Safe Home
Cuauh always greases the landings. If the winds are strong, he lands in the desert north of Obregon, on a sand strip outlined by burning tar barrels, desert oak, and split saguaro cut lengthwise to catch the neon sun. But if the winds are calm, Cuauh lumbers his aircraft, an aging M20J, onto a neighborhood street in Lomas de Poleo just inside Ciudad Juarez. All of the homes abandoned. Everyone gone from the drug wars.
The neighborhood landing always warrants thirty degrees of flaps, the elevators popped low with the shimmy damper extended full to the hook and bolt, no further slack to give. The flexing tension of the wire pings up and down the length of the aircraft as it descends. You can hear it ringing like a bell in the sky from both sides of the border: From one hill the Ejército—the Mexican military—gazing up with silent admiration for the pilot who can grease such a landing. From the other hill, the Americans looking down into the city with a fixed gaze, as if willing the cartel plane to crash.
Cuauh dives in at an angle, on a slipstream, with his left rudder pushed full to the carpet and his ailerons turned fist-over-lap so the plane falls fast and loud, the up-gush of wind roaring high through the idled propellers, the plane like a screaming vulture descending crooked into the remnants of the neighborhood. Five hundred feet, four hundred feet, and he’ll kick out the rudder to right the plane just before impact. He’ll land it clean and free onto a street named Nahual where the crumbling tar-gravel and rock splatter up against the nickel-plated underbelly of the plane behind the thrust of the cooling twin flat-eight Lycoming piston engines still revved to a thousand RPM.
The wingtips, forty-eight feet from one tip to the other, scrape along the thresholds of the houses on either side of Nahual Street. The power lines roll up and stretch over the bump of the cockpit. All the birds move to either end of the line, unimpressed by the smoking four hundred and fifty horsepower engine threatening to suck them in. The driver, too, waits unimpressed at the end of the road.
The driver is always the one asking questions. The driver is both Cuauh’s ride home and his interrogator, his friend and his enemy. How was the flight? Any messages to be relayed? Any peculiarities along the way? Are you sure? Are you sure? he’ll ask. Cuauh knows the routine, and he knows better than to incriminate himself on what he did or did not see from the skies.
The driver is always different but more or less a variation of the same man. Mid-thirties, severely overweight, reeking of Delicados and cheap sex and Tommy Hilfiger cologne. Probably named Chuy, which is short for something. Cuauh can never remember.
From his cockpit, Cuauh can see the driver sitting back in his pleather-covered seat, drumming his nicotine-stained fingers on the steering wheel of the truck. He listens to the American radio pouring in from the station atop the hill. He hates Ke$ha. He loves Katy Perry. He checks his watch and waits for the engines to cut. He checks his hair in the mirror, perfectly lacquered with Tres Flores pomade. He cracks his spearmint gum. His breath smells like Swiss cheese.
Cuauh purges it all from his mind before his boot even touches the ground. He forgets the bloody road leading up to San Miguel. He forgets the private strip in Sweetwater, Texas, called Fraley, where he made his drop, cocaine by the smell of it—it had no smell. He purges his memory of looking down on Interstate 20 running east of El Paso. Those burning cars. Hot, greasy, diesel smoke pouring black up into a plume that screened out the sun and painted the whole scene wispy in shadows of smoke. That familiar burnt-orange Ford Lobo—the one he’d ridden in so many times before from the airstrip—gushing from the undercarriage. Blood and oil and gasoline in the sand. A body pouring out from the driver’s side wearing purple boots. Cuauh knew, even from the sky, who those boots belonged to. He purges that name from his mind too.
He plants his foot on the running boards of the white Dodge Durango at the end of Nahual street and climbs into the passenger seat.
“Any peculiarities?” the driver asks him, cracking his spearmint gum. Cuauh glasses him over. They’ve never met before. “No,” he says. Cuauh keeps a stolid face, but his hands give him away, his finger pulling at the long, puckered scar on his left arm where it was cut the night he was deported from Texas, the night he was kidnapped and forced to fly cartel planes.
Cuauh says nothing as he eases his body into the passenger seat of the car. He turns down the radio and clicks it to the AM band. Texas High School Football. Westlake vs. Copperas Cove. He takes the driver’s Stetson from the dash and drapes it over his sun-wearied eyes.
“I can’t understand English,” the driver says.
“I know,” says Cuauh softly and lowers the brim.
The engine turns over and the driver pulls out onto a side road. The driver expertly weaves through the boulders strewn pell-mell about the streets that keep the police from navigating the neighborhood and keep the military out too.
Cuauh closes his eyes and feels his neck fuse with sweat to the hot pleather headrest. His mouth is dry. His bones are aching. The driver takes Cuauh the long way to the safe house, which looks like all the other safe houses in Juarez. A squat, pale-brown one story. Bad foundation. Meandering cracks in the walls that split jagged in the cold months like sweeping bolts of lightning.
Desert wasps make their home in the seams where the warmth escapes. They breed and die. They shred up the adobe with their lives until the house takes on the fragile look of a cracked egg, or like tempered glass about to shatter.
Cuauh eases his aching body from the comfort of the pleather. He moves to turn off the radio but it’s already off. He walks around the fender and slaps the numbers tacked on the wall of the house just for kicks. 410. All the safe houses end in 10—2810, 510, 4510. Cuauh commits every safe house address he’s tried to bring down with the slap of his palm to memory.
The door opens. Darkness pours out from the threshold. A wiry little man with ropy muscles lays out the flat of his hand. Cuauh and the driver hand over their chirping Nextel phones like they do every time.
The little man puts them in an oversize Ziploc bag and says, “I hope all is well.” Cuauh’s eyes adjust to the musty darkness inside so he’s nearly blind. He can only feel the little man’s words on his neck now, a plume of smoke that cools just above the shirt collar and hangs there at the volume of a whisper. The driver follows behind.
“All is well,” says Cuauh to no one in particular and the door shuts behind him.
Inside, there’s the too-sweet smell of perfume and sweat. There’s the honeyed sound of women’s voices, soft, like heather—the lilt of beauty queens or beautiful liars who say they’re beauty queens. There’s the knock-knock-knock of their heels against the tile, tiny women who seem almost weightless as they glide.
They appear to Cuauh behind the iridescent patches of light that burn away from the center of his gaze, his pupils fully dilating in the dark. All the women look the same to him. He wonders if he’s met any of them before.
On the long table in the living room are silver bowls of cocaine, an RCA universal television remote, a polished pistol reeking of Hoppes 9 oil, a sweating beer, a half-finished ham torta sandwich with a bag of Sabrita potato chips.
“All is well?” asks the little man again. Cuauh takes a bite of the sandwich and a swig of the beer and repeats, “All is well.”
The man with purple boots lies unconscious in the safe house tub, his hair still tinged with the sulfury smoke of burnt diesel. His hands are smoked black and his eyes are two fiery coals peering out with a thousand-yard stare. His name is Lalo and he’s barely breathing. He’s soaking wet in his clothes: a blue pearl-snap shirt, a pair of Wranglers, a pair of purple Larry Mahans that have all but cracked the fiberglass wide open. Along the inside of the tub are long, black arcs where the heels have scuffed in the struggle. The leather of his boots bloats about the same time his skin does. His fingers turn white and slough off their outer layer into the water.
Cuauh’s face turns ashen at the sight of Lalo—this man he’d purged from his mind only thirty minutes ago. A million thoughts course through Cuauh’s brain just then but none louder than the questions.
“What happened? What’s going on?” says Cuauh. He acts just as surprised as he should be, though of course he’d seen this coming from way down the pike.
There’s a doctor sitting on the toilet in a white coat, R.M.P. embroidered on his lapel. Across from him there’s a boy with blue tattoos up and down his arm, these beautiful Chinese dragons with red eyes. The boy is wearing jeans rolled up to his calves and a plastic green rosary that dips in and out of the pink water of the fiberglass tub. He seems to be holding Lalo down or at least guarding him.
The doctor checks Lalo’s pulse, consults his watch, and then produces a capped needle from his breast pocket. He plunges the needle through the denim into the fleshy part of Lalo’s thigh. Lalo’s eyes spring open, the black of his pupil spreading like ink to chase the green of his iris away.
“I only fly planes,” says Cuauh to the little man staring up at him. The little man rubs his eyes and says, “We need to know who else. We know you were close. We need to know who.”
“I only fly planes,” says Cuauh. He says it again and again. He keeps repeating it as if it might change something.
Of course, Cuauh knew these things happened, but he never dreamed he’d ever be part of it. He knows what’s coming and Lalo knows too. Everyone looks down on Lalo in the tub. The air is static. Lalo refuses to look anyone in the eye or speak for that matter.
“I need you to tell me where it’s at,” says the boy with blue tattoos into Lalo’s ringing ears. He grabs Lalo by the neck. Lalo coughs deep and raspy from the diaphragm. He looks at Cuauh finally. Cuauh looks away.
“Where’s the money?” the boy asks Lalo, tired and aggressive as if he’s asked him a thousand times before. Lalo swallows his own voice. “Where’s the money? Where is it? Who has it? Tell me,” says the boy with a cool, unnerving calmness. A whisper. A plea. “Tell me. Where is it? Where is it?”
Lalo’s eyes stay open even beneath the water. They only close right before a giant, pink glug escapes his lungs and clouds the tub with a rolling boil. Lalo’s hands grasp the sides of the tub. His index finger points at the boy, then the ground, then Cuauh standing by the doctor.
The doctor waits a beat or two and then raises his hand. “That’s enough,” he says. The body is still.
The doctor rubs his eyes and puts a plastic device over Lalo’s mouth that makes him puke up water until his teeth chatter, until the color returns to his lips.
“You’ll get us those names,” says the little man. He leaves the bathroom and Cuauh and Lalo are left alone. Everyone knows what Cuauh knows already.
Lalo’s eyes are still dilated wide, the adrenaline in his veins faster than the cortisol.
“Don’t say anything,” says Cuauh to Lalo, and Lalo nods his chattering head. Lalo points his index finger to the mirror over the sink, and Cuauh looks up at it. Presses his thumb to the glass to check if there’s a space between his thumb and its reflection. It’s flush. It’s a two-way mirror.
Cuauh turns off the lights and lights the votive candle over the toilet with the single match left in his ruddy matchbook. Saint Rita. Cuauh places the candle between him and Lalo.
He produces two crushed Faro cigarettes from a soft pack in his breast pocket and puts one behind his ear, puts the other at the corner of Lalo’s face, the bent cigarette jumping up and down, up and down with Lalo’s chattering jaw. Little flecks of tobacco fall from the end of the cigarette and rest on the surface tension of the water.
“How long has it been since you ate?” Cuauh asks.
“Long,” says Lalo.
“What do you want?” Cuauh says. He rubs his eyes.
“Please,” says Lalo.
“Chinese food?”
“Please.”
“That’s good,” says Cuauh lighting his own cigarette from the flame of Saint Rita’s candle. The smoke casts shadows on the wall. “That’s good,” he says again and takes Lalo’s cigarette by the filter to light it with the cherry of his own.
He places the cigarette back into the corner of Lalo’s face. It’s wet, so it burns better at the top than it does at the bottom. Lalo takes quick puffs to keep the fire from going out. His mouth fills with hot smoke. He coughs and coughs, unable to get a breath.
To Cuauh, it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen.
Some people said Lalo was a queer, but others said he was just like that—purple boots, those games he used to play. That one he used to do with a ten-dollar bill.
He’d stick it in a urinal, a cantina urinal, and then go back to the bar and drink with Cuauh and watch, observe, take note of everyone who stepped inside to take a leak.
He liked to take bets with the bartender: who’d be the one to reach in and fish it out? The thought of it amused Lalo to no end, his little giddy chuckle amplified by the half-emptied cantina glass at his lip that made him look retarded.
Every so often a patron—a nice elderly woman or a vaquero or someone—might pat Cuauh on the shoulder and say, “So nice of you to take your brother out. He looks better every day,” or “Lucky him to have a brother like you. How is he doing as of late?” to which Cuauh would say, “fine, fine,” and end it at that. Lalo would take little swigs and then laugh again to himself. He taught Cuauh to laugh in those days. Cuauh would laugh only when Lalo was right about who’d take the bill from the urinal.
Almost always, somebody would pay the bar with the piss bill and the bartender would know (Lalo would smell just for proof) and the matter would be settled. If the bartender won, Lalo would cover 5 percent of whatever the cantina was paying the cartel that month in collections. But if Lalo was right, the bartender would pay 5 percent to Lalo on top of the standard fee. It was usually a wash, the odds favoring the bartender if anything, which is why the bartender kept betting with Lalo.
For Lalo, the kicks were enough, and when he won, he’d always split the earnings with Cuauh, which is how they got talking about money in the first place.
This was in the beginning, when Cuauh was freshly deported. The new pilot from Texas who’d once been a crop duster. He was kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo, right after he’d walked the bridge, and ever since, he’d been lonesome in that briny way—sulking, scared, stone hopeless. For all the lore he’d heard growing up in Texas about the Zetas and Sinaloa and El Golfo, with all their evil ideas and all their evil ways, he’d never expected a narco to look like Lalo, who was more silly than scary and a little bit stupid too.
But Lalo, like Cuauh, was also an outcast within the cartel—one of those men who were kidnapped and not recruited—and that made them brothers in a way. They were both paralyzed by their circumstances. Their loneliness hurt and throbbed like a bruise. It was only when Cuauh thought of escape, of going home, that his body felt at ease. Cuauh could sleep when he dreamed of escape. He ate, he breathed, he laughed knowing that everything he did, every cent he made in this line of work, would all be put to use someday—not too far from now—when he’d leave Mexico and go back home to Harlingen. He decided, from the day he was kidnapped, to dedicate his life to returning, and he and Lalo mostly talked about that. How Cuauh planned to go back to his old farm in the orange groves and dust the crops until he bled black in the nose. He told Lalo about June bugs and cicadas that come every so many years and the smell of all that chlorpyrifos raining down from under his plane like the tang of urine. He told him of other smells too. The smell of his mother’s posole stew boiling hot on the kitchen stove. The smell of tobacco drifting in off the breeze from the grove master’s cigarillo, wet like rain but sweet like autumn.
“Work on a farm like a fucking slave?” Lalo would say to Cuauh. His lecture was always the same. “That’s your big dream?”
“Maybe,” said Cuauh to Lalo.
“That’s the problem with paisanos, Cuauh. We’re still slaves. Even in Texas, Tucson, wherever. We make El Norte run and we bring this country to its knees. But at least there’s some dignity to destruction. Some dignity in living here. It’s nice for a little while, don’t you think? But eventually, I’ll leave this too. We’ll both leave it, you and me.”
“How?” he asked Lalo one time. And Lalo looked at Cuauh almost surprised, as if he didn’t expect that question or at least the audacity of it. It was only one word—how—but between them both it was the most dangerous word. It was the bridge between dreaming and doing. How connected them at the brain. How was the end but also the beginning of everything. And suddenly, it was out that they were both planning, scheming against their captors. They would both leave their cartel, escape it, which, of course, carried its own dangers, especially for those who were kidnapped. The cell chiefs kept names and addresses of relatives. Even if they couldn’t find you they would find your brother or your parents. It was the thing that kept Cuauh from simply taking his plane and flying off into the north. It was the fear of it that kept him coming back, day after day, to the desert strip or the little road in Lomas de Poleo.
“Out with it, then,” said Cuauh, as excited as ever. “How? How?”
Lalo’s answer was simple. “A lot of cash.”
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“From where?” asked Cuauh.
“From everywhere,” said Lalo, and he explained how he kept his money in one place but never on him. He kept it in the base of the aluminum-lined false steering column in that burnt-orange Ford Lobo he’d drive across the border into Texas, that hollow space where drugs were kept and stored. Safe from the prying eyes of X-rays, gamma rays, whatever rays reflected off the aluminum sheet inside the steering column. Other drivers drove that pickup too, but the money was still safe. Everyone knew that to steal from the cartel was a death sentence. And of course, everyone talked about the stash in that steering column, but nobody knew who it belonged to, so nobody dared take it. The other drivers assumed it was a test of sorts, of loyalty or something. And Lalo got a kick out of that.
He loved the idea of his money traveling to all the places drugs went, the places he might go some day after this—Houston, Wichita Falls, Oklahoma City, Tuscaloosa, Raleigh, New York, Montreal.
“Come with me,” Lalo would say, and they’d make plans together. They dreamed of fancy hotels, fancy dinners, Buchanan’s Single Malt Scotch, never having to work again.
Lalo told him that when it was his turn to drive the Lobo, he always checked on his money and it was always there, packed against the back of the column down by where the Freon hit the A/C vent. The bills were always cold and he liked to fan them in his face. The smell, like plastic.
Cuauh remembers Lalo telling him all of this. And he remembers asking again, “But how? So, you have a lot of cash. But what do you do with it?” Cuauh remembers that crooked index finger on Lalo’s hand and how it waved the bartender over with just the tiniest motion that night in the bar, the cold of the January wind slapping hard against the window panes.
Lalo took a hundred-peso bill from his wallet, looked off toward the Cantina bathroom, and said to Cuauh, “Let me show you what honest men will do for money.”
In the bathroom, Lalo busts his chin on his way toward the porcelain lip of the toilet. He hurls and hurls, his voice splattering echoes inside the toilet bowl that rattle out at the tiled corners of the ceiling and ping with a long whang like the tight, coiled racket of a kicked doorstop. Nothing comes up. A beaded string of spit arcs from the fleshy part of his lip to the clear water below.
Cuauh hooks his arms under Lalo’s and pulls him up so he’s kneeling. His chin sluices bright red. It meanders in streaks like jagged lines that dry maroon, brown, black, and then stops at his collarbone. He looks as fragile as an egg and just as pale. That incredible voice, that incredible noise.
“Don’t talk,” says Cuauh, “don’t speak,” and he takes the Chinese food from the ledge of the bathtub and places it on the floor. “Don’t eat,” he tells Lalo, who tries his best to be a good sport about the whole thing.
They look at the mirror and then look at each other. They see themselves. Lalo, the boy he used to be. Cuauh, the man he might become—the bloody mess, that pulp of a person. He looks at Lalo the way you might look at a car wreck, the way you might observe it and rubberneck because you don’t want it to happen to you. He observes Lalo begging. Cuauh swears when it’s his time that he won’t beg.
“Please,” says Lalo shivering in his cold clothes. “Please,” he says reaching for the food, and Cuauh lets him have it.
He nibbles at the breaded chicken. He can’t keep anything down.
Inside the tub the ashy cigarette from Lalo’s lips, snuffed and bloated at the filter. It spins slow under the drippy faucet.
Cuauh takes off his shirt and ties it like a scarf around Lalo’s neck. He pats him dry with the tail of it. He grabs him by the shoulders and blows out the candle.
The sodium lamps pour in through the window and light up half the tub orange. In the dark the other half is blue. Lalo’s skin is yellow, his torso cut in half. The water is green, the same shade of green Cuauh remembers so well from his childhood.
He eases Lalo’s head into the water and closes his eyes. Lalo wraps his legs around Cuauh, and Cuauh lets his mind drift back in time. The warmness of Lalo’s escaping breath. Like Texas heat in the summertime.
Cuauh lets his mind go elsewhere. He imagines walking barefoot in his old backyard or what he considered his backyard at one time. It’s where he played anyway, him and his little brother. It’s still teeming with sounds. The tick of the heat in his ears, the tick of the insects flapping pell-mell from one tree to the other, ruining everything he’s ever worked for.
Behind his closed eyes are the cicadas too, seventeen-year-old cicadas humming pitch perfect in the shade of the orange-tree branches. You can’t see them but they’re there. And they’ll die eventually, like all the other critters and crawlers and men and women in the grove—all poisoned by the pesticides.
Lalo moans and Cuauh brings his toes to a point. He’s flexing his calves, he’s bringing his body up two or three inches to the tree. He pulls down a switch and plucks a cicada from the branch. He pinches its humming legs between his fingers and dangles it away from his face, as far as his arm can reach, staring at its molting body. The cicada feels the same way it did when he was seven—the last time he handled a cicada—like a sliver of metal but undeniably alive.
He remembers how they’d make them fight, him and his brother. How he’d clip their wings and set them off against each other in a dirt ring like oversize ants. Being flightless made them hostile. They circled for a long time before they attacked one another. They made them carnivores, him and his brother.
It was always a quick death. He remembers how placidly his little brother watched as one cicada would split the other open, the broken one’s exoskeleton sloughing off like flaking bits of fish food. And they’d talk over it just like teenage boys might talk over cigarettes or old men might talk over dialysis at the Harlingen Scott & White down the road—what is the worst way someone can die?
His little brother would always come up with the funny deaths: ants, getting killed by a hooker, getting killed by ants and a fire and a hooker at the same time.
When it was Cuauh’s turn, all he could think about was shriveling to death, sloughing away like that bug—molting, beautiful and iridescent like that cicada drying in the dirt.
What a slow death, he thinks. How cruel children can be.
He thinks of the cicada and thinks of the drivers and thinks of Lalo and thinks of himself. Disposable, just like everything else. He’ll molt under hot dirt eventually, somewhere in the world. In his mind he can see their skin sloughed off by zip ties or bullets or fire. He’s suddenly conscious of his own scars all over his body: the puckered red blips of skin around his wrists from when he was zip-tied and kidnapped in Piedras Negras; the pink laceration over his arm when he was made to fight gladiator-style at midnight; the serrated bead sutures across his clavicle from when he crashed a plane for the first time with his brother.
He opens his eyes and sees that face underwater. Perfectly still. Perfectly at peace. He imagines plucking each scar from his body to lay them over himself. He thinks he can remember what it felt like to be flawless at one time.
