He looked at his cut middle finger from the night before. It seemed to be healing well, along with the one on his cheek from a couple of days prior.
Bellacosa heard Paco Herbert whistle a birdcall. He walked toward him on the opposite side of the road, a little past the dead end and steel rail, and as he got closer saw there was a huge vertical drop in the land, as long as a football field. Anybody walking here in the dark would just fall to their death, no question. Along the edge of the drop was cement about a meter and a half in width that ran down both horizons, east and west, like a sidewalk for daredevils. They looked down on a whole valley of dead trees like wooden soldiers covered in snow, and the unaffected Rio Grande was down there, too, running with ease all the way from the Rockies in Colorado toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Paco Herbert said, “You know what we’re standing on?”
“The wall.”
“That’s right, we’re standing on the border wall. Isn’t that crazy? They don’t even have a fence up along its edge or anything here. There could be an accident, a person can fall in and die. But check it out. See all the way over there? Look, way past that little wooded area, past the Rio Grande. It’s the first border wall. We’re standing on the second one. That’s fucking hilarious. So if you’re trying to cross from Mexico, the land drops over there, too. See, instead of building a wall that goes upward here, they dug into the ground, and created this cheap walled-in valley where the river is. It’s only along the international bridge that the two walls almost touch. Even if you climb down the first border wall successfully over there, and cross the river, how are you gonna make it up this second border wall? It’s a ninety-degree climb, straight up. Not even if you were half-cat could you do it. And if you’re a person with a gun standing here, and see somebody trying to cross in this little valley between the two border walls, you can pick them off, like the immigrant is a plastic duck at a carnival game. It’s not at all against the law. Even if you’re not a Border Protector. Any American citizen could do it. A colleague of mine wrote a report, how Arizona gives tax breaks for people killing immigrants trying to come here. Whole families camp out on the edge of the second border wall to shoot the immigrant people. Because this river only runs through Texas, everywhere else there’s just open space between the two walls. I saw pictures of kids with their parents posing in front of dead bodies from far away, with everybody smiling and everything, like it’s a vacation for them. Like they’re standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or something.”
Bellacosa started to walk back as the old man was exiting the hut, surveying the land, and feeling the snow melting into gray mud under his feet. He smiled and clapped his hands as he looked toward the fat-faced sun. “Go on inside,” the old man said. “I’m going to check on my little bonsai trees.”
Rosita paid them no mind as they entered. She was collecting all the twigs and herbs from Oswaldo’s body, and picked the ones between his toes as well. The urn beside his head had been brought to room temperature. Rosita pulled leaves off every branch, threw them into the quieting embers of the fire. There were two leaves floating in the dark, reflecting liquid of the urn. She picked the brown leaf and placed it over Oswaldo’s right eye, then the green one over his left. Oswaldo’s complexion had changed to a healthier, tanned brown overnight. His tufts of hair were a little thicker, but equally frazzled, and his ribs were protruding noticeably less.
Rosita signaled for Paco Herbert and Bellacosa to stand away. The old man waddled back into the hut, anticipating instructions from Rosita. He knelt above Oswaldo’s head and with one hand held open his mouth, with the other the top of his head. Rosita handed the urn to Bellacosa, like it was a chalice with the blood of the Lord, and she bowed to him.
“Pour it carefully into his mouth,” the old man said. “Very carefully. Fast, but don’t let it spill over him or us.”
This seemed cruel to Bellacosa, felt like he’d be drowning him. He didn’t want to do it. Paco Herbert watched, looking very beat-up, unshaven, with dark circles around his eyes and unbrushed teeth. Bellacosa looked deeply into the old woman’s eyes of black pearl—they were carved very small and didn’t have any whites. The old man was getting impatient with his visitors. Bellacosa got down on one knee, and as the old man tilted Oswaldo’s head back and held his jaw open, he poured in the dark ruby liquid. Immediately, Oswaldo’s body started to shake, his limbs flopped around like trouts on a dry deck, and with a sudden motion he punched Bellacosa, whose body flung backward. The empty urn hit the floor.
The old man let go of Oswaldo and quickly took cover. Everybody gave Oswaldo space as he retched, and a sound gurgled out of his throat like a thousand ravens flapping their wings; like magma shifting inside him, and, with the utmost grace, like a swan flying away from a still lagoon, a dark green worm about two inches thick ejected from Oswaldo’s mouth, and quickly crawled out the open door. Bellacosa and Paco Herbert would later have different accounts of its length but ultimately agreed on a minimum of twelve feet.
Bellacosa had been knocked to the ground by Oswaldo’s punch, and the worm crawled within reach of him. It was shiny and left a wet trail on the concrete floor like a trickling garden hose had been dragged out. Oswaldo’s trembling winded down, and the old man cried, “Give him his space a few minutes. Sometimes there can be more of those things.”
Bellacosa got on his feet. The whole right side of his face was throbbing and the cut on his cheek split open. Oswaldo was absolutely still now. The azure morning sunlight shone in, slithered around the walls and over Oswaldo’s body. Paco Herbert, motioning to a part of his own face, told Bellacosa, “You’re bleeding.”
Oswaldo suddenly sat up on the pallet, like an electric marionette that’d been turned on. He looked around the room like an angry soldier, then made intense eye contact with Bellacosa, as if intending to fight him. With unsteady feet, he got up. Bellacosa was quiet, and slightly shocked that his brother was standing on his own. He could see inside Oswaldo’s mouth through the punctures from the huarango thorns when they came face-to-face. For the first time, Bellacosa recognized Oswaldo in that mean stare of his. His brother’s brown eyes were his own, and in them he could see his grandfather taking them to see their first river when they were boys; he saw their mother cooking them dinner, and in her pain humming a slow, mournful melody, preparing a separate dish for Oswaldo, who rarely ate meat; he saw his own pain and the pain of their entire lineage, and from those very eyes he was prepared to accept whatever judgment came. Oswaldo reached into the breast pocket of Bellacosa’s jacket. He pulled out the Herzegovina Flor cigarettes, and pinched out the lighter and a cigarette from inside the pack. Oswaldo lit the cigarette and inhaled not like a smoker, but like somebody imitating a smoker.
“Hermano mio,” Oswaldo said, in a spasm of deep emotion. He dropped the cigarette, then collapsed on the floor, the smoke never having exhaled from his lungs.
Bellacosa got on his knees, ran his hands along Oswaldo’s head, face, and felt the cosmic fabric of all their lost people. Oswaldo was dead. The old man urged them to sit back down while he and Rosita wrapped him in a shroud colored a deep violet. The blood on Bellacosa’s face dried.
Rosita set Oswaldo in the position of the dead, with his arms crossed, chin up, and ankles locked together. Bellacosa and Paco Herbert carried out Oswaldo, wrapped in the shroud, on the pallet bed: Paco Herbert noticed it must have been made especially for him; the pallet was exactly the length of Oswaldo’s body, and they’d even made it so two people could easily lift it.
A pile of potato-sized stones stood by a row of skeleton pecan trees. Rosita signaled them to lower his body. The old man had found a walking stick for himself and tapped it seven times on the hard, frozen ground. Bellacosa felt foolish in thinking they’d have to dig a hole. The air was biting cold and the sun was elastic, the sky wearing the bashful blues.
Rosita was the first to start piling the stones around Oswaldo’s body, then on top of it, and between the four of t
hem they had him covered in less than ten minutes. Everyone looked to Bellacosa, as if waiting for a eulogy, but to Bellacosa everything that’d happened had been eulogy enough. He didn’t have anything else to add.
People are always saying nothing ever happens until it happens, he thought. But for me, things have always been happening, from the very beginning. Every week there’s a new tragedy to answer to, a new miracle to be grateful for. I’ll never understand people who get bored, who claim nothing ever happens to them. Which one of us is doing things wrong?
When enough silence had gone by, Rosita pulled out a small medicine pouch. She filled one of her fists with cadmium-colored dust, like powdered sky, and threw it over the stones and Oswaldo’s shrouded body. The stones crackled as if they’d suddenly turned hot, and a silver smoke started to rise from them like burning sage. Oswaldo’s body beneath the rocks caught fire, like it was laced with fuel. The violet shroud turned dark green, then gray as it was eaten up by the flames. A voice in Bellacosa’s head said, Hermano, this is what it comes down to. We grew so apart only to have life bring us together in this way. How many times have we been brothers, my brother? They haven’t been enough. We’ll be brothers again someday.
* * *
AFTER TWO TOWNS’ WORTH of silence on the sunny drive back, Bellacosa had a strange memory and said to Paco Herbert, “When we were boys, me and Oswaldo, they grew nothing but oranges on the other side of the border. Here in the U.S., I mean, and back then obviously we had no Border Protectors. It was much easier to cross back and forth, and around the time it started to get into the cold season, our mamá would send me and Oswaldo to pick oranges. It would take us all day, and we’d have to get up early, hitch a ride with the old drunk that drove the carretón, picking up trash, who went all the way to the river. Sometimes if we helped him and he wasn’t too hungover he wouldn’t charge us anything for a ride. We had this method of crossing through an irrigation pipe that ran across the thinnest part of the Rio Grande, by Madero and Anzaldua Park. We each carried two plastic bags, these tough ones that wouldn’t tear that we’d get from Doña Teresita at el mercado. Well, I don’t know why, maybe it’s just a small memory of being a boy, but me and Oswaldo had a game. That the only grapefruits we could pick had to have a blue spot. You understand what I mean now? If you’re ever around a grapefruit tree, there’s a stage right when they’re getting perfectly ripe. In that process nature’s painting them from green, to red, to orange. All those colors of jungle and fire—that’s what we called green and red-orange. In that process, all these changes are happening to each fruit, and there’s always a spot that doesn’t exist very long in the rind that is perfectly blue. Like the way the sky is right now. Oranges do this, too.”
Bellacosa pictured himself crossing the irrigation pipe not as a boy, but as the grown man he was, carrying the fruit and looking down into the Rio Grande. “We would both fill our bags up with oranges and run back before nightfall to Mamá,” he continued. “She’d sell them to the fruit stand vendor, or they’d give her credit. We did this maybe seven or eight times growing up, and I remember now that’s how we always thought about it. That we were bringing back pieces of fire and jungle and sky to our sweet mother.”
EIGHTEEN
After sleeping for many hours on the living room floor, Paco Herbert awoke to a telephone call. Thinking it to be his editor, Paco Herbert prepared for a confrontation and answered using a cheerful tone.
“Are you Herbert? The cat that writes trafficking for La Jornada?”
It was a male voice he didn’t recognize. Rather than correcting him, Paco Herbert said, “I write trafficking sometimes, yes.”
The voice said he had interesting music he’d like to sell him, and asked if he’d like to perhaps meet.
Paco Herbert said, “Music?” into the receiver and the voice replied, “Yes, music. Rare records. Seventy-eights.” Paco Herbert caught on that it was some code phrase. After agreeing, he very mechanically and deliriously jotted down the name of a rendezvous point.
Though Paco Herbert was suspicious, the voice suggested to meet at a public place named Up-Up & Away, the bar with slot machines by the airport, at 7:15 p.m. When he got there Paco Herbert found a disheveled man around his age dressed like he was going on safari, with a pleasant, nonthreatening smile. Unlike the other patrons, he seemed happy to be in MacArthur, Texas, was eloquent and polite, had even taken his hat off. Paco Herbert ordered two milk stouts, and after chatting about their backgrounds and sleeping patterns, the man got very serious.
He complimented Paco’s choice of beer, took a long gulp, then said, “I’m a big fan, Mr. Herbert, and very grateful you could meet me here. I would like to share something with you, if you don’t mind going on a little drive.”
Paco Herbert agreed, and before leaving he finished his beer and went to the restroom, where he took the last orange pill from the tin in his pocket. Only now, it seemed, did he hear the man’s name from the introduction moments ago: Angelo.
As they drove away in a Lobo pickup truck, Paco Herbert said to the man behind the wheel, “You’re an officer for the Border Protectors. It was you who found Oswaldo Bellacosa, by the edge of the river.”
Angelo nodded, confessed he’d personally tailed Paco Herbert the night he picked Oswaldo up outside Bellacosa’s shack, and even looked up the number of his sublet apartment and personal information. Somehow Paco Herbert felt relieved by this, and he recounted to Angelo what happened in Oswaldo’s final moments with Rosita del Escalon, at times with disbelief.
Paco Herbert realized he left behind his blue notebook at the bar. He couldn’t believe it, felt unprofessional and displaced without it.
The Lobo truck pierced through the darkness into Willacy County, the part of South Texas with the lowest light pollution. Paco Herbert felt inwardly exasperated from all the driving and spending so much time inside an automobile—point A always being so far from point B. He wondered how they did it in the past, how anybody could have survived all that horseback riding before the advent of the engine. All the battles fought in Texas seemed appropriate, and made a lot of sense now to Paco Herbert. He wiped sweat from the back of his neck and said to himself, This is the blood South Texas makes you sweat, and he wished he had his notebook once again.
They were on an unpaved road surrounded by tall brush, with the headlights gutting open the belly of the night. Against the twilight Paco Herbert saw they were approaching a large rectangular structure, and the Lobo truck stopped just short of it.
Angelo left the truck running and from a toolbox in the back grabbed two industrial halogen flashlights. As Paco Herbert tried to gauge the size of the warehouse in front of them, Angelo handed him a light and asked him to follow.
“Is this building government property?”
“No. This is private land.”
“Who owns it?”
“A rich man. Entrepreneur. Leone McMasters. You heard of him? He’s the one who first invested in the technology to filter food down here, during the food shortage. You know Hatfield’s Supercenters, the chain of stores? For many years his big contract was with them, until the companies had a dispute and falling-out not long ago.”
Paco Herbert flashed his light up, down, and all over the rim of the night, as they walked toward a steel door by the side of the building. Angelo opened it with little difficulty and somewhat downheartedly stepped in, as if he was visiting a terminally ill friend.
They left the door open and were inside a big, dusty warehouse—in the darkness, the dust and cobwebs made the walls appear like cardboard. The moldy air was stagnant and thick, and to Paco Herbert it felt like trying to breathe inside an old shoebox. It was impossible not to notice the troughs laid out like long coffins all around them. There were about twenty, each running about a hundred feet, and divided into five sections of four rows.
Remembering Bellacosa’s account while looking into the dry soil in the troughs, Paco Herbert was relieved not to recognize the corpse
s in there as human. Patches of muscles covered in white fur emerged throughout the troughs, shining like polished moonstones with direct light—along certain sections, pleading hooves and jaws with thick, browning teeth cracked through the soil that’d hardened around them like concrete.
When he noticed the fine-pointed spikes swirling out from the limbs of the animal corpses, Paco Herbert said, “What the fuck is going on here?”
“It looks like they were trying to make those horses. With the horns on their head. But they all have their horns growing out of somewhere else. Look at that one, it’s coming out of its back. That one out of its ass.”
What Paco Herbert thought were weeds were actually shriveled tails and thinned manes off the dead horses’ heads and backs. He walked toward a horse in a trough with a spike jutting out of the side of its neck. Its pearl-gray eyeball was open and looked right at Paco Herbert like a snow globe filled with ink. He was grateful its mouth was buried but imagined it was gasping there under the dirt.
“And they just abandoned all this?”
“Looks like a failed project.”
“Project by who? McMasters?”
“McMasters.”
“Why would he just abandon it?”
“It wasn’t making him any money. Clearly. Moved on to something that could. Mr. Herbert, have you ever heard of the Trufflepig? What they call ‘the shepherd of dreams’? I’m not kidding when I say they’ve been filtering them, too. These rich investors like Leone McMasters are trying to perfect filtering these fucking imaginary things.”
“Why? What for?”
“Why not?” Angelo laughed. “What he, and people like him, are doing is just privatizing a science. They’re doing pretty much what the kingpin Pacheco did, but with brains and the right paperwork.”
“But it’s against the law to filter other living beings. Why would a person that’s already rich like Leone McMasters risk it all just to make more money?”
Tears of the Trufflepig Page 21