Again he glanced up and down the street, hoping to spot the Chamula woman. The first time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing a black-and-white poncho, typical of the women from San Juan Chamula, so he’d been told, and she’d carried a few chickens by their feet, a bundle of firewood on her back, an infant strapped to her chest with two more clinging to her skirt. The next time, yesterday, she’d been dressed in traditional Mayan traje, a boldly colored china poblana skirt, a lavishly embroidered overblouse called a huipil. That was when he’d seen her selling her little doves. He couldn’t say for sure why that had moved him so deeply but he’d gone down, bought several greasy bags of cold rubbery popcorn off her. It wasn’t peanut butter but it would do.
In the easterly distance a virginal sky topped the alpine highlands and cliff-scarred plateaus. Corn and sorghum fields checkered the lowlands all the way to the marigold fields nearer town. The yellow of their blossoms, he’d learned, was considered the shade of death. It looked so welcoming here. The flower fields yielded to the garbage dump on the town’s edge, which in turn gave way to the sprawling rail yard with its tumbledown station across the street, its adobe walls slathered with graffiti.
Glancing one last time up and down the empty sun-blasted street, Roque finally decided it was time to check in with Victor.
He was holding court in the spacious room on the ground floor that the picadero’s denizens grandly called the ballroom. The windows were covered with ragged sheets of tacked-up plastic, creating a stuffy gloom. The spikes were all male, half a dozen or so in all, varying in age from around twelve-kill the young, Roque reminded himself-to mid-thirties, sprawled on soiled mattresses or just bedsheets scattered across the floor, the muchachos bleary from smack or just there to watch TV, an old Sony with a built-in DVD player perched on cinder blocks in the corner. A few salvatruchos were hanging out as well, shirtless, their torsos black and red with tattoos, contenting themselves with beer or chicha, a fiery corn liquor sold everywhere.
Victor, tragically handsome, sculpted bone and nappy hair, sprawled sideways in the room’s only armchair, black-soled feet dangling over the arm and bobbing lazily as he dug beneath his nails with a hairpin. His eyelids hung at half-mast, jaw slack, a white plastic rosary draped around his neck. A pirated DVD of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto was playing on the TV, and as far as Roque could tell, the picadero gang watched little else, mesmerized by all that color-saturated sadism, the cool tattoos and wicked costumes, the spooky nihilism and debauched scarification and ooga-booga religiosity, as though it weren’t box-office bullshit but a kind of Mayan home movie.
Meanwhile, two salvatruchos near the doorway where Roque stood were going back and forth with the latest horror stories.
– Yesterday these five pollos got shaken down in broad daylight by some local cops, right? Out front of the church. Then guess what-those cops got jacked by state cops not five minutes later.
– Cops are fucking thieves.
– Shit, man, I’m a thief. But I am what I am, I don’t pretend to be nothing else.
– Listen to this. Two nights ago, we were running the tops of the boxcars heading up from Tapachula, okay? Came across this pack of hicks from, I dunno, Nicaragua I think. Funny fucking accent, everything like twee twee twee. Anyway, we tell them, you ride the train, you pay the freight. They said they had no money. So we beat them stupid, stripped the fuckers naked. They had their money in their shorts, like we wouldn’t find it there. Then because they lied we tossed them off. So long, suckers.
– You hear about that guy who slipped trying to pull himself up into a boxcar out here the other night?
– Guy who fell under the wheel?
– Cut him in two. He’s lying there, watching the rest of the train roll over him, screaming. Fucker finally bled to death, but man…
– You saw it?
– I was chasing the cocksucker.
– No fucking way.
– What’s more important, your money or your life?
– People, man. So fucking stupid.
– Reminds me. That Honduran girl?
– The one got raped?
– The one got gangbanged while they shot her boyfriend right in front of her.
– I heard that was cops.
– It was the fucking vigilantes, man.
– No, I heard cops.
Roque listened to this last bit and tried not to think of Lupe. She and the others had been due in town yesterday, no word from Beto or anyone else about the delay. He knew how many stops the group would have to make: Get off the bus, trek around a checkpoint, maybe miles of detour. It was anybody’s guess how long they might have to wait, hiding in the fields, waiting until the time was right, dodging God only knew how many patrols, legal and illegal-local police, state police, private security thugs, vigilantes, federales, Grupo Beta, the army, the Mexican migra; the anti-immigrant backlash here made the Minute Man reaction along the California-Texas corridor look like Welcome Wagon-then heading back to the road, flagging down the next bus whenever it happened by.
Catching Victor’s gaze, he gestured that he was heading out. Victor responded with a swacked grin and a fiddly wave.
ROQUE CHECKED TO BE SURE THERE WERE NO COPS OR OTHER ARMED men around, then headed up the block. A group of urchins materialized, begging. He’d learned the trick to saying no: nothing out loud, just a slow wagging of the finger back and forth, mysteriously effective. The kids made faces but retreated, scattering a handful of chickens pecking the dust.
He felt light-headed from sleeplessness. The picadero with its unholy stench, its meandering ant trails, its festering mattresses, it was the perfect spot for insomnia. In the long hours awake at night he’d found himself beset with increasingly shameless fantasies of Lupe, in which their lovemaking became tormented, ravenous, desperate. At times it had been difficult to know what exactly he was picturing, sex or a smackdown. What was it about this place, he thought, that caused such tormented obsessions?
He headed toward Julio’s taberna, walking distance-more to the point, in visual range of the car. Julio’s was the third and last of Roque’s distractions.
After the blinding sunlight, the dimness felt welcome. Two field workers from one of the nearby plantations nursed beers at the end of the bar, their sweat-stained straw hats tipped back on their heads. A ceiling fan stirred the air around, unable to dispel the odors of leaky refrigeration and piss. What sunlight filtered in through the quarreled amber windows dissolved in the shadowy interior, surrendering its heat, a mystery Roque accepted gratefully.
Seeing him enter, Julio broke off feeding his parrot and dug out a can of 7UP from his ice chest, setting it atop the bar for Roque.
Julio cracked a smile.-Still can’t find your way out of town?
– I’m waiting for the bushtits and trogons to show up. He popped open the icy wet can.-How are things?
Julio shrugged.-Why complain, the worst is yet to come. Returning to his stool, he swept away the bits of seed husks littering the bar beneath the parrot perch.