“Tol’ ’em to do eet while I am here at th’ offeece,” Spic explained. When he was borracho, his English became the slurred wetback English of his youth. “Tha’ way Maria, she gonna know I deent have notheeng to do weeth eet.”
Since Maria would eventually learn there had been friction between husband and nephew over missing receipts, Spic had arranged that she would hear of Manuel’s death almost as quickly as he would. She would call him here to wail over the phone; and later, learning of the estrangement, she would remember her husband had been nowhere near Coates when Manuel had died.
This was necessary because the only person on earth Spic Madrid feared was his wife. Not Maria as Maria, short, wide, mother of his five children. Rather, he feared her spiritual powers, renewed daily at mass. Family was muy importante to Maria; if she knew he’d had her nephew killed, she would put God’s curse upon him, and Spic would surely wither and die.
Por Dio, where was the call? In his mind he could hear the Mexican band (originally from Chihuahua) he’d hired for the wedding. Horns, guitar, bass, accordion, fine-tuned Peavey cranked to the max, bowing out the dance hall walls with “Las Mariposas.” He was nodding his head in time to the unheard music. Stamping feet, whirling bodies… flashing knife…
The phone rang, an unknown voice said, “Es muerto.”
Spic hung up. So. It was done. Now Maria’s call.
She would be at their rambling frame house on Marshall Ave in St. Paul, far from the west side where he did his business. When they had married twenty-two years ago, she’d been tiny and skinny; during their wedding dance, he in his rented black suit, she in her rented white wedding gown, she had clung to him as if she were an appendage of his body. He had been the strength she had needed, the realization of her dream of El Norte.
In turn Jose, their two-year-old son, had clung to her white skirt with both his little brown hands as they had danced. At the time of his conception and birth, they had been afraid to get married lest they be caught in the system and deported.
Three years before that, at seventeen, Spic had been a mojado muling kilos of raw heroin taped to his ribs across the Tortilla Curtain at El Paso, until one night some maricon pusher tried to pay him off with a switchblade. He left the man dead under a mesquite bush, minus his head, which Spic left in the middle of the road with the tongue sticking roguishly out.
He fled north all the way to St. Paul where what he now termed “a shit job the gringos wouldn’t take” was arranged for him by a man named Cisco Monteluego. For his new life he took the name Madrid because Madrid was in Spain, not Mexico, thus had no echoes of his pachuco past.
During his two years washing dishes in the restaurant where Cisco cooked, he had met Cisco’s niece, Maria, and their son had been born. After he and Maria had married, he started calling Cisco “Tio,” and together they started selling tacos at county fairs during the summers. The next year, they opened a taco stand on Concord Street in St. Paul’s mostly Latino west side, and during the next few years prospered in a modest way.
Awaiting Maria’s call, Spic shut his eyes and remembered…
It was three-thirty in the morning, and the tiny four-stool place was deserted with the door open to let out the hot grease smell of deep-frying taco shells. The sign over the door said TIO’S TEXAS TACOS. Tio Cisco was sweeping the floor and Spic was in the minuscule storeroom opening a hundred-pound sack of corn flour. A man dressed in black, with black gloves, and wearing a Porky Pig Halloween mask, came in and took a stool.
“We are closed, sir,” said Uncle Cisco in his invariably courteous way. “If you come back tomorrow…”
But Porky Pig took from his pocket a gun with a silencer screwed onto its muzzle. His voice was distorted by the mask.
“You want to be closed forever, or you want to pay us a hundred dollars a week so nobody comes around bothering you?”
“Senor,” began Uncle Cisco in a terrified voice, staring at the gun, “a hundred dollars a week will take all of our profits.”
“That’s one,” said Porky Pig.
Spic was drawn to the storeroom door by the voices. Porky Pig turned his stool to give the short skinny Mexican a measuring look, swinging the lethal silenced gun Spic’s way as he did, then turned back to Uncle Cisco as the main man in the equation.
“That’s two,” he said.
“We will pay, we will pay,” said Uncle Cisco very quickly.
“No, no pagamos,” muttered Spic sullenly.,
But Porky Pig must have understood Spanish. He said, “That’s three,” and the silenced gun said pfft pfft pfft, like that. But not at Spic.
Instead, Uncle Cisco seemed to leap backward, his feet coming up off the floor, the broom flying from his hand. He caromed off the end of the counter to sprawl facedown on the faded linoleum, his limbs jerking and twitching, then still.
Porky Pig stood up and began unscrewing the silencer from the gun. Death had loosened Uncle Cisco’s sphincter so the smell of shit overrode the hot grease smell in the little room.
“Whew!” he exclaimed in his muffled pig voice, “smells like something crawled up there and died.” He chuckled. “Must be all that hot Mexican food.” Spic hadn’t moved from the doorway of the minuscule storeroom. To him, Porky Pig added, “Remember, beaner, one hundred dollars a week, starting Friday.”
Then he was gone, leaving Uncle Cisco dead on the floor. Before calling the police, Spic took all the money from the cash register and from the body and hid it under the floormat of Uncle Cisco’s dilapidated Chevy. That way the cops would treat it as a simple robbery and would not look very hard for the killer.
Uncle Cisco, dead upon the floor.
Tonight, Uncle Cisco’s son Manuel, dead upon the sere yellow grass and frozen ground beside the Coates Pavilion.
Spic felt tears hot behind his eyelids. Leadership was a stern mistress. He opened his eyes, looked at his nephew Alejo across the scarred and battered wooden tabletop. The tequila bottle was empty, his limes and salt were gone. His drunkenness had passed. He wanted to be alone to mourn the death of Tio Cisco’s son at the hands of unknown assassins.
“Go get me another bottle of tequila, Alejo.”
“I s’posed stay with you, guard you, jefe.”
With a chuckle, Spic made the sign of the cross over him. “I absolve you.” He threw money on the table. “And more limes.”
Spic had paid protection for five weeks, always leaving the cash drawer ajar with a single hundred-dollar bill in it, staying in the storeroom until Porky Pig had come and gone. Then he began closing the store to follow Porky on his rounds, finally to the house where Porky lived under his real name of Alex Jones. One night after the wife had gone to bed, Spic cut off Porky’s head and set it on top of the TV set, tongue protruding, for Mrs. Jones and their two children to find in the morning.
Spic took over the collection route. When the Organization sent a man to kill Spic and thus reclaim the route, Spic killed him and buried him in a patch of woods overlooking the Minnesota River near Fort Snelling. He sent the killer’s head, packed in dry ice, tongue lolling, to the killer’s fag boyfriend.
The local capo realized Spic had no compunctions about killing anyone whatsoever, for any reason, at any time, and that he would be harder to kill than to absorb. So Spic became a made man, always moving up by killing the man above him, always just before that man realized he was in Spic’s way. Now, at forty-two, he controlled illegal drug sales in four northern states.
His wife called. She sobbed and wailed in Spanish about the death of Manuel, her favorite nephew. Spic consoled her, crying too, promising to come home right away to pray with her for the salvation of poor Manuel’s immortal soul.
While they talked, he heard Alejo behind him, returning with the tequila and limes. As he turned, phone in hand, the muzzle of the Jennings J-22 was pressed by the gloved hand against the bridge of his nose, and he just had time to think, Maria knows that I
As Alejo got out of the car with the tequila, shivering in his sports jacket in the freezing drizzle, the bulky man just coming down the front walk from Spic’s business bungalow tossed a new, heavy overcoat around the skinny Mexican’s shoulders. Alejo dropped tequila and topcoat to run up the walk into the house. As he was doing
