by John Sayles
From where he’s standing with his back up against the club wall, the kid’s head looks like it’s part of the sidewalk, stuck there with drying blood. Scorch is next to him, while Oxana, who was behind the bar while the assailants were still on the floor, is talking to the sheriff, blue lights strobing on them from the patrol cars.
“Looks like he got it from behind,” says Vic. “Could have been you.”
Scorch has his yard face on, even though he’s in the clear on this one. “When I bounced those assholes, I should have bounced them harder.”
“Whatever you do, there’s always that chance.” Vic taps his hip. “Still got some lead in there, ricochet. We booted some character in Fairbanks, real pain in the ass, he drives home shitfaced, manages not to run into a moose or off the road, gets his automatic, drives back, head clearing up now but not enough to stop him from emptying a clip into the joint from the doorway. It’s me and a couple of the staff, doling out the tip pool.”
“Somebody left the door unlocked.”
“He waited till a bargirl left, elbowed his way in. We were just sitting around, easy target.”
“Could have been one to the heart, one to the head.”
Vic gives Scorch a look, but that face gives nothing away.
“He was just a jack-off with a temper, not a hired assassin.”
The night deputy, Clayton, throws some plastic over the kid on the sidewalk and clears a path through the crowd that has poured out of both clubs once the news spread. Teasers has had a half-dozen fights, but this had to happen with guys from his spot. The murder weapon is still on the ground between four orange traffic cones, a bloody three-foot length of metal pipe with a hexagonal nut the size of a grapefruit threaded onto the end of it. A couple EMTs step in with a stretcher, looking for a place that’s not all bloody to lay it down, but there isn’t one, and their feet are already sticky with it.
“Head injuries,” says Vic. “Bleed like a motherfucker.”
The sheriff comes over.
“Can I hear your version?”
“Guy comes in with friends, already loaded to the gills,” says Vic, “and I give Oxana the eye, so she never quite gets to his drink order in the crowd. Makes himself obnoxious to everybody sitting there, louder than the music, which is saying something, and ends up pinning the kid on the ground there against the counter. Kid probably called him out for the douchebag that he was. Then Stanley here, my head of security, escorted him from the premises, followed by two of his posse.” Vic looks to Scorch. “I don’t believe any blows were exchanged.”
“I had his arm behind his back, stayed with him till his friends had him calmed down, cut him loose.”
“Description?”
“My height,” says Scorch, “maybe two hundred, two fifteen on the scale– he’s got a half keg where the six pack should be– two-day stubble, brown eyes, still got his lace-up work boots on and a T-shirt that says ‘Pump Till it Squirts.’”
The sheriff looks impressed.
“I had him in my sights for a while before I give him the boot.”
The sheriff nods. “Might need you two for ID sometime tomorrow.”
“No problem.”
The EMTs have gloves on, trying to get all of the kid’s shattered head onto the stretcher now, the crowd oohing and aaahing. Vic has seen guys pretty messed up who survived somehow, but this one is a goner.
“And I’d advise you not to open tomorrow night.”
Vic nods. Tomorrow is payday and he’ll lose a fortune, but this kind of thing gets the church ladies riled up and the mayor might cave and pull their license altogether.
The sheriff steps away then, helping his deputy herd the rubberneckers out of the way. One of the regulars, a local who Jewelle has got a lock on, looking in pretty bad shape himself, crosses over to join them.
“I saw the whole thing,” he says. “In case you need a witness.”
“We’ll be okay.”
“The guy was out of line. Looking for trouble.”
There are fight bars, of course, where a nose-buster or two every evening serves as the floor show, but the money is not worth the aggravation. He’d hoped the tone had been elevated a bit when he hired a DJ, plushed up the seating.
“Got plenty of trouble now,” says Scorch. “Done screwed the pooch to death”
WHEN HE COMES IN late from his rounds with the boys he sleeps on the sofa. “Don’t want to wake a fellow worker up,” he says, but Francine figures it’s so she can’t gauge the liquor on his breath. She bowls with the other teachers on Wednesdays and they have a couple drinks, loosen up, but you have to imagine another level for oil workers. This won’t last, this frenetic drilling, and she can’t imagine Tuck wanting to follow the rigs to the next strike, or whatever it’s called in that world.
And the money is great, good for Tuck to be contributing again, making a lot more than she does. Not that that should matter so much. He’s never been the macho type, considering himself more of a thinker, a spotter of trends and connoisseur of opportunities. Like the stock market, where he’s got most of what’s left of his inherited money tied up, no rainmakers in the portfolio yet, but some promising long shots. Francine has learned to think of it as a pastime of Tuck’s, like betting on the NFL games, rather than real money they’d be able to spend if he cashed in.
He’s left his shoes in the kitchen, considerate when she’s such a light sleeper, but they’re big and in the way right now. And stuck to the floor with something.
In fact there are tracks, half a heel on one side and the whole shoeprint on the other, leading backwards to the driveway. She peels a shoe up with a crackly sound, something he stepped in last night–
THE TRUCK COMES DOWN Los Mayas in the Bellavista neighborhood an hour after dark, stops halfway down the deserted street. The rear doors are unlocked. Macario and Nacho haul themselves in, wriggle their way around what Macario thinks are huge industrial heaters mounted on wooden pallets, till they can crouch out of sight. It is very dark.
They hear the clunk of the rear doors being locked from the outside, then in a moment the truck starts to move. It is not long, maybe twenty minutes, before the truck stops again, the engine turned off. Macario quickly opens the jar he’s brought, dabs liquid on the metal around them. There is the biting smell of kerosene. The rear doors are thrown open, they hear voices and see flashlight beams against the back wall of the trailer where they are squeezed behind the machinery. He has given Nacho six thousand pesos to pay to the truckero, but that is no guarantee against betrayal.
A dog whines. The yanqui Customs people, Macario thinks with relief, the dogs sniffing for mota or humans and smelling only kerosene.
The rear door is closed again, locked.
The engine comes to life. The truck rolls on.
“We’re crossing the bridge, chango,” Nacho says to him in the dark. “Right under their noses.”
It is very hard to judge time without light, with only the engine rumble and the drone of the highway beneath you. The yanqui highway. I am a message in a bottle, thinks Macario, adrift in the great ocean, at the mercy of currents and the pull of the moon. He called Nilda this morning, his voice floating into space, then caroming off a satellite back down to Xichulub, then the reply making the same journey. Nilda’s sister, the computer voice informed him, was not available at the moment.
The girls will look different the next time he sees them, if he sees them, and little Azalea will have no memory of her father. Macario can tell from the rhythm of his breathing that Nacho is sleeping, exhausted.
“Pan o plomo?” the narcos are reported to have said to the chief of police of Nuevo Laredo. Bread or lead? Apparently he gave the wrong answer and was assassinated only hours after he was sworn into office. Bread or lead. Those should not be the only choices, to accept the narcos’ world, their money, to do their bidding like a frightened dog or end up encobijado, rolled in a plastic tarp and sealed with tape. Macario hopes this oilfield in the far
north of el norte will be better, even with the shadow of la Migra always looming above. He could make enough money to build them a house in Yucatán, or even bring his family up–
It is dangerous to think too far ahead. All that matters at the moment is to get himself out of the back of this truck and into the big sea of the United States.
Macario is not sure if he sleeps or not. It is never comfortable, his body bent around the metal heaters, the kerosene smell lingering. A coffin, he thinks, suddenly finding it hard to breathe. I’ve been buried before I’m dead.
At some point Nacho wakes and begins to talk. He is a boy afraid of silence.
“Do you know any English?”
“Some,” Macario tells him. “There were gringos on the oil rig. And I watch their television shows.”
“Me too. I know words.”
“Dígame unos”
“Ford. Chevy. Toyota.”
“That’s Japanese.”
“Lexus. Jeep.”
He says it yip.
“You can be a car salesman.”
“It’s no joke. I don’t know anybody up here, I don’t who the gangs are, who’s in charge. I don’t know how to do anything.”
“You’ll learn.”
“They’ll take one look,” says Nacho in the dark, “and think puro mojado, this guy doesn’t belong here, and throw me into their federal prison.”
“There are thousands of people who look just like you in their cities. Believe me.”
“If you pay what the Zetas demand,” says Nacho wistfully, “you never really make enough. You eat, but you’re still nothing compared to them.”
“Don’t compare yourself to them.”
“güey, I was not born in a mansion. I’m not some fresa who takes tennis lessons and goes to una academia privada. Anything I get, I have to rip it from the world.”
“Take your time when we get out,” counsels Macario. “Look around, see what’s here, don’t start ripping things right away.”
When the truck finally stops and the rear doors are opened there is a tentative dawn in the yanqui sky outside.
“Fuera!” calls the truckero. Macario does not like the tone in his voice.
They wriggle out past the heaters and let themselves down, legs cramped and unsteady, onto the ground. There is nothing but flat, scrubby plain around them and the truckero, holding a shotgun.
“There’s a checkpoint just south of the next town,” he says. “You’ll have to walk around it.”
“We got through at the bridge,” says Nacho.
“This is as far as you go with me,” says the man. “Dump out what you’re carrying and turn your pockets inside out.”
They’ve turned off the highway onto a dirt road. The man with the shotgun is nervous, his face frozen in a scowl. Unless he is truly stupid, thinks Macario, he won’t kill them here, his tire tracks like fingerprints in the sand.
“I already paid you!” cries Nacho as he empties his plastic sack onto the ground. The truckero kicks at what falls out, eyes Macario’s few clothes and bottles of water. He takes the roll of pesos from Macario’s hand.
“Pick up your things and start walking,” he says, indicating the direction with the barrel of the shotgun.
An amateur, thinks Macario as he gathers his belongings, hearing the truck grind gears as it turns around. He still has the yanqui bills in his shoe.
“Hijo de la chingada!” Nacho spits as the truck rolls past them on its way back to the highway, Macario memorizing the license number to tell to the Border Patrol if he is caught by them today.
“We can’t walk along the pinche highway,” says Nacho, turning to look at the nothingness that surrounds them.
“We don’t have to. Mira.”
Macario points to the faint strip of clearing, only a few feet wide, that runs for miles in a straight line in either direction. “There’s an oil pipeline buried under there. It will go parallel to the big road all the way to a refinery, or maybe right to a city.”
They walk, Nacho cursing the truckero and all his ancestors, the sun still mercifully low in the sky. In less than an hour they see what must be buildings off to the left.
“Where do you think we are?” asks Nacho.
“Tejas.”
Nacho glares at the little bumps of civilization in the distance, shakes his head. “Let’s get it over with. I don’t want to die in this pinche desierto.”
It is very early, not much moving in the little town when they arrive, looking like refugees. From the sign next to the huge statue of a rattlesnake, it seems the place is called Freer.
“What does this mean?”
“Más libre,” Macario guesses. “More free.”
They sit to drink the last plastic bottle of Macario’s water on the concrete steps of the statue’s base. The cascabél is poised to strike, head erect, rattles in the air.
“What kind of people,” asks Nacho, “honor a fucking snake?”
“What kind of people,” Macario responds, “wear a tattoo of Jesús Malverde on their skin?”
“Assholes from Sinaloa.”
“Or San Judas Tadeo, or la Santa Muerte, or any of the other narco-saints?”
“Those spirits can protect you. But a snake.”
Macario points to the metal cut-out in the shape of the state of Texas on a pole beside them. “That sign says there is a rodeo de cascabéles here. A rattlesnake round-up.”
Nacho shakes his head, looking around miserably. “I want to go home.”
“You fucked yourself there. If I want to go back I just turn myself in. But they’ve got you in their computers for transporting– you’ll have to sneak back in to your own country, and when you do the Zetas will be waiting.”
They continue down the highway, passing a tire store and a pair of motels. They are between two low stores with empty parking lots, one called Dollar Value and the other called Family Dollar, when a pair of old cars pull up beside them. The driver of the second one, a güero about the same age as Nacho, calls to them in English through his open window.
“Need a ride?”
Macario steps closer to talk to him.
“Yes. We are needing to go to Houston.”
“San Antonio,” grins the blond boy, pointing ahead. “Straight north from here.”
“Igual,” says Macario, making the thumbs-up gesture the gringos on the rig always used when it was too loud to hear.
“The way it works,” says the blond boy, “is my buddy up there rides ahead, and if the Border Patrol has thrown up a spot check he calls me.” The blond boy has a cell phone resting on his thigh. “That means you get out, wherever we are, no refund. Comprendo?”
“I understand.”
“Two-fifty each, Americano,” says the boy, his eyes moving to Nacho, who has backed into the Family Dollar parking lot to watch. “And that’s only because we were going there anyway.”
Macario hesitates. He has only a few more dollars than that in his shoe.
“Or you can keep walking.”
“Is okay,” says Macario, and waves for Nacho to come over. He starts to get in next to the güero, but the boy pushes a button and there is the click of the door lock.
“Sorry, amigo. Gotta see the cash first.”
Macario is not sure he understands. The boy makes a gesture with his fingers, rubbing them together, and speaks very slowly.
“Show– me– the– money.”
“Ah, por supuesto,” says Macario. These are just boys in cars, the ones you see in their television shows, lovers of speed and girls and Coca Cola. He and Nacho will not be left murdered in the desert by these two. He steps back from the car, smiling at the güero.
“Excuse me, please. For this I must take off the shoe.”
BULLETINS FROM THE BLACK STUFF
Comeback of the Century – North Dakota.
Since the Pashas of Petroleum have encamped in the Bakken oil field, the former Gateway to Manitoba can now boast a paltry 3% jobless ra
te, the lowest in the country (in Williams County it is under 1%), enormous growth in population and personal income, strong housing and construction markets, and an enviable state budget surplus. Thousands of residents have become millionaires from oil and gas revenues, and there’s more to come!
This month we count nearly eighty new rigs in the mix, many of the wells nearing completion.
With crude holding at $95.70 a barrel and gasoline back up to a respectable $3.67 ($3.90 for diesel) we’re bullish on the Bakken!
O when I die
Please bury me low
So I can hear
The petroleum flow–
EVERYTHING IS NEW. EVERYTHING in the kitchen– pots and pans, set of plates and glasses, microwave, even the stove and dishwasher look like they’re right out of the box. Only the blender has a film on it, Wayne Lee saying that his man Brent makes himself protein shakes. Tina feels a little weird to be here, knowing what she does from Fawn, but Wayne Lee said it was chill, his man Brent gone for the day and always running an open house. The wife is gone too– whether it’s about-to-divorce gone or just out-of-town gone is not clear– and Tina wonders if she was the one who chose the colors, who picked out the appliances online or in catalogues. There is only beer and energy bars in the fridge, so it’s probably been a while since she was here.
Nothing at home is new. Her grandfather eats shredded wheat from a chipped bowl every morning, and the furniture was old when her parents were still alive. He plays music, old croony love songs with lots of orchestra behind the singers, on a record player where you have to place the needle by hand.
Wayne Lee said he wanted her first time to be somewhere nicer than a Days Inn. It was nice, better than she expected, though he smelled a little like McDonalds and she smelled like Colombian Roast. She insisted they change the sheets after, and they finally found some, still in plastic, from a place called Pottery Barn.
“Look what’s happening to me,” Wayne Lee had said, “just looking at you.” And it was pretty amazing, like his thing had a life of its own.