Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  It was her. It was her.

  He hung up.

  Jesús ran straight over to the Freight House and jumped the first train leaving the station. There were two stinking, dirty-faced bums in the wagon, their hands were cracked and dry; they were on their way to Missouri, one of them explained.

  The train lurched forward. Jesús had missed this ritual of being on the tracks. He stretched out on the wagon’s creaky floor and tried to catch a little shuteye. He’d figure out how to get to Albuquerque in a while.

  “Holy be the absence of thy name. no no no no NO.”

  A big burly man holding a gun surprised him in the first house he tried to burgle, in a small town near St. Louis. He took off like a bat out of hell.

  Worried the man might try to identify him, he went to apply for a new social security card in St. Louis, under a false name. The woman in the social security office picked up that something was peculiar. Reyle, Reyles, Reyes? The name didn’t sound right.

  Jesús was still in the waiting room when two INS inspectors showed up with a cop, who read him his rights and made the arrest. He was taken to a holding cell where other illegal aliens like him were kept.

  He was accused of trying to solicit a social security card under false pretenses, of lying to the Social Security Administration and entering the country illegally. The public defender worked his case without much conviction, limiting the defense to attempting a lesser sentence. Jesús begged to be deported, promising that if they left him at the border, he’d never come back again. They didn’t believe him.

  He was sentenced to twelve months in prison.

  He served the time in solitary, fanning his growing hatred for the people in this country. The guards beat him and punished him under the slightest pretext; his fellow inmates spent all their time stabbing each other, buying coke and weed from the guards, and raping each other like dogs.

  Jesús was allowed one phone call a week, and instead of calling Renata, he dialed his sister’s number in Albuquerque. At times nobody would pick up and he imagined her off working somewhere. When a voice answered on the other end, he would panic and hang up.

  Nights were restless. The doctor prescribed a number of different medicines to reduce his anxiety: Librium, Tryptycil, Valium, Clonazepam.

  It was impossible for him to write.

  Jesús started having nightmares about his first victim, the puta from the California—how many years ago was that? The whore’s face would morph into María Luisa’s face, and then back.

  He was released from prison after serving five months of his sentence. He walked out edgy but determined. After Starke, he’d done his best to keep the dark Jesús tucked deep inside and under control, while quietly preparing for the final battle. But not now, not anymore. He would pour out his indignation like a burning river of fire upon the earth until there was nobody left but him, standing atop a mountain of toothless skulls, all that would be left of the wretched who brought down his wrath with their coruptionignoranseprejudiceinferiority.

  When he got back to Rodeo he found Renata at home. She had decorated the place with pink curtains, and there were stuffed animals on the sofa, in stark contrast with the football posters—Montana, Rice—that he had taped to the walls.

  She gasped when she saw him. She sat down on the flowery couch, not wanting to hold his hand, but then she tried to hug him. Jesús wasn’t sure how to act either. He took his glasses off, put them back on again, and finally said: “What the fuck have you done to my house? What’s up with the fucking curtains, vieja?”

  Renata burst into tears, catching Jesús off guard. Moron, he thought, idiot, puerca. But he adjusted the way he was thinking. It wasn’t worth getting into a fight with her. He apologized for being inconsiderate; “It’s just nerves,” he said, and encouraged himself to come up with some explanation: he had found work on the other side, near El Paso, but didn’t have a way to get word back to her. Renata believed him; she wanted to believe him, all she needed was for him to tell her something convincing. Slowly but surely she calmed down. She moved closer to him and gave him a kiss, told him the next time he should warn her in advance, she had been so worried.

  “It’s just not fair, Jesús. My brother comes over here and asks where you are and I don’t know what to say. Then the neighbor comes, and I have to put on a brave face and act like I know. And you hear so many stories of fathers and brothers and husbands who are fine one day and gone the next, skipped across the border. At first they send money, then they vanish off the face of the earth. I know you’re different: look at me, Jesús, you would never do that, but still it’s not fair.”

  Stupid bitch is gonna get what’s coming. Right now he needed her though. And to stop people’s running at the mouth, he’d leave her some cash next time, open an account at the local bank and let her take out 150 bucks a month if he was away.

  But the fucking curtains had to go.

  Over the next few years, he spent very little time in Rodeo. He went back to jumping freight trains and burgling houses in cities and towns in Texas and New Mexico. Renata accepted their implicit pact: Jesús always brought her some gift when he returned—watches, earrings, chains, dresses—and his pockets were stuffed full of dollars. She agreed that what else could he do if there was no work in Rodeo, what else but cross the border every once in a while to keep up their lifestyle. She got used to being alone in the house, to seeing him for a week every three or four months.

  But Jesús finally worked up the nerve again to hunt down María Luisa’s specific whereabouts in Albuquerque, make sure she hadn’t moved. His quest had been interrupted when they threw him in prison, and it was high time now that he reached his destination. Clinton had just been reelected and Jesús was in a pissy mood because of it. It meant there’d be more Wacos, more bombs over Sarajevo.

  It was a Friday afternoon when he showed up on her doorstep, a house in the suburbs near a K-Mart. The house was smaller than the others on the block; it was painted deep purple. There was a tricycle in the yard.

  He rang the doorbell. A woman came to the front door. María Luisa? She was a little plump and wearing a roomy dress that made her body into a rectangle, like a piece of furniture. What happened to her slim figure that used to make him so giddy? There were the green eyes, but they didn’t engage squarely (now they were dodgy and evasive, the way he always looked). Her cheeks were pockmarked and there was no shine to her hair. Her thin lips looked like piecrust. Where was her glow? She looked even older than him now.

  “Jesús . . .”

  He wanted her to invite him in. He had to tell her about the Book of Revelations, there was a place for her salvation.

  “Maria Luisa . . .”

  “Don’t just stand there, please come in, come.”

  A wave of intense emotion short-circuited his capacity to react; he turned around and ran away.

  They were dangerous months for Jesús. The Migra was relentlessly tightening its control along the border, the prisons in the desert Southwest were full of Mexicans and Central Americans waiting their turn to argue their case and avoid the inevitable deportation—my wife and children are here Your Honor, I’m a political refugee from my country Your Honor, if you send me back the narcos are going to kill me Your Honor, Your Honor, Mister Lawyer, sir, mister, mister sir, please, please, please.

  In California the police stopped the freight train Jesús was riding in, and he was arrested together with four hoboes. He was pardoned and sent to a city along the border and released.

  Another time he boozed up in Texas and was arrested for public disorderliness and not having papers. They released him three weeks later. When he got back to Rodeo, he told Renata that he had been arrested. It gave her more faith in him: Jesús didn’t hide anything from her, not even the bad things.

  Christmas was just around the corner. He was exhausted; he wanted to get back to Rodeo in time for the holidays. He would rest for a few months, his body was begging for it. One of his knees ac
hed, it got excruciating at times.

  Dusk had fallen. The city’s lights were coming on. The train was sliding through the suburbs just outside Houston—cars lined up at the crossings, waiting for the signal bar to go up—when Jesús spied a three-story house perched beside the tracks. The sheer size of the structure called his attention; it was much larger than the neighboring homes.

  His body started to tremble. He jumped off without thinking twice.

  The back door was unlocked. The house seemed empty, but he armed himself with a knife from the kitchen just in case. It was a serrated knife, the kind for cutting meat. Jesús went up to the master bedroom on the second floor. He jumped onto the bed and immediately sank down deep: it was a waterbed. They say you sleep better on them, but he didn’t buy the spiel. It was like floating on Jell-O—it jiggled too much, like having a thousand twitchy worms underneath. No way he was gonna close his eyes on that thing.

  The pictures along the wall told the family story: a married couple together for about a decade, three kids. She was a doctor who worked in the university, a typical white lady; he looked like a bank executive or something. Jesús came across pamphlets with images of fetuses on her desk, and there was her name: Joanna Benson. He read a few lines of the pamphlet, in English. He thought he understood that the doctor did experiments with fetuses.

  He’d better hurry.

  He’d stay there and wait for her.

  Jesús took some of the ceramic pieces from the dresser and stuffed them into his canvas bag. He snatched a wooden box decorated with mother of pearl that was full of necklaces and earrings; he found three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in one of the bedside drawers, along with a watch that wasn’t running but looked chichi. In one of the girls’ rooms—decorated with posters of Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, and Bon Jovi—he found a baseball bat in a toy chest near the bed. He batted an imaginary game of baseball and realized that in fact he’d never actually played the game. He should. There must be a league in Rodeo.

  He took the bat with him back down to the first floor. He considered pinching the stereo set but decided against it: too heavy. There were more ceramic knickknacks in the dining room, but they were too clunky and would probably break his canvas bag.

  Jesús sat in the living room, waiting. He started when he heard a noise, readied himself, alert. It was the garage door. He still had time to get out.

  He followed the sound of the car’s engine as it entered the garage. The driver turned off the ignition and the engine sputtered, then stilled. Jesús positioned himself beside the door between the garage and the house, looming there, waiting.

  The woman walked into the room with grocery bags in her arms. The shock of being blindsided and the force of the blow sent her headlong to the floor. Tin cans, butter sticks, a milk carton all went flying; her low-heeled black sandals skidded across the carpet.

  “Oh, oh please, no. I have three little ones.”

  “You shut the fuck up, Joanna.”

  He sat down on top of her and punched her in the right eye. The crack juddered her entire face. He hit her again. This time he felt something snap, as if a bone had broken. KILL THEM ALL, Jesús intoned and plunged the serrated knife deep into her thorax. He grabbed the bat and swung it hard, until her face was nothing but pulp. One of her eyes was driven from the socket and landed on the kitchen floor, next to a tin bowl full of water for a dog that was nowhere to be seen (maybe he’s at the vet, or maybe they’re doing experiments with it, too).

  Satisfied that the woman was no longer breathing, he got up and went into the kitchen. He picked her eye up and threw it in the garbage. He returned to where the woman’s body lay and sliced off her tongue. He should do this to Renata. That’d get her to shut up.

  Jesús undressed her. She had peed her pants, the puerca. He folded her clothes into a pile, threw them in the garbage too. He sat back down on top of Joanna. He masturbated in front of her. He penetrated her. He fixed his eyes on the bloody mess that had once been her face. He moved rhythmically, feverishly, until he felt that electric flash gathering somewhere deep inside. He pulled his cock out and held it over the gaping orifice and finished himself off.

  The spurts of semen mixed with the blood. He was trembling. His heart hammered in his chest, relentless.

  With one of his bloody fingers held high, Jesús approached the white kitchen wall and wrote: THE UNAMED.

  But he caught his spelling error, and wrote again: THE UNNAMED.

  Fatigue slowly crept in, and his throat was scratchy and parched.

  Jesús used the first-floor bathroom to wash up, first his face and arms, then the drops of blood splattered across his pants and shirt. Then he took them off and went upstairs looking for a change of clothes. He found a blue shirt that was a few sizes too big, but he put it on anyway. Not the pants: they were so big that even with a belt he couldn’t stop tripping over the cuffs. He put his jeans back on and convinced himself that it was no big deal. He’d have to buy himself a new pair.

  Back in the kitchen, he opened the fridge and prepared himself a ham sandwich and washed it down with a glass of milk.

  He shot a quick glance from the corner of his eye at the naked body in the next room. The blood on her chest was drying quickly. Her color was draining, the skin was turning ashen and pale.

  He threw the laden rucksack on his back and went out the back door. He left the bat and the knife lying on the kitchen floor.

  6

  Landslide, 1997

  That morning, Sergeant Fernandez was in his office doing paperwork. A few of the thumbtacks holding the map of Texas on the wall behind him had fallen, and part of the territory had curled over itself as a result.

  He thought about Debbie and wondered what it must feel like to live so many years in one place yet always fancy you’d be better off someplace else. Whenever he brought up the subject, she would sigh in that heavy way that defines an entire manner of seeing the world, expelling the air she’d been hoarding in her lungs for just such an occasion. He’d notice the condescending curl of her upper lip, the tetchy angle with which she held her arms to her waist, but even so he insisted that she articulate the words these gestures were meant to define.

  He ran his fingers over his two-day beard. “It scratches Rafa, you really need to shave,” Debbie had said. So many things he was supposed to do, according to her. Moisturizing cream around his eyes so his crow’s-feet don’t deepen. Serum on his cheeks and forehead, lotion before bed. She was obsessed with staying young. In her teens she had been a model for shopping centers and department store catalogs; during college she’d been an actress in an amateur theater company. She’d shown him the photographs, the posters where her aloof, captivating smile was the main attraction for luring spectators.

  He ran into Jackson on his way out of the office, carrying a folder and talking to McMullen over the phone.

  “Did you read the dispatch from Houston? Heinous murder in a Houston suburb. Yesterday afternoon. The killer may have jumped a train to get away. They asked us to tighten up surveillance at the station.”

  Fernandez stopped cold in his tracks. “Wait a sec. Give me the details. Slowly, please.”

  “Here, read it for yourself.”

  McMullen handed him the folder. There were copies of police emails from Houston, the INS, Texas Rangers, and the FBI. Fernandez read that a Baylor University professor had been brutally murdered in her home. Three stab wounds to the chest, her face had been smashed in with a baseball bat. She had been raped after death. Two words were written in blood on a kitchen wall—or two attempts to write the same word. The killer’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, taken from the knife and bat. Sperm samples were sent for analysis. The INS hadn’t found a match yet, though there was a profile of the suspect: a young male, probably Mexican or from a Central American country.

  “OK then,” Fernandez said, “if he can’t spell in English he must be Mexican. So we can all sleep peacefully now.”


  “Not so quick,” McMullen said. “What if he strikes again?”

  Ah, McMullen never catches the sarcasm.

  “Why do they think he jumped a train?”

  “The house was in the vicinity of the station. It’s the most likely scenario.”

  “But he could also not have taken the train, right?”

  “Sure. Right now anything’s possible, he could even be on a bike.”

  “He wrote on the wall, you say. Must watch Night Stalker.”

  “Just what we need. Psychopaths who study other psychopaths.”

  He met up with Debbie at the Best Western in downtown Landslide. They drank a bottle of red wine and she got a little tipsy. After having sex, Debbie jumped into the shower while he read a copy of Newsweek. She came out dressed in a red robe; she took it off in front of the mirror in a corner of the room and rubbed her body with a creamy lotion. Almond-scented, Fernandez noticed, distracted from his reading and watching her sideways. She was struggling against the ravages of the aging process, her body doing all it could to resist what was happening inside, the tissue that was losing elasticity and loosening, the skin that was drying out, the spots showing up on hands and cheeks, the joints that creaked and threatened to give out any second.

  He should go find himself a twenty-year-old whore instead. He had to admit it would be tough now: he had a weakness for her. Their habitual rendezvous had begun on weekdays, sometimes in hotels, others in his apartment. She stopped charging him after the third month, though he continued to pay; it preserved a sense of freedom and allowed him to fool himself into thinking this wasn’t a stable relationship.

  The way she walked around the room naked, so willowy and uninhibited. She called herself an escort, not a hooker, and insisted there was a difference. Sometimes she accompanied men who wanted just companionship, no sex. Fernandez would have liked to meet them, he wisecracked. Ask them how they did it. How it worked for them. Must be the same kind of men who bought Playboy for the articles. Anyway, what mattered was that as long as she was hooking, she would continue to be a whore to him. They could spend all their time together, but he refused to consider them a proper couple. Sometimes when he was out doing his nightly rounds on the streets of Landslide, he would catch himself wondering what she was up to. If she was out somewhere with another man. He would have liked her to quit, but he was too proud to ask. It had to come from her. Who knows, maybe it was exactly what Debbie was hoping he would say to her.