Fifty Grand (4 page)

“We just drove over,” I said with a smile.

The kid nodded happily. He was the youngest of us. Sixteen, fifteen, something like that. Sweet little nonentity.

He and I and three others jammed into the back of the ancient Land Rover. Seats opposite one another. No way to stretch your legs out. Empty chair next to Pedro but he wouldn’t let anyone sit up.

I drifted for a bit and felt drool on my arm. The old man from Nogales was napping against my shoulder. I wiped the spittle with my T-shirt sleeve.

Yeah. Five of us. The Indian boy, me, the old man, a deaf woman from Veracruz, and a punk kid from Managua who was sitting directly across from me, pretending to sleep.

Didn’t know any of their names. Didn’t want to know.

I stared through the window at the sameness.

So hot now the air itself was a gigantic lens distorting the landscape, bringing distant mountains dizzyingly close, warping the flatland into curves.

I pressed my face against the glass. Time marched. The heat haze conjuring ever more intense illusions from the view. The yellow desert: a lake of egest. The cacti: dead men crucified. The birds: monstrous reptiles from another age.

I watched until nausea and vertigo began to zap my head.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and for the hundredth time since that last interview with Ricky I wondered what exactly I was doing here. Revenge is a game for
pendejos
. Hector says that tit for tat is a base emotion,
from the lizard brain, from way, way down. He says we’ve evolved beyond revenge. Witnesses at executions always leave dissatisfied, and he would know, he’s seen dozens. But it’s not about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infinity of nothing—it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on the chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.

Do you see? No, I’m not sure I do either.

I wasn’t the only one suffering. “It’s like being born under glass,” the woman from Veracruz was saying. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

The Land Rover rattled through a huge sand-filled pothole on the coyote road.

“As long as we don’t break an axle we’ll be ok,” Pedro muttered, and as if in response, the engine grumbled, stuttered, stalled, caught again. Jesus, that’s all we need. Outside of Delicias, Pedro had to start it with a hand crank. He boasted that the old Land Rovers were better than the new ones, but none of us was reassured.

I affected an unconcerned yawn and reached in the bag for my bottle, but when I took it out I saw that it was empty. The tortillas were gone, the tequila was gone, the water was gone.

The kid from Managua nodded at me. He’d been twitching in his seat for twenty minutes. Jumpy little torta. Could be a sign of anything from schoolboy nerves to an ice habit.

“
Güey
, what’s the matter?” he asked in slangy chingla Spanish. He had a sly, pinched face with big green handsome eyes and a throwback Elvis haircut.

My type. A dozen years ago.

“I’m out of water,” I said.

The kid nodded, reached into his own grubby backpack, and produced a bottle of tap water.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching for it.

“Five dollars,” the kid said.

I smiled and shook my head.

“Four,” the kid persisted.

“You’re kidding.”

“Three.”

But I was done talking to this Nicaraguan street punk, this half-chingla trash. Clearly he was a mother of the first order. Give him a taste of this and a year from now he’d be coyoteing grandmas in meat lockers, leaving them to fry on a salt pan at the first sign of the INS.

I leaned back against the side of the vehicle and continued staring out the window.

A cerulean sky.

Cloud wisps.

Tardy moon.

I wondered where we were. The brief hint of mountains was over. The desert was becoming white.

“One dollar,” the kid said, tapping me on the leg. I looked at the long-fingered, grubby-nailed paw resting on my knee. I removed it with my left hand and replaced it on the kid’s lap. I stared at him for another sec. High cheekbones, coffin-shaped face, and a kind of faux menace in his sarcastic grin. I could tell that he thought of himself as a heartbreaker. Shit, he probably was back in Managua. Girls under sixteen or widows over fifty would be susceptible but everyone else would see right through him.

He was wearing an oversize black T-shirt and blue Wrangler jeans that had been hemmed by a tailor. His shoes were interesting. White Nike Air Jordans that seemed to have two different soles. He was dressing up, but he was dirt poor—in his brother’s pants and someone else’s used sneakers.

Still, that was no excuse.

“One dollar for a refreshing drink,” he insisted.

I decided to work him a little.

“Where I’m from,
güey
, we have a saying: ‘Refuse a man a drink and he’ll refuse to speak for you at the Gates of Heaven.’ But maybe you don’t believe in Heaven. That’s ok. Most people don’t, these days,” I said icily.

The deaf old woman genuflected.

The Indian kid looked uneasy. “And what do you know about it,
señora
?” he asked.

Señora
, not
señorita
. That was ok. It was better than
güey
.

“It’s just a saying, forget it,” I assured him.

His eyes frosted over and he looked at me with disdain, and I knew the hook was in. Too damn easy. Poor kid, I thought, and returned to the view of the flatland. A few scrabble trees, a dried-up creek.

“Ok, fifty cents, you can have it. . . . Hell, you can have it for nothing.”

I yawned.

“Go on, take it,” the kid said finally, resting the bottle on my knee.

No point torturing him anymore. “For your sake,” I said.

He smiled with relief. A big easy grin. A kid’s grin. Life hadn’t ground that out of him. Hadn’t seen too much of the world.

Twenty-one, twenty-two. Half a decade separated us. Half a dec and a lot of experience.

I unscrewed the bottle top, took a drink of the tepid water, and passed it back.

“Muy amable,”
I said.

He put his hand over his heart. “Please think nothing of it,” he replied formally.

Somewhere, at least for a while, he’d been raised right with a lot of sisters and aunts. It made me curious.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Francisco.”

“I heard Pedro say you were from Nicaragua.”

“Originally, but I lived in the DF for a few years.”

“The DF?”

“That’s the Distrito Federal, you know, Mexico City, and then after that I moved to Juárez.”

Shit, I’d been planning on saying that I was from Mexico City too. Have to change that idea. “I see,” I said hastily. “So what are your plans in America?”

“I want to make money,” he said flatly. The old man murmured, the little kid grinned. Of course. I was the odd fish here. That’s why everybody went to America.

“Why didn’t you cross in Juárez?”

He leaned forward. “Vientos Huracánados,” he said in a whisper.

I nodded. One of the newer, nastier drug gangs. They don’t kill you. They go to your house and kneecap your children. Then they go to your mother’s house and torch the place with her in it. And then they go to the cemetery and dig up your father’s corpse and behead it. Not to be fucked with.

“What did you do to them?” I asked.

Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I was a mechanic in Belize, I can speak English,” the Guatemalan kid
chimed in. I nodded and put my sunglasses on—see, that’s why you don’t make conversation; now here I was caring about two people.

I pretended to doze.

The two boys started to chat about soccer and the old man next to me began chanting some ancient Gypsy ballad.

After a while I really did sleep.

Hector says the mammalian brain is the most amazing thing in the world. Even when you’re asleep your brain is taking stock of things, measuring the temperature, processing auditory input, sniffing the air.

When I woke I knew immediately that something was wrong.

The bitter taste in my mouth was adrenaline.

The Land Rover had stopped.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s a car in front of us,” Francisco said.

I looked through the filthy windshield. Sure enough, about a quarter click ahead, a red Chevy pickup. New one. Big one.

“Pitufos,”
Francisco speculated, but they didn’t look like cops to me.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We’re northwest of Palomas at a junction called Bloody Fork. Just south of the road. This is our way up,” Pedro said.

“Can we go round ’em?” Francisco asked.

Pedro shook his head. “Only way is back the way we came, and they’d catch us.”

“They won’t chase us over the border,” I said.

“Won’t they?” Pedro muttered.

“So what are you going to do? Just wait?” I wondered with impatience.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the border patrol.”

“What’s happening?” the old man asked, suddenly becoming aware of the situation.

“Cops, or something,” I told him.

“We should get out and make a run for it,” Francisco said.

Ni madres
. “Are you crazy? On foot? Across the desert?” I exclaimed.

“They can’t chase all six of us,” Francisco replied, attempting to open the rear door of the Land Rover.

Pedro turned around in his seat. “Everyone stay put!” he snapped.

“I can’t afford to get deported back to Mexico,” Francisco said, pushing at the door. He looked at me. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“If we run for it, they get us all sooner or later. Get the old-timers first and then us,” the kid from Guatemala said.

“They’re going to murder us,” the old man said, insanely grinning at this prospect.

“Look, they’re coming up,” Pedro muttered. “Everyone relax and stay put and let me do the talking.”

The big truck gunned the tires and came toward us in a cloud of dust. When the two vehicles were about six meters apart the cabin door opened and a man in a baseball hat produced a rifle and a bullhorn. He wasn’t pointing the weapon at us but he made sure everyone got a good look at it.

“Everyone out of the vehicle,” he said through the speaker.

“Everyone has to get out,” Pedro said in Spanish.

No one moved.

“Everyone out,” Pedro repeated.

I didn’t like the look of it. “He’s not wearing a uniform,” I said.

Pedro took the keys from the ignition and opened the driver’s-side door. He exited and walked toward the truck with his hands up.

“Lie down, with your arms and legs spreadeagled,” the American said.

Pedro lay down.

“The rest of you. Come out slowly with your hands in the air,” the man said, still hiding behind the door.

Nothing else we could do. “Pedro took the keys,” I said.

Logic worked us; we got out of the Land Rover and lay down next to Pedro on the desert floor. When they were sure that everyone had exited, the two American men cut the Chevy’s engine and walked over, one carrying a hunting rifle, the other a double-barreled shotgun. They were both tall, wearing boots, jeans, plaid shirts. The one with the rifle had a John Deere hat pulled low over his face. The other was sporting a baseball cap of some description. Both seemed to be in their early thirties.

“Well, looks like we got ourselves something better than javelinas here, Bob,” the John Deere man said.

“Fuck it, Ray, they’s sorry-lookin’ wetbacks, maybe we should just leave ’em,” Bob said.

Ray shook his head and dropped the bullhorn.

“Please, sir, we got lost, we were driving—” Pedro began, but Ray kicked him in the ribs before he could finish.

“Listen up, dinks, nobody speaks till they gets asked a question. Is that understood?”

I didn’t know if all of us could follow English but the message was clear enough.

“Everyone’s gonna have a stash, Bob, keep ’em covered and I’ll shake down their gear,” Ray said.

“Why do I have to keep ’em covered?” Bob asked a little nervously.

I stole a look at him. He was the younger of the two—might be persuadable if things got hairy.

“Cuz you have the shotgun. Anyone gives you any trouble, plug ’em. Hear that, dinks? Anyone moves and Bob here will blow your fucking head off,
comprende
?”