Roque chugged back a mouthful of 7UP, ambling to the small corner stage where a guitar and a vihuela rested against the wall. He earned his drinks and a lunch of red beans and rice by playing for several hours each afternoon, sometimes teaming up with Julio for a duet, the barkeep on the vihuela, a smaller guitar used for mariachi ensembles, tuned high like a ukulele.
Julio, an able if not quite inspired musician himself, at one point had offered to give Roque the guitar as a gift.-When you become famous, you can tell people about this place, how I saw your stardom ahead of you. And the only thing between you and fame, my young friend, is bad luck and the devil.
Julio was bearish with a soup-catcher mustache and a wild mop of curls. Mestizo by heritage-half-caste, Spanish speaking-he was courteous but wary, that instinctive mejicano reserve, at least until dusk stole the bite from the day’s heat, at which point he indulged in a few jolts of mescal chased with beer.
The night before, regaling his new talented friend from Gringolandia with the crazy mixto accent, he’d intoned:-We mejicanos take great pride in losing. We don’t just have a capacity for suffering-everyone does-we enjoy it, like the Russians. Then he’d broken into song, a ballad by the legendary mariachi Juan Gabriel, sung in a beery tenor.-I just forgot again that you never loved me.
Roque had to admit he felt tempted to take the man up on his offer, make off with the guitar, but it struck him as unseemly. Julio was lonely, bored, stuck here in Chiapas with nothing but daydreams and his parrot and a nightly drunk to amuse himself. And that would not change. Time was stuck. To that extent, Julio, like some creature from myth, seemed eternal, which meant it would be unwise to take a gift from him unless the consequences were clear up front.
Roque grabbed a chair and set the guitar in his lap, figuring he’d change things around a little today, rock out, jam on some Santana or Maná, maybe a little Aerosmith or even Steve Earle, whose tunes he’d learned from the edgier folkies at open mikes. Lalo had always told him, listen to everything, dismiss nothing; the key to creativity lies in two simple words: Steal wisely.
He got no further than tuning, though, before he sensed a sudden tension in the room. Glancing up, he saw Julio reaching beneath the bar for his bastón, a kind of billy club. Thinking that some immigrants were at the door, hoping for a handout, he glanced that direction, only to see the Chamula woman waiting there, one of her daughters by her side, the child a miniature of her mother, down to the china poblana skirt, the beautifully embroidered huipil. They both held woven baskets filled with bags of popcorn.
The mother called out: “Las palomitas, señor,” her Spanish brittle, heavily accented.
– I told you, Julio bellowed, slamming his hand on the bar, scaring the bird.-Not in here. Out!
– It’s okay, Roque said, returning the guitar to its spot along the wall.-I want to buy a couple bags off her.
As though to prompt him, the woman said again, “Las palomitas,” her voice a kind of singsong, feigning innocence.
Julio, incredulous:-Don’t encourage these people. He reached up to stroke the parrot, soothe it.-She’s probably drunk on pox. He pronounced it “posh”-the local home brew.
– I’ll take care of it, Roque said. He gestured for the woman to back away from the door, he’d meet her in the street.
To his back, Julio said:-If she steals from you, don’t cry to me. The two field workers chimed in with a wheezy little spate of laughter.
From snatches of conversation he’d overheard at the picadero and the bar the past three days, Roque had gathered that the Chamulas were the largest, poorest, most hostile of the Tzotzil tribes in the area. He’d learned too that the name Tzotzil meant “people of the bat;” in their folklore there were ancient stories of black winged creatures who escaped from the mountain caves at night, kidnapping women, eating children, but the old folks said those creatures didn’t exist anymore. The last were seen forty years ago. This was all a grand joke to Julio and his pals. They considered the Indians layabouts, thieves, drunks, which seemed only too predictable, since they themselves were mixed blood.
As Roque reached into his pocket the woman’s eyes never left him, nor did her daughter’s. He could only guess at their respective ages; they seemed not so much mother and child as two reflections of the same idea. He pulled what coins he had and a few wrinkled pesos from his pocket, bought three bags of popcorn from the woman, who clearly wished he’d buy more. That was when the idea came to him.
“Venga conmigo,” he said-Come with me-pronouncing the words slowly, in case her comprehension of Spanish was as rough as her pronunciation.
He led her and her daughter inside the picadero, making a funny face so they wouldn’t be frightened. They entered the ballroom with Apocalypto at its midpoint, the parade of the bound slaves into the limestone city with its clouds of white dust, the bloodthirsty crowd in primitive exotica, the cynical priest in his towering headdress prancing atop the sacrificial ziggurat. Roque clapped his hands loud, shouting, “Oye, cholos.” Hey, guys.
Heads turned, Victor’s among them. People of the bat, Roque thought. He presented the tiny Chamula woman and her daughter.
– What’s a movie without popcorn?
He snatched bags from the woven baskets the woman and her daughter carried and tossed them around the room, gesturing with his finger and thumb that payment was due. As he waited for the money to materialize he suppressed an impulse to add: You clowns want to commune with your Mayan roots? Here she is.
Thirty-One
LOURDES LOCKED HER CAR, TRUDGED UP THE STEEP DRIVE TO THE front door, put her finger to the bell. She glanced once Happy’s direction, despite his having told her not to, not under any circumstances, but why get angry? He knew how scared she was.
They’d bonded, he and Lourdes, talking on and off throughout the night. She’d said he reminded her of a friend of her brother’s she’d known back in Santa Clara del Cobre, a young man who’d gone off to El Norte a short time before she had. She hadn’t seen him since but that was the way it was, you grow up with someone, learn to know them, perhaps come to love them, then they leave to make a better life but for you it’s a kind of death, because so often, almost always, they never come back. Happy had let her go on like that for hours, playing the sympathetic heavy, letting her wear herself out with talk, then watching her sleep balled up like a cat until it was Efraim’s turn to keep an eye on her.
A misty winter dampness filmed the ground, the asphalt, the parked cars. His bones felt like tin from the chill. Strange, he thought, how screwed up his inner barometer had become, all that time in Iraq. Maybe he’d head somewhere good and hot when all this was over.
The front door to the contractor’s house opened, Lourdes said something quick to whoever was there, then vanished inside. Happy racked the Glock’s slide to chamber a round, alerting the others sitting in back to get ready, grab the duffels with the guns. Stuffing the pistol under his belt, he zipped closed his coveralls and glanced at the cell phone on the seat beside him, waiting for it to trill.
“I NO KNOW WHAT I DO WITH IT, VERONICA. MY WATCH, I MEAN. I SO sorry, I feel stupid, I no want bother you.”