For Lucy
Finally, special thanks to Margaret Kahn, “Khanim,” author of
We the suicide fighters,
heroes of the nation,
lions of black times
We shall sacrifice our
lives and our property
for the sake
of liberated Kurdistan.
We shall wreak vengeance
upon the many guilty hands
which sought
to destroy the Kurds
And that shall serve
as a lesson for the
generations to follow.
Are there really any cowboys left
in the good old U.S.A.?
Yet, by the Virgin and Her glory, Reynoldo Ramirez was astounded.
A feeling that the simple rhythms of the world had been profoundly upset crept through him as he sat with his closest associate, the ever-smiling Oscar Meza, at their usual Number 1 table well back from the bar at El Palacio. Yet he allowed no sign of concern to disturb the surface of his face as he regarded the man who now stood before him.
The man was American. Or again, was he? He stood in blue jeans, impatiently, his face sealed off behind sunglasses. He looked immensely muscular. He was tan and hawk-nosed. And he had something quite foreign to the usual pawing, grabbing, yakking, farting gringo: he had dignity, which Ramirez prized most in this world, having worked so assiduously to fashion his own.
“Why not just walk up the street and go through the gate?” asked Oscar Meza in English. It was Oscar’s job to handle this sort of negotiation. “A simple matter. It’s done ten thousand times a day. Then you are there, eh? In wonderful America. Why trouble us with illegal proposals?” Oscar turned to smile at Ramirez.
“Why not just answer my question?” said the American — or the maybe-American.
The maybe-American was tall too, and his hair was blondish, light from the bright sun; and though Ramirez could not see them, he gauged the eyes, from the skin coloring, to be blue.
Yellow hair and blue eyes: what could be more American?
“It’s a dangerous trip,” said Oscar, “this trip you propose. It would cost much money.”
“I have money.”
“You are a rich man? Why, I wonder, would a rich man—”
“Just talk the business.”
Stung, Oscar recoiled. He had merely been sociable. Oscar always tried to be sociable.
“All right then. Three hundred U.S., cash. No credit cards—” Oscar turned, pleased with his joke, and smiled at Reynoldo. “Two hundred now. Then one hundred tomorrow morning when you are in Los Estados safe and sound.”
“A boy said it would be one hundred.”
“Boys lie,” said Oscar Meza. “It’s a rule. When I was a boy I lied. All the time, about everything.” He laughed again. “Forget what this boy said.”
No flicker crossed the maybe-American’s face.
“I think you are not happy,” said Oscar Meza. “We want you to be happy. Sit down. Look, have a drink, get a woman — there are some pretty ones here and not too expensive, although you say you are a rich man. Think it over. You must learn to relax. We want you to be happy. We can work something out.”
Behind his glasses the man remained impassive.
“I want a guarantee.”
“Life is too short for guarantees,” Oscar said. “Maybe we ought to make it four hundred, five hundred, a thousand? All this talking is making me weary. I cannot guarantee what I cannot control and I cannot control fate.”
“A guarantee,” said the man.
“I said, no guarantees. Don’t you hear so good, mister?”
Ramirez at last spoke.
“Once every twenty nights out, they get you, mister. That’s a law. You may go thirty-eight nights clean, then they get you twice. Or they may get you twice, then you go thirty-eight. But one out of twenty. I can’t control it. God himself, the Holy Father, He cannot control it. It’s the law.”
Oscar said, “You listen good, mister. It’s the true law.”
“Send this stupid man away,” the man said to Ramirez. “He makes me want to hurt him.”
“I’ll hurt
“No,” Ramirez said. “Go away, Oscar. Get me another Carta Blanca.”
Oscar scurried off.
“He’s a stupid man,” said Ramirez. “But useful in certain things. Now. Say your case.”
“You go a special way. There’s a special way you can go. High, in the mountains. The direction from here is west. A road to a mine which is old and no longer used gets you there. Is this not right?”
The maybe-American spoke an almost-English. It was passable but fractured. Even Ramirez could pick out the occasional discordant phrase.
Ramirez looked at him coldly.
“You go this route,” the man continued. “Once, maybe twice a year, depending. Depending on what? Depending on the moon, which must be down. And depending on the drugs, which you take across to the Huerra family in Mexico City for delivery to certain American groups. You are paid five thousand American dollars each trip. And the last time the Huerras gave you some extra because it went so nice. And I hear it said you don’t give one dollar to the priests of your church, because you are a greedy man.”
Ramirez stared at him. He had known such a moment would one day come. A stranger, with information enough to kill him or own him forever. It could only mean the Huerras were done with him and had sold him out, or that the police had finally —
“The last run was January sixteenth,” the man said. “And the next one will be tonight, moon or no moon, and that’s the true law.”
Ramirez fought his own breathing.
“Who sent you?”
“Nobody sent me.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I have friends.”
“Important men?”
“Very important. Very knowledgeable in certain areas.”
“You should have come to me and explained. You are a special man. I can see this now.”
The man said nothing.
“You better watch yourself, though. Somebody might put a bullet in your head.”
“Sure, okay; somebody might. And then somebody might come looking for
his
“All right,” Ramirez said. “But it will cost you more. The distance is a factor, the increased risk, the danger to my way of doing business. This is no easy thing — it’s not running illegals into Los Estados. You want to go the guaranteed way, you got to pay for it. Or go someplace else, to some man who’ll cut your throat in the desert.”
“Nobody cuts my throat. How much?”
“A thousand. Half now, half later.”
“You are a thief as well as anything else.”
“I am a man of business. Come on, damn you, pay up or go someplace else. I’m done with talking.”
“As God wills it.” He handed over the money, counting out the bills.
“Out back, at eleven. Beyond the sewer there’s a small shop called La Argentina. Wait behind it in the yard with the trucks. A van will come. You’ll be in Arizona tomorrow. Pay the man in America, or he’ll give you to the Border Patrol.”
The man nodded.
“If nothing goes wrong,” he said.
“Nothing will go wrong. I’ll drive the damned truck myself.”
The man nodded again, and then turned and left.
Oscar returned.
“A gringo pig,” he said. “I’d like to cut him up.”
Ramirez would have liked to have seen Oscar try to cut the man up. But he said nothing. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief scented with persimmon, took a sip from the new glass of Carta Blanca Oscar had brought him, and looked about.
“Did you notice?” he said to Oscar. “Even the whores left him alone.”
But now at least he thought he knew why, and he guessed that tonight the man would have with him enough cocaine for all the noses in America.
The tall man crouched in the yard behind the small shop called La Argentina. The odor of human waste from the open sewer in a gully next to El Palacio was disagreeable and thick. He could hear the music the Mexicans like, all guitars and vibration. He could see poor Mexican men gathering in the pools of light along the cobbled street that curved up the hill behind him. The few minutes passed and a drunk and a whore wandered into the yard and came to rest not far from him. Their conversation, in English and Pidgin Spanish, was all of money. The act of sex that followed lasted but seconds.
The man listened to it dispassionately, the two rutting against the side of the shop, in the dim light of half a moon. There was a swift cry and they were done and then another argument. Finally a deal was struck. Contemptuously, the woman strode away.
“Whore!” the man called, as though he’d just learned it. Then he too left the yard.
A truck pulled into the yard; its lights flashed twice.
“Hey! Where are you?” called the fat Mexican.
The man waited, watching.
“Damn you. Tall one. Gringo. Where are you, damn you?”
At last he stepped out.
“Here.”
“Jesus Mary, you made me jump. Make some noise next time.”
“Get on with it.”
“In back. There are others. Poor men, looking for work with Tio Sam.”
“Others?”
“Just don’t bother them. They know nothing of you and care nothing.”
The man shook his head.
“Two hours now,” Ramirez said. “Longer, because of the special route. Bad roads, much climbing. But it will go fine. Just don’t make no trouble.”
The tall man spat. He climbed into the back of the truck.
“No policemen,” he warned.
The truck crawled up the dark and twisting roads through west Nogales. The shacks began to separate, giving way to wider spaces and the vehicle moved out of the edge of the city, into rough scrub country. Then it began to climb slowly and after a while the road became a track, jagged and brutal.
Ramirez had watched this progress many times; it did not interest him by now. He was thinking of the man in the back. Yes, the man had had a bundle with him, a pack of some sort. It could carry twenty pounds of cocaine. Twenty pounds? Close to a million dollars’ worth. Ramirez reached inside his jacket and touched the butt of a Colt Python 357 magnum in blue steel, his favorite pistol.
Jesus Mary, it would be so simple.
The tall man comes out high in the mountains, dazed, probably trembling with the chill. He blinks, shivering. Perhaps he turns. Ramirez lifts the pistol, already cocked, and fires once into the center of the body. Then he’d go into the business himself: no more errand boy for the Huerras. He had the contacts too; he knew the people in Tucson.
Jesus Mary, it would be simple.
“Turn here?” Oscar Meza asked.
“No.”
“Keep going?”
“Yes.”
“Reynoldo, I—”
“Keep going.”
“We are going into the mountains. I—”
“Keep straight.”
Ramirez reached down and turned on the radio. He fiddled with the dial until he found a Tucson station. He left it on, thinking of Tucson, a flat new city on a plain surrounded by mountains. He thought of it as a city of money, full of Americans with money, full of blond women and swimming pools.
So simple.
The American country music rolled softly against his ear. The jarring in the cab was thunderous. He prodded his cowboy hat lower down his face, masking off his eyes, set his head against the seat back, and stretched and crossed his legs. He chewed a toothpick and thought of himself as a don, with a palatial estate in the hills outside Mexico City like Don José Huerra. He thought of blond women and horses.
So how did he know so much? And who was he working for?
This was the crux of Ramirez’s dilemma. In three or four sentences he had delivered up Ramirez’s most closely held secret. If he knew of Ramirez’s connection to the Huerras and the mountain route into America, then —
“Reynoldo, I can tell. This gringo scares you. Say the word and I’ll go back and finish him. Nothing to worry about.”
“Drive on, stupid one,” Ramirez said. Oscar was really getting on his nerves this night. He’d found him five years ago driving an Exclusivo cab and pimping for American college boys down from Tucson; now the fool considered himself a right-hand man. Ramirez spat out the window.
“Lights. And go slower.”
“Yes, Reynoldo.”
The lights vanished.
“Keep the side lights on, idiot. Do you want to go over the side?”
Oscar immediately turned on the lower-powered orange lights.
Ramirez got out a stick of gum as the truck lurched forward. Soon they were on a ledge and the two Nogaleses were visible, the small and pretty American one and its larger, less neat brother, spilling awkwardly over the hills, spangles of light these many miles away. But Ramirez was not a man for views; in fact, he was looking now in the other direction.
“There,” he said suddenly. “Jesus Mary, almost missed her. I’m too old for this.”
Oscar stomped the brake and the van skidded for a breathtaking moment on the gravel and dirt as its treads failed. Ramirez shot a bad look toward the idiot Oscar, whose fingers whitely fought the wheel. But the van did not slide off. Ramirez, cursing, got out, pulling his jacket tight against him. Cold up here, so high. The men in back would have no coats; they’d shudder and whimper in the chill. But the gringo?
Ramirez’s breath billowed before him. He fished in the brush with gloved hands until his finger closed on something taut; pulling, he opened a crude gate wrapped with an equally crude camouflage of brush to reveal a smaller road leading off the main track.
“She’s ready,” he called.
The truck eased through the gap, turning. It began to slip and drop. Oscar double-clutched as the vehicle tipped off; it seemed to fall, sliding down the incline in a shower of dust, coming at last to rest on an even narrower road. Ramirez swung the gate shut and scrambled down.
The truck picked its way down the switchback in the dark. Ramirez hung out of the cab, watching. It was tough work. Twice the fool Oscar almost killed them, halted by Ramirez’s cry,
Finally he ordered, “Kill it.”
Ramirez climbed out of the cab and went back to the rear doors.
If you’re going to do it, here’s the time.
He took out the pistol. He opened the doors. He could smell the men inside, dense and close.
“Let’s go, little boys. Nothing but American money up ahead,” he joked in Spanish, and stood back to watch them clamber gingerly out. They came one by one — five youngsters and an older man — shivering in the piercing cold. Ramirez waited, not sure what he would do.
He backed off a little and whispered, “Hey, gringo. Come ahead. We’re waiting. Cold out here.”
There was no sound from the truck.
“Hey? You fall out? What’s with this
shouted Oscar, rushing to them with a shotgun.
The pistol was pried from Ramirez’s fingers; the man rose and stood back.
“Hey,” called Ramirez. “Don’t do nothing stupid. The gun is for your protection. From
asked Oscar.
“Tell him to drop that shotgun,” said the man.
“Drop it,” yelled Ramirez. The gun fell to the dust.
“Now get up,” the man said.
Ramirez climbed to his feet, shaking his head. He’d been hit with something heavy, something metal.
“I was just making sure you don’t bounce out,” he said. “Don’t do nothing crazy with that gun.”
The tall man tossed the pistol into the scrub. Ramirez marked its fall next to a saguaro cactus that looked like a crucifix. He could pick it up on the way back.
“Okay?” he asked. “No guns now. We’re friends.”
“Let’s go,” said the man.
Ramirez walked ahead, pushing through the knot of men. He didn’t wait to see what the tall man would do. He walked ahead a short way down a path, hearing them shuffle into line behind him. The moon’s soft light turned the landscape to the color of bone. Ramirez turned.