“Muñeco found him.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I’m not sure just how it happened. Your mom talked to my old lady, and she told me. They say he had a heart attack in the bathroom.”
“Shitting.”
“Washing his hands, they said.”
“Because of the soda.”
“No. They say he’d stopped.”
“Not a fucking thing since he came out of the can,” Nelson added. “I know ’cause I offered him a fix and he came this close to giving me a thrashing. It was like the thing had gotten to him, man. He was in general population too. We put up the money for privileges, but the kid they had as minister of public security wouldn’t take it. Seems like what we got was a lesson from the state. They took your old man out every day and whacked his nuts. Why d’ya think the old man let the AGO take the houses and the cars? You think he’d have done that if they hadn’t had him by the balls?”
We turn on Colón and down to Guerrero.
“Take the next turn after Diagonal.”
“What?”
“Here, dude.”
“But the funeral par—”
“I wanna drop by the Roman Wedding first.”
Nelson takes another right and we rejoin Guerrero at the wall with mirrored plasterwork. He then takes a left and we cross the Treviño neighborhood on Marco Polo as far as Vidriera. We park in front of the Roman Wedding, the disputed cantina that once belonged to my pop. There are “closed” signs on all the doors and in the windows. The pockmarks left by AK-47s on the facade blend in with areas of fifteen or twenty layers of peeling paint.
“Frigging Urko.”
“It wasn’t him.” Nelson plucks up the courage to contradict him. “He was in the bar that day. You think he was going to order all that gunfire on himself?”
Bebito gives him a backhanded slap.
“What the fuck do you know about anything, you knucklehead? Your brains are in your dick.”
Nelson nods. I inspect him covertly. The graying hair is new. I remember him as a colossal figure heading balls into the opposing goal during Llanos games in Asarco Park when I was a kid.
“Urko told the filth,” says Bebito. “Why d’ya think they picked me up? The two-timing rat prefers to offer his loyalty to the assholes who lost the war than to take over the pitch.”
“Sorry, Bebito,” says Nelson.
“And what’s all that shit about no bribes? When did you last hear of a damn screw not taking a bribe? Urko just said that to keep them quiet while he was fucking up Pop.”
“You’re right,” replies Nelson, and switches on the ignition of the Cutlass.
Tony is standing at the top of the wide, crowded steps leading up from the sidewalk. You can hear him shouting halfway down the street. As we drive past the funeral parlor, I open the window to get a clear picture of what’s going on. The well-dressed fatso guarding the entrance is dragging hard on one of his ears, seemingly trying to pull it off, as Tony pokes an index finger into his chest. A couple of steps below, Muñeco stands smoking.
Nelson joins the line of cars waiting to enter the parking lot. I see Uncle Chapete by a public telephone. He’s wearing a black suit, his arms are crossed, and he’s murmuring a prayer, looking blankly into the distance.
We park, get out of the Cutlass. The shapely calves of three plump little miniskirted cousins pass by. Our remaining men (no more than eight) move aside to make way for us. They are wearing off-the-rack black suits bought at the last minute in Del Sol or El Nuevo Mundo. We come across Iris: she looks awful, teetering back and forth across the entrance to the parking lot. She’s wearing a short, strapless mourning dress that hugs her boobs and her perfect high-class-restaurant-hostess’s glutes.
“Tell him to forget the ass licking,” she says as Bebito, Nelson, and I pass. “He was my old man, you bastards.”
She smells of Camay soap and Mennen peach shampoo.
On the sidewalk, Uncle Chapete greets us with open arms, like he’s trying to hug us and, at the same time, stop us from getting past him. His eyes are red; he’s been smoking a joint.
“He was only asking us to wait, Pop. Don’t be so tough on him.”
He likes playing the gangster, but this is a plea.
“Who?” asks Bebito. “Urko?”
“Your little brother Urko, Pop. Don’t be so tough on him.”
“That asshole ain’t my brother.”
Bebito bypasses Chapete and walks straight to the steps leading to the chapels. We follow behind. Muñeco watches us approach. He throws down his half-smoked joint, makes a wry face at me, and links his hands behind his back.
“You heard, Bebo? They won’t let us in till the son turns up, man. The son, for god’s sake. That fuckin’ fairy’s going too far.”
Muñeco tries to grab Bebito but Nelson pushes him aside. Bebito ascends the steps to where Tony is still standing, gets him in a wrestling hold, and pulls him down. Tony tries to defend himself, but when he recognizes our brother, he spreads his arms wide in a sign of surrender.
“They won’t let me in.”
“I know, dude. Me neither. Not even him, and he’s the eldest,” says Bebito, freeing him and nodding toward me. “No Pipo the Clown stuff, though.”
“Fuck that!”
Bebito strokes the back of his neck and kisses him on the cheek.
“I’m just gonna ask one thing, kiddo. Is this how you want your last sight of him to be?”
Marta, Tony’s mother, drags her boy off. He’s a kind of distant brother: I can’t have met him more than ten times max. Don Manos Torpes never wanted him mixed up in the business. He can’t be even eighteen: still in school. Tony starts screeching, breaks lose from his mom, and comes back to us. Tony, Bebito, Muñeco, and I sit on the steps to wait for Cousin Urko to turn up so we can go inside and say goodbye to Pop.
A little under ten minutes later, Urko descends from a Land Rover, escorted by his driver, Vic, and a short, well-hung thug he must surely be fucking. After him come Aunt Maruca and Doña Quecha, Bebito and Muñeco’s mother.
“I really didn’t see that coming, Sultanes,” says Bebito with a laugh, mimicking a sportscaster’s voice.
I look around and tally up the widows. Only my mom is missing. I suddenly feel I’ve got nothing to be proud of.
Urko passes Bebito and the other mourners, comes to where I’m standing, and hugs me.
“Sorry, cousin: I told them they had to wait for the eldest son. But they’re knuckleheads, and they got us mixed up.”
He’s wearing a three-quarter-length Dolce & Gabbana leather coat that, in the suffocating summer heat of the New Kingdom of León, makes him look like an elegant Italian gangster and, at the same time, the son of a suburban National Action voter. He’s covering his lazy eye with one hand and I notice he’s put on weight. Turning to Bebo, he lowers his hand and says, as if speaking to everyone:
“I think the right thing would be for his eldest son to say goodbye to the boss first. Agreed?”
He turns around and, without waiting for a reply, takes my arm and leads me toward the door of the funeral parlor. The others cluster behind us. Iris attempts to get her perfect high-class-restaurant-hostess’s figure up front, but Urko elbows her aside, almost knocking her over.
“Fucking sod. He was my man.”
Urko covers his lazy eye again so he can look at me with the good one. Just behind us are Maruca, Uncle Chapete, Tony, and his mother, Marta. I look around for Bebo and see him a couple of steps below, with Muñeco and Doña Quecha, his mother, holding an arm apiece, and escorted from on high by six feet, ten inches of Nelson. For no particular reason, I remember that Nelson used to drive us to elementary school. I give Bebo an uncertain look and he blows me a kiss and smiles one of those perfect smiles of his that, along with the latest-model truck, the Buchanans, the Banda music, and the high-caliber weaponry my father used to buy for him, have endowed him with the privilege of fucking the most beautiful asses in the Kingdom.
The well-dr
essed fatso guard opens both panels of the wooden door to let us pass. Urko and I stumble in, the crush of people forcing us forward. It’s dark. A switch clicks on and I hear that refrigerator buzzing of old fluorescent bulbs. Flat light splashes across the floor tiles. At the far end of a long green and coffee-colored room stands the coffin, covered with an array of white, yellow, and purple flowers. Urko drops my arm. At my back, I sense people fanning out, hugging the walls of the chapel as if fleeing death. I smell the nauseating scent of the newly lit candles, hear the first sobs, all of them feigned except for Bebito’s; his sound more like snorts and hardened snot. Dry-eyed, I walk to the coffin. Suddenly, I’m ashamed not to be wearing a tie. I think about the morning I first met my father.
I was seven years old and my grandma got me out of bed (it wasn’t yet light) and delivered me to my mom at the back door of a brothel called El Siglo XX. What I remember most clearly is that Mom’s eyelids were covered with some silvery powder that extended to her temples. We took a cab and she removed her makeup with Theatrical Cold Cream as we drove to a place on Calle Villagrán for an Eskimo juice. The sun was just coming up when we saw him on the other side of the street. He was setting up a stand selling heavy-metal T-shirts.
“Say hi to your father,” she said.
Mom swears to this very day that we met by pure chance, but I know she’d planned it: she’d fallen for some guy who couldn’t stand my being around and was pressing her to do something about it. Two months later I moved into the house belonging to Manos Torpes: that’s what everyone in the neighborhood called my father because he could lift a two-pint Carta Blanca in one hand as if it were half that size. His fists were as powerful as those of the great Julio César Chávez and his fingers and palms more solid than the Blue Demon’s.
Years later I helped him run the retail narco trade in Treviño. They used to call me Manitas, little hands. But although I was the oldest, for Pop I was never the firstborn son. That status belonged to Bebito: my father had actually married his mother, Doña Quecha. We all knew it and respected his decision. Except, it would seem, Urko.
I kneel on the wooden prie-dieu with satin cushions so that my head is only just above his, resting in horizontal comfort—or at least that’s how it looks—in the open coffin. He’s still the most handsome bastard I’ve ever seen in my life. The fags at the funeral parlor haven’t dared to spoil his face: barely a touch of makeup. He has a neatly cut salt-and-pepper beard, marked crow’s-feet, a finely shaped nose and mouth, and the scar of a knife wound crossing his left eye. My old man is beautiful. I want to kill him. I want to kiss him on the lips.
Around noon the next day, after the burial, Bebito makes us stop for tacos before going to the wake.
“We show up last and together,” he commands.
Marta, Tony’s mother, tries to stop her son from coming with us, until Bebito swears on Don Manos’s memory that it’s for his own safety, that nothing’s going to happen and that we’ll keep an eye on the beers. In the taqueria, Nelson and I sit at a separate table so as not to rile Muñeco. Then we pile into the Cutlass and head for the Roman Wedding.
“Take Avenida Carranza,” Bebito barks at Nelson.
Tony, Muñeco, and I are crowded into the back seat. Muñeco is pressed up against the window to avoid even touching me, as though I had mange. From time to time he looks over his shoulder, like he wants to put a bullet in me.
“Here,” says Bebito.
We park on Magallanes, the street that runs along the back of the cantina, and open the windows to smoke. The whole block is empty. There’s a red-hot-coal breeze, the sort that issues from the mouth of Monterrey in the summer. The only sound to be heard is the faint voice of Lalo Mora singing “Eslabón por eslabón.” We all smoke our own cigarettes.
“I want a shooter,” says Tony.
“What d’ya mean, a frigging shooter, you chickenshit sniveler? It’s a funeral, not a job!”
“So why not go in through the front door, like everyone else?”
Bebito doesn’t answer.
We scale the outside of Norma’s place, Nelson first, then Bebito and Tony. I bring up the rear. Muñeco has to be helped because he’s out of shape. Then we sit on the roof while Nelson runs along a couple of walls and descends into the yard via the Conchis’s house. While waiting, we do target practice, throwing pebbles at the wall of the adjoining building. It’s almost four, the sun is beating down like a bottle-blow to the head, it’s really hot, and that’s why I take off my shirt. After around fifteen minutes, there’s a whistle. I walk right to the edge of the roof. Nelson waves from the backyard of the Roman Wedding, holding a one-ounce bag of coke. We climb down the wall. Vic, Urko’s driver, comes out to meet us.
“Not real trusting, are you?”
No one answers.
Inside, Lalo Mora is still playing, and there are two-pint bottles of Buchanan’s 18 from Costco, small bags of coke, and six-by-eight-inch mirrors on all the tables; in the kitchen, Bro is working his ass off making carnitas tacos; by the jukebox, there’s a high stool with a red cushion and piles of ten-peso coins: everything just the way Manos Torpes wanted it. Fucking Urko, he didn’t even forget the Bulgarian girls from Don Raciel Pulido’s club, who right now are looking bored, dancing without poles in garish jumpsuits.
I put my shirt back on. Tony leans over a couple of lines, sniffs like a pro, and no one stops him: he’s fucking around, I think: fucking his mother, Marta. Muñeco, Bebito, and Nelson are sharing a table. I walk over to the end of the bar nearest the front door, where my cousin Urko and his shaved-headed, cocksucking thug are dishing out. Urko passes me a tortilla.
“We’ve just had tacos,” I say by way of apology.
Urko’s mouth turns down, as if he’s shrugging his shoulders, and he slides the plate along the bar and the thug catches it. My cousin’s lazy eye twitches again: he covers it with his hand. He’s taken off the Dolce & Gabbana coat and is now wearing a bright red chef’s uniform with a hat that has white skulls on a black background. We all know he’s not the one doing the cooking.
“Are you going to stay on?”
I shake my head. Urko grabs the back of my neck and pulls me toward him over the bar as though he’s going to kiss me. He keeps his other hand over his lazy eye. His breath smells of Listerine.
“Stay, dude. Stay here beside me a little while, now that you’re clean.”
“Word gets around.”
“Bebito’s full of shit, but you know what my pop wanted.”
“He wasn’t your pop.”
“He wanted them out of the business. For their own safety.”
“You never called him Pop.”
“That’s why he made me his second-in-command. I need you to keep that pack of hounds under control, dude. You know them. They’re good kids, but they don’t see the big picture. They don’t see the opportunities.”
“And I do, right? Because I fucked my nose up with coke.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about.”
Disappointed, he lets go of my neck and returns to the kitchen for more tortillas.
I order a mineral water, ask for a deck of cards, and play solitaire at the bar. Someone has turned off the jukebox without my even noticing. At the back of the room, the mothers are praying. Vic passes me on his way out into the street.
“Tell your cousin I’ll be in the wagon, will ya?”
I nod. When Vic opens the door, I glance outside. It’s beginning to get dark.
Iris is now sitting next to Bebito. She’s drunk as a skunk and snorting coke from the table with the long nail of her little finger, getting right up close to my brother’s face when she talks and brushing knees with him under the table. Urko’s thug turns to me with a smile.
“The old girl’s already looking for a replacement.”
Urko slaps him and says something I don’t catch. I’m not sure if that slap is just for my benefit, but everyone in the family knows Iris is a twin, and she always gets up close
like that when she’s talking, always, ever since she was a girl and we were all fantasizing about fucking her when she was a little older, never thinking that the one to win the prize would be our father. Even Urko imagined fucking her, and he doesn’t really like broads. We all ended up loving her like a kid sister.
Muñeco sits down next to me at the bar.
“Since when did you play solitaire, dude?”
I tell him the truth:
“It’s just my way of laughing in the face of temptation. Of not having a line. I’ll be on my way soon.”
“You should’ve laughed in that face earlier, you asshole. You could’ve saved me the beating of a lifetime.”
“I know, dude.”
We sit there in silence for a while: I’m concentrating on my game and he’s sipping his drink.
“At least I have the consolation of knowing you never got to say goodbye to my boss,” he eventually observes.
Then, like someone carrying the Olympic torch of another guy’s wound, he picks up his glass and disappears into the crowd.
He’s wrong.
A couple of months before they threw Manos Torpes in jail (around four months after I’d stopped smoking rock, begun going to NA, and started working in maintenance), he’d called me on my cell phone. He said my mother had given him the number.
“How you doing?”
“Fine.”
I thought: He wants to kill me. That’s why he called.
He didn’t mention the brick of rock I took with me when I fled the Kingdom.
“I’m here in Zacatecas, son. I need you to do me a little favor.”
He said he’d been driving from Guadalajara with an average load when he got a tip-off that they were going to take him at the Marine checkpoint. He said he’d pulled in at the roadside, buried four pounds of coke and a few bottles, and driven on to the checkpoint. The naval guys made him get out of the car, frisked him, roundly dissed him, and almost took the wagon to pieces but, not finding anything, had unwillingly let him go. He said he was in Zacatecas without any dough or goods, shitting his pants from the shock, and that all he wanted was to get a fix to lower the stress level and continue on his way. He was in rival territory, he said, and there was no way he could pick up the stuff personally, for fear of being recognized and turned in, he had no money, so please would I do him a little favor and speak to the dealers, because it’s not like I was anyone important. It all sounded like some bizarre story to get me out of my home ground and give me that slug in the ass or a planking, but … What could I do? It was my father on the other end of the line. I gave him my address, hung up, and called the number of the best dealer in the city: Manos Torpes never used poor-quality goods.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino Page 6