Mules:: A Novel

by Jarred Martin

  “Fu-uck!,” She moaned again, eyes closed against the boiling desert sun streaming down through the windsheild. “I am so fucked. My dad is going to straight up fucking cunt-punch me when he finds out about this.”

  ‘Okay,” said Els, “this is pretty bad, but we’ll figure it out.”

  “Oh Fuck, this is so bad. Don’t you get it? This isn’t like losing a school ring or my virginity, this is important, I lost a whole fucking car. I think I left my fucking passport in the fucking glove box, too.”

  “No you didn’t. I made sure to get it and put it in your bag before we left last night.”

  Neesha rolled her eyes. “Well, isn’t that a little sprinkle of sugar on top of a shit sandwich.”

  “I got your Chapstick out of the cup holder, too,” Els added.

  Neesha gave her a slight smile. “I actually appreciate that.” She looked up at Seve as he leaned on the edge of the door with his arms crossed over the top of the empty window space. “You’re looking pretty disinterested over there, Speedy. What do you think about all this?”

  He shrugged. “Happens all the time. They’ll remove any identification, serial number, VIN, and what have you. Repaint it. Maybe sell it for a tenth of what it’s worth. Or maybe strip it down and use it for parts.”

  “That’s great,” said Neesha. “Maybe if you were a mortician you could tell somebody what happens to their grandma after she’s dead. Very informative. Very helpful.”

  Seve’s face broke out in a grave look. “You want my help, or do you want to sit in the desert and feel sorry for yourself?”

  “Help, I guess,” said Neesha. “But I don’t know what you can do. Unless you know where my car is. Do you know where my car is?”

  “I don’t know that.” Seve slid a hand in his pants pocket, fished around.

  “Then what can you do?” Neesha asked.

  He pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper, handed them to Neesha. “I can find out. Write down the make, model, color, license plate, anything you think I need to know and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Neesha’s face lit up. “No way. Are you fucking with me? You can do that? You can find my car?”

  Seve was pleased to see her get so excited. “Sure, kid. I might know some people who know some people. I just need to make some calls.”

  Neesha scribbled some information down on the paper, folded it and handed it back to Seve. He shoved it back in his pocket without looking at it. Neesha could feel a smile creeping up around the corners of her mouth. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go get my fucking car back,” she said excitedly.

  They piled back into the truck and Seve turned it around.

  Els rode bitch, sitting between them with her legs slung to one side of the gear shifter. From her position she had an almost palpable sense of Neesha’s admiration for the cagey Mexican stranger and his boundless resource. It leaked out of her like something visceral and Seve soaked it up like a tampon. It was some combination of appreciation and self satisfaction that straightened his spine: he was feeling very cool right now and it showed in his posture.

  Els, needless to say, was dubious, or at least unimpressed. She didn’t exactly doubt his seedy car-thief connections, but she almost wished they would fall through just to see a layer of hubris peeled off his smug exterior. She hated thinking this way. She knew she should be grateful; should appreciate all that Seve was doing for them, and above all pray like hell he could find the car. And she would, too, if it weren’t for the way Neesha was staring at him. Neesha’s vapid schoolgirl gaze was boring a hole straight through her skull and she could feel the heat, hotter than the desert sun. She kept it together pretty well. Instead of seething, she focused on the monochrome landscape and the soggy, ever-widening pit-stains soaking beneath her shirt sleeves. She closed her eyes and imagined the salt from her body dissolving microscopic cotton fibers a single tiny thread at a time and when she opened them again sometime later, the truck had come to a stop outside a Quonset hut surrounded by a serious-looking razor-wire fence.

  There was a guard outside the fence. He didn’t wear a uniform, but Els sensed something military about him. He recognized Seve immediately and let them drive through. Seve parked the truck outside the Quonset hut, it was, unsurprisingly, the same shade as everything else in the desert. Els was beginning to understand the necessity for the flamboyant pastels that adorned the architecture in the metropolitan regions.

  “What is this place?” Neesha asked.

  Seve gave her a look that was calculatedly reserved and shrugged. “It’s a place, you know? Just some place we went to. That’s all you should think of it as.”

  “Oh okay. I gotcha. Mystery man and his mystery building. I don’t guess we’ll be welcome to follow you inside?”

  “Sharp as ever. The best mysteries are the ones that go undetected. Otherwise they wouldn’t be mysteries, right? But seriously, I’m just going to use the phone, talk to some people. I’ll be right out, so don’t miss me too much. Just wait right here.”

  “That’s fine. Take all the time you need in your secret warehouse, or super villain headquarters, whatever it is. I don’t care as long as you’re getting my car back.”

  “I aim to please. And as with everything I do, I think you’ll see, I do it well.” He gave her a very cocky wink before leaving them and entering the quonset hut through a side door.

  “As with everything I do, I do it well,” Els mocked him in an accent that sounded more French than anything after he was gone and the door was closed behind him.

  Neesha ignored her. She was very aware of the growing distaste that Els had for Seve. It was inexplicable to her. If she had to guess, though, it was an attention thing. Els was jealous; worried she would be neglected in some way when Seve was around. It was just like the perfectly nice boys they had met the other night at the motel. Neesha thought it was childish. So what if they spent some time with a handsome, rich, connected guy who knew the country and went way the hell out of his way to accommodate them? Where was the harm? There was none as far as Neesha could see. Just Els being jealous. Not a good look on you, sweetie.

  “He wasn’t using that word right, you know,” Els said beside her.

  Neesha sighed, annoyed. “What word?”

  “When he said ‘undetected.’ He should have said uninvestigated. Or unexplored or uninspected.”

  “Uninspected?”

  “Yeah, uninspected. Look it up,” she challenged. “He’s not so smart.”

  “Well, maybe when he gets our ride back, and we go back to his mansion that he was kind enough to let us stay at after he saved us from being gang raped to death over a toilet, you can let him know what a dumb asshole he is for not speaking a language that isn’t native to him well enough. How many fucking languages do you speak, by the way, huh?”

  “Just one. But I speak it good.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t for a while, okay? Just know that you are being an unbelievable twat at this moment. I just want you to know that.”

  “Well, I want you to know that you’re getting dazzled by him and the stuff he has, his car and his house, and his clothes, but I can see past it. I see a criminal. He’s dangerous, I can tell, and I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “Dazzled? What is he a fucking magician? And saying a young Mexican man can only be rich because he’s a criminal is like super-racist.”

  “I’m not racist. I’m just saying this particular rich Mexican man makes me suspicious.”

  “I think you’re looking for anything you can to pin on him to make him look bad. But the thing is: you can’t find anything, so you have to make up this criminal bullshit. It’s really pathetic, Els. Just fucking petty. I don’t even want to be in the car with you right now.”

  Neesha reached for the door handle to let herself out.

  “Don’t bother,” said Els. “I’ll go. It’s getting too hot in here anyway. Hot and stupid.”

  “Good. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass
on your way out.”

  “How original,” said Els.

  Els climbed out and slammed the door behind her as hard as she could. She walked around to the back of the truck. She shouldn’t have said anything about Seve. Having Neesha thinking she disliked him because of some self-centered jealousy was infuriating. It wasn’t true, but it was her fault for coming off that way. She wished she had the words to explain her instinct. But hadn’t she said it plainly enough? Hadn’t she made it clear that she was being cautious out of concern for her friend? Maybe Neesha just didn’t want to hear it. And if that was the case then, fine, she didn’t have to vocalize her apprehension. She could keep it to herself while still maintaining a vigilant guard.

  She looked back at the cab. Neesha was watching her from the side mirror with a very contemptuous look scrawled across her face.

  She looked around. Nothing but flat desert and a security fence. Nowhere to hide from Neesha. What she needed most was to put a little distance between them. Screw it, she thought. I don’t care what he’s hiding in there, I’m going in. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a grow house full of cocaine plants or something and she could rub that in Neesha’s face. She walked to the side door that Seve had used, wondering if cocaine grew from plants. She was pretty sure it did.

  She found the door unlocked and she twisted the knob and went inside. It took a second for her eyes to adjust to the dim light inside after being exposed to the atomic brightness of the Mexican day. It was pleasantly cool inside and she could hear the hum of an air conditioner.

  As her pupils dilated and made use of the low light inside, she saw why Seve had forbidden them from entering.

  It wasn’t cocaine being harvested and processed by young peasant women sitting around wearing nothing but underwear and painter’s masks, but it wasn’t far off.

  NINETEEN

  Els had to take a step back. The enormity of what she was seeing was overwhelming. The breath left her body as if she had been gut-punched. She was stunned. The entire quonset hut was overflowing with weapons: on shelves, in crates and boxes, lying partially-assembled on work tables. They were everywhere. She inspected a rack holding dozens of M-4 assault rifles, some of them were fitted with grenade launchers beneath their stubby barrels. These weren’t ordinary pawnshop guns with streaks of rust and missing clips, these were military grade. The air was heavy with the smell of gun oil, usually a comforting scent that reminded her of her father and Montana, days spent learning to hunt and shoot. She came to a table piled with M-249s,or SAWs- gas-powered machine guns, and a partially pried-open crate stamped U.S. Military, containing belts of ammunition. All this stuff was brand new, never fired.

  She walked through the warehouse in disbelief. There was more than just guns. She saw crates of grenades: more rounds of ammunition, a mound of camouflage flak jackets piled on the floor, stacks upon stacks of unopened crates containing only God knew what.

  There was enough ammunition and arms to outfit an army, and it was all United States government issue. There were countless M-16 assault rifles, M-9 .45 caliber handguns and even mortars. She saw some really heavy-duty stuff: Short range Stinger missiles that could bring down a helicopter, shoulder mounted anti-armor rocket launchers, .50 caliber Browning M2s that needed to be mounted to something sturdy like a Humvee in order to fire.

  Enough firepower to take over a small country inside of this place, and she had just wandered in like a retarded child stumbling through a field of posies. She realized that a man involved in. . . whatever this was, would most likely have no problem killing her and her oblivious friend to keep it quiet.

  Her first thoughts were of Neesha. She had been right about Seve, he was definitely some sort of criminal. She needed to get back to her, but how would she explain any of this? Neesha would never believe her.

  She turned around to try and sneak out without being seen, and saw Seve standing behind her. He had been watching her the whole time and she had been to awed to notice. Stupid. Careless.

  He smiled at her with his arms folded across his chest. “So, what do you think? Impressive, no? Lots of cool shit here.”

  “What- what is this?” she asked.

  “This? I’m uh, what do you call it in your country? Gun enthusiast? Yes?”

  Els pointed to the stinger missile. “You’re enthusiastic about bringing down small aircraft?”

  Seve laughed. “Apparently you’ve never lived next to an airport.”

  Els’ face registered no humor, he wasn’t entirely sure she knew he was joking. She just stood there, staring him down in her inexorable and confrontational way. Relentlessly obdurate, demanding to be answered without asking a question. Seve admired her stubbornness.

  “Alright,” he relented. “I’m a bad guy, right? I’ve seen the way you look at me. You don’t trust me. You don’t like me and you maybe wanted me to be a bad guy, huh?Then you come in here, you see all this and you know I’m a bad guy. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not true.”

  “Go ahead, then” said Els. “I’d love to hear you explain all this.”

  Seve picked out an M16 from one of the myriad racks and held it, hefting its weight in his hands. “Even though I hardly think you deserve an explanation, here it goes: Mexico, as you probably know already, is a very dangerous place. There is much violence, bloodshed everywhere you look. It is beginning to cross over into your country. That makes certain powerful entities very uneasy. What you are seeing is part of a solution to help the U.S. feel a little more comfortable. Everything you see in this room was delivered to us in good conscience by factions of your government’s law enforcement agencies, namely the CIA.”

  “You really expect me to believe that you’re a federal agent?”

  “I never said that.”

  “But you’re working with them.”

  “I never said that either.” Seve took a breath. “The cartels, the the drug gangs, real bad guys, they run through Mexico like streams of oil. It pools up until it cannot be contained anymore. Then you have the violence, the kidnapping, rape, acts unspeakable, the brutality is beginning to spread into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California. In Mexico, if Mexicans want to brutalize other Mexicans, who cares, right? If they want to make a business out of killing each other, America shrugs. But when it crosses the border, if Mexicans start to kill for their business on American soil, then it gets attention.”

  “What are you saying? That America is what, preparing for war with the cartels? War with Mexico?”

  “No, that would never happen. There’s no profit in it. It’s in the best interest of your country to stay out, keep its hands clean. But they realize some level of involvement is necessary. You’re standing in America’s solution to contain the cartel. It’s not enough to eliminate it, but they’ve surreptitiously provided a means for Mexicans to handle their own problems.”

  “By arming a militia?”

  “That’s exactly right. Mexico has a long history of peasant revolts and militias. Your country has supplied us, and now they sit back and wait for the problem to take care of itself. What could be simpler?”

  “So none of this is documented? Nothing is accounted for? What’s to keep you from just supplying the cartels with these weapons? Or what if the militias they’re arming are worse than the people they’re fighting? Does the U.S. just expect you to hand these weapons back over when you’re done with them?”

  “I highly doubt that. None of these weapons or supplies are cataloged in any substantial way. The CIA is probably largely unaware of what they’ve provided us with, and those who do know have, no doubt, destroyed any evidence of it.”

  “That seems irresponsible.”

  Seve nodded in agreement. “Perhaps. You’d be surprised by how loose major world powers can play things. Nobody really knows what they’re doing.”

  “That sounds like something my dad would to say.”

  “Your father was probably very wise. Fathers are like that.”

  Els t
hought of her father, wild-eyed, ranting, screaming until he was red-faced and crying. She shook her head. “What exactly are you planning on doing with all this?”

  Seve dropped the rifle back down on a table, its clatter echoed hollowly throughout the dome. “I don’t really know. You seem to have the same concerns that my partners and I have. Short of handing out rocket propelled grenade launchers to random citizens who promise to be extra careful and only kill the bad guys, we have very few ideas. We are building a resistance quietly. But it is slow. At this stage, it is practically nonexistent. And if you really want to know, it scares the shit out of me. So, now that you have heard my story, now that you know where my interests lie, has your opinion of me changed? Am I still the bad guy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. You could be lying about all this. This could all be stolen. You could be an arms dealer, supplying the cartels, maybe even the Taliban. Do you really hate them? Do you really hate these cartels?”

  Seve nodded. “I really do.I’ll tell you another story. I come from money, as you have seen. Long ago, my family was something like royalty, you know? Everything I have, It’s not really mine. It was given to me by my father. And that was given to him by his. The ghost of my ancestors still lingers, but it’s a ghost with a decimal point proceeded by a lot of zeros. We were a small family by Mexican standards. For a time it was only my mother, my father and me. But I had a sister. Only for a little while. You see, the child was not of my father. Our grounds keeper, he was a white man named Simmons. Isn’t that funny? My father thought so. But he didn’t laugh when my baby sister was born with light skin, pale eyes like the sky. He was furious. He was embarrassed. He made the man named Simmons take the child, and leave Blancasinato forever. But that was not enough, you see. He had the man beaten in front of my mother. The man never walked again, but my father considered himself merciful that he was allowed his life. He never forgave my mother. He never passed the opportunity to remind her that she was a whore. That she was trash. Go to him, he would say, go to your crippled poor white man and raise your bastard child. But she would never do that. She was miserable, though, staying with my father who hated her. She took her own life. She cut her wrists open and bled to death right in her and my father’s marital bed. And do you know he never cried? He acted like it was expected of her. He was relieved when she died.”