“You need that hand looked after.”
“The hand’s a fucking giveaway. Once the cops talk to the girl they’ll check every ER in the state, then move on to every state nearby.”
“There’s clinics that’ll keep it quiet.”
“Not once this thing hits the news.”
Happy felt the usual boil of nausea churning in his gut. “I’m heading to Mexico.”
“I can handle that.” Godo wrapped the bandanna around his charred and blistered hand, fashioned a knot using his good hand and his teeth. “We’ll get my guns and meds at the trailer.”
“Your hand like that? What good are your guns?”
“The hand’ll heal. Till then, you can shoot.” He smiled, remembering. “I couldn’t see much of what happened, but I saw the result. Brought the fucking heat, primo.”
Happy shook his head. “I can’t go back to the trailer. Don’t wanna risk running into Tía Lucha. Don’t want to explain, don’t want any naggy fucking bullshit, I just-”
With his good hand, Godo reached across the space between them, touched Happy’s wounded arm. The sleeve was crusty with dried blood. “She’s at work.”
“I can’t look after you.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
Happy felt like he was swirling down a drain. “You can’t leave a note for Tía, neither. You leave a note, she’ll just go off, you know how she does. Better she doesn’t know.”
Godo turned away, looking out at the barn pocked with bullet holes, the grassy hills beyond, the lurid downshaft of light. He began to whistle a gentle tune and after a second Happy recognized it, “Canción de Cuna,” a lullaby Roque had practiced damn near to death when he was first learning guitar. It used to drive Godo batshit. Funny, him thinking of it now.
Godo said, “They tell you in basic that, first time you’re in combat, you’re gonna experience this thing called battle distortion. Time comes to a stop. Or you see things so clear it’s like they’re magnified or some shit. Maybe all of a sudden your memory goes blank. Some guys hallucinate, I fucking kid you not. Nothing like a squaddie with a SAW tearing up shit that isn’t there. But I had none of that. I had this weird disconnect between sight and sound, I could see okay but my hearing cut out, not entirely, but like I’d plugged up my ears real bad somehow. And in that, like, silence I heard the tune I was just whistling, the one Roque used to play. And you know what? It calmed me down. I told myself I wasn’t gonna die, I couldn’t die, I had to come home, tell Roque what’d happened. I had to come home for Tía and your dad. I didn’t feel so scared then.”
Happy remembered the ambush on his convoy, the numbness he didn’t recognize as blind terror till after. He hadn’t thought of the family at all. That only came later, death and its lessons, wanting to make things up to the old man, wanting to do good by him, show him he understood now, the sacrifice, the love. “Why tell me this?”
Godo turned, eyes like stones in the hamburger face. “I know you don’t want me along, Pablo. But you can’t leave me behind. Not with this.” He presented the wrapped hand. “And no way I’m doing time, not on Vasco’s ticket. Bad enough these scars, the fucking leg. But I was the one who got you sent away the first time. I can’t face your old man again, tell him one more time, Hey Tío, your son’s fucked, guess who’s to blame.” He reached out again for his cousin’s arm, laid his hand gently near the wound. “We’ll meet up with your dad and Roque in some cantina before they cross the border, one last boys’ night out, all of us together. We’ll figure out if this haji friend of yours is for real. Right?”
He withdrew the hand and slapped the old Ford’s dash, lifting a whisper of dust.
“Come on, cabrón. Drive.”
Thirty-Two
THE FOUR OF THEM ARRIVED ON THE BUS A LITTLE AFTER SUN-DOWN, caked with road grime, wobbly from hunger and thirst but with fewer bug bites than the last crossing. They took turns in a bathroom upstairs, splashing water around, faces, torsos, armpits, while Beto made it clear they were stopping only momentarily. They needed to make Juchitán as soon as possible; from there he’d know which route they would take north through Oaxaca and beyond.
Given Tío Faustino’s exhaustion, Roque again assumed driving duties, Beto taking the seat beside him, the other three in back. He suffered a vague wish to say goodbye to Julio but he realized the sudden vanishings of strangers from Arriaga would be nothing new.
Checking his rearview, he saw the three of them-Samir, Lupe, Tío Faustino-in uneasy slumber, Lupe leaning against Tío Faustino’s shoulder, her head sliding vaguely toward his chest, while his uncle protectively circled an arm around her shoulder. Roque felt grateful the two of them had grown closer, at the same time secretly wishing it were him back there.
They reached Juchitán a little before midnight and Roque was surprised by its sprawl. Beto gave him directions away from the old center of the city to a more industrial district near the bay, but before they veered too far afield of the nightlife they passed several bars where astonishingly large women, dressed elegantly in traditional traje, sat in chatty clusters at outside tables, fanning themselves in the lamplight. Taking stock of one particularly hefty mamacita wearing a ballooning green pleated skirt, a white huipil, even a mantilla, Beto chuckled. “You don’t know about this, I’ll bet. This town is famous for its homos. There’s like three thousand muxes-that’s the Zapotec word-who live here. It’s a matriarchal society, queer sons are considered good luck, as long as you only have one. Mothers like them because they don’t marry and go away. They’re usually good earners too. And because virgin girls are still prized down here as brides, a lot of guys pop their cherries on muxes.”
He directed Roque into a nest of warehouses near the water and finally down a dark callejón to a nameless bar. Opening the passenger-side door, he said to keep the motor running, he wouldn’t be long. Roque switched off the headlights, threw the transmission into park and slid down in his seat, watching as Beto pulled back the bar’s narrow tin door and vanished inside.
A weather-worn poster for Zayda Peña, a singer, was tacked up to the bar’s outside wall. Roque recognized the name from news reports. She was one of a dozen or so musicians on the grupero scene, Mexico’s version of country-western, who’d been murdered the past few years. Some of those killed had recorded narcocorridos, ballads touting the escapades of drug lords, a surefire way to piss off rivals. None of the murders had been solved. As though to drive that point home, somebody’d shredded the poster with the tip of a knife to where it looked as though a giant cat had come along to sharpen its claws on Zayda’s face.
Glancing over his shoulder, he caught Lupe disentangling herself from Tío Faustino’s arm, stretching, yawning, finger-combing her hair. You’re such a sap, he thought, mesmerized. At the same time he realized he could be looking at the next Zayda Peña. You pay for the company you keep. And yet when somebody walks up, says he loves your act, tells you he wants to bankroll you, turn your dream into your future, knowing as you do how hard you’ve worked, how few musicians catch a break, how many give it up or lose their way, is it really such a sin to say yes? Is it really a sign of virtue to shrink away, turn down what, for all you know, is the last real chance you’ll get?
The door to the bar opened again but it wasn’t Beto who emerged. A wiry man with a burdened slouch and artfully slicked-back hair stepped out into the street and rummaged a cigarette pack from his hip pocket. As his match flared, Roque got a glimpse of his features: less Mayan, more mestizo, with strangely bulging eyes like the clown Chimbombín.