The Cagney picture, finding his brother, Oswaldo, in the condition he was in, and all the recent events were doing a number on Bellacosa’s sense of emotional equilibrium. Thinking of his boyhood, he had a hard time accepting that what he’d done then was wrong: crossing drugs with the other boys, selling them to men who drove them farther north—though these were still considered serious crimes, in those days the brutality just hadn’t caught up. To him, they were still boys playing at marbles—there were rules and everybody played fairly. This had allowed Bellacosa to make a lot more money than he did shining shoes in the very beginning, and he’d moved his mother into a respectable place, paid Oswaldo’s way through the Dental Academy of Merida. It wasn’t until later that the synthetic drug crystal-kind entered the market. The violence and addictions that followed forced a change in perspective, paving the way for the legalization of certain drugs and controlled substances, but by that time Bellacosa had already met his future wife, Lupita.
Together they mapped out their future, and when Bellacosa was ready to tell his partners, Rogelio Canchola and Freddy Santos, and their employer that he was quitting, he didn’t have to anymore. The trafficking and production of crystal-kind was slowly gaining way, as was the bloodshed and betrayal up and down the chain of command. Somebody on the American side turned out to be an informant during a standard deal, there was a raid, and a couple of the higher-ups got caught and sentenced. Rogelio disappeared, and Bellacosa, until learning otherwise from Paco Herbert, assumed he’d been killed, like Freddy was. Bellacosa laid low in Mexico shortly after marrying Lupita, and they moved to Mission, in South Texas, on their second anniversary. Lupita applied for U.S. citizenship and they invested in equipment to start their own screen-printing business. They did well for themselves for many years, screen-printing uniforms and class shirts for elementary and high schools across the Rio Grande Valley.
Still, putting everything into context with history and modern trafficking and now filtering, Bellacosa couldn’t believe what he’d gotten away with in those days. For never having killed anybody, he got pretty ahead of the game as a boy and a young man. How far could I have gotten if I would have stayed, he wondered, but knew the answer had to be: not much further at all. He dropped it, as fate would have it, at the perfect time, and always he had Lupita to thank. When she was alive he never dared harbor the “what if,” but now he couldn’t help but imagine what could have happened, how much more money he could’ve made on the side in those days with the occasional deal. Instead of suffering through the years of the food shortage, struggling hard to have the life with a wife and child his own mother once wished for him, then burying all of them and slowly aging into a lonely, broke old man.
Bellacosa pictured his good, patient wife, standing next to him in a lucid way no photograph could show. Though they’d had many trying moments, though he could have been a better husband, and not a day went by since her death he didn’t beg for her forgiveness, Bellacosa suddenly wished for a chance to do it all again. He remembered Job and how he’d lost it all in a cruel, sadistic test of his love of God, and how as an old man he was rewarded with a real chance at a family and a prosperous, normal life. As his pain was steeping, Bellacosa reminded himself that the cosmos has a plan for everybody, even widowers who’ve lost everything. He didn’t allow himself to think of things being unfair, and unlike Job, Bellacosa was unsure of his faith toward any God. He didn’t wish for anything to be easier, only for another crack at it, a chance to be able to love his wife again, to show his dying daughter something meaningful, more than what he was able to offer when confronted with the reality of her imminent death.
It was a shame Bellacosa wasn’t really a drinking man. Alcohol never sat well with him, and he always asked himself what there was for a non-drinking man to quench his sorrows. In spite of himself, he uncorked the rest of the Bordeaux and said, “Just to get rid of it, then I’m done.”
In recent months he’d also grown fond of old music from all over the world. If it was Mexican, great; if not it didn’t really matter, so long as the musicians played non-amplified, acoustic instruments—what they call Depression Era music, especially. He walked to the old Jeep, grabbed the disc of World War II songs that Paco Herbert had left behind, walked back to his place, and popped it into the audiobox. He listened to the songs into the evening, some humble and folksy, others clearly arranged for propaganda purposes, with high production value and orchestras. At a certain point he did a little dance in his shack holding the glass of wine, with his other arm around an invisible partner. He enjoyed simply holding the glass, not really drinking, listening to songs about Hitler, evil, hope, Yokohama, and patriotism in those old days he never lived through.
When the disc ended it was nighttime. Bellacosa set the untouched glass of wine down, put on his Wingham shoes, and took a drive in the old Jeep. He drove through the historical district in Mission, then closer to the border, to hidden spots he thought maybe Oswaldo could be, like the abandoned monastery, the run-down BigTex warehouse, and the shady side of Will Shuppe Park. He decided to cross into Reinahermosa and visit the old neighborhood where they lived their formative years, hoping to find some kind of answer, and his hands began to sweat as he imagined an encounter with Manolo Segura. When the old Jeep neared the international bridge Bellacosa saw yellow police tape and two Border Protector tanks set up in front of barricaded toll booths like the steel boots of colossal titans. Uniformed officers standing guard shone lights on Bellacosa’s face and a voice from a bullhorn blared, “Move along, the bridge is closed off for investigation by state and federal law. Move along. You can cross at the Pharr-Progreso Bridge.”
As he drove away Bellacosa noticed news vans for several networks that’d been corralled, and a reporter was doing a live report in Arabic on the sidewalk, while the local station crew tore down their own equipment.
None of this seemed out of the ordinary to Bellacosa, but he took it as a sign not to cross into Mexico at all, to calm down, and drive back home.
He thought again of his client Don Villaseñor, and hoped what the waiter Quintero had said about the kidnapping was misinformation. With him missing, Bellacosa was at a loss for what to do, whom to answer to, and the money he owed from the failed 7900 Rig purchase was just sitting in his bank account, tempting him. Though it wasn’t a huge amount, he could live on that for a good stretch of time, considering his discipline and minimalist lifestyle. But it didn’t feel right. He hadn’t worked for it and the money wasn’t his.
Bellacosa stopped to pump gas, picked up the day’s edition of The Bugle of Plenty, folded it, and didn’t read the headline until he was walking into his shack. It read: “Thirteen Olmec Heads Stolen Overnight.” He read the entire article, sipping at the red wine, and finally understood all the fuss at the Reinahermosa-MacArthur International Bridge. They’d taken the Olmec head that’d been a gift from the ex-president of Mexico Miguel Redondo to Sigifredo Mueller, the acting mayor of Reinahermosa twenty years back. He read the article a second time and it seemed more like a piece of absurd fiction than news. Bellacosa couldn’t believe the audacity of these thieves, these men. In this world, it is only men who are guilty of anything, men of flesh and bones and gravity and sin, he reminded himself.
He turned on the ceiling fan and cracked open the door to his shack. Sitting on the easy chair his brother had used during their encounter, Bellacosa smoked a Herzegovina Flor, and fell asleep to an a capella number playing on the audiobox called “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’.”
A few hours later Bellacosa was startled awake by a cold, sticky hand lightly tapping on his left wrist, and he hopped to his feet, his heart dry-heaving. It was a small, old woman with curlers in her hair and a baby-blue bathrobe covering her entire small frame. She was holding a burning candle that emitted a good amount of gray light, and after a few seconds Bellacosa recognized her as his landlady.
“Ay, señora, what a surprise,” Bellacosa stammered, realizing he’d been busted
smoking indoors.
“I’m sorry for waking you, joven Esteban. I didn’t mean to give you a fright. You had your door open so I helped myself in. Please forgive me for this trespass, I had no right.”
“No, no problem at all, señora, how can I help you? I’m at your service.”
“Come with me, por favor, joven Esteban.”
The landlady was very formal and old-fashioned, from a distinguished family in Mexico City whose lineage could be traced back to the Toscana neighborhood in Rome. She was about thirty years his senior and Bellacosa got a huge kick from her referring to him as joven—young man. They entered her large, tastefully decorated house, and she led him up a balustrade staircase to a master bedroom with a golden threshold. She held the candle close to the side of a large bed with blue and yellow covers, and there was Don Castañeda, her husband, beholding the kind of peace reserved only for the sleeping.
Doña Castañeda said, “I had a dream where my husband kissed me. And he told me, ‘I’ll see you soon, mi amor,’ and jumped into a fountain carrying an umbrella, turning very small as he did. This took place at a train station, surrounded by people hurrying in every direction. When I awoke he was already this way.”
Even before he reached to take his pulse, Bellacosa understood the patriarch was dead. He no longer looked peaceful, but like a general in mourning, the war long over. Doña Castañeda placed the candle on the bureau by the bed and held the old man’s hand as Bellacosa dialed the paramedics. He stayed in the room until they arrived shortly thereafter, and a young black medic who spoke Spanish took information from Doña Castañeda with patience. Emotion hadn’t yet settled in the old woman, so what she recounted was merely factual. The events hadn’t been articulated into actual feelings for her, and Bellacosa tried to remember how much time passed after the deaths of his wife and daughter until he admitted they were gone. Probably no time at all was his answer.
Bellacosa offered to give her a ride to MacArthur Memorial Hospital, where they were taking him, but Doña Castañeda insisted it wasn’t necessary. The old woman removed her curlers, changed into something more formidable, and drove herself to the hospital filled with quiet pride.
He admired her freight train determination and tried to imagine what she could’ve looked like at his age. Bellacosa checked the time. It was 2:45 a.m. He walked over to his shack, which smelled like an ashtray to him, and opened the doors and windows to get the air circulating. After turning the lights off he sat in total darkness on the easy chair until he found himself dozing, then went to bed.
THIRTEEN
Bellacosa woke up with a clear image of Oswaldo, the huarango thorn holes around his mouth, and regrettably accepted what they’d done to his brother. Which to him meant they had done the same thing to the neighbors’ brothers as well; which meant they would also take the neighbors and one day they would come and take him, too. Bellacosa felt there was a constant, unspoken war and the battlefield was always somewhere in the map of the collective brain. He thought about Don Castañeda now gone, que en paz descanse, and wondered what the world looked like to that old man in his final days. He remembered the girl in the pastel dress, along with the Trufflepig at the dinner—the girl being so comfortable around that terrible creature.
As he had his breakfast back at El Caballo Ballo, Bellacosa pulled out the crude sketch he’d previously made. What was the word the girl in the pastel dress used for the Trufflepig, he asked himself. He’d also heard the waiter Quintero say it. It was like the name of a volcano.
Susanita, an older career waitress with a tiny diamond engraved in one of her teeth that flashed with her smile, refilled his coffee without asking, and brought him an extra ramekin of tomatillo-cilantro salsa. Bellacosa looked around to see if Quintero was creeping around before his shift, and thanked Susanita kindly.
Holding up the napkin, Bellacosa asked, “Susanita, do you know what this animal is?”
Susanita appeared shocked and embarrassed, like Bellacosa had flashed her his dick. She denied knowing what it was, blushed, looked down and to the side. Bellacosa could see she was lying, somehow felt sorry for her, and did not press the matter further.
He ate his chilaquiles oaxaqueños humming a World War II folk song, and sipped his coffee thoughtfully. The vibe was dense and uneasy with the staff of El Caballo Ballo, and he didn’t bother asking about Don Villaseñor.
After breakfast he decided it was finally time to find Paco Herbert. Bellacosa had a lot of questions, and was confident Paco was the only person he could trust to ask. Funny, Bellacosa hadn’t felt anybody to be a friend in a long time, and Paco Herbert felt more and more like a friend, though the reporter was at least twenty years younger than him. He questioned his own judgment in this, but managed to shrug it off, and he parked the old Jeep along Baldemar Avenue in downtown MacArthur and walked to Baby Grand Central.
On the sidewalk he was stopped by the chilango anarchist man who sold toys from the old world like tops, yo-yos, and baleros, all of which he’d whittled himself from Valley mesquite. “One for the independence, señor.”
Bellacosa didn’t know what he meant and asked him to repeat it. The man replied, “When you support the independence of one, you support the independence of all. Revolution first starts with the wrongful imprisonment of an exceptional individual. We old-timers have to remind the proletariats of this, otherwise they’ll catch them like El Tigre de Santa Inez. You remember him? He was the thief of the small area of Durango they once called Santa Inez. He was a master thief before such a thing was common. He’d break into business establishments, banks, and people’s homes, all at odd hours of the day, and nobody ever seemed to notice him, since he was always well groomed and carried himself like a cultured prince among men. Well, remember now how they caught him? This guy, who the press and people dubbed El Tigre for his cunning ability, never did much with the money and artifacts he stole. He hoarded everything in various holes he dug by the wilderness in the mountainside. He was living out there, too. When the authorities discovered this they sent a few teams out there and guess how they caught him? With his pants down in the middle of taking a huge shit. They let him wipe himself with those soft banana leaves before arresting him. That’s why we have that saying now, ‘You caught me like El Tigre de Santa Inez.’ Meaning, you caught me at my most vulnerable, when I was taking a shit, jajaja.”
Bellacosa sighed and asked him how much for a balero, and the man replied, “Seis.”
This seemed too much and Bellacosa offered the man five dollars, wondering what kind of anarchist this crazy man was, charging so much for two pieces of wood tied together with a string.
“Sobres,” the man said, and gave Bellacosa the one he secretly felt proudest of.
Bellacosa walked with the balero into Baby Grand Central, past the older southern woman who ran La Frutería Andes as she laughed like a yodeling bird at a Spanish game show on her little black-and-white replica. He approached Marselita’s and saw Colleen Rae working the counter, but no Paco Herbert. It was emptying out as a group of suited men walked away laughing and shoving one another in caveman-like praise. Colleen Rae had a scowling, offended look on her face.
When she saw Bellacosa approaching she winced her eyes and told him, “You know what that pig just said to me?”
“Which one?”
“The one with the goatee and neck tattoo. I don’t even want to repeat it, just know it was misogynistic and repulsive. And look at all his idiot work friends laughing. They didn’t tip me a cent and left their stations filthy. Look.”
Very calmly, Bellacosa walked toward them, and got in front of the man described by Colleen Rae.
Bellacosa said, “Excuse me.”
The men all stopped laughing between the Middle Eastern couple’s stand selling local honey and bark from all over the world and the stand belonging to the Chilean man who fixed watches and sold Mexican junk food. Colleen Rae didn’t mean for Bellacosa to react as such and, fearing trouble, left the Mar
selita’s stand. The cook in the back washed his hands and looked over their way.
The man’s shoddily executed neck tattoo was of a harpooned mermaid. Very aggressively, he said, “What’s this? You have something to say to me, old man?”
“I don’t have anything to say. But you do. To apologize to this young woman for disrespecting her, and for disrespecting yourself.”
“Excuse me, old man?” Neck-Tattoo replied, and from thin air the man produced a blade, while three men beside him grabbed Bellacosa by the arms and legs, one of them administering a hold that prevented much struggle. Bellacosa dropped the balero as they carried him outside Baby Grand Central. The three men pinned him down hard on the sidewalk, as Neck-Tattoo pressed the blade to Bellacosa’s left cheek. There was loud cursing on Colleen Rae’s part, and commotion among people and passersby, when suddenly a voice said, “Ricky, we can’t do this. We got a meeting in a few minutes.”
Just like that, the gang of them fled calmly toward an office building on the next block—central offices for Hatfield’s Supercenters, and the tallest building in MacArthur, Texas. A couple of young strangers helped Bellacosa to his feet. A heavyset woman in a blue tank top was outraged, protesting in a rapid Spanish nobody understood, and spit on the sidewalk. It had all happened so fast Bellacosa felt a little embarrassed—a man his age, being shown up by a pack of twentysomethings.
Colleen Rae suddenly emerged from the arches of Baby Grand Central in her smock, a revolver in her hand. Before anybody else could see, Bellacosa grabbed her by the shoulders and redirected her back inside, to Marselita’s, and said, “C’mon, this isn’t necessary.”
Her teeth were clenched and in her eyes Bellacosa saw an anger that ran deeper and was more real than what he’d seen in any of those men. He let go of her and her body went limp. She slipped the revolver into her apron pocket and went into the women’s room in Baby Grand Central. Bellacosa looked around as people went about their normal business again. He had forgotten that crazy things like this happen every day here. Then he felt something dripping down his chin and realized Neck-Tattoo had cut him.
Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Page 13
