Tijuana Straits (18 page)

These tales and others like them were conveyed to him with great enthusiasm by the cowboy in the red convertible. Armando did nothing to dispel them. On the contrary, he was beginning to
see how they might be put to his advantage. It was during this time that he took the liberty of having the disembodied eyeball tattooed into the ever-expanding bald spot at the rear of his skull, and he went about armed and dangerous and half deranged from whiffing fumes so that factory girls and workmen alike were more often than not put to flight by his very approach and even the cowboy was at times a little bit frightened by him. In the cowboy’s case, however, his fear was tempered with a certain grudging admiration as he, too, was a student of crime with aspirations of his own in that department, and as word of Armando’s frightening countenance and dubious accomplishments continued to spread, even into those parts of the city where such things as wanton bloodshed and mindless violence were valued like rare coins, so did the cowboy imagine his own claim, however modest, on the other’s ascent.

And indeed it was true that men would sometimes come to Armando with money to pay for favors—a store manager threatened or tortured, a small-time dope seller carved and robbed, a girl to be snatched from one of the factories then sold to the slavers at the border . . . The men who came to see him about these jobs were not the men who paid but the men who worked for the men who paid and they came in fine cars and expensive clothing and often wore surgical masks when approaching his ruins. The money rolled in. The stories multiplied. There came a night, walking home in the wake of some foul deed, that Armando heard a street musician at the door of a factory, the man giving voice to a crude corrido in praise of the exploits of El Diablo de la Mesa, and he stayed himself in the shadows and listened, for it seemed to him that he himself had become the subject of song, which in fact was the case, and he went so far to imagine a shrine built in his honor, such as he had seen in his youth, monuments to the drug lords of Sinaloa. In Armando’s case he imaged a pair of boxing gloves dangling from the neck of the virgin, the lost cartilage of his nose arranged at her
feet, a small pile of reeking waste and next to this a container of the yellow glue. He might have taken some pride in finding himself the subject of song but in truth he was past all of that now and there was really only a kind of snaking dumb wonder, a standing and gaping, at the awful procession of things as they are.

It should also be noted that Armando took no great satisfaction in the deeds themselves. Nor did he think much about them when they were done. He viewed them as the manager of human resources had once viewed his son, as he’d learned to view the murder of the factory worker who had told him about the abortion clinic, as a part of nature. Though it is also true there were now many things he could no longer remember about his son, or about himself for that matter. The future was a corrido sung high on fumes, a reflection in a bottle, the past a fever dream, punctuated by a single brilliant image—that of his Reina in the arms of her Madonna. For if it is true that each man is a child wandering lost in a forest of symbols as some have said, then for Armando, the little tableau so named had not simply continued to burn in his mind’s eye, it had become the lamp to light his way, the marker on the road, and though there were none around him to so state it, one might well have dispensed with the host of rumors as to why he’d come to the mesa and cited only Hades in pursuit of his Persephone as the more direct representation of Armando’s intentions. The old recycling plant was at the very heart of the factory district. It was the perfect vantage point from which to resume his search for Reina—the search his sojourn in the tunnels had put on hold—and so had he done, prowling once more among the industrial parks, wandering among the armies of working women, revisiting the neighborhood of Casa de la Mujer. And yet his wife was gone and the Madonna with her, swallowed whole in this city by the sea.

Had he never seen either of them again, he might have reached a time when each would have been called into question, and each found wanting, their origins ascribed to some nightmare born of fumes, the scratches on his arm as mysterious as a birthmark. But such was not to be. As out of the blue, the Madonna appeared once more, in faded jeans and a Casa de la Mujer T-shirt, not fifty yards from where he waited, amid his block walls and rotted casings, peering out across the rim of the mesa and the paths of the factory girls.

By some miracle, she had come to his very door. But there was a catch—a miracle with a bit of hooked steel set to snare the eager jaw. There were people with her, a man with a camera, a woman with a briefcase. On the following day she came again, the others still with her. He watched as they moved about the bluff, in back of the factory, taking pictures, making notes. He followed at a distance as they walked the path between the body shop and the factory. He followed as far as the street, where they got into a car, Magdalena behind the wheel, then watched as they drove away.

The cowboy said the woman with the briefcase was an attorney and that Magdalena was her helper, that he had heard them talking to the owner of the body shop and that they were trying to do something about the old plant in which Armando lived. It was unbelievable. His first thought was that she had been given into his hand. He now saw that it was she who pursued him.

Later that night, alone in his hammock, he’d pondered this mystery and others like it till sleeplessness had driven him to the dirt pathway where the smell of tobacco and trace of smoke spooling upon a night sky had led him to Chico in the back of the red convertible, as that was where the cowboy lived, in his car, at the rear of the body shop.

“Who’s they?” Armando said. He put his weight against the fence that ran along the path, screening the body shop from the rest of the world, the steel mesh corroded with time, giving beneath him.

He saw the cowboy come bolt upright in the backseat of the car, his cigarette tumbling to the floor. “For Christ’s sake,” Chico said.

Had the cowboy not already confided his age it would have been impossible to guess it. He might have been twenty. He might have been forty. He had a large Aztec sun tattooed on his stomach, gangland-style. When working at the body shop he went about in grease-stained rags, missing teeth. Come the weekend he would add a bit of cheap Tijuana bridgework, dress himself in cowboy finery, and go about in his ancient red convertible in search of factory girls to satiate his desires.

“Who’s they?” Armando said once more.

“What do you mean, who’s they?” Chico asked. He was somewhat disoriented. Armando Santoya made for a disturbing spectacle at almost any hour but even more so by moonlight, in the dead of night.

“You said they wanted to get rid of the factory. I want to know who they are.”

Chico looked him full in the face, his own vacant as the moon. Armando was about to turn around and go back the way he had come when some dawning light of recognition fluttered across Chico’s face, the bat-winged shadow of dim intelligence above a nearly toothless grimace. “Oh, that,” he said. “I didn’t know what the fuck you were talking about.”

Armando waited, at rest upon the fence.

Chico pulled himself to the rear deck of his car, where he settled upon his haunches, a feral animal awaiting treats. “It’s these women,” he said. He waved toward the lights of the city sparkling beyond the dark rim of the mesa.

A junkyard dog slunk from shadow and set about barking at Armando. Chico was quick to drive it away with some object snatched from the back of his car, thrown hastily into the night. “They say the factory is bad for the children.”

“What children?”

“You know, down there . . .” Chico nodded in the direction of the
colonia
at the base of the hill.

Armando looked off into the night. He saw no children but his own, dead young and dead unborn, vitreous flesh emitting starlight . . . “Casa de la Mujer,” he said.

“Say what?”

“The women. It is what they are called.”

Chico shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.” In truth he didn’t. Not knowing made him uncomfortable. Armando’s eyes glinted in the night. He wanted to change the subject. “Is it true,” Chico asked, “that the Obregón brothers keep tigers?” He knew the answer to this one but he wanted to hear Armando tell it.

Armando made a vague gesture with one hand, as if to dismiss the subject, though in Chico’s case he knew this to be an impossibility. The cowboy harbored an obsession with the Mexican drug lords, both large and small, but especially with those famous enough to appear in the contraband music he played incessantly upon the tape deck dangling beneath the dashboard of his convertible amid a web of exposed wires and tiny glass tubes. That Armando had actually done jobs for a number of these men filled him with both dread and envy. He knew there was a part of the city in which such men lived, in their million-dollar mansions, behind walls of stone, among menageries of wild animals kept for no other reason than that they could be kept, objects of status, like a new car, a fine watch, or a beautiful woman. Nor could Armando escape all blame for his friend’s infatuation, having on at least one occasion made the stoned-out-of-his-gourd mistake of admitting to firsthand
knowledge of these amazements, though in truth he’d done little more than hear of them in his own right, for he was hardly an invited guest to such halls of power but was rather like some dangerous animal retained on occasion for the dirtiest of jobs. But for now he was willing to move his head knowingly in the dim light, an assent to fantasy . . . “They feed their enemies to them,” he said. “You’re not careful they’ll put a T-bone steak up your ass and lower you into a pit with chains.”

Chico shifted his weight, bouncing upon his coiled legs. “No way,” he said, the words issued as a chorus, a response to Armando’s call, as between a preacher and his congregation.

“These things are the truth.”

A solitary tooth glinted in the moonlight. “Maybe you could use me sometime,” the cowboy said.

Armando sighed. The man’s ambitions bored him and his first instinct was to tell Chico to go fuck himself because rarely did he need help in carrying out an assignment and when he did there was already one that he used, and that child of darkness unbeknownst to any save himself and bound to remain so. But he checked this impulse as something else was at just that moment beginning to occur to him, a new plan of action. He looked into the darkness beyond the rim of the mesa where the lights of Tijuana cast a pale frosting upon the night sky, like breath made visible, as if some great warm-blooded thing lay hidden there, then cast his eye upon the Chevrolet convertible listing before him, among refuse and weeds, faint reek of body odor and gasoline above grease-spattered soil, its owner like a hood ornament misplaced, dangling cigarette clutched in toothless jaws, potential acolyte, partner for a day.

“I’ll tell you what,” Armando said. For he was thinking now of his Madonna, that if she had come twice, she would come a third time, and for that he intended to be ready. “I’ll make you a deal.”