A burning sensation crawled across the back of my neck; it felt like humiliation. I remembered a couple of the cholas who had hung around with Joachin back in the day, advising me to toughen up, when they’d caught me crying over a boy. I’d done it. It hadn’t been easy.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I snapped at Finn.
“Neither do you,” he said.
The similarity to Connie’s recent remark made this sting more than it might have otherwise. Hector must have smelled my fuse lighting, because he intervened quickly, saying to Finn, “Hey, man, I got a bone to pick with you.”
Finn made another instrument adjustment, then looked over at Hector. “Pile on, brother.”
“Julia says you got a record. That you helped some eight balls kill a Mexican woman.”
“I didn’t ‘help,’” Finn said, his voice as placid as ever. “I was outside, in the car. Didn’t know what was going down, or why.”
“When was this?”
“Got out in ’07. I did five of ten, which should tell you how deeply I was actually involved. The other guys are still in the joint, on death row.”
Hector digested this in silence for a while, then asked, “How’d you get mixed up with these Tibetan guys?”
Finn glanced in his direction. “I never want to go back to what I was.”
“So don’t,” Hector advised drily.
Finn turned back to the instrument panel. “You’ve obviously never been in prison. Even after you get out, they want to keep you in the system. Counseling, parole, all of that. Yeah, OK, it’s supposed to help you ‘reform’ or whatever, but how can it, if it’s coming out of the same system that made you? I wanted to be out of it. All the way. Like, on another planet.”
I watched them, fascinated, as always, by the way men talked to each other. Guarded and succinct, yet somehow attuned to each other, linked by unspoken understandings beyond my ken.
“I’m hip,” Hector said to Finn, “but I ain’t wearing robes.”
“Life just felt thin,” Finn shrugged. “Everything felt meaningless. People kept telling me I needed to behave myself but they couldn’t give me a convincing reason why.”
“Staying out of jail seems like it’d be high on the list,” Hector said.
“I was hardcore for a long time,” Finn replied. “I spent a lot of nights in the can. If wanting to stay out of it was going to straighten me out, it would have done that years before any of this happened. I needed something actively constructive, something other than the carrot-and-stick routine.”
“It might have been smarter to pick something legal,” I put in. “If you get popped helping those border-crossers, I doubt you’ll get in the cushy quarters, given your record.”
Hector frowned, but before he could say anything, Finn replied, “I’m not going to let human beings die in the desert when I have the ability to prevent it from happening. If I have to go back to prison for that, so be it.”
“Why not put your efforts toward getting them in legally?” I said.
“There are plenty of resources going to that already.”
“OK, but by helping them do it illegally, you’re just encouraging more people to take the risk,” I pointed out.
He and Hector exchanged a look. The monk took a deep, resigned breath. “I can’t explain samsara to you. It’s a concept that takes years to grasp, and you have to want to grasp it.”
“Well, at least provide a ‘for dummies’ version, if you’re going to keep talking about it,” I told him.
He gave it some thought, then said, “Everything’s temporary. Clinging to stuff like happiness and success and rules is pointless. And, yes”—this before I could open my mouth—“that means exactly what you think it means. Most effort in life is absolutely meaningless. At the end, you’re gonna croak, and it will all have been for nothing. Because nothing here is real.”
“Oh,” I said, sitting back. “You’re a nihilist.”
“No, because there’s a way out: letting go. Letting go of wanting anything, including your own life.”
“That’s a way out, all right,” I agreed.
Finn turned to give me a quick look in the eye. “No. See … What makes people miserable?” He paused, watching my face, then went on, “Wanting things. It’s not the lack of the things, it’s the wanting of the things to begin with. Eliminate that and you eliminate all human suffering.”
I glanced at Hector, who’d been listening with an air of having heard it all before. “Are you buying this?”
He shrugged, smiling. “Makes about as much sense as any other philosophy I’ve listened to.”
“If you’re going to give up wanting everything, then why not just jump off a bridge?” I asked Finn. “For that matter, why bother to go straight?”
“That’s an excellent question,” he replied.
I waited for him to answer it, but after five minutes passed without him saying anything else, I realized he wasn’t going to. I was growing tired of talking on the subject anyway, so I sat back, out of the cockpit, and settled in to think about more interesting things, like the details of my plan to find “Rachael,” and what to do with her once we found her. I was horrified enough about what had happened to Maines to just take her out on sight, but I was doing this via Benny’s good graces, and doubted he’d want something like that on his tab. He’d known Maines longer than I had, so by rights “Rachael’s” head was his to do with as he pleased. If she gave us any trouble, though, I wouldn’t balk at making her regret it.
CHAPTER 26
“I’ll have to insist that you fasten your seat belt while we land,” Finn said to me. “It’s not going to be as smooth as taking off.”
“You can put it down right there,” Hector said, craning to see over the nose of the plane.
We were coming in low over a lumpy brown landscape. I didn’t see an airstrip anywhere, but I buckled into the jump seat and braced myself. A hard bump, then the plane burst into a deafening rattle that lasted about a minute and died down as we came to a stop.
“Shit,” Hector breathed. “Sorry about that. It looked a lot smoother from up there.”
“I’ve had rougher,” Finn said, popping his seat belt loose.
The two men got out and I pushed the side door open. The plane was perched in the middle of a badly potholed asphalt road. There were dark-green crops growing on either side, and low hills hazy in the distance. No buildings anywhere.
Hector scanned the horizon, then got out a flip phone. He must have picked up a new one after he’d been sprung from jail, because I still had the one he’d given me after we found Maines.
“¿Dónde estás?” Hector said. “Somos aquí.”
A tail of dust kicked up toward the west, where the sun was starting to drop. Hector closed his phone.
As we watched, a vehicle gradually materialized out of the dust. It was an old Chevy Suburban, blue and white, making a beeline for us. When it stopped, a kid of eleven or twelve got out. There was a thick stack of newspaper leaning against the back of the driver’s seat, to push him forward far enough to reach the pedals.
He gave me a saucy, curious look and said, “Aho, mami.”
I advised him, in Spanish, that I was way too old for him, lifting an eyebrow. It didn’t wipe the smirk off his oddly mature young face.
Hector stepped forward and gestured at me and the monk. “Julia y Finn.”
“Me puedes llamar Aguilito,” the kid said, looking us up and down like we were zoo animals.
“Little Eagle,” Hector chuckled. “That figures.”
Finn extended a hand, and the boy shook it, peering at his robes. “Qué are you?”
“Hermano de dios, like the guys you see in church,” Finn replied, spreading his robes as if he were showing off an evening gown. “You like ’em?”
Aguilito gave an adult-sounding chuckle, then turned back to Hector, who had produced his wallet and extracted a hundred-dollar bill. He held it toward Finn, who wave
d it away.
“There are some brothers up near Sonoyta I haven’t seen in a while,” he said. “Give me a call when you’re ready to head back. I’ll be around.”
I was surveying the Suburban, which didn’t look like it would get us over the next hill, much less however far it was to Sells. Finn shook hands with me and Hector and headed back to his plane. Hector, Aguilito, and I piled into the vehicle, the kid in back.
The phone in my duffel bag made a tinkling noise, and I dug it out with a satisfied grin. There was a text from my contact, telling me she could meet us on the reservation within a couple of hours. I typed in a quick reply, telling her to go ahead and start down, and to message me again when she got there. Hector watched me do this with an expression of worried curiosity, but I let him dangle. If he could be mysterious, well then, so could I.
The air was cooling off fast, now that the sun was going down, and the sandy ground between the saguaros and agaves was turning purple in the fading light. We drove west for about half an hour, and stopped at a collection of board-and-batten shacks that looked like they had grown right out of the rocky ground. Hector parked and turned off the motor. We all got out.
Aguilito came around to the driver’s side and extracted a shotgun from behind the seat, lifting his chin toward the shacks and telling Hector in Spanish that “they” were by the fire. I wanted to ask who “they” were, but figured I’d find out in person soon enough.
The plane buzzed low overhead, toward where the sun was setting, tipping one wing at us. Hector and I walked through a tumbledown cedar gate to an open clearing enclosed by the rickety buildings. The kid and his equalizer stayed behind.
Four adults were sitting around a pyramid of burning cedar wood. One, a chubby man in a black dress shirt and slacks, with a Vandyke beard and a shaved head, was smoking a short cigar. He extended a hand toward Hector without getting up, and asked if he’d brought the fee.
Hector shook hands and nodded. The man rose from his plastic folding chair, grabbing the dark blob at his feet. It was a chopper—an AK-47—with a night sight mounted on the side rail. His homies rousted themselves, producing similar weapons, and one, a skinny youngster of less than twenty, shouldered a grenade launcher along with his rifle.
Aguilito was leaning on the Suburban smoking a joint, his shotgun resting against the quarter panel, when we returned. Cigar Guy gave him an affectionate rub on the head and stopped to say a few words. A dark SUV with blacked-out windows had appeared and sat with its motor idling.
I took the opportunity to whisper to Hector, “Seriously?”
“This is Sinaloa country,” he murmured back. “Nobody crosses through here alive without an escort.”
“So why are we trying?” I hissed back.
“Two reasons,” he said, holding up a pair of fingers. “One, element of surprise. No one will be expecting us to come onto the reservation from Mexico. Two, I won’t have to go into the States.”
“That last thing? It’s really getting old,” I told him.
Cigar Guy and Grenade Launcher were coming our way. They climbed into the back of the Suburban, and Hector took the wheel. The other two of the crew disappeared into the SUV. Aguilito headed back to the circle of shacks.
If you’ve never been to the Mexican desert, save your money. It has a beauty, but once you’ve seen one square mile of it, you don’t need to see the rest. The uniformity of the landscape, especially in the rapidly darkening evening, made me wonder how our navigators knew where the hell we were going. There were no roads; we simply drove along the unmarked dirt, dodging cacti and the occasional chunk of colorless rock.
The two guys in the back didn’t say much, and Grenade Launcher fired up a joint about fifteen minutes into the drive. He politely offered it to me across the seat after taking a hit. I declined. The last thing I wanted to do right now was relax.
As I turned forward again, Hector slammed the brakes. The SUV in front had stopped short, and their two riders jumped out and assumed defensive positions with their backs to the vehicle. For a few tense minutes everything froze like that. Then one of the people from the SUV—a stout, sun-browned woman somewhere in the neighborhood of forty, with her hair in two long braids—skittered around the vehicle to examine a pale lump about the size of a small ice chest lying in their headlight beam.
“Chaca!” she called back to us.
Cigar leaned over the seat and said something to Hector in Spanish too rapid for me to follow. Then he shouldered his AK, got out, and trotted up to join the woman bent over the lump.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Might be an ambush,” Hector replied, reaching across me and getting a pistol out of the glove compartment. He nodded ahead. “That’s a dead body up there. The cartels will do that. Leave them along a route to make you stop, so they can jump you.”
“Pft,” I said. “That’s too small to be a body.”
Hector looked at me. “We’ll probably find the rest as we go along.” He flipped the pistol’s safety off. “Assuming we survive.”
Grenade Launcher had gotten out at the same time as Cigar, and was leaning against my side of the Suburban, his T-shirt wrinkled flat where it pressed up against the window glass. I felt a sudden, intense affection for him.
We idled there for about five minutes without any warheads coming in, while Cigar and Braids talked over the body. He came back to the Suburban and got in. The SUV’s brake lights went off, and we started to move forward again.
“Not one of ours,” Cigar said to Hector, in Spanish. He got out a lighter. “A woman.”
“Somebody’s hit?” Hector asked.
Cigar shrugged. “Too long to tell. She might have died crossing.”
“She didn’t cut herself into pieces,” I said.
I don’t know why it surprises people when I speak Spanish to them. It’s not a dead language.
Cigar applied the lighter flame to the cold end of his smoke, to cover his pause. “Lots of animals out here.” His eyes met mine briefly. “Some of them human.”
Grenade Launcher spat noisily out his window, making a face. “Fucking chavas.” Hector gave him a look in the rearview, and he elaborated. “Men who kill women have no balls. They take it up the ass, all of them.”
I couldn’t see his face from where I was sitting, but the intensity of his disgust radiated over me from behind.
We passed the victim’s head and arms a few miles farther. They’d been worked on by insects, but it was clear from the clean cuts that their removal had been effected by something with opposable thumbs. We never did find her legs.
After about an hour of driving, the meandering course we were taking across the landscape changed to a dirt road, and we stopped at a steel cattle guard in a weather-beaten barbed-wire fence. The sky had turned an intense dark blue and stars were starting to show.
Cigar leaned forward and thrust a hand over the seat toward Hector, who got his wallet off the dash and counted out a thousand dollars. Cigar took it, and the two men got out and piled into the SUV. It did a messy 180 and sped off into the desert, leaving us alone.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, into the silence. “Remind me never to go anywhere with you again.”
Hector looked at his watch. “It’s seven thirty and we’re probably an hour away from Sells. If we’d done it your way, we’d still be in Texas.”
I didn’t argue, but I silently promised myself to get all the details out of him beforehand, next time.
I reached over the seat for my duffel and brought out a roll of cash. Hector glanced my way and waved it off.
“Seriously?” I said. “Weren’t you just telling me you’re practically homeless?”
“We get this bitch, I’ll submit a reimbursement to Benny,” Hector said, putting on his seat belt. “Otherwise, it’s on me. I mean, this was my idea.”
He paused with his hand on the ignition key, looking down the low wire fence that radiated into the distance from the cattle guard i
n front of us. There was no sentry house, no lights, no gate, no indication of life anywhere. Not even a sign telling us we were entering the reservation, in Spanish or otherwise.
“Man,” he said. “I know the O’odham refuse to observe externally imposed borders, but this is ridiculous.”
“This is the one between them and Mexico,” I told him. “They have good relations with the Mexicans. The U.S. border is the touchy one. It’s farther in.”
We rolled across the cattle guard and drove about a mile before the dirt road turned to asphalt. It wasn’t long after that when another car materialized behind us, seemingly out of nowhere.
I couldn’t see it in the dark, with the headlights blinding me, but Hector gradually slowed down until we were doing well under the speed limit, and the car went around us. It was a beat-up old Mopar of indeterminate hue, the rear end riding low on bad shocks. The passenger-side window was open, which tweaked my radar, but the only thing sticking out was someone’s elbow. I got a glimpse of a circular tattoo on the forearm as they went by.
Hector let his breath out. “Just some girls.”
“Just?” I scoffed.
Hector looked over at me.
I said, “In the old days, when the tribes went to war, the men brought captives back for the women to torture, instead of killing them on the battlefield. It was way worse. My grandmother was barely five feet tall, and she scared the shit out of me. She could tell you stories that’d curl your hair.”
Hector’s eyebrows went up, and I remembered, too late, who I was talking to.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. I certainly don’t hold the patent on family horror.”
The remark reminded me I still hadn’t gotten the full story on his trip with Maines. I let things settle a bit, then said, “So. Cuba.”
“You saw the clipping.”
“OK, you met Castro. I’m sure he wasn’t waiting at the gate when you arrived.”
“Of course not,” Hector said. “Nobody knew I was coming.”
“So what’d you do? Look up your relatives in the phone book?”
South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery) Page 10