by Don Winslow
The chair is tilted back, the rag shoved back in his mouth. A flood of gas goes up his nose, fills his sinuses, feels like it’s flooding his brain. He hopes it does, hopes it kills him, because this is unbearable. Just when he thinks he’s going to black out, they tilt the chair back up and take out the rag and he vomits on himself.
As Navarres screams, “Who do you think I am?! Some traffic cop who stops you for speeding?! You offer me a tip?!”
“I’m sorry,” Adán gasps. “Let me go. I will contact you, pay you what you want. Name the price.”
Back down again. The rag, the gasoline. The awful, horrible feeling of the fumes penetrating his sinuses, his brain, his lungs. Feeling his head thrashing, his torso twisting, his feet kicking uncontrollably. When it finally stops, Navarres lifts Adán’s chin between his thumb and forefinger.
“You little traficante garbage,” Navarres says. “You think everyone is for sale, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, you little shit—you can’t buy me. I’m not for sale. There’s no bargaining here—there’s no deal. You will simply give me what I want.”
Then Adán hears himself say something very stupid.
“Comemierda.”
Navarres loses it. Screams, “I should eat shit? I should eat shit?! Bring him.”
Adán is yanked to his feet and dragged out of the tent to a latrine, a filthy hole with an old toilet seat thrown across. Filled almost to the top with shit, bits of toilet paper, piss, flies.
The federales lift the struggling Adán and hold his head over the hole.
“I should eat shit?!” Navarres is screaming. “You eat shit!”
They lower Adán until his head is completely immersed in the filth.
He tries to hold his breath. He twists, squirms, struggles, again tries to hold his breath, but finally has to breathe in the shit. They lift him out.
Adán coughs the shit out of his mouth.
He gulps for air as they lower him again.
Closes his eyes and mouth tightly, vowing to die before he swallows shit again, but soon he’s thrashing, his lungs demanding air, his brain threatening to explode, and he opens his mouth again and then he’s drowning in filth and they lift him out and toss him on the ground.
“Now who eats shit?”
“I do.”
“Hose him off.”
The blast of water stings, but Adán is grateful. He’s on all fours, gagging and vomiting, but the water feels wonderful.
Navarres’s pride restored, he’s fatherly now as he leans over Adán and asks, “Now . . . where is Don Pedro?”
Adán cries, “I . . . don’t . . . know.”
Navarres shakes his head.
“Get the other one,” he orders his men. A few moments later the federales come out of the tent dragging the campesino. His white pants are bloody and torn. His left leg drags at an odd, broken angle and a jagged piece of bone sticks through the flesh.
Adán sees it and pukes on the spot.
He feels even sicker when they start to drag him toward a helicopter.
Art pulls a kerchief tightly over his nose.
The smoke and ash are getting to him, stinging his eyes, settling in his mouth. And God knows, Art thinks, what toxic shit I’m sucking into my lungs.
He comes to a small village perched on a curve in the road. The campesinos stand on the other side of the road and watch as soldiers get ready to put the torch to the thatched roofs of their casitas. Young soldiers nervously hold them back from trying to get their belongings out of the burning houses.
Then Art sees a lunatic.
A tall, stout man with a full head of white hair, his unshaven face rough with white stubble, wearing an untucked denim shirt over blue jeans and tennis shoes, holds a wooden crucifix in front of him like a bad actor in a B-level vampire movie. He pushes his way through the crowd of campesinos and brushes right past the soldiers.
The soldiers must think he’s crazy, too, because they stand back and let him pass. Art watches as the man strides across the road and gets between two torch-bearing soldiers and a house.
“In the name of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” the man yells, “I forbid you to do this!”
He’s like somebody’s dotty uncle, Art thinks, who’s usually kept in the house but got out in the chaos and is now wandering around with his messiah complex unleashed. The two soldiers just stand there looking at the man, unsure of what to do.
Their sergeant tells them; he walks over and screams at them to quit staring like two fregados and set fire to the chingada house. The soldiers try to move around the crazy man but he slides over to block them.
Quick feet for a fat man, Art thinks.
The sergeant takes his rifle and raises its butt toward the crazy man as though he’s going to crack the man’s skull if he doesn’t move.
The lunatic doesn’t move. He just stands there invoking the name of God.
Art sighs, stops the Jeep, and gets out.
He knows he has no business interfering, but he just can’t let a crazy guy get his melon smashed without at least trying to stop it. He walks over to the sergeant, tells him that he’ll take care of it, then grabs the lunatic by the elbow and tries to walk him away.
“Come on, viejo,” Art says. “Jesus told me he wants to see you across the road.”
“Really?” the man answers. “Because Jesus told me to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
The man looks at him with amazing gray eyes. Art sees them and knows right away that this guy is no nut job, but something altogether different. Sometimes you see a person’s eyes and you know, you just know, that the bullshit hour is over.
These eyes have seen things, and not flinched or looked away.
Now the man looks at the DEA on Art’s cap.
“Proud of yourself?” he asks.
“I’m just doing my job.”
“And I’m just doing mine.” He turns back to the soldiers and once again orders them to cease and desist.
“Look,” Art says, “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Then close your eyes.” Then the man sees the concerned look on Art’s face and adds, “Don’t worry, they won’t touch me. I’m a priest. A bishop, actually.”
A priest?! Art thinks. Go fuck yourself? What the hell kind of priest—excuse me, bishop—uses that kind of . . .
The thought is interrupted by gunfire.
Art hears the dull pop-pop-pop of AK-47 fire and throws himself to the ground, hugging the dirt as tightly as he can. He looks up to see the priest still standing there—like a lone tree on a prairie now, everyone else having hit the deck—still holding his cross up, shouting at the hills, telling them to stop shooting.
It’s one of the most incredibly brave things Art has ever seen.
Or foolish, or just crazy.
Shit, Art thinks.
He gets to his knees, and then lunges for the priest’s legs, knocks him over and holds him down.
“Bullets don’t know you’re a priest,” Art says to him.
“God will call me when he calls me,” the priest answers.
Well, God damn-near just reached for the phone, Art thinks. He lies in the dirt next to the priest until the shooting stops, then risks another look up and sees the soldiers starting to move away from the village, toward the source of the gunfire.
“Would you happen to have an extra cigarette?” the priest asks.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Puritan.”
“It’ll kill you,” Art says.
“Everything I like will kill me,” the priest answers. “I smoke, I drink, I eat too much. Sexual sublimation, I suppose. I’m Bishop Parada. You can call me Father Juan.”
“You’re a madman, Father Juan.”
“Christ needs madmen,” Parada says, standing up and dusting himself off. He looks around and smiles. “And the village is still here, isn’t it?”
Yeah, Art thinks, because the gomeros started shooting.
; “Do you have a name?” the priest asks.
“Art Keller.”
He offers his hand. Parada takes it, asking, “Why are you down here burning my country, Art Keller?”
“Like I said, it’s—”
“Your job,” Parada says. “Shitty job, Arturo.”
He sees Art react to the “Arturo.”
“Well, you’re part Mexican, aren’t you?” Parada asks. “Ethnically?”
“On my mother’s side.”
“I’m part American,” Parada says. “I was born in Texas. My parents were mojados, migrant workers. They took me back to Mexico when I was still a baby. Technically, though, that makes me an American citizen. A Texan, no less.”
“Yee-haw.”
“Hook 'em, Horns.”
A woman runs up and starts talking to Parada. She’s crying, and speaking so quickly Art has a hard time understanding her. He does pick up a few words, though: Padre Juan and federales and tortura—torture.
Parada turns to Art. “They’re torturing people at a camp near here. Can you put a stop to it?”
Probably not, Art thinks. It’s SOP in Condor. The federales tune them up, and then they sing for us. “Father, I’m not allowed to interfere in the internal matters of—”
“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” the priest says. He has a tone of authority that makes even Art Keller listen. “Let’s get going.”
He walks over and gets into Art’s Jeep. “Come on, get your ass in gear.”
Art gets in, starts the motor and rips it into gear.
When they get to the base camp, Art sees Adán sitting in the back of an open chopper with his hands tied behind his back. A campesino with a hideous greenstick fracture lies beside him.
The chopper is about to take off. The rotors are spinning, kicking dust and pebbles in Art’s face. He jumps out of the Jeep, ducks below the rotors and runs up to the pilot, Phil Hansen.
“Phil, what the hell?!” Art shouts.
Phil grins at him. “Two birds!”
Art recognizes the reference: You take two birds up. One flies, the other sings.
“No!” Art says. He jabs a thumb toward Adán. “That guy is mine!”
“Fuck you, Keller!”
Yeah, fuck me, Art thinks. He looks in the back of the chopper, where Parada is already tending to the campesino with the broken leg. The priest turns to Art with a look that is both question and demand.
Art shakes his head, then pulls his .45, cocks it and sticks it in Hansen’s face. “You’re not taking off, Phil.”
Art can hear federales lift their rifles and chamber rounds.
DEA guys come running out of the mess tent.
Taylor yells, “Keller, what the hell you think you’re doing?!”
“This what we do now, Tim?” Art asks. “We toss people out of choppers?”
“You’re no virgin, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’ve jumped into the backseat lots of times.”
I can’t say anything to that, Art thinks. It’s the truth.
“You’re done now, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’re finished this time. I’ll have your goddamn job. I’ll have you thrown in jail.”
He sounds happy.
Art keeps his pistol trained on Hansen’s face.
“This is a Mexican matter,” Navarres says. “Stay out of it. This is not your country.”
“It’s my country!” Parada yells. “And I’ll excommunicate your ass so fast—”
“Such language, Father,” Navarres says.
“You’ll hear worse in a minute.”
“We are trying to find Don Pedro Áviles,” Navarres explains to Art. He points to Adán. “This little piece of shit knows where he is, and he’s going to tell us.”
“You want Don Pedro?” Art asks. He walks back to his Jeep and unrolls the poncho. Don Pedro’s body spills onto the ground, raising little puffs of dust. “You got him.”
Taylor looks down at the bullet-riddled corpse.
“What happened?”
“We tried to arrest him and five of his men,” Art says. “They resisted. They’re all dead.”
“All of them,” Taylor says, staring at Art.
“Yeah.”
“No wounded?”
“No.”
Taylor smirks. But he’s pissed, and Art knows it. Art has just brought in the Big Trophy and now there’s nothing Taylor can do to him. Nothing at fucking all. Still, it’s time to make a peace offering. Art nods his chin toward Adán and the injured campesino and says softly, “I guess we both have things to keep quiet about, Tim.”
“Yeah.”
Art climbs into the back of the helicopter and starts to untie Adán. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Not as sorry as I am,” Adán says. He turns to Parada. “How’s his leg, Father Juan?”
“You know each other?” Art asks.
“I christened him,” Parada says. “Gave him his First Communion. And this man will be fine.”
But he gives Adán and Art a look that says something different.
Art yells to the front, “You can take off now, Phil! Culiacán hospital, and step on it!”
The chopper lifts off.
“Arturo,” Parada says.
“Yeah?”
The priest is smiling at him.
“Congratulations,” Parada says. “You’re a madman.”
Art looks down at the ruined fields, the burned villages, the refugees already forming a line on the dirt road out.
The landscape is scorched and charred as far as he can see.
Fields of black flowers.
Yeah, Art thinks, I’m a madman.
Ninety minutes later, Adán lies between the clean white sheets of Culiacán’s best hospital. The wound on his face from Navarres’s pistol barrel has been cleaned and treated and he’s been shot up with antibiotics, but he’s refused the proffered painkillers.
Adán wants to feel the pain.
He gets out of bed and walks the corridors until he finds the room where, at his insistence, they have taken Manuel Sánchez.
The campesino opens his eyes and sees Adán.
“My leg . . .”
“It’s still there.”
“Don’t let them—”
“I won’t, “ Adán says. “Get some sleep.”
Adán seeks out the doctor.
“Can you save the leg?”
“I think so,” the doctor says. “But it will be expensive.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I know who you are.”
Adán doesn’t miss the slight look or the slighter inflection: I know who your uncle is.
“Save his leg,” Adán says, “and you will be chief of a new wing of this hospital. Lose the leg, you’ll spend the rest of your life doing abortions in a Tijuana brothel. Lose the patient, you will be in a grave before he is. And it won’t be my uncle who will put you there, it will be me. Do you understand?”
The doctor understands.
And Adán understands that life has changed.
Childhood is over.
Life is serious now.
Tío slowly inhales a Cuban cigar and watches the smoke ring float across the room.
Operation Condor could not have gone any better. With the Sinaloan fields burned, the ground poisoned, the gomeros scattered and Áviles in the dirt, the Americans believe they have destroyed the source of all evil, and will go back to sleep as far as Mexico is concerned.
Their complacency will give me the time and freedom to create an organization that, by the time the Americans wake up, they will be powerless to touch.
A federación.
There’s a soft knock on the door.
A black-clad DFS agent, Uzi slung over his shoulder, enters. “Someone here to see you, Don Miguel. He says he’s your nephew.”
“Let him in.”
Adán stands in the doorway.
Miguel Ángel Barrera already knows all about what happened to his nephew—the beating, the
torture, his threat to the doctor, his visit to Parada’s clinic. In one day, the boy has become a man.