Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  The machete, the blood, the silver teeth flashing in the sun.

  ‘He approached me at the end,’ said Francisco, turning his glass on the table. ‘Asked me for a few names of the people he’d seen. Asked me to get him to the bus station. So I hid him in my car, lying down behind the front seats.’

  My throat was chalkdust-dry. ‘You really put your life on the line, man.’

  Francisco shrugged. ‘Oh, it’s there anyway.’

  The teenagers in the pool had reconciled, kind of: the girl was slapping the guy in the chest while he laughed.

  ‘We owe you, too,’ Francisco said. ‘Weren’t for you and Carlos, we wouldn’t have found out about Julián Gallardo.’

  ‘Protest looked bad,’ I said. ‘Be better if we’d said nothing.’

  Francisco lifted his hands like he was weighing something. ‘Look, I mean, it did get nasty. Lot injured. One girl hit with a machete, went missing. Cops said she fell. Said she caught her leg on some metal. Said they took her to the hospital. Said she went missing after she was discharged.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘So precise. The police – Mexico’s greatest fiction writers.’

  Carlos’ photos of black drops of blood falling from the blade, a girl on the ground clutching her opened leg.

  Francisco shrugged. ‘But, hey, unless there’s a revolution, crackdowns at protests is all we’ve got.’

  A Totonaca man in clean white linen trousers and a shirt emerged from the hotel and skirted the pool, holding metal key rings of the Tajín pyramid out to the kids, smiling a silver-plated grin. One by one they shook off his pitch.

  ‘Ah! American!’ said the Totonaca guy, in English, when he saw me, jangling his pyramids at me. ‘Welcome, welcome. Souvenir, souvenir.’

  ‘I no want.’ I waved my hands, pretending I spoke no Spanish. ‘No. Wanto.’

  The Totonaca guy held the pyramids under my face. ‘Good price.’

  ‘No. Wanto,’ I said.

  At last he was deterred, and swept from the terrace and out the back door onto the street with a flourish of his broad-brimmed straw hat.

  Francisco made a crease of his mouth, nodded. ‘You never know who’s involved.’ He gestured at the door to the street, where a viene-viene was whistling a car as it reversed to the curb. ‘Even these car-minding guys get a couple hundred pesos a week from Puccini’s boys to keep an ear out.’

  ‘How do you stay safe?’ I offered him a cigarette.

  Francisco shook his head. ‘There is no safe. Three reporters dead in town this year.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘A cameraman, an editor of a paper bought out by Zetas, a guy who did sports.’ He sipped his tamarind juice. ‘So much for the clean-up.’

  ‘About that.’ I pulled out the map I’d bought from the stationery shop across the street. All day, I’d combed the local news outlets to do a notch-and-cross tally of the people murdered in Poza Rica for the last eight years, with separate columns for people killed by Veracruz State Police, by suspected criminals, and by the Guardia Civil. ‘This look OK to you?’

  Francisco nodded. ‘Yeah, the narrative’s there. Puccini’s boys basically did here what he’d done in Salvador. Anywhere people felt cagey about fracking, his boys went in.’ He flicked his hands. ‘Burned houses. Killed people in their beds. Disappeared the bodies.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’ I flicked back a couple of pages. ‘An Ajenjo guy I met, he said Puccini’s boys used to put bodies down into fracking wells.’

  ‘Other places, too. A bridge right outside town. Lot of rocks. Lot of strong currents.’

  For a moment I rested my fingertip on the page that Leo had shredded for his science lesson. Another kid splashed into the pool.

  Francisco tapped one of the rows. ‘But do you see this? Since 2014? Eight dead Zetas for every dead cop. These aren’t shootouts: they’re massacres. Death squads. Sentence first, evidence never. Not just for Zetas – students, protesters, indigenous people. This was the same year that local companies started trying to get foreign companies back into Poza Rica. Same year the Guardia Civil went after the Zetas, making room for whatever new gang of cops and criminals the companies send after protesters from now on.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that anybody’ll complain, long as the last gasp of oil makes it into the right bank accounts.’ He signalled the waiter for another tamarind juice. ‘How long you here for? Got much lined up?’

  ‘Few days. Main thing is I wanted to go see this guy out in El Chote.’

  Francisco sucked his teeth. ‘Yeah. That’s a polluted spot. An old waste tank left by some American company started leaking a couple years ago, right into the river.’

  ‘Huh.’ I turned a page. ‘Here’s the other places this driller guy mentioned. Could be our next couple of days,’ I said, passing Francisco the notebook.

  He tapped the page. ‘This place, San Antonio Ojital, we could go in the morning. Some people I interviewed once live round there. After that, we could do a drive around Poza Rica. I’ll have to leave you then – it’s school-run and then the night-shift for me now. But we can get breakfast before all that. I want you to try zacahuil.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is, but sure.’

  The whole group of kids were in the pool now, their laughter kiting up in brilliant red flags.

  ‘There was one other thing.’ I scratched my chin. ‘Reckon I could talk to Julián Gallardo’s mother?’

  Francisco cocked his head from side to side, balancing it up. ‘I mean, I’ll try, but after all she’s been through? We’ll see.’ He grabbed his car-keys from the table. ‘You’re in for a pretty boring evening, hey – it’s not safe after seven around here.’

  ‘Oh, I love boring.’

  Francisco laughed. ‘Well, then,’ he said, getting up from the table. ‘Enjoy.’

  19

  Next morning, Francisco couldn’t convince me to try the zacahuil.

  ‘It’s traditional.’ In the passenger seat his fork scraped against a styrofoam burger-shell loaded with an orange mess of shredded corn and chillies. ‘Very ancient.’

  ‘Yeah, well, then you shouldn’t have told me how people made the first zacahuil out of the body of a defeated sex murderer.’

  ‘Just sharing.’ Francisco held up the empty container. ‘I leave this where?’

  ‘Honestly, wherever.’

  Outside the white church, six Totonaca guys in white linen pants and embroidered floral tabards climbed a tall cedar-wood pole, ropes tied to their heels. The clouds were a lead hood over Papantla. Day labourers shivered on the park, waiting for pickup trucks that might come, might not. The GPS sent us out of town, past a rubbled house whose chunks of wall were scrawled with letter ‘Z’s, then up a gravel track lined with red-trunked palo mula trees whose leaves looked burned. The jeep’s tyres growled against the stone track. We rolled down a hill past a primary school with a cedar-wood pole standing in its yard.

  ‘Guy broke his neck diving off that one,’ said Francisco. ‘Ten days ago. Totonaca guy, like the souvenir guy yesterday. They do this ritual where men climb the pole and dive off, sort of a slow bungee-rope thing, banging drums, playing fifes, trying to attract the rain-god’s attention. Started years ago, during some drought or other.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Legend says it did, yeah.’

  ‘So why are they still doing it?’

  Francisco shrugged. ‘Tradition?’

  The ceiba trees on the other side of the road didn’t look good, either, their oval leaves holed with yellow. We parked in their shade, because by now the clouds had burned off, and the seven a.m. cold wouldn’t be around much longer, and then headed down a white path through an arcade of singed-looking banana leaves.

  ‘We’re not too early?’ I hauled two ten-litre bottles of water from the boot.

  ‘It’s practically lunchtime for these guys.’

  Francisco led us down the sloping path as far as a gap in the banana stems, their fruit spotted with rot, knocking against my shoulder.

  ‘
Take a look,’ he said, parting the stalks so I could lean through. A well had been cut in the ground and lined with halved bricks.

  ‘Smells like petrol.’

  ‘There’s a drill-site near here,’ Francisco said. ‘Soil’s poisoned. Trees, too.’

  After I’d snapped a couple of pictures, Francisco led me forwards into the clearing, where a thin Totonaca man of about fifty, wearing a vest and faded jeans, hacked at the stems with a long machete, outside a house walled with clapboard and roofed with dried palm fronds. When he saw us he stabbed the machete into the dirt and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  ‘Tomás,’ Francisco said, ‘meet Andrew.’

  He studied me from the shade of his faded baseball cap. ‘A pleasure.’ His voice was wary as he held out a calloused hand.

  ‘We wanted to talk about what it’s like living here.’ I raised the bottle as best I could. ‘Heard you had some problems with water.’

  Tomás pushed his cap all the way back. ‘Very kind of you,’ he said tonelessly.

  ‘Where do you want me to bring it?’

  ‘Through to the kitchen, if you don’t mind.’

  He held the door open, and we stepped into a wide, clay-floored space with a metal cot in one corner and plastic chairs in the other. A woman in a polyester dress stood beside a sink’s metal skeleton, scouring a plate with water from a plastic basin.

  ‘Apolonia,’ Tomás said, ‘we have visitors.’

  The woman gave me the same hooded look that her husband had. ‘Welcome to our house,’ she said, in a voice as dull and guarded as her husband’s, drying her hands on a frayed tea-towel and then patting her pinned-back grey hair. ‘Please, sit.’

  Francisco and I crossed the clay floor, past a framed photo of the Virgin of Guadalupe decked with lilac orchids and dried mandarins. I stowed the water under the sink and sat down on a chair with no table. Tomás poured out plastic glasses of orange juice from a small jug, handed them to us, and sat down with his arms folded, beside Apolonia.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I tell them all,’ Tomás said. ‘We’re poor, but we’re not stupid. You can’t eat money, and you can buy less with it every year. It’s a fraud. Not like the land. The land never stops giving. That’s what I tell them.’

  ‘Who do you tell?’

  ‘Foreigners. Mestizos,’ Apolonia said. ‘People who want us off our land. People who poisoned our well, made the water almost too thick to draw.’

  Francisco took a sip of his juice. ‘Tell Andrew about the company.’

  Apolonia laughed, and put a long-fingered hand over one eye. ‘Our owners?’

  ‘The new laws,’ Tomás said. ‘If there’s oil under your property, the government can sell it under you. Suddenly you’re the company’s.’

  ‘We didn’t take the money,’ Apolonia said. ‘And the man who offered it hasn’t come back.’

  ‘What if he does?’ I asked. ‘The companies are returning soon.’

  ‘Fight them, I suppose,’ Tomás said with a bitter laugh. ‘I’ve got a machete. A catapult. Apolonia can throw oranges at them.’

  ‘Look, whatever about the money,’ she said. ‘We could take it. We could move. But where?’ She pointed at the hearth. ‘They buried my umbilical cord here when I was born, tangled up with my mother’s, and my grandmother’s, and her mother’s, all the way back. If I sell this place, what will my family tell me when I meet them again?’

  ‘But they’re sending police,’ I said.

  ‘Police?’ Tomás laughed. ‘They’ve sent worse than that.’

  A chill crept my neck. ‘What? When?’

  ‘A couple of months ago,’ Apolonia said.

  ‘Longer than that,’ Tomás said. ‘Spring. I’d gone to town to get weed killer.’

  ‘Left me to deal with them,’ Apolonia cut in, with a mocking glare. ‘Two weeks after we refused a compensation cheque from Ajenjo – that much I know for sure. Because no more than fifteen days after he was gone, the Zetas came.’

  ‘How did you know it was them?’

  She spread her hands. ‘This was something we all heard about. How they’d go to a village, kill people, dump bodies on the outskirts. We knew we’d be next.’

  ‘What uniform did they wear?’ My breath was going like a piston. ‘Veracruz State Police?’

  Apolonia nodded. ‘But they talked like narcos. “We made a generous offer, and if you’re here when we come back, you’re all dead”.’ She leaned her chin on a seamed hand.

  The chill spread from my neck to my shoulders. ‘And could you tell me –’ I slid my iPad out of the satchel and tapped open the photos of Puccini and his lieutenants ‘– were any of these men there?’

  Apolonia studied the screen. ‘This one doesn’t come around. They say he’s in charge.’ She tapped Puccini’s face, then moved her finger to El Prieto’s. ‘This frightening one isn’t someone I’ve ever seen.’ Finally her finger rested on Sharktooth’s face. ‘This one, with the teeth. He came here.’

  The chill crept down my shoulders, over my back.

  ‘Just to be clear.’ I flipped back through my notebook pages. ‘After you refused a compensation deal from Ajenjo, you were threatened by members of an organised crime group.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Apolonia. ‘Twenty thousand dollars, they offered, no more.’

  ‘And these gang members, they were masquerading as police.’

  ‘Correct,’ she said.

  ‘And you know they were masquerading as police, because you recognised one of them as a members of Puccini’s cell of the Zetas.’

  ‘Also correct,’ said Apolonia.

  ‘And you’re sure you want to go on the record?’

  ‘You can use our names,’ said Apolonia, running her fingertip along her eyebrow. ‘If they’re going to do something, they’ll do it, whatever you write.’

  ‘OK.’ I stood up on jellied legs. ‘Thanks for having us.’

  ‘Thank you for the water,’ said Apolonia, but her eyes were already somewhere else. Tomás slipped out the front door, and Francisco picked up my orange juice for me and brought it to the sink. Then we went back to the jeep and started driving, and I was glad that my licence plates were too dirty to read.

  20

  Driving in to Poza Rica jacked my heart-rate right up. The noon sky was brown and louring, the dashboard thermometer read forty Celsius, and the breaths I drew were warm and thick as bathwater.

  Francisco had me drive past the union building for a few photos. The green glass facade shone in the dull afternoon light. To one side, beside the words SECCIÓN 30, a smog-browned concrete frieze showed a muscled oil worker toting his spanner in the shadow of an oil derrick. A second frieze retold Mexican history as a straight line from conquistadors battling locals via some priests and revolutionaries as far as a petrol-worker’s family dressed up like it was 1950s America.

  ‘The guy I want to talk to,’ I said, snapping a picture, ‘his friend said a union official drove him to the body-disposal site.’

  Francisco nodded. ‘Sounds about right. This is where a lot of money gets laundered – there’s some pretty high union rates. Really it’s just workers being given parcels of cash to pay into the union.’

  ‘Huh,’ I said, my camera lens drifting over a group of beaten-down-looking men and women peering at chits and waiting to be called. Among them stood union officials wearing the kind of suits and watches that union officials can’t usually afford.

  After that, we continued to the edge of town so we could see the Zeta-controlled neighbourhoods. Scrolling by, fast, in the rear view: electric wires rat-tailed in puddles; rainbow maps of spilled-out cooking fat, detergent, petrol.

  Outside a rundown pink convenience store sat a mother and son. The son had dreads, a Rasta-theme Adidas zip-up, cracked bifocals, and he and his mother gave a start when they saw our jeep. We could have been the cops, or local bosses seeking their weekly war tax, or why not both.

  A bunch of men in vests and jeans lounged outside a row
of grey degraded shop fronts and mechanics’ yards. Beside some of the doorways stood Santa Muerte statues garlanded with flowers and rosary beads.

  ‘Those shops don’t look too active.’

  ‘They are,’ said Francisco. ‘But only in the mornings, when the night’s haul comes in. Your car gets stolen in Poza Rica, next morning, you can buy back the parts right here.’

  We passed the open doors of a Jesús Malverde temple, its inner walls pasted all over with prayers scrawled on dollar bills. Some of the prayers were threats: ‘Brother Malverde, help me to chase down the dogs of the colonia Zapata.’ Just outside sat a man heating a crack pipe. A tall Santa Muerte altar loomed over him, overhung with black and yellow triangles of bunting.

  ‘That altar’s a drop-off point,’ said Edgar. ‘You leave guns, drugs in under the flowers, and nobody’ll touch them.’

  The skeleton saint grinned out from under her purple cowl. Her glass box was like a vertical coffin, crept all over with a vermicular spackle of airborne dirt.

  The man in his beer chair gave a cagey backward nod when he saw us.

  ‘Is there an international sign for “I’m not DEA”?’ I said to Francisco.

  ‘Looking like you do, no.’

  The guy was still looking, so I gave him a big cheery thumbs-up.

  We cut down off the avenue, drove through an alley of trash and cinder-block housing. Then a siren cut the air and put a spike through my navel.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Probably another raid,’ said Francisco.

  When we got to the top of the alley, a whole fleet of Guardia Civil vans were parked across the road, outside a rundown coral-pink vivienda. From inside you could hear the quilted pop of gunshots.

  ‘You aren’t worried about those guys?’ I asked Francisco.

  He shrugged. ‘Always. But what can you do?’

  Six Guardia Civil guys in ski-masks and sunglasses were marching a line of about fourteen kids from the vivienda towards two big, mesh-windowed police wagons, kids with Neymar haircuts gelled crisp as toffee apples, Barcelona and América jerseys, big fake Nikes, not one of them older than seventeen. Through the glass, you could hear one of the cops yelling, ‘You’re fucked now, boys! You and your mothers!’ while the rest whistled.