Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel

by Fernando A. Flores

  Bellacosa, not meaning to stick it to him, asked, “How are you doing today?”

  Edgar ignored this and stared into the green phosphorescent screen of a computer, clicking on things, and on a separate, bulging keypad Bellacosa watched him plug in the numbers.

  Shortly after, a whirring machine was eagerly printing, which meant the check was printing, and that the money had come through. “What a miracle it is, when the money comes through,” Bellacosa whispered.

  He thanked Edgar after reading the sum of fifteen thousand dollars on the check and tapping it twice on the counter. From the old Jeep, Bellacosa called the office of Mr. McMasters, the owner of the 7900 Rig in Calantula County, and told him the deal was set on his end, that the twelve thousand dollars would be in his bank account by the following morning. Bellacosa then arranged to get a driver with a flatbed at Tío Primo’s Towing to haul the rig to the border, then finally dialed his client Don Villaseñor’s border office so his secretary could schedule one of their own drivers to take it down the rest of the way into Piedras Negras, Mexico. The deal was rolling, and Bellacosa was excited to be making the rounds.

  * * *

  DEPOSITING THE CHECK, Bellacosa knew the funds would clear by nightfall, and the people at his bank assured him he had access to 30 percent of the sum immediately.

  Bellacosa waited until he entered Edinburgh City to fill the old Jeep with premium gas, and got himself a bottle of high-end drinking water, from the underground river of the volcanic island Hsi, which was also the name of the brand.

  Hsi, he thought to himself, driving in the old Jeep, like “Yes,” in Spanish, because the “H” is silent. Yes. Si. “Yes” en ingles, just what the body needs, original and real water from Mother Nature. It’s funny now, the biblical phrase “He turned the water into wine.” You hear it a lot in those old songs from the South, too. The Bible Belt, is that what it used to be called? Either way, it makes me laugh now if I really think about it. Turning water into wine no longer impresses anybody. Any teenager with a chemistry set now can turn even gas into wine, so if the Lord were to come back he’d have to brew up a new trick to keep the party going.

  “But I know you’ll say, Lupita,” Bellacosa said out loud to himself, “that whereas anybody can turn water or gas into wine, it’ll have to be through science, and the Lord can do anything science can but better, simply with his divine touch. I guess that is true, you got me there. The Lord, they say, had a hell of a divine touch.”

  On the edge of Edinburgh City and the small town Vela, Bellacosa saw another branch of his bank, walked in, and withdrew thirteen hundred sixty dollars in hundreds and twenties, which the teller gave him in a sealed bank slip after counting it out for him and the cameras.

  At LuAnn’s Cafeteria a few blocks down from the bank, Bellacosa ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of chocolate pecan pie called the Lloyd Sherman, and nursed all of it until 6:30 p.m., reading the copy of The Bugle of Plenty that Tcheco had let him keep. He tipped a fiver and thanked the server for making the coffee dark and strong.

  Bellacosa left the paper on the table, though he’d circled two ads in the classifieds; one for a man in Donna who welded and sold his own grappling hooks, and another for a Thai lady who gave affordable massages specializing in bad backs.

  * * *

  FIFTY FEET FROM THE BORDER, Bellacosa paid for parking at the privately owned Nevarez Lot, where the keg-shaped man working the booth recognized him.

  “How are things along the border today?” Bellacosa asked the man.

  “It’s an orange alert day, but there’s no shootings and no commotion, so I would say things are pretty okay.”

  Bellacosa slipped him a few extra dollars and said, “Keep an eye on my Jeep, okay?”

  “You got it, hermano.”

  Bellacosa parked and walked to the pedestrian side of the international bridge. The Border Protectors didn’t have any tanks set up, and as Bellacosa walked to the toll booth the armed officer handed him an illustrated pamphlet warning of the current dangers in Mexico. Bellacosa paid the toll with a crisp bill and crossed the bridge that took him into Reinahermosa, the first Mexican city directly across.

  Bellacosa threw the pamphlet away when he passed the first trash bin. He noticed that the lines of cars and pedestrians crossing back into MacArthur weren’t very long as he ascended the arch of the bridge to make the leap over the river and the two border walls. Halfway over the Rio Grande the fabric of the bridge changed—the Mexican half was built out of cobblestones and was slightly more vandalized. Bellacosa stopped at the bolted plaque commemorating the spot as the official divider of the two countries, and looked through the ten-foot chain-link fence along the railing, down at the river. He knew the Rio Grande naturally flowed eastward toward the gulf, but Bellacosa swore it was running the opposite way.

  He watched as two children climbed the railing as high as his waist level to take a look. They were both pointing and smiling with a look of wonder Bellacosa hadn’t seen in a child in so long that the sight nearly touched him, until he noticed the source of their amazement. It wasn’t the water, but the two border walls, one built along the south side of the Rio Grande, the other along the north, and like two scheming sentinels they escorted the river, their dying queen, as far as the eye could see into the horizon. The look of pleasure on the children’s faces made his blood harden like lava in his veins. Suddenly, against the northern border wall a few hundred yards away, a howling, tall flame sprung to life. The children clapped. Bellacosa knew it was a controlled fire for the great cane, which threatened the structural integrity of the border walls, and he continued his walk.

  As he approached Mexican customs, there it was: one of the ancient giant Olmec head monuments for border crossers to see, carved to depict a long dead Olmec king. It had been a gift from a previous Mexican president to the old mayor in Reinahermosa. Its presence on the international bridge was initially a huge controversy, critics demanding its return to the south, where the Olmec people had lived.

  Bellacosa laughed when he had first seen it, but now he no longer saw the humor. The wonder the border walls failed to inspire came over him like a blue shadow as he stared at the giant Olmec head. It reminded him of the shrunken heads of Indians and the syndicates that lopped heads, shrank them, and sold them to sick collectors for exorbitant prices. Bellacosa was convinced the Olmecs predicted Mexico’s present reality long ago, predicted the museums and private collectors abroad paying in gold for made-to-order shrunken heads from down south, with Indians now killing other Indians for their heads, because they are left out on the margins of the modern world and have few recourses to feed their families. A price tag is now placed on every Indian’s head to be mounted and encased, turned into conversation pieces at fancy cocktail parties thrown by rich, trendy circles, calling themselves aficionados of the arts and of ancient cultures.

  Bellacosa got in line behind about eight people to pass through Mexican customs. He was perfectly composed, though he’d decided not to declare the American cash he was crossing over. When his turn came, the dark-skinned Mexican officers scanned Bellacosa’s left palm, he got a green light, and they didn’t search him. Bellacosa thanked the officers, and let out a chuckle of relief.

  At 7:15, right on time, he saw a taxi painted green and red like a giant sliced watermelon. The driver was inside and the car’s motor was running.

  When the driver saw him approach he leaned out the open window and said, “Bellacosa? Come on,” in Spanish.

  Inside, as the taxi zoomed along La Zona Rosa, Bellacosa asked, “Are you Manolo Segura’s friend Videncio?”

  “Nah, I’m just a taxista. I was hired only to pick you up.”

  Bellacosa was confused by this reply, but somehow trusted it. They sped over potholes and a long section of unpaved, muddy road. He saw a mustard-colored two-story house with the second floor missing a big portion of the exterior walls—inside was a living room setup, and a woman breastfeeding a baby whil
e watching a telenovela on a black-and-white replica. They passed a pharmacy with a pile of gravel next to the entrance and an old man dressed in a western shirt and trousers shoveling some of it onto a wooden wagon hitched to a station wagon vehicle. Curiously, at the soccer field, nobody was playing a game, but a group of boys ran around with bows and arrows made of sticks and strings, and Bellacosa wondered if there were others dressed like cowboys hiding in the brush. He took a good look at the driver’s Japanese-style hat, his Hawaiian shirt, and listened to the voices and static from the CB radio, turned down low.

  The taxi passed the abandoned San Efrén de Edessa Cathedral and Bellacosa crossed himself, telling the taxi driver, “Not a single dove on the steps of the church.”

  When the driver didn’t reply Bellacosa felt slightly ashamed at having crossed himself. It was a subconscious Catholic gesture he’d renounced after his daughter’s death, and picked back up years later when it was his wife who’d passed away.

  Bellacosa then recalled what El Gordo Pacheco had said in his famous recorded statement, how he considered himself to be a man who dealt in commodities. The statement had surprised him. As a freelance buyer for these Mexican contractors and being Don Villaseñor’s confidence man—the one he called when he needed a rare piece of machinery, fast—this was the way Bellacosa also described his trade. He was a man who dealt in commodities.

  “Me and Pacheco,” Bellacosa whispered. “We both think highly of our damned selves.”

  At a light he saw a newspaper vendor waving a copy of Hoy Mismo in the air, which documented the latest atrocities in the filtering syndicate wars. A mass grave had been found outside Reinahermosa by the mountains, and the authorities believed it contained the headless bodies of the first-year biology students from Universidad la Reforma who had gone missing the previous semester. Though DNA tests were pending, the people of Reinahermosa were at a loss as to how to react to this iniquitous, unfathomable revelation. Looking at the gruesome front-page photograph as the vendor waved it around and hollered, Bellacosa could no longer feel shocked. However, there was always a sadness in him that could unroll like a carpet of damp autumn leaves if he let his emotions wander too far into sentimentality.

  Though Bellacosa had been raised in Reinahermosa, too much had changed in the decades since he’d moved away. It was the city where he learned to make a peso, where he first saw what a blue-eyed girl and an American dollar looked like. But he no longer felt the town was a part of him, more of a reflection at the bad end of a cursed looking glass, and he romanticized the old image of the city in which doves and pigeons still flapped their wings. He chewed on an energy booster pill with papaya enzymes as the driver sadistically scratched the back of his own neck and the taxi hurled over railroad tracks.

  Recently, Bellacosa had discovered something slightly unsettling about himself: that he neither liked nor disliked all these Mexicans and Americans living along both sides of the border. He saw them now as one and the same people, both stale imitations of the cultures they were meant to be a part of. This revelation neither disappointed nor astonished him; it was simply how he felt. The border walls, the filtering syndicates, headless bodies of scientists, shrunken Indian heads—he felt these things were always around even before they’d materialized. It was all the continuous overflow of the tension that had been boiling for over a century along the border.

  Bellacosa didn’t recognize the neighborhood the taxi driver was driving him through and it was starting to get late, so he said, “Oye, how far out are you taking me?”

  Just then the driver pulled over in a paved, abandoned parking lot under a bridge and said, “Get in the car that’s on the other side.”

  “How much is the fare?”

  “Twenty-two thousand cubic pesos, not counting the tip.”

  Bellacosa gave him thirty American dollars, got out. The cloudy sky grimaced like an old retiree counting change. The overhead bridge, like the parking lot below it, also appeared unused and abandoned. He climbed the cement embankment to reach the road and saw a dark sedan with Manolo Segura wearing crocodile-skin boots, leaning on the open driver’s door. Manolo was smiling and looked like he’d had something greasy and covered in cheese for lunch.

  They shook hands and Bellacosa, taking out his cigarettes, said, “So many theatrics. You worried someone’s following us, Manolo?”

  Manolo cackled, patted Bellacosa on the back a few times, and said, “What do you think we’re doing here, compadre? Everybody in the police department and the syndicates could have me killed for no reason if they wanted to. What is that, the shit the Russians smoke? I’ll try one, if you’re offering.” He took one from Bellacosa. “Come on over here, walk a little with me. I want to show you something.”

  Manolo led him over the abandoned bridge as he lit the cigarette with Milenio de Oro matches and soured his face upon tasting it.

  Bellacosa saw broken beer bottles, crushed cans, cigarette butts, and gun shells on the empty two-lane bridge, which led to a swamp on the other side. Manolo remained silent. As they made it a fourth of the way over Manolo pointed to the ground up ahead. There were about three scores of some duck species lying motionless over the middle of the bridge. The ducks had long orange bills and dark green and gray feathers, and were dead. Their feathers hadn’t been plucked, the bills weren’t sawed off, nor had anybody taken their feet to make the expensive salve rich ladies paid high prices for.

  Bellacosa said, “Did they just dump these birds here without taking anything?”

  “They aren’t decomposing either, you notice?”

  “That’s right. How long you think they have been dead?”

  “Not sure. I discovered them here last week. So I don’t know. They didn’t take anything because I presume these ducks have to be real, God-made ducks. They must have been flying and something in the air or the clouds killed them.”

  “It doesn’t stink. Even if they died a while ago it would still have that death stink, right? That’s how it is with dead things. Don’t you think so?”

  Manolo shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. The last time I saw any birds flying through Reinahermosa must have been over five years ago. Before the filtering got bad. This means there are five-year-old kids now that have never even seen a real bird. Forget it.” He turned to Bellacosa.

  “You brought the money with you? All thirteen hundred, in American dollars?”

  Bellacosa handed him a carefully folded wad of money.

  “I’ll count it later, I’m not worried about it. I want you to understand that this money you’re handing me here is not all for me. To score information things need to be set up, to pay off dinners and drinks and people.”

  “I understand. But it took a lot of looking around and hustling to get this money, Manolo. It may not be a lot of money to some people, but it’s a lot to me.”

  “Hey,” Manolo said, “I don’t want you to think I’m a dishonest or greedy man. We’ve known each other since we were boys. I’m playing this the way it is, and that’s it. Though of course a little of this money is for me, yes. It’s our business, Esteban. I have good news for you, de todos modos. I talked to two of my guys who are deep in the syndicate network here in the city. Both of them were able to confirm that your brother, Oswaldo, is still alive. They’re keeping him in a cell somewhere. I’m not sure where. Possibly I can find out. But I can’t guarantee anything right now. I’m sure you’ve heard what happened with Pacheco? With him gone, there’s this big scramble for power down here. My guys are very reliable but anything can change. You and I know how this whole network thing works. Whatever anyone says, the complete opposite is sometimes the reality.”

  Bellacosa was unconvinced. “And what do you think, Manolo? Seriously? As far as this being only a case for you, and not this whole money thing, with nothing of me or my brother involved. Just your professional opinion, as a detective.”

  “I think I would trust this lead. It’s the only thing we have. These two g
uys, they have nothing to do with each other, and told me almost identical stories.”

  “What else did they say? Was there any harm brought to him?”

  “They said he was badly beaten. Not terrible, but in a bad way. Everywhere except on his face. They consider him dark-complected enough to cut his head and sell it as an Aranaña shrunken head. It’s the trend with Sindicato Unidos and the headhunting syndicates now, to scope out non-Indian people and kidnap them. The only reason they haven’t cut his head off is because they’re waiting. They’ve taken a special interest in your brother, almost like he’s a filtering scientist. Do you have any idea why?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just a damn dentist. He checks people’s teeth for a living, has two grown boys, he’s not into all this syndicate stuff. I haven’t even been close to my brother in years, but I’d do anything to get him out of this. What do I do, Manolo?”

  Manolo slightly kicked a dead duck using the tip of his right crocodile boot. “That’s a difficult call. They’re not asking for a ransom or anything. Just holding him for the moment. I’m telling you this, though, Esteban, not just because you’re from the old barrio and we grew up practically neighbors, but also because I am personally interested in all this as well, as an enforcer of the law. I will try very hard to find out what is happening, and I’ll keep you informed. If they do ask for a ransom, or if I hear anything else, we will arrange another meeting. But not here, maybe on the American side. I have a little business to attend to over there soon. A little job. Hopefully. A big, little job.”