Luz hung suspended in the higher side of the car. The air tasted like motor oil. The old woman lay dead in drainage water and window glass, and the old man had disappeared entirely. The cab’s engine continued to climb. The wheels droned, chewed up sludge. The driver seemed to be reaching for something, but he jerked and died and his foot fell from the gas pedal and the revving ceased. The air and all the rest shimmered. Luz wondered if she was dying, too. But now everything cleared again. Sharp. Her bruised sternum ached. And for the first time in such a way Luz thought of the future growing inside her. She thought: We are alive.
4
THE STREET HAD EMPTIED OF BYSTANDERS. TIRES SQUEALED. Someone was wailing. A man strolled out from a doorway into the yellow glow of the streetlight. He held a large silver blade at his side. People watched from where they huddled in the café. They recognized him and would spread the word. The big truck with the covered bed had run itself into a wooden telephone pole. Car alarms bleated. One of his men, with an AK-47—el cuerno de chivo—slung across his back, pulled the deceased passengers from the truck. A pickup sped into view and braked, and men got out. They carried an assortment of weapons. One of them slashed the tie-downs over the big truck’s flatbed, and the men began loading the plastic-wrapped parcels into the pickup. They did not rush, but they did not lag, either. The municipal police would wait until the scene cleared, and the federales were occupied elsewhere. The man with the silver blade squatted over one of the dead men, pinched the corpse’s lips together, and sliced a diagonal through them. This was the moment Luz came upon as she crawled out of the ditch.
The mud had soaked through her jeans, plastered itself to her forearms and hands. It was cold, but the sensation seemed to exist at a great distance from her. The yellow globes of streetlight were haloed, as seen through water, and she looked at her mud-slathered hands and felt untroubled. She glanced at the cab behind and beneath her, thought of her bag in the trunk, her things. The old woman dead in the backseat. Luz shut her eyes against a ringing that came from deep within her own head. When she opened them again she saw a man hunched over a body in the street. He did something to the corpse’s face and then he noticed Luz.
In a flash he pulled a pistol from his belt. He glared at her for a moment and Luz’s hands rose. The man cocked his head and lowered his arm, and he began to walk toward her. A little urgent voice was babbling at the bottom of her mind, but her legs were too heavy to move. In the man’s other hand he held the large knife, a red blade.
His skin was the color of the mud and his black hair was smooth, combed against his skull. He might have been handsome but for the scar that began at the corner of his eye and slanted around his nose and through his lips to his jawline. He grinned, and the pale cicatrix stood out like an ineffective suture. He gestured, and two of the men working on unloading the parcels from the truck stopped and came toward her.
They wrenched her arms around her back. When she felt the coarse twine brush against her wrists, hot adrenaline finally bolted through her limbs.
As with the sound of the starting gun, she broke low into her sprint. She made three strides—not even enough time for her ghost runner to spring to life—before something hard clipped her across the space above her ear. She fell. Stars hailed. A spasm of thought—This is what it felt like, Papá?—crushed into the void growing in the center of her skull.
They held her down as they bound her wrists at the small of her back, yanking hard so that the bones bit into one another, and then they hauled her to her feet. The man with the scar was still grinning, shaking his head. Luz tried to speak. Words wouldn’t come, and with the misfire, pain sparked in her head. The man with the scar had an olive-green bandanna around his throat. He sheathed his knife, shoved his pistol into his waistband, and untied the bandanna. He tossed it to one of the others, who whipped it into a blindfold and dropped it over Luz’s eyes. It was damp and rank.
They dragged her, blind and stumbling, and someone lifted her and deposited her onto a solid, ridged surface. She scrunched like an inchworm to her knees, and her cheek slammed back to the surface, a boot in her back. An engine started, vibrating in her teeth, and she slid a little as the truck kicked into gear. They held her down against the bed, and every bounce of the truck knocked through her vertebrae.
5
BY THE TIME THE TRUCK PARKED SHE WAS EXHAUSTED, BATTERED like a sheet of aluminum. The blindfold ripped free when they dragged her from the truck, her cheek scraping along the bed. There was an adobe house and a dirt yard, cast in a weak orange glow from a solitary lamp on the corner of the building. Outside that, the dark pressed in. This was all she could see before they deposited her onto the tile floor of a small shed.
Walls of corrugated tin spotted with rust. The men unloaded the rectangular packages from the truck and stacked them against the walls around her. She was lying on her back, her own bound fists punching into her tailbone. The ligaments across the front of her shoulders howled.
A man entered and shut the door behind him. Near-total darkness. He smelled of sweat and liquor in the tight space. He sighed, then hunched and clamped his hand to her thigh, fingers digging into her quadriceps. Luz writhed and rolled and kicked. The man let go and backed off, laughing quietly. “Calm down, girl.” A voice like water dripping in a cave.
Luz lay there, crushing her own fists, heaving with breath. Her heart jumped against the floor. The fingers squeezing into her muscle had revealed her absolute exposure. She had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. She watched his shadow and anticipated his falling to her. She tried to time her kick. Tried to ignore the feeling of defeat that already clamored. The finish line approached, her ghost runner led.
The man squatted on his heels, exhaled. “I don’t want what you think I want, but there are others here who would take it, and take it at my order. Behave yourself, okay?”
“Who are you?”
“Listen to me. Be calm. You won’t be here more than a few days.”
Hot water ran from her eyes. “Why are you doing this?”
“Oh.” He reached out and brushed her cheek. She jerked her head away. “You might consider yourself lucky. When I saw you with your wet clothes shaped to you, I appreciated your form and thought you might fetch a good price. Otherwise I would have put a bullet through your eye.”
He stood and stepped to the door and opened it. “Sleep well,” he said. “I will see you in the morning.” Then he went out. A chain rattled and clanked against the outside.
6
LUZ WAS OF COURSE NO STRANGER TO DESPAIR, THAT INCURABLE sickness cultivated in the lonely years before Jonah. It was despair from which her ghost runner sprang, but at this moment she encountered despair distilled to its essence: she was alone in the dark and there was no way out and there would be no way out. She coughed, choking on phlegm, and turned her head against the grit-strewn tile to breathe. What light leaked into the shed was hardly noticeable. It must have been very late. A wind rose, sand clinked against the tin. She missed Jonah. Even if she now bore a part of him within her, he himself was a world away. Still she fought her despair in the way she had learned to, remembering the sound of his heartbeat while they lay there, her body pressed to his. And if I can only match the beating of my heart to your own, we might become something different, something perfectly tuned, like Papá’s guitar. We can be safe, if only for a little while.
She remembered, too, another one of those frequent evenings when her father took down the guitar and sat on the steps and played. His thick fingers drew forth the notes, and in the street a cat slunk through a cone of streetlight, and water burbled from around a manhole cover and flooded a corner of the asphalt. Luz sat next to him on the stoop, and the music thrummed through the neighborhood. A Honduran neighbor came out, bobbed his head. Luz sang the folk songs her mother had taught her and wondered, as she often did, whether her mother had once sat with her father, too, singing while he played. When they were young and in love, before Luz was born, maybe,
and certainly before her father departed for El Norte. People passed and glanced, but when Luz sang they stopped to listen. There was something in her voice, and they stopped in a half-moon on the sidewalk, swaddling themselves in her voice. People of different ages and colors. A shirtless little boy stepped forward and danced, sneakers scuffing against the concrete. He danced until the streetlight gleamed on his skin. The others clapped. The boy took a bow.
Luz woke from the remembrance into searing pain. She could not feel her arms from the shoulders down, lying as she was, and the sharp stretching from her shoulders to her clavicles was acute, burning brightly in the dark. An ache spread from where her numb fists still punched into her tailbone, and she needed to pee. It was enough to make her cry out in the hot, stale air.
She arched her back into a bridge, heels and shoulders on the tile, slid her bound hands beyond her tailbone, and then pulled her ass down through the loop of her arms. The bones of her wrists ground together, a flicker from within her dead limbs. She pushed her arms and pulled her waist down and managed to get her wrists—sliding against her sweat-soaked clothes—to the crooks of her knees. She lay flat again, pulled her knees to her chest, slipped her arms around her sneakers, and rested her hands on her stomach.
She sat up, sensation prickling back. Pain jigged over her ear. She touched the raised cut where they’d hit her. Her skull throbbed and the room spun. Once the nausea passed she got to her feet and unbuttoned her jeans. She squatted in the corner, leaning against the stacked packages, and urinated on the floor. There was nothing else to do. She pulled up her pants and sat in the adjacent corner. She worked on the twine around her wrists with her teeth for a while but made no progress. She tasted her own blood where the bindings had rubbed her raw.
Somebody could have seen them take her, sure. Somebody in the street, or one of those ghostly faces in the café. But would they be on their way to rescue her? No. No, they probably wouldn’t, Luz figured. She was alone. She rested her forehead on her knees and sighed. The tears in her eyes stung.
“Mamá,” she prayed, “señora McBee.”
7
LIGHT ROSE IN THE GAP BENEATH THE DOOR. HER EYELIDS WERE swollen. She hadn’t slept. A rooster crowed outside. When they moved to New Orleans after the storm, she’d drifted with her father and Rodrigo from apartment to apartment, following the cheap rent, and in most neighborhoods someone had kept chickens. Roosters gone feral could be found everywhere. It was funny to see them strutting down the street.
She heard a door open and clack shut, and someone was whistling. Soon enough the chain rang against the far side of the door. The door squealed open. The flood of light was blinding, a rush of hot dry air. The man who ducked into the room was the one with the scar slashing across his face. He smiled, scar taut. The large knife hung from his belt in a leather sheath. He looked at the spot where she’d pissed but he didn’t say anything. Neither did he mention Luz’s hands, no longer behind her back.
He dropped to a knee in front of her and set down a plate and a tin cup, toast and water. She didn’t move. He crossed his arms over his knee and watched her. His eyes were dark and darting. From time to time he tongued the furrow through his lips.
“I need you to eat.”
Luz looked at the twine around her wrists, brown with blood, and didn’t answer. It was the same voice, the man who had hovered over her and grabbed her thigh.
“You will eat or I will take it away. Here.” He lifted the cup toward her. “Drink. It will be very hot in here today.”
She was indeed thirsty and the cup was cold in her hands, and she drank the water in several gulps, throat aching. The man said, “Good.”
“What’s your name?” Luz asked. He cocked his head and Luz realized she’d spoken in English. She asked him again in Spanish.
“I am called Cicatriz,” he said, tracing a finger along his scar. “That is all you need to know.” His grin was curious, and he tried some clunky English: “Where you from?”
Luz shrugged. Cicatriz nudged the plate with the toast toward her. It made an unpleasant sound against the tiles. He tried again: “You are American?”
The question felt somehow absurd. “I’m not from anywhere.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, and he returned to Spanish: “But you lived in America.”
“Yes.”
“And where were you going when we found you?”
“Home. Las Monarcas.”
“Does your father have money?”
A bitter taste leaked into her mouth. She understood. “He is a laborer.”
Cicatriz clucked with regret. He gestured toward some far-off place: “My father worked on a horse ranch. He did not own the ranch.” He said it as if they should understand each other. A black and viscous loathing whipped in Luz’s gut. She imagined she could kill him in that instant, if she were able, but then he drew his knife.
It was a silver-hilted thing with a leather grip. Symbols were etched into the blade, Chichimec designs perhaps, similar to the pictograms her grandmother branded into leather wares for resale at the Las Monarcas market. The symbols meant nothing more to her grandmother than business, and Luz didn’t know their individual significance, either, but she had always associated them with her mother’s stories.
“Do you like this?” Cicatriz asked, meaning the knife. “It is pretty, no? I got it when I worked for them—” With the knifepoint he tapped one of the plastic-wrapped packages. “When I was a sicario. Do you know that word?”
Luz shook her head.
“A,” he said, trying in English, “hit man. That is how I mean?”
“They are a cartel?” She meant the people he’d stolen from.
Cicatriz hummed, returned to Spanish. “A group affiliated, more or less, with the Cártel del Golfo.” He sat back and rested the knife across his lap. “I lived in Monterrey.” He told her that as a sicario he had lived alone in a nice place they bought for him and he would wait for cell phone calls telling him whom he needed to kill, and then he and his team would kill them and get paid. He had killed many. “I cannot remember them all,” he went on. He closed his eyes, seemingly in effort, shook his head: “Mere noise and shadow.” He picked up the knife. “But this one,” he said. “I remember his face. A rich man. A big house. I knocked on his door, and when he looked through the crack I shot him through the door with a shotgun. I went inside and shot him again.” He told Luz that the man died right away, which was not as common as one might think. In the hallway behind the man was a glass case full of artifacts. The knife was there. “It was beautiful. I knew I needed it. I needed it and I took it and now it is mine.” Cicatriz smiled, the white furrow rigid. “Anyway,” he said, tapping the packages again, “your home, Las Monarcas, is their plaza. Eat your toast.”
He stood, his boot heels rapping against the tile. Luz wasn’t hungry.
Cicatriz patted the stack of parcels. “A good haul,” he said. Nodding. With the knife he slit a package open and dipped his pinkie finger in, and then he held his fingernail to his nostril and snorted. He shivered. “I worked for them, now I rob them.” His smile was brilliant. “I am a Robin Hood.” He pointed with the knife and ordered her again to eat her toast.
Luz stood up. Her head was heavy and her limbs were loose, wobbly. Cicatriz was not much taller. She said, “I didn’t know Robin Hood kidnapped women.”
Cicatriz spun faster than she could react and he had her against the corrugated wall, a two-by-four crossbeam in the small of her back. The knife blade was to her throat and his other hand gripped her between her legs. His face was inches from her own and he squeezed, pushing into her groin. “I would,” he breathed, rancid. “I would. Just to take you.” The blade pressed against her larynx, threatened to puncture. Then he let go and backed away, and she collapsed, drawing herself into the corner.
His arms hung at his sides and he shook his head and seemed somehow disoriented. He sheathed his knife and picked up the plate and the cup, and he flung t
he bread from the plate onto the floor. “Eat your fucking toast,” he said and walked out. The chain banged against the tin, and Luz pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and cried.
8
LUZ LAY ON HER SIDE, SWEATING OUT ALL HER WATER AND watching the light under the door whiten. In the suffocating heat of the shed she slipped in and out of a half-delirious, choking slumber. The vehicles fired up and tore away, and she nodded unconscious and heard them return, men whooping and hollering. In her dream she fluttered along, one among many others on a never-ending journey, and she woke remembering a jog with Jonah. They ran from his house to City Park. He started off with too aggressive a pace and she urged him to take it easy, to run for the distance, but he couldn’t seem to understand, and soon he was dragging, heaving for breath, saying he might throw up. She laughed and encouraged him, come on, come on, there’s always a way through it, and eventually they reached the park. They were walking along the fenced gardens to cool down when a monarch butterfly slipped through the iron bars and wobbled across their path, and Jonah said, Look, and tried to catch it. Luz placed her hand on his arm to stop him. She understood the butterfly for the lost one that it was, a member of a larger migration somewhere out there. In her childhood she’d known clouds of monarchs, and her mother letting one land on her palm and passing it to Luz’s own, and saying, They are here for you, my daughter, they are here for you, my Luz.
She was lying where she’d urinated, and she sat up, gasping. Her head ached, the shed smelled terrible. Every breath was like a dollop of something rotten. She remembered that butterfly. There was something important about it, something she could have shared with Jonah then but didn’t. I should have, she thought.
Luz rested her head against the packages behind her. The light beneath the door softened as the day progressed. Men were coming to get her. She was to be sold. And what could she do? She remembered that night in the Quarter when she and Jonah were held up at gunpoint. Jonah’s futile anger afterward. I shoulda done something, I shoulda done something. Luz had told him there was nothing he could have done, but she was in the dark, sweating against packages of cocaine, and she whispered to herself:
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