This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  * * *

  —

  NEVA DIDN’T WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD, she wanted to leave it.

  She talked about it all the time: going over the Río Bravo to Los Estados Unidos to stay with familia she had in Dallas or Houston (Chayo could never remember which). In two years she planned to leave Ojinaga for good, or so she promised, and get a job and see the americano bands that she loved and shop in the stores that she’d read about. She believed trying to change things in México was as silly as trying to move a mountain, and when Chayo once told her that such a thing could be done, one rock at a time, she’d said maybe, maybe, but that would take too damn long and she had too many other things to do. Plus, rocks were sharp and heavy, and she didn’t want to hurt herself. She pretended not to care with such practiced ease that she almost believed it herself, but Chayo knew better. She was afraid of what change demanded, of its high cost. In the past few years everyone had lost someone, something, to the narcos and their corruption and a government that had no will to stop either. Everyone had a story, as many stories as all the songs she sang.

  She was right; she just didn’t want to get hurt.

  * * *

  —

  SO HE WAS SURPRISED when they returned to Naranja’s bus to find her there waiting with Batista and the other normalistas. He thought at first she’d only come to see them off, but no, she was going with them. She needed to see for herself what all the fuss was about, take some pictures on her iPhone, and share her grand adventure with her friends. She even leaned in close to him (not as close as that day on the road, but close enough) and said maybe she’d carry a rock or two of her own, a couple of the lighter ones. Her eyes were bright and shining and forever, and he knew then that he’d carry her all the way to Chihuahua City and back in his arms, if he had to. He wanted her to come more than he’d ever wanted anything in his whole life, so it was good there was no talking her out of it anyway.

  She marched onto Naranja’s bus with a smile on her face and Chayo had no choice but to follow her.

  * * *

  —

  “IT’S OKAY. No fear, my friends. They’re shooting in the air.” Castel was waving his shirt, about to adjust his now crooked glasses, when his face disappeared.

  Chayo saw that clearly.

  It was there and then it was gone, only a reddish mist left hanging in the air like a bloody thumbprint. Shattered glasses falling to the ground. Then Castel himself was gone, too, all of him, as if he had never been; vanishing completely. The night that had been stalking them took him just like that, just like a pouncing jaguar. Juan Pablo shouted, pointing at the place where Castel had been standing, as another bullet came through an open window and punched him in the throat. He looked down at his hands, opening and closing them like he was trying to hold on to something he couldn’t see, before falling backward into his seat. His steaming blood hit Iker in the face, who screamed and scrambled to wipe it off, but not before three fingers of his frantic left hand were clipped off by another passing bullet. Then the whole bus was filled with them: bullets from every direction, like heavy bugs battering at the inside of a glass lamp, each as big as the pale leopard moths Chayo had collected in jars as a boy. The normalistas began screaming and throwing themselves down between the seats and on the floor to escape them.

  Chayo saw the driver Naranja stand, his great bulk eclipsing the light from the truck in front of them. It was like he was lit from within, the tips of his hair burnished by light. He waved his fat arms as if waving the bullets away, trying to shield a boy Chayo did not know well, until the funny and brave bus driver took one, two, three bullets in the stomach and chest and the bus’s windshield buckled, flecking his falling body with glass.

  An hour earlier he’d been eating an empanada and laughing with them.

  Él sólo murió por nosotros.

  No . . . no . . . we killed him.

  Limón had already abandoned his bus, leaving Naranja’s pinned between the other two vehicles. Both buses were under heavy fire now, bullets ricocheting off their metal skin, hot sparks dancing in the air. Glass was breaking and blown tires were groaning like old men. Normalistas were crawling over one another and fleeing the buses, making a wild run across the intersection, some waving cell phones in the air, either trying to make calls or film what was happening to them. But they were only beacons, as bright and telling as flashlights, and the men hidden in the shadows used them to track the fleeing students over the dark streets.

  Chayo saw one after another go down, their phones left bouncing across the pavement.

  And that’s when he knew they were going to kill them all. He didn’t know why, or what crime they had committed, but now that the shooting had started, it couldn’t end without all of them dead. Dead and buried and rotting somewhere in a deep hole, piled on top of each other and covered in dirt or sand or trash or shit. The men out there would see to that.

  They had to, to bury the shame of what they’d done.

  This night would never end until it swallowed them all.

  Neva was screaming, both his name and Batista’s, and this time it was he who grabbed her hand, holding it tight. He told her over all the noise that it was going to be okay, that he would get her out of there no matter what. Nothing would happen to her.

  She looked into his face and he saw that she believed him.

  A bullet gently moved the air, nearly kissed his face. Like soft wings against his skin. It reminded him of Neva’s touch, that very first touch.

  These are only moths like those I used to catch in Blanco. They cannot hurt me.

  Nada me puede hacer daño.

  He told her to stay low and behind him, to move only when he moved. If he fell, she was to keep running and not look back. He couldn’t help himself and quickly kissed her between the eyes and whispered that he loved her, but he wasn’t sure she heard him, and that was okay. At least he’d said the words, finally releasing them. Their weight would no longer burden him or slow him down and he would not die with them heavy on his lips.

  Voy a volar por los dos de nosotros.

  He squeezed her hand again, not to hold her back as she had done for him, but to let her know it was finally time to run. To run and never stop.

  To fly. Para volar.

  And they did.

  II

  Juan Abrego Carrión kissed his little Zita and thought about murder.

  Death. Muerte.

  She was in a new dress and had come out to the porch to show it to him, turning in circles by firelight. It was a pretty thing, pink and lace. The sort of thing when she was older she would wear to her quince, and what a fine party that would be. He did not want to touch it with his hands and get it dirty. He’d found himself staring at his hands more and more lately—they sometimes shook on their own now—unable to get them clean no matter how much he washed and scrubbed at them. There was always dirt beneath his nails, thick and rich, worked into the creases of his old, leathery skin. Sometimes it even looked like sangre . . . blood. He did not know if he was imagining this, or if he truly was forever stained. Was it possible he still had the soil of his father’s fields ground into his skin, buried in his heart? Fields that had once grown marijuana, and now poppies? He had memories of long stretches of rolling green under a hot, hot sun, standing stripped to his waist and tanned as dark as cowhide, drinking water from a wooden bucket. But he wasn’t sure how real those were, either.

  Maybe that was another boy, another place. Sometimes he wished that boy had never grown up to do the things he’d done.

  He motioned to Luisa, who was not Zita’s mother, to take the young girl gently by the hand and lead her back into the main house. Moths circled them both, winging against the naked bulbs. When Luisa moved, a man with a gun moved behind her, a shadow on the ranch house’s simple walls. Wherever Luisa and little Zita went, men with guns followed. There were so many
he did not know them anymore, and they all looked the same. Young, dark-skinned, thick-mustachioed. Their eyes were all flat, unreadable, like they were hand-painted on their skulls—blank and mirrored as the sunglasses they often hid them behind. They pretended to be like the great men who had come before them, the true narcos, but these buchon gangsters were nothing, replaceable as the money it took to buy them. No one would ever know their names, no one would sing narcocorridos about them, and their clothes were richer than they were. Here in Cuchillo Negro they wore jeans and boots and Stetson palm-leaf cowboy hats that had been sent down new from El Paso. But when they were in Mazatlán or Juárez or Mexico City they wore Z Zegna suits, like those his own son favored, although Martino himself never came to Cuchillo Negro anymore. He didn’t like the dirt, the smell, the sun. Martino had never worked fields the way he had, and said it wasn’t safe for them ever to be together anyway, and he was probably right.

  He’d last looked on Martino’s face a year ago, not recognizing the boy he’d once been or the empresario in the expensive suit he was pretending to be.

  The man with the gun fell in step behind Luisa and his Zita. He had never seen this one before, or maybe he had, but he didn’t like the look of him anyway. He was one step too slow, too nonchalant. Like he was distracted, listening to music only he could hear. Maybe he was thinking of a girl he’d had in Mexico City. Who was choosing these men now? Martino, or his segundo, Gualterio? He would have to ask. He would have this one replaced with another. There was always another.

  He knew that as well as anyone, even if Gualterio liked to tell him: There will only ever be one El Patrón.

  What his oldest, dearest friend truly meant was that he, Juan Abrego Carrión, had outlasted all the rest. For one more day, he yet remained standing.

  Él estaba solo. He was alone.

  Now, with the girl safe and gone, he rose from his rocking chair and made ready to go down to the barn, where a man waited to die. As much as he wanted two fingers of Tres Quatro Cinco in a cool glass and his bed, and the slow touch of whatever woman they’d brought out to the ranch for him, he still had work to attend to.

  There was always more work, and because he took it seriously, so personally, maybe that’s why he had lasted so long.

  As the old man—and he was old, too old—finally stepped off the porch to make his long walk to the barn, more than a dozen other men, with shoulder-strapped Mossberg Tactical AR-15s, walked with him.

  * * *

  —

  THE BARN SMELLED THICK OF HORSES, although the animals themselves had been moved into the fields because the fire in the barrel would scare them. He’d once owned Andalusians, Arabians, and Trakehners, and years ago funneled nearly ten million dollars through a quarterhorse farm in Texas. One of his finest animals there, Hay Fuego, won the All-American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico. But the horses here now were farm breeds, no different from those in the surrounding valley. He kept them simply because he liked them. On the coolest mornings, he always took his black coffee in the barn to spend time with them, rubbing their coats, listening to them talk to each other, watching their breath plume that was so much warmer . . . so much more alive . . . than the air around them. He wondered what they said to each other, what they thought of this life.

  What did they think of the old man with his coffee, watching them and calling them by name?

  This ranch at Cuchillo Negro—one of his favorite places—was among dozens he owned, so many he could not remember them all. It reminded him most of where he’d grown up right on the edge of Durango, although that place no longer existed. On a night like this when he could see every star ever made, when the sky glowed thick with them in all directions above the blackened curves of nearby hills, and when the small fires of distant farms also burned, he imagined hearing the wind itself lost in the trees. He could feel, too, the soft step of unseen animals moving under them. It was vida everywhere, all around him. But as much as he liked it here, he could only spend two or three days at the most, sometimes less, because of the americanos. Las Tres Letras . . . DEA. He could never stay anywhere for long. His life had become disposable, cast away, everything in it ready to be thrown out or discarded at a moment’s notice. He used a cell phone two times and it was replaced with another; fresh laptops and satellite phones were always appearing out of plastic and Styrofoam; new cars and stolen and repainted trucks came and went by the score, changing or disappearing as frequently as the men who drove them and protected him. No longer was he with the same woman twice. No one could know too much, or get too close, except for Gualterio. Not even Martino, who chose to stay away anyway. This was his life now: all these things he could have, yet everything slipping almost untouched through his fingers.

  The lyrics of a narcocorrido once boasted that Juan Abrego Carrión owned the world, but that was far from true.

  He could buy the world, but he could own nothing.

  No longer.

  * * *

  —

  HE WANTED TO STAND outside the barn door for a moment more, gather himself for what would come next, but it was never good to be outside, uncovered, for long. Martino, who had studied two years at a university in California, had talked to him of satellites and drones and all the things the americanos were using nowadays to hunt him. No, he truly did not own the world. It owned him, and even the sky held him prisoner.

  That’s why they had to light the fire barrel inside the barn, and do this thing he needed to do beneath its roof, so there would be no image of it flashing across the night’s horizon, captured by a camera hidden among the stars.

  But in some ways, it did not matter. God saw all anyway, and He knew all that Juan Abrego had done.

  * * *

  —

  THEY HAD THE MAN TIED TO A CHAIR, his hands pinned back with copper wire.

  There was no blood on him, not yet, because Juan Abrego had given the order he would not be harmed. And there was a bottle of water that his men had been giving him mouthfuls of as a small mercy, next to his shoeless, bruised feet, and another filled with sour goat’s milk and cayenne pepper for Juan Abrego to spray up the man’s nose, if he chose to do so. There was also a bag of pepper in a small bowl ready to push directly into the man’s face as well, to force him to breathe in deep, like inhaling raw flame. The barn was brutally hot from the burning barrel and the man had sweated twice through his shirt. It clung to him, revealing a thin body, the very count of his ribs. He had been brought here in a hood, but that had long been tossed aside in the hay, which should have terrified the man as much as anything; a fresh understanding that it did not matter what he saw at this ranch, even if it mattered very, very much what he said here.

  Then there were all the other items Juan Abrego had ordered to be made ready: more copper wire, two machetes, a bag of broken lightbulbs and glass, a hammer and nails, and a brand-new set of medical implements. Scalpels and saws and specula of all sizes and shapes reflecting the men standing in the shadows. All these things had been carefully, specifically, laid out on a horse blanket in front of the man, and his eyes roamed wildly over them.

  There was a real doctor sitting in a car outside the barn, driven in from Ciudad Jiménez wearing a hood of his own, with a bottle of Juan Abrego’s favorite Tres Quatro Cinco and two freshly cut limes, grown right here at the ranch, on a tray in the passenger seat to help steady him. He’d been brought here not to use the new medical instruments, but to keep the man in the barn alive as long as necessary.

  Juan Abrego knew terror intimately, knew the very curves and contours of it as well as he knew those of any woman he’d ever had, so he stood in front of the bound man for a long minute, watching him. Watching him breathe faster and faster and then piss himself as the terror took hold. He let it embrace this man, when Gualterio appeared at his side.

  Gualterio was big, solid. His chest pushed against the pearl buttons of his shirt
and his stomach hung handsomely over his jeans. He remained as strong as ever, his size alone menacing, though there was some gray in the thick hair at his temples that Juan Abrego suspected his friend was thinking about coloring. It was in the way his hands went unconsciously to his hair all the time now, continually pushing his fingers through it, as if he could rub the signs of his age away. Juan Abrego would say nothing about it, having learned long ago that a man’s vanity was a dangerous thing better left unchallenged, even between old friends. He was ten years Gualterio’s senior and they had known each other their whole lives. Gualterio had always liked his rich food and his women and his beer—it showed in his florid face and stomach—and on Juan Abrego’s orders had killed more men than either of them could count. There was no one he knew better, and after the death of his own brother Rafael—who everyone had called Nemesio—no one he trusted more, and that included his five remaining half brothers and one sister and his own son.

  It was sometimes hard to remember that Nemesio had died thirty years ago.

  But here, now, in front of the other men with guns, even Gualterio knew to stand silent until he’d been addressed.

  “Is this the bus driver?” Juan Abrego asked the darkness gathered in the barn, although only Gualterio would dare answer.

  “Sí,” Gualterio said. “It was all done as you asked.” Gualterio paused to light a cigarette; again, the only man who had the license to do so in Juan Abrego’s presence. “There are others. We will find them.” Gualterio ended with a shrug. It was both a statement and a threat. Una promesa.