The Road to Quintana Roo (Part II)

(If you haven't read Part I, you can dig it here)

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon by the time a wrecker tugs the sewage truck off the flatbed and out of the intersection.

The only nice thing that one might say about the station is that it’s cool inside—relatively speaking. It was once lime green but the damp walls are now roped with black bacteria and covered with something like soap scum. I’d say it was like a jail, but the jail’s downstairs, and there’s nothing like that. The lights are bare tubes—meant to be muted by something plastic—and produce headachy symphonies that still buzz in your head when it hits the pillow. Worst of all, the card tables and plastic chairs are always occupied by my so-called colleagues.

“Oye Companzo!” Maximilio crows as soon as I clear the door. “Did you wash your boots?”

Apparently this joke has been anticipated for so long it doesn’t even need to be clever. The half dozen detectives and patrolmen erupt with laughter. Maximilio sends his beady little eyes around the room, pulling in validation like a gambler snatches chips. Captain Rosario permits himself a little grin and shrug. He doesn’t laugh because he’s cut from sharper rock than these fools. He’s my only predecessor in this building.

The mescal bottle behind the coffeemaker is empty; someone has drawn a sad face in magic marker on it. I pour what is probably the same coffee as this morning into a plastic baby cup and reluctantly join the group.

“Seriously, Federico,” Maximilio says now, leaning forward like he’s concerned. “How’d it all shake out? I need to know where to buy my chickens!”

The reason I want to kill Maximilio is not because his sense of humor is that of a twelve year old. It’s not because he’s half my age and gets to dress for undercover work. It’s not because he’s cracking at my benefit. It’s because he can’t see that I’m toeing an edge and it has nothing to do with chickens or sewage.

“You need to know where to buy your suits,” I manage and the great democratic wave of laughter washes over to my side. Maximilio sneers and bats a paw at me, straightens a horrid purple tie over his yellow shirt. Rosario bellows.

“Get out. Go catch muggers. Rescue girls. Companzo’s the only one here who’s earned his day’s pay.”

As the knot of men untangles toward the doors, hefting Kevlar vests, shooting coffee, there are more jokes about shit and chickens, about a day’s pay, about “rescuing” girls. Rosario watches me with calm eyes and his hands laced on his stomach. Like a Buddha. He can see me toeing an edge—always has.

“I understand you had an encounter with Emilio Herrera today,” he says like a psychologist, steepling his fingers in front of his gray mustache. “You want to tell me about it?”

Fucking Rosario. I look into the greasy dregs of the coffee, can’t bring myself to drink it without any liquor. Look at the man’s rheumy old eyes instead. He wants to know about it? Fine.

“Sure, jefé. The little gangster drives down the sidewalk and almost kills an old man. Talks back to me, threatens my life, then threatens yours, my wife’s and Javier’s. And for his trouble I cleared him a path to drive over the rest of the sidewalk like a fucking doorman.”

Rosario nods; behind the dampness his eyes sparkle, just a little.

“Ah. The same small rooster, he is. That does not surprise me, Federico. It does surprise me to hear you say ‘Javier’ out loud, however. It has been some time.”

Rosario understates the case—it has been four years, eight months and six days since I last spoke my son’s name to him. I recall it vividly. The cordite burn in my nostrils. The crust of blood on the heel of my hand. The taste of metal in my jaw. Rosario’s hands on my clavicles, squeezing hard enough to pierce the tight world that morning had built around me.

I’d trained myself to remain horizontal until the light was blue enough to see my hand outstretched in front of me; Angela would not scold me for getting up if I could reasonably point out it was dawn. What this meant for me was an hour or two every morning of staring into blackness as my brain looped. The Relámpago Cartel was taking La Velita like a virus takes a body: setting up nodules of control and sending out spoors of destruction and extortion. By then they skimmed off every real estate deal, they carried weapons freely, they raped the high school daughters and sometimes the wives of hardworking men I’d known my whole life. They charged taxes on these families for parking a truck, for safe passage down the block, for anything they pleased. And all these men I knew? They looked to me, Federico, Policia Local to set things right. And when I told them that my hands were tied, some of them nodded, like I’d denied them my last smoke. Some of them wept bitterly. Some of them cursed me in ways that were not casual or passing. Rosario heard my laments and I know he empathized because I know his heart. But Rosario is political or perhaps philosophical in a way that is foreign to me. Rosario didn’t seem to want to tear these demons to pieces like me. He had other visions of justice.

The light that morning was barely blue; I could see my hand but not my fingers individually when I eased the quilt off my legs. Angela curled in on herself, not wanting to face what I was getting up to investigate: Javier had not come home. He was twenty years old, all of a man, and I agreed with my wife about treating him as such, but I knew things she did not—I had seen Javier not once but twice in conversation with low-level narcos. Of course, Javier had known most of these boys his entire life; Angela had fed them dinners, I had punished them with my own hands for terrorizing chickens in our yard. These boys had orbited our home like harmless meteors. But things had changed: for Javier, they were still peers. For me, when they chose the life of the cartel they became something else—if not enemies, then targets. I was a cop. I am a cop. Even if many of the men who wear my badge are no better than the cartels.

Papá, I cannot pretend I don’t know them! Javier had protested, the high note of exasperation that reminded me of the nearness of his boyhood slipping into his voice. It would be worse for me if I did, you know that. They go about their business and I go about mine. If we share a word or a chingado coca-cola, what of it? Do you think I’ll come home one day and cut your throat?

My son has a grin that permits him the crassest of jokes. But I also knew he was right. Still, that morning I could not even force myself to finish one taza de café before I strapped on my gun and went into the smoggy streets to find him.

The thick smog is a springtime event in La Velita, a wind-driven phenomenon from the Pacific that arrives only in the mornings and only in April. Smog, of course, is commonplace: we are south across flatlands from Juarez and El Paso, but this opacity is unnerving. Emaciated town dogs appeared out of nowhere like phantoms and even pickups were hard to see until they were nearly upon me. I kept to the edge of what passed for sidewalk as I drew near to the center of town.

There is only one cantina in La Velita where men prone to drinking through the night and into their own blackness can go. La Lata Letal is tacked onto the backside of a service station, a corrugated tin roof and neon beer lights, but there is something contrarily sturdy about it. I didn’t care for Javier spending time there, especially given that the narcos were probably running the place by then, but it was his youth, not mine and more to the point I had not found him a job that would keep him from washing away the hours with Tecate and bad mescal.

Approaching by way of the alley and the back door to La Lata, I heard nothing at first and almost walked on, but a strand of quiet conversation and the brief squeal of a chair on linoleum halted me. I forcibly calmed myself with a couple of breaths. I closed my eyes as I did so, smelling the diesel and dust and burro shit and morning tortillas of my hometown.

I suppose I’ll never know for sure why I yanked that door wide, popping the little hook lock in the process. It’s true that La Velita is a small town and it’s true that I knew the owner Ronaldo and it’s true that I expected to find Javier inside with old friends and nothing more. But none of that fully explains my incaution.

Javier was indeed inside, tipping back on a barstool, sipping a Corona. But closer to me, at a card table, sat Emilio Jose Gonzalez Herrera and two other young narcos, one of whom was Javier’s childhood friend Victor, packing cocaine into the false bottoms of cans of corn. A .38 lay on the table and a police-issue shotgun leaned in the corner and, therefore, my .40 came up and I shot Victor in the face and neck when he moved for the pistol.

Emilio and the other kid had their hands raised before the door even hit the wall. Javier’s hand still cocked the Corona to his lips but the world in his eyes had altered dramatically. I went into numb protocol, hooking my prisoners and securing the drugs, ignoring my son, imploring the gods to make him vanish but knowing that would be my duty. From his stomach on the floor, Emilio informed me I was a dead man and I didn’t have enough emotion in me to stomp the back of his head so he went on.

You, too, are fucked Javier, he spat. Fucking snitch!

I turned to my son. He closed his eyes hard against the verdict. I told him to go home. I did not have to tell him to pack.

It was not until Rosario arrived that I found that my face was completely covered with the dead man’s drying blood.

“I think maybe it’s a mixed blessing, compadre. Seeing Emilio today, I mean. On the one hand you’re all stirred up. On the other, you’re facing a piece of what happened before.”

The old man still has his fingers in a steeple and he peers over the peak of them at me. Rosario has these fucking philosophies about mental and emotional health, especially in the face of circumstances you can’t change. He wags his finger and repeats the serenity prayer whenever he has half a chance: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Only Rosario isn’t religious. Maximilio had once pointed out that it was the touchstone prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous, only Rosario doesn’t drink. I have to admit that if his habits make him a mighty odd Mexican police Captain, his philosophy is exactly what’s called for. Too bad I can never embrace it.

“I don’t need to face anything, jefé—I need to end it. I will never accept what has happened to this town or to this country and I will never adapt to it like these other fools—what is served in a trough is slop and I’m not bellying up to Maximilio there. I respect you, sir, but I cannot be you. I will find resurrection.”

Forgetting what’s in my cup, I stand and throw it back. Rosario looks up at me, his beatific smile a degree flatter. He deconstructs his steeple to turn the flat of his hands up and the smile regains its curvature. I rise, the wish for tequila and beer exploding in my head.

“Thanks for trying, though,” I tell him, from the door.

YES!

(From Publisher's Marketplace)

NON-FICTION: MEMOIR

Dustin Diamond's BEHIND THE BELL, a tell-all account of his life as Samuel "Screech" Powers on the set of the TV show "Saved by the Bell," including sexual escapades among cast members, drug use, and hardcore partying, resold to Transit Publishing, following "a mutual decision not to publish" with Gotham, for publication on September 29, 2009, by Jarred Weisfeld of Objective Entertainment (world).

Back When I Was Crazy

(Writing exercise at EDVP Adult Creative Writing Group, inspired by Roberto Bolaño's "The Romantic Dogs")

Back when I was crazy it was normal to put beer in my gut before breakfast, perched on a carved up picnic table with a warm, empty can of Miller Lite in one hand and a stale, untouched raisin bagel in the other, beneath a Seattle drizzle as common as air, drawing slow, easy stupidity down like a curtain in my brain before the experiment of the morning classroom proved me right.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fight for hours with a girl I was making ugly and being made ugly by, shirking our costumes of cool to become red-faced lunatics over something that scarcely mattered anyway, something that was merely an excuse to strike at each other for loving someone so far away.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to drive cars down the black throats of liquored nights, telling myself lies about my ability and fate, as if simply knowing which direction a back road curved would be enough to keep my blood inside my body instead of painting the asphalt and trees like countless fools before me.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fling a dish, upend a table, even press a knife to my fingers in a dish-filled sink, to hate walls and the limitations of fists, to hammer my spirit and hers with blunt words or pierce our minds bloodlessly with the filed down tip of insult.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to imagine myself at 32, far beyond the dangers and excesses and torn affairs of youth, to imagine myself bald and good-naturedly grumbling through a career, as close to happy as I'd get having left behind the violent bafflement of youth.

After the Humans

(A writing exercise from Youth Speaks writing circle, every Thursday from 5 - 7 at the Seattle Central Public Library, open to all youth 13-21 with word interest or passion!)

A few weeks after the planet shrugged—typhoons, tsunamis, a tectonic grind—and freed itself from the clammy grip of humans (and the planet felt bad about this, somewhat as a human might feel upon crushing a bumblebee that hadn’t yet stung, but whose presence seemed to be growing inexorably from nuisance to threat), the downtown Seattle library still stood—or, rather, leaned, tipped as it was by a filthy tidal wave that set it to rest against the neighboring skyscraper, one-third full of murky seawater, like an odd toy in the bottom of a drained aquarium. The Puget Sound itself had been spoiled by the spillage of countless metric tons of human civilization’s offal: diesel, sewage, chlorine, acids, gas and Freon and the half-solid waters that lapped at downtown’s waterfront hosted no marine life that any self-interested creature would consume. The gulls and hawks and the odd Peregrine falcon that used to feast amid the rain of tourist-tossed French fries and the bait fishes of the bay had grown weak with hunger and sick with the smoking wreckage of human life and believed themselves to be on the way to a similar end as the wingless fools who were now gone forever. Until one day an indefatigable gull named Simon caught sight of a flash of silver in one of the thousands of triangular windows in the a-kilter husk of the library. Simon veered in for a closer look and indeed, on what had once been reasonably called the third floor, he could make out not one but several winking bodies in the tepid sea that had poured into the library by way of the tsunami before poisonous ruin could occur in that celestial sized scoop of water.

Fish!

Elated but panicked to miss the chance, desperate to prove to himself it was real, Simon snatched a chunk of cement from the decay of 4th Avenue, soared to a strategic height, angled his wings for proper aerodynamics, and let loose his tool, which plummeted true and shattered the window nearest where he’d glimpsed his bounty. Simon banked tight circles as the green water fluted out of the side like a hole poked in a water balloon, till finally the arching bodice of a large steelhead was silhouetted against the blood red dying sun over what used to be the Puget Sound and he let loose a cry that humans would have thought desolate, but which actually articulated great joy and dove toward his prize, his survival.