Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  Her face shut. ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ she said.

  ‘Off the record.’ I reached out the Coke can.

  She looked at the can with mistrust. ‘You people always say that.’

  ‘But this definitely is.’ I gave a backward nod at the apartment. ‘This guy. The victim? I knew him.’ The road blurred so much that I had to press myself against the wall to keep from hitting the curb.

  The technician took the can. ‘OK. But I won’t say much.’ She leaned against the ash-streaked bonnet of her car. ‘That scene – worst this year.’ She breathed out smoke. ‘Animals.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to this country. I say that every time. But I really don’t.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and sipped my Coke, and tasted nothing. ‘How’d he look?’

  She cracked open the Coke and took a long swig, then said, ‘Tortured, you know? Broken fingers. Shot through the hands.’

  His tattooed fists: the praying hands, the anchor and the motto.

  ‘Shot through the wrists.’

  In my head I saw a burn hole the octopus tentacles inked on his skin.

  She paused. ‘Broke a chair off in him. His rectum.’ She shut her eyes, breathed out hard. ‘Look, I’m really sorry.’

  The street wavered. ‘He bled out?’

  She shook her head. ‘Petechial haemorrhaging around the eyes. Hyoid bone snapped.’ Her voice had gone flat, like a printer spitting pages. ‘Not much blood from the chest wounds. Less from the forehead.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m guessing strangulation. Reverse chokehold.’

  My eyes shut on pictures of Carlos spraying aftershave on his throat, of my fingers winding in the hair that hung to his shoulders.

  ‘Shot in the chest,’ I said.

  The technician nodded. ‘Twice. Impact spread suggests hollow-point bullets.’

  ‘Gang-issue?’ I said, even though I already knew what she’d say.

  She shook her head. ‘Six impact cuts around a central wound.’ Then she nodded in the direction the cop car had gone, then shook drops of Coke into her mouth. ‘Police issue.’

  A cold weight shunted down my gullet.

  ‘Veracruz State Police,’ I said. ‘At a Mexico City crime scene.’

  She nodded. ‘And he wrecked the scene, too – so much fingerprint dust that I couldn’t see the blood patterns. Samples are destroyed.’

  ‘On purpose?’

  She gave me a withering look. ‘I couldn’t possibly speculate.’

  My belly squirmed. So crass to have blood, to breathe air, to hear my stomach groan even though I wasn’t hungry, never wanted to be hungry again.

  She checked her watch. ‘Look, I have to go. Here’s my number.’ She took a pen from her pocket and unlidded it with her teeth, before scribbling on a Superama receipt that she handed to me. ‘You need more, you call. I’m Teresa.’

  ‘You sure?’ I turned the card in my fingers. ‘That cop gave me the creeps.’

  She swatted the air. ‘I’m nobody to these state cops. They make shit for me, my boss makes shit for their bosses.’ She climbed into the car. ‘Thanks for the Coke.’

  The door slammed, and her car threw dust onto my jeans as she drove off towards Eje Cuatro, and for the first time in four years I found myself alone.

  7

  Back home, I lay down on the chaise-longue, the heels of my hands pressed to my eyes until I couldn’t see Carlos’ body on the stretcher for all the white stars. For a while my head was nothing but the noise of my fish-tank filters. Then Maya called, and brought everything back.

  ‘Oh, thank God. You’re OK.’ She sounded out of breath. ‘You heard?’

  ‘I saw.’

  Above my head hung framed encyclopaedia cut-outs about rural Mexico, the pictures taken back in the ’60s and ’70s. The looted pyramid at El Tajín stared back, a pile of empty eyes.

  ‘You went?’ Maya sat back so hard that I heard her chair roll backwards to thunk against the table. ‘How are you not terrified?’

  Julián Gallardo’s face watched me from the noticeboard.

  ‘Oh, I am,’ I said.

  Air pollution can do a lot of damage over time. Post-mortem studies of teenagers in Mexico City showed that the stuff in our air kinks your genes, makes your heart tougher over the short-term, but claps it out faster overall.

  Meaning you needed a mutant heart to live there, I guess.

  Me and Carlos, our hearts had gone mutant a long time ago. Meaning it hadn’t felt wrong to print out Julían Gallardo’s peeled face and hang it above the desk. Because if he hadn’t been our story before, he sure as shit was now.

  Maya’s breath went in hard. ‘You call Carlos’ mother?’

  ‘Hah.’ My voice was a torn wet tissue. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’d she say?’

  Behind me, the wall-size photo of a half-nude American footballer in Captain America body-paint looked from the wall, his creased-mouth smile mournful.

  The thought of his mother’s silence on the line when I’d called her, the blame in her voice, they shook me harder than that cop’s metal grin.

  ‘As little as possible,’ I said.

  You could practically hear Maya grimacing on the other end of the line.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, even though we both knew it wouldn’t. ‘But, well – this is going to sound crazy,’ Maya said in my ear. ‘But after this? You need to protect yourself, yeah?’

  ‘How?’ I rubbed my temple and got up from the chair, unpinning the blotter of Díaz Ordáz from the wall, running my finger over the tabs that me and Carlos would never take together.

  Maya paused. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘How do the bad guys do it?’

  She wasn’t bluffing. One of the first news stories Maya had showed me of hers – back during the English teaching days – was about how she’d bought a gun in Tepito for three thousand pesos.

  ‘You’re right. That is crazy,’ I’d said to her then, in that basement classroom on Calle Alfonso Reyes, and I said it to her again now.

  ‘True,’ Maya said. ‘But after this, yeah? You’re kind of crazy if you don’t.’

  I stopped at the giraffe orchids, ran my fingers over their petals, their black centres neat as zeros.

  Hollow-point bullets, Teresa had said. Six impact cuts ringed each wound.

  My hand was damp against my forehead. ‘I can’t believe this is real.’

  At the clay garrafón in the kitchen I filled my dinged metal water flask to just below the neck, tore off a strip of tabs, halved them and tamped them in, then put on the lid before shaking until the dissolved tabs slopped against the metal.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Maya.

  ‘Uh,’ I said. ‘Making a smoothie.’

  ‘Good,’ said Maya. ‘Get something down you, yeah? Even if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Oh, I will.’ Cold gulp rocked my throat, washing away the rust-taste leaking from my bitten cheek.

  Microdosing, it’s called, when you dissolve acid tabs in water and top up your high over a period of hours, and it spreads your thoughts out in a gauzy web, makes your attention into a spider-pick along ideas as clear and bright as metal struts.

  Yeah, well, what I was doing now, call it megadosing.

  ‘So, tomorrow?’ I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, half-dissolved chunks of blotter clogged in my teeth.

  ‘Yeah, he says eight a.m.,’ said Maya. ‘Meet me at the Salto del Agua church.’

  Acid takes an hour to metabolise, usually, but I was so strafed with grief that the serotonin had already rushed my brain, thick and white as steam, meaning I had about a minute to get things set up before my medulla was drowned and I was more acid than man.

  ‘You don’t want me to pick you up?’ I asked, unlocking my desk’s bottom drawer and pulling out a tape marked ‘CARLOS // EL PASO // 30 / 12 / 2012’.

  ‘Nah, you just eat something and go sleep, yeah?’

  The cassette clicked into my tape recorder, the one I’d
stolen from the school where I’d taught, and I flicked the switch marked ‘PLAYBACK’.

  ‘You’re so calm,’ I said.

  I heard her swallow, take a deep breath and say, ‘Well, someone has to be, right?’ She coughed, sniffling, and said, ‘Here, I’m gonna go mop my face off, yeah? I’ll check on you later.’

  When she hung up I turned my phone off and lay down on the chaise-longue, my Sennheisers snug on my ears. On the recording the mic stopped crackling and mine and Carlos’ voices rose through my headphones, turning my cigarette smoke to snow over El Paso on the morning I met him, while the river noise of my fish tanks washed me back into four years before.

  8

  The plane to Ciudad Juárez that December morning left me the same greenish tinge as the snow clouds above. None of what I was doing made any sense to me. It was all too sudden, too new. But I told myself that this feeling was what I wanted, and kept walking to the taxi rank.

  A week earlier, at the end of class, Maya had been zipping shut her bag when she’d asked if I’d wanted to make some extra money over Christmas.

  ‘Obviously,’ I’d said, lifting my tie to show her the frayed end.

  ‘Well, if you want, right?’ She’d taken her phone out. ‘I got asked to go up to El Paso. A story. This journalist who can’t go back to Juárez. Some death thing.’

  ‘“Death thing”?’

  She’d pulled a face. ‘Well, OK, so some death-threat thing. But Juárez is fine now.’ She’d wavered her hand. ‘Ish.’

  ‘I don’t know, Maya,’ I’d said, tidying a sheaf of papers. ‘I get nervous in the colonia Juárez – and they’re gentrifying the shit out of that place.’

  ‘C’mon, please? I don’t want to do the story.’ She’d pouted like a toddler.

  ‘Because it’s dangerous.’

  ‘No, because I want to go back to Durango and lie on my back at my mother’s house, eating my own fucking weight in bacalao.’ She’d handed me a slim business card with the name ‘CARLOS ARANA // FOTÓGRAFO’ on one side and a picture of a cage fighter whose inner-lip tattoo read JARDCORE.

  ‘Consider this,’ Maya had said, bowing, ‘my Christmas gift to you.’

  The cage fighter’s lip shone livid pink on the card.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ I’d said. ‘I think.’

  In the backseat of the taxi I turned the card in my hands, driving through the smoky winter morning, as far as the International Bridge. On the pavements either side went revellers headed for home and labourers headed for work, their breath smoking in the air, their chuckles and gags breaking through the window. Army trucks roared past under switched-off Christmas lights that looked as sad as dead coral. From the newsstands the morning papers said ‘72 HOURS WITHOUT A MURDER’, like that was a good thing. ‘Missing’ posters hung from the post boxes – ‘Help find Marisela, Carmen, Estefanía’ – under a flitter of snowflakes as pale as moths.

  Getting out at the border crossing I stepped into an explosion of laughter from a gang of twenty-something girls off to work the El Paso malls’ Sunday-morning shift, turned my collar up against the wind’s big gusts, and walked through customs and into the U.S.

  Carlos’ hotel on the El Paso side was a rain-faded shade of orange, between a shuttered Walgreens and a bail-bondsman’s sign that read 1-888-GET-U-OFF.

  When I texted Maya to say I’d arrived OK she replied with a picture of an extremely tall sandwich beside a box-set of The Wire, so I leaned against the wall, smoking, checking my notes on Carlos, and burning all over with envy, because, back when I was driving my dad’s 1991 Toyota Corolla through the fields and taking pot-shots at rabbits, Carlos had been working the crime pages and avoiding pot-shots from gang members. His bylines hurt to read: The Times, the New York Times, the Financial Times – and that was just the papers with Times in the name.

  And then there he was, a stooped shape in a black coat, held at the crux of the glass and steel buildings at the end of the street. In one hand he held a battered guitar case. From the other swung a twelve-pack of Dos Equis.

  Through a curtain of cigarette smoke and wavy brown hair, he raked a look over me and said, ‘You the interviewer guy?’

  I pointed at the guitar-case. ‘You definitely the photographer guy?’

  He coughed out a one-syllable laugh.

  ‘Sometimes your side gig’s your main gig, you know?’ He had that smooth, sidling NAFTA English, all wide vowels and clipped consonants. When he shook my hand I saw a black-and-grey tattoo of octopus tentacles reach up over the back of his hand, tapering right up to his bitten nails.

  ‘You eat breakfast?’

  ‘No.’ I held out my hand and took the beers from his hand. ‘You?’

  ‘You’re carrying it.’

  His room smelled of hash-smoke, adrenal sweat, stale beer. Books by Mallarmé, Nicanor Parra, and Michael Herr were stacked on his locker.

  ‘Take a seat.’ Both the room’s twin beds had been slept in, or at least passed out in, littered with rumpled Levi’s and cigarette-boxes. ‘Mi rúm es tu rúm, güey. Shove over whatever, the whole place is chaos anyway.’ He shook a bottle at me. ‘Grab what you want. They’re not dead cold, but hey.’

  ‘Bit early for me,’ I said. ‘Thanks, though.’

  ‘Don’t let me drink alone, cabrón. Sign of alcoholism.’

  ‘So’s drinking before noon.’

  He cocked the base of his bottle at me. ‘So’s timetabling your drinking.’

  ‘Fine.’ I cracked a bottle open with my lighter.

  Carlos shucked off his coat and slung it on the back of his chair. His white shirt was crossed by the thin leather harness of a shoulder holster.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, vato.’ He unbuckled the harness. ‘I can barely shoot a camera.’

  ‘No bullet-proof vest?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Too heavy to run with.’ He slid a stout grey Colt .45 from the holster. ‘And the mamónes know how to make sure anyway.’ He stowed the gun under his pillow. ‘Wearing a vest is like saying your life’s worth more than the people you’re reporting on.’ He flung himself down on the bed.

  ‘What’s the gun say?’

  ‘That my life’s worth more than a cop’s.’ He gave me a hard look. ‘You want to argue that one?’

  ‘Not with that lying there.’

  The grimy windows were a balcony on Juárez. Grey fog coiled under the arches of the faux-colonial international bridge, while Yaqui vendors toted their wares in and out of the traffic stalled on the Avenida de las Américas, the whole scene shadowed by a grey ruck of mountains.

  Carlos took a drag of smoke and a long pull on his beer, his chest heaving as he suppressed a belch. ‘And so, these questions?’

  ‘Sure.’ I unsnapped the elastic band that held my notebook shut. ‘How does it feel to be Mexico’s best young photojournalist, but not to be able to work in Mexico?’

  Carlos’ eyes narrowed. ‘Fuck called me that?’

  ‘Maya.’

  ‘What else she tell you?’

  ‘That you’re not as much of a try hard as your business card.’

  He cackled and rubbed his jaw. ‘Fucken ouch, man. Nah, but not working? That shit’s hard, vato.’ He gestured out the window. ‘The things going down back home, we’re talking pictures enough to make a career, cabrón.’ His voice was warm with awe, envy, bloodlust. ‘And I’m missing it.’

  ‘You feel safe here?’ I said, then clicked my tongue: I was snapping into my questions too fast, and I’d probably spook him if I kept it up.

  But Carlos just shook his head and said, ‘Not after this morning, man.’ He took a swig of beer. ‘You know why I left, right?’

  As I shook my head, he took a cigarette from my pack, lit up, and, after three drags, started talking.

  ‘So this is nine months ago. And I’m driving home from work at Diario de Juárez. And where I lived at that time, me and my mother, yeah? This place, our place, it was way out. You can hear no
thing out there.’ Cigarette smoke traced the wave of his hand in the air. ‘Like, for example, as a kid, I’d be staying up, late nights, just watching the trucks come speeding through the dark, from Hermosillo, Chihuahua, Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, from all these places.’ He rapped the air with the edge of his hand. ‘Like, that’s how boring we’re talking. Those trucks passing by all lit up was, like, an event, or whatever.’ He flicked ash. ‘And so, you know, there I am, driving home. Desert road, black all round, lights on green signs, shadows of cactuses, nothing else. And then this fucking cop car, blue and white, out of nowhere.’ He took another drag. ‘Three cops. Federales. Big units, yeah? One waves me over. Has this sort of wrestler beard.’

  ‘Wrestler beard?’

  He mimed a circle around his mouth. ‘That fucken goatee thing.’ He shrugged. ‘Metal fans, wrestlers, perverts, they all have this beard. What it’s called, I don’t know.’ He cackled again and took a long drink, scratching his neck. ‘Anyway, these guys, right. They give me the usual: “Can we see your licence, get down from the vehicle, please,” all that, yeah? And, when I do, one of them kicks out the backs of my knees, drops me to the ground, while this wrestler beard one, he puts his gun right here.’ Carlos screwed his finger against the skin between his eyes.

  The tape recorder whirred in the silence. ‘But why?’

  He sat up. ‘My job, cabrón. Crime reporting. And if the cops are doing the crimes, the cops get pissed off.’ He took the pack of cigarettes from the bed I sat on, then took the gun from under his pillow. ‘These cigarette right here, yeah? That’s the street gangs. You have your Barrio Azteca, your Artistas Asesinos, your small local sets with, like, eighteen soldiers, max. Harmful in numbers but –’ he shook the packet ‘– you know, lightweight. And this, yeah? –’ he held up the gun ‘– this is the main guys, Chapo’s boys, the cops, the local politicians, a couple businessmen, all the big cheeses sticking together. And so when the army comes into Juárez, what are you going to do?’ Carlos held up the cigarettes. ‘You go after a numbnuts coalition of goons?’ He held up the gun. ‘Or a bunch of guys protected by the government since the year dot?’

  ‘You go after the small-timers,’ I said. ‘You see can you work your way in with the big shots. You see can you get a cut.’ I was quoting stories Maya had told me. ‘Same as everywhere.’