  “Less,” says Araceli softly.

  “You didn’t get too far did you?” says Iván, nearing Araceli’s room again with her glass of water. He places it in her trembling hand.

  She downs it in three big gulps.

  “Another?” says Iván.

  “Please,” say Araceli.

  Iván is on his heels to the living room again. “Where are you going?”

  “Here,” she says.

  “Well, you made it. Family visit? I don’t like to stay with my own either. Not to pry or anything.”

  “My sons,” she says taking the glass again into her hands. Again she downs it. “They’re here, I think,” she says looking out the window.

  There’s still smoke in the air from the pickup’s engine. That boy with the Nextel phone stands framed in front of Araceli’s window, looking at the license plate on the bumper of her truck. She can’t hear anything, but she makes out the shape of his lips calling in the plate to somebody. She wonders who could possibly be on the other end of that line.

  “How many?”

  “What’s that?” she asks Iván.

  “Sons,” he says pulling up a stool to the doorway.

  Araceli feels suddenly trapped. She’d panic if it weren’t for the rheumy, dumb look in Iván’s eyes to show he’s harmless. A grandfather maybe. He’s about old enough, she thinks.

  “They crashed a plane outside the city,” she says matter-offactly.

  Iván’s face hardens. “A plane?” he says. “A small one?”

  “A Pawnee. If you know what that is.”

  “Look, lady—”

  “Araceli.”

  “Araceli. Sorry, look. I run a really good business here. Family business. And it’s really no business of mine, but if your sons are narcos—”

  “They’re from Texas,” she says to him. “My oldest is an agricultural pilot.”

  “Cropduster?” he says, his face changing again. Less dark, more shock.

  “Yes,” she says, looking into her bag now. Something missing. My medicines, she thinks, downing what’s left of her water. Her thirst is ignited by her diabetes. Fucking medicines.

  “That plane that crashed by the river?”

  “That’s the plane,” says Araceli, putting her glass down on the nightstand by the bed.

  “It’s been in the papers, if you haven’t seen,” says Iván. “I’ve got a few of them here in the living room.”

  “Did they find bodies?”

  “Said one was at the hospital,” says Iván.

  “Do you know where that’s at?” says Araceli excitedly.

  “Not too far from here,” he says. He goes to the counter and gathers up his papers for Araceli to see.

  That night, Araceli makes the short walk to the hospital on foot. It’s only four blocks, but it might as well be four miles. She hobbles along the pavement, her feet swollen in her shoes, the arch of her bad foot smarting with too much pressure on the small toes.

  As she moves, Araceli thinks about how she belongs to this place but it doesn’t own her. She owns nothing in it except for her husband and her sons and that house they’d abandoned in San Miguel. Though, if she’s honest with herself, she sometimes wonders if she ever owned her husband at all. As she walks she sees his eyes, his mannerisms, his slouchy gait in everyone that m
oves past her. She sees Cuauhtémoc too. She sees Uli.

  A block goes by, and then a second one, and then a third one and all she can see is her husband looking back at her— smiling eyes, sad eyes, eyes that haven’t slept, eyes too sick to see. And it’s as if her family has been broken into a million different people, two million pairs of eyes. That’s what Araceli thinks it will take to find them again: two million pairs of eyes.

  Well, I’ve only got two, she thinks. Which is some small chance out of two million but it’s all the chance she needs about now—enough to keep moving. She’ll start with the hospital.

  Araceli is both relieved and horrified to find that Uli has been cared for in a public hospital, where the staph infections almost always outdo the free medical care. Araceli has been in these hospitals herself too many times than she cares to remember. She’s got the scars to prove it—Chikungunya shots, measles shots, rabies shots. The hospital, being a government facility, is like all the other public hospitals across Mexico. A two-story building painted white with rectangular windows that makes it look more like a Catholic school than a hospital.

  There are sets of green, double doors on each end of the building. Araceli knows the left door is for the medical personnel and staff. The right door is for everyone else. She walks into the right door.

  She’s immediately blasted with the tang of urine. She covers her nose and instinctively moves to the left where there’s a triage nurse waiting beside a burnt-out EKG machine still plugged into the wall, spitting out what sounds like Morse code.

  Araceli takes in the nurse—a fifteen-year-old girl—behind the desk, possibly the only link between Uli and herself. The nurse is texting someone on her phone.

  Araceli stands there for a long time catching her breath, but the nurse does not look up. Araceli coughs to make her presence known. “I have a question,” says Araceli politely.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” says the nurse back to her, that piece of shit canned answer rolling off her tongue with a syrupy confidence only attained through daily practice.

  Araceli resents this most about her countrymen and women. This shell they’ve built around themselves. It’s exhausting to penetrate.

  Araceli begins her journey with a simple declaration: “My son is here.”

  “And who did you hear that from?” says the nurse, looking up from her screen now.

  “The news,” says Araceli. “My sons crashed a plane from Texas. Landed here. I was told one of them was at this hospital.”

  At this the nurse puts down her phone. Without moving a muscle in her face, something shifts in her eyes.

  “You’re his mother?” the nurse asks.

  “Is he here?” asks Araceli, conscious of not answering the question. She knows the policing of her country. She knows that this will become a long nightmare if she doesn’t undo the mistake that’s already been made.

  “He was here,” says the nurse, picking up a landline phone.

  “What do you mean, he was here? Who is he?”

  “Are you his mother?” the nurse asks again, more firmly this time.

  “We couldn’t be talking about the same person,” says Araceli, trying to backpedal now.

  “Your son was here,” says the nurse, trying to appeal to Araceli’s motherhood.

  Araceli hates the woman for trying to confirm, trying to put into words what has yet to come out of Araceli’s mouth.

  “We had him. There were police everywhere. He escaped in the middle of the night. Slid out the window. Why do you think he would run?” the nurse asks her. “Who do you think is after him?”

  “Goodbye,” says Araceli.

  “There are some police that want to talk to you,” the nurse says, her tone formal now, full of distance.

  Araceli can feel them behind her before they can even announce themselves. Jackals in the wings hungry for the only scrap of knowledge they can hope for now: not where her sons are, but where they will be.

  EL ATÓMICO

  THE ONLY THING ULI KEEPS from his old life is the birthday money inside his tracksuit: 80 bucks which he converts to a little over 1,000 pesos at a Santander bank at the world’s shittiest conversion rate. The first thing he buys is a pair of knock-off Nike’s from the market on Avenida del Niño. After that, a pair of Levi’s 514s and a San Antonio Spurs shirt that fits too tight around the collar and too loose around the arms. He pockets what’s left of his cash and wanders the aisles of the market searching for a meal, his body craving something oily, briny, filled with heat.

  He wanders past the men’s clothes, past the used Xbox 360 videogame dealers, past the fat man with a muscly arm scraping a giant block of ice with an aluminum scoop to make raspados, past the cricket salesmen, past the flimsy baby clothes filtering sun through their cheap fabric, past the raicilla liquor dealers bottling their product in empty plastic Coke bottles, past the glass cases full of gelatina, until he finds himself in the middle of the comida corrida puestos, where clay pots boil under open butane flames and comales hiss their blue smoke up into the air, everything grey and rustic and reeking of charcoal and sweet diesel. He stands there in the center of it all, temporarily stunned by the choices in front of him. The wad of cash burns in his pocket.

  He saunters off toward the smokiest stand, the one crowded by a group of men, young and old alike, jockeying for plastic stools to park up at the white bar that’s littered with red and green salsas, salt shakers shaped like tomatoes, tin bowls of toodry limes, used napkins balled up and rolling around in the wind and greasy plates.

  At the far side of the taco stand, there’s a vat of boiling grease filled with longaniza and suadero. Next to that, a steam tray with organ meats: cow’s tongue, cow intestines, graying eyeballs, hacked ox-tail—all of it covered with saran wrap.

  The man in charge is, of course, the man with the biggest knife. He hacks and scrapes meat over a wooden tree stump impregnated with hot fat and moist wood shavings that roll around in the grease so that the stump looks furry where the knife has scraped. The taquero collects money, gives change, hacks meat and takes orders all at the same time in rapid-fire fashion.

  When the taquero’s gaze falls on Uli, he shouts, “Güero, güero, ¿qué quieres, güero? What do you want?”

  “Three campechanos,” says Uli.

  “Just three?”

  “And a Coke,” says Uli.

  “More like it,” he says with a smile.

  Uli smiles back, almost cries because that’s the first smile he’s seen in days. How long has he been here? He can’t say.

  He watches the taquero slice his blade into the vat of meat with a shallow angle to pull up a sliver of popping grease, which he promptly throws down onto the edges of a pile of corn tortillas to keep them from burning on the comal. With the same angle and speed, the taquero pulls out a link of longaniza and a hunk of suadero meat at the same time, slicing the link open with an elegant drag of the blade before placing both meats under the heel of his knife and moving, with rapid efficiency, back and forth over the furry stump to mix them together.

  Uli stares into the glistening blade under the taco stand’s one incandescent bulb. His eyes move from that blade to the taquero and then to everyone around him, working their jaws over the food. Everybody stares straight ahead, avoiding each other’s eyes. Uli wonders how many of these men belong here in Matamoros and how many are just passing through. How many of them are going to Texas tomorrow? How many are going much further than that?

  It’s then that the weight of it all sinks in for Uli. He might never go back to Texas. He knows, however, where to go if he has a shot at getting back: northwest, toward San Miguel, where his father built a house with horse-racing money. Where he was born, where Cuauhtémoc was born, where everyone will end up eventually (he hopes), on the only patch of land his family owns in this world.

  As he walks off into the night, the world is both fast and slow like a dream. He feels the burn of money in his pocket. He decides that tomorrow he’ll
buy that bus ticket to San Miguel, to the northeastern part of Chihuahua, to the desert, to where he comes from, to where his blood belongs (if that’s even true anymore).

  In the parking lot of the bus station there’s a man crying inside a gun metal Mercedes C-class coupe. Uli looks at the car, then at the man behind the windshield. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to afford luxury sadness. Maybe, he thinks. Though he’d buy a Land Rover instead. That way he could have an all-terrain cry instead of a parking-lot cry, which seems less dignified somehow.

  The man wails so loud that he’s audible through the rolled-up windows, his face warped into a bandy patchwork of wrinkles. Everyone observes him as they file into the Estrella Roja station to buy their tickets to the only bus left going to Chihuahua.

  Uli buys his ticket and boards the bus, a Coke and a bag of chips in his hand as he walks up the steps. He sits in the very back row, closes his eyes and presses the cool Coke to his forehead. By the time he opens his eyes, the crying man is onboard too. He holds a clipboard in his hand as he goes up and down the rows talking to the passengers, ticking off names from a list, his little frame swimming inside his oversized uniform—a green and yellow patch on his arm, a white nametag on his shirt. When he gets to Uli, he’s all manic smiles and alcohol. His eyes are too sad to look at. Uli stares into his teeth instead. They need work.

  “Which city are you headed to?”

  “San Miguel,” says Uli. “Are you the driver?”

  “I am,” says the man.

  Uli closes his eyes and waits to be there already. He’s weary but like all teenaged boys he feels invincible. Having survived the plane crash only confirms his hunch that he can never really die. Death happens to other people but not to him, not to Cuauhtémoc either. In his boy’s heart he knows that everyone is still alive because they have to be.

  He half-sleeps the entire way, his head pressed up against the rattling window pane, and tries to remember the San Miguel of his boyhood. He remembers his father’s Fender reverb amp, his father’s record collection, his home with the L-shaped floor plan. He remembers his best friend, Ernesto, who lived next door. He remembers the street named Ocotepec that stretched on and on forever, all those houses and their gleaming glass in the desert. It was the perfect life. He wonders, sometimes, why they ever left it at all.