Bellacosa reflected upon his small business. Lupita hardly came into the shop anymore. Only once or twice a week, to help him with Diego’s payroll, or to catch up with the paperwork for the coming tax season. He felt she’d distanced herself from the business to distance herself also from him. Bellacosa knew they hadn’t had much romance the last few years and their marriage was suffering. Though they were able to make a good living now, after working on the business so hard for many years, it had consumed them, and he had no choice but to keep it going. This was their American Dream, to be a family in MacArthur, Texas, as opposed to Reinahermosa, Mexico, the city where they’d met and which they still considered a kind of home.
The only hope they really had now was to keep growing and expand the business. To open another shop, maybe in the next county, Calantula or Starr or Yver. To make a little bit of extra dough. Perhaps Diego could run one of them and make a better living for his family, too.
Bellacosa thought about the things he missed from his childhood. He admittedly missed the thrill of crossing over drugs and money into the U.S. We were so stupid then, Bellacosa thought. We didn’t know the weight of what we were doing. Warnings back then were just lies adults told, but glowing in that innocence and the amount of money we made, that was something like power.
Bellacosa sparked up another Windjumper cigarette, thinking of these daring, naive days. He also missed the period before he and Lupita agreed to quit smoking, for their health. He missed sharing cigarettes with her on car rides, even on the back porch, discussing finances or having an argument. But as the attitude on smoking changed, they agreed to be a positive influence on Yadira, and he reminded himself that, despite the little spat with his daughter, he was a responsible, providing father. That he and Lupita were good parents. They worked hard together, owned their own house, and had invested in their daughter’s education—all things that in some way also gradually dissolved their affection for each other.
Driving down Twenty-Third Street, Bellacosa asked himself, But what could I have done differently all along, chingado, to not end up this way?
The only answer he had was that he could have stuck to the drug game in his early years. He could have grown into a man while trying to keep rising in power and remaining a bachelor. He could have renounced his American citizenship and stayed in Mexico for good.
If I did those things, odds are I wouldn’t be alive on this earth. Just like Freddy and Canchola. They stuck with it and now they’re dead or disappeared.
Bellacosa had run into Freddy Santos’s sister many times in the past, and always avoided eye contact with her. He was afraid she’d ask him questions of the old days.
Just as mysteriously as all those memories came to him, they went away, and Bellacosa was grateful for everything he had in the world. He was honest, sent the bills on time, had built his credit history and maintained it.
About half a block away from the screen-printing shop, a black Blazer driving in front of him came to a complete stop. He tried going around it when another black Blazer with tinted windows blocked him to the left and Bellacosa slammed on the brakes. Four teenagers dressed in the Tejano fashion came out of the first Blazer and the window of the Blazer to his left rolled down. A boy in a suit behind the wheel greeted Bellacosa, playing at being tough and bigger than he actually was.
As the other four teenagers stood around Bellacosa’s work van, the boy said, “Your name is Esteban Bellacosa, is that right? Is that your business over there? RGV Uniforms?”
Looking him in the eyes, Bellacosa said, “Así es.”
“It’s a very nice business,” the boy continued. “You have some sophisticated machinery in there. It looks like it cost a lot of money. Machinery that took sacrifice and hard work to acquire. If something happened to that equipment it would hurt your business. Is that right?”
Without talking, Bellacosa responded in the affirmative.
The boy said, “We are the Zuetzales around here. It didn’t come to our attention until recently your business is in our territory. But don’t look so worried. That only means we are going to collect payment from you. Starting tomorrow.”
“But I pay rent to my landlord of many years, Don Villaseñor.”
“Let us worry about Don Villaseñor. We are your friends now, Esteban Bellacosa. We will watch that your business stays safe. We’ll come by tomorrow morning, shortly after you open. Don’t be late this time. I want you to remember that we approached you here like friends. Look around. None of us are armed. And that pi-po-pe that works for you? We didn’t even touch him. He fell to the ground on his own and started squirming like a worm.”
The teenagers surrounding Bellacosa’s work van chuckled in unison.
“Welcome to the Zuetzal neighborhood, Esteban Bellacosa.”
* * *
ON THE DRIVE back home, after closing up shop early for the day, Bellacosa took his time getting there. He drove through the Sharyland neighborhood of MacArthur, and walking on the shoulder of the road he saw the bearded man who’d been selling walnuts earlier. Bellacosa pulled over and offered to give the man a lift.
“Where are you heading?”
“To the border,” the bearded man said.
Bellacosa signaled him to hop on. For a few minutes they rode in silence. The bearded man smelled like many layers of back roads and sweat. He sat with his back straight, staring at Bellacosa with an attentive grin. Thinking him to be deranged or a pervert, Bellacosa stopped the van and was about to kick the bearded man out, when he saw it was his brother, Oswaldo. They hadn’t seen each other in many years, and Bellacosa was at a loss for what to say.
As they rode along in the van, Oswaldo said, “I ran into some trouble in life, brother, and have been laying low. There are men looking for me, who say I have taken their money. That I owe it to them. I lost my job and social status. My family want nothing to do with me. And these men, when they find me, they will kill me. I know where that money is, brother, only I can’t show my face there. If you can drive me there I’ll take you. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. We can split it down the middle. You are the only family I have left, brother. What do you say?”
They drove to the edge of the Rio Grande by the ghost town of Madero. There was no bridge, not even one border wall dividing the United States and Mexico. Bellacosa saw a piebald mare tied to a mesquite with a bucket of water at its side and Oswaldo signaled him to stop. He jumped out of the van, ran toward the piebald mare, and mounted it. Bellacosa stayed behind the wheel and watched Oswaldo ride the mare, splashing across the shallow, waxy river into Mexico at a gallop.
* * *
THAT EVENING, Bellacosa had a pleasant dinner with his family. They all sat together at the table with the electronics turned off. Lupita had been looking up recipes from the Southwest that had gone out of fashion for a project, and prepared flautas San Quilmas. Yadira had a good day in school and received two different acceptance letters from top universities. Quick to put the disturbing events of the day behind him, Bellacosa told a non-dirty joke he heard from a customer a while back, involving gold, an immigrant, and a bullfrog with a sore tongue that discloses words of wisdom.
After dinner Bellacosa washed the dishes and Lupita announced she’d finished a new piñata for the bazaar during the weekend. She’d been wanting to branch off into another business about a year back and had learned the art of making piñatas. Lupita rented a booth at the MacArthur Bazaar and was happy selling them there, until she felt confident enough to find a location and open her own shop.
Yadira, Lupita, and Bellacosa walked into the shed they’d built that was Lupita’s studio, and Yadira said, “Oh my God, Mom, wow. This is amazing.”
Lupita had made a piñata in the form of a Trufflepig. It had yellow hooves and dark green skin with a yellow beak, made out of papier-mâché.
Bellacosa said, “What kind of thing is this?”
“What do you mean?” Lupita said. “You don’t like it?”
<
br /> “No, I like it. I like it, of course. I just thought. I don’t know.”
“Don’t listen to Dad, Mom. This is incredibly bad-A. Somebody is totally gonna buy this.”
Lupita got mixed signals from Bellacosa when she asked him to elaborate, and, being confused himself, he couldn’t come up with anything. He slept on the couch that night and awoke before anybody the next morning, brewed some medium-roast coffee from Chiapas. He made eggs with beans and salsa, the way his mother did for him and Oswaldo. When Lupita woke up he felt an iciness from her, which put him in a funky mood again.
Yadira drove herself to school in the car they had financed for her, and Bellacosa whistled quietly in the van on the drive to work again.
Suddenly he said out loud to himself, “I will grow old with my Lupita. This is just a rough patch. We will come out stronger after all this. I will be a less stubborn man with our marriage and we will learn to live in peace and be happy.”
The two black Blazers were outside his shop ten minutes before opening time, along with Diego’s Murciélago. There was something about these tough guys that he didn’t believe, that didn’t quite scare him. Nevertheless, Bellacosa decided he was going to the authorities in the afternoon.
When he walked in the same four unarmed teenagers were waiting for him, and Bellacosa saw Diego on the ground once again, shaking like he had been electrocuted.
“Diego,” Bellacosa said, and moved toward him as the four teenagers grabbed and subdued Bellacosa against the wall. Diego was convulsing ravenously. From the back room the boy wearing the sharp suit emerged like he’d just had a meeting with the undertaker, grinning like a crocodile and exposing his matchstick teeth.
“What’s wrong with your friend here?” the boy said. “You oughta make him see a doctor. I think he might be an epileptic. It can be serious, you know. And the man has dependents.”
The boy’s fist turned into a vampire bat and it bit Bellacosa on his neck.
Bellacosa heard strange sounds circling, as if the stars had climbed down and started barking, as if the earth below him had turned into clay humans speaking all at once about the future. Bellacosa heard the song of the Sirens, the lyre of the passed-out man, felt himself cold and with jellylike hands.
When Bellacosa came to he was in the dark trunk of a moving vehicle—probably in Diego’s Murciélago. He felt sticky with blood. Although he couldn’t see, Bellacosa knew he wasn’t bleeding. Then he felt the body next to him, and a very deep sadness came over him. It was Diego, and he didn’t give signs of life. The car skidded to a stop, the trunk was opened, and the blue light of day blasted in like an unwelcome mariachi.
They’d zip-tied Bellacosa’s wrists together on his back. Four silhouettes pulled Diego and him out of the trunk. They were suddenly surrounded by thick snow. There was snow on the ground, toward the hills, on the still treetops that looked down like old schoolteachers, and there were long tire tracks the vehicle had made on the Styrofoam terrain. Feeling the slippery ground beneath him, Bellacosa figured they were over a frozen lake.
When he saw Diego’s body unconscious over the ice, he saw his own brother, his own blood, lying there like a suitcase full of flesh and bones, waiting to be inspected by customs. Bellacosa’s eyes finally adjusted to the inferior daylight. The four teenagers who pulled him out of the trunk were armed and wore dark sunglasses and silver boots. In a quick gesture, the boy leader signaled the other four to commence, as if rehearsing a scene.
One of the teenagers grabbed Bellacosa by his work shirt and pushed him to start walking. Bellacosa heard a sound again from afar, something between beeping and the yelping of a bloodhound. It was persistent yet subtle. The teenagers were confident in their wolfpack movements, and none of them responded to hearing the sound. Getting a mental hold on himself, Bellacosa thought about what was happening: that these boys were there to kill him. He looked up at the gray sky as if it was a safe waiting to be cracked, and the light snow over the frozen lake was like a Sunday pastry.
What beautiful battlefields we tread on, Bellacosa said to himself.
He looked down at his white Velcro tennis shoes walking over the crystal-blue ice and didn’t recognize them. He lost his traction, slipped, fell forward on the side of his face. As if it was a sick joke, the four teenagers and the boy leader lost their balance and followed suit. Lying there, looking into the frozen lake, Bellacosa saw a structure submerged in the ice. As the armed teenagers cursed and picked themselves up, a gun went off that hurt nobody, and Bellacosa lay there as if he’d found the source of the song of the Sirens, and was beginning to be seduced by it. He saw that the structure in the ice was not a ship or a vessel and it was made of bricks. A house? A building? It was a pyramid the size of a shopping mall. It rested in the dark depths with a wise and infinite patience, knowing one day the ice would thaw and it would emerge, setting foot on the shore like a great amphibian. Bellacosa was struck dumb at the sight of this submerged pyramid. As he stood up he asked the teenagers, “Which lake is this?”
“Laguna Ballí,” responded the last of the teenagers to get to his feet.
Bellacosa heard that strange, distant sound again. It wheezed like a balloon with a slow leak and rang like an alarm from the valley of snow.
From the lake’s horizon appeared a small green dot making its way toward them. Bellacosa strained his eyes to see it and said, “There is no Laguna Ballí. Ballí is the South Texas desert.”
The figure on the ice effortlessly glided toward them. It was a Trufflepig, its hooves skating on the ice. It stopped about ten feet in front of them. The Trufflepig cast its odd, beady eyeballs over the teenagers and Bellacosa like tiny rain clouds, and its stumpy tail wiggled obscenely. As they gazed at it, the Trufflepig brayed loudly out of its beak, like a deranged donkey at the garbage dump; like the bird of the apocalypse; like all of creation crawling out of a deep, dark nothingness. The Trufflepig brayed and brayed, as the armed teenagers covered their ears. Bellacosa tried with his shoulders, as his hands were zip-tied.
Everything slowed down, to where the braying reached cavernous lows, then in a flash it all sped up. The boy leader held up his pistol, pointed it at the Trufflepig. Bellacosa let out a primitive battle cry, jumped and kicked in the air like he never had in his life, and with his foot made contact with the boy’s pistol—
Bellacosa’s body rolled off the gurney in the mock hospital room, as his right foot kicked in the air. With the sensors attached to his body, he hit the floor, wearing the blue suit and Franco Brunis. Bellacosa panicked for a moment and felt around for the ice as the Trufflepig in the room continued to bray for all it was worth. Bellacosa’s face was dripping with sweat like a wet mop. For a second he wasn’t sure it was actually sweat and wiped some of it with his sleeves. He got up and looked at the Trufflepig’s jaundiced eyes, as it lay on the crib-like cushioned high chair, the sensors on its small body. It stopped braying.
The silence came down like a guillotine.
Bellacosa removed the leechlike sensors from his body, buttoned his shirt. He moved toward the window and saw a massacre had occurred. He opened the door of the mock hospital room and heard light whimpering. The scientists, in their white bodysuits, were covered in blood. None of them moved. The armed men were also shot up, one of them twitching and holding a pistol, and the chubby man who had the golden AK was dying alongside him. The golden AK was missing.
Bellacosa considered the possibility that it was him who was dead. He remembered his wife and his daughter the way he’d just seen them, like the reality he’d experienced was a stove he forgot to turn off. He felt desperate to get back to them. His heart beat fast and he panicked, looking down at the shot-up young scientists and thinking about his wife and the business they’d started; about his teenage daughter graduating high school and going off to college; about his homeless, wandering brother, Oswaldo.
When Bellacosa looked back at the stoic Trufflepig he began to realize that none of those things had actually
happened, and he quietly sobbed as he remembered his wife and his daughter and their painful deaths. He saw his four-year-old daughter with the color of her skin drained out in the months before her death. His chest heaved as he looked down at the ridiculous Trufflepig. He wanted to shake it; to destroy the terrible creature. Then he wanted to embrace it like a filthy teddy bear after a bombing. Bellacosa didn’t know what it was, but the Trufflepig had brought him closer to his dead wife and his dead daughter, to his life if it had taken a different direction. He slapped his own head to force himself to stop crying. He pictured his wife’s face as he saw it in the ultra-vivid dream, and his daughter’s, got emotional again, and gently this time tried to push those feelings aside.
On the floor, Bellacosa saw his wallet and his keys and grabbed them. He was half-afraid to open the door of the main room, pictured the Border Protectors stomping in at any moment. If anybody took a look at this they’d conclude it was he who killed everybody. He opened the door, which led to a long, gloomy corridor with a blinking green light at the far end. He was about to make a break for it when he looked back at the Trufflepig. Bellacosa walked carefully around the blood and bodies and wondered what the hell had happened. It didn’t appear there had been a struggle or much of a fight among them. Bellacosa thought maybe the Border Protectors did it themselves to pin it on him, that he was the patsy of this unspeakable crime.
Bellacosa removed the sensors from the Trufflepig. He grabbed it, carefully at first, until he was sure the animal didn’t mind, then he walked out of the room carrying it confidently down the long corridor. The Trufflepig wasn’t slippery like he’d imagined, but scaly and dry, and Bellacosa had a firm grip on it. The Trufflepig salivated from its eyes and wiggled its tiny feet and stumpy tail. Bellacosa walked briskly down the dark corridor, thinking at any moment the floor would give or turn to quicksand, and down they would go. When he reached the blinking green light, he saw it was a switch on the wall, and the corridor made a sharp turn into a room that gurgled, as if housing many large aquariums.
Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Page 17
