Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 10

We flew into El Paso late that night. By dawn of the next day we were on a shuttle flight to a windswept dusty airport set among brown hills five hundred miles into Mexico. The Mexican drug agent who met us wore boots and jeans, a badge on his belt and a pistol and a sports coat over a wash-faded blue golf shirt. His name was Heriberto, and he was unshaved and had been up all night.

"The guy try to kill you, huh?" he said, as he unlocked the doors to the Cherokee in the parking lot.

"That's right," I said.

"I wouldn't want a guy like that after me. Es indio, man, know what I mean? Guy like that will cook your heart over a fire," he said. He looked at Helen. "Gringita, you want to use the rest room? Where we going, there ain't any bushes along the road."

He looked indolently at the flat stare in her face.

"What did you call her?" I asked.

"Maybe you all didn't get no sleep last night," he said. "You can sleep while I drive. I never had a accident on this road. Last night, with no moon, I come down with one headlight."

The sun rose in an orange haze above hills that looked made of slag, with cactus and burnt mesquite and chaparral on the sides. The dirt road twisted through a series of arroyos where the sandstone walls were scorched by grass fires, then we forded a river that splayed like coffee-stained milk over a broken wood dam and overflowed the banks into willows and rain trees and a roofless mud brick train station by tracks that seemed to disappear into a hillside.

"You looking at where those tracks go?" Heriberto said. "The mine company had a tunnel there. The train's still inside."

"Inside?" I said.

"Pancho Villa blew the mountain down on the tunnel. When a train full of Huerta's jackals was coming through. They're still in there, man. They ain't coming out."

I took my notebook out of my shirt pocket and opened it.

"What's bugarron mean?" I asked.

Helen had fallen asleep in back, her head on her chest.

"It's like maricon, except the bugarron considers himself the guy."

"You're talking about homosexuals? I don't get it."

"He's adicto, man. Guy's got meth and lab shit in his head. Those double-ought buckshots in him don't help his thinking too good, either."

"What lab shit?"

He concentrated on the road, ignoring my question, and swerved around an emaciated dog.

"Why'd you bring us down here?" I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

"The priest is my wife's cousin. He says you're in danger. Except what he knows he knows from the confession. That means he can't tell it himself. You want to go back to the airport, man, tell me now."

The sun rose higher in an empty cobalt sky. We crossed a flat plain with sloughs and reeds by the roadside and stone mountains razored against the horizon and Indian families who seemed to have walked enormous distances from no visible site in order to beg by the road. Then the road began to climb and the air grew cooler. We passed an abandoned ironworks dotted with broken windows, and went through villages where the streets were no more than crushed rock and the doors to all the houses were painted either green or blue. The mountains above the villages were gray and bare and the wind swept down the sheer sides and blew dust out of the streets.

"It's all Indians here. They think you paint the door a certain color, evil spirits can't walk inside," Heriberto said.

Helen was awake now and looking out the window.

"This is what hell must look like," she said.

"I grew up here. I tell you something, we don't got guys like Arana here. He's from Jalisco. I tell you something else, they don't even got guys like Arana there. Guys like him got to go to the United States to get like that, you understand what I'm saying?"

"No," she answered, looking at the back of his neck.

"My English ain't too good. It's a big problem I got," he said.

We pulled into a village that was wedged like a toothache in a steep-sided, narrow canyon strewn with the tailings from a deserted open-pit mine on the mountain above. Some of the houses had no outbuildings, only a piece of concrete sewer pipe inserted vertically into the dirt yard for a community toilet. Next to the cantina was the police station, a squat, white-washed building with green shutters that were latched shut on the windows. A jeep carrying three rurales and a civilian with a bloody ear and hair like a lion's mane came up the road in a flume of dust from the direction of the mine and parked in front. The three rurales wore dirty brown uniforms and caps with lacquered brims and World War I thumb-buster U.S. Army.45 revolvers. The civilian's clothes were in rags and his hands were roped behind him. The rurales took him inside the building and closed the door.

"Are these the guys who popped Arana?" I asked.

"Yeah, man, but you don't want to be asking them no questions about it, know what I'm saying?" Heriberto said.

"No, I don't."

He scratched his nose, then told me a story.

The village had been visited by a carnival that featured a pedal-operated Ferris wheel, a donkey with a fifth leg that grew like a soft carrot out of its side, a concessionaire who sold hand-corked bottles of mescal that swam with thread worms, and Arana, the Spider, a magical man who swallowed flame and blew it like a red handkerchief into the air, whose scarlet, webbed tattoos, Indian-length hair, blackened mouth, and chemical green eyes could charm mountain women from their marital beds. His sexual energies were legendary.

"Arana was in the sack with the wrong man's wife?" I said.

"They gonna tell you that. You go away with that, take that story back home, everything's gonna be fine. You don't, you keep asking questions, maybe we got a problem. You see that guy they just took in? You don't want to go in there today."

"What'd he do?" Helen asked.

"Two children went in those empty buildings up at the mines and didn't come back. See, where all those pieces of tin are flapping in the wind. He lives in there by himself, he don't ever take a bath, comes down at night and steals food from people."

"Why'd they shoot Arana?" I said.

"Look, man, how I'm gonna tell you? This ain't no marijuanista we're talking about. This guy takes high-powered stuff into the States sometimes. These local guys know that. It's called la mordita, you got to pay the bite, man, or maybe you have a shitload of trouble. Like the guy behind those green shutters now. He don't want to see nobody light a cigar."

The infirmary had been built by an American mining company in the oblong shape of a barracks on a bench above the main street of the village. The lumber had warped the nails out of the joists, and the windows were covered with ragged plastic sheets that popped in the wind. In back, a gasoline-powered generator throbbed next to a water well that had been dug in the middle of a chicken yard.

Inside, the beds were in rows, squared away, either a slop jar or spittoon under each one, the steel gray blankets taut with a military tuck. The woodstove was unlighted, the open door congealed with dead ash. The bare walls and floors seemed enameled with cold.

But the man named Arana needed no heat source other than his own.

He lay on top of the sheet, naked except for a towel across his loins, the scarlet tattoos on his skin emblazoned with sweat. His chest was peppered with wounds that had been dressed with squares of gauze and tape and a yellow salve that smelled like an engine lubricant. But that was not where the offensive odor came from. His right thigh was twice the size it should have been, the shiny reddish black color of an eggplant.

The priest who had called the sheriff brought us chairs to sit by the bed. He was a thin, pale man, dressed in a windbreaker, flannel shirt, khaki pants and work boots that were too big for his ankles, his black hair probably scissor-cropped at home. He put his hand on my arm and turned me aside before I sat down. His breath was like a feather that had been dipped in brandy.

"Arana has absolution but no rest. He believes he served evil people who are going to hurt you," he said. "But I'm not sure of anything he says now."

"What's he told you?"

"Many things. Few of them good."

"Father, I'm not asking you to violate the seal of the confessional."

"He's made himself insane with injections. He talks of his fears for young people. It's very confusing."

I waited. There was a pained glimmer in the priest's eyes. "Sir?" I said.

"The man some think killed children up at the mines is his relative," the priest said. "Or maybe he was talking about what he calls the bugarron. I don't know."

Helen and I sat down next to the bed. Helen took a tape recorder out of her purse and clicked it on. The man who was named Arana let his eyes wander onto my face.

"You know me, partner?" I said.

He tilted his chin so he could see me better, breathed hard through his nostrils. Then he spoke in a language I didn't recognize.

"It's an Indian dialect," the priest said. "No one speaks it here, except his relative, the crazy one who lives inside the mines."

"Who sent you to New Iberia, Arana?" I said.

But my best attempts at reaching inside his delirium seemed to be of no avail. I tried for a half hour, then felt my own attention start to wander. The priest left and came back. Helen yawned and straightened her back. "Sorry," she said. She took one cartridge out of the recorder and put in another.

Then, as though Arana had seen me for the first time, his hand cupped around my wrist and squeezed it like a vise.

"The bugarron ride a saddle with flowers cut in it. I seen him at the ranch. You messing everything up for them. They gonna kill you, man," he said.

"Who's this guy?"

"He ain't got no name. He got a red horse and a silver saddle. He like Indian boys."

Inadvertently, his hand drew mine against his gangrenous thigh. I saw the pain jump in his face, then anger replace the recognition that had been in his eyes.

"What's this man look like?" I said.

But I had become someone else now, perhaps an old enemy who had come aborning with the carrion birds.

Helen and I walked outside with the priest. The sunlight was cold inside the canyon. Heriberto waited for us in the Cherokee.

"I have no authority here, Father. But I'm worried about the fate of the man from the mines, the one inside the police station," I said.

"Why?"

"Heriberto says the rurales are serious men."

"Heriberto is corrupt. He takes money from drug smugglers. The rurales are Indians. It's against their way to deliberately injure an insane person."

"I see. Thank you for your goodwill, Father."

That night Helen and I boarded a four-engine plane for the connection flight back to El Paso. She looked out the window as we taxied onto the runway. Heriberto was standing by a hangar, one hand lifted in farewell.

"How do you read all that?" she said, nodding toward the glass.

"What?"

"Everything that happened today."

"It's an outdoor mental asylum," I said.

Later, she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I watched the clouds blowing through the propellers, then the sky was clear again and far below I saw the lights of a city spread through a long valley and the Rio Grande River glowing under the moon.