Fifty Grand

From what I’d been led to believe we were somewhere on a sovereign Indian nation that didn’t allow fences, or the border patrol, or even the local cops. Law enforcement was done by the FBI and they had to come in specially from Austin or Washington, D.C. It had been a coyote road for years.

“We just drove over,” I said with a smile.

The kid nodded happily. He was the youngest of us. Sixteen, fifteen, something like that. Sweet little nonentity.

He and I and three others jammed into the back of the ancient Land Rover. Seats opposite one another. No way to stretch your legs out. Empty chair next to Pedro but he wouldn’t let anyone sit up.

I drifted for a bit and felt drool on my arm. The old man from Nogales was napping against my shoulder. I wiped the spittle with my T-shirt sleeve.

Yeah. Five of us. The Indian boy, me, the old man, a deaf woman from Veracruz, and a punk kid from Managua who was sitting directly across from me, pretending to sleep.

Didn’t know any of their names. Didn’t want to know.

I stared through the window at the sameness.

So hot now the air itself was a gigantic lens distorting the landscape, bringing distant mountains dizzyingly close, warping the flatland into curves.

I pressed my face against the glass. Time marched. The heat haze conjuring ever more intense illusions from the view. The yellow desert: a lake of egest. The cacti: dead men crucified. The birds: monstrous reptiles from another age.

I watched until nausea and vertigo began to zap my head.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and for the hundredth time since that last interview with Ricky I wondered what exactly I was doing here. Revenge is a game for pendejos. Hector says that tit for tat is a base emotion, from the lizard brain, from way, way down. He says we’ve evolved beyond revenge. Witnesses at executions always leave dissatisfied, and he would know, he’s seen dozens. But it’s not about feeling good, Hector. It’s about something else. It’s about tribal law, it’s about the restoration of order. Entropy increases, the universe winds down, and one day all the suns go out and the last living entity ceases to be. It’s about accepting that, accepting that there’s no happy place, no afterlife, no justice, just a brief flowering of consciousness in an infinity of nothing-it’s about seeing all that and then defying the inevitable and imposing a discipline on the chaos, even as the boilers burst and the ship goes down.

Do you see? No, I’m not sure I do either.

I wasn’t the only one suffering. “It’s like being born under glass,” the woman from Veracruz was saying. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

The Land Rover rattled through a huge sand-filled pothole on the coyote road.

“As long as we don’t break an axle we’ll be ok,” Pedro muttered, and as if in response, the engine grumbled, stuttered, stalled, caught again. Jesus, that’s all we need. Outside of Delicias, Pedro had to start it with a hand crank. He boasted that the old Land Rovers were better than the new ones, but none of us was reassured.

I affected an unconcerned yawn and reached in the bag for my bottle, but when I took it out I saw that it was empty. The tortillas were gone, the tequila was gone, the water was gone.

The kid from Managua nodded at me. He’d been twitching in his seat for twenty minutes. Jumpy little torta. Could be a sign of anything from schoolboy nerves to an ice habit.

“Güey, what’s the matter?” he asked in slangy chingla Spanish. He had a sly, pinched face with big green handsome eyes and a throwback Elvis haircut.

My type. A dozen years ago.

“I’m out of water,” I said.

The kid nodded, reached into his own grubby backpack, and produced a bottle of tap water.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching for it.

“Five dollars,” the kid said.

I smiled and shook my head.

“Four,” the kid persisted.

“You’re kidding.”

“Three.”

But I was done talking to this Nicaraguan street punk, this half-chingla trash. Clearly he was a mother of the first order. Give him a taste of this and a year from now he’d be coyoteing grandmas in meat lockers, leaving them to fry on a salt pan at the first sign of the INS.

I leaned back against the side of the vehicle and continued staring out the window.

A cerulean sky.

Cloud wisps.

Tardy moon.

I wondered where we were. The brief hint of mountains was over. The desert was becoming white.

“One dollar,” the kid said, tapping me on the leg. I looked at the long-fingered, grubby-nailed paw resting on my knee. I removed it with my left hand and replaced it on the kid’s lap. I stared at him for another sec. High cheekbones, coffin-shaped face, and a kind of faux menace in his sarcastic grin. I could tell that he thought of himself as a heartbreaker. Shit, he probably was back in Managua. Girls under sixteen or widows over fifty would be susceptible but everyone else would see right through him.