“My name’s Shel,” she told him.
“I know.”
Shel smiled. “You do.”
“It’s written on the back of the picture I have.”
“The one you had at the house.”
He reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. As he scratched the flint to create a flame, Shel thought of the bloody black scald at Snuff’s temple.
“Where’d you get that picture?”
“From Francisco Fregado.” Cesar grinned. “That’s what we called him. Frank the Mess.”
She felt light-headed suddenly and searched around for a place to sit. A rock jutted out of the grass not far away. She aimed for it, took two lunging steps, and came within falling distance. She hit the ground in a heap then pulled herself onto the rock. Cesar walked up behind.
“You all right?”
“Haven’t had my Wheaties.”
“You mean your pills.” He sounded angry.
“I would’ve taken more if you hadn’t stopped me.”
She drew up on her haunch, pulling her legs up beneath her and sitting stiffly on the rock. She chafed her arms. He offered her his cigarette.
“Thank you,” she said.
She took a shallow drag, coughed despite herself, and handed the cigarette back. He waved it off. “I’ll light another.”
It was a cool and blustery morning, the air clear and sharp and scented with rain. Threads of cloud, propelled by an easterly wind, seethed across a crackling, dawn-lit sky.
The house was a two-story farmhouse that seemed to have sat empty for some time. It stood alone on a grassy plane surrounded by low-lying hills. The terrain was lush from recent rain, the air smelled of mud. The road down which the cars had come ran parallel behind a windbreak of eucalyptus trees that flanked an irrigation canal choked with weeds.
To the north a barrier ridge of taller hills gave Shel her bearings. We’re on the north side of the strait, she thought. Not far from the mouth of the Sacramento, near Bird’s Landing, somewhere between Montezuma Hills and Grizzly Bay. Windmills sat atop the nearest easterly hills and that clinched it. She remembered reading something about them, how they’d been built by a consortium hoping to supply cheap electricity to the nearby farms. Funding had backfired, bureaucrats descended, the investors got strangled in red tape. Now the windmills stood there, skeletons of metal, transforming the wind into nothing but sound.
About a hundred yards beyond the eucalyptus trees, vans and trucks filled with squatters crowded a small clearing. The women in the camp were cooking by wood fires beneath canvas awnings attached to the vans. Pozole and nixtamal from the night before simmered for the tortillas the women were roasting now on their stone comals. Children sucking on sticks of rock candy clung to their mothers’ skirts, warmed by the fires. Grizzled men wearing sweat-stained hats sat in folding chairs, waiting for breakfast. A makeshift pen for chickens stood at the edge of the clearing. A group of older children taunted the birds, throwing acorns through the wire.
As Shel turned back from the squatter camp she noticed that Cesar had wandered toward the house. He stood before one of the windows, turning his head at various angles, as though appraising his birthmark. She imagined him hoping it had grown smaller since the last time he’d inspected it.
“You speak English well,” she said, trying for his attention.
He turned away from his reflection. “You talk a lot,” he said.
“My head hurts. I’m trying not to think about it.” She worked up a comradely smile. “So, anyway, like I said, your English, it’s impressive.”
“I’ve been here awhile,” he said, stopping a couple yards away.
“You sound like a guy I knew once in TJ.”
“Spent some time there as well,” Cesar acknowledged.
“Sending mojados over the fence?”
He shot her a look of sly fascination. “It’s a living. I came over the fence a few times myself.”
Near the chicken pen the squatter children stopped pelting the birds with acorns and started in on each other. They shrieked and giggled. It was murder.
“You didn’t grow up there, in TJ?”
He shook his head. “Chalco.”
“That’s-?”
“A shithole,” he said. In a gentler tone, he added, nodding toward the squatters, “Down near Mexico City. Where people like that come from.”
This was going well, Shel decided. It took some effort for her not to blurt out: Save me.
“Poor Mexico,” she intoned, quoting a saying she’d once heard. “So far from God. So close to the United States.”
Cesar laughed. Beyond him sunlight flared across the easterly hills, creating a horizon that was achingly blue, stippled with clouds flecked gold and red by the rising sun.
“Your friends,” she went on, “they seem to enjoy their work.” It wasn’t till after she’d said it she remembered it was something Dayball had said about himself.
“Dumbfucks.” Cesar cleared his throat and spat. “Worthless. Stupid.”
“They’re large, though. It’s a talent.”
“They think in pictures. Believe in death rays and sorcerers. All spine and no brain.”
“So why are they in there instead of you?”
He turned and looked at her, like he was trying to figure out if he’d been insulted.
“I mean,” she added, “they get to stay in there and play rough. You have to sit out here and be a human being. With the woman.”
Cesar drew on his cigarette and exhaled. “Quien va a villa,” he said, “pierde su silla.” It sounded like a curse.
“What’s that mean?” Shel asked.
“The one who goes to town loses his seat.”
He glanced down at her, checking to see if she understood. The anger in his eyes mingled with a breathtaking despair. I wonder, she thought, if anyone’s ever told him he’s depressed.
“How exactly,” she asked, “did you go to town?”
“I was the one who worked up the deal with your old man. Frank the Mess.”
He sighed bitterly and shook his head. She fought an impulse to smile. An outcast, she thought. It seemed strangely hopeful.
“That picture you got from Frank,” she said. “Could I see it?”
Cesar reached inside his jacket, withdrew the snapshot, and handed it to her. It was a picture taken of her by Frank a year or two ago. She was sitting at a table in some forgotten place they’d rented. There was nothing remarkable about the photograph, just one forgettable moment in one forgotten day in a string of over a thousand such days. He’d just shown up and said, “Smile.” She looked weary.
“Why’d Frank give you this?”
“He didn’t,” Cesar said. “We found it in his car.”
She cocked her head. “When?”
“Last time we met, before that fucking disaster out at the junkyard.” He spewed a long trail of smoke and with a flick of his finger sent his cigarette butt flying into the weeds. “I sat with him at the hotel, in the bar, we ran through what was supposed to happen. While he was in with me, Humberto and Pepe, they searched his car.”
Please, Shel thought, no more names.
“Why?”
“He was acting strange.”
“He was drugged.”
Cesar cackled. “Now we know.”
“If you knew he was drugged- ”
“The fact he was loaded, that wasn’t the problem. Half the motherfuckers you deal with anymore are tanked. He just seemed”- he spread out his hand, waving it slowly back and forth- “a little more out of touch than loaded could explain.”
“He was scared.”
Cesar shook his head. “Not scared so much. More like, I don’t know, like nothing would have made him happier than if I’d just stood up at the table and shot him. Get it fucking over with.”
I think I know how he felt, Shel thought. She turned the picture over. On the back, in pencil, Frank had written her name. As though he needed to remind himself who it was on the other side. Cesar reached over and tapped with his finger at the penciled lettering.