The Beasts of Juarez

by R. B. Schow

  “That’s your world, Pop,” Otis muttered in response to the memory. “Not mine.”

  The old man had died in his own vomit at sixty-three. Now, Otis’s motto was, “If you shit, shower, shave, and show up, you should be just fine.”

  He felt a low rumble in his belly. The noise held promise, but his bowels had yet to move sufficiently. Pressing an elbow against his stomach, fighting to spur his colon to life, he groaned and wondered if he’d eaten too fast the night before.

  “We ain’t making bricks in there,” he said to his stomach. “Just let’r go. I know you don’t want them turds in there no more.”

  An air bubble pressed against the inside of his stomach expanding so fast and so large it caused him to fold over in pain. Heat rose to the surface of his skin. He started to sweat. Using a wad of toilet paper, he wiped his balding forehead thinking this was not a good sign at ten in the morning. If he started now, he would be sweating all day. And if he couldn’t get it under control before it was time to go, the second he stepped out into that dry Texas heat, he’d just keep that internal faucet going.

  The air bubble inside of him either popped or found a way to move on. Whatever the case, the pain subsided long enough for him to recover.

  Leaning forward to put the good kind of pressure on his colon, he relaxed his sphincter and said, “Stop being so damn stubborn!”

  His phone buzzed—a text alert. Sitting up, his face red from the straining, he took a breath, then turned to the vanity and reached for the phone. The toilet seat pushed sideways under his shifting weight, the lid’s two screws straining. He grabbed ahold of the sink to keep from falling off the bowl, and then he snatched up the Samsung. He swiped across the screen, then pressed the message folder and read the text message.

  THEY’RE HERE.

  He typed in a reply: GOOD. KEEP ME POSTED.

  With his three-day-old boxers circled around his ankles and his tight wife-beater creeping up over a round, white belly, he waited for a text reply. When none came, he scrolled his phone for something interesting to look at while struggling to crunch his morning grumpie. Naturally, he ended up scrolling through his feed on Facebook.

  The social media site was all politics, family pets, memes, and pictures of everyone’s keto diet progress. There were friends of his chatting about their cancer, their dying parents, how they just put their dog down because it was time. While sitting on the toilet hoping his life was about to change for the better, he sent his prayer-hand emojis, made his sad faces with a colon and an open parenthesis, and he called some guy he didn’t know a few choice names because the douchebag’s politics were garbage and Otis wasn’t afraid to say so.

  Then movement inside his gut finally happened, a sort of unclenching that had him thinking the elevator was finally moving south…and then the phone rang.

  “Dammit,” he cursed.

  The distraction stalled that creeping-down elevator inside his gut, the one that NEEDED to offload the goods. He checked the caller ID, drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. The elevator stopped on the first floor, the brown passenger angry, stuck.

  “Yeah,” he grunted.

  “All four of them are together, plus the bodyguard,” the voice said, his words heavy with a Hispanic accent. This was the same guy who texted him a few minutes earlier.

  “Has the opportunity presented itself?” Otis asked, still sweating.

  “Yes, sir,” the voice said. “Just now it has.”

  “It’s broad daylight.”

  “We’ve already gone over this,” the man said, his tone reeking of disappointment.

  Otis knew this moron from a few jobs before. He said he only spoke English when he was dealing with gringos, which was as little as humanly possible. Otis had said, “Well I ain’t no fans of you people either, but money transcends both borders and racial intolerance.” Back then, the guy laughed and wholeheartedly agreed with him.

  “And you still feel confident about grabbing them all?” Otis asked him.

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Alright then,” Otis replied, the tension in his chest easing. “I’ll make the call.”

  The line went dead, and just like that, his colon let go. Gripping the side of the bathtub and the side of the vanity, Otis started breathing heavy, little beads of sweat popping out of his shins, his lower back, and the skin behind his ears.

  “Mother of God!” he bellowed.

  His eyes flashing from the cramping, a groan escaped him. The groan quickly became a steady growl until the full grumpie was crunched and life inside his otherwise unhealthy body had the chance to return to normal. Dripping with sweat, breathing hard, he sat up straight and swore he’d stop drinking and binge-eating if he could just get through this moment.

  Unfortunately, the pain just didn’t want to let go. Seeking distraction, he went back to his phone, saw the time, and then accessed his “Live TV” app. He found the station he wanted, knowing what he would see: Fox at the Border. This was a one-hour Saturday morning special featuring Congressman Camden Fox of Louisiana. He was a huge advocate of border security and immigration reform.

  This blowhard son of a bitch was too pretty to be interested in women and too clean to know dick-all about the border, dealing with migrants, cartels, coyotes, and stolen or borrowed children. But there he was in his fancy suit with his Ivy League haircut and all his disdain for border politics, even though his entire career was built on border politics.

  Otis knew he should call the client, but he decided to wait three minutes to watch Camden Fox do a five-minute leg of his crybaby tour. He didn’t feel bad about what was going to happen to the man as much as he felt sorry for Fox’s wife and kids. They didn’t deserve what was coming.

  A second and third wave of rumbling started in the middle of his belly, the sad promise that this nightmare was still far from over. Still squatting on the toilet, marinating in turd vapors, bad breath, and body odor, Otis Fykes focused hard on Camden Fox, praying that the pain inside of him would just stop.

  On the live broadcast, the congressman was touring the border patrol’s newest detention facility in Northeast El Paso. It was clean and well run but crowded. Shocker. To the BP’s credit, none of the detainees were sitting in cages or lying on their sides in their own filth. Otis knew the other facilities were far from presentable, which was why the president had ordered a media blackout.

  Thinking about kids in cages reminded him that he had his own child to attend to. He really should check in on her. Pulling the toilet roll, collecting another wad of TP, he wiped the moisture from his face, under his eyes, and around his neck.

  “I know that you have given me the chance to tour this facility,” Fox was saying to the border patrol representative, “but truthfully, this is your newest, shiniest facility.”

  “We want to put our best foot forward,” the rep said, too experienced to ever look uncomfortable, “which is why we wanted to show you what taxpayer dollars have done for those making the dangerous trek north.”

  “America loves to put their best foot forward,” the congressman countered. “But nowadays, the public isn’t interested in the latest and greatest. We want to see the status quo, and we want to know why those other facilities are off-limits to the press.”

  “Tell ‘em where to shove it,” Otis said, squeezing out a pathetic turd that was more bark than bite.

  “With all due respect, Congressman Fox,” the BP rep said, “you asked to tour the first available facility and this is it. The other centers are overrun, we don’t have the funding to handle the latest influx of refugees, and I’m spending my valuable time with you when I should be spending it protecting the border for you and people like you.”

  Otis laughed at the jab then paused when a text came through. The text notification box blocked part of the live broadcast.

  DID YOU CALL YET? IT’S TIME.

  Frowning, he texted back immediately: CALLING NOW.

  With his good looks and e
loquent way of speaking, Camden Fox was the epitome of a southern gentleman. It was all a ruse, though. It had to be. In politics, as in much of life, you almost always manufacture a public persona, some rendition of yourself that speaks to a better version of your character, your morals, and your work ethic. Camden’s public persona was disgusting. Otis didn’t hate the man because he was a faker, though. He hated Camden Fox because of everything the politician tried taking from others.

  “You’re about to have the worst day ever, fart-knocker,” Otis mumbled as he shut off the internet and switched over to his contacts screen.

  He found the client’s number, dialed it, then clenched tight as the bottom of his bowels crashed and growled again. He stifled a groan as the physical agony of last night’s indiscretions persisted.

  “Yes,” the client said, drawing out the word with his gravelly voice.

  “We’re ready to light this fuse, sir.” Otis was trying hard not to sound like he was on the can. Then, with as much authority as he could muster, he said, “You just say the word and we’re a go.”

  “Do it,” the client said.

  Otis was about to respond when the line went dead. Shaking his head, he opened the text box to his contact, typed in the words, then thought: When you send this text, everything is going to change.

  The funny thing was, he wasn’t thinking of the money or even the congressman and what he and his family were about to go through. He was thinking of his own daughter, Janie. At that moment, he wondered what his life would be like if she were taken from him. He felt a hitch in his throat at the thought of her not being taken. Sadly, no one would ever take her away. She would likely be with him until he died, which was about the most tragic thing he could imagine. Freaking Tanya! She really left him holding a steaming bag of crap. He looked at the text he’d written and knew time was of the essence.

  TAKE THEM NOW.

  Drawing a deep breath, realizing it was now or never, he pressed SEND. It took a moment for him to catch his breath.

  Relieved, he turned his attention back to the live broadcast of Fox at the Border, then leaned back against the opened toilet lid and watched the congressman layout a whole host of talking points.

  The forty-nine-year-old Louisiana congressman was now conversing with a young Guatemalan girl at a kids’ table where everyone had a sandwich and a juice box. “How scared are you right now?” Camden Fox asked.

  Beside Fox, an interpreter asked the child the question in Spanish. She didn’t look frightened as much as she looked bored.

  “I’m really scared,” she said, contrary to her expression. It was almost as if this was a script she’d dutifully memorized before illegally crossing over into America.

  Camden turned to the rep, his eyes shining with unshed tears. He cleared his throat and apologized, and then he asked, “How do you handle those eyes?”

  “Excuse me, sir?” the rep asked.

  “Look at those eyes, the fear, the desperation, the absolute aloneness they must feel,” Camden said, pointing to the ambivalent little girl. “All the kids have that same look, the same expression. How do you handle it, emotionally?”

  “We’re not in the business of emotions, Congressman. We’re here to protect the border with as much dignity as we can.”

  “It just breaks my heart to see this,” Fox said, again clearing his throat of so much manufactured emotion.

  “You big, stupid fraud,” Otis mumbled in his slow Texas drawl. “You’re about to get exactly what you deserve.”

  He couldn’t take any more. He shut off his phone, tidied himself, then started the shower and waited for the water to run hot.

  Grimacing, he stood on the scale and frowned. “Forty pounds in two years,” he said out loud with the biggest frown. “You can’t even see your pecker, you fat asshole.”

  He got off the scale, kicked it back by the toilet, then tried cheering himself up. Today was the day he went from the minors to the majors.

  “You’re in the big league now, playa,” he said as he stepped into the shower.

  Chapter Three

  SYDNEY FOX

  Forty-six-year-old Sydney Fox wished her husband was with her at the El Paso street fair, but she was content being there with their three girls. In his stead, however, Camden had hired an armed escort from a local security outfit. As comforting as Camden thought this would be to Sydney and the girls, she had assured him it wasn’t necessary.

  “A woman like you stands out in a crowd, be it at parties, charity dinners, on vacation, or even street fairs in the middle of El Paso, Texas. I want an extra set of eyes on you, just to keep you and the girls safe.”

  “Thank you, Camden,” she had said, “but we’ll be just fine on our own.”

  No matter what the blonde-haired, green-eyed beauty said, she knew Camden’s real concern was for his daughters, especially their sixteen-year-old daughter, Callie. Having just reached womanhood, she was fast becoming the bright and shining star in the eyes of males of all ages. And it didn’t help that being in the family of one of today’s most controversial politicians put her in the public spotlight more times than either he or Sydney liked.

  Looking around the crowded streets of El Paso, she didn’t know how people would feel about her if they recognized Sydney and the girls. Making the connection wouldn’t be difficult with Camden at her side, but being alone with the girls at such a pedestrian event didn’t strike her as something that required a risk assessment, or even an armed escort. But to Camden it had, which was why he went ahead and hired Tyler Vandecourt for protection.

  “We have to think of your safety first,” Camden had said that morning before they went their separate ways.

  “You say that like we’re not going to one of the safest cities in the nation.”

  “Be that as it may, El Paso is only a stone’s throw from one of the most dangerous cities in the world. And now that the border is wide open, even something as simple as a street fair warrants a bit more precaution on our part.”

  She tried to put those conversations and her continued agitation out of her mind as she and the girls walked through the heart of El Paso. Fanning herself with her free hand, she said, “How is it this hot and dry and it’s not even noon?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty freaking hot,” Callie said as they meandered down the sidewalks through the crush of bodies.

  Callie was not only a flowering beauty, she was a potential problem as far as Camden was concerned. She was getting too much attention from the press, social media, and from boys and men alike. It didn’t help that she wore too much makeup and frequently posted a few too many provocative selfies on Instagram. In fact, it was for that very reason that Camden had been overly protective lately.

  “If I see one more bellybutton, or the white underside of her boobs, or even her butt cheeks sticking out the way she did in that picture with her green bikini,” Camden had said just two nights ago about Callie’s latest Instagram selfies, “I’m going to break her phone, toss her laptop, and break her texting fingers.”

  “Do that and you’re going to turn her into a holy terror,” Sydney said. “I just don’t have the patience for that and neither do you, obviously.”

  “No more posting selfies,” he had said.

  When Sydney told Callie no more provocative photos, she had said, “C’mon, Mom. There’s nothing sexual about a freaking bellybutton!”

  “Not to you, there isn’t. But if you want to keep your Instagram account, something your father is fighting hard with me to remove, then all selfies must be approved by me first.”

  “Mom!”

  “You have no idea how hard I’m fighting for your internet freedom,” she had said, sounding political even to her own ears. “If you did, the only words leaving your mouth would be ‘Thank you’.”

  “Things may feel like they’re too sexual, Mom, but a lot of boys really aren’t interested in girls these days. They like video games and porn, two things that don’t involve actual gi
rls. So we feed the fantasy with a few pictures, so what? Reality is boring, Mom. BORING!”

  She was tired of the arguments, but the fights with her daughter would go on until Callie was eighteen and able to leave for college.

  “Before you storm off and tell all your friends what a miserable wretch I am, I have something for you.”

  “What?” Callie had asked, pouting.

  Sydney had pulled her daughter into a hug, wrapping her arms around the girl just as she had done Callie’s entire life.

  “Everything I do for you and your sisters, it’s because I love you so much. My heart breaks some nights thinking of what the world is going to do to you girls someday.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Callie had asked, resting her head on Sydney’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, and it’s getting worse. That’s why we’re so protective of you.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Callie had said with laughter in her voice.

  “These days, people are ugly, presumptive, entitled, and just plain mean. And that’s when they’re trying to be polite.”

  “In the world of politics, maybe.”

  “I’m afraid that before we’re dead, these people will cut our entire family down.”

  Callie had pulled out of her arms, then looked at her, and asked, “Why would you say something like that?”

  “The world hates politicians and we’re front-and-center in one of the worst controversies this nation has ever created.”

  “Immigration policies,” Callie had said.

  “I’m sorry for your father’s choice in careers. We never knew politics would be this combative.”

  “Yeah, well, people suck,” Callie had joked.

  “Never have truer words been spoken,” Sydney had said with a warm, motherly smile.

  Now, shielding her face from the bright morning sun, Sydney walked down El Paso’s downtown sidewalks with her three beautiful daughters, trying to enjoy the day. There were shops to look in, fried foods to eat, tons of outdoor displays, and a host of interesting people to watch. She was just starting to relax when their bodyguard spoke.