The Skull of Pancho Villa and Other Stories

by Manuel Ramos

  Corrine never mentioned Panchito to the cops. She told me that she had it in a Styrofoam cooler at the back of her coat closet near the front door. The cooler was still in the closet, empty. The coats had been tossed on the front room couch, and she guessed that the thief had taken the skull in one of the pillowcases missing from her bed. The cops said that was a tried-and-true method for burglars to haul away their booty, in the vic’s own pillowcases or trash bags.

  I knew that the cops would never arrest anyone. We got so many unsolved break-ins on the North Side that the police will give you a number to use when you call in to ask about your case—they don’t need your name or address, just your number. It’s been that way for years, but the new mayor has promised to do something about the North Side crime rate, which means that City Hall is finally noticing all the young white couples with two big dogs and one little blond-haired rug rat that have been moving into the neighborhood. Sylvia calls them yuppies, but I don’t think anyone uses that term anymore, except Sylvia, I guess.

  The next day after work I started asking around but I couldn’t say too much, you know. The Corral family hadn’t exactly been up front about Panchito. We had assumed that possession of Pancho’s skull was illegal and the desecration of the grave of a Mexican hero certainly wouldn’t do anything for the family reputation. Mexico could demand Panchito’s return and the U.S. government could back away from us and might declare that we were as illegal as the skull and deport us, although Corrine, Max and I hadn’t set foot in Mexico since we were infants, a trip we couldn’t even remember. So for two days I asked about any kids who had been trying to get rid of CDs that didn’t seem right for them—Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Miguel Aceves Mejía—and a jar of pennies. It was ridiculous but what else is new in my life?

  I asked old friends who still called me “bro”; I quizzed waitresses at a couple of Mexican restaurants. My questions made more than one pool player nervous; and the ballers that crowded the court at Chaffee Park swore they didn’t know nada. Those NBA wannabes wouldn’t tell me anything anyway.

  On the second day my search took me to the beer joints. It had to happen.

  I got nothing from the barflies, naturally. They scowled like I had asked for money, never a popular question in any bar I’d ever been in, and a couple of the souses didn’t even look at me when I spoke to them. I decided to take a break. Detective work had made me thirsty, and the Holiday Bar and Grill always had very cold beer, but there wasn’t a grill in sight.

  Accordion music blared in the background and a pair of muscular women wearing their boyfriends’ colors played eight ball along a side wall. There were a couple of other guys at the bar, and the three of us were entertained by Jackie, the bartender who worked the afternoon-early evening shift at the Holiday.

  Jackie methodically wiped a glass with a bright yellow bar rag and blinked her inch-long eyelashes at me. I worried for a hot sec that the weight of what looked like caterpillars sitting on her eyelids might permanently shut Jackie O’s eyes, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. Jackie O—that’s what she wanted to be called, but I remembered when she was just plain old Javier Ortega, which, as you might guess, is another story entirely. I hardly ever used the O in her name; I just couldn’t bring myself to say it. I had to comment about her outfit and headdress.

  “Trying for the Carmen Miranda look today, Jackie?”

  “Don’t be foolish. These are just a few old things I had around the house. A summer adventure. You like?” She twirled and clapped her hands, kind of in flamenco style. The two guys down the bar gagged on their beer. I kept a straight face.

  “Nice. That shade is good on you.”

  “What you been up to, Gus? I don’t see you in here too much anymore.”

  “Same old, you know how it is.” She nodded. “But Corrine got ripped off the other night, maybe you heard about it? They broke in her house and took a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff. At least that’s what she told the insurance. Too much, huh? I’m trying to find out who would do such a thing, maybe get some of Corrine’s stuff back. Maybe kick some ass.” I threw that last part in but I knew she knew it was just talk.

  She almost dropped the glass. She turned away quickly and helped the two guys who couldn’t seem to get enough of her show. I picked up a bad vibe off Jackie and it bothered me. We went back a long ways and I recognized her signals. I sipped on my beer and out of the corner of my eye I could see her looking at me through her heavily accessorized lashes. Again, I felt foolish. This was not like Jackie.

  She reached under the bar and pulled out a bottle of what I was drinking. She opened it and brought it to me, although I hadn’t ordered another.

  “Let’s have a smoke, Gus. I need one bad.”

  Now we had moved into strange. For one thing, Jackie knew I didn’t smoke. For another, although the recent antismoking ordinance meant that all smoking had to be done outside the premises, I couldn’t remember when that particular law had ever been enforced in the Holiday, especially during the afternoon-early evening shift when there wasn’t anyone in the bar, to speak of.

  But I went with it. She snapped her fingers at the women playing pool. “I’ll be right back, Lori,” she shouted. “Come get me if anyone comes in.”

  One of the women shouted back, “Whatever.”

  I followed Jackie’s sashaying hips into the alley.

  She lit a smoke and dragged on it nervously. I waited. Like most of the women in my life, Sylvia being the prime example, Jackie loved drama. Jackie could emote, that’s for sure.

  When she finished sucking the life out of half the smoke, she whispered, “I shouldn’t say anything. But we been friends forever, Gus. You backed me up when I needed it. You can’t ever let on that you got this from me. I’ll call you a damn liar. I mean it, Gus. You swear, on your mother’s grave, Gus? On your mother’s grave.”

  See what I mean.

  Her face was lost in the twilight and the glowing tip of her cigarette didn’t give off enough light for me to see how serious she was, so I took her at her word.

  “Okay, Jackie. I swear. I never heard nothing from you. Which so far is the truth.”

  “Jessie Salazar was in last night.”

  I heard that name and I wanted a cigarette.

  “I thought he was in the pen,” I said. “Limon or Cañon City. Supermax.”

  “He was. Did five years, but he was here last night. I had to fill in for Artie, he got sick or something or I wouldn’t even know Salazar was around. He showed up with his old crew. All dressed up in a suit, smelling like Macy’s perfume counter. Talking loud and stupid. Same old crazy Jessie. He said things about your family, and you. That chicken-shit stuff between the Corrals and the Salazars. He said the great payback had begun, that’s what he called it, but that there was more hell to pay. He talks like that, remember?”

  I felt like someone punched my gut. I couldn’t say anything.

  “He never got over that Corrine testified against him,” Jackie continued. “I didn’t think anything about it last night. That happens in here all the time. Guys blow off steam, then the next day forget all about it. More so if the guy just got out of the joint. But when you said someone had broken into Corrine’s house, I got to thinking. Salazar’s that kind of punk. He could have trashed Corrine’s house, easy, but if he did, that’s just the beginning. You got to tell her, and you got to watch your back, Gus. He always thought you should have stopped her, controlled Corrine. He blames you for him doing time.”

  Jackie stomped on her cigarette. I smiled weakly and walked away through the alley. I stopped and turned and waved at Jackie. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Cuídate, Gus,” Jackie said. “Be careful.”

  Crazy Jessie had been my number one life problem for most of my life. He was the school bully, then the neighborhood gangster and eventually he passed through reform school and the state penitentiary. I tangled with him several times when we were younger. My mother and his mother had b
een rivals when they were low-riding North Side cholas, and I had heard many stories about parties gone bad, fights on school yards and in nightclubs. That nonsense just kept on when they had their own kids. Corrine and I often brushed up against Jessie and his brothers and sisters, not always coming out on top. But we held our own.

  Corrine was having dinner one night about six years ago with the latest love of her sad life when Jessie stormed into La Cocina restaurant waving a handgun. He terrorized the customers, pistol-whipped the owner and took cash, wallets, purses and jewelry. That happened when Jessie was strung out bad on his drug of choice at that time. Corrine talked to the cops and fingered Jessie without hesitation, but her date denied recognizing the gunman. Hell, he wasn’t sure that there had even been a disturbance, if you know what I mean. Didn’t matter to Corrine. She gave Jessie to the cops and testified in court. I was proud of her but also a little bit nervous. We all relaxed when they turned Jessie over to the Department of Corrections. We thought he would be gone for a very long time. Five years didn’t seem long enough, but then I never understood the so-called justice system.

  I knew where to find Jessie. I just didn’t know if I wanted to find him. I had to warn Corrine, and I gave serious consideration to forgetting about Panchito. I thought that the thug might leave us alone now that he had vented on Corrine’s property and he had the skull. I could see him shaking his head about his discovery in Corrine’s closet, thinking that the Corrals were way weirder than he had always assumed.

  I tried to call Corrine on my cheap cell phone but the service was weak on the North Side, which meant it didn’t do much for me. I got a busy signal, but that wasn’t right. I should have gone to her voice mail.

  Jessie’s crib was in the opposite direction from Corrine. He had a small house on a hill that overlooked the interstate, right on the edge of the North Side where all the new condos were going up. Yuppie hell, Sylvia called it. The house had been the Salazar home forever and it had always been a dump. But with the wave of newcomers and the frenzy of construction, the shack must have doubled or tripled in value since Jessie had been sent away, although Jessie would never know what to do with that piece of information. One of his deadbeat sisters technically owned the place, but as sure as I knew that Jessie’s urine had stained my sister’s carpet, I also knew that he was living in that house.

  Okay, right about now you’re thinking, call the cops, Gus. Don’t be a pendejo. Let the law handle it. But see, you don’t live in my world, man. Where I come from, the cops aren’t your first line of defense. You didn’t grow up constantly squaring off against cabrones like Jessie. You never had to accept that every lousy week another clown would challenge your manhood and you would have to beat or be beaten. You never had to explain to your old man why your sister came home in tears and you didn’t do a damn thing about the bastard who slapped her around. You never sat in a cell in the City Jail staring down the ugly face of what your life could become if you didn’t do the right thing.

  I had to stop for gas and I used the restroom at the 7-Eleven. Stalling, for sure. It took me a while to make it to Jessie’s, but eventually I was there.

  I parked about a block away and did my best to be inconspicuous. Construction equipment was everywhere, and a few of the projects had crews working late, overtime. Steel beams stretched to the sky and white concrete slabs waited. I had played ball in these lots, had made out with girls and drank beer with my pals. No one who ever lived in the new buildings would know that or care about those things.

  I made my way up the alley behind Jessie’s house. I picked up a piece of rebar, two feet long, not thinking about how inadequate it was for the job I had to do. The night had a gray tint from the construction lights. Rap music blared from his back yard. I crawled behind a dumpster and peeked through the chain-link fence.

  Jessie was sprawled on the dirt, an ugly hole in his head leaked blood and a messy soup of other stuff.

  The guy standing over the body, holding a gun, looked like a junior version of Jessie, except he was alive. Another worthless gangbanger, extracting his own revenge for whatever Jessie might have inflicted, maybe in that back yard that evening, maybe in a jail cell that was too small for the both of them, maybe years ago for something that Jessie couldn’t remember.

  I guess no one had heard the shot. The construction could have drowned it or the rap music might have covered up the crime. And sometimes gunshots have no sound on the North Side.

  The guy spit on Jessie. He tucked the gun in the back waist of his pants and jumped over the fence. I inched closer to the dumpster and my luck held. He walked the other way, whistling, if I remember right.

  I swung open the gate and tried to sneak into the back yard. No one else was in the house. Whoever had capped Jessie would have made sure of that. I looked all over that yard, except at the oozing body at my feet.

  Panchito perched on a concrete block. A lime green sombrero with red dingle balls balanced on his slick, shiny head, and an unlit, droopy cigar dangled from his mouth hole. I was embarrassed for him. I removed the hat and cigar and picked him up. There was a dirty pillowcase on the ground. I wrapped Panchito in it.

  It was a long walk back to my car and a long drive to Corrine’s. I never heard any sirens, and no one stopped me. I drove in silence thinking about what had happened, trying to piece together coincidence and luck. I never thought so hard in my life.

  My luck had been amazing and I toyed with the idea of going back to the 7-Eleven for a lottery ticket. But I wasn’t the lucky type. Had never won anything in my life. I thought even harder about what had happened.

  Corrine opened the door slowly. She let me in but didn’t say anything. I set the bundle on her kitchen table.

  She smiled.

  “How’d you find out about Jessie? Who was that guy?” I blurted out my questions as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to give her time to make up something.

  “You’re the smart one. Figure it out yourself.”

  “Jackie. She called you, told you what she had told me. Said I was probably going over to Jessie’s.”

  “Close. She said you were on your way to get killed by that son-of-a-bitch.”

  “And the guy? What’s that all about?”

  “You remember him. Charley Maestas. He lived here about six months, a while back. Too young for me, turned out. He owed Jessie for a lot of grief, something awful about his sister, but he had to wait for Jessie to do his time. I let Charley know that Jessie was out and where he could find him, and the rest was up to him. I said Jessie was getting ready to book so he had to deal with him tonight. I thought the least he could do was give you some help if you got over your head. I guess Charley took care of the whole thing?” She asked but she didn’t really want an answer.

  I shrugged. It turned out to be simple. Corrine and one of the loves of her sad life. North Side justice often is simple. Direct, bloody and simple.

  My older sister picked up Panchito and gave him a quick wipe with the pillowcase. She carried him to the closet, dug out the cooler, placed the skull in it and shut the door.

  As I walked out the back I hollered, “I like the new rug!”

  IF WE HAD BEEN DANCING

  I walked into the bar the same as I had a hundred times before and my thoughts were the same as a hundred times before.

  This is all I have to do after work? Drink beer, shoot the bull with the bar flies, flirt with Maggie, throw a dollar in the jukebox? What a life.

  Maggie winked and popped open a beer before I had made it to my stool. She slid it in front of me and said, “How’s it hangin’, Álvarez? Workin’ hard or hardly workin’?”

  She laughed, the boys two stools over laughed and I grinned a little. That’s what she always said and it bugged me, but that’s what happened at the Club Lido. A man had to put up with Maggie’s clichés if he wanted to drink cold Bud in a bottle for two bucks.

  In the background a one-hit wonder soul singer cried about his ba-a-a-by br
eaking his poor ole li’l heart and the boys two stools over told lawyer jokes.

  I had nothing but respect for Maggie. She had grown up in the neighborhood around the bar and spent so much time in the Club Lido that when she started tending the bar no one thought much about it. Seemed like a natural place for her.

  I peeled off my damp jacket and draped it over the stool next to me, then swept my hand through my hair to shake out some of the raindrops that hadn’t yet run down the back of my neck. My sweater was wet, too, but I needed to keep that on. I sucked down half of the brew before I looked around the place. Same old dirty windows looking out on the same old rain-slicked street, same old grimy pool table, same old tired face staring back at me from the stained and cracked mirror behind the bar. Nothing had changed.

  The door to the bar opened, letting in cold, moist air, but I ignored it and concentrated on my beer.

  That’s when the girl picked up my jacket and eased herself onto the stool next to me. My beer stopped halfway to my mouth.

  She said, “This yours?”

  I took it from her hand and dropped it between the bar rail and the floor. It was an old jacket without any sentimental value, and I wanted to look at her and not the jacket. She had a small, pinched face with a thin nose and thin lips that held a droopy cigarette. Black, very short hair hung across her forehead and dripped wetly down her neck. She looked like a duckling who had been thrown in the lake by the mama duck before she knew how to tread water. She wore jeans, boots, a loose red scarf, a black T-shirt and a denim vest that exposed skinny arms and a three-inch tattoo of Our Lady of Guadalupe crushing a snake with her bare foot. And when she looked at me she did it with a pair of brown eyes that were tinged with the gray smoke of her cigarette and the cobalt shadow of her soggy hair.

  Maggie turned to her and asked, “What’ll you have, honey?”