Pirata

by Patrick Hasburgh

  Meagan nodded.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Oh,” Obsidian said, “he’s for sure the fuck dead, Nick.”

  “Don’t say the f-word, honey,” Meagan said, almost to herself. This was a mom in shock.

  “Can I make sure?” I asked.

  Meagan nodded toward the walk-in cooler at the far end of the bar.

  I moved over to that side of the room. I wasn’t looking forward to what I was probably going to see, but like Obsidian, I was trying to stand tall and look tough. I yanked open the cooler’s heavy stainless-steel door and instantly almost puked. The smell was horrific.

  I took a candle from the table and extended it with one arm into the cooler. I held my nose and tried not to breathe. I could see Winsor, slumped on the floor as if he had toppled out of a chair. He was still bent like he was sitting. His pants were down around his knees, and he had an erection.

  He had also crapped himself—probably because both claws of a long-handled framing hammer were deeply embedded into the back of his skull. I recognized the hammer. It was the one he and I had used to bash the hole in the wall when we installed the air conditioner.

  “Okay, Obsidian is right,” I said, still holding my nose and sounding like the guy who sings in “Yellow Submarine.” “Full speed ahead, captain—he’s for sure dead.”

  I closed the cooler door—and was nearly knocked over by a wave of angst-ridden nausea. Whatever the reason, my surf buddy was dead. It didn’t feel good.

  “Nobody else knows about this?” I asked, looking directly at Meagan.

  I was pretty certain the boys wouldn’t have told anybody. Jade was still in shock, and Obsidian radiated humiliation and grief.

  “Just us,” Meagan said.

  “Okay, good,” I said, forcing the we’re really fucked out of my voice.

  I opened the black steel door and motioned Jade and his mom outside. Meagan blew out the candles, and I almost said happy birthday to Obsidian but then thought better of it.

  “Let’s go to my place,” I said.

  12

  It was midmorning and pouring rain, but the heavy cloud cover accompanying the revolving thunderstorms made everything look like dusk with an electric glow. Meagan had been standing out in front of the casa for the last half hour, buck naked, with her arms stretched wide and her palms open to the sky. It was pretty obvious that she was desperate to make herself feel clean.

  And it appeared to be working. She was spotless.

  The boys were still sound asleep in my bed. I had the ceiling fan cranked to the max, and I had left the door to my bedroom open just a crack. I even went in once or twice to check on them and make sure they were both still breathing. It was something I used to do with my son, Marshall, all the time.

  Meagan came out of the rain, and I handed her a towel. She dried herself off, completely cool with her nakedness, despite how it made me fixate on only her eyes, as if I were a hypnotist with a stiff neck. But no way was I going to let her catch me sneaking a peek at her body—as beautiful as it was.

  I had made some tea, and I poured her a cup. She sipped it.

  “What is this?” Meagan asked.

  “Tea,” I said. “I figured you’d like tea.”

  “But what kind is it?” she asked again.

  “The kind that isn’t coffee.”

  Meagan wrapped the towel around her waist and slipped on an old sweatshirt I had put out for her. Then she sat down and balanced the cup on her knee.

  “This is going to ruin him,” Meagan said.

  “No, it won’t,” I said. “People survive stuff. We’re hardwired for it.”

  “Not stuff like this,” she said. “Jade saw me kill someone.”

  “Who deserved it. In some ways, that could end up being a positive.”

  “He was raped,” she said quietly.

  I wasn’t exactly sure how to be the strong one here, so I decided to just be real.

  “We can survive ourselves, Meagan,” I said. “And I think it’s our job to help Jade understand that.”

  “Don’t say shit like that to me,” Meagan said. “You don’t have kids.”

  She was really pissed and just glaring at me.

  “I have a son,” I said.

  I said it slowly, like a confession. It backed Meagan off some.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know where your kid is?” she asked.

  I could see that Meagan wasn’t particularly impressed with my commitment to fatherhood.

  “Because I fucked up,” I said, “and behavior has consequences.”

  She let out a breath and smirked.

  “Clichés like that make you an expert on parenting?”

  “I know what not to do,” I said.

  I wasn’t exactly closing this deal, but at least I was keeping my customer from walking out the door.

  “We have to believe that we can survive ourselves, Meagan. And that’s what we need to show our kids.”

  “Did you ever get over getting shot in the head?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But thanks to your kids I’m working on what isn’t permanent.”

  Meagan didn’t know what to say—and then she motioned for me to bend toward her. I did. And with the index finger of her right hand, she began to trace the scar on the back of my head.

  “It’s pretty ugly,” I said.

  “I’ve seen worse,” she said.

  Meagan kissed me on the scar. It was the first time anyone had ever done that. I pulled my T-shirt away from my chest and tried to let some air in. It was soaking wet and I was sweating—but somehow enjoying the salty sting dripping down my back.

  I cleared my throat. “When the policía find out what happened, this’ll just end up as a justifiable homicide. I wouldn’t worry.”

  But I had no idea about the law down here or how it works.

  “I’m not,” Meagan said. “Ninety percent of Mexican crimes go unsolved.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “It’s common knowledge.”

  For someone who had just killed a guy with a hammer, she was a lot calmer than I was.

  “And it was self-defense,” she said. “A mother’s right to defend her child, or whatever.”

  “But it still needs to be reported. I mean, if we don’t, we’d be, like, criminals.”

  “Report it to who?”

  “The local policía,” I said. “At least.”

  “How’s your Spanish?”

  “I can say good morning.”

  Meagan laughed.

  “And a few other things,” I said. “How’s yours?”

  “Not good enough to defend myself in court,” she said. “And in Mexico you have to prove your innocence. They don’t have to prove you’re guilty. You start out that way when you’re arrested.”

  “Jade is a witness.”

  “There’s no way I’m letting my son testify about what happened to him.”

  “Okay, so we find the best defense lawyer in Mexico,” I said, ignoring the oxymoron and just sounding like a regular one.

  “While I’m waiting in jail?”

  “The boys and I’ll visit you,” I said.

  Meagan shook her head. “No fucking way,” she said. “We need to hide this.”

  “It’s a small town, Meagan.”

  “In the off-season.” She smiled. “I mean, who’s going to know?”

  “Look, Meagan,” I said. “I’m, ah, kind of a coward, actually.”

  “Everyone’s a coward, Nick,” Meagan said. “It’s why nobody ever wants to get caught.”

  And I suddenly had this feeling that in a lifetime of bad decisions, I was about to make one of my worst.

  13

  I shouldn’t have waited until dark. By now, Winsor was probably in worse shape than King Tut. Still, there was no way I wanted to drag a dead guy with a
framing hammer stuck in his head out of a bar and into the back of my Suburban in broad daylight.

  I had my longest surfboard bag, the one I use for the tanker I ride when the waves are small. I also had a flashlight and a pair of those nostril pinchers that old guys wear in swimming pools. I was hoping to keep most of the stink out.

  I let myself into Wave of the Day. I lit a candle and snapped on my nostril pinchers.

  I opened the cooler door and shined my flashlight toward the floor. Winsor was there, pretty much like we had left him, except that he’d lost his erection and the poop had dried up, so the odor wasn’t as bad. I’d surfed Gagger’s when it smelled worse. This was barely waist-high Gagger’s.

  I unzipped the bag and laid it out next to Winsor. What it lacked in width, the bag made up for in length. I was pretty sure he’d fit inside, though as a lifelong shortboarder, he’d be bummed.

  It was time to pull the hammer out of Winsor’s head. I had been dreading this part, imagining that once the holes in his head were unplugged, there’d be a fountain of blood. But then I thought that if Winsor’s blood pressure was zero, like it’s supposed to be in dead people, the blood thing wouldn’t be much of an issue.

  I pulled on the hammer’s handle, and the claws easily came out of Winsor’s head. There was just a trickle of blood—unlike when I got shot. I bled buckets. But that was probably because the .22-caliber bullet was traveling at about one thousand miles per hour. Serious shooters use .22s because the slug gets trapped inside the skull and bounces around, creating a shitload of tissue damage. A fatal result is just about guaranteed—and one potential witness is taken care of.

  But the bullet with my name on it had blown out the back of my head, and despite the ugliness of what it left behind, the fact that it exited rather than ricocheted probably saved my life, not to mention whatever brainpower I might have left. I lost some significant memory. I have fits, and sometimes a little trouble hooking up the right thoughts and words, but that’s getting better. And I’m still paddling out, which is something Winsor can’t say anymore.

  It was a pretty good hammer, and tools are hard to come by in Mexico, so I decided not to bury the murder weapon with the victim. Not that this was a murder, or that Winsor was a victim. The victim was back at my casa playing Minecraft on my computer.

  I put the hammer on the table next to the tequila.

  Grabbing Winsor by both ankles, I stretched him out and flipped him onto his back, sort of the way you tip a wheelbarrow onto its side. He wasn’t really that stiff yet.

  It was pretty easy to roll Winsor into the bag. I started to zip it up.

  Not so easy.

  I had to kneel on his chest as I pulled the zipper closed. I even had to bounce up and down a little bit, and when I did, he croaked out a burp that was ghastly—Gagger’s double overhead, easy.

  I finally got the board bag closed, except for the last little bit. Winsor’s face was framed by black canvas, and the jagged plastic tracks of the bag’s big zipper dug into his fat cheeks. His eyes were closed, and there was some snot on his face. I wiped his nose.

  We had been friends. I had surfed some good waves with this guy. So I figured I should probably say something. But I barely believed in luck, let alone God and heaven, so what the hell was I going to say.

  “Adios,” I finally said. And then, like recovering Catholics everywhere, I made a sloppy sign of the cross.

  I got a good grip on each side of the board bag and yanked up hard to hoist Winsor over my shoulder like I had seen in a hundred war movies—as if Winsor were a fellow soldier I was trying to retrieve from behind enemy lines. But the dead pedophile barely budged.

  There was no way I was moving this body on my own. Winsor probably weighed more than two hundred pounds. I could barely drag him—forget getting him to the curb and hoisting his carcass into the rear of my Suburban. Deadweight was everything I had heard it to be.

  “This is fucked,” I said, absorbing the fact that my only experience with hard-core crime was what I’d seen on television.

  Real crime is hard.

  And committing one that you might actually get away with is probably even harder.

  I was going to need help.

  14

  I was aware that the chances of getting caught for pulling stupid shit increased proportionally with being even stupider and telling people about it. But you have to spill some beans to get someone to help you get rid of a body. And to get really good help, you probably had to spill a lot of beans.

  When people say “partners in crime,” they’re not talking about a business plan. There is no honor among thieves. Just desperation.

  Which was my problem.

  I was missing the big cash advantage. Nobody was going to make a centavo off this gig. Winsor wasn’t the chartreuse four-door with a standard transmission and no AC that earned a sales bonus if it was sold before the end of the month.

  That’s the problem with crimes of passion—there’s no profit motive. What I really needed was a favor. A big one.

  If I had a best Mexican friend in Sabanita, it was this local I knew named Chuy González. The González family had lived in this part of Mexico for so long that Chuy’s grandparents didn’t even speak Spanish. They spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.

  Chuy’s mom learned Spanish from the nuns at the Catholic school, and then English from the gringo tourists who bargained her down on the price of the Chiclets she sold on the beach. She named her son Cuāuhtliquetzqué, which is Nahuatl for “eagle warrior” and is impossible to pronounce without pulling a throat muscle, so everyone in Sabanita just called him Chuy—the nickname for Jesus. It’s also what I called him. Because Chuy had become my savior, too.

  I made my way over the back side of Gringo Hill and then into the jungle where Chuy lived with his wife and kids, six of them, three of each. Yohana was twenty-three. Their oldest child was nine.

  I had helped Chuy install a tanque de agua in his cinder-block house. The roof was palapa. Casa de la familia González was small and damp, but built with Chuy’s own hands. The water tank we installed was a big deal—Chuy’s only toilet flushed, and the casa also had electricity and Internet. Chuy was on Facebook.

  He had learned to speak English from the tourists on the beach, just like his mom, but Chuy sold dope instead of Chiclets—or, more accurately, he sold dope to everyone but me. Chuy wouldn’t sell to surfers. He said it was because he hated having guys in the lineup who were high. But when it came to me, I think his reasoning went a little deeper than that.

  “Chuy,” I called out.

  It was pretty late, but there was still a light on inside. The kids were probably watching YouTube.

  “Pirata!” Chuy yelled back.

  He was in a loft he had propped up at the very top of his palapa. He swung down like Tarzan—if Tarzan had been half an inch under five feet with an exceptionally large head. Chuy wore a ponytail and had a network of homemade tattoos. I had never seen him wearing shoes or a shirt. Not flip-flops or even a tank top. Not once. Not ever.

  His trademark look was a pair of black cargo shorts worn low, the huge pockets full of inventory and contraband. He had a family to take care of.

  “Amigo, it’s late,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  Anything after sundown is late during tormenta.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” I said, lying a little. “I just need a favor.”

  Chuy had a solar-powered smile. He beamed. I looked down at my feet.

  “Sure,” he said.

  A lot of gringos ask too much of their Mexican friends. They smuggle down a couple of pairs of old sneakers and a few boxes of throwaway textbooks, and then they expect the Lord Jim treatment, as if the poverty-stricken paradise they’ve barged into owes them something for their meager generosity—like cheap labor or easy sex.

  Chuy called these gringos yo-yos because their good deeds always came with strings attached.

  “Just don’t ask me to help
you move,” Chuy said. “You gringos have too much stuff.”

  “I’m not moving.”

  “Good.”

  “You know Winsor?”

  “Your buddy?” Chuy asked. “That guy who rides the T and C Pang?”

  At one time, Chuy had been the No. 2 longboarder in all of Mexico, and he was still one of the best surfers in town. And like every local in the lineup, he knew just about every surfer who had ever paddled out at Sabanita. It was uncanny.

  “Well, yeah, sort of,” I said. “Except that he’s dead.”

  “No shit?”

  I nodded.

  “How?” Chuy asked, not really that surprised. People die down here pretty regularly.

  “He got hit in the head with a hammer.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Self-defense.”

  “Like a suicide?” Chuy asked, his beach English failing him a little. “That’s hard to do with a hammer. Huevos grandes.”

  “No, someone else hit him.”

  “Well, that prick could drop in,” Chuy said. “He cost me more waves than a job.”

  My amigo was already choosing sides and reminding me how often Winsor had taken waves that weren’t his.

  “At some point, what else can you do, right?” Chuy continued.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter. He deserved it.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  I could hear Yohana laughing with her kids from inside the casa.

  “I need to get rid of his body,” I whispered. “Do you know how to do that?”

  Chuy shrugged. He was pretty nonchalant.

  “I’m not an expert,” he said. “But it can’t be that hard.”

  15

  Chuy was a foot shorter than I was, but about twice as strong. With him, it took us less than a minute to get Winsor into the back of my Suburban. If anyone looked in the rear windows, all they would think they were seeing was a longboard bag stuffed with too many surfboards—not a board bag stuffed with too much body.

  We were driving through town.

  “Turn your lights on,” Chuy said.