He almost didn’t, but Bellacosa flipped the switch with the green light, and, like some divination, a warehouse as big as a gymnasium lit up. He jumped back and turned the switch back off. A few seconds later he changed his mind and flipped it again, and as the lights came on the gurgling immediately seemed to get louder.
The effects of the peyote, having dissipated for a while, flared up. Bellacosa held the Trufflepig under his arm tightly like a stolen car stereo. Illuminated beneath the lights of the warehouse were aboveground troughs, lined up parallel to each other like furrows of onions growing in a field—about a score of them, at least fifty yards in length. Bellacosa felt not horror, but a deep revelation, even when he saw the muddy soil in the troughs sprouting bare limbs of gender-ambiguous adults. The sight was creepily familiar: he had seen this image before. Various pipes and tubes ran through the length of the troughs, and small machines pumped either gas or fluids in and out of them like artificial arteries.
Rows of mirrors hung from the ceiling, just slightly lower than the lights. Bellacosa thought, The body parts need a reflection of themselves to grow, like the earth reflects itself from the sky, and vice versa.
He felt very attuned to the artificial life growing around him, felt a certain pride to be walking among it. Bellacosa moved down one of the rows in the middle of the huge room, then stopped. He hallucinated the shack in Calantula County, where he was now sure he’d been born. Bellacosa saw his mother, his father, and when he focused on the trough closest to him clearly saw an adult’s shoulder, next to a foot and the hairless scalp of another person submerged in the dark mud.
Patterns of scalps and limbs were growing out of every trough, some of them emerging more confidently, like flesh-colored daisies from the black, cake-like soil. He looked up and saw the neck and lens of a camera pointing at him from the ceiling, and he was transported to the slave quarters on the property where he had the illegal dinner, standing in that stuffy room, watching the wired-up monitor, as it flicked through images from different security cameras. He made sure there was only one camera set up in the warehouse.
Ten feet in front of him, Bellacosa saw a dark-complexioned young scientist in a bodysuit, shot up dead on the cement floor. Standing there, holding the Trufflepig and hallucinating again on the peyote he’d been forced to take, Bellacosa heard nails being pried off an old gazebo. He wasn’t sure if the prying was coming from the dead young scientist or from the bodies being grown in the troughs. He heard the dragging of chains by dead, unforgiven armies, and the nails became doomed moans, growing in clusters like garlic cloves, and the carved-out shapes and shadows under the lights became cavalrymen, then a lynch mob, and they were coming for Bellacosa.
The warehouse went dark, and an alarm sounded with a circling-banshee red light. Bellacosa started to run, looking for an exit. He ran through the gurgling troughs, which became more like purgatorial supplications under the frantic alarm. He was desperate, and the Trufflepig was his only friend.
Bellacosa pushed open something heavy that felt like a door and he was outside. It was nighttime. There were a few lampposts giving off a turmeric light in a lot with many large warehouses and hidden crickets. Bellacosa heard humans hollering at a vague distance as the alarm sounded and the red pulsating light flapped its wings around like a buzzard circling on its prey. He had no idea who the enemy was, what had happened, or why they cared about him. He looked the Trufflepig in the eyes, like a pup he couldn’t keep. Bellacosa had an ominous feeling the Trufflepig must be left behind. That his survival depended on leaving it.
Immediately, he thought the opposite, that his survival actually depended on this creature. Again, he remembered his wife and daughter. Though he was positive the new memories of them weren’t real, he knew the Trufflepig had something to do with materializing them. The peyote had probably helped, and Bellacosa felt he was coming down off it again. He found a dark edge by the side of the warehouse, and there were loud hangar sounds coming from all around, creating a dust storm of noise.
Shots rang out, and Bellacosa heard the zooming of vehicles. Suddenly loud gunfire burst in rapid succession, from a machine gun at a distance. Creeping with his back against the dark warehouse wall, clutching the Trufflepig, Bellacosa got to a well-lighted area in the hangar and hid in the shadows again, trying to find where the shots came from.
Bellacosa saw Marcos, the young scientist, running backward, holding something bright like his forearms were on fire—the golden AK-47. He was being surrounded by an exaggerated number of Border Protectors. Marcos went for another mad dash of firing rounds that shot nobody, then a bullet picked him off and he hit the ground. Officers approached his body cautiously, as if he was still a threat. The Trufflepig had a mean streak of clear residue running down its eyes, like pulpy tears, and Bellacosa recalled the same thing had happened when the armed men beat up the other young scientist, Chivo.
Bellacosa saw the attention of his captors had been concentrated on Marcos’s spree, and things would be back to normal for them very soon. He ran in the opposite direction on his toes. He didn’t know why, but when he got to the end of the shadows he ran straight through the middle of the hangar. There was a wide, exposed area that he cut through, bathed in light and thinking he must be out of his damned mind.
But nothing happened.
The alarm in the hangar stopped circling the air. Bellacosa reached the last warehouse lined up in the lot, and toward the back of it found a patch in the fence with yellow “Caution” and “Warning” tape. A couple of trash bags were tied to the posts of the fence, too, as if covering up a break. Bellacosa thought it would be ridiculous if that’s what it was. He drew back the edge of a black plastic bag flapping in the wind, and that’s exactly what it was—a break in the fence. The night had temporarily busied itself with silence, and Bellacosa was suddenly so grateful that he could kiss the Trufflepig. But he didn’t. He squeezed between the bags and the metallic fence to the other side, where neither the ground nor the sky was visible, and ran away carrying the Trufflepig into the unknown. When he looked behind he saw every building in the hangar lit up, and painted on their angled aluminum roofs were the letters “McM.”
SIXTEEN
Bellacosa remembered the adage si hay piquete hay zancudo as he approached a dimly lit closed gas station—if there’s a bite there’s a mosquito. A taxicab sat with its motor running by the gas pumps, its headlights turned off. The driver was smoking a wooden pipe, wearing a thick scarf and a derby hat. He laughed loudly to himself when he noticed Bellacosa approaching from the portico darkness.
“Buenas noches,” Bellacosa said, and the taxi driver lowered the window all the way and replied, “Sobres, where did you come from, friend? Where’s your coat, they say it’s gonna be snowfall by sunrise.”
Bellacosa got into the taxicab and the driver turned on his lights and started rolling.
“I’m not even working right now,” the driver said, “just having a smoke before I get home. I live just down the road over there, but I’ll take you wherever you’d like, no worries.”
“That’s very kind of you. North MacArthur, please. Many thanks.”
“No problem, brother, no problem. I’m not even that sleepy yet. I’d just end up waking my wife. Slow night for me. I don’t allow animals in my cab, by the way. I don’t think any cab driver would allow that. Just for future reference. There’s gonna be snow in the morning, and I feel a little carefree right now, so it doesn’t matter. Are you a farmer? That’s a funny-looking pig. What’s his name?”
“His name? His name is Abuelito Kukú.”
The cab driver laughed and ashed his wooden pipe in the ashtray, under the stick shift.
“Kukú? Like a grandfather clock? Haven’t seen one of those in years. I don’t think either of my grandfathers even had a clock like that, that struck around the midnight hour, and a bird came out and would go kukú, kukú.”
His captors had left Bellacosa’s wallet surprisingly intact, a
nd when they reached his street in MacArthur he had just enough cash for the fare and a decent tip. Bellacosa saw his old Jeep was parked in an unusual spot, across from the house of the Padilla family.
“Keep the pig warm,” the driver said.
Bellacosa got out of the cab and felt how cold the night had become. He held the Trufflepig close as an electric chill shuddered through his body. He had his keys, too, another tiny miracle. Bellacosa picked a chile from the chile piquín tree growing at the side of the shack, ate it, then walked inside.
He finally set the Trufflepig down, on his couch, walked to the bathroom, took a crap, and when he finished realized he hadn’t seen the Trufflepig ever piss or shit.
Bellacosa took it out back, by the birch trees, and set it on the ground. The Trufflepig didn’t even move. Bellacosa got down on all fours to look at the Trufflepig’s face, as it stood there like a tree stump and stared back with sleepy eyes. Bellacosa felt tired and didn’t care if it shat or pissed in the shack, took it back indoors, and set it on the couch again. He didn’t trust falling asleep in the same room as the Trufflepig, locked the front door, shut off the lights. He closed the living room doors behind him, and also the one to his room, kicked off his dusty Franco Bruni shoes, and passed out without removing his dark blue suit.
After showering the next morning, Bellacosa sat on the easy chair by his altar and stared at the Trufflepig a good while. Only now was Bellacosa thinking of it as a living being. It stared back at him differently than any cat or dog, with lifeless eyes, like an armadillo, that were deceiving. He wasn’t sure if its leathery green exterior was its skin or some kind of shell. Its hooves were rough and piglike, and in the morning light pouring through the blinds, Bellacosa took a good look at the beak. It was brighter than a rooster’s beak, and larger. The Trufflepig was beginning to disturb Bellacosa. Then, strangely, the creature gave him some kind of assurance. He felt that if a Trufflepig could happen, that anything could happen, and Bellacosa began thinking of it as a kind of Tex-Mex platypus.
It occurred to Bellacosa that the people who’d taken him knew where he lived, and maybe they’d come looking for him when they saw their Trufflepig was missing. Bellacosa didn’t know what to do with the Trufflepig or why he’d acted on taking it. He definitely couldn’t be carrying it around town. Bellacosa spread a blanket in the bathtub and set the Trufflepig on it, along with a plastic cup filled with water. He found a bag of passable baby carrots in his refrigerator, and he sat on the toilet lid. The Trufflepig’s stumpy tail wiggled slowly. Bellacosa chuckled as he fed the Trufflepig a baby carrot. The Trufflepig took in the carrot through its beak and chewed with hidden inner teeth. Bellacosa fed it another one, then left a few down by the bowl of water on the towel, like it was having a little picnic in the tub, and he shut the restroom door.
Inside the old Jeep nothing looked like it’d been ransacked or even inspected. Bellacosa stabbed the key in the ignition, hit it, and the Jeep came to life. He grabbed the tin of mints he kept in the glove compartment: his emergency stash of money was still there.
“Puros milagritos,” Bellacosa said, slipping the bills into his wallet.
Bellacosa remembered the warnings of snow—but where’s the snow, he asked himself in jest, knowing very well the meteorologists in the Valley were excitable and prone to exaggeration.
Bellacosa drove by Teatro Los Alamos, and the marquee read “The Final Days of Kid Cabrito,” a biopic of the famous alcoholic boxer getting rave reviews, starring a young actor from South Texas, Salomon Gonzalez. He parked, bought a ticket, and walked into an already dark theater with the previews rolling. Bellacosa felt uneasy, like how Lee Harvey must have felt as they were coming to get him. He walked back out and got into the old Jeep, thinking, I can’t afford to be wasting time and money this way.
Bellacosa wondered how to start looking for his brother, Oswaldo, and scratched his chest on the spot over his heart. He thought about the unresolved business he had with his client who had disappeared in Mexico, Don Villaseñor, and drove to his restaurant El Caballo Ballo to find it shut down, with a delinquency notice signed by the mayor posted on the door.
This was a strange surprise for Bellacosa, and as he drove away he began to recount the hallucination he’d had in the mock hospital room with the Trufflepig. Out of curiosity he drove to the place where his business, RGV Uniforms, once stood.
He got to the overpass by the airport, and there was a building painted the color of old gold, with a very decadent mural portraying gangsters and brown women with big breasts and short shorts, hanging around a couple of souped-up lowriders. The name of the business hovered above in a jaunty font, “Trujillo Cruizerz.” A couple of mechanics were standing by a jacked-up Wild Child truck, drinking forties and smoking rolled cigarettes. They stared down Bellacosa until he passed and turned onto another street.
A whitewater sadness flowed through Bellacosa as he drove through the shady business district of downtown MacArthur. He felt like he’d temporarily experienced another life through the looking glass, and, stuck in this reality again, he felt cheated. If we remember dreams more vividly than actual experiences, which would be the true reality? What if what you once thought to be a memory never existed?
Bellacosa felt nauseated by the deaths he’d been so close to in the last few days, and how they’d felt like nothing. He knew somehow that those young scientists were the actual ones the syndicates made disappear, and the bodies that’d been reported by the media were other casualties. The syndicates were kidnapping new people, murdering them, using their bodies to take the place of the previous disappeared, in an endless cycle. Having seen the troughs with the torsos and limbs and scalps, and going over all the pieces, trying to put everything together, Bellacosa had an idea of what was happening in his world. He retched with the dry horror that Oswaldo was also another casualty. If the Border Protectors or the government or the syndicates, whoever it was running those warehouses, came to his shack and killed him, he wouldn’t mind one bit anymore.
I’m a Mexican, Bellacosa thought. Which means I am only human, and I’ve had enough.
Desperate for any kind of answer, it was then Bellacosa finally decided to find the journalist Paco Herbert.
* * *
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER Bellacosa was walking toward Baby Grand Central under a swollen purple sky that covered the city of MacArthur in fermented darkness.
“It’s snowing, it’s snowing,” said a little fat boy wearing a parka, jumping up and down, and holding the hand of an old lady in a houndstooth babushka by the fruit stand. The vendors who had opened their shops despite the weather warnings lined up along the arches at the entrance with a few stray customers.
A waitress over at Marselita’s with sandalwood-brown eyes was smiling, admiring the beginnings of snow with the others, when she spotted Bellacosa and signaled to the short, stocky cook that they had a customer.
“How you doing today?” the waitress said. She wore indigo lipstick with no other makeup.
“Good, good. And you? No Colleen Rae today?”
“What’s wrong with good ol’ me?”
“Nothing, apologies. I just can’t seem to recognize anybody today. I come here all the time and was hoping to recognize at least one face.”
“Do you know what you’re having?”
Bellacosa looked over their small, laminated menu and peeked at who was working the kitchen. As if it was the most difficult decision he’d ever made, he placed his order.
The waitress gave the ticket to the cook and when she came back she and Bellacosa introduced themselves by their first names.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Bellacosa said.
“Why do you ask me that? Are you asking me that because I’m black? And there’s a relatively low population of black people in South Texas and northern Mexico? Where do you think I’m from? I’m not gonna tell you, take a guess.” She waited, with her arms crossed. “Nope. Nope. Nope. One more, one more. N
ope. I’m gonna see what that other guy wants. In the meantime, think about it.”
She brought Bellacosa coffee and water without him asking, and a menu for the suit who’d just arrived. Bellacosa recalled the men he’d had an altercation with in his last visit to Marselita’s, and made sure this guy wasn’t one of them. When the suit noticed Bellacosa eyeballing him, he scowled, then the waitress came back and said, “If you must know, I just moved here from Monterrey. In the state of Nuevo León.”
“Ooooooooh,” Bellacosa said, and acted like he’d just got shot through the heart. The waitress laughed at his theatrics, then hung around the cook for a few minutes. She came back with Bellacosa’s food. The other customer didn’t order much and disappeared, leaving money on the table. She collected it and wiped down that spot, then stood on her toes to see the snowfall a little better.
Bellacosa said, “You oughta go see it. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve seen the snow. I mean, not down here, but it’s snow. Little, sugary things falling from the sky. I’ve seen it. I’m over it. Give me glaciers, the hard shit. Give me Pluto. Pluto’s not a planet anymore, is that weird to you? It was weird to my mom when it happened. There was a period there when we were growing up and really learning about math and science. You know, in school. And she’d just go on about how she’ll never believe those science books again, because they had taught her when she was a girl that Pluto was the ninth planet. And then a long time went by and people decided it actually wasn’t a planet, just a big rock of ice. It was always funny to me. I was always like, Mom, there’s moons revolving around Saturn that are bigger than Pluto. Now, if Pluto is going to be a planet, shouldn’t those moons also get to be planets? My mom’s probably around your age, so you must have grown up with that, too. This guy only wanted a lemonade. Can you believe that? In this snowing weather?”
Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Page 18