Taking from your own was so bad, Noe fretfully considered. Carmelita would never forgive them. God would never forgive them. They had ended it; all those years of their big sister’s protection and love. It had been America. They had been promised a better life here, but it had changed Alejandro. Hardened his heart. Noe thought of how Carmelita had taken them to church in Ciudad Obregón every Sunday, always making sure that they were neat and tidy. Insisted that they attended school and even visited their father in prison as they prayed for his soul, and put flowers on their mother’s grave.
He looked at Alejandro’s square jaw, his heavy features in which those sunken eyes were set. Killer’s eyes, Carmelita had once said, after Alejandro had beaten a young man to a pulp in a bar, over some petty argument. The eyes of their father.
Yet it was Carmelita who always made excuses for Alejandro. It had been he who had found their mother, back in their home town in southern Sonora, bending at the kitchen, breathing heavily, pain etched on her face as she smoked a cigarette. A pot of rice and one of fava beans had cooked down on the stove and the house stank of burning food. And then Alejandro had seen the blood in her lap, and on the big knife that lay on the table. He’d started to cry and asked her what had happened, even though he knew, and in demented rage, he quickly searched the house for his father. He was certain the knife had been wielded by the old man’s drunken hand, his breath stinking of tequila and the cheap perfume of whores.
But the old man had fled.
Their mother had begged Alejandro not to call a doctor or the police, said that it looked worse than it was, protecting her treacherous husband even as her own life blood oozed out across her lap. Then she keeled over and fell heavily onto the tiled floor. Alejandro screamed and ran for help. It was too late; their mother was dead before they could get her to the hospital.
Sure enough, the police found their father a few hours later, and he instantly cried out his confession. They had argued and she had pushed him to his limit and he had blindly struck at her with the knife, his mind muddled with drink. When he saw the blood, he’d crossed himself and wandered for a while, eventually ending up back on the seedy Boulevard Morelia at the dingy Casa de Huéspedes he frequented, and in the arms of his favorite whore. She was a big, meaty woman named Gina, and the police officers found him sobbing and singing an alabados, a poignant hymn of praise on the suffering of the Virgin Mary, as she cradled him like a baby.
Then their big sister Carmelita had tried to become their mother. She took the boys to America and worked so hard to give them a better life. Noe remembered passing the old harbor for the last time, the mottled cloudy sky, the squawking of the birds and then driving across the desert roads over the yellow rock and tumbleweed-strewn terrain toward the highway. All the time Carmelita singing, and telling her excited little brothers about how good their new life in America would be.
And this was how they had repaid her!
A sister who had so recently seemed a browbeating harridan was slowly being recast as a madonna figure in Noe’s penitent soul. He looked over at Alejandro’s tight mouth again, his big gold-ringed fingers on the wheel of the Chevy.
It is him, the bullying oaf! He has done this to me. Taken me from my school, from my friends. Poisoned my soul. He’s just like our shitbag of a father!
Alejandro turned at that point, catching his scrawny younger sibling’s angry gaze. — What is wrong? he snapped.
— Nothing, Noe said meekly, kittenlike under the harsh stare of his older brother.
— Do not look at me like that, he spat and contemplated Noe again, his cold black eyes murderous.
A bolt of fear struck Noe square in the chest and he turned away to the side window. It felt cooler on his cheek, reminding him of the times when their father would borrow his brother’s old car and drive the family down to the beach at Miramar, by Guaymas, along the Pacific Coast of Mexico. He recalled the distinctive shapes of the towering denuded mountains, which surrounded the bay. The time he cut his feet paddling in the water on the shells from the delicious oysters native to the area. How he and Alejandro would beg for change when the anglers from all over the world would converge on Guaymas to participate in the tournaments and pursue the fish catch in the Sea of Cortes.
Now, looking gloomily out through the settling dust at the slowly visible horizon, broken only by big rocks, he contemplated his now saintly sister again. What had they done to her? The money. Her savings. All her hard work. Her chance of a better life: they had ruined it.
There was something ahead. The dust was clearing and a peculiar-looking object, giving off a luminous orange glow, was visible by the side of the road. Alejandro stopped the car and the brothers got out, each disappointed that on closer inspection the entity that had excited them was something as banal as a tent. Beside it was a 4x4 vehicle, which had almost turned over on its side, having run into a steep sudden rise of dirt, sand and shale, trapped by some rocks and banked up from the road. Alejandro pulled his .38 revolver from his inside pocket, and transferred it to the external pouch of his leather jacket. Noe went to speak in protest then thought against it. To his knowledge, Alejandro had never shot anybody before, but with a lunatic rage and desperation propelling him through this strange land, both sensed that he was destined to do so, and probably quite soon. Noe just hoped and prayed that it would not be him.
The settling sky brought out a red sun, which shimmered in front of them. In the growing light they could vaguely ascertain smudged figures in silhouette from inside the tent. Noe touched Alejandro’s arm, in a spirit of affirmation rather than any attempt at restraint, but in the event, it was brushed aside. Alejandro confidently opened the tent flap.
Instantly greeted by that smell he knew so well, the meaty, sour scent of spilt blood in the heat, Alejandro could scarcely believe his eyes as he surveyed the scene before him. One gringo was on his knees, performing fellatio on another, as a pretty girl looked on. They were a truly disgusting people, Alejandro thought with rancor. The penis of the man was covered in blood. The girl, she had a bloody towel in her lap. The animal had obviously fucked her in her stinking pussy when she was at her dirty time of month and the other gringo pig was sucking him clean! He wondered, in a bitter rage, if those were the sordid games his sister was participating in right now, the sissy boyfriend of her wealthy lover licking her foul menstrual blood from his dick as she watched on eagerly like the whore she had become. Now the cock-sucking norteamericano pig turned and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the ground.
Inside their own tent!
The Americans turned in shock to see the Mexican brothers.
— Two faggots and a dirty leetal lady, Alejandro said evenly, his features creasing up in malice.
— This is… a rattlesnake bit me… Eugene stuttered, then shouted in outrage, — Get the fuck out of here!
Alejandro’s face tightened further and he took a step into the tent. — Hey, seesay boy, you no talk to us like that, see, and he pulled out the gun and aimed it at Eugene’s cock and Scott’s mouth. — I blow your leemp deek off and thee teeth from thee head of your faggot friend too, he scowled.
Scott and Eugene froze, looking in open-mouthed vacancy at the barrel of the pistol.
Madeline swallowed hard, then crouched backwards, feeling the wall of the tent behind her. — What… what do you want?
Alejandro looked her up and down. A faint, mordant grin of contempt crossed his mouth. Then he turned to the others. — Feenish, he spat.