The Rescue

42

“Three, two, one...,” she counts off. “This is Bettina Blazak, of Coastal Eddy, live with the head of the Sinaloa Cartel in the heart of the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. Shall I call you El Gordo, or Señor Godoy?”

“Alejandro.”

“We’re standing in front of the house you were born in, Alejandro, is that correct?”

“It was built by my grandfather with his own hands.”

“And the nearest city is Badiraguato?”

“It is a small town.”

Bettina has set up her video camera on its tripod, and positioned Godoy outside his birthplace. The house is a compact one-story, its stones rough and irregular, held fast by thick veins of cement. The roof beams look heavy and old, but their seams shine with fresh mastic.

Armed men loiter in the forest. There’s a flatbed pickup with a mounted machine gun parked near a blue barn, the driver smoking a cigarette and the machine gunner seated at his weapon, watching Bettina.

She has posed Godoy in front of the eastern wall of the house to take advantage of the late morning sun, now coming over the ragged peaks.

Strickland stands in the sun of the eastern wall, too, well off-camera. Bettina thinks that Strickland is the opposite of boyish, well-coiffed Godoy. Strickland looks sullen. He really doesn’t want to be photographed, or recorded, she thinks. A rare find, in her line of work. He also seemed unimpressed when she introduced him to El Gordo, refusing to use his good Spanish. She wonders if he’s threatened by Godoy and his masculine supremacy here. The idea that Strickland is possessive of her feels good. Steam rises from his coffee cup in his gloved hands.

Bettina stands near the camera with her back to the sun, fingers stiff with cold, cussing herself for not bringing gloves.

She’s annoyed that Godoy has refused to let her even see Felix until they’re done with the interview. The interview which, if she’s understanding his not-bad English correctly, will involve some mountain driving and take all day. She hopes Felix is inside the stone house, nice and warm. Sees the thick stream of woodsmoke rising from the chimney. Godoy wouldn’t leave the dog in a freezing barn, would he? She keeps thinking Felix will hear her voice and bark, but no. Maybe he’s been moved off-campus

Godoy looks younger than his forty-eight or forty-nine years. He’s got a slender face, big eyes, curly dark brown hair with a forelock. Gordo he is not.

Bettina was more than surprised when he came to the door dressed in black boots, pressed jeans, a black wool blazer over a white, still-creased-from-the-package cowboy shirt, and a braided leather bolo tie with a silver cross outlined in turquoise. He looked like Springsteen on Tunnel of Love, her mom’s and dad’s favorite album when she was ten.

“What are your first memories of this place?” she asks.

“Collecting firewood with my mother. There is still no heating in this house other than the fireplace. I built my mother and father a new house lower in the mountains. For the cold. It has carpet and a heater — air conditioner.”

“Did you have enough to eat when you were little?”

Godoy frowns. “Almost. There are good cattle here and fruit and beans in the markets. But there was no work. My father grew poppies and potatoes to survive.”

“Can we see the poppy fields?”

Strickland cuts her a look.

Godoy frowns again. “I will show you the clinic and the schools I have built.”

Bettina turns off the camera and unscrews it from the tripod. “Can I just see my dog once before we go?”

“He is with my wife and children in another casa.”

“Is he happy here?”

“He is adored.”

“Do you have lots of homes here in the mountains?”

“Yes, I am always moving. Vamos,” he says, heading for a dusty white Suburban.

El Gordo does the driving, Bettina up front, Strickland and a gloomy-looking gunman behind them.

The Godoy Clinic on the other side of Badiraguato is a new-looking, boxy affair made of cinder blocks and topped with a still shiny aluminum roof. There’s a shaded entryway and when Bettina steps inside, she sees the clean waiting room and the white-clad receptionist behind the counter, peering around a large clay pot of chipper, oversized paper flowers. The waiting room is furnished with rustic mountain furniture, a table stacked with newspapers and magazines, a large mural in the style of Diego Rivera, and is empty of patients.

Bettina pans this interior, then sets up her camera and tripod again and questions the receptionist, Leonarda Cuevas Escobar. The woman speaks almost no English, so Bettina coaxes her along in Spanish. Leonarda smiles shyly and says what she likes most about the clinic is all the free help they can offer to the poor. People with no money appreciate help, she says. Señor Godoy donated the land and the building, so the Clínica Godoy can stay open forever.

Bettina is aware of Godoy watching her. She can see him just at the edge of her vision, expressionless, his eyes rarely straying from her. She glances at him as she removes the camera from the stand, catches a hint of a smile.

Strickland strides between them to talk to Leonarda in his good Spanish, giving Bettina a brief cautionary look on the way. He’s as on edge as I am, she thinks. She’s not surprised he’s this protective.

Next, El Gordo shows her the new church he’s built near Divisadero (La Luz Sierra); the school in Batopilas (Universidad Godoy); the restaurant just outside Creel (Buen Vaquero) where they have a late lunch. Bettina continues her interview in the quaint cantina, where Godoy tells her his plans for the Hospital Godoy in Los Mochis, Godoy Primary school in Alamos, and a Thoroughbred training center outside San Bernardo.

Bettina changes the subject abruptly when she sees that Godoy isn’t going to volunteer the part of his story that many Coastal Eddy readers want to hear most.

“Alejandro, some people in the United States say that money from the Sinaloa Cartel has paid for all these things. That the Sinaloa Cartel is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world.”

She sees the flash of anger in his eyes, quickly muted into a warm smile.

“The appetite of norteamericanos for illegal substances is renowned worldwide,” he says. “They flood our country with dollars. They flood us with guns. The Mexican cartels are greatly exaggerated. It is the police and the government who control the narcotics and the guns and the money.”

“The Mexican government and police?” asks Bettina.

“Working with American government! Americans speak of corruption in Mexico, but look around you, here in the Sierra Madre, where the great Sinaloa Cartel is supposed to be all-powerful. Where is this cartel? Where?”

“With all respect, Alejandro, it is sitting right in front of me and my camera.”

“Señorita Blazak, I have surrendered myself to you and your camera so the world can see the truth. I have taken you into my home and shown you the life of El Gordo. A life that began in poverty. A life of hard work. Yes, I have done business in the narcotics trade. I have sold illegal products to the United States. I have negotiated with Americans who are policemen in the day and traffickers at night. I have seen the slaughter their guns bring to Mexico. I have used those guns to defend myself. But I have always given much of my earnings to the poor of my country. As you have seen today. The clinic. The school and church. The cantina in which we now sit, where profits go to charity. I will build the hospital and the majestic Thoroughbred training facility.”

Bettina knows that she’s taken the accusations as far as she can go without pissing off Godoy and losing her chance to return home with Felix. Part of her responsibility is to please her subject. His breathtaking lies are walls that she can scale only at great peril to Felix, Daniel Strickland, and herself.

And yet there’s some truth in them, she thinks. If you see things through his eyes. Through what he was given at birth and what he’s done with it.

Either way, she’s angry at herself for not digging in and getting the darker truths about this story — a story that matters. She’s downsizing her professional integrity for ownership of a dog. For her dog, which means, for herself.

She looks out the window at the dirt street and the late daylight.

Realizes it’s now or never to ask the biggest question she’s wanted to ask Godoy since she agreed to profile him in Coastal Eddy. It’s a way to rescue this story from being a one-sided puff piece. And to make it something that will matter to her readers and watchers.

She feels her heart beating fast and takes off on the wave:

“Alejandro, my brother Keith was twenty years old when he overdosed on a fentanyl-laced vape pen. So, what do you say to Keith, and the thousands of others who have been killed by that deadly drug you sell in huge quantities? Do you have anything you’d like him to know about why you do what you do?”

Strickland, arms crossed, looks down at the table, shaking his head.

“Do you have proof that this substance came from me?” Godoy asks.

“No, I do not.”

“Or maybe from China, where fentanyl has for years been produced?”

“I can only prove that he died from fentanyl under a freeway in San Diego.”

Godoy squints into the camera, his expression hard to read. Calm, certainly, but what else? Cold? Thoughtful? Measuring his words?

Then he nods and places his right hand over his heart. “I am sorry for what you did, Mr. Keith. I do what I do to provide for my family. That is all.”

Bettina senses no falsehood in Godoy’s words or voice or gestures. “But there must be more, Mr. Godoy. Can you apologize to him?”

“I am sorry what happened, Keith, but I will apologize for nothing. We choose our own roads. I am finished with this interview now, Bettina.”

“May I ask you three more questions? One about giving and taking. One about killing and one about God.”

He agrees to three more questions.

And answers them with a blunt honesty, his charm spent and his vanity exhausted.

When she’s finished, she turns off the camera and returns El Gordo’s troubled stare.

“I have enough for the story and the video,” she says. “I’ll need some time and privacy to write and edit them.”

“I have an office in one of my homes. It is warm and quiet and you can work.”

“When will I get Felix?” she asks.

“When I approve the story and video.”

“Get me to that office, Señor Godoy. I need a shot of bourbon to get me started.”

“You will have all the bourbon you need.”

“One shot of bourbon is what I said.”

“You loved this brother very much.”

“Very much. He was my twin. The other half of me.”

True to her word, it takes Bettina one shot of bourbon to get her through the five-thousand-word feature story on Alejandro “El Gordo” Godoy. Once she has that first line: He was born on Christmas Day, so his mother was certain that Alejandro would become the light of the world, Bettina is off and running on her laptop, fingers flying to keep up with the words racing into her. The story tells itself, as the good ones sometimes do. The layers build from Godoy’s impoverished nativity, and he becomes a hero in his own eyes. She lets him supply the hyperbole and vanity, the braggadocio and narcissism. And the charm, too, his boyish pride in the illegal empire he’s built from almost nothing, his self-promoting pro bono investment here in the Sierra Madre: Clínica Godoy, La Luz Sierra church, Universidad Godoy, the restaurant Buen Vaquero.

The piece is sympathetic and subtly flattering. Well written. But her last few questions — especially about Keith — keep it from being a puff piece about a self-righteous peddler of deadly drugs, a stone-cold killer.

But what will El Gordo think of it?

She saves and sends it to her desktop in Laguna for safekeeping, uses a cruddy old printer to make a copy for Godoy. Not much of an office, she thinks, but everything seems to work.

Her video, edited right there on the laptop, is also to her liking. The fashionably dressed Godoy loves the camera as much as Strickland hates it. Bettina’s good eye for locations helps Sinaloa come alive — its rugged mountains and vast canyons, the humble, brightly painted houses, the towns, the silent regard of the Indigenous Tarahumara, who labor on foot on the dusty roads.

But most of all on Godoy and all his histrionic self-revelation.

Godoy’s last words on camera: “I take and I give, in the eternal way of the Sierra Madre. I will leave this world a better place. If I have ridden with the devil, it was only to survive. God is my judge.”

Bettina: “How many men have you killed?”

Godoy: “Only those who tried to kill me. This I swear, Bettina Blazak.”

Bettina: “Are you afraid of the God who will judge you?”

Godoy: “I fear nothing.”

Her rough edit now complete, all Bettina can do is pray that Godoy signs off on his story.

And that she can go home with Felix.

Godoy sits at one end of a long leather sofa in his living room, watching Bettina’s Coastal Eddy video on her laptop, propped open on the old streamer trunk before him.

Bettina sits at the opposite end, nervously appreciating the artisan crafts and paintings on the walls, the handwoven Indigenous rugs and brilliant Huichol yarn art — an extravagant exhibition of color.

Strickland stands in front of the fire, eyeing her unhappily, silent. He’s got the pistol jammed into his belt where everyone can see it, as he has pretty much all day. Godoy didn’t seem to mind, which made Bettina wonder why El Gordo would trust the gringo Strickland enough to pack a gun in his presence. But more than half the men she saw today were armed with automatic weapons, so maybe a gringo with a pistol was small potatoes.

Godoy’s man, Miguel, surly and still as an Olmec statue, faces Strickland from across the big room with a tactical shotgun slung over his shoulder.

Bettina is hopeful but worried. Going on scared. If El Gordo doesn’t like both the story and the video, she’ll have to try again tomorrow. And if he still can’t accept the El Gordo that she has created, she may never see Felix again. Or worse.

Godoy has already read the article and offered Bettina only a long blank look, saying nothing about the piece.

Now Bettina hears the Coastal Eddy music outro, and hears herself signing off from Sinaloa, Mexico.

Godoy looks over the trunk at her.

“Excuse me,” he says, standing. “I have some business to do.”

Bettina looks in mounting panic to Strickland, then back at Godoy as he strides across the hardwood floor in his shiny black boots, his new western shirt with the big turquoise bolo tie, and his black blazer.

Then out the front door.

The thud of that heavy door sounds final to Bettina in a dreadful, numbing way. She tries to conjure her spark, the old Blazak spark, but right now her feet and fingers are cold with more than the freezing mountain night. She feels stripped of everything she knows, a visitor in a hostile world.

Strickland and Villareal still face each across the room, motionless but intensely attached.

“You guys ought to lighten up,” she says, her voice flimsy. “We could play a board game or something.”

She rises and goes to the fire and rubs her hands together in the orange glow. Strickland doesn’t look at her.

She’s back on the sofa when she hears muffled commotion outside, coming her way. She stands on wobbly knees.

The door opens and Felix flies into the room, Godoy behind him, slamming the door against the cold.

“Señorita Blazak, I deliver to you your dog!”

Bettina runs to Felix, catches him midair, and wrestles him to the floor.

Then he’s off for Strickland, who takes a knee and spreads his arms as the dog launches into him.