“That’s a very intelligent service you provide. How long does it take for you to carry a service tray to the back and return to the bar where your customers are waiting?”
“That depends, senor. Sometimes my customers take care of themselves. They are poor but honest, and they leave the money on the bar for whatever they drink.”
“What’s your name?” Hackberry asked.
“Bernicio.”
“You have maybe a half-dozen customers in here. You can see everyone in the cantina from the front door to the back. My friend called me from here. He gave me the name of the cantina and directions to it. My friend is tall and looks very much like an Anglo. Don’t offend me by pretending you were not aware of his presence.”
“ Claro that maybe he was here, but I didn’t see him. I wish I had. Then I could be helpful. Then I could finish my supper.”
Hackberry found himself trying to think through a peculiar manifestation of dishonesty that is considered normal in the third world and is totally antithetical to the average North American’s point of view. The individual simply makes up his own reality and states that black is white and white is black and never flutters an eyelash. Appearance and denial always take precedence over substance and fact, and the application of logic or reason will never sway the individual from his self-manufactured convictions.
“Did you see a man with a wound in his face playing pool?” Hackberry asked.
“No, senor.”
“You were already shaking your head before I finished my question,” Hackberry said.
“Because I have no information that can help you. The people who come here are not criminals. Look at those by the pool table. They’re campesinos. Do they have the wary look of dishonest men?”
“I’m an officer of the law in the United States, Bernicio. I have friends who are officials here in Coahuila. If you have deceived us and put my friend in harm’s way, you will have to answer both to them and to the United States government.”
“Will you join me, you and the senorita? I can put onions and extra tortillas in the tripe, and we will have enough for three. I would like very much for you to be my guests and to accept my word about what I have said. I also hope you find your young friend. The Americans who come here are not on a good errand, senor. I hope your friend is not one of these. I worked in Tijuana. Marines would be arrested by our police and moved from jail to jail in the interior and never seen again. Your government could do nothing for them. I served time in one of your prisons. It was a very nice place compared to the prisons here in Mexico. Fortunately, I am a Christian today, and I no longer think about these kinds of things.”
Hackberry studied the swastika that was tattooed as large as a hand and clamped down on the bartender’s shaved scalp. “Do you have to wear a hat when you attend church?” he asked.
Bernicio leaned forward, lifting the spoon to his mouth, his eyes focused close together, as though he were staring at a fly three inches from the bridge of his nose. “Buena suerte, senor,” he said.
Hackberry and Pam went back out onto the street. The dusk had settled on the countryside, and the sky was traced with shooting stars that fell and disappeared beyond the mountains in the south. Farther up the street, a band was playing in a cantina, and prostitutes were sitting on the steps of the brothels, some of them smoking cigarettes that glowed in the shadows and sparked brightly when the girls flipped them into the gutters. Across from where Hackberry and Pam had parked their unmarked Cherokee was a squat one-story building constructed of rough stone with steel bars on the windows and a single tin-shaded yellow bulb over the entrance. Through the main window, Hackberry could see a beetle-browed man in a khaki uniform wearing a khaki cap with a lacquered black brim. The man was absorbed in the comic book he was reading, the pages folded back tightly in one hand.
“You want to check in with the locals?” Pam asked.
“Waste of time,” Hackberry replied.
“It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?”
“It’s not like prayer. The cops run the cathouses.”
She was chewing gum, looking up and down the street, her hands propped on her hips. “This is what hell must look like.”
“It is hell,” he replied.
She glanced at him, then concentrated her attention on the police station across the street. He could hear her gum snapping in her jaw.
“I was a frequent visitor,” he said. “Not to this place in particular but seven or eight like it. I was educated and had money and power and a Cadillac to drive. The prostitutes were hardly more than girls. Some of them were the sole support for their families.”
“How many people were in a North Korean POW camp? How many of them spent months under a sewer grate in a dirt hole in winter?” When he didn’t answer, she glanced at him again, still chewing her gum, shifting it from one side of her jaw to the other. “Let’s stomp some ass, Hack. R.C. said the guy with the hole in his face worked for somebody who was visiting a cathouse?”
“Yeah, one that features teenage girls,” Hackberry replied.
Krill was furious. He paced back and forth in the last silver glimmering of sunlight inside the clouds, staring at the open trunk of the gas-guzzler Negrito had parked behind the ruined adobe house where they were staying. In his right hand, he clenched a braided wallet, the shape as curved as his palm and pocket-worn the color of browned butter. “You smoked some bad weed?” he said to Negrito. “Something with angel dust or herbicide sprinkled on it??Estupido! Ignorant man!”
“Why you say that, Krill? It hurts my feelings,” Negrito said.
“You kidnapped a Texas deputy sheriff!”
“I thought he was valuable, jefe.”
“I’m not your jefe. Don’t you call me that. I am not the jefe of estupidos.”
“It’s clear that he’s a narc. Or maybe worse. Maybe he came down here because of us and the DEA informer we killed. We can sell the Tejano to La Familia Michoacana. They’ll cut his tongue out. He ain’t gonna talk to nobody if he ain’t got a tongue.”
Krill ripped Negrito’s leather hat off his head and slapped him with it, raking it down hard on his face. Negrito stared at Krill blankly, the orange bristles around his mouth and along his jaw and on his throat as stiff as wire, his lips parted, his emotions buried in a stonelike expression that seemed impervious to pain. Krill whipped the hat down on his head again and again, his teeth clenched. “Are you listening to me, estupido?” he said. “Who gave you permission to act on your own? When did you become this brilliant man with a master plan for the rest of us?”
“You keep saying you’re not my jefe. You keep saying we follow or we don’t follow, that you don’t care about these small matters. But when I use my perceptions to make a decision, you become enraged. I am a loyal soldier, Krill.”
“You are a Judas waiting for your moment to act.” Krill hit Negrito once more, and this time the leather chin cord with the tiny wooden acorn on it struck Negrito in the eye, causing it to tear.
“Why you treat me like this? You think I’m an animal and this is your barnyard and you can do whatever you want with me because I’m one of your animals?” Negrito said.
“No, an animal has brains. It has survival instincts. It doesn’t always think with its penis. Who saw you leave the house of puta with the deputy sheriff?”
“It wasn’t a house of puta. I don’t got to go to houses of puta. It was a cantina. Bernicio the bartender drugged his coffee. We took the boy out the back. Bernicio is a member of La Familia and ain’t gonna tell nobody about it. You worry about all the wrong things. Now you’re taking out your anger on your only friend, someone who has been with you from the beginning.”
The dirt yard where they stood was blown with tumbleweeds and chicken feathers and lint from a grove of cottonwood trees. A hatchet was embedded in a stump by an empty hog lot, and on the ground around the stump were at least two dozen heads of chickens, their beaks wide, their eyes filmed with dust. Someone had lit a kerosene lamp inside the ruined adobe house, and through the back window, Krill could see five of his men playing cards and drinking at a table, their silhouettes as black as carbon inside the window glass. He tried to clear his mind of anger and think about what he should do next. He gazed at the bound and gagged figure lying in an embryonic position inside the trunk of the gas-guzzler. It is not smart to abuse Negrito anymore, he told himself. Negrito’s stupidity is incurable and cannot be addressed effectively except by a bullet in the head. There will always be time
