Savages

“Your friends paid the money,” Esteban says. “We’re going to take you back.”

O starts to cry.

Esteban’s a little choked up, too.

Summoning up his courage, he asks her to be his Facebook friend.

245

They text the instructions:

Be ready at 2PM. We’ll text you the location.

“You trust these motherfuckers?” Chon asks.

Jump—I’ll catch you.

“No, but do we have a choice?”

No.

246

Dear Maternal Unit,

I’m clicking my ruby slippers.

Europe is like, way cool and all that, but ‘there’s no place like home,’ right? Plus, I’m about out of money, but I guess you guessed that already.

Now Momzoid, when I say I’m coming home, I don’t mean home. Well, for a little bit, maybe, but then I’m going to move out. About time, huh-duh? The thing of it is, I think I need to create a you know. (Sans coach, that is.) I’m not even sure yet what that really means, but it has to mean something. I might even go overseas (again) to do some humanatarian work. You know, like aid stuff. You remember my friend Ben? I might go with him and another friend, Chon, to do some useful type stuff in Indoneesia. Dig wells or something like that. CanU picture that? Your useless little girl with a shovel in her hands?

Luv u,

O

247

Gun shop Barney is an inveterate listener to right-wing talk-show radio.

Anyway, Barney hears all about the massacre on the highway and gleans the additional news, welcome other than the fact that he has six less Mexicans to worry about. What he hears is the leaked info about the .50 rounds found in and around the said dead Cans and the speculation that the first shots were fired from a distance—

—well no fucking shit, you don’t use no Barrett Model 90 for close work—

—and he sees a chance to do himself some good.

See, Barney lives on the border.

Yeah, okay, everyone in this fucking life does, but Barney lives on the border and what that really means these days is that he lives as much in Mexico as he does in the USofA.

He don’t like it, he ain’t happy about it, but the facts is the facts.

Don’t matter what the Border Patrol says, what the Minutemen say, what any dickhead in DC says, this country is run as much or more by the Baja Cartel.

Just something Barney had to work with.

Which he does pretty well, seeing as how they’re his best customer.

He don’t let that out, because his second-best customers are the right-wingers, who, like Barney, hate Mexicans, but Barney’s got stacks and stacks of medical bills, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is all over his ass—we’re talking the possibility of him spending his golden years dodging the niggers and the shit in a federal penitentiary—so now he has a choice to make.

Which government does he call?

Which one can he trust?

Which will do him the most good?

He turns down the radio so he can talk on the phone.

Lado is very pleased to hear from him and believes, yes, they can do a little “horse tradin’.”

(Gringo cracker pendejo.)

Then Lado hears which pony ole Barney has to trade and

—he’s not happy.

248

Lado isn’t happy, but Elena is furious.

Out of her skull angry.

Because she feels like a fool.

She let these Americans dupe her and now she wonders if she let her fondness for (or fascination with?) the girl get in the way of her better judgment.

Settling into the new American house—

Well, compound, really, a new fortress set in the remote desert, with more yards of barbed wire, alarms, sound and motion sensors, armed men patrolling in four-wheel-drive vehicles and ATVs, all on high alert since the last assassination attempts—

—is sadly easy. Another set of clothes, sets of linens, towels, toiletries, kitchen appliances that have never been used to fix a meal, all as sterile as her present life. Lado’s wife, the perfect hostess, a lady-in-waiting, has come personally to see that everything is in order. Even the surrounding desert seems too clean—scrubbed by wind and bleached by the sun, an exterior to match her sparse interior landscape.

Thirst.

She thinks about her new life as a refugee.

A billionaire mujado, a wetback with greenbacks.

Lado has prepared this (sere) ground against this day, when the cartel would have to leave Mexico and take up a new existence in this new and savage land. Everything is in place—the safe houses, stash houses, the markets, and the men. The DEA generously bribed, her presence here duly un-noted.

She had hoped to leave the bloodletting behind, and now this.

A war that came with her.

A betrayal of her trust.

And now the necessity to commit yet another atrocity.

She gets on the phone to Lado.

“Bring Magda here.”

“She won’t want to come.”

“Did I ask you what she wants?” Elena snaps.

The silence of acquiescence. She’s used to that in men—passivity is their small rebellion. It seems to keep their precious cojones in place.

Then Lado asks, cruelly, “What about the girl? The other one.”

“We have no choice but to follow through.”

“I agree.”