A friend picks Suarez up and drives him back to base, where he goes on half-duty for two more weeks.
“Rough duty, my friend.”
This from Suarez’s Sergeant. They lounge on adjacent cots in the otherwise empty barracks passing a smoldering spliff.
“I hear we’re doing some big anti-drug exercises soon.” Suarez says.
“Just when you go back to full duty. Big fuckin’ exercises.” The Sergeant puffs haphazardly on the jay, sending up clouds of blue smoke. “We’re going to need every piece of transport we can get our hands on,” he says. “Including that old Huey of yours.”
“The Huey’s a lot more reliable than most of that high tech shit.”
“Then you’ll be happy to know, since your Huey doesn’t move fast enough to be used in an assault, that we’re using it to ferry around the visiting dignatarios and some Brigade Escorpion liaison bitches.”
“So we’ll just be baby sitters for the entire operation?”
“It could be worse,” the Sergeant retorts. “You could be rotting in a shallow grave out behind the Crimson Cat.”
When the Sergeant leaves to drive into Matamoros, Corporal Suarez begins constructing an explosive device that will fit into his knapsack along with his navigation charts. As the full-time aerodrome clerk when he isn’t navigating aboard the Vietnam era Huey, Suarez has the only set of keys to the file room. The perfect hidey-hole for building a bomb.
4.
The Vice President of the United States of America sips a glass of fresh squeezed OJ. His cat-o’-nine-tails eyes torture every detail of the room, looking for anything out of place, any breach of etiquette, any potential threat.
The VP is a stickler for detail, a real pain in the ass. He lowers himself into an overstuffed Victorian armchair. His ass sinks six inches below seat level.
“Who owns furniture like this? It’s like a goddamn man eating plant.”
“Your host, the Governor of Texas?”
The Veep waves his hand dismissively.
“Even the Governor of Texas has better taste that this,” he says. “What have we got, Monty?”
Monty Brown, the VP’s chief of staff, consults a miniature black leather notebook.
“Just the high points,” the Veep adds.
“Today is the fund raiser luncheon at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. Then you’re free until dinner with the Gov.”
Wetting a forefinger with spittle, Monty flicks over to the next page of his diary.
“Thursday there’s the meeting with the Texas Supreme Court Justice whose wife was indicted last week for arson. It’s a condition of his agreement to resign that he gets to shake your hand in a photo op. Then there’s a beer and brats picnic with the Bexar County Republican Party Committee. From two to four you can hang by the hotel pool. At seven you’ve got drinks and dinner on the River Walk with a bunch of local business brass.”
“I need a fuckin’ vacation, Monty.”
Monty detects the beginning of a whine in the VP’s voice. Things are bound to head south before the week is out.
“Friday you and El Presidente do a quick flyover of the cross-border anti-drug exercises called Operation Fig Leaf.”
“Fig Leaf? Who thought that one up?”
“I did, sir. Thought it has a nice Biblical ring.”
“Sounds like a bunch of fags in a hot tub.”
Allowing a thin smile, Monty continues:
“From there you ‘copter directly to El Presidente’s lodge in the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains for a weekend of bighorn sheep hunting.”
“Finally something fun.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Veep slaps his thighs. Then struggles to climb out of the sagging cushions.
“Give me a hand here for Christ’s sake.”
Monty gives him a hand up.
“Breakfast?”
The VP is salivating.
“Just remember,” says Monty, “two Republican-leaning reporters are joining you for an on-the-record chat. And since your wife isn’t here, there’ll be biscuits with redeye gravy and plenty of bacon.”
A burly Texas State Trooper opens the doors into the dining room. As they enter, he stands smartly to attention, his heels snapping together. He offers the vacuous smile of a certified lunatic.
5.
DRAMA Public Relations Officer Lieutenant Bobbie Beck thinks: I have no reason to live.
Across the room his single parent sister-in-law Marge Carter is talking to the preacher. She shakes his hand, which is boney and calloused.
“I’ll pray for your little boy,” the preacher says. He reaches out a hand and ruffles the sunflower blond hair of a twelve year old. Marge’s kid’s name is Randall. Randall Carter needs a liver transplant or he’ll be dead in six months. “When it rains, it pours,” the preacher adds.
He glances over at Bobbie, who gives him back a fuck you look.
There are still a few folks milling about, poking at the remaining slices of cold cuts, forking up another helping of potato salad or black eyed peas and cabbage. Mostly they’re friends of Amanda’s. Amanda, who is now six feet under, dead from a stroke, the bottom line result of pregnancy-induced toxemia. The deceased unborn child shares the same coffin.
Marge takes a can of Budweiser from the cooler next to the dining table, rolls it back and forth across her forehead a few times, then pops the top and walks over to Bobbie. She offers him the beer. When he shakes his head, she upends the can and takes a long swig. Then lights a Newport.
“I’m sorry, Bobbie,” she says.
“Who gives a fuck!?”
“Shit happens.”
“No it doesn’t. Amanda should never have gotten pregnant. She was 39. When you’re 39 and pregnant you put yourself at risk.”
Bobbie looks across the room to where Randall is sitting on the couch playing with a handheld video game. There are no other children at the wake. He wonders who put Randall at risk.
“What are you going to do about Randall?” he asks.
“I keep praying for a miracle.”
“That isn’t going to cut it.”
Marge starts to cry.
The next morning Bobbie calls the Billy Desire Insurance Agency and buys a hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy. He names his sister-in-law as the sole beneficiary.
“I’m sorry about Amanda,” Billy says.
“Who gives a fuck!?” says Bobbie and disconnects the line.
6.
Tiara Vega dreams an impossible Rube Goldberg device: marbles slaloming down shoots and spillways, a trap door opened by a hopped-up rat racing on a treadmill to nowhere, springing springs and whirling gizmos, a death’s head beetle dragging a slab of marble up a slippery slope. The penultimate step in this nightmarish chain of events is the removal of the firing pin from a hand grenade, achieved by the gnashed teeth of a nude dentist swinging by his ankles in the grip of a gay Rumanian trapeze artist. The grenade resides like an evil egg beneath the extra firm, hyper-allergenic pillow of Major General Artimus Wade Vega.
Tiara jumps awake just before the explosion in her dream creates a blood and brains Rorschach splatter on the wall above their mutual bed. Tiara is in a sweat, her heart palpitating like an amphetamine-stoked rodent.
The other half of the bed is empty, uninhabited. The general is still absent, seeking telltale spores of drug traffickers in the vastness of the Chihuahua Desert.
She steps into a cold shower.
Cascading darts of icy water restore calm and rationality. She knows Artimus can’t help himself. Like all men, he’s a slave to his cock. But he’s always been a good provider. And a decent fuck.
Besides, I love Artimus don’t I?
There has to be another way.
Slipping a 9mm semi-automatic Glock pistol into her purse and securing the gimcrack lock of the married officers housing she shares with Artimus, Tiara cranks her aging Dodge Charger into life. This baby could use a dose of Viagra, she thinks.
At the
main gate of Firebase Harry S. Truman somewhere in the south Texas scrub, Sergeant Albert Ramos rests his egalitarian gaze upon Tiara’s serendipitous cleavage.
“Ya’ll drive safely, Mrs. Wade,” he says.
“Honey, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
She guns the hypercharged engine, pops the clutch and roars through the exit, splintering the wooden gate arm into a quintet of jagged-edged segments flying every which way.
Well shit! thinks Sergeant Ramos, they’ll ream my ass for that.
***
Three hours later Tiara eases the Charger into a visit’s slot at the Tres Amigos condominiums, three stories of sagging, black-mold-infested timber and stucco on a back street in Port Aransas, Texas. Her knuckles rap harshly on the door to #308. The door opens.
Framed in the doorway Susan O’Faolain, wrapped in a corn yellow cotton robe, sways provocatively to an Amy Winehouse tune floating up from somewhere in the dusky interior.
Susan O’Faolain: one hundred twenty narrow-hipped pounds of flyblown femininity. Eyes the blue of NASCAR decals. A black mole on the left side just above her dry martini lips and below the left nostril of her pub-crawl nose inherited from her Irish father. Arms muscled; fingernails trimmed short and left natural. Bodacious.
“Help you?” she asks.
It’s not as if she doesn’t know who Tiara is.
“Can we talk inside?” Tiara says.
“Suit yourself.”
Susan turns back into the apartment.
It takes several seconds for Tiara’s eyes to adjust to the twilight of drawn shades and flickering candles. To one side of a conversation area made of black leather sectionals, Susan sits at a Louis XIV-looking table shuffling a pack of tarot cards.
Ignoring the straight back chair opposite Susan, Tiara remains standing.
“I didn’t come here to play cards,” she says. “I came here to tell you for the last time to stay the fuck away from Artimus. He loves new toys. But your cooze isn’t on the approved list.”
“Since you came so far, I thought the least I could do is read your fortune,” says Susan. She ruffles the cards. In the next instant the pack explodes from her hand, fluttering to the floor like dead leaves.
Tiara suppresses the urge to start picking them up. “Your fortune has just about run out,” she says.
Susan stands, shrugs off her robe and walks naked into the mini-kitchen. She returns with a stainless steel ice bucket. Febrile as a gazelle scenting a lioness on the hunt, Tiara can’t take her eyes away. Her heart flutters up and down like a white cabbage butterfly. Her brain is a saucepan of cheese grits bubbling on the back burner. Beautiful younger women have always been her weakness.
“Would you mind putting some clothes on?” Tiara says.
“Would you mind pouring me a Tradicional on the rocks?” Susan sits on one of the leather sectionals and tucks one leg under the thigh of the other.
Tiara pours two tequilas. Hers is neat. She tosses it back and pours another. Then hands Susan hers.
In no time they’re groping each other with wild abandon. Tiara shucks her clothes on the double, a military term of art she’d learned from Artimus. As she goes down on Susan’s Day-Glo pink whoosawhichit, it occurs to Tiara that she might be wrong about the source of Artimus’ dose of crabs.
Later on Susan finds the 9mm in Tiara’s purse, ejects the clip and the chambered round and hands it to Tiara, who puts it to a not uncommon pornographic use.
7.
Born from the loins of an HIV-positive skag whore in a back street doorway in Matamoros, Mexico, the “Toad” owes his life to the Cartel del Gulfo.
His 15-year-old mother bled to death in that very doorway. A gringo tourist who’d strayed from the beaten path finds her wasted corpse sprawled in a pool of blood.
Moments before the tourist makes his grim discovery, a wizened old man bent over like an upside down L shuffles past the same doorway. Seeing the silent newborn lying in a swamp of blood and placenta, he cuts the umbilical cord and holds the newborn aloft like a plucked chicken. When it begins to cry he tucks it under his handmade suit jacket and hurries along as best he can on his arthritic legs. Two blocks further on a cream-colored Cadillac pulls to the curb and the old man climbs into the back seat. He hands the wailing baby to one of the two female bodyguards with whom he shares the vastness of the Cadillac’s backseat.
The old man is Carlito Guzman, silent founder of the Cartel del Gulfo.
The next day the most expensive abogado in Matamoros enters the municipal palace and files a birth certificate and guardianship papers for the newborn street child. The name of the child is shown on the documents as Jesus del Toro. His guardian is none other than Carlito Guzman.
Known as the “Toad” because of his gray warty skin and his relentless patience until his prey comes within reach of his long, black tongue, Jesus del Toro has been waiting 27 years, since the day of his birth, for this assignment.
Adjusting his cap and sunglasses, Captain del Toro walks out of the airbase canteen onto the sun bleached tarmac and toward the Huey UH-1N helicopter parked 150 meters away. Waves of heat radiate from the metal bird.
Like a coating of olive oil, sweat sizzles on his exposed skin.
Inside the Huey it’s a sauna. He turns on a small overhead fan. Then sits at the instrument panel, running through the pre-flight checklist. At 0500 hours tomorrow Operation Fig Leaf kicks off. At noon he and his crew will lift off from Aerodrome Alpha and fly the bird across the border to Firebase Harry S. Truman. There they will secure on board El Presidente de Republic de Mexico, El Vicepresidente de Estados Unidos and a bunch of other high placed scumbags for a flyover review of the results of the morning’s assault on the plantations, labs and facilities of his only family, the Cartel del Gulfo.
These attacks on the assets of the Cartel del Gulfo are intolerable to the Toad. How dare these pathetic nations strike at his all-powerful family. The family of the man who like a god had lifted him up from the gutter!
He sucks down a sob of anger and frustration.
Now he is ready for payback.
Tomorrow the highest of the high, the mightiest of the mighty, the wielders of power north and south of the Rio Grande will die in a fiery crash when Captain del Toro slams the Huey into the ground at full speed. The fact that the Toad will also die is irrelevant. He has already lived 27 more years than the cards foretold.
8.
It is after midnight when Tiara Vega trips open the door lock and stumbles on the cheap wall-to-wall carpeting of the married officers housing she shares with Artimus Wade Vega at Firebase Harry S. Truman. Having lost all sense of time in the arms of Susan O’Faolain, there has been no chance for her to take a shower, just a splash or two of YSL Opium. She reeks of sex.
When she flips on the overhead light, Artimus, propped at a 30-degree angle in the upturned seat of the rat turd tan La-Z-Boy lounger, gazes at her with heavily lidded iguana eyes. He raises a sweat-beaded can of Coors in salute. The foreground is littered with crushed beer cans.
“Welcome home, baby,” he slurs. “Bit late for dinner aren’t you?”
“Ah…ran outa gas on the road out from Del Rio. I think my gas gauge is defective.”
“Del Rio. You got some action going in Del Rio?”
“No, honey buns. Just lunch with a girlfriend.”
He upends the Coors. It’s empty. He crushes it into a metal nodule and pitches it into the far corner of the room.
“You need another Coors?”
Without waiting for his answer, Tiara strides into the kitchen alcove. From there, with the fridge door open, she calls out:
“When’d you get in? I wasn’t expecting you.”
“No, you surely weren’t,” is his mumbled reply.
She comes back into the living room and over to the La-Z-Boy to hand Artimus the fresh beer.
“What’s that smell?” he says.
“Smell?”
“Cross between a over-r
ipe cantaloupe and a women’s locker room rising off you like a mist off a cypress swamp.”
“You sure do wax poetic sometimes, Artimus. Guess I worked up a sweat walkin’ a couple miles with the gas can.”
He reaches out to take the beer she’s holding; then suddenly grabs her wrist. She tries to pull away. But he’s up out of the La-Z-Boy, twisting her arm behind her back. Her wrist burns.
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