The Highway Kind

by Patrick Millikin

  Life was fulsome and redolent.

  Nobody would tell him where El Surfo hung out. That culero had served two years in La Mesa and had walked. They knew better than to rat him out to anyone. But Pemexes all along the main drag were full of bored men waiting between cars to pump gas. “Man,” he said at each one. “Have you seen that yellow Volks van? It’s a beauty.”

  Cowards looked at the ground and mumbled, “No, no.”

  But it didn’t take long.

  The tenth guy had seen it. He wore a baseball cap with a homemade logo inked on it. In Sharpie he had written KISS in LIVE! Puro rocanrol. The van? The Volkswagen with the loud engine? It was always parked at the Farolito, a cantina off the docks not far from the cannery.

  “Just follow the gulls,” he said. “And the stink.”

  Benigno gave him twenty dollars.

  “I need you to meet me beside the cannery,” he said. “At five in the morning. Yes. Five, vato. I need a can of gas. And you need to drive me to Wilo’s yonke. I’ll give you fifty more dollars and two new surfboards.”

  “Órale.”

  They shook.

  Benigno started to whistle.

  He walked past the bar. Yeah, it all stank. Stank of bad old fish. Pelicans squatted on the pilings of the dock. Boats out there bobbing. Benigno thought Maria might have found this romantic once. Now, she’d just cover her eyes and chuckle. His vieja Abigail would just want to get some cheap fish. Why lie? He desired Maria, not Abigail. It made him hot. Maria was still young enough. He thought he might be able to teach her to talk again, though he preferred silence. He stuck his tongue in the wound in his jaw and jerked himself back into the day.

  He had paid the Pemex guy back home to give Maria a ride. If it all worked out, and it would work out, he’d give her a big surprise. She couldn’t be expected to walk or take part in this business. But he had plans. Pinche Pemex! He was spending so much on them, he should be made president of the company.

  There it was, fat and yellow and beautiful, that pinche surfer van. Two tones of yellow, pearl-white flames painted down its sides. Tinted windows and little curtains. He’d peeked in when it was in the prison lot. He knew there was a bed back there. Phony-ass surfboards still tied to the luggage racks on top. He shook his head. If you’re going to cut off heads, at least be a man. The first thing Benigno was going to do after he killed El Surfo was get rid of that garbage.

  He kept walking. The sicarios standing guard watched him and sneered. Some of them had those long narco boots, with toes so extended that they curled upward for six extra inches and looked like genie slippers. Black cowboy hats. Gold belt buckles with AK-47 insignias. He nodded. They nodded back. Some old bastard hauling a hose down the street.

  He coiled the hose in an alley when night fell and made a nest there and slept the sleep of the righteous with his head on the paper bag.

  When he’d lost his job at La Mesa, he and Abigail were even more dependent on the Baptists. Word went out in the barrio that Benigno had a crazy woman in his house. Maria would step outside completely naked, and Abigail would chase her back in with the broom. Cops sometimes drove down the alley and paused outside the house. Benigno knew it was only a matter of time. Some bad men of one stripe or another would come along wanting to know who she was and where she’d come from. He was sure the cartel would want to finish the job of protecting Surfo from further hassles. When the Baptists told him they needed a new director for their Casa de Luz orphanage south of Ensenada, he immediately volunteered. Abigail didn’t fight him—a house near the beach? A paycheck and no rent? Away from Tijuana? In her mind, an endless supply of gringo Cristiano goods and utter cachet in her new village. She was delighted.

  Aside from the Bible studies and no tequila, it was a good life.

  Soon, though, Benigno started to chafe. All the hubbub, all the noise, the smell of kids. It made him mad. He was old now. He just wanted to sleep. He didn’t need much. He needed a room to himself. No snoring Abigail. No six a.m. shouting kids. Well, maybe Maria laughing quietly.

  When he was a boy, homesteading the garbage dump in Mexicali with his mother, he loved his small hut made of box slats and plastic sheets. A tidy den where he could hide and dream his days away. There was a spot behind the orphanage. Flat. About ten feet above the high-tide line. He imagined his little hideout there. Maybe get the missionaries to bring him some old American garage doors to hammer into an extra room—he could dig his own outhouse. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Sit out there as long as he wanted, staring out at the waves. Yes.

  It was more of his general bad luck when that damned yellow van showed up in Sal Si Puedes. Two years of peace and here was the narco again. He walked down the stony road and stared at the back end of the VW sitting beside the little cantina by the Pemex. There was a four-room motel behind it, and stooges could be seen carrying Surfo’s gym bag to one of them.

  Benigno rubbed his jaw and spit and cursed. He was startled when that redheaded asshole stepped out of the bar and waved at him. He was hitting a bottle of Carta Blanca pretty hard. Benigno realized that El Surfo had no idea who he was. He lifted one hand and nodded. Surfo urinated in the street.

  The whole plan presented itself like a revelation from Jesus.

  Benigno slapped his own forehead.

  Surfo zipped up and went back inside.

  Yes. Benigno was a genius. He would hop on his little motor scooter and putt up to Wilo’s first thing in the morning. The mule. The garden hose. He rushed back to the house and wheeled the little spindly bike over to the Pemex and put gas in its tank. He didn’t have to drive a car to get around. It was like the super-bicycle. Pedal until you were up to speed and hit the little motor and fly. He didn’t even wear a helmet, just chugged along at five miles an hour.

  He put down the kickstand and left the bike chained to a short white steel pole behind the station. No need to wake Abigail pedaling it ten times to get it started in the morning. He’d sneak away and be back before lunch, he thought.

  Morning.

  He was so happy. He went to the bathroom, where ten pestilential stalls sat in open cubbies. A flimsy plywood wall whitewashed and nailed to uprights separated the boys from the girls. He had been having some problems with their filthy toilet habits lately. He took a small can of black paint and a narrow brush and painted directions on the wall above the sink:

  DON’T SHIT ON THE FLOOR. DON’T WIPE WITH YOUR FINGERS. DON’T

  WIPE YOUR FINGERS ON THE WALL.

  Maria followed him out of the orphanage building.

  “Go home,” he said.

  She turned around and went back inside.

  He walked down to the Pemex. His motorbike was crushed and bent against the pole. The pump attendant came out from the garage, wiping his hands on a blue windshield cloth. Benigno was speechless. He just pointed.

  “The Volkswagen,” the man said. “Backed out. They were laughing.”

  Benigno had taken the Pepsi bottles out of the trash and filled them and started walking. Dirty sons of whores. He saw it was his destiny now. It was always meant to be.

  He’d walked up the frontage road, figuring he could trudge along beside the highway. It was fairly flat all the way to Ensenada. But he came up out of the Sal Si Puedes access road and realized why Surfo had come to town. The little cement bridge over the Baja California highway had three naked bodies hanging from it, dangling from nooses. Cops had shut down the roadway and stood atop the bridge staring stupidly at the dead men. That fat bastard had come into town and killed fishermen!

  But the worst part was the highway being closed. That meant no Baptists. No clothes or toys or doughnuts. Who knew how long the highway would be closed. Cabrones.

  The cops didn’t care that he had been a prison guard. They wouldn’t let him walk up the frontage road or cross the bridge. They made him run across the dead highway and climb the rocks on the other side.

  Surfo, he thought. Just wait.

  The next morni
ng, Benigno awoke in his nest of rubber garden hose. He was stiff. His foot stung, but with a fierce prod from one fingernail, the red volcano of flesh burst and the cactus thorn popped out. The jaw was already better, though his breath was like some rotten beast beside the road. He pissed on the wall and stowed his bag and hose and trudged to the cantina.

  Too early, even for degenerate fishermen or buchones. It was dark and abandoned. He grabbed one of the white plastic chairs on its shabby cement porch and sat in the sun, eyes closed like a lizard. The barkeep was the first to arrive, around noon.

  “Viejo,” he said. “You can’t sit there.”

  “I have a hundred gringo dollars that say I can,” he replied, not opening his eyes. The hole in his gums still dripped poison down his throat. “I want to drink it all.”

  Abigail would be furious when she discovered he had emptied her coffee can of missionary money.

  He could feel the man standing there, staring down at him.

  After a few moments, there came the rattling of keys and the crack of the door lock snapping open.

  The sicarios came in a pickup and two Japanese motorcycles. They stomped up to the porch and stood before him in a semicircle.

  “¿Y tu?” one of them said.

  “Waiting for El Surfo,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Funny,” he said.

  “We don’t know a Surfo.”

  “I knew him at La Mesa.”

  Silence.

  “He was in cell block twenty. He had cells ten, eleven, and twelve. In the Penthouse. I was one block over. In a corner cell. I did him a favor once.”

  Silence.

  “Stand,” the same guy said. He stood, held out his arms. They frisked him. Took his knife. Felt the plastic bottle in his back pocket. The sicario pulled it out and inspected it.

  “¿Y esto?” he said.

  “A gift for El Surfo. Got it from the gringos. I can get more. Lots more. Try one. It’s codeine. You’ll love your fucking life.”

  The guy smiled and glanced at his associates.

  “Look at this old guy,” he said.

  “Viejo loco.”

  They laughed, with no trace of warmth at all.

  “Bueno,” his interrogator said. “You can stay.” He handed the plastic bottle back to Benigno.

  They held open the door of the cantina.

  “Sit in here. We’ll be watching you.”

  Te vamos a wachar.

  El Surfo was a bear-shaped bastard, all right. He was hilarious. He seemed to fill half of the bar. Chain-smoking and hugging his crew of killers and kissing his worshippers. Benigno watched him from a corner as he sipped a tepid beer. Damn, but that boy could eat. It was Ensenada—he had platters of shrimp tacos and fish tacos delivered to his corner booth. Women in tight dresses and piled-up dyed-blond hair ate bits of taco from his fingertips. He demonstrated the immense bad taste of displaying a gold-plated AK on the table beside his greasy wax-paper rubbish and empties. Benigno watched him squeeze chi-chis and tell jokes. You could almost forget good old Surfo liked to make videos of men getting their heads cut off with electric saws. That he once wrapped two teenage girls’ heads in duct tape and then filmed them writhing on the ground as they died of suffocation. And then he had come to Sal Si Puedes and pissed all over everything. Benigno’s eyes grew redder as he squinted.

  Maria, he thought.

  The first sicario gestured for him to stand. He stood. The thug leaned down and murmured in Surfo’s ear. Surfo looked over at Benigno and jerked his head in the universal Mexican gesture meaning What do you want?

  Benigno stepped forward. He felt the pus bubble in his foot leak. His huarache was slippery. The pain was a small lightning bolt up his ankle, dissipating in his calf. Clean pain. Focus. He smiled.

  “Jefe,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I knew you back in the day.”

  “When?”

  “When you were in La Mesa.”

  Everybody knew El Surfo didn’t like to talk about prison.

  “I don’t remember you,” he said.

  “Why would you?” Benigno moved closer, went to sit. “May I?” he asked.

  Surfo opened his hands like a king and nodded.

  Benigno slid into the seat across from the great man. He was shorter than Surfo by a head at least. The sicarios all thought he looked like a monkey.

  “Can I smoke?”

  Surfo nodded. “Give me one.”

  Benigno had Dominos, the notoriously rough Mexican cigs. Real men sucked the corrosive smoke into their lungs and let it slither out of their noses and never coughed. He shook one out for the narco and lipped out one for himself and lit them both from the same match.

  “It’s like we’re on a date,” El Surfo said.

  His men exploded in laughter.

  “Not going to kiss you,” Benigno said.

  “Look at this guy!” Surfo shouted.

  Benigno took a drag. “I did you a service back then,” he said.

  Instantly suspicious, Surfo crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes.

  “And what was that?” he demanded.

  Benigno made a show of discomfort. He glanced at the sicarios and smiled shyly.

  “It was...delicate,” he said.

  “What. The fuck. Are you talking about?”

  Surfo’s meaty palm smacked the table.

  “The girl,” Benigno whispered. “The—you know—whore.”

  Surfo snapped his fingers. Two thugs swarmed the bench and held Benigno’s shoulders so he couldn’t move.

  “Which whore, old man?”

  “The one. The hurt one. I took her and buried her for you.”

  El Surfo stared at him. His brows knotted over his freakish pale blue eyes.

  Benigno whispered, “I smothered her and carried her out. Buried her up in Colonia Obrera.”

  “How.”

  “They let me go when I volunteered to do it. For you. I was set free. It was a good trade.”

  A strange kind of sigh came through the room. Surfo nodded once, and his gunmen let go of Benigno.

  “I just wanted you to know that’s what happened. It was taken care of.”

  Surfo drank some beer and belched and grinned.

  “You came to tell me that?”

  Benigno nodded. Took his plastic pill bottle out and set it on the table.

  “And for this.”

  “¿Qué es?”

  “Codeine. From California. Medical missionaries. They want to sell.”

  Surfo rattled the pills in the bottle.

  “I sell to them, they don’t sell to me.”

  “Not codeine, jefe. Not the best codeine in the world. I thought a genius like you—millions.”

  Surfo grinned with one side of his mouth.

  “Genius,” he repeated. “Handsome too.”

  His men laughed.

  Benigno kept his eyes down.

  “It won’t take you long,” he said, “to own these pinches gringos. Do what you want with them. Make them your slaves.”

  “Pinches gringos.”

  Benigno nodded.

  “How many pills?” Surfo said.

  “How many do you want?”

  The sicarios and the jefe laughed.

  “Have some tacos,” the big man said.

  Benigno took a pill and held the bottle out to Surfo.

  “Sample,” he said.

  Surfo stared at him.

  “You first.”

  “Ah! Of course. Very wise, jefe.”

  Benigno bounced two capsules in his palm and downed them. Held out his tongue. After five minutes, Surfo swallowed a couple of pills and washed them down with beer.

  He couldn’t know that drugs had absolutely no effect on Benigno.

  Benigno ordered two tequilas.

  He had never been drunk a day in his life, no matter how much he drank.

  “You like the van,” Surfo said.

  It was after
midnight. Some of the sicarios were asleep; most were drunk. Two of them danced in slow motion with hookers. All was smoke and red lights.

  “I love the van,” said Benigno. They were five tequilas down and had drunk an equal number of beers. “I always saw it through the front gate of the prison.”

  “Stop saying that. Damn.”

  “What, prison?”

  “Hey.”

  “Sorry, jefe.”

  “And now you want a ride in it.”

  “Is that too much to ask?”

  Benigno popped another codeine and slid the bottle to Surfo.

  “Keep it, jefe,” he said.

  Surfo took another.

  “You’re all right, old man,” he said.

  They stood up. Benigno was glad to see that Surfo was unsteady already. He snapped his fingers at the bartender. “Una botella más,” he called. He dropped dollars on the bar. “Drinks for the boys.”

  One of the ridiculously pointy-booted gunmen said, “Boss. You all right?”

  “I do what I want.”

  His men looked at each other. Surfo was a notoriously difficult guy to control. The gods seemed to be smiling on Benigno.

  “You all right to drive, jefe?”

  “Around the block, pendejos! How hard is that.”

  “Drink,” Benigno said. He had his arm around this murdering asshole’s shoulders. Partially bracing him with his body. He had to get him out of there, get him in the van, get him to start it and drive away to his dark place.

  “I know where there are some fresh muchachas,” he whispered.

  Surfo hugged him and slurred, “¡Pinche viejo jodido!”

  He laughed all the way to the van.

  Benigno snagged his hose and tossed it on the roof. Surfo didn’t even notice. They climbed in.

  Although Benigno didn’t drive, he appreciated a good vehicle. El Surfo had the interior tricked out with plush leather seats. The bed was in the back. Everything was deep maroon in there. Frankly, it looked like a whorehouse. It smelled like incense and marijuana. He gazed all around. Roomy. He liked it. It would fit right in that slot above the waves. My bedroom, he thought.

  He watched El Surfo start it. Fancy. There wasn’t even a key. The redheaded bastard pressed the brake to the floor and pushed a button, and the creamy roar of that Porsche engine filled the van.