Bellacosa had never known the cruelty and frustration he experienced in the drive back to South Texas after that fateful lunch. Less than two months later Yadira died, and Oswaldo’s condolences and statements on how he had no idea it was so serious came pouring in. Then the economic collapse happened, Oswaldo was forced to sell his properties, and his practice lost many clients who could now only afford government care. The syndicate wars escalated and restoration along the border declined dramatically, turning the southern tip of Texas into a dark spot on the map.
Look what’s happened, hermano mio, Bellacosa said to himself. Oswaldo kidnapped, without his wife, who divorced him, and his two boys, who have no respect for their father. Though initially Bellacosa hesitated doing anything when he caught news of the kidnapping, thinking Oswaldo deserved to die for deserting his own blood, he was able to put these feelings aside and remember their suffering mother, and that despite everything, blood was still blood, and they were still brothers. Bellacosa was making moves now that Oswaldo would never have made for him. Bellacosa meditated again and again over what there was to be learned out of all these regrettable experiences, and he came to the conclusion it was this: the more innocent you are, the closer you are in line toward death.
* * *
BELLACOSA’S OLD JEEP was suddenly surrounded by thick black smoke as he parked at the edge of the McMasters property in Calantula County. He was there to supervise the handling and mounting of the rig, in case it was mishandled or dropped, and didn’t want to take any risks. Something was on fire, and he immediately thought the worst: that the van Tranquilino and his son had stuffed the chickens in had exploded. As he stepped out of the old Jeep and got closer, Bellacosa saw a pile of burning branches and trash in the middle of the property, and half expected to see flaming chickens running around. The 7900 Rig wasn’t anywhere in sight. Bellacosa’s timepiece read ten till nine. He thought maybe the Tío Primo Towing boys were shockingly ahead of schedule and had already hauled it to the border.
Bellacosa heard chickens clucking like loud typewriters coming from the black van and looked at it indifferently, since it wasn’t on fire and nothing appeared to have exploded.
Tranquilino was at the spot where the ants had carried the chicken the previous morning. He had an opaque beige tank with a sloshing liquid strapped to his back, rigged with a piece of garden hose and spray that shot out a green mist toward the ground. Tranquilino saw Bellacosa approaching and stopped what he was doing.
“Buenos días, oiga, did they take the 7900 Rig already? Did you end up signing for it?”
“Si, se lo llevaron,” Tranquilino replied, in an agitated, rude manner, which surprised Bellacosa. “They came last night. Look what they did to me. In front of my son and my wife, too. They threatened to kill us, and challenged me to do something about it.”
Tranquilino had a black eye, blotches of dark bruises around his neck, and cuts and scrapes along his face.
Bellacosa didn’t understand. “Señor,” he said, “what happened, again? Who took the machine?”
“Who do you think? They did. Los hombres malos.”
“What hombres malos?”
“The only hombres malos. The ones without honor who have no shame, who go around torturing and killing and nobody puts them in jail or does a thing about it. Say what you want about the kingpin Pacheco, at least he had a code and didn’t go around torturing poor farmers like me, the poorest workers in the world.”
Bellacosa felt his heart trying to crawl out of his throat. He took a deep breath, swallowed it back down, and held it there as he felt this deal coming undone. It occurred to him that Tranquilino was poisoning all the ants that had taken refuge on the property. His son had the same clothes on as the previous day, only filthier. The boy was gathering several piles of dead ants using a rake and with a shovel scooped them up and hurled them onto the burning heap of trash, where they crackled like bamboo, or fireworks.
“My son, pobre niño, he saw everything,” Tranquilino stammered. “His mother was crying, and three men held her by the hair and abused her. And look at me, I’m an old man. I worked hard but got started late in life. I didn’t marry Paulita until I was sixty-one. I’m not the young man I used to be. But now after this what does it matter? If they come back I’m going to give them a good run. I was a brave young man once. I’m from where people settle things with machetes. A machetazos. I have to do it, to teach my son, señor. What else could I have done? First the storm in the middle of the night, then these men. After a long day of hard work, you saw how we were yesterday. Now, look. We took care of the chickens and the ants, but now what do I do about the men? I won’t be scared anymore. Let them come again so they can see I’m not scared.”
Tranquilino kept mumbling and trembling and continued to spray the land with the sour-smelling chemical. Bellacosa stepped away and breathed deeply as he smoked a cigarette, trying to see the bigger picture and calm down.
He got a signal and dialed Tío Primo headquarters, to see where the flatbed he ordered was, if by chance it had shown up early and taken the rig, but the nervous, apologetic operator told him it had just now left MacArthur and should arrive in the next fifty minutes. Bellacosa thanked her, hung up, then called her again to cancel the whole thing, to which she apologized further.
Bellacosa walked to the spot where the 7900 Rig was set, looked at the heavy indentations on the ground, and followed the tracks, which vanished and led nowhere. Not knowing what else to do or what the hell was even going on, he walked to take a look at the chickens in the black van–turned–chicken coop. There were plastic milk crates stacked around and it actually looked quite spacious in there; the chickens were now peaceful, their clucking like soft schoolhouse gossip in the air.
He shuffled back to Tranquilino and said, “Señor, forgive me. This is terrible. Let me ask, did you call Mr. McMasters about this, and let him know his property was stolen? I already wired him the money for it; the machine actually belongs to my client now.”
“I called, but nobody answers, like always. I’ve been dialing his office all morning, and I’ll keep trying. I could call the police, but they’ll deport me and my family, and then what? You know what I think? Listen to those machines, all the way over there. The ones all the ants are running from. I think that is them, the same men who were here last night. I’ve seen them going up and down the road in their big trucks, sometimes at night, too, and I’ve heard them shoot guns in the air.”
Tranquilino walked up the steps of his little trailer, opened the screen door, and slammed it behind him. Through the screen, Bellacosa saw for the first time Tranquilino’s wife. She wore a yellow dress and had indigenous features. She was very young, probably not even thirty, and eyed him with animosity and suspicion. Bellacosa felt she suspected he was also one of the hombres malos and with slight shame he walked away.
He climbed in the old Jeep, cursing in a balled-up torrent of border Spanglish, and drove down that unpaved, rural road. He rolled his window down, and the passenger one as well, clicked off the radio, and let in the high-tide autumn breeze, gunning the gas with a death wish. Bellacosa got to a marked farm road and stopped in the middle of a powdery intersection. He jumped out of the old Jeep and listened for the clanking and whistles of construction equipment. He couldn’t hear a damned thing and continued to drive, turned after a dried apple orchard, where the road narrowed and seemed to slope and slide off the earth into some kind of tunnel, or poorly executed labyrinth. Bellacosa put his Herzegovina Flor out in the ashtray with a feeling like he’d walled himself in and was now awaiting death.
The road suddenly ended at a locked gate that led down a throaty driveway, covered by thick foliage of mesquite. Bellacosa could distinctly make out the cacophony of construction equipment, and he was sure it echoed from the other side of the hill through this driveway. He stepped off the old Jeep cautiously, and as he walked toward the gate his tongue dried up and he smelled a sour, acrid smell, like ammonia mixe
d with gasoline, or a statue covered with bird shit in the heat, or five generations of hobo piss in an alley, only worse. It made his eyes water, reminded him of riot police, and mustard gas stories from the First World War; it had a yellow, unctuous fiber about it.
Turning around and driving away, Bellacosa was starting to panic and relit that Herzegovina Flor from the ashtray. He tried to picture every step he’d hit on the way down, having been given money from a client for a product, having spent a chunk of it on a personal matter, then the product not coming through.
He remembered to breathe deeply and calmed down, cracked his knuckles on the dashboard.
Mr. McMasters, he hoped, was a reasonable businessman. He was sure he’d be able to understand the situation and wire the money back.
Bellacosa pulled sharply into the sandy shoulder and almost hit Tranquilino’s big mailbox. The flaming pile on the property had grown bigger, and as he watched it burn, he couldn’t accept that the 7900 Rig had simply been taken by these hombres malos. These evil men. Bellacosa told himself he’d be back, reversed the old Jeep, and drove away.
FIVE
There’s a way to invite oneself to any situation without being intrusive. Bellacosa had become a master of this. Leaving Calantula County, and desperate for a human encounter that had nothing to do with business, he decided to drop in on Ximena, very conscious that it was close to lunchtime and he needed food in his hollow belly. Bellacosa had met her shortly after the death of Lupita, his wife, when he was at a loss with how to deal with his grief and started attending counseling for people directly affected by the years of the food shortage and the subsequent filtering syndicate wars. Ximena’s husband had been a truck driver who one day disappeared delivering a shipment of natural cantaloupe to Camargo, Mexico. Not having his body to properly mourn, and never having had children, Ximena developed a kinship with the only man of her age in the counseling group, Bellacosa. After the funding for the group meetings at the Y fell through, the two of them continued to meet whenever possible and were very encouraging toward each other’s lives.
Ximena was sitting on her blue porch and humming a tune that she said an apparition of her godmother taught her a few years prior in a dream. On a small wooden table next to her was an empty cup of Moroccan tea, a ramekin with a teabag, a glass pipe, and a Japanese geisha fan, which she grabbed and snapped open like a switchblade.
“Vaya, vaya,” she said teasingly, upon the approach of Bellacosa. “Que cosa tan fea tengo aquí, mira nada más. Santos cielos. And this miracle? Come, give me a hug, I’m only teasing, of course. I knew you were coming. I heard a coyote in the middle of the night last night. I know they say there aren’t any more coyotes or wolves living freely in these parts. They know to stay away from humans, but they come close sometimes, taking stuff that’s food for them in the trash. You look good, Esteban. How are you?”
“Well, you know. I’m not bad. Better, now, being here.”
“Have you been cutting down on the sugar, and the smoking, like you told me last time? Did you start exercising? Or was that a joke? Let me make you a cup of tea and read your leaves. Or do you prefer a cup of coffee? I think that works better for you, I can read your grounds instead.”
Ximena brewed a cup of Limoncillo-blend coffee from the Santa Josefina Estate out of Panama, with the coarse grounds directly in the cup. She brought out her deck of tarot cards designed by the late-nineteenth-century artist Anselma Pontecorvo, which she considered sacred and let nobody else handle.
Ximena’s movements were archaic, yet had an air of a hidden choreography, in the way she opened doors, pulled chairs, poured drinks, and shuffled the tarot deck. She brewed herself a whole pot of chamomile from Yucatán and was going on about her favorite subject, the Ancient Egyptians, saying, “So in this dream, this cosmic dream, the entire planet was an ocean, just covered in water with no land anywhere. And in the bottom of the ocean there were volcanoes erupting, while all these animals and species lived in the water, of course. But if you imagine hundreds of years of this erupting, these explosions, all that molten lava eventually hardens and builds and builds. And one day it accumulates into a piece of land that finally peeks up from the ocean surface like a fish for a breath of air. And guess what?” With her hands she made a shape that resembled a pointed roof.
“It is in the shape of a pyramid. The first bit of land that ever came up from this ocean planet was in the shape of a pyramid. The Ancient Egyptians knew this, Esteban. The pyramid is an image embedded into our collective dream for a reason, it drove civilizations mad, so mad that they worshipped the pyramid, worshipped its shape, so mad they built temples in its image, like we keep building statues of Jesus and images that represent something deep and sinister about who we are and why we exist.”
Bellacosa shifted in his seat. “Yes,” he said. “That is interesting.”
“Do you understand, then? How that involves us?”
“Us?”
“The people here in South Texas.”
“I don’t. But. Please. Tell me.”
“Well, you know what the Aranaña people believed, right? In the Ballí Cave, deep in the Ballí Desert, over fifty years ago, when the Aranaña people began to return, they found those cave paintings of pyramids that once stood here in South Texas. The Aranaña themselves built those pyramids that were possibly destroyed, or buried by nature. Interestingly enough, various civilizations in different parts of the world that seemingly had nothing to do with each other built and worshipped pyramids, too. They all believed pyramids were a method of communication and transportation. Have you heard about this? Because I have been reading and meditating on this subject, Esteban, and I want you to at least listen to me, even if you disagree, or don’t believe. The Ancient Egyptians and Aranaña believed that if they built a pyramid, and if the people in the tribe would all at once worship around it, then those people would be transported to another corner of the world with other tribes, worshipping around another pyramid, and vice versa. Pyramids were, in a sense, like phones to communicate with other tribes, which linked them to other people from the original diaspora of the very first people on the planet. Can you picture it?”
She gestured toward Bellacosa’s hands. “Are you almost done with your cup? Hurry up. Here, let me see, don’t stir the grounds. Have you been eating well? I have chiles rellenos left over from last night, de carne y de queso.”
Ximena heated up some chiles for Bellacosa along with white rice in the special way she made it, with peas, finely chopped carrots, paprika and other spices. As he ate, Ximena read the coffee grounds in the brick-red ceramic cup and said, “You see this trail of grounds in your cup? It’s a thick swirl, but look at those spirals that formed, in the pattern of a braid. It starts at the center of the bottom and swirls upward, toward the lip where you drank out of. Now, look at these,” she said, holding up four unique ceramic mugs.
“I’ve saved these four other cups you used, from previous visits. Look at this first one, it’s only a stringy, straight line from the center to the lip again, with no swirls, no braids. In this other cup you see the line start to ripple, start wanting to take form. Look at these others, the line gets more and more out of control, and now look at the one you drank today. You’re attracting something. A powerful energy, Esteban. Like the vanished Aranaña pyramids sending us signals, something resting inside you wants to break out. Knowing about it, perhaps you could wield this energy and use it positively, don’t you think?”
* * *
IT TOOK BELLACOSA a good amount of fortitude to not be spooked by the events of the day thus far. He chewed three tablets for a tingling of heartburn the chiles stirred up, and to make himself think of pleasant things thought about archery, how elegant being an archer in the old days seemed. Under the overpass on Tenth Street, waiting for the light to turn, Bellacosa saw purple graffiti that read NO TE APURES PARA QUE DURES, under a colorful border-disarmament symbol.
He decided against telling his client
Don Villaseñor down in Piedras Negras, Mexico, the bad news about the 7900 Rig—at least for the moment. He dialed the office of Leone McMasters and let it ring over ten times, but nobody picked up. The tingling heartburn in his chest quickly expanded into a melting sensation over his vital organs. Bellacosa pounded on his rib cage, then on the steering wheel, and like a balloon gradually loosing wind the heartburn receded. Bellacosa gasped for air and said, “Ay, Dios,” wiping sweat from his brow, then dialed Leone McMasters one more time. He let it ring too long, hung up, and pulled over by the side of Buddy Owens Boulevard and Lavaca Street.
He lit a Herzegovina Flor and stared at a water tower the size of a small building about a hundred yards off the southwestern intersection. It’d recently been painted dark blue and yellow, but somebody had already vandalized it with the shoddy drawing of an odd purple farm animal.
Taking one more drag, Bellacosa puffed out his chest, then flicked the lit Herzegovina Flor as far as he could. He was about to drive away; then, like a person changing his mind about abandoning a dog, he got out of the Jeep and walked toward the burning cigarette. He put it out on the heel of his shoe, which he never did, and packed it into the old Jeep’s ashtray as he drove away.
He breathed in deeply with the radio shut off and hoped there’d only been a misunderstanding. That nobody was trying to purposely pull a fast one on him and things would get sorted out.
As he pulled into a warehouse building with a sign reading “McM Imports” off Sugarland Road in Hidalgo, Bellacosa immediately noticed that the metal screens were all shut and no eighteen-wheelers were backed up along the dock. A white Suburban was parked against the air-conditioned section of the building and in the small parking lot there was an array of brown and black Lobo pickup trucks with smoky windows, and a dark sedan that resembled Manolo Segura’s. Bellacosa circled around the sedan but it had South Texas plates and couldn’t have belonged to a Mexican detective. When Bellacosa parked and walked toward the office entrance he thought it out of the ordinary that all the parked trucks had been left running.
Tears of the Trufflepig Page 5
