by Jim Nesbitt
“Glad to see you stand up for your lady. Make her a paragon of virtue. But you sound like a true believer. One of them Branch Davidians. You’da been perfect for that bunker in Waco. Right there at the side of ol’ David Koresh and all the other crispy critters. Lemme tell you somethin’ one more time. She was a stone killer and you got her stink all over you.”
“You keep seein’ it that way, lieutenant. Roll it around in your mind like brandy in a snifter. Hold it close like a lover. Bet it keeps you warm at night. Bet it keeps the creepy-crawlers back in the shadows. Must be what keeps you from thinkin’ about what you need to think about.”
“And you’re going to reveal that grand truth any time now, aren’t you?”
“Not that it will do any good. But it’s what any cop needs to know when his partner gets blown away. It’s what I had to learn when mine got gunned down.”
“Can we speed things up a little bit? I’m not ready for a Sermon on the Mount.”
“And you’re not ready for much of anything else, either. But you’re going to hear this from me one more time, then I’m gonna quit wasting my breath on you. One — I didn’t kill your partner. The spade did. This stuff about me bein’ a catalytic converter for evil is a bunch of bullshit. We were all in the whirl of what was goin’ down back then. Some of us got killed — your partner, my ex-wife. Grief for everybody. Blame to go all around. I’ve swallowed what’s due me for my wife gettin’ killed. She didn’t deserve it. She wasn’t part of what was goin’ down. She just got sucked in. Sucked in because she used to be my wife and my trail led you to her. Had to chew up that knowledge and move on. Had to chew up me blamin’ you for gettin’ her killed, too. But the main thing was chewin’ up that guilt I was directing at me. You got the same thing for your partner’s death. But you haven’t taken the first bite of that in seven years. It’s what every cop feels when his partner gets killed — he’s dead because I didn’t watch his back. He’s gone because I wasn’t good enough, didn’t see things I should have, didn’t move quick enough when the deal went down.”
“Nice sermon, preacher. I’ll put a buck in the collection box on my way out.”
“Chew on it, Slick. Chew on it. Swallow and shit it out the other side. Then move on.”
A beefy face zoomed close into Burch’s field of vision. Lank, dark hair, Indian black and straight; a pock-marked jawline.
“Chew on this, son. Another wad of grief and guilt for you. Your best buddy got killed up in Dallas yesterday.”
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”
“Boy name Krukovitch. You know him well. Somebody walked into a bar, beat the shit out of him and broke his neck. No witnesses. A nasty way to die. My money is on it bein’ connected to you and your client.”
“Might not be. Dallas can be a badass place.”
“Who’s hangin’ onto fantasy now?”
Burch knew it was the right call. Knew it in his gut. Knew it was connected to Savannah and her ride, a course he had eagerly joined. His stomach churned with nausea that had nothing to do with bruises and broken bones.
“One more piece of joyful noise. Your client? She’s flown the coop. Left that little safe house you had her stashed in. Left two bodies behind, too. The thin bald guy and the black Cuban. Deader ’n hell. With a shotgun. Very messy.”
Burch said nothing. Cider Jones was standing by the door, looking back at Burch.
“That makes it three people, son. Four, counting Delgado. And the slants make numeros cinco y seis. We won’t count the elegant Mr. Thanh since his boys done him in. Still makes a pretty hefty bill — six stiffs charged to your account. One of ’em a close friend. Two others iced by a client. Enough for any man to chew on.”
Burch said nothing. He took a last drag on his Lucky then snapped his arm forward, flicking the burning butt toward the big cop in the doorway. It struck Jones in the forehead then fell down the front of his shirt, spreading sparks over the lapels of his jacket.
Burch grimaced in pain, his eyes too watery with tears to witness the accuracy of his shot. The cop barked out a brittle, reflexive laugh, the kind a jock uses to put down an opponent’s best shot. He patted out the cigarette cinders burning the front of his jacket, his eyes narrowed on Burch.
“I’ll get nursey now. You look like a man in some pain. You could use a shot of something.”
TWENTY-ONE
You could blame a jokester for the name of this place. Or a land speculator looking to lure some unwary buyers. Or maybe a booster with grand visions of a future metropolis. But to call it Eagle Pass was to give it a sense of soaring, geographic grandeur that this gritty little South Texas river town never did have and never would.
The name brings to mind raptors on the wing, spiraling in the updrafts above a great sandstone cliff, flying over a rock gateway through the mountains. Particularly when an Anglo lets the original Spanish roll off his tongue — Paso del Aguila.
It sounds grand and sweeping, wind-swept, vast and noble. The reality is far different — broken, scrubby land full of mesquite, live oak, huajilla and cat’s claw, with barely discernable folds, ancient and small ridgelines leading down to the Rio Grande.
Hardly mountains. Barely hills. No daunting cliffs. Just a shallow cut for a river running north to south, a vertical divide between two countries, bordered by worn shoulders covered in gravel, sloping down to a broad brown back of slow-moving water. And miles of uninterrupted horizon, west and south into Mexico, east and north into Texas. Desolate, not noble.
The eagles the first Spanish and Indian inhabitants saw were nesting in the tops of low-slung pecan trees. But Eagle Roost is hardly a Chamber of Commerce drawing card. Not even in Spanish — Nido del Aguila. It is a contradiction. A shit-spattered perch for avian grandeur.
For Anglos, the problem is partly one of linguistic ambiguity. In Spanish, paso can mean a pass through the mountains. Or it can simply mean a pathway from one place to the other. Or the gait of a man or horse. Or a place where something or somebody dwelled. In this case, the original settlers probably meant the phrase to indicate, “place where you see a bunch of eagles flying ’round.”
But there is also the matter of a hijacked name. When old Spanish conquistadors like Domingo Ramon or Pedro de Rivera saw the birds that Eagle Pass is named for, they weren’t in Texas and they weren’t standing on the banks of the Rio Grande. They were looking at a ford about thirty miles west in Mexico, on the old military road between Guerrero and Monclova Viejo, at a crossing of the Rio Escondido. That was the true Paso del Aguila.
The place where Eagle Pass now sits had a different name — Paso del Adjuntos, path of the alternates, another name capturing that wonderful Spanish linguistic ambiguity, using a word that could mean a business associate, an assistant professor or the aide to a professional. Instead, the word christened a smuggler’s route. After Texas broke away from Mexico, the Mexican government prohibited trade with the new republic. But black market trafficking continued between San Antonio and Mexican villages along the Rio Grande, the traders using this new, alternate crossing that ran north of the old Camino Real and its ford near Guerrero.
The true purpose of this paso created a problem. Calling it Pathway of the Smugglers would be an insult to the nobility of those who used the route and would bring an unwelcome bit of publicity. Truth-in-advertising was about as useful as a neon sign over a lovers’ lane. And in this case, it might lead to a killing. Or a visit from the federales. Better to leave it vague and call the people who used this route associates and their pathway the same. That’s the way the logic ran. After all, one of them was probably one of us.
As with most things Tejano, this sensible arrangement was upset by an Anglo. After the Mexican War, a Texas militia commander set up an observation post here in 1848, filing dispatches with an Eagle Pass dateline. He praised the place as a natural spot for a thriving town. His dispatches never mentioned any smuggling. Or any eagles.
The commander’s name was Joh
n Veatch. He was the jokester with the grand dreams. The name stuck.
So did the sense of a place flying under false colors — a fantasy trumped up by Anglo land hustlers and civic dreamers, a fabrication that did little to cover the truth of a haven for outcasts and outlaws. It was a town plagued by marauding Indians, peopled by rustlers, killers, slave hunters, cashiered soldiers and prospectors who failed to make it to California.
Other Anglos were filled with the nightmares and bitterness of battle. At the end of the Civil War, Confederate Gen. Joe Shelby bivouacked an unbowed brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi near the town on his way to offer his services to Maximilian, the Mexican emperor. As his troops splashed across the river, Shelby paused to bury the brigade’s battle banner beneath the water — one Lost Cause drowned in defeat and sadness, another rapidly pursued in futility. Through the 1880s, a bandit named King Fisher dominated the town and Maverick County until a pair of Texas Rangers shut him down.
Across the river from this home to dreamers, schemers and outlaws sits a Mexican twin with an unambiguous name. In English or in Spanish. Piedras Negras. Black Rocks. As in coal. Originally a garrison town, later the roost of an uprooted Seminole raider named Wild Cat, it bore a name that wasn’t stolen from someplace else, one that wasn’t meant to hustle the unwary outsider, a name that played off the low-quality seam that started near the surface just east of Eagle Pass and ran west, dipping under the river and the streets of the Mexican town, angling deeper into the earth as it journeyed several miles into the interior.
Coal built both towns, made them more than just dusty cattle villages, particularly after the completion of the Southern Pacific railroad. German engineers built the mines. Mexican labor brought it out of the ground. Until the early 1920s, the decline of the steam engine and a slow slide into far tougher economic straits.
That changed with the heavy industrialization of northern Mexico, driven by the rise of the maquiladora factories on the south side of the river. This created new interest in coal too dirty to burn in U.S. power plants but acceptable for the less-stringent environmental standards of Mexican generators, namely a big belching complex about thirty miles southwest of Piedras Negras.
It is an interest rich in irony, crystal-perfect as an example of how modern-day growth along la frontera has reversed the pecking order between towns like El Paso and Juarez, Brownsville and Matamoros, Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras.
By the early ’90s, the Mexican tail wagged the Anglo dog. Growth in Mexico — cancerous and chaotic in Ciudad Juarez and Matamoros; calmer, more controllable and less culturally devastating in Piedras Negras or Ciudad Acuna — created an economic dependency on the north side of the river that Anglos in El Paso or Brownsville didn’t like to admit, preferring to mask their reliance with rhetoric about closely knit trans-border partnerships that they say make the national boundary irrelevant.
This is a clever rap, rooted in the prickly cultural and economic history of the border, a place unto itself, a scar rather than a boundary, pulsing and always open, never quite healed, a land that is neither fully American nor completely Mexican, a gritty outlaw zone that is disparaged and orphaned by the mainstream of both countries. It is stubborn territory, where the Anglo and the Hispanic have clashed, collided and imperfectly intertwined, forming tighter bonds than the outsider expects and the stereotypical symbols of the white rancher and the Mexican ranch hand allow one to see.
But talk doesn’t cover the reality of American cities leaning on the Mexican towns they once looked down upon as one-stop shops for trinkets, cheap booze and young whores.
This changed relationship can be seen with a casual pass through both towns — the threadbare weariness of Eagle Pass, a town wearing the worn, hopeless smile of the owner of a roadside souvenir stand overlooked by too many travelers; the trim, self-contained bustle of Piedras Negras, a town that looks well-fed and prosperous but not overwhelmed by growth, its tidy square, ancient cathedral and narrow streets testimony to a place still firmly rooted in a Mexican identity that hasn’t been shouldered aside by a blast of the worst America has to offer, like it has in the honking, fast-food hurly burly of Juarez and Matamoros.
Cullen Mueller passed these reminders of the new relationship between Mexico and America every day but didn’t think about them. Not on most mornings. And not today. Not with the worries he had on his mind.
Sipping coffee out of a lidded Dallas Cowboy travel cup, punching the Seek button on the Sony radio-CD player of his black Chevy Suburban, he settled for music blaring from Piedras’ top station, which billed itself as the Rancheria of the Airways.
But he barely noticed it.
Tooling away from his house on Seco Creek and down US 277 toward the heart of Eagle Pass, Mueller, a short barrel-chested man with a bass-boat tan and the sharp-eyed squint of a card player, usually eyed the sky and gauged the weather’s impact on fishing. Usually, he had the taste memory of the sharp, savory bite of his customary breakfast burrito at the front of his brain. Cabrito and kidney, slapped on a fresh-baked tortilla at a little street-side stand on Main.
But on this morning, with the warmth and caffeine of the coffee shifting him through the gears of an escalating day, he wasn’t focused on breakfast or his ever-present fish lust. And he was even less aware of the weather and what was rushing past his open window, his arm resting on the cold metal ledge, the breeze ripping past the Rolex on his wrist, riffling the hair that led to a carefully folded-back shirt sleeve of perfect white.
His thoughts were whirring around a single matter with two opposing consequences — the collapse of the Mexican peso. It was a joy and a worry to Cullen Mueller.
A joy because it chopped his overhead by more than a third, meaning his company’s dollars bought more of everything for less at the maquiladora factory they ran on the southeast side of Piedras Negras, more labor, more electricity, more water, more heat.
A joy because it made it easier to meet the bottom line his stateside partners expected him to meet. They were lazy, greedy bastards who rarely bothered to cross over to see his operation and expected him to come to them for a monthly accounting.
A joy because it meant it cost less to keep Marta, his mistress, an ill-tempered, narrow-hipped woman with a spectacular chest and the sharp, copper cheeks of an Indian. Her flat, one floor above the tight passage of Avenida Xiocotencatl, was cheaper. So was the silver she loved to wear on her wrists, fingers and neck.
But Mueller, whose German ancestors came to Texas with the first land companies of the 1830s, knew these were short-term highs. The peso’s sudden collapse caused him panic for reasons that stretched beyond the horizon of the rising day, out there beyond the bottom-line pain the crisis was giving the standup members of the Eagle Pass Lions Club.
Underneath the syrupy patter that sweetened his hustle, below the endless line of “Hey, pards” and “amigos” he passed out to contacts like a dentist giving Chiclets to a balky child with a bad tooth, Mueller could give a shit about the griping of shop owners who saw their steady stream of Mexican customers instantly dry up. He heard that lament every other day over lunch at the Charcoal Grill or La Fiesta and nodded gravely, feigning concern, doling out a squeeze on the bicep and a “Hang tough, pard,” but not caring that Mexicans weren’t buying as many groceries or blue jeans as they used to.
Some of his luncheon companions, always in danger of going under because of the town’s stagnant economy, would go bust this time. It happened before, the last time the peso collapsed in the early ’80s. To him it meant the absence of two or three familiar faces at the table, two or three fewer names you called on for a round of golf or a run up to Amistad, the big international reservoir above Del Rio, for a day of fishing. No problem — they would be replaced by new players. Sooner or later. When the free-fall stopped and the economy smoothed out at whatever new level it chose to flow.
His eye was on bigger worries than the loss of a lunch or golf compadre, troubles that caused him
to fidget in his seat, pick the twill fabric of his tan Riata slacks out of his crotch and pop his ultra-dark aviator shades down his nose so he could check the mirror image for the sweep of his carefully combed and lacquered hair up and over ruddy and spreading baldness. Sandy brown strands over brick red skin, testimony to a long day on the big reservoir.
The obvious worry was the long-term impact the peso collapse would have on Mexican economic policies and the country’s lurching movement toward free markets and easier access for foreign capital, meaning the dreaded Los Gringos. This was a huge factor for anyone doing business on that side of the border.
He remembered a history lesson he didn’t learn in school, one passed to him by an aunt long dead, a trim, cultured Mexican woman married to his favorite uncle, who was also dead. She told him of the strong pull of the Revolution and its tendency to punish any Mexican politician who strayed too far toward capitalism and the appearance of economic servitude to the hated gringos. It happened before; it would happen again.
“Mexico doesn’t forget,” she said. “The politician who fails to remember La Revolucion will be rudely reminded of its lessons.”
He remembered the last collapse a decade ago. It triggered a crisis of confidence — the Mexican government, mindful of the Revolution’s hard memory, halted their tentative steps toward open markets. Americans new to the maquila game pulled up stakes and the stateside businesses that relied on maquilas for parts and subassemblies looked elsewhere for suppliers, turning to companies located on more stable ground.
Sorry son, we like your product and the job you do but we need to know this stuff will be there for us and you can get it to us on time. Too shaky down there. Like doing business in a bed of quicksand. Not worth the worry. Call us back when things get calm.