‘Haven’t decided where I’m moving yet.’
‘Oh, you have to. I couldn’t live without pets.’
‘Think a pet’s about all I’m fit to live with. Or a plant. A sturdy one.’
You tidied my hair back from my face. ‘We’ll train you. We’ve got nine days.’
Except we didn’t have nine days. We had barely nine hours.
That night, coming back from the bathroom, I saw the green notification light flashing on my phone. When I swiped it unlocked, there were twelve missed calls from Francisco, the most recent one from ten minutes before.
The covers rustled as you pulled them around you. ‘Andrew, the door!’
‘Won’t be a sec.’ I shut the door and went downstairs with the phone pressed to my ear. ‘Francisco, what’s happening?’
‘Ah, you’re OK,’ he said. ‘Phew. When I heard they got Carranza, I was worried. Word of it came so soon after you called.’
‘Still here, man,’ I said. The hearth still smouldered. I leaned against the warm brick arch and flicked my cigarette butt into the hearth. ‘You all right?’
‘Same as ever,’ he said. ‘Nobody seemed to mind that you were down here.’
‘No, everyone was very helpful,’ I said.
‘Glad to hear it. Hey, so, I’ve got some good news, too,’ he said. ‘It’s Julián Gallardo’s mother. She said she’ll talk.’
I sat down on the armchair. Your coat fell to the ground. ‘And she won’t talk to you?’
‘She won’t talk to local press,’ he said. ‘And she’s afraid they’ll tap her line. Going to have to be face to face, I think.’
‘Ah. Right.’ I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. The cigarette I’d flicked into the hearth had begun to smoke, a long, grey taper as smooth as the line of Carlos’ smoke rising from the crematorium, and I knew I had to be the one to finish this. ‘Here, let me get a plane sorted. Meet you in Papantla day after tomorrow, how’s that?’
‘A plane? Where are you?’
‘Think it’s fair to call this place the opposite of Poza Rica.’
Francisco tsked. ‘It’s well for some.’
‘Yeah, well, see you in a bit, OK? I’m going to pack.’
You were sitting up when I got back into the room. ‘Everything OK?’
‘I have to go.’ I started turfing my things into a bag.
‘Did I do something wrong?’
‘No, not at all.’ I put my arms around you. ‘Work called.’
You looked at me with big-eyed fake amazement. ‘But your laundry.’
‘Security deposit.’ I zipped shut my backpack.
You pushed back your hair. ‘Are you seriously leaving now?’
‘There’s a flight out of Montevideo that hasn’t been cancelled.’
‘You won’t get there in time. No buses.’ You grabbed your jumper. ‘I’ll drive.’
‘What, really?’
You shrugged. ‘What? This is the most exciting thing to happen to me since the boat.’
When we pulled in at the departures building you stretched like a cat in the driver’s seat and put your hand in the back of my hair.
‘OK, you’re semi-trained,’ you said, and pulled me in for a kiss. ‘We can finish the rest when you’re back.’
‘What’s the rest?’
You shrugged. ‘Small stuff. Fetching logs. Taming dogs.’ You plugged a cigarette in my mouth. ‘Now, go get your plane.’
I twisted the bag-strap on my shoulder. ‘This was nice.’
You smiled. ‘And it will be.’ You took off the handbrake. ‘Te espero acá.’
In Spanish, the verb esperar means ‘to hope’, ‘to wait’, and ‘to expect’. Which of the three you meant, I didn’t know, but I prayed it was all three.
23
After that came fourteen hours of migraine-colour light and air that made my throat sore, but enough of your gardenia smell had caught on my clothes to keep the dread at bay until I landed at the squat concrete airport outside Poza Rica.
Francisco met me at arrivals, where he stood next to a small spry man with a large moustache and a faded baseball cap.
‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘Andrew, this is Lombardo, the agente municipal for Zapata. He spoke to Julián’s mother for us.’
‘Thanks for setting up the meeting.’ I shook his hand. ‘You sure you won’t get in trouble being seen with me?’
‘Ah, don’t worry.’ Lombardo waved a hand. ‘We’ll just say you’re my cousin. On the Chihuahua side of my family.’
‘There’s a Chihuahua side to your family?’
‘Sure there is,’ said Lombardo.
Francisco led us out through the doors to an ambulance that stood parked on a mostly empty, weed-pocked lot.
‘It’s the town’s,’ said Lombardo. ‘Present from Pemex.’
‘Is the doctor OK with this?’
‘Cousin,’ said Lombardo, clapping me on the back, ‘I am the doctor.’
We drove through thick woodland, past a grass verge dotted with rusted signs for Pemex wells, as far as a deep gorge crossed by a huge rusted bridge. A Guardia Civil pickup stood at one side. Four men in plainclothes stooped over the edge with AR-15 rifles under their arms. Lombardo just kept driving.
‘Another kid went missing in Papantla last night,’ said Francisco.
The ambulance rucketed over the bridge and we headed down a tree-hooded road tight and dark as a tunnel. The uneven surface rattled the trolley and drips in the back. A tall, shimmer-edged refinery flame wavered in the distance.
‘Those cops weren’t looking very hard.’ I turned around my chair.
‘That’s because they threw him in,’ Lombardo said simply.
Slowly the refinery flame grew taller and taller, until we could hear its roar through the windscreen. Lombardo lowered my window.
‘Sounds like a plane taking off,’ I said.
‘All day, every day,’ Francisco said as we passed outside a reed-and-mud fence that surrounded a whitewashed bungalow roofed in tin. Men and women dressed in Pemex overalls, jeans, and plaid shirts stood clustered in the yard, eating pork and tortillas from plastic plates. Beside them the clean pink halves of a pig hung from a wood frame, its parts bobbing in a tin cauldron over a wood fire. The refinery flame towered above us in the blue air.
‘Our whole village is a victim of the oil companies,’ said Lombardo as we crossed another bridge. Pipes traversed the gap, some of them dripping, tainting the water with oil-stain rainbows. In one yard a woman sat on twelve-inch pipe, fanning her cooking-fire with a dried palm-frond. Francisco and I leaned out to take pictures.
‘Is that safe?’ I asked.
Lombardo shook his head. ‘Not really. We’ve counted them – a hundred and eighty-two pipes cut through the town.’
‘How many people are there?’
‘About a hundred and eighty-two.’ I pretended to take a note. ‘I’m joking, I’m joking. Jesus. You got the slow blood in the family, eh, cousin? We’re living on top of a bomb. Whole village burned down when a pipe exploded in 1962.’ He gestured out the window. ‘All this was rebuilt.’
The hilltop road took us above a grove of mandarin trees, their leaves burned-looking, their fruit pitted and scrotal on the branch.
‘And what about crime?’
Lombardo laughed. ‘Don’t get me started. I’m the only doctor for miles. A country doctor, treating war wounds in the middle of the night.’ His voice was light. ‘You get used to it. And, you know, I do my best work for those Zeta guys.’
‘Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you,’ said Francisco.
The road tapered through a centreless maze of rusted spigots and crumbled concrete walls, bleached by the high noon sun. Thick ferns bobbed in a light wind. A graveyard feeling breathed from the wreckage.
‘The old village,’ Lombardo said, stopping the ambulance for a moment. He clicked his tongue. ‘I wasn’t born. My father remembers.’
‘What’d he say?’
‘“You ever see pictures of Pompeii?”’ He took off the handbrake and drove as far as a house on an outcrop above the valley. ‘Here she is,’ he said gently.
A woman of about forty wearing sweatpants and a purple spaghetti-top stood outside. She looked different to her son’s Facebook photo. The red streaks in her short hair had faded, the smile on her face had gone, and her eyes had a broken look.
She was already walking towards me as I climbed out, her arms open. ‘I want to thank you,’ she said, and clasped me to her, ‘for what your friend did.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I said.
She talked on like she hadn’t heard. ‘He was so brave.’
‘So was your son.’
We stood looking out at the green empty countryside seamed by the distant river. The refinery flame roared and smoked above it all.
‘Tell me about Julián.’ I took out my notebook.
‘He was a good kid,’ she said. ‘For a kid from this town to go all the way to university is a big thing. Lombardo threw a party for the whole village. We were so shy, but we went.’ She smiled. ‘And for the first year of university, it was like a celebration, every day. He worked so hard. He’d get the bus to Poza Rica, come back from the library after dark, even though it was dangerous. We lit so many candles. But he was always careful. He hadn’t any vices. But then his father died. My husband.’ She swallowed. ‘He was a personal driver for one of the Ajenjo engineers. He’d take him around the wells at all hours of the day, morning, noon, the dead of night. Sometimes they’d sleep there. Sometimes he’d come home pale, and wouldn’t tell me why.’ She waved her hand. ‘But we all knew. We all knew where the bodies went.’
She coughed out a bitter laugh, took her phone from her pocket, and started swiping through photographs. ‘One night, halfway through Julián’s second year, his father went out late at night with the engineer – some emergency, he said, but something that wouldn’t take long. He said he’d be back in an hour.’ She shook her head. ‘And, you know, Ajenjo, supposedly, they had a protocol around this. They tell you within ten minutes if they can’t locate somebody, then they update you every hour. But they didn’t tell me a thing. Julián and I went to the offices, and all we got were stony looks and words that don’t mean anything: “We’re investigating to the height of our capacity, we’ve involved every element of law enforcement”, everything like this.’ She held her phone up for me. ‘Then, two weeks later, the company sent us this photo.’
The screen showed two bodies lying beside an oil-tank, their faces masked in oil, the lines of their lips dark, their eyes full, their hair like brown eels, the thick glar heavy in the folds of their clothes.
‘They said the engineer fell in first, and that my husband fell in after him. That they both drowned. That it was an accident.’ She shook her head. ‘A lie. I’ve seen these tanks. They’re not deep. And even if you do fall in, there’s a metal rod you can hold on to for someone to pull you across to the ladder. And somehow it took them a fortnight to find them in the tank. Here, give me your number. Have this photo.’
I handed her my card.
‘They told me I could claim him,’ she said, tapping on her phone, ‘but when I went there, they hadn’t washed him. He had no autopsy stitches, you know the ones? And the marks on his face, the bruises, the broken nose – you don’t get this when you bang your head.’ She zoomed in on the picture for me.
‘And this was in 2014, right?’ I said.
‘August of that year,’ she said. ‘A week after the Guardia Civil came in. One of them was there when they gave the body back. A tall man. Silver teeth. Brown hair.’
My pen stopped moving.
Carlos, if you get this, what the fuck?
‘Your husband saw something he shouldn’t have,’ I said. ‘And either the company or the Zetas or both decided he couldn’t go public about it.’
Nodding, she leaned against the chipped wooden lintel of her door and finally let herself cry. ‘And this is what killed Julián. This is why he started to organise, to rally, to work. To find the people who killed his father. And I tried to tell him to keep quiet, tried to tell him that I knew what would happen, that what always happens would just keep happening, like it happened to his father, like it happened to those poor Ayotzinapa students, like it happens to anybody in this company since forever.’ She cut herself off, waving her hand. I handed her a tissue from my pocket.
‘So the company sent the same man after your son,’ I said. ‘And got the police to cover up his murder.’
She nodded again, her eyes shut. ‘And, you know, part of me is proud of his sacrifice. But the rest of me just wants his body.’
The weight of the airline pastries was cold as oil in my gut.
‘Señora Gallardo,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to take up any more of your time. But we’re going to take your son’s story to everyone we can.’
She wadded the tissue up in her hand.
‘It’s not justice,’ I said, ‘but it’s something like revenge.’
In that flickering orange refinery fire I saw Carlos wreathed in flames, smoke pouring from the bullet-holes in his chest.
‘It’s all I want,’ I said. ‘The ones who killed your son and your husband killed my friend, too.’
She put her hand on my chest. ‘I’ll light a candle for him.’
‘He’ll need a few more than that.’ I slid my notebook into my pocket. ‘He was a complicated guy, Señora Gallardo, I’m not going to lie.’
‘So was Julián.’ She stared at the refinery flame. ‘We need complicated people.’ She shut the door behind her and I climbed back into the ambulance.
‘All set?’ said Francisco.
‘All set.’
Lombardo took off the handbrake and drove down the hill. ‘Back to Chihuahua, then, cousin?’
‘I was thinking further south, actually.’
The first flight back to Mexico City wasn’t until the following morning and we couldn’t trust the night buses, so Lombardo dropped Francisco and I at the hotel in Papantla.
‘You know, this place is all right,’ I said to him, as we sat down on the restaurant’s banquettes. ‘You should move here.’
‘The voladores would drive me crazy,’ he said, pointing through the window at the six men in their tabards and white linens diving from the pole by the church.
‘Ah, c’mon, man,’ I said. ‘Embrace the tradition, or whatever.’
He gave a fake shudder. ‘I’ll stick to zacahuil.’
The sharp white fife notes cut through the glass as the voladores dropped backwards to the ground on their long ropes.
‘Fair.’ I pointed at his empty glass of tamarind juice. ‘Another?’
‘Think I’ll be heading back.’ He patted his stomach. ‘All those tacos, plus a hotel dinner. I feel like a python. Going home to sleep for a week.’ He stood up.
‘Yeah, same.’ I hugged him. ‘Here, thanks for the zacahuil. Kind of.’
‘Reporters are a dying breed round here,’ he said. ‘Have to stick together.’
When he left, I headed back up to a room so tight and airless it was like being sealed inside a plastic bag. Dominic had emailed to thank me for the photos from Uruguay – and to badger me about the oil story. The blank document pulled my thoughts all the way back to you, its cursor a lone coated walker, the fan a wind edged with sleet, the letters skinny as holly branches. All I could think of was how snow over El Paso and a blizzard over Uruguay had become this sweltering hotel in Veracruz.
The slow ceiling fan chopped my cigarette-smoke into long blue festoons. Through the open window the evening sky was a thirty-two-degree hyper-saturated red. My cursor ticked across the screen, and the tin roofs outside ticked and contracted with the day’s fading heat. As the colour died from the air I watched them hammer their tambours and toot their fifes as they dropped backwards, their music shrill enough to make me want to saw down their stupid UNESCO World Heritage pole, but I grit
ted my teeth and bashed out a draft before slamming shut my laptop and walking into the humid night.
The hotel’s red lights smouldered through the evening mist. Dun flocks of chachalacas scattered above the park, empty now except for an old couple sitting on a bench by the bandstand. The Totonaca guy I’d seen at the pool with Francisco had come into some luck at a restaurant: a salesman type and his wife marvelled as he held up a replica of the church and its diving pole, complete with four model voladores. When he caught my eye he nodded and smiled.
After that I walked downhill into a maze of streets I hadn’t gone down before. The only lights on around here came from a whitewashed bar on a corner with the words EL TALIBAN written in tall blue letters above the door. Instead of a door the bar had a red curtain. Bolero songs rippled out to me through the gap.
White-knuckling is the name for what happens when you’re sober but skip out on meetings, when you grip anything and everything that’s not a drink, because really you’re just a drunk without the alcohol.
But now the man I’d been white-knuckling was gone. The LSD flask I’d been white-knuckling was gone. The story I’d been white-knuckling all this time was almost gone. Soon I’d be left gripping nothing at all, and then I would only slide.
My cigarette flew through the dark and I was through the red curtain and into the bar’s warm aortic dark before that flicked butt hit the curb.
There weren’t many of us in there: just a table of teenage boys hunkered giggling at a video playing on one of their phones, and a couple of Totonaca builders with the shins of their jeans white with the dust of a long day. At the bar I sat beside a scrawny guy in a Pemex outfit. Behind the bar a large woman dressed in a bodice and lace tights fixed her makeup in the smeared bar-optics.
‘Chela, güerito?’ she said in a deep, velvet voice.
The flutter in my throat was so loud and so strong that all I could do was nod. The bottle cap hissed against the opener and tinked to the ground.
A six-foot oil painting of Osama Bin Laden watched me through the gloom in the corners, hung with cobwebs thick as cotton gauze.
The bottle sat in front of me. A bead of moisture slid from neck to shoulder. Before I took that first swig, I got up and crossed the room as far as the jukebox, flicked back through the menu as far as the Elvis songs, found ‘If I Can Dream’, slid in ten pesos. Trumpets rose, sad as a last-stand bugle, toy piano notes played on my own back’s bones, and the washes of electric organ were the same green tone as the crematorium music two weeks before. I shut my eyes and Carlos slowly formed out of my cigarette smoke, wearing the slim leather shoes and suit that I’d found in his ruined wardrobe. The smoke darkened and curled into the gentle brown waves of his hair, the jukebox speakers buzzed like wasps, and his voice rose in my head.
Call Him Mine Page 16