Savages

12

Lado is short for “Helado,” which is Spanish for “stone cold.”

It fits.

Miguel Arroyo, aka Lado, is stone cold.

(A figure of speech that Chon would object to, BTW. Having been to the desert, he knows that stones can be fucking hot.)

Anyway—

Even as a kid, Lado didn’t seem to have any feelings, or if he did, he didn’t show them anyway. Hug him—his mother did, a lot—you got nothing. Whip his ass with a belt—his father did, a lot—the same nothing. He’d just look at you with those black eyes, like what do you want with me?

He’s no kid now. Forty-six, he’s a father himself. Two sons and a teenage daughter who is making him loco. Of course, that’s her job at her age. No kid, he has himself a wife, a nice landscaping business, he makes money. No one takes a belt to him anymore.

Now he drives his Lexus through San Juan Capistrano, looking at the nice futbol field, then turns left into the big housing community, block after block of identical apartment buildings behind a stone wall that runs alongside the railroad track.

NBM.

Nothing But Mexicans.

Block after block.

You hear English here it’s the mailman talking to himself.

This is where the nice Mexicans live. Where the respectful, respectable, hardworking Mexicans live when they’re not at their jobs. These are old Mexican families, been here since before the Anglos stole it, were here when the Spanish fathers came to steal it first. Put the stones in the mission for the swallows to come back to.

These are Mexican-Americans, send their kids to the nice Catholic school across the street, where the faggot priests will train them to be docile. These are the nice Mexicans who dress up on Sundays and after mass go to the park or down to the grassy strips along the harbor in Dana Point and have cookouts. Sunday is Mexicans’ Day Out, pray to Jesus and pass the tortillas por favor.

Lado is not a nice Mexican.

He’s one of those scary Mexicans.

A former Baja State cop, he has big hands with broken knuckles, scars from blades and bullets. Black black obsidian eyes. He’s seen that Mel Gibson movie about Mexico back in the Majan days when they ripped people’s bellies open with obsidian blades and his viejos say that he has eyes like those knives.

Back in the day Lado was one of Los Zetas, the special counter-narcotics task force in Baja. He survived the narco wars of the nineties, saw a lot of men killed, more than a few at his own hands, busted a lot of the narcos himself, took them into alleys and made them give up their secrets.

He laughs at the news reports about “torture” in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were using waterboarding in Mexico since before Lado can remember, except they didn’t use water but Coca-Cola—the carbonation gave it a little more zing and motivated your narco to bubble up with useful information.

Now the U.S. Congress is going to investigate.

Investigate what?

The world?

Life?

What goes on between men?

How else do you make a bad man tell you the truth? You think you smile at him, give him sandwiches and cigarettes, become his friend? He’ll smile back and lie to you and think what a cabrón you are.

But that was back in the old days, before he and the rest of the Zetas got tired of busting drugs and making no money, of working their asses off and dying while they watched the narcos get rich, before they decided to get rich themselves.

Lado’s eyes are cold stone?

Maybe because those eyes have seen—

His own hands holding a chain saw

Swooping through a man’s neck as

Blood sprayed.

Your eyes would be hard, too.

Your eyes would turn to stone.

Some of those seven men they begged, they cried, they pleaded to God, to their mamas, they said they had families, they pissed their trousers. Others said nothing, just looked with the silent resignation that Lado thinks is the expression of Mexico itself. Bad things are going to happen, it is simply a matter of when. They should stitch that on the flag.

He’s glad to be El Norte.

He goes now to find this kid Esteban.