Thirty-Three
IT WAS LUPE’S IDEA TO STOP AT THE CHURCH.
They’d driven for an hour, daybreak brightening a cloud-jumbled sky, but once they passed the village of Barra de la Cruz they knew trusting their luck any longer was foolhardy. The Bahías de Huatulco lay ahead with their tony resorts; sooner or later they’d reach a checkpoint and it wouldn’t much matter who manned it, the police or the army, vigilantes or paramilitaries, not with the ambushers’ weapons and Tío Faustino’s body in the truck bed.
The sign for the church pointed up a steep and rutted dirt lane shaded by majestic ceibas with their hand-shaped leaf clusters, the peaks of the Sierra Madre del Sur in the distance. There was a notice posted beneath the sign, a declaration from the local archbishop, warning of a con man working the area, impersonating a priest and performing sacred functions-confessions, deathbed absolutions, baptisms, even weddings-for a fee. Atop the hill, the church sat in a clearing surrounded by cornfields-a short steeple lacking a cross, walls the yellow of egg yolks, wood shutters painted an electric blue. Shaped differently, Roque thought, it might have passed for an Easter egg.
Lupe gestured to Samir to let her out.-Let me talk to the priest.
Samir didn’t move.-What will you tell him?
Her face was weary with grief.-I’ll say we got attacked by bandits along the road. We have someone we need to bury. He was a good man… She trembled, choking something back.-He deserves to buried by the church, he deserves to be blessed and prayed for.
– Look at you. Samir eyed her blouse, her jeans, caked with dried blood.-He’ll think you’re crazy. Worse, he’ll think-
With the fury of a child, she began slapping at his head, his chest, his shoulder.-Let me out, asshole. Now. Out of my way…
Samir obliged, if only to escape the indignity. She slid across the seat into the gathering sunlight and stormed off, even her ponytail clotted with blood. Samir slid his hand around his face, chafing the stubble, eyeing her as she climbed the wood-plank steps to the church’s front doors. They were locked. She rattled them hard, testing to be sure, then ventured around back, to an add-on section that looked as though it might be the rectory. A modest cemetery lay beyond.
As she vanished around the corner, the Arab leaned his weight against the pickup’s open door, as though only that were keeping him upright.
“We can’t drive this truck much farther.” Roque checked the gas gauge, an eighth of a tank remaining, but that wasn’t what he was getting at. “We get to a roadblock, it won’t just be the bullet holes we have to answer for. Even if we bury my uncle’s body here, ditch the guns-”
“You seriously want to continue without weapons?”
“The worst is behind us.”
“Says who?”
“The truck’s registered in somebody else’s name. That alone, boom, we’re done. And for all we know those men we killed were police, military, someone else we’ll have to answer for.”
Samir squinted against the dusty wind. “All this I already know.”
“Fine.” Roque opened his door, dragged himself out from behind the wheel and stretched his legs. His clothing, too, was crusted with dried blood. Turning to the truck bed, he checked the tarp covering the weapons and Tío Faustino’s body, tugging at the corners. He lacked the nerve to peek underneath. “Since you already know everything, solve the problem.”
“We’ll catch a bus at the nearest town up the road, head for Mexico City. We’ll catch another bus there for Agua Prieta.”
“We’re sitting ducks on the bus. If those really were cops back there, soldiers, paramilitaries, whatever, word will spread. They’ll be looking for us everywhere. On a bus we have nowhere to run.”
“You asked my solution, I gave it to you. You don’t like it…” He shrugged.
“We can call Victor, back in Arriaga, he might-”
“Who does he know we do not know ourselves? I bet he was bought off. They probably want his skin because we are not already dead.”
“You think he betrayed his own, betrayed Beto.”
“Let me tell you something, this kind of animal we’re dealing with? We paid all that money for nothing. When the gangsters take charge, everything turns to chaos. Trust me, I have seen it with my own eyes. We would be fools to stay with them.”
Despite his fury, Roque felt encouraged by this turn. If Samir was giving up on the salvatruchos down here, maybe he’d given up on making the connection with El Recio in Agua Prieta as well. That meant Lupe was free. After all, they were dead. Their bodies were back there on the road, burned to cinders in the Corolla. “You saying we’re on our own?”
“I am saying we need to be careful. We need-” He winced, something in his eye. He rubbed at it, face naked with fatigue. “Honestly? I have no clue what we need.”
Lupe reappeared, trailed by a man in street clothes, not a cassock. He looked younger than Roque expected, more trim and fit too, though he wore perhaps the world’s nerdiest pair of glasses. He headed straight for the truck bed and glanced down at the wind-rucked tarp. No one said anything. Up close, the man’s face told a more complex story. He had wary eyes and a sensual mouth but a strong jaw, a fighter’s misshapen nose. His thinning brown hair curled around his ears and he had an educated air, though with a worker’s ropy musculature and rough hands. Finally, he looked up and met Roque’s eyes.-He was your uncle?
Roque glanced toward Lupe, but she looked away rather than meet his gaze. Turning back to the man, he nodded.
– We can bury him here if you like. Preparing him for transport elsewhere, to be buried in the United States, let’s say, will take time. And the involvement of the authorities.
He paused there, everyone conceding what he declined to add.
– I’m Father Ruano, by the way. Or Father Luis. Whichever you prefer.
– I think it’s fine, we bury him here. Roque’s voice was so hushed he had to repeat himself.-I’ll let my aunt know where she can visit the grave. We can visit it together… His voice trailed away, as though heading off to find some truth in what he’d just said.
– All right, then. The priest backed away from the truck, pointing vaguely toward the cemetery.-If you carry him behind the church, I will get the shovels. We will have to dig ourselves. That’s not a problem, I assume.
BY MIDMORNING THEY’D FINISHED THE GRAVE, WORKING IN CONCERT, even the priest pitching in. Though baked hard from the tropical sun, the ground was sandy with little rock or clay to break through. They covered their noses and mouths with bandannas against the fine coarse dust, while Lupe murmured the rosary over and over, the monotony of the prayers only intensifying the monotony of the work. Not that anyone complained. It seemed fitting that things should go slow and hard. It rendered the effort devotional. And it distracted them from the zopilotes riding the thermals overhead.
The vultures weren’t the only visitors from the sky. Swarms of monarch butterflies, migrants themselves, descended from the foothills in the southerly downdrafts. Some of the birds Roque had seen in the plates of his Peterson Field Guide made appearances here; he spotted petrels, frigate birds.
He grew numb as his shovel bit into the dirt, wondering if the pain that gnawed at his arms and the small of his back, the blisters breaking open on his palms, weren’t all conspiring to fashion a wall between what he needed to do and what he hoped to feel. In time, though, memories rose up to deliver a little shock of feeling, one recollection in particular standing out, the afternoon of his twelfth birthday.