The Highway Kind
Page 26
“What happened?”
“Curtis knew I did something but he didn’t know what. So he just started hitting me. He hit me over and over, and Burny and Josh were laughing and cars were honking. I guess there were cops nearby ’cause they came and saw Curtis hitting me and then Curtis tried to hit one of the cops and then they knew the car was stolen and they took us away. My mom came and got me, but she left Curtis there.”
“All that really happened?”
“I’m not a liar anymore.”
Eddie nodded.
“Do you want me to leave now?”
Eddie shook his head. “I can’t believe you risked your life for a piece-of-shit old car.”
“It’s not a piece of shit,” Russell said and wiped his eyes.
“So what are you doing today?” Eddie asked.
Russell shook his head.
“I just got a job doing a remodel on a house near the river. I don’t start for a month but they just gutted the whole first floor and there’s an old claw-foot tub they’re throwing out. The head contractor said I could have it. I was thinking we pick it up and then I gotta do a bid in the hills and then we’ll eat some lunch. After that we’ll pick up a new toilet and sink. A friend of mine is coming tomorrow to tile the bathroom. I have to get the shower out and gut the bathroom tonight so he has room.”
“You’re redoing the bathroom?”
Eddie nodded.
“Does that mean Monica’s coming back?”
“No,” Eddie said and laughed. “I’m just getting old and my back hurts. I think sitting in the bath might help. Are you too beat up to help?”
Russell shook his head. “I can help,” he said. “My face hurts but nothing else does. I told Curtis that he didn’t have the guts to hit me in the face. I knew he’d hit me in the face then and when the cops and my mom saw how bad I looked, I knew they wouldn’t let him come back.”
“That’s pretty smart thinking,” Eddie said. “And just so you know, I’m pressing charges against Curtis for stealing the car. With all that and hitting the cop and his priors, he’ll be in some shit for a while. But sooner or later, eventually, he’ll be back.”
“I know,” Russell said. “But I’m going to start growing soon. I know I will.”
THE PLEASURE OF GOD
by Luis Alberto Urrea
THE OLD MAN lurched over the pass under the brutal Mexican sun. Behind him, the ocean was dull and heavy as indigo felt, heaving slowly toward a shore hidden by cliffs. He didn’t waste time staring at the sea. The sea was of interest to him only when his neighbors brought up abalones or langostinos. Tortillas and butter and beans. Not the fried shit from cans, either—beans, boiled and soupy with a chunk of fatty pork for flavor.
He was angry at the sun. It hammered so hard that he was bent under its blows, and his hair had stiffened with old sweat into a sculpture. He smiled once, in spite of the rotten molar in his mouth. He was as old as that useless sea, and his hair was still black. Even the hair on his balls. He had never been broken, and he intended to live forever. He was cursed with vitality.
He spit. He normally would save it in this heat, would suck a rock as he walked to make himself salivate. But he had two Pepsi bottles full of water strung across his shoulders on a rope. It was only twenty kilometers. He should have worn shoes for this hike, though. But he didn’t have any good walking shoes. He wore his huaraches—and they made him furious. Leather straps and soles made of old tires. A cactus thorn had worked its way deep into his left foot, and he couldn’t carve it out with his knife. He stomped harder with that foot, rubbing the pain into his flesh so the infection would swell and force the thorn out. He wasn’t afraid of infections—the bad molar was leaking black-tasting poison into his mouth and swelling his cheek. When he got to town, he’d find some pliers. He’d show God and everyone else what he was made of.
He walked on. Not far now. He had walked out of Sal Si Puedes, his little blister of a fishing town hugging the cliffs, with one thing on his mind: revenge. Especially now—man, he was going to ride, but thanks to those cabrones, he had to walk. That he had to walk to Ensenada made him madder than he usually was. Life was generous: it gave a man a thousand things to be pissed off about. He was old, after all. Old men had the right to be mad all day. Just a kilometer to go till he reached Guadalupe, a small community on the outskirts of the city. There was a guy there with a wrecking yard. He could get pliers there. And the guy had a mule. The old man had a deal in mind. He was going to trade for that mule. And he was going to collect what he wanted.
“I get what I want,” he said to the air. “When I want it.”
He would have ridden his old moped up the highway, but those narco assholes had backed into it and broken the back wheel and fork. Well, he could have walked up the frontage road, nice and level, except they had hung naked bodies off the bridge after they crunched his moto. The policías had shut the whole road down. God damn them. Made him walk over the mountains and get thorns in his feet, and him with this rotten tooth leaking pus into his mouth.
He smiled again.
“We will see what we see,” he said.
They had that yellow VW van, though, those pinches narcos. He liked that van. He was going to take it when he was done with them. He would shit in their mothers’ milk first. Then park their van beside the sea.
His ridiculous mother came into his mind. She had named him Benigno, a stupid peasant name he never forgave her for giving him. But her sayings, her dichos, came back to him sometimes. Her tone came into his voice when he didn’t want it. Usually advising a course of mayhem. She hadn’t survived as a trash picker by being soft. He shook his head and grimaced at the memory of that little leather-faced demon. He saw a flash of her striking a pit bull over the head with a pipe. Today, Mother’s voice said: Vengeance is the pleasure of God. Oh yes, he had heard that one before.
“Bueno, pues, Mama,” he said out loud. “I must be God, then.”
He descended.
He first saw that VW van at the prison.
Before Benigno got into the orphanage racket, marrying the widow Abigail in Tijuana and opening their house to street kids and abandoned waifs and attracting Baptist missionaries with their endless vanloads of food and clothes and toys and doughnuts—and cash—Benigno had been a guard at La Mesa. The penitentiary, that stink hole east of town. He’d been hired because he was good with guns and was meaner than any inmate. He met Abigail when she brought the pinches gringos there. Translating Bible stories for the scumbags inside. But she was just what he liked—a bustling fat woman with a big bottom. And a car.
“You cook?” he asked her. “I know you drive.”
It was his idea of courtship.
He shacked up with her shortly after that. The Christians gave him a Bible and a cross he wore. He drank only when they weren’t around. They feared him—he was smaller than the blond gringas with their folk guitars, but his red eyes and grimace repelled them like a force field. He sometimes sat outside the little house and listened to them all shrieking their hymns, and he’d smoke and watch the street. You couldn’t own guns in Mexico, but he was a guard, and to hell with them all. He kept a Glock in the back of his pants, and if anyone did not return his smile, he thought: I know what you would look like with your brains on the street, chingado. Those were good afternoons. Plus doughnuts.
The yellow van had appeared at the prison in the midst of the uproar surrounding the capture of El Surfo. Shit, Benigno thought now. He had to spit every time he heard that stupid name: El Surfo. Jesus Christ, they had enough Mexican narcos and sicarios, but this red-haired asshole was raised in California and had come down here chopping heads. Big celebrity. American accent. Calling himself the Surfer.
Benigno liked walking guard duty on the wall. Nobody in his right mind went down into the yard or into the cell complexes. It was a den of monsters. There was nothing like it outside of Mexico. Gangsters with La-Z-Boy loungers and big-screen TVs. Transvestite hookers
and children. Women washing laundry and doing chores and marrying and cooking and working as whores. Booths selling tacos and knives, and babies playing in the dirt. Smoke. Screams. Music. Barbers. They had their own little city in there, and the gangsters sliced up anybody they disliked. Guards got Christmas bonuses from the narcos. Life went on. Benigno stayed up above it—aside from the smell, it was all right. It was like watching TV.
Then that fat red-haired bastard was dragged in, wrapped in chains. Helicopters and TV news crews swarmed. He’d grinned as he was led in. Smug. Looking around like a big movie star. His chained hands out in front, his big body laid back against the cops. He started to laugh. “¡Me vale madre!” he called.
Benigno watched from atop his wall and held his ancient M1 to his chest and hoped for a chance to drill him through one of his eyes. He didn’t care if they sold drugs, if they chopped off heads. He hated it that they were lazy and arrogant. These narcos thought they were tough. He, Benigno, was the one they should have feared. If the government gave him enough guns and bullets, he’d have every one of those fools cold and facedown in the street.
Later, when El Surfo strode around the crowded yard with his bodyguards and hookers and fans and, sometimes, gringo journalists, Benigno tracked him, keeping his melon head in the sights.
Who had bright yellow VW vans in Tijuana but surfers? Benigno understood that van was Surfo’s. It was his trademark. That’s why it was painted so brightly. Everybody knew who was in it, even if the windows were black. But nobody dared take a shot. They had seen pictures of skinned enemies, their terrifying grinning red skulls left on street corners.
Surfo’s associates came every day as a form of narco theater. Showing off. Parking that famous VW in the lot.
People loved El Surfo as much as they feared him. In Mexico, death was philosophy, mysticism. And Surfo was its boy king. They thought he was some Pancho Villa figure, some hero of the poor. Shit. That van was there to accomplish one thing: feed the fear. They kept two brilliantly painted surfboards bungeed to the roof rack. If he hadn’t wanted to steal it so badly, Benigno would have set it on fire.
The Surfer. What a fool. Looking at him, Benigno was sure he couldn’t even swim. He’d sink like a hog. Well, Benigno himself couldn’t swim. So what. He couldn’t drive either. He had found out that he was a good father—father to about thirty stinky-butt street urchins and Abigail’s three kids. Everyone knew not to mess with his kids. Even bullies were afraid to steal their shoes or schoolbooks. It took only two or three visits from Benigno to make their colonia a peaceful kingdom for the orphans. It was amazing what a broken leg and a bloodied parent could accomplish. He liked it. He even liked the Baptistas calling him Brother Benigno.
He was almost a Christian.
It had started to go sour when El Surfo beat a hooker with some rebar.
Benigno was on the go-team when the whistles started blowing. They charged into the stampede of running criminals, following the sound of screams. That fat bastard was standing over a sprawled woman with three feet of rebar in his hand. She was dead, they thought at first, but Benigno found a pulse. Her head was battered into a strange shape, and her eyes were rolling. Nobody knew her name.
They pointed their sidearms at him, but he just laughed and went back to his rooms. He didn’t have a cell. He had rooms. His cartel had paid thousands of dollars. Inmates called it the Penthouse.
The guards carried her to a storehouse outside the walls and laid her on the floor. Nobody knew who would get in trouble. It was clear that word had come down from outside that her injuries could not be blamed on the cartel. Important men were arranging Surfo’s fate, and nothing should stand in its way. Freedom. The officers and guards were told to go back to work. So the doors were closed and she was left there to dream her life away.
Benigno didn’t like being told what to do. And he didn’t care for Surfo’s smirk when they’d suggested they were going to shoot him. Too bad about the woman, of course. Yes, that wasn’t very good.
After dark, he checked on her—still breathing. “Damn, girl,” he told her, “you’re as hard as I am.” He heaved her onto his shoulder. “You don’t weigh a goddamned kilo!” he said. “That fat asshole had to use an iron rod to win a fight with you!” He smuggled her out during the evening Bible study and hid her in the Baptists’ van. The pastor took one look at her when he was done and nodded to Benigno and threw a blanket over her and drove them out of the lot. They got her treated at a clinic outside of the city. Incredibly, she survived. He moved her into the orphanage. It took her months to stand, to eat. Benigno had surprised himself by feeding her baby food with a plastic spoon until she could do it on her own. He changed her diapers. It was all a mystery. He had cared for only one other creature like this—a goat, when he was small. Mother had cut off its head and cooked it.
Abigail was furious. She was sure Benigno nursed the prostitute only so he could see her naked when he bathed her. But he ignored his wife and refused to allow others to help him.
When the woman finally came around, she was like some ghost. Her head was all lumpy, bits of her hair missing forever. She stood silent in corners and covered her eyes with her hand. He called her Maria. When he said it, she laughed. She laughed when she saw him naked too. But she could not talk. If he gave her a broom, she swept. Otherwise, she covered her eyes. One morning, Maria woke him with her shoe, hammering his face with it until blood was flying.
“Maria,” he said. “No! Bad!”
So at night, he tied her to her bed.
“The only good thing I ever did,” he said to Abigail.
Of course, the prison discovered it was he who had stolen Maria, and of course this good deed had cost him his job. Bastards took away his pistola and badge.
Benigno limped into the village of Guadalupe in the afternoon. He’d been walking since dawn. He threw a couple of kicks at the street dogs threatening him in the dirt alley. He spied Wilo’s yonke ahead. The old junkyard. Wrecked cars were stacked behind a rattling chainlike fence. In a shabby corral beside the main office hut, Panfilo the mule hung his boxy old head in boredom. One ear swiveled toward Benigno as he approached.
“¿Qué onda, pinche mula?” he called.
Panfilo lifted his head and peeled back his lip and waited for Benigno’s carrots. Benigno always brought carrots from the damned Baptists’ larder. He hated carrots. He patted the mule’s neck and went inside the shack.
“¿Qué onda, Wilo?” he said.
“¡Don Benigno! ¿Qué hay?”
“Aquí nomás.”
Benigno sat down and picked up a Mexican magazine featuring vividly crimson dead bodies basted in their own blood. A poster of a topless woman was taped to the bathroom door.
“Got pliers I can borrow?” he said.
“Sure.”
Wilo shuffled over to a workbench and rattled around. Guy looked like a vulture, Benigno thought. Wilo handed him the pliers.
“Thanks.”
Benigno opened his mouth and reached in and clamped the molar.
“Oh Jesus,” Wilo said.
Benigno used both hands to twist it. Tears fell from his eyes. He grunted. He ripped the tooth out of his head. Noxious fluids choked him. He hurried to the toilet and spit red globs into the bowl.
“Jesus!” Wilo cried.
When Benigno sat back down, he had wads of toilet paper stuffed in that side of his maw. He showed Wilo the dark tooth. He was very proud of himself. He had done that. Nobody else could do that. But he wasn’t stupid or crazy. He also knew he had just terrified poor Wilo. Now he could negotiate. Wilo understood he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
“I want the mule,” he said.
“My mule?”
“Sí.”
“But that mule, es muy caro. I don’t think you can afford him. No offense.”
“I’ll trade you a car engine for him.”
Wilo stroked his chin.
“What kind of engine?”
Later, the gringo-skateboard Baptists brought him old car magazines. He couldn’t read a word. But he laughed at Rat Fink cartoons and studied hot-rod flatheads and full-blown hemi engines as if the magazines were scriptures. In his spare time, he drew fantastic dragsters and Formula One cars on notebook paper he stole from the kids.
The only time Maria spoke to him was when he showed her a modified ’36 Ford with chrome blowers and upswept pipes in a magazine centerfold.
“Muy bonito,” she had said.
He lit a cigarette and said, “Ah, cabrón!”
Now he grinned at Wilo—something Wilo did not want to see, considering the grisly tooth on a rag on his bench.
“Porsche,” Benigno said. “A 1986 Carrera, rebuilt, fuel-injected, geared to a VW transmission.”
He had looked at the van many times out in the lot, chatted with the buchones leaning on it with their stupid narco cowboy clothes, guarding it ostentatiously.
Wilo’s eyes widened.
“Nice,” he said.
“You can have the transmission too if you give me a few other things.”
“Condition of the engine?” Wilo said.
“Better than new.”
Wilo wasn’t a fool either—that Porsche engine was worth ten mules. Twenty.
“Did you kill somebody?” he asked.
“Not yet, no.”
Wilo laughed nervously.
“Decide,” the old man said.
They shook on the deal. Wilo put the supplies Benigno requested into a paper bag.
Benigno told him he’d be back for the mule in three days. He hoisted the garden hose over his shoulder, took the sack Wilo handed him, and set off toward Ensenada. He kept laughing all the way down the alley. He had missionary money in his front pocket, and he had the bottle of codeine they had given him for his toothache in his ass pocket.