Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  The next day I phoned Ruth and told her not to count on me for the show catalogue. It didn’t seem to bother her; her tone was calm and understanding, as if she had expected it. That hurt my feelings. I would have liked her to fight for me, not to give in so easily, even if it were only so that I could refuse once more.

  I hung up feeling as though she didn’t want me to participate in the show catalogue any longer, when I was the one who had just abandoned ship.

  3

  Houston, Texas, 1999

  Jesús fell to his knees. His hands had sunk into the gravel at the side of the tracks; one of his palms was cut and bleeding. The train’s silhouette shrank into the night. The sound of the whistle persisted but eventually faded out, and the soft resonances of summer settled back in: the chirping of crickets and cicadas; children shouting in the distance, delaying the time they’d have to go indoors, put away their bicycles, say goodbye to the neighborhood kids.

  He stood up. His limp was getting worse. He had jumped from the moving train even though it hadn’t slowed down. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, and he had the scars to prove it: on his right hand, his left forearm, his right wrist, his forehead.

  The house that had caught his attention was on a corner lot and had a chimney; there was a well-worn, faded green couch on the porch and strings of carnations hanging from wires. A wooden sign with gothic letters decorated the front door window and read MI CASA ES SU CASA.

  He peered in and saw a couple arguing in the kitchen. The man wore overalls and a straw hat that reminded him of the Mennonites he had seen near his hometown when he was a boy.

  He was in no condition to challenge someone a full head taller than him. Fucking white people. Even the women made him seem small by comparison. No matter, they didn’t intimidate him anymore, not like they used to. He could come and go as he pleased, as if this whole gigantic territory belonged to him alone. He knew how to get around: his size made him more agile than them. He had fake social security cards he’d bought from the coyotes, stolen driver’s licenses, even cards for libraries and gym memberships. He knew their weaknesses: there were guns everywhere; violence was an everyday affair. Like in Mexico, but different. The police and the law enforcement didn’t function there; here they tried, but whenever a sexier crime came along they’d get distracted and forget.

  He spat.

  A young woman wearing butterfly barrettes in her coal-black hair stepped out of a blue Honda Civic in front of an ochre-colored ranch house. The yard was delicately landscaped, with luminous rosebushes and a lemon tree that looked as though it had popped (there were lemons scattered all around the ground). She glanced over at him quickly but continued on her way inside as if in that split second she had gauged that his was an insignificant face, that saying anything to him was a waste of her time, that he was just another of her paisanos walking the streets in search of a job: carpenters, plumbers, construction workers, anything to earn a few bucks. Why didn’t they all just go back to Mexico?

  Fucking puerca. They were the nastiest, the bitches who changed their clothes style and accent, took on snotty airs, tried to hide their origins. He walked over and snuck around the house, peeping through a back window. The woman was alone; she had switched on the lights and was pacing back and forth, barefoot, talking on a cell phone in English. She was wide-hipped, with fat legs and a plump ass. Meat everywhere, the way he liked his women.

  She set up an easel in one of the rooms, pulled up a chair, and sat down in front of a sheet of onionskin paper, holding a paintbrush in one hand and a box of watercolors in the other. Her back was to Jesús. He knew he needed to hurry, but he preferred to wait just a little bit. He was curious to see what she was painting.

  A figure appeared on the paper: a man running across a dry riverbed.

  He had better enter through the front door this time. He went into the kitchen and opened a drawer beside the sink, trying to find some instrument. There was a pair of scissors but they weren’t sharpened. He found a wooden block in a corner beside the microwave that held five knives lined up according to size; he grabbed the biggest.

  He stood motionless in the hallway between the room and the kitchen. She finally caught sight of him standing there, and stopped painting. There was a tiny hint of defiance in her expression. He had expected her to scream the second she noticed him.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said in perfect Spanish. “Take whatever you want. Just please don’t hurt me. My name is Noemí . . .”

  Fucking asshole bitch. Would it hurt to be a little original?

  Jesús saw her lip tremble slightly, as if a sense of dread was finally coming over her. Her cream-colored skirt was embroidered with little flowers, and there was a smudge of lipstick on the collar of her white blouse.

  “I’m illustrating a children’s book,” Noemí continued.

  He took in the walls around the room: movie posters (Toy Story, Ice Age, Monsters, Inc.).

  “It’s about a man who leaves his wife and his children to cross the border and look for work.”

  He coughed.

  “Don’t think I like it,” Jesús said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ain’t believable.”

  “I can change it if you’d like,” she said quickly. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe one of the sons will cross the border to look for his father. I saw this show by a painter not long ago . . . We’ve been crossing the border for a long time.”

  “You mean the border crossed us. All this was ours first.”

  Jesús moved in a little closer, till they were only a few feet apart. Noemí glimpsed the knife, the blade glinted in the room’s overhead lights. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said, her voice reduced to a whisper.

  He consented with a quick nod. And sprung, plunging the knife deep into her chest. She struggled to defend herself and fell to the ground, clinging to the knife handle with both hands. “That’s right, puerca. You stab it in.” Jesús straddled her, bent down, and pulled the knife out of her chest, smearing his hands with the blood as it gushed from the wound and formed a puddle.

  Before continuing, he walked over to the window and lowered the blinds.

  Then he gouged the knife into one of Noemí’s eye sockets. He messed around with the white, viscous substance as if operating on a life-sized doll. When he was little, he had operated on one of María Luisa’s dolls without asking her permission, the only doll she’d ever been given for her birthday. He sliced the head off.

  This time he stabbed Noemí in the other eye. The blade cut a chunk out of her right cheek and sunk back in to the left one, shattering the bone and leaving shards in its wake. He drove the knife into her forehead, but the blade broke off and Jesús was left holding the handle. “Fucking puerca, even your knives are cheap.”

  Nah, he wouldn’t fuck this one.

  He went to one of the walls and wrote in blood: UNNAM

  The word was too long; he’d leave it like that.

  He washed his bloody arms in the sink and threw the knife handle in the kitchen garbage bin. He reheated a bowl of pozole that he had rummaged from the refrigerator and chased it down with a cold Corona. He found some necklaces and silver earrings in the bedroom; no cash in the wallet, but he pocketed three credit cards. He dumped Noemí’s DVD collection in his bag. The only movies she seemed to like were animations; who knows, might just find something good.

  He stopped to observe the painting of a smiling skeleton in a cowboy hat sitting in a chair and playing a guitar; bingo cards were strewn about its feet (the mermaid, the soldier, the drunk, the valiant, the rose). There was a book of photographs of the Mexican Revolution. One of them caught his attention: a man standing before a firing squad, smiling, holding a cigarette in his hand. His attitude expressed a complete lack of fear. Courage.

  That’s the way he’d go when his time came. With a smile on his lips, a cigarette in his hand—even though he didn’t smoke—and a bott
le of sotol in the other.

  Noemí’s cell phone rang and he was tempted to answer it but refrained. He grabbed the keys to the Honda on his way outside, jumped into the car, and drove off. He stopped at the first gas station he saw. He bought beef jerky, Doritos, a six-pack of Corona.

  He called his sister from the public telephone at the entrance to the gas station. As soon as he heard her voice, he hung up.

  He drove south. The closer he was to the border, the more secure he’d feel.

  Two deer crossed the road and he slowed down to watch them. The whole region was teeming with antelopes, coyotes, and snakes. They said wolves can only be found on the Mexican side now; ranchers in Texas and New Mexico had killed them off to protect their livestock.

  He passed a jeep parked on the dirt shoulder of the highway, in the shade of a cedar tree. Jesús moved into the right lane and drove by slowly. A middle-aged woman was trying to change a flat tire.

  Our unnamed father who art not in heaven.

  Jesús pulled over. He grabbed the knife out of his bag, stuck it between his belt and the back of his pants. He stepped out of the car and strode over to the jeep with a firm step. From his repertoire of possible expressions, he chose the most humble, solicitous one possible, the same one that had saved him from being arrested a few times when the police had detained him. A few cars passed by without stopping. The sun was relentless; it burned his neck, his arms.

  “Hi, need some help?”

  The woman was surprised to see him. She was short and stout and barefoot, with cropped brown hair and a pierced lip. Her face was tough and weatherbeaten, as if she spent the greater part of her time outdoors. Her arms were smeared with grease. The jack was next to the flat tire, under the jeep, and she held the wrench in her hand. She had taken her rings and bracelets off and set them on the ground near a can of beer.

  “Hi, thanks,” she said in English. “The lug nuts are really tight, they won’t budge forward or backward. I was thinking of just calling a tow truck.”

  “Lemme give it a try,” Jesús said in English.

  “My name’s Peggy. Want a beer?”

  Jesús said yes to the beer, more out of politeness than because he really felt like drinking one. Peggy went to the back of the jeep and fetched one for him from a cooler.

  KILL THEM ALL.

  Jesús grabbed the wrench and tried to loosen the nuts. Three of them came off quickly, without much of a struggle; the fourth and the fifth required more of an effort, but eventually he worked them off too. He fought with the sixth for a long time. Sweat ran down his forehead and cheeks, soaked his armpits. He took a swig of beer and nearly spat it back out: it tasted like piss.

  “No luck?”

  Holy be the absence of thy name.

  “Just gotta keep at it, güey,” he said in Spanish. Then he jumped back into English: “Just a shame I don’t have the time. There are people waiting for me.”

  “Thanks anyway. I’ll just call a tow truck.”

  It wouldn’t take much. The road was deserted; he could jump her now and knock her over. She was more or less his size, probably stronger than she looked, but he could overpower her. The knife would do the rest.

  Jesús asked her what was the best way to get to Highway 10. He was playing for time while he decided what to do. It was easy, just keep driving straight ahead for ten minutes and he’d see the signs.

  Peggy didn’t have a cell phone. She’d have to walk some three hundred feet where the CALL BOX was on the side of the road. Jesús walked alongside her. Once there, he stared at her a moment, surprised to see the sparkle in her green eyes, and said:

  “You’re very lucky.”

  “I guess so. Seeing as things could be a lot worse.”

  Peggy fidgeted in place, a little antsy now, and lowered her eyes.

  “Well, guess I should call for the truck now. Thanks again.”

  Jesús turned around and walked back to the car. Peggy glimpsed the knife as it flashed in the sun, but she pretended not to and concentrated on making that phone call.

  4

  La Grange, Texas, 1999

  The elderly woman lay in bed with her skull crushed in. The blood had soaked into her hair and run down her forehead and cheeks, staining the comforter and forming a puddle on the floor. The shovel the murderer had used was visible at one side of the room. The television was on, tuned into a Spanish-language soap opera.

  Sergeant Fernandez heard the FBI agent just outside the bedroom, in the hallway. Apparently she had been asleep, the agent said. At least she didn’t suffer.

  “Any leads?”

  “The report just came in from Houston. They confirmed our hunch. Now it’s official. The fingerprints taken from the shovel’s handle are Reyle’s, and they match the ones taken from the house in Houston yesterday. Ditto the other crime scenes. Drops of blood now tie him to five murders. So. Not to state the obvious, but I’m afraid we’ve got a serial killer on our hands, folks. He doesn’t even bother to cover his trail.”

  “He never really did,” Fernandez said. “He’s just been very lucky. He’s been incarcerated, he’s had run-ins with the police a bunch of times, and the only thing INS did was deport him to Mexico.”

  “What else could they do? They arrest illegals every day. All they want is to haul them back to Mexico, clean and quick.”

  “But this is different,” Rafael said. “With a record as long as somebody’s arm, they should have been more careful. These murders could have been avoided.”

  Fernandez brought his hands to his forehead and tried to conceal his annoyance. Nothing ever functioned the way it was supposed to. Starting with him: the FBI databanks tied Reyle to at least five murders; for a long time he’d had a hunch that a single person was tied to the other unresolved deaths, and yet he never actually acted on it. He never bothered to bounce his intuition off anyone else. If he had, maybe now someone up the chain of command would be congratulating him for his sharp instincts, cussing their own carelessness. And his fellow agent was right, you can’t blame the INS: Reyle had used a series of pseudonyms, he was in possession of several fake social security cards, and he was remarkably elusive, you had to give him credit for that. It was true what others liked to say said about the Rangers, famous for their arrogance toward other federal agencies and local police: how they loved to turn things in a Hollywood film. Somehow they had begun to believe their own legend. It’s also what the Rangers said about the FBI.

  The FBI had dubbed the Gonzalez Reyle manhunt Operation Stop Train, the agent studying the walls in the hallway said, as if he might find some clue that would lead him straight to the killer. The media gave Reyle a nickname: Fox News was calling him the Railroad Killer. Some clever FBI agent must have fed the name to the journalists, the type of agent who spends the day profiling serial killers.

  They might have made an effort to be a little more original, Fernandez thought as he walked out of the house. If all the murders had taken place next to a football stadium, they’d have called it Operation Touchdown, and the murderer would have been given the nickname Quarterback Killer.

  The elderly woman’s son and his wife sat in the back of a police car, in a state of shock. The son blew his nose into a Kleenex; the woman’s head was shaved, and Fernandez wondered if she was undergoing some kind of treatment. She reminded him of one of his cousins after chemo; she had put up a good fight, but the cancer won out in the end.

  Annie Tadic’s lifeless body had been discovered by the two of them. She lived alone on a ranch in Fayette County, near Highway 10. They were supposed to have breakfast together that morning, but she never showed up. When they phoned over to the house, she didn’t answer. They went to her home and found her there, already dead.

  Fernandez walked by and bowed his head slightly in greeting. He heard them express surprise at the idea that the deceased would have been watching a Spanish channel; she didn’t speak the language, which had been a problem with the occasional hired help. Fernand
ez concluded that it must have been the killer who had changed the channel. So after murdering the elderly woman, he sat down next to her and watched a soap opera. He’d done similar things in other houses: after committing a heinous murder and often a postmortem rape, he’d calmly prepare a sandwich, drink a beer, or heat some dish in the microwave. An FBI psychologist from Quantico who was an expert in profiling serial killers wrote in a preliminary report that this astonishing equanimity hid a calculating personality, a rational mind with a delusion of absolute omnipotence. Fernandez agreed with the omnipotence bit but not with the rest of the report. You couldn’t always draw such a neat correlation between cause and consequence. The murderer could have been so nervous after the fact that instead of fleeing, he needed to sit down and have a beer. Rational and calculating? Not necessarily. Although in truth, who knows? Psychopaths like Reyle were cut from a totally different fabric. A serial killer case was way beyond anything he’d ever had to deal with as a Ranger.

  He went back to his car, behind the yellow tape that cordoned the house off.

  The Quantico psychologist’s report made him think how much of what the FBI agents worked with was fictional, and they were often wrong. They profiled murderers, wrote reports full of childhood abuse and rape, developed procedures for observing the world through trivial acts. The fictions helped fill in the blanks, allowed them to speculate aloud and feel more confident about reaching a positive outcome, that the rule of law that had been broken would be restored in the end. All murderers can be reduced to a limited set of attitudes, obsessions, and compulsions. But all these narratives lacked a fundamental element: “the inexplicable,” that little detail that doesn’t lead to anything else. How easy to appreciate that evil can be titillating, it fascinates, seduces. How much harder to accept that evil, horror, the abyss are a fundamental part of life. Remarkably, the FBI had someone in charge of getting into the head of serial killers: someone had to do it. But Fernandez had come to the conclusion that it was better not to understand them at all. They just were, period. One had to arrest them, get rid of them by lethal injection.