Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  The GPS said five more minutes, but the traffic said different. My teeth found a hangnail and I tugged at it until the quick red zip of pain cut off my thoughts. When the cars budged and flowed, I cut down a quiet street of cobbles, plane trees, luxury apartments built in the ’70s, past an artisan bakery, past a restaurant behind tall metal security doors where yuppies and hipsters forked up Italian food. When I got to the café its shutters were down and a brown-haired woman dressed in black was dragging a couple of Acapulco chairs and potted ferns in from the terrace.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, when I’d parked beside a shiny red Honda 450 dirt bike and gotten out of the jeep. ‘We’re closed.’

  ‘I’m not a customer,’ I said, goat-footing it through the drench and under the awning, my press lanyard held up. ‘Guy work here called Leo?’

  Her eyes took on a hard shut gleam. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Isn’t this his bike?’ I pointed at the Honda. ‘Motocross fan, I’d heard.’

  A door slammed inside the café and I heard someone turning a tap.

  She shook her head at me, then craned around the door. ‘Leo? Someone’s here. Some journalist.’

  Footsteps clumped across the pale wood floor. He looked nothing like his LinkedIn photo: he’d gotten contacts, grown one of those huge lumberjack beards, shaved his head, covered his arms in bright, clean-lined Sailor Jerry-style tattoos – a cormorant, a seagull, a mermaid, an anchor.

  ‘What’s this about?’ he said, drying his hands on a towel.

  ‘Sorry for coming so late.’ I handed Leo one of my cards. ‘We’re doing a story about Poza Rica. You have a minute?’

  The woman came back out through the door, the hood of a pink rain-jacket pulled up over her head. She handed Leo a bunch of keys. ‘I’m going to go, OK? I don’t want to hear about that place again.’ She walked away fast.

  Leo tapped the card against his knuckles, looking at the writing. ‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in. Coffee?’

  ‘Bit late for me. Water’s fine, thanks.’

  ‘I might make one. Long day, you know?’ He went around behind the bar and tipped beans into the grinder, flicked a switch.

  ‘Nice place,’ I said over the whining grinder. ‘Lighting’s nice and dim.’ I tapped the windowsill. ‘Scrap-metal’s always a good look. You open long?’

  ‘Year and a half.’ He jetted hot water into a small white cup. ‘Me and Erika and her boyfriend, we all lived in Poza Rica together. Got sick of the place. Her boyfriend, he’s studied tourism, hospitality, everything like that, and Erika’s parents used to do agronomy stuff for coffee growers. So I took out my savings, retrained as a barista, moved here with them.’ He handed me a glass of water and sat down opposite me. A gust flung rain against the windows. ‘You mind me asking what this is about?’

  ‘Just a few general things.’ I shrugged. ‘Saw on LinkedIn you had oil-industry experience in Poza Rica, working with Ajenjo. Can I switch this thing on?’ I held up my voice recorder.

  ‘Do what you got to do, man.’ Leo fluffed his beard. ‘You want to talk about this?’ He traced a ‘Z’ in the air with his finger.

  I tried not to sound interested, just kept right on fumbling with my tape recorder. ‘You know something about that?’

  Leo stared past me. ‘When you live in that town, that’s all anyone knows about. Weeknights at home, weekends at the mall. Park’s too dangerous, day or night. Nobody out after dark. Nobody calls it a curfew, but they might as well. Stuck in the shitty apartments they kept building. Inside, right, everything was all shiny, all new, but the walls were like this.’ He tapped the table we were sitting at. ‘Like you could put your hand through them. Because a proper place with solid walls costs more than an apartment in Mexico City.’

  I sat back in my chair. ‘Oh, I was shocked when I went there. Everything is astronomical – food, rent, even the petrol.’

  Leo raised his hands. ‘Inflation. All that oil money washed in, and nobody thought it’d ever wash out. But even after the companies pulled out, the prices stayed up.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Puf – just like that. Painters, builders, welders. Drillers, engineers. Every job in the place, flat gone.’ He scratched his beard again.

  ‘Mexico City prices, and no money coming in,’ I said. ‘No wonder you got out.’

  He clicked his tongue. ‘Oh, that’s not why we got out. It was just too dangerous. You’d see bodies a lot, lying right on the main avenue, real blatant, you know? Kids selling crack by the Banco Azteca, out of their little kangaroo-pouch bags.’

  ‘The cops let them do that?’ I widened my eyes, tried to sound amazed.

  He snorted. ‘The cops help them. If they’re even cops at all. Mostly they were just Zetas in uniform, shipping in all that crap.’

  ‘But which set of cops?’ I flicked back through my notebook. ‘There’s the State Police, and there’s the Guardia Civil. Which ones help the Zetas?’

  Leo shuffled in his seat. ‘Both, I guess, nowadays.’ He shook his head. ‘I mean, at the beginning, people said the State Police were all bought by the Zetas, which was why Guardia Civil came in –’ he mimed air-quotes with his fingers ‘– “to clean up Poza Rica”.’ He gave a one-shoulder shrug. ‘Wound up being the same shit.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ I said, and in my head I heard the clunk of Julián Gallardo’s body in the flatbed of the pickup truck. I tapped my pen against my notebook. ‘Last time I was down there, me and my partner caught three Guardia Civil guys lifting a body.’

  Leo nodded. ‘Sounds about right.’ He blew steam from his coffee.

  I pulled my chair in to the table. ‘But this kid’s body, it really looked awful. No face. No –’ I gestured above my lap ‘– well, you know.’

  Leo just nodded. ‘Zetas did that a lot. But the Guardia Civil, too, after they came in. Did it to the Zetas. Or, you know –’ he did the air-quotes again ‘– to “Zetas”. A lot of the time, they just kill people – activists, poor people, indigenous people, even journalists – and say they’re criminals afterwards.’

  ‘But these new guys, these Guardia Civil guys – why would they help the Zetas get rid of a body?’

  Leo shrugged. ‘I mean, aren’t they supposed to be cleaning the place up? Going to look bad for business if faceless kids keep turning up in alleyways, right?’

  ‘But the kid we saw,’ I said, ‘he was the one that the protesters are talking about. Activist. Surely it’s in a company’s interests to have him disappeared, right?’

  Leo clicked his tongue. ‘Well, look, if you kick up enough of a fuss around there, someone will find a hole to put you in. Sure, they’ll want him dead. But they might want it to be more discreet than in the past.’ He sat back in his chair with his arms folded. His foot tapped the floor. ‘You’d hear stories. How Zetas would go out to the villages, scare people off their land. Drown people in oil tanks. Rape. Murder.’ He pulled a face. ‘If the companies and the business guys and politicians want to terrorise people the same way as before, they’ll have to be more discreet. And that would be the literal only change – that it’d be more hush-hush.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I scratched my chin, looked at my notebook, waiting for his silence to crack again.

  Leo rubbed his hand over his scalp. ‘It’s a dirty city. Not just crime-wise. The things we did made every turtle in the region homeless. Plus you have all those places where the air hurts to breathe.’ He folded his arms and leaned on his forearms. ‘Coatzintla. El Chote. San Antonio Ojital.’ He shook his head. ‘Can totally see why kids like the guy you found would risk his life for better things.’

  ‘Right.’ I wrote down the place names. ‘Anyone I should talk to down there?’

  Leo stared at his coffee cup. ‘Out of my crew, I think there’s only one guy still there. Armando. Owns a grocery store in El Chote. I’ll give you his number.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I slid the notebook across to him and he took out his phone to copy down the number.

  After he’d fini
shed, he looked at the page and scratched his chin, his frown deepening. Then he shook his head, blew out a sigh, and held up my notebook. ‘Mind if I draw on this page? Quick science lesson.’ Leo sketched an ‘L’, then drew an ‘8’ on top of the vertical line. ‘This straight downward line,’ he said, ‘is what a regular pipeline looks like – just a cement channel drilled into the earth.’ He traced a finger along the drawing. ‘The bottom of the “L”, though, here? This is an extra channel. You put that in when you want to break open an old oil deposit.’

  In my head I saw the article in La Jornada de Veracruz, listing the items that Ajenjo had bought from the U.S. company.

  ‘Trucks for injecting water and chemicals,’ I said. ‘A horizontal drill. Monitoring booths. Eight billion dollars’ worth – seems a lot.’

  Leo nodded. ‘It is, but it makes sense. Because that vertical channel, this one here?’ He ran a fingertip over the page. ‘It’s a mile long. And you’ve got to shoot pressure all that way down, while keeping that pressure up high enough to carve open the old well.’ Now he pointed to the ‘8’ drawn on top of the ‘L’. ‘This is your wellhead, right? On the site we had, there were a bunch of pipes going into that wellhead.’ He drew a long pipe, added a bunch of tiny dots. ‘One for sand.’ Next he drew another pipe, drew slightly bigger dots, said, ‘This is for gravel,’ then drew a third pipe and added tiny sharp triangles, saying, ‘And these are ceramic chips.’ Next to these he drew some large wheeled rectangles. ‘These are your injection trucks, OK? Pressure chambers the size of this café. And they have to be. Remember –’ he ran a finger along the ‘L’ ‘– a full mile down, a half mile across to the well. Ten thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, shooting jets of sand and gravel and ceramic, tons and tons, non-stop.’

  His scribble grew furious – jets of sand, gravel, ceramic – and he said, ‘What you’re trying to do is shred the rock encasing the oil deposit.’ When Leo slid the notebook across to me he’d torn through three pages. ‘Now,’ he said, tapping the page, ‘imagine what that would do to a body.’

  From outside came the sound of a tamal-seller riding through the soaked night. A couple of cats yowled from a rooftop. The rain kept dumping down.

  Leo leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his head. Then he breathed the word ‘OK’ at the ceiling and took a long drink of coffee.

  ‘So this was in May 2014,’ he said, once he had swallowed. ‘Just before the Guardia Civil came in to do their “cleanup”. Town was a nightmare – men and women getting shot, day and night, everyone scared of the cops, because you couldn’t know which one was a real cop or a Zeta in a cop uniform. Me and my friends called off our basketball league because nobody could make it to training. On one of my nights off, my boss calls me. He says there’s been an accident. Says a jeep’s on its way to my apartment. Boss sounds scared – and that gets me scared, because if he’s scared, then it’s something big. And if they’re sending me out at night, it’s going to be dangerous. But the jeep that shows up outside my house is a Pemex jeep, and the guy driving it is wearing union overalls, and my friend Armando’s in the back, and he doesn’t look scared. So I figure if he looks OK with it, then what’s the harm?’

  ‘The Pemex guy,’ I said, ‘how’d he look?’

  ‘Kind of fat,’ said Leo. ‘Pretty short.’

  ‘Curly hair?’ I said.

  ‘Yep. Dark guy, Campeche drawl, but didn’t have the Campeche friendliness, you know? Not one single word the whole time we were driving.’

  The name ‘El Mangueras’ floated up in my head from the spider diagram Maya had shown me.

  Leo kept talking. ‘Drill site was in the middle of nowhere – grass, hills, crickets, bunch of sick-looking trees. Foreman’s there by the gate, and he looks like a ghost, because he has these cop cars parked behind him. When the Campechano guy tells us to get down out of the jeep, one of the cops waiting for us tells us to give him our phones, ID cards, wallets.’

  ‘White guy?’ I said. ‘Beard?’

  ‘Yeah, but no moustache,’ said Leo. ‘Sort of an Abraham Lincoln thing. Norteño accent.’

  Another face from the diagram, tall, white, with a huge beard like a heavy-metal bassist or a high-school shooter, the name ‘El Prieto’ written beneath.

  Leo kept going. ‘They put me and Armando on our knees. Put guns to our heads.’ He put a finger between his eyes. ‘Right here. The mark didn’t fade until like a day after. In these calm voices, like they’ve done things like this a million times before, they tell us to do what they say or they’ll put us and our families into the ground.’

  My pen tapped my notebook. ‘And you think Armando can confirm this?’

  Leo nodded. ‘He was so messed up. Sobbing, man. Telling those Zeta-slash-cop-slash-whatever guys that he had kids. A family. He’ll never forget that.’ Leo shrugged. ‘So they hit him. Kick him in the ribs. Leave him crying in the dirt. I felt bad for him, but mostly I felt bad for wanting him to shut up. Because I was pretty chill, all told. Maybe because I didn’t know it was happening. Whole thing was like someone telling you about a dream they’d had – just couldn’t relate to what was happening, even though it was happening to me. I just figured, if they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it. And the only choice you have, it’s how you go down, right? It was kind of easy to just zone out like that.’

  His fingers rapped on the table. ‘But so the tall one, the white guy, he tells us to go over to the police pickups. Drags Armando to his feet. And I follow them. And in the back of the pickups, there’s these bin bags – the heavy-duty kind, like you get out the back of restaurants. Bottom of the jeep’s all wet. All red. Bags are wet. Smell from them like a butcher’s shop.’

  Leo checked his cup for dregs, drained them, then kept going. ‘Those Zeta-cop guys ask which one of us is the systems guy. And that’s me. So I open the prefab, switch off the pumps, get Armando to open the tanks. Then we start carrying the bags.’ The rapping of Leo’s fingers on the table grew louder. ‘And, I mean – you know but you don’t know, right? As in, you feel the weight jostle your leg. Slippery, making your hands red. Drops of wet on the plastic, on your boots, all red. The smell makes you know what it is, too. But your whole mind being on the struggle not to gag, you start thinking all sorts of things. How maybe the shapes bumping your leg are just fruit, big fruit. Jackfruit. Watermelons. The same flat thud. And the dumping of the bags requires the same motion as hauling trash, so you figure, “Yeah, that’s all I’m doing. Hauling trash. A load of rotten fruit trash”. And we wad those bags into the tank, with the water, and the sand, and the pebbles, and the ceramic chips, and down the chute go all those people.’

  ‘Who were they?’ I said.

  ‘My guess?’ said Leo. ‘Villagers. Protesters. People who saw something they shouldn’t. People the cops didn’t like. People like the kid you saw.’ He waved a hand. ‘Could have been anyone. One of the bags Armando was carrying went and split. A tattooed arm fell out – a woman’s arm, maybe, or a teenage boy’s. Cut up all rough at the joint, it all looks the same: like steak or something.’ Leo massaged his forehead, went to drink some coffee, remembered the cup was empty.

  ‘How many?’ I handed him my glass of water.

  ‘Cut up like that, it’s hard to know. But we were hauling bags a long time. Started around midnight. Moon was low when we finished. Switching the machine on was the worst. Sounded just like a normal job – same roar, same numbers on the screen, pressure, quantity, velocity, et cetera – like all we were firing into the ground was gravel or sand.’

  Outside, the rain had eased. Drops plinked from the eaves.

  ‘When we were done, those narco-cop guys tossed our cards and wallets and phones on the ground. Told us to get the fuck out of there. Not to breathe a word. The Pemex guy, the Campechano, he got in one of the cop cars. Left us to walk home. I barely could. Just put one foot in front of the other, all the way to the town, like a robot, or a zombie. Don’t remember saying goodbye
to Armando. Don’t remember the bus-ride home. Just remember lying on my bathroom floor, cooling my belly on the tiles, too wiped out to move, too wiped out to puke.’ His knuckles rapped the table. ‘And, you know, what made me get sick, in the end, wasn’t even a smell in my nose or the blood on my boots or whatever. It was just this this five-word phrase looped in my head – It could have been me. And, yeah, it could. Any one thing went wrong, it would have. I’d be in that hole. I’d be pulp. My being alive was just an accident.’ He frowned, biting his lip. ‘Like, life is shit-cheap in Mexico, man. We all know that, like, in theory. But to really know it, really feel it?’

  He shook his head, then pushed back his chair suddenly. ‘I need a coffee. You want one?’ Leo crossed the room and switched on the grinder. ‘Couple weeks later, we finish on that well. Switch off the machines. The goop oozes upwards, thick and brownish, same as ever. Oil and gas and people. Looking at it, you wouldn’t know. It was just the usual dirty gunk. Nobody could tell what else was mixed in. Just me and Armando.’

  Hot water rode the sides of his cup. The grounds seethed, thick and brownish.

  ‘You know what,’ I said, a hand at my mouth, ‘I think I’m all right.’

  ‘You sure?’ He returned to the table. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Just one more thing.’ I took my laptop from my satchel, flipped it open, opened the photos of Puccini’s pyramid. ‘The Pemex guy, the Campechano – is this him?’ I scrolled the document down to El Mangueras’ photograph.

  ‘Without the shadow of a doubt,’ said Leo. ‘Man, I will never forget these faces.’ Leo tapped the photo of El Prieto. ‘This one, too – the white guy with the beard, he’s the guy who took our phones and stuff.’ He eased back in the chair, holding his cup. ‘And so where’s this going to be published, anyway?’