The Road to Quintana Roo (Part I)

Everything started up again because this morning a sewer pump truck hit a flatbed full of chickens, pulling a good seven other cars into the resulting tangle. Can you imagine four-dozen shit-spackled, terrified birds hopping through traffic, their owners bleeding from the head and trying to gather them up? A Pemex couple in a Lexus vomiting as feces slides down their tinted windshield? Campesino pedestrians laughing and using handfuls of the dusty road to wipe the crap of themselves? Well, if you can, you can imagine the size and the tension of the traffic snarl I had building in the worst fucking possible spot at eight in the morning.

The intersection of Encendido and Mex 2 is not just the center of town, but Mex 2 is also the route the goes northeast to the US border outside of Ciudad Juarez and south to…well, south to Quintana Roo if you want it to, I suppose. So you can imagine that a weekday morning in what has now become a “suburb of a border city” is hectic on the roads. And here I had traumatized chickens covered in shit and dozens of held-up vehicles, which swelled to hundreds in the ten minutes it took me to get there from the station. God knows I could have used every cop on duty, but between the intestinal flu of the last weeks, the higher ups’ refusal to go anywhere near such a scene, and the task force working all the missing girls files, after twenty-seven years on the force I got the special assignment of trying to straighten out the intersection on my own. Only in Méjico.

So I hustle up the block, the station’s burnt coffee sloshing around in my gut, making me think that I might have to hit a toilet, especially when I first catch whiff of the sewer truck. The truck climbed up on the back of the flatbed and tipped off and was then torn open, as if by a can opener, on the fender of the flatbed. The sewer pump driver is calmly talking on his cell phone, watching the chicken ranchers like they’re a boring sitcom. The Pemex Lexus is trying to back away from the mayhem but can’t angle through the mass of common cars, which are honking at them, the drivers howling curses peppered with laughs. Poop on the rich! Populism is like weeds in my country.

“Oye, Agente!” the head chicken rancher bellows. “Are you going to make this cabrón pay for my chickens?” When I begin my gesture of futility, he throws his cap to the filthy earth and stomps on it. “ And who will eat shitty chickens, sir?”

I turn toward the sewer pump driver who gives me a “hold-on” palm, with a finger pointed toward the phone and the mouthed explanation “el jefé.”

With a few shouts, a couple of negotiations and one quick palm to my sidearm, one side of the intersection is pretty quickly straightened out: vehicles maneuvered into rough rows, those furthest north able to reverse away. I hook a clean, renegade chicken by the feet and deliver him to the solemn rancher.

I move to the west side of the pileup and am just approaching the closest driver, who’s motioning for me to examine the thumb-sized dent in his fender, when it catches my eye: a waxed, dark blue Impala driving straight down the sidewalk to circumvent the accident. It’s not coming slowly either: street kids do monkeyish hops over hoods and trunks; a viejo with a table full of lottery tickets loses his wares as he saves his ass by way of a panadería’s doorway.

If anything, a well-insulated midsection is probably an asset in this situation but it’s in situations like this that I become aware of my years, the sag of my flesh, the atrophy of muscle groups, the moonscape of my baldhead. But what I’ve got are my eyes and my voice (which once stopped a knife fight) and I use all of them to halt the Chevy before its grill kisses my kneecaps.

“ALTO!”

The Impala stops but the engine races. The cacophony of horns has all but ceased. Except for the growl of the V8, the intersection is relatively silent. I count four occupants through the tint, all with sunglasses, all narcos, all young. I do not draw the .40 but I have it in my grip, my finger already past the trigger guard. A long plume of marijuana smoke issues from the passenger side as the glass sighs down. I put my faith in things one should not in Méjico: witnesses, my own gun, reason, negotiation.

I’m alarmed to see Emilio Herrera in the passenger seat. Emilio and I are acquainted in an unfortunate way.

“Good morning, officer,” he says to me in sarcastic, cheerful English. His long black hair is placed rather than combed back. It stays with mysterious obedience. His goatee is thin and carefully trimmed. A gold cap winks when he smiles. One black flake of ash from his enormous spliff rests on his immaculate white tee shirt. “This is quite a mess you have here. “

He sweeps his hand at the shit-spotted scene.

“You cannot drive on the sidewalk. You almost killed an old man back there.”

Emilio drops the shades to the end of his strangely thin nose, rotates his stocky torso, peers through the back window. He turns back around, takes a deep drag, aims his one blue and one brown eye up at me.

“Seems that we can. We did. And as for that viejo, he looks fine. Now: how can we help you Agente Companzo?”

Shoot him. Shoot all four of them if you can. It’s a ten round clip; fully auto. It’s practically drawn already. They’re stoned. Sure, you’ll die but you’ll be a hero—all these citizens will remember you. Thank you. Celebrate you.

“You can help yourself by obeying my orders, joven.”

The smirk dies on Emilio’s pockmarked cheeks. His free right arm dives out of sight. I draw the .40 and place it at the edge of his window, aiming at his sternum. I hear racks sliding in the backseat. My martyrdom suddenly looks duller.

“You can help yourself by stepping away from my car and clearing a path for us, cerdo.” Emilio hisses. “I do not know what has gotten into you but I will be insulted if I have to remind you of your place.”

I hesitate.

“I don’t even want to have to remind your boss of his place, old man. But I might not mind showing your wife hers—she is impressive for an abuela. And with an afternoon of phone calls I could find your cobarde son in el norte and finish that old thing.” Emilio’s voice has carried from vicious growl to singsong mockery in the course of these words. He pulls hard on his joint. “Now move.”

Before I can move, however, a hand with slender fingers, nails painted onyx back, slips through the window from behind Emilio. It deposits a gram of cocaine and a five-peso bill into my uniform pocket, pats my breast. The engine revs. Emilio pushes his shades up. The window disappears them all, along with their laughter. A Narco Ballad starts up. I stand squarely before the Impala, drop the coke and money and grind it into the sewage-covered ground with my boot. Then I lead them down the sidewalk, shooing pedestrians and bicycles and carts out of the way. I feel my teeth creak and shift in the back of my jaw.