“I didn’t intend any disrespect.”
“But you paid her! I saw you pay her. Everyone saw you pay her and then walk away. What are you saying, that she is the kind of girl you would pay not to fuck? Is that what you are saying? Drink your tequila.”
By now the truckers and anyone else who had come down to party had gone away with their girls or gone home. What men were left in the cantina sat alone and without speaking, hunched and wasted, staring down into their drinks while the girls slouched quietly beside them and waited for what happened next. Ethan stood.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
“Maybe you do not like women?” Javier said. “Is that it? I saw you leave the Plátano Verde.”
“The what?”
“The fag bar.”
“That was a pretty good bar,” Ethan said.
Javier sprung up, stepped toward him and brandished the tube of Vaseline. He spread some right from the tube onto his lips. He smacked them together a few times.
“It is very dry here. The skin is always dying.”
“Look,” Ethan said. “I gave Yolanda all the money I had left. What do you want?”
“I want you to apologize to her. I want you to make amends.”
“Okay, I’ll apologize. Where is she? “
“In our room. In the back. It is not far.”
“I’m not going into any back room,” Ethan said.
THEY STOOD ON THE THRESHOLD of a bare room wavering under the candle flame: a couple of Coronas sweating on a square wooden table, an empty sugar cane chair, an elaborate papier-mâché nativity scene, and Yolanda sitting quietly in the corner.
“Please sit,” Javier said, and Ethan did. Javier folded his knife and put it away. He stepped back from Ethan, circled the room and stood behind Yolanda. Somehow, in the moment between closing the blade and stepping again into view, he had pulled his hat back on. Yolanda did not turn around and he perched there behind her with his long hands draped loosely over her shoulders like epaulets.
“Well?” he said. “Apologize.”
Ethan didn’t think this was a shakedown, not anymore, but in the candle’s shudder, he still couldn’t read Yolanda’s expression.
“I didn’t mean any offense, Yolanda. You seem very nice.”
Javier said, “Give me the bag, Yolanda.”
She reached down and placed a blue Indian coffee bag on the table. Ethan could see by its shape that it did not contain coffee.
“A man’s love is his pride,” Javier said. “A man’s love is his pride and you have spit on it. A man may do a million things. He may murder his brother, he may spend all night digging a hole in the dirt and into this hole he may put whatever he wants. Ten severed heads. Fifty severed heads. A hundred heads! There is nothing to stop him. There is no order. Except love and commerce. In these things there are still laws, and tonight you have disrespected both.”
About this, Ethan could not argue. If there were rules of love or order he had not abided by them. During the first of Samantha’s three-day detox holds, he had sat by her bed as if he had a right to be there, hoping that somehow, by some alchemy, she would step back out of this and into life and marriage with him. He stood. The tied bag, he saw, was squirming on the table.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “There’s no reason not to let me go.”
“You have apologized, but you have not made amends.”
“Let him go,” Yolanda said.
“I’m out of cash. What more can I do?” Ethan said.
Javier nodded down at the wriggling bag.
“Take it to the border. Cross over tonight.”
Suddenly there was laughter on the other side of the door. Men wandering in. More sirens in the road.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” Ethan said.
“Let him go,” Yolanda said again.
“But he hasn’t even complimented my nativity scene,” Javier said.
Ethan didn’t know what to say. Was this a joke? Javier hadn’t moved; his hands were still draped over Yolanda’s shoulders and his long face hung heavily out of the shadow of his hat. He appeared in aspect entirely without whimsy, some awful scarecrow come drifting out of blighted fields, and behind him, in the nativity scene, there were plastic dinosaurs—plastic dinosaurs and soldiers and real geckos with red eyes slinking between the dinosaurs.
Ethan said, “I like the dinosaurs, but I’m not touching that bag.”
Javier reached up and pinched his nose; he ran his index finger along his open lips; he smiled.
“Where do you think you are?” he said. “What do you think this is? Some Cadillac bar? Some Tijuana donkey show? Is that why you’re here? Did you come to see women get fucked by donkeys? Is that what you think my girl should be doing?”
“Sure,” Ethan said. “I came for all the shows. Donkey shows, iguana shows, chupacabra shows. Let every woman conjoin with every beast. Present the virgins to the Minotaur.”
Later, Ethan remembers it like this: Javier pushing Yolanda to the ground and flipping the table up into his face, so that the bottles, the bag, the weight of the wood itself struck him in the chest and he was stumbling back, already off balance, when Javier hit him with a tight hook to the cheekbone and it wasn’t a great punch—not well aimed or well landed—but Ethan went down to his knees anyway from the shock of it, and then, when Javier’s boot found his ribs, he was curled amidst the splintered ruins of an empty table and overturned chair on the damp concrete. He heard the knife open before he saw its blade flare in the candle’s light and he knew he should say something but there was no time to say anything at all.
“Levántate,” Javier hissed, and Ethan tried but he could not yet find purchase in the spinning haze of the room and his hands slid out from under him in the thrown wreckage of the table.
“Levántate,” Javier said again. Ethan saw Yolanda step forward, step over him maybe, and take Javier’s arm, the one holding the knife. She spoke to him in Spanish that Ethan could not follow and he shook his head and when he did the light from the cantina played quickly across his face and Ethan realized that the door must have been knocked open and whoever was still left in the bar was watching this happen, watching as Javier flung her off so hard that she fell back into the nativity scene while Ethan reached for a Corona and lurched and stood and shattered it across Javier’s face as he loped toward him with the knife still at his side.
They stood there for a moment, Ethan and Yolanda and the patrons and prostitutes, in the stunned silence of the aftermath, as if everything that had just occurred was not possible, an action nightmared and then discarded in some other world—Ethan rising fast and swinging the bottle as his knees straightened, the shocking pop of glass and audible wet slitting of skin against bone and Javier reeling, already spraying blood like an Albert and Costello spit-take, dropping to the floor. Then Ethan just standing in the smoke and the bleeding bar lights, standing and panting and clenching the long jagged neck of the Corona.
Yolanda touched his shoulder, and then his arm, and then his hand. She wrapped her fingers in his, pulled him, and when he responded, when he turned and looked at her, she began to run.
The crowd parted for them, spread out for the whore and the gringo with the bottleneck trailing blood. Yolanda pulled him and he followed and they moved through the crowd, they stumbled and ran and broke out through the door as the bar again erupted into sound.
Outside, Ethan turned to run down the main street, down the street and to the gate, but Yolanda stopped and pulled him back into the dark cove of the cross alley.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“I’m saving your life.”
“But the gate’s that way.”
“They will never let you through the gate,” she said.
They stood in the corner where the alley met the main street. From inside the bar there were shouts and scuffling boots and men rushing out into the road. He stepped farther back into shadow and watched her as the humming
neon sign slicked her hair green.
“I gave you all the money I have,” Ethan said.
“Oh, shut up and come on,” she said as she turned and stepped into the dark.
HE FOLLOWED HER DOWN the alley that at first seemed completely destitute of light—but not of sound. Women he could not see called to him from the doorways and high windows of whatever buildings framed the street. Salsa music and rap blared under the Plexiglas canopy and always about him he heard the feathered wing beat of rising birds. Once, they passed a man lying on his face in the street and Ethan sensed in the playing layers of shadowed dark the massing presence of waiting rats. A woman wept in some side grotto and another ran out suddenly into the road to beat on the hood of a car with a mangled toaster oven. Yolanda hurried before him and he stayed behind her, moving carefully. The dirt road was pitted and uneven and he stumbled through beer cans, broken glass, and strange deep puddles whose origins he did not wish to know.
She turned once.
“Come on,” she said. “We do not have much time.”
As they went on he began to perceive what little light there was: the blue glow of electric mosquito lamps popped in windows, weak neon light leaked from beneath uneven doorways, and like a photographic image slowly developing under the darkroom’s red safety light, the alley unveiled itself to his inspection. Here stood no bars, but half-built buildings of crumbling concrete strangely latticed with iron-barred windows and sloping tin-shingled roofs. Now he could see the women he’d heard calling to him: they sat on stools under crooked porticos or watched him from high porches where, if one were to step through the empty doorways, some strange curl of darkened stairs must lead. They perched there and whistled and laughed. From a verandah above a woman wailed again and again, “Pero el llanto es un perro inmenso.”
Ethan turned his gaze back to the road that wound past cars without wheels, turned and watched Yolanda walking quickly ahead of him. Above the music, he heard glass breaking and babies squealing and he looked up to the high porches and saw that where light shone the air shivered in a haze of swarming insects.
Then the road ended and Ethan was beside Yolanda, standing at the concrete perimeter wall. He turned and looked back the way they had come, but the street was dense with the new dark and he could not imagine treading that way again.
“It’s a dead end,” he said, and knew then that she’d tricked him, had lured him down here.
She pointed to the base of the wall where the concrete met the street. “This is the only other way out.”
He glanced down at the hole dug in the muddy earth. He glared at it a moment and then looked around to either shadowed side to see if he’d missed something.
“No fucking way,” Ethan said.
“What? You are too good to crawl on your knees?”
The hole was no more than four feet wide and certainly less than three feet high. It was cut low and sickle-shaped and though the wall could not be very thick, the distance to crawl very far, Ethan could not see any light shining through. It was dark and sour-smelling and he felt the mud’s wet slick with his boot’s inspection.
“It’s wet,” he said.
“Of course it is wet. This is where the alley drains to. That is how the mud is soft enough to dig.”
“And this leads outside?”
“Yes, it leads outside and into the street.”
“Tell me again why I’m not just using the gate?”
“Because the man you hit is a traficante for the Juárez cartel, and in the Zone the police give free passage to the traficantes. You would be killed at the gate.”
“None of that made any sense,” Ethan said.
“Do you want to die? Or are you just an asshole?”
Ethan didn’t see why it had to be one or the other. He peered down into the hole, where a spent condom floated on the mud like a jellyfish.
“I’d never fit.”
“No,” Yolanda said. “You are not as big as that. Now go. When you come through to the other side you will be on Calle Juárez. Walk two blocks to your right and turn left on Calle Jimenez and go to the twelfth house. When you get there knock and an old woman will answer the door. Tell her I sent you. Tell her you are here to help Mirabelle.”
“Mirabelle?”
“Yes. Mirabelle. Are you too drunk to understand?”
“By half,” Ethan said.
Yolanda touched his wrist. In the mist of bad light the scar on her collarbone looked like a raised seam of marble.
“Calle Juárez, Calle Jimenez, twelfth house, Mirabelle. I got it,” Ethan said.
“Good. Now please go.”
“Is there any chance that you’ll be able to find my bag and camera?”
“Hurry,” Yolanda said.
“You’ll meet me there?”
“Yes, of course,” said Yolanda already starting to turn back down into the alley. “Do not worry, this favor comes with a price.”
On the last morning in New York before it happened, Ethan rose from the couch where he slept, stepped into their room and opened the window. He went over to the bed and sat down softly. “Samantha,” he said. “I’ve made coffee.”
She turned in her sleep, turned and covered her face with her hands and woke suddenly.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“The coffee’s warm.”
“Why’s it so cold in here?”
“I thought I’d open the window.”
“I hope you thought better of it.”
“It’s open.”
“Ethan,” she said, and looked at him for the first time and said it again, his name, like she was trying to fit it to what she saw, and could not.
“Yes?”
“It’s the middle of December,” she said.
Ethan walked over to the bedside table and cleared it. He picked up the mug and the vermouth and held the vodka under his arm.
“We needed some fresh air.”
“You’re a sanctimonious prick, Ethan.”
“I made you coffee,” he said. “It’s warm.”
“Can you close the window?”
He closed it and pulled the shutters. Outside, the sun broke in slantwise shards off the windshields of passing traffic. He picked up the bottles again and walked to the door.
“Coffee’s ready,” he said.
“Don’t pour those out,” Samantha said as she pulled the covers over her face like a shroud.
ETHAN SAT at the kitchen table and waited. When he heard the shower come on, he began to sip his coffee; when he heard it turn off, he poured two bowls of cereal and cut up some bananas. He stood at the balcony window. Outside, blue clouds drifted across the sun. Down in the street, fifteen floors below, the noodle vendor assembled his cart.
“It’s going to snow,” Ethan said to the closed door. “Don’t forget your boots.”
When she came out she was dressed for work and her hair was up and he could see the warm water from her hair slicking on her neck like sweat. He touched her arm.
“How are you feeling?” he said.
They sat and ate and he stared at her across the table while cars revved and blew their horns and pigeons cooed and flushed and settled on the sill.
She looked up at him from her cereal. Already, even before breakfast, she was wearing lipstick.
“What?” she said. “What are you thinking now?”
He was thinking of how it used to be that she’d come out of the shower in the morning with her hair in a towel and glasses on because she hadn’t put her contacts in yet. He remembered how he’d come up behind her, hand her her coffee, kiss her neck and her collarbone and her shoulders, how her skin would be beaded with water, how her hair where it escaped the towel would smell like lavender and raspberries. He was thinking that now she stepped out of a shower like that was all she needed to step out of; he was thinking that now her contacts were already in and she didn’t smell like anything at all.
When Ethan broke through to the surface, he vo
mited and wiped his mouth and vomited again. He wiped the mud from his nose and wiped it from between his fingers and leaned back against the wall. There was something in his hair, a slick strand of plant or tendon that he jerked and cast from him as he would an insect that suddenly lighted there. He sat against the wall and gasped and tried to breathe through his mouth to avoid gagging again on the humid rot of the alley’s reservoir, but when he did, he inhaled something like the skim off fouled milk and he was retching again on his knees in the street.
A block away, a fountain bubbled in one of the city’s hundred deserted plazas. Ethan ran and threw himself into it. The water was oily and shallow. Drunks probably pissed there. It occurred to him that lying in the absurd fountain in the wasted plaza with the warm, likely infected water sloshing over him was the least stupid thing he had done all night.
Finally he stood, wrung out his shirt, and began to walk. The street was empty but for two lean and mangy dogs that limped the far sidewalk. The sound of Boystown’s revelry wafted through the walled city in a static hum. Beyond that, there was little sound but the crunching of his feet on the street’s pitted concrete, a car alarm sirening in the distance. The way was not lit, and he knew that here, where mass murder was a daily occurrence, where cartels ravaged the streets with hyperbolic displays of violence, where shop owners pointed loaded shotguns at you as you entered their stores and nights quaked with the concussion of grenades—here a gringo did not walk alone after dark.
But he did and the night was empty and quiet and the air in the street was heavy with coming rain. He turned left on Calle Jimenez and walked a road slanting down into the far city where the houses stood crumbling and, like most that he had seen beyond the border, half built. Three and a half walls were marred by gaping holes, the outlines of doors uncut and tiled roofs clearly unfinished, as if just after the town’s conception the builders had fled some pestilence. He saw shadows move in the holes but could not discern their form. Now, in the near distance, he heard the soft gurgle and splash of another fountain. He counted the houses as he went and came to the twelfth one. He walked up and down the street and counted them again and arrived at the same house. It was no different than any of the others: whitewashed concrete, iron-barred windows and an iron-gated door, an eastern wall unfinished and boarded with plankwood and a Pepsi-Cola sign near its apex.
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