“You want the next one, mimado—el segundo?” He was tormenting Jade.
“Please,” I said.
“It’s good to feel power when you’ve been surrounded by weakness.”
“He’s just a boy,” I said.
El Jefe whispered to Jade, “Ya es tiempo para ser un hombre.” And then he whistled again and raised his hand. “Say it, mijo!”
Jade was trying to catch his breath. I couldn’t let him be marked by this. I called out, “¡El segundo!” And the second man was shot dead.
A couple of soldiers yanked up the bodies and hurled them into the back of the pickup truck.
“That’s what truth looks like. Spread it around.”
El Jefe walked off and rejoined his men. I kept waiting for him to turn around and shoot at us or something—but he didn’t. So we just sat there for a couple of minutes.
“Can we leave now?” Jade asked.
“I think so,” I said. “Start to drive away slowly. And don’t look back.”
Jade started up the Suburban. He put his right foot on the brake pedal and shifted into Drive. We drove away—slowly—as Jade merged perfectly back onto Mexico 200, heading north.
I let out a long breath. Jade glanced over at me, squeezing the wheel. He was trembling.
“Huge courage, dude,” I said and faked a smile, but Jade shook his head.
“Who were they?” he asked.
But I wasn’t sure if he meant the two dead men or the soldiers and El Jefe, so I couldn’t really give him an answer.
“Sometimes Mexico is just Mexico,” I said. “And it’s better not to know.”
37
I had commandeered some tweezers from Meagan’s makeup bag, and I was squatting over a mirror that I’d positioned on the floor of my bedroom. Jade had passed out from exhaustion and trauma as soon as we’d gotten home.
“Are you okay to drive now?” Jade had asked me on our way back.
We’d made it about twenty minutes from the roadblock. Jade was still trembling. He was beyond tears.
“No problem.”
Jade pulled the big SUV to the side of the road and let it roll to a stop. We switched seats. I put the Suburban in gear and stepped on the gas. The faster I drove, the less my ass hurt, mostly because I had to concentrate—the roads were shit and it was dark—something that also kept my mind off how I’d just become an executioner. Even if it was for the right reason.
I began to hate El Jefe in a way I hadn’t known was possible—it nearly matched my fear of him. I hated him for how he’d terrorized Jade, and for how it had made me feel powerless.
“Do you think those guys are dead?” Jade asked.
I considered lying to him about what we’d just witnessed—but if truth mattered, it really mattered now.
“I have no doubt,” I said. “They are dead. Yes.”
“Were they bad men?”
“They could have been,” I said.
Jade thought about that for a moment.
“So then it would be okay to do that. To shoot them,” he said.
“What you just saw is never okay, Jade. Never think that it is.”
I turned on the radio, but there was nothing but white noise. Jade turned up the volume, and we just listened to static for the next ten miles or so. Our Alacráns adventure had been consumed by a kind of speechlessness and unforgettable impossibility.
Just before we’d made it home, Jade’s iPhone had crowed a roosterlike ring. He handed it to me, and I pressed the speaker button.
“Hello,” I said.
“Please state your full name,” a digitized voice said.
“Who’s this?”
“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
But this time, it was a real live voice.
I froze—and then looked over at Jade. He shrugged.
“So what?” he said.
I mouthed, “The FBI!”
“J. Edgar Hoover wore a dress,” Jade shouted, like a graduate of Google U.
Then he snatched his iPhone back and tossed it out the window. It broke the tension, and we both laughed.
“I thought you had a lot of your songs on that,” I said, a little shocked.
“It’s easy to download more,” Jade said, “and I got tired of having to skip over Winsor’s stuff. The guy was an Amy Winehouse freak.”
At the very least, I thought.
“Besides,” Jade continued, “it had the Find My iPhone app, so the FBI could locate us if they ever felt like coming down here.”
“But it’s not like they know we’ve done anything wrong,” I said, sweating the thought more than I would have liked.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Jade said. “Obsidian and I don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Oh, yeah, just like Mom isn’t,” he said, and laughed.
Back at the casa, I’d let Jade take a shower first, and then he hit the sack while I put away our boards. Meagan had left a note on the higuera informing me that she and Obsidian were having tacos in the street and they hoped the surfing was great.
I was about three for seven when it came to plucking the sea urchin spines out of my ass. It was difficult; I had to look down between my thighs to a reflection in a mirror that only a proctologist could love—face-to-face with the outer rim of my inner self. It wasn’t pretty.
I broke off the back end of a sea-urchin spine.
“Damn,” I said.
My legs were cramping, and my back was killing me. But then Meagan came through the door, and my humiliation trumped everything.
“You could have knocked,” I said.
“I’m sorry. I thought I lived here.”
Meagan looked down at me, and at my ass reflected in the mirror. She smiled.
“Are you trying to find your head?”
“That’s what I love about you, Meg,” I said. “Your sensitivity.”
I stood up, and for some reason I had a bit of an erection. I was at half-mast—at least.
“Oh, my, what’s this? Were you expecting company?”
“I was trying to get a couple of dozen sea-urchin spines out of my ass,” I said.
“With my good tweezers?”
“I didn’t know they were your good ones.”
“Jesus, Nick,” Meagan said. “I use these on my eyebrows.”
I handed her the tweezers. “Sorry,” I said.
“How was the surf?” Meagan asked, shaking her head as she rinsed off the tweezers and put them back in her makeup bag—the contents of which I had scattered out on the top of the polished concrete counter.
“Your son killed it,” I said. “You would have been really proud of him.”
Meagan smiled. “How did you do?”
“It was too big for me. I was afraid to go out.”
She turned cold. “You let Jade surf alone?”
“I did,” I said. “But I was on the beach watching him.”
It was a hedge—but no way was I going to tell Meagan about El Jefe if she was already going all helicopter mom over Jade surfing alone.
“You were too afraid to paddle out?”
“The boys have passed me by, Meagan. They’ve got the stoke. They’re really good.”
For some reason, I hadn’t lost my half erection. In fact, it was no longer at half. It was heading toward three-quarters.
Meagan looked down at it but didn’t appear to have much of an opinion. At least, not yet. “Are you waiting for me to hang something on that?”
“I guess that would depend on whether or not you have any hang-ups,” I said, with a glibness that recalled my car-lot days.
“I don’t have many.” She took the scarf from around her neck and began to gently—very gently—buff and polish my penis as if it were a shoe and she was a shoeshine boy.
“In the porn industry, this is called fluffing,” Meagan said.
She was sexy as hell, and as embarrassing and odd and funny as this was,
it was wonderful.
“Were you a fluffer?” I asked.
“Not professionally,” she said.
I couldn’t believe how relaxed and comfortable she was in her own skin. It didn’t seem as if there was a self-conscious bone in her body. It calmed me down quite a bit.
“Let’s see what we can do about those sea urchins,” she said. “Lie down on your stomach.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. My erection was pointing toward the ceiling. I hadn’t been this hard since I slow danced to “Nothing Compares 2 U” at my senior prom.
“Oh, I’ll make it so you can lie down,” Meagan said. “Promise.” She turned around and motioned to the buttons at the back of her thin cotton dress. I unbuttoned the first three or four, and she easily slipped out of the shoulders. Meagan never wore a bra. She didn’t have to. Her breasts were perfect. She kicked off the dress and slipped off her panties.
She turned around and faced me. And then she touched herself. I could see that she’d recently had a full-Monty wax job. Her fingers glistened. She put the middle one in my mouth.
“Suck me,” she said.
And I obliged. Then Meagan turned and locked the door. “The boys are sleeping,” she said, “but just in case.”
Meagan squatted in front of me—straddling the mirror—and I had to admit that I preferred her reflection to the recollection of my own. She cradled my cock with one hand and began to masturbate with the middle three fingers of the other.
I had a very good view of the mirror. I was sort of mesmerized. Then Meagan French-kissed my belly button.
“Do you like oral sex?” she asked me.
“I do.”
“Me, too.” She put my cock in her mouth, and I closed my eyes.
In too short a time, I was able to lie on my stomach. And Meagan went to work on removing the sea urchins.
She must have been some kind of ass-repair expert, because she was able to manipulate out virtually all of the sea-urchin spines. Meagan barely had to use the tweezers, but once or twice she applied that old cowboy standard, the snake-venom suck.
“Sorry,” I said. “He can be persistent.”
I had another erection.
“We’ll see,” Meagan said, pulling me close to her. “My turn.”
“What’s fair is fair,” I whispered.
I kissed Meagan as lightly as I could, hovering just above her lips, barely touching them, and then I licked out for her tongue until I found it. I kissed her chin and then her neck and then the nipples of both breasts.
“I don’t like gentle,” she said, a little breathlessly.
“That’s just where it’s going to start,” I said. “Give it a chance.”
38
The sheets were soaked and twisted. We had somehow knotted ourselves together like two sneakers flung over a telephone line.
Someone was banging on the window. I opened my eyes. It was already dawn.
Shit.
“Hola, Pirata!” It sounded like José. I pulled back the curtain and saw him standing next to Chuy. Chuy looked like he’d seen a ghost. He was obviously freaked. I opened the window.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“We got trouble,” Chuy said.
Meagan groaned. I went back to the bed and whispered in her ear, “I’m going to go surf the early session, honey.”
It was my first real lie of this new relationship, and I wasn’t happy with how easily it slipped from my lips.
“Have fun,” she whispered.
I put on some surf shorts and a free fiji T-shirt and met José and Chuy in my front yard. They both stared at me in disbelief.
“What the fuck,” José said.
“Jesus,” Chuy said.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“What’s the matter?” José said. “How about what the fuck?”
He was laughing. A rare thing to see. Whatever it was, José thought it was very funny.
Chuy was pointing to my left eye.
“Are you seeing better now?” he asked.
And I realized that this was the first time these guys had seen me wearing my glass eye.
“No,” I said. “It’s just for appearances.”
“It’s a good disguise,” José said. “You could rob banks with that shit. The policía would all be out looking for a one-eyed bandito.”
“You always see the positive in everything, José,” I said. “That’s a great quality.”
“You make work what works,” he said. “But you get something shot out down here, amigo, you are on your own. Nobody’s passing out fake eyes for free.”
“This wasn’t free,” I said. “It cost me twenty-two hundred dollars.”
“Muy guapo, Pirata,” Chuy said. “But it looks crooked.”
“That’s how they all look,” I said. “Do we need to drive?”
“We can walk,” Chuy said.
“Fill me in,” I said. “Because you just yanked me out of heaven.”
“And now we are all going to jail,” Chuy said, a little panicked. “Un cuerpo muerto washed up on the beach at Libros.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A dead body,” José said.
“Oh,” I said.
Libros is a small beach and stand-up-paddle break just above Sabanita, between San Carlos and our north beach, named for the booklike stacked reef that emerges at low tide.
“Why is that a big deal?” I asked. “If we don’t know him.”
“But what if we do?” Chuy interrupted. He was starting to spool up. “José saw the body when he was out getting bait this morning.”
“But it’s okay, Chuy,” José said. “I called la policía.”
“Why the fuck would you do that?” I was incredulous.
“So they would know I wasn’t involved because I’m not worried.”
I shook my head. “Do you guys know how they catch arsonists?”
We were walking down the beach and getting very close to the little rocky point that separates Sabanita from Libros. A helicopter was circling low and about to land. There wasn’t a SUP surfer in sight.
“No,” Chuy said. “How?”
“They go into the crowd of spectators that always shows up to watch a fire—and they arrest the guy who’s got a hard-on.”
“What’s a harden?” Chuy asked.
“A hard-on,” I said. “A boner. An erection.”
I pointed at José’s crotch and made an Arm & Hammer fist—which José took as a direct assault on his heterosexuality.
“I’ll fuck you in the ass with my boner, bizco,” José hissed.
“All I’m saying is that things aren’t as connected as they look,” I said. “Synchronicity is a crock. No way the cops would put us with some dead guy without your help. And the possibility that it’s our dead guy is ridiculous. It’s a big ocean. We dumped Winsor miles from here.”
It was low tide, so it was easy to wade around the point. The helicopter had landed, and there were a couple of cops and a coroner huddled around what looked like a bloated, beige couch cushion. It must have been the body.
“So it’s just dumb to drag me into this,” I continued, keeping my voice low.
“Oh, so that’s it,” José said. “Even if this is your mess?”
“How would this be my fucking mess?” I didn’t know if it was the Epilim or some kind of postcoital bravado, but I was feeling clearheaded and ready to throw down, although, considering the look on José’s face, that might be a mistake.
“José thinks the dead guy is a gringo,” Chuy said.
“Why?”
“Because of his pulsera,” José said.
“Relax. It’s probably stolen,” I wiseassed.
José’s look turned contemptuous. He didn’t like the cheap shot I’d just taken at his compatriots. And he was right. It was a shitty thing to say.
“Lo siento, amigo,” I said to José.
The cops saw us coming. They even separated so we
could get a better view of the body, as if we were somehow official and entitled to a closer look. Maybe it was gringo privilege and they figured I was a tourist. Or maybe they recognized José as the fisherman who had reported the dead guy at Libros.
“Buenas tardes,” I said.
“Buenos días,” José corrected me.
Everyone smiled—estúpido gringo. But I was instantly relieved when I got a closer look at the body. No way it was going to be identified; it was barely recognizable as a human. Crabs had cleaned the entire carcass of hair and fingernails and a couple of crustacean hangers-on were still gnawing on an earlobe.
The body had blown up, rotting from the inside out and stretching against skin so tight that it looked as if it was about to explode. I stepped back and picked a place to take cover. What was left of the face had swelled into something about the size of a sunflower and cartoon hands with hideously fat fingers reached out from ridged arms.
I was trying to hold my breath. There was a horrific smell of sweet gas and seaweed, like a bizarre kind of sushi-fart. But then I exhaled and gasped.
A bright yellow Livestrong bracelet cut deeply into the dead flesh that circled one wrist.
Uh-oh.
It was Winsor, after all. He’d put on weight—but mostly water-weight.
I looked at Chuy and José, but they were too busy staring down at the body.
“This guy puts the float in flotsam,” I said.
I really needed to learn to watch my mouth. The coroner looked up at me. He sort of glared but then smiled. I was lucky he didn’t speak English.
We stepped back to give the guys room to zip up Winsor’s body bag, which fit him about as good as the surf bag had. Winsor was hoisted into a body basket attached to the helicopter’s landing skid.
One of the cops slap-shaked José’s hand and, from what I could make out, thanked him for making the call. Then he pointed at me. José said something. The cop laughed and then walked off.
“What did you just say to him?” I asked José.
“I told him I was taking you fishing,” José said. “And that I hoped you were luckier than my last customer.”
I didn’t think that was a particularly funny or smart thing to say to a cop. Neither did Chuy.
“We’re going to jail,” Chuy said.
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