We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  Ariana had brought some of this up with Jorge a day or two earlier, her visions of her husband’s death. “Am I dreading this, or am I wanting it to happen, Jorge?” Like all confessions, it was in part a bid to expunge a gnawing sense of guilt.

  Jorge’s first reaction: “Why are you telling me this, Ariana? I’m your priest? Your confessor?”

  But then he engaged: “I’ll be honest with you, Ariana. I don’t spend much time fantasizing about a lover’s death, at least not if I’m still enjoying the pleasure of his flesh. But I’ll tell you something: At this point the quality of your relationship with Schuyler doesn’t matter.”

  Jorge cops a thuggish Bronx accent to make his point: “It don’t matter worth shit.”

  Then in his normal voice: “There’s only one thing going on right now, which is you doing what you have to do — and everything you can do — to get Schuyler back. You’ve got to save his life, girl. It’s on you. You want to offload him after that? Divorce him? Be my guest. But first you do everything you can to get him out of this alive, because if you don’t, you’re a complete shit. I’ll hate you, and you’ll hate yourself. You get him back. You’re his lifeline. Then you can dump the son of a bitch, if that’s what you need to do.”

  Every death is a testament to something or other, Ariana thinks to herself as Cy Milligan’s service drones on — but to what? Perhaps, in Schuyler’s case, to a life of adventure — mistresses, expatriation, financial ruin. Or would Schuyler be remembered as someone more mundane: as the husband of the unfaithful wife who tried to play the cartel too cagily and wound up getting a good man killed. Or as half of the stupid couple who imagined they could step beyond the timid routines of expat life and penetrate an authentically Mexican world.

  Sitting there as one expat after another chimes in with reminiscences about Cy Milligan, Ariana tests her capacity for brutal self-reflection. The truth is, she tells herself, that as Cy and other old friends and colleagues begin to die off, her grief — if what she’s feeling qualifies as “grief” — is accompanied by a less charitable feeling: a sense of satisfaction that she has outlived another one of them.

  But this was also true: an eeriness has come over the shrinking huddle of people left behind. It wasn’t so much the sharpening awareness that her own death lay over the horizon; it was that in due course there would be scarcely a soul left with whom to relish the simple fact she was somehow still alive. Ariana remembered the Japanese word for it: kodokushi, the lonely death. It is the sequel, she supposes, to the lonely life, the fate that awaits those of us who outlive the people with whom we have shared that life.

  Night settles over the mountain village, emptying the plazas, except for the diehards — Ariana among them — who have declared Miguel’s, up a flight of stairs in the old Hotel Vasco de Quiroga, as the place to send Cy off a little more raucously than was possible at the service in the ex-Colegio or at graveside. One drink too many and Ariana wanders unsteadily out into the street, alone.

  She was going a little crazy even before the alcohol kicked in. The onerous silence she has only partially broken is matched by the silence from the men who claim to have kidnapped Schuyler. Her every nerve is prepared to respond instantly to another proposal from their side, another round in the “negotiation” she so far has botched. But the counteroffer doesn’t come. Her brain is soft with drink, but she needs to do something. She’s been to the embassy (power), she’s been to New York (money). My god I’ve been to church (faith), she thinks to herself, remembering the encounter with the agent in the basilica. She has passed time, though not enough of it, with her elusive lover, Enrique.

  Tipsy and depressed, she is heading home when, on an impulse, she signals to the driver of a taxi in the thinned-out squad of them still working the plazas. She directs the driver down past the train station, almost to the embarcadero, where the last boats are preparing to leave for Janitzio and the other islands. She settles with the driver and sends him off, then bangs on the door of a one-story house of no particular distinction, the house where she has dropped Gabriela off a time or two when they needed her to work into the evening. A young woman opens the door, Efraim’s wife, Ariana assumes. In a housecoat and with a baby at her breast, she blanches visibly at the sight of the gringa, then tosses word of her arrival over her shoulder toward a room flickering with the green glow of an unseen TV turned down low.

  Shirtless, barefoot, Efraim steps out into the corridor from what must be a kitchen. Ariana unloads her secret once again, sheds it like an overcoat:

  “Efraim. I am very worried. I need you to help me. Don Schuyler is missing. I need you to help me find him. I will pay you, of course. The cartel? The Caballeros? Someone has taken him.”

  Efraim leads her into the front room. He has stepped into sandals but has not pulled on a shirt. At 19 he is starting to soften in the gut. His pajama pants are held up with a cloth cord, and his belly swells against it. There is a bed in the corner of this room, but the two small children who occupy it — twin girls — are asleep. Efraim gestures toward the sofa and takes a chair for himself, a kitchen chair 40 years out of fashion, with bronze-colored tubular legs and a plastic seat and backrest stamped in a floral pattern. He straddles it backwards, pressing his chest against the seatback. Ariana notices the outline of his cock against the fabric of his pajamas. She wonders if the display is intentional, decides it isn’t, fixes her eyes on his face. Elena appears in the doorway with a bottle and two glasses. She sets them down and disappears in the direction of the television and her baby, which has begun to whimper.

  Ariana starts by asking Efraim if he already knew what she just told him: that her husband has been taken. Is he hearing anything? Are the Mexicans saying anything about Don Schuyler? Maybe a greater sense of self-confidence comes over Efraim in the security of his home. Because, unlike when she quizzed him about his murdered cousin, this time he begins to talk:

  “I heard someone say that the Caballeros have him.”

  “What does that mean? Where would they be hiding him?”

  Just then Elena appears again in the doorway, now with the baby quieted in her arms and sucking. She mixes unintelligible Purépecha words with her rapidfire Spanish. Something about the girls on the cot; she is gesturing in their direction. Ariana supposes she is telling Efraim that he needs to deal with them: dos pastillas (two pills) for each. The little girls are ailing, to judge from their hacking coughs. But she senses that Elena’s presence in the doorway is also her way of warning Efraim against saying much at all to the gringa who has appeared in the night. The medicine can wait, Efraim tells his wife. But a few minutes later, he rises from his seat and half wakens the girls from feverish sleep, to give them the pills, first one little girl, then the other.

  Over the course of the visit — less than an hour — he mentions a finca a few miles toward Uruapan that is said to be a Templario redoubt. It’s near where they found the police chief beheaded — el jefe descabezado. Ariana remembers the coverage at the time: the body propped up along the highway near dawn, the head in the man’s lap. She and Schuyler had just returned from a visit to the States and the town jangled with the news, some of it fancifully embroidered: i.e. that for a split second the severed head remained capable of speech, and cried out the name of the masked man who had done the killing. Take away the talking head and Ariana’s mental image of such an execution is shaped just then by Internet video clips showing masked operatives of the Islamic State beheading American and British hostages. The ISIS clips de-contextualize these executions, assassinations, call them what you will. They have been reduced to a pure essence against the monochrome desert backdrop: the orange jumpsuits, the black balaclava masking the face of the executioner/assassin. It startles her to realize now that the local rendition of an ISIS-style killing would occur against the backdrop of Michoacan’s familiar landscape, or that members of the community would know where the dismembered body had been found. But of course they would. Why else would the poli
ce chief have been killed if not to send a message, as jolting a message as possible?

  She asks Efraim where all that went down. He says he has a good idea but wants to be sure, wants to confirm what he has heard. It seems possible that he is again losing his nerve, stalling for time, looking for a way out of a conversation that tequila has already taken too far. Ariana offers a thousand pesos if he can guide her to where the police chief was beheaded. She tells him she will want some kind of proof that his information is accurate. (A gentler way of saying she will want proof that he is not lying to her.) She will want a corroborating detail. She can’t imagine what will constitute adequate proof that Efraim knows what he’s talking about and is telling the truth, other than his reluctance to accept her offer and take her anywhere at all.

  day twenty-three

  Back on Madrigal, Ariana wakes up around three a.m. and cannot recall an iota of detail from the cab ride home. She assumes she knocked herself out with a final shot of mezcal before falling into bed. In the hours before dawn, she drifts in and out of a dream, rooted in a memory Schuyler once shared with her, a vignette from his childhood along the Hudson. He and a friend would hang out down by the freight tracks, swinging on vines as thick as their arms, skipping stones into the river, competing to see who could arc his piss farthest out into the water — one of the usual pastimes of 10-year-old boys, as Schuyler put it. But her dreamed version of his reminiscence picks up on a secondary emotion, not pleasure but panic, the panic Schuyler said he always felt as a train rumbled toward them. After climbing out of bed she thumbed through his notebooks until she found it:

  Now the rumble was a roar as the train closed in on us, and I felt a sense of panic sweep over me, like it always did: which side of the track to be on when the train finally howled past.

  The river side? No, the land side. The side where Sammy was crouching? Or the far side?

  It wouldn’t matter half as much if it made any difference at all.

  The train is twenty feet away and I hop again, daring Sammy to do the same. If I trip, I lose a leg. Or my life. But I can’t stop myself, and the thundering rush of that train now sweeping past is like a cosmic sigh of relief.

  I squat on the ground and watch Sammy through the wheels, Sammy hunkering down on his side of the track, the two of us grinning like crazy and flipping each other the bird.

  Ariana passes a listless day, has a light supper with Jorge and is home by early evening. The phone rings: The voice on the other end of the line is Gabriela’s and it is shot through with fear. One of the little girls, the ones bedded down in the living room when Ariana dropped by the night before has taken a turn for the worse. Much worse. Her fever has spiked; she has had a convulsion. At least that’s what Ariana can make of it. Could Ariana help them get her to the hospital in Morelia?

  Ariana groans at the thought of setting aside her glass and her laptop and going out into the night. But she can do the math. A cab to Morelia would be the peso equivalent of $30 or $40, ruinously expensive for them. She is tempted by a charitable alternative. She’s about to say, “Just call a cab and let me reimburse you later” — when it dawns on her that they probably can’t even front the cost she’s offered to cover. Ariana throws on a jacket and drives through deserted streets to the embarcadero neighborhood as fast as the brutal topes (speed bumps) will allow. Efraim is at curbside. He signals to the women in the open doorway and shortly they are loading the little girl into the back seat. A drawn and peaked Gabriela helps Efraim’s wife in beside the sick girl, hands her the baby, then turns and heads back inside to look after the other child, the sicker girl’s twin sister. Efraim takes the front passenger seat and forty-five minutes later, the emergency room doctors are clapping an oxygen mask over the little girl’s face and sliding an IV drip into her arm. Efraim’s wife — Ariana has finally got her name into her head: Elena — trots along beside the gurney, babe in arms, as the medics roll the little girl down the corridor and out of sight. As arranged in the car, Elena and the baby will stay with the sick girl. Efraim will ride back with Ariana to relieve his mother. Gabriela has work in the morning: an elderly gentleman she bathes and feeds three days a week. As it will turn out, the little girl is soon stabilized, but the evening is not over.

  Between silent stares over the steering wheel and into the inky night, Ariana looks for ways to draw out Efraim.

  “What do you know, Efraim? What have you learned?”

  “They should never have done that.”

  Ariana freezes with dread. She says nothing, waiting for him to go on. He must have learned something terrible. He has, but his focus is on another cartel victim, a young man he knows — or used to know — from a small village around the lake.

  From what Ariana can piece together, the boy has been pushed over the edge. The last time Efraim saw him he was making no sense at all. She asks Efraim what happened, and he tells the story.

  Apparently the boy got crosswise with one of the local syndicates — Cabras de las Calles (Street Goats), one of the small bands of second-rate thieves and bullies. These groupings hover somewhere between gangs — like the ones some of them joined while working illegally in the States — and the cartels that they dream will one day accept them as full-fledged sicarios. It seems the boy, Juan, had got into it with a rival. Something stupid: the rival had made a play for woman engaged to Juan’s brother, then serving in the army. Juan and some buddies had grabbed the Lothario, stripped him naked and pitched him out of a car as they passed through the village square in the bright light of day. In retaliation, the Cabras decided to strip Juan, not of his clothing but of his flesh. They took him to an abandoned slaughterhouse and poked meat hooks into his arm pits. Then they hoisted him aloft, just high enough so his feet can’t touch the ground, however much he kicks and flails. And then what do they do? Efraim puts it this way: They slice into the backs of his thighs and one of them works in his fingers until it’s like the back pockets on a loose pair of jeans. When they circumcised the left thigh completely with their blades, they start rolling the flesh down his leg. Then they do the other one. Ariana, horror-struck, envisions a lover peeling stockings off a woman’s legs. They’d have stripped the legs completely, except that the flesh begins to tear and shred around the kneecap. “Increible que sobrevivó,” Efraim says quietly. Apparently someone found him and got him to the got him to a retired nurse who worked on him around the clock for two weeks. From what Ariana can catch from Efraim’s account, the woman picked rotting scabs off his skinned thighs with tweezers, and used maggots to eat away at infection. She guesses the woman’s prayers for divine intercession were more effective than the physical therapy. The leg is grotesquely disfigured, but Juan can walk, Efraim says. From Efraim’s description of their most recent encounter, Ariana deduces that Juan suffered a psychotic break. He spends all day sitting on a crate in the local market engaged in a conversation punctuated by screams, a conversation between voices in his head.

  Ariana, expresses shock and dismay over what has happened to Efraim’s friend, but she is left to wonder why he belabored Juan’s story, why now? — to underscore the urgency of Schuyler’s situation? Or to stun her to hopelessness with this testament to the reach and power of the region’s criminal subculture?

  She asks again about Schuyler, whether Efraim has heard anything.

  “They tell me he is with La Tuta’s people, but I think it is a lie. La Tuta has his principles. He would not do such a thing to a good man like Don Schuyler.”

  “Well then, who has him?”

  Efraim digresses without answering Ariana’s question. Does she still want to see the place where the police chief was beheaded?

  “Take the right just ahead,” Efraim says, and with his further guidance — another right, a left — they have skirted the village and are on a road that would be easier to drive (fewer massive, rim-gashing potholes) if it wasn’t paved. Shortly they reach the old two-lane highway to Uruapan, the one now bypassed by the cuota. It skir
ts the south end of the lake and begins a slow climb into the mountains.

  They have gone maybe four miles when Efraim breaks a lengthening silence:

  “Está allá.”

  Ariana looks left to see a wall of adobe easily ten feet high and topped with razor wire. Only the roof of the house it surrounds is visible, but as the finca scrabbles up the hill behind the main house, a cluster of sheds is exposed along with a long, low barn.

  She slows the car and, a half-mile beyond the finca, pulls over onto the shoulder of the road. She says nothing for a while and then asks Efraim if he knows how to get into the property. She is winging it, not so much plotting strategy as trying to assess her own level of courage, or foolhardiness. Also Efraim’s.

  “The wall goes all the way around. There’s a gate, but you don’t need that. If no one is watching, there are places you can get through.”

  She pounces: “How do you know this, Efraim?”

  “You asked me to find out.”

  And so she had, though Ariana is left to wonder if it took any fresh research for Efraim to earn his thousand pesos.

  “Well, all right. Is he in there? Schuyler? Mi esposo?

  Efraim says that he believes this is where Don Schuyler is being held, locked in a troje.

  In her right mind, Ariana would not have said this: “I need to get in there, too, Efraim.”

  His response, if he said anything at all, is drowned out by the whine of an old-time police cruiser’s siren. The cop pulls in behind them, lights flashing. The growl of the siren sinks by an octave and dies out. A gun appears at the window a half-foot from Ariana’s head. The officer, if that’s what he is, asks if she needs assistance — a civilized way of asking what she’s up to.