Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  Francisco and me, we just started filming. My camera’s mic caught the thunk of gun-butts against kids’ shoulders from where we were parked. The kids’ poker-faces started to strain as they neared the police wagons. One caught my eye: frowning, pudgy, around fifteen years old, climbing into the mesh cage of the riot-van. That’s all I saw of him, but what I could feel was his life in that vivienda, hearing cries catch and warp against the walls all day and night, years and years between walls that were too tight and too thin for him to get any homework done, and what I knew was he went stressed-out every day to a school that was no more than a holding pen.

  Me, if I’d been that kid, I’d have dropped out too. I’d have taken the hundred-sixty-dollar weekly wage to watch a block for the boys who owned shiny jeeps and shiny guns like the posers on Bandamax TV, instead of turning chickens on a spit sixty hours a week for a hundred dollars a month.

  While Francisco finished filming, I peered at the kid on my screen, at his bleached Mario Balotelli mohawk, at his wide, lost face.

  Could have been the face of a lookout. Could have been the face of a kid who drank a few cans or snorted whatever lines of cut-to-shit coke he could cadge from his friends so that maybe they’d stop making fun of him. Or it could just have been the face of some poor fat kid born in the wrong city.

  A cop slung shut the police wagon, and I lidded my camera.

  ‘Good luck with the school run,’ I said, dropping Francisco off at his newspaper. A couple of kids with pinched faces and baseball caps eyed us from a doorway, their hands in their hoodie pockets.

  ‘See you tomorrow, for more zacahuil,’ said Francisco.

  After that I headed for the address Armando had given me, my eyes locked on the rear-view mirror, waiting for a State Police truck to slip behind me, my blood a scurry of ants, the highway snaking through a humid green nowhere.

  With no cars chasing me the sweat began to cool on my back, and I dropped down the approach road to El Chote, quiet, lined with ceiba trees, with nests of vines hanging from its telephone wires. El Chote itself was a barely there town with a bar about double the size of a shed, a straggle of low houses screened by bluish ocote pine, a group of kids jinking their ragged football across a field the colour of rust, with a wellhead stuck up through the centre circle. Between the pines you could make out a slow black river thick as blood. A high ammoniac sting pricked my sinuses even with the windows up.

  The abarrotes shop Leo had mentioned stood beside a junkyard. Faded Telcel and Sabritas sponsorship logos hung above its door. When I parked outside, a man stepped out from the rusted security cage, peeling a mandarin.

  ‘You the journalist?’ he said when I got out of the jeep. He had an indoor pallor, and his thin hair was mussed like he’d been lying down. ‘Yeah, Leo told me you might come here.’ He tossed a chunk of mandarin into his mouth. ‘Be careful taking pictures. Photographer came round here once. People didn’t like him taking pictures of the kids. They left him in ribbons.’ His skin breathed days, weeks, years of frightened sweats and bad sleep, a madness that isn’t a madness, a paranoia that’s not paranoid, because, living in a place like this, if you’re paranoid, you’re probably right. He flung the handful of mandarin peel into the grass. ‘How can I help?’

  The air seethed with insects. The long grass rustled. In five minutes, I told myself, I’d be out of there, speeding back to the quiet furnished cave of my apartment.

  ‘Leo told me about your time working for Ajenjo,’ I said.

  Armando nodded. ‘Those were bad times. The worst times. After those times, I quit. Then my wife left. Took the kids to Puebla. There’s a military academy there. My boys, they’re good boys. They won’t fall into vice – not like the boys around here.’ Armando gestured at the grass that edged the football field. ‘Everything talks here. The grass. The crickets. They know things before you even think about them.’

  My thighs and groin tensed with fear.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Could you identify some men if I show you their pictures?’

  He lifted the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his face, revealing a leopard-mottle of burns all over his skin. He huffed a laugh through his nose. ‘I tried, I really tried. Wasn’t enough petrol.’

  ‘I’m going to need a yes or no answer here,’ I said.

  Armando stared at a point above my shoulder.

  Turning, I saw a Veracruz State Police car roll slow past the poisoned river, past the pines and the bar and the football field. The windows dropped. The kids didn’t even stop kicking their ball around.

  In the driver’s seat was a man with a long beard and a pale face. His picture from the iPad flashed in my head: El Prieto, the white guy who’d been there when Leo and Armando had gone to the well. Beside him sat another man, muttering into a phone, his arm hanging through the open window, his tie loosened, his eyes brimming with sleepy patient violence. He was heavyset and curly haired. His voice was a Campechano drawl.

  ‘Here’s your “Yes”,’ said Armando.

  Something like that happens to you, your bladder swells up planet-sized. The piss runs right to the tip of your dick. You want time to skip into thirty-two-speed fast-forward, except you also don’t, because you don’t know how long you have left.

  Armando clanked shut the gate behind him and went back to his couch, the blanket pulled over his head. Mangueras gave me a slow salute, the gravel crunched, and they drove on into the dark, while I ran for my jeep, the phone at my ear, already calling Francisco.

  ‘Everything OK?’ he said.

  ‘Met a couple of our friends.’ I swallowed.

  Francisco clicked his tongue.

  My eyes flicked from the road ahead to the rear-view mirror. No jeeps up front, no jeeps behind: just a motel built to look like a castle, a couple of kids in school uniforms punting a Coke can along the verge.

  On the other end of the line I heard Francisco rap his knuckles against his desk.

  ‘Which friends did you meet?’ he said.

  Up ahead, parked by the roadside verge, stood a Veracruz State Police car. My back ran cold.

  My foot pressed the gas. The cops in the car looked up. One of them spoke into his walkie-talkie, but the car didn’t move.

  ‘Andrew?’ said Francisco. ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The lawyer and the white guy.’ I swallowed. My throat was drier than it had been on the morning Carlos and I had found Julián Gallardo. ‘Look, if anything happens to me, you never knew me. You never saw me. I was never here. OK?’

  The doors of the police car opened. The two cops climbed out. One was videoing my jeep on his phone.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I have to go. Be safe, OK?’

  After a long pause, Francisco said, ‘OK,’ and hung up.

  The narrow streets on the outskirts of Papantla were choked with people – a religious festival, kids dressed in white, candles held under their chins, San Judas Tadeo riding a litter heaped with yellow and green flowers – while cars and mopeds inched behind, hazed in exhaust fumes. Bass drums thumped louder than my heart. Trumpets squalled.

  ‘Jesus, come on,’ I said to no one, and rubbed my fingertips against my forehead, willing the procession to move faster. A firework thoomed and streaked the dark.

  Outside the machine shops and abarrotes stores stood men in dirty vests and women in string tops. They weren’t watching the parade: their eyes were locked on the forecourt of a Pemex across the street. One woman chewed a fat gum-wad, her jaws working fast, and the tension in her gaze watching the petrol station should have told me to worry, but I was too spooked to think straight, and the police car I’d seen on the highway pulled out of an alley and rolled across to block the gap of space between me and the rest of the traffic jam. Before I could kick into reverse a pickup rolled off the Pemex forecourt to block the way back. The kid riding the moped behind me didn’t even honk.

  Mangueras opened the door of his pickup and walk slowly towards my jeep, rolling up his sleeves, stretching like he
’d had a tough day locked behind the desk.

  ‘Andrew,’ said Mangueras, and leaned against my open window. ‘We met earlier. You never introduced yourself.’

  The policemen who’d filmed me opened the driver door and gestured for me to get out. When I climbed out into the street the onlookers slunk back into their shops and their houses.

  ‘You’ve been poking around,’ said Mangueras. ‘Mostly in the wrong places. We can take you to the right ones.’

  The white guy with the heavy metaller’s beard, the guy they called El Prieto, he got out of Mangueras’ pickup, held out his hand for my keys, and I handed them over before he had to pull out a gun.

  ‘Sale, pues,’ said Prieto, and shoved me into the passenger seat.

  The procession thumped its way around the corner, leading the cars and mopeds behind it. Then it was just the tremble of crickets, the shudder of my breath.

  Prieto climbed in on the other side. One trained an FN-259 on me. The other turned my keys in the ignition. The Fidel Castro key ring jangled.

  ‘My boss said it would be a big noise if you were to go missing around here,’ said Prieto, driving. ‘Me, I’m not so sure. It’s never a big noise when anyone goes missing.’ He raised his hand from the wheel. ‘But who am I to say, hey?’ He chuckled. ‘He’s the boss.’

  We’d gone back the way I’d come, then out a side-track, past a junkyard so overgrown with ferns that they sprouted from the open, empty bonnets, and then on to a tyre-rutted tarmac road.

  ‘So my boss, he says we have to do something special for you.’

  The seat ran with my sweat. Shakes hit me in bursts, like my body was a washing machine on its last spin. The coffee cups rattled at my feet.

  ‘And I’m like, sure, whatever. You know best. That’s why you’re the boss.’

  Mangueras’ police car drove just behind us, headlights glaring white on the cracked glass facades of the big oil company headquarters zipping past, one by one, security guards watching the grass that poked through the parking lots.

  ‘But it’s not my bag. No, sir. If it was up to me, you’d be dead by now.’

  The grass verge was littered with plastic bags, sweet wrappers, rat-looted heads of corn. Beyond the headlights the night was humid and empty.

  ‘You know how long it takes for a body to go bad out here? In all this heat?’

  The chatter of my teeth did the replying for me.

  ‘And it’s a wet heat out here, cabrón. Four days, you wouldn’t have a face.’

  When the lights of a house came into view on the right, Mangueras flashed his headlights once and Prieto slowed the car to roll up a dirt track with tall rows of corn on either side, as far as a red-brick house surrounded by scaffolding.

  Prieto clicked his tongue, said, ‘Idiot couldn’t wait until he’d finished his house,’ then pulled up at the door, braking so hard and fast that we skidded to a halt right outside, loose grit pinging the undercarriage. Mangueras parked just behind, then hopped from the police car to open my door. Prieto kept his gun trained on me so I didn’t bolt. So did two men in State Police uniforms, their ski masks pulled up, AR-15s primed and ready.

  ‘Get out.’ Mangueras hauled me from the car into the dirt. My arm nearly popped out of its socket as he dragged me into the tiled hall. A smell of fresh blood kicked me in the nose, and, when I saw where the smell was coming from, my guts lurched and I sprayed the back of the white leather couch where Abel Carranza, alias Sharktooth, alias Z-35 sat with his head blown off and his silver teeth melted into his exposed bottom jaw.

  Mangueras dealt me a shove that knocked me over, sent me sliding face first towards scattered shards of Abel Carranza’s skull. ‘This is the man who killed Julián Gallardo, the man who killed your friend.’ He nudged me in the ribs with his patent-leather shoes. ‘And we caught you before him and his bosses could. Stopping him is the last favour we’ll do for you.’

  What I wanted to say was, ‘Last favour?’, but Mangueras was already dragging me out the door. Prieto and the cops raised their gun at me again.

  ‘Now, get the fuck out of here,’ he said, climbing into the police pickup.

  Prieto threw the keys at me. Fidel Castro’s beard caught me full in the temple.

  Then he sat in beside Mangueras, and the two cops took up positions in the back, the headlights raking over me one last time as they turned in the driveway and drove back the way we had come.

  For a while I lay there waiting for my pulse to slow down from a heart-attack sprint, then dragged myself into the driver’s seat with the keys in my fist and my jeans stained with the blood from cuts I didn’t even feel yet. In the red glow of the dashboard light my shoulders had the same bullied hunch as the kids I’d seen during the round-up that afternoon.

  The steering wheel was wet when I lifted my face away from the moulded plastic. A hand that didn’t feel like mine placed a lit cigarette between my lips while the other hand keyed my home address into the GPS, its red navigation line a miles-long snake unkinking toward the highway.

  ‘Just be glad that bastard’s dead.’

  Moths clouded my high-beams. The day’s pictures flickered in the dark: Apolonia with her head in her hands, the sad fat kid in the back of the police van, the burns stippling Armando’s torso, the unreflecting calm in Mangueras’ eyes as he dug me in the ribs, the dark pool of blood and brains on Abel Carranza’s couch. My story was a ragged collage that made no sense.

  Another five tabs of the Díaz Ordáz blotter sloshed at the bottom of the flask. The bitter pulp slid down my throat. Smoke floated from my pulped lips as my tyres droned against the road.

  The first time I zoned back in, the mountain fogs had rolled in over the car. Bolero songs played on the radio, a Pemex zipped past in the rear view, and the road lines ticked by like white dashes.

  ‘Where it all went wrong,’ I said to no one.

  The second time I came round was in Mexico City: bad traffic, brown air, sour drivers. My eyes scanned over all that morning rush but all I saw was Abel Carranza’s unlidded skull, his shot-out molars, the silver teeth welded to his jaw forever.

  My street looked like nothing had happened. And nothing had, not for the older women sat waiting in the beautician’s beside my apartment building, or for Gustavo the Rastafarian luchador sweeping up outside his fruit shop, or for the moustached old guy in the cowboy outfit selling lottery tickets outside the HSBC.

  Inside my building, the ground floor apartment’s widescreen TV cast blue lights over the palm tree and the pebble bed at the bottom of the light well. The usual morning chatter filtered from the doorways: radio burble, parents hurrying along their children, the clink of grabbed keys.

  Those sounds of normality, they were the closest thing I’d known to safety in I didn’t know how long. My gait was baggy as a sleepwalker’s heading up those stairs.

  But when I got to my floor, the door swayed open, one of its panels kicked in. The lock was buckled, gouged, stripped of paint.

  The queasy feeling I’d carried all the way from Veracruz got worse now, my ears ringing like I’d stayed underwater for too long. No noise came from inside: not the trickling fish tanks, not the hum of the fridge, not the gurgling of the pipes.

  The Mexican papers have this way of writing the passive voice. When you don’t know who did something but you know what happened, you just say they did it.

  So when a man gets shot, the headline reads, Lo tiraron: They shot him.

  When a woman turns up stabbed to death, La acuchillaron: They knifed her.

  When eleven bodies turn up chopped up by a roadside, the headline reads, Los descuartizaron: They chopped them up.

  Yeah, I know: they and them in two separate clauses.

  What you lose in clarity you gain in immediacy, I guess. That’s the thing about reporting in Mexico: clarity’s in short supply. All you know most of the time is that something happened, and that they did it. That’s how it is, reporting in Mexico: you only find out the truth
s you don’t want to know. Truths you do want to know, you’ll never find out.

  And that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, those truths find out where you live.

  Whoever they were today, they had pulled the shelf of cocktail-glasses from my wall, left broken glass drifted like snow across my table, floor, chairs.

  A landing plane whooshed low overhead. The room and my skull shuddered.

  ‘They really hated my art.’

  The display cases had been tipped over, my strobe-lighting Kalashnikov stomped in two, my Guatemalan pagan idol’s bright skull punched in, and each one of the five faces of Michael Jackson I’d kept framed on my wall had been torn in two.

  ‘Thorough,’ I said, nudging the smashed halves of the William Howard Taft mug with my toe. ‘Too scared to wreck the saint stuff, though, eh?’ I picked the Jesús Malverde plate up from where they’d left it on the table in a space cleared of broken glass, beside the Santa Barbara and Santa Muerte statues.

  In the kitchen I climbed over the tipped-over fridge and leaned under the sink to the cupboard where I kept my cleaning supplies. When I swung the door open Motita coughed out a yowl and jumped into my arms.

  ‘Someone was shy.’ I hefted her until she stopped trembling. She swatted my face with her paw, gave me a look that said everything was my fault.

  ‘Let’s go see the damage, fatty,’ I told Motita, carrying her through the sitting room. The metal-framed chair lay buckled under the weight of my heaved-over palette and plants. They’d shattered my pots and pulled the branch down from its ceiling wires to lie snapped on the floor, as ugly as Abel Carranza’s bared jawbone. Peat-moss starred the floor, the reed mat, my cowhide throw, the sheepskin rug.

  They’d had trouble with the desk: it weighed half a ton, after all. Some of the drawers had been beaten in, my folders scattered everywhere, and my iMac was gone. They’d torn down my map and snapped the noticeboard in two, but the acid blotter was intact enough to fold into my jacket pocket. They’d flung the yellow ashtray right at the fish tank, let the water come flooding out, sucking the java fern and Amazon sword plants and the pebbles onto the floor.