Crossers (23 page)

Yvonne found his meaningless repentances more contemptible than the acts that had provoked them. If a man was to behave like a monster, better that he be a monster all the time and not feel bad about it afterward. On that afternoon he put on a greater show of contrition than usual, breaking into sobs and lowering his head to his uplifted knees after she said, “God may forgive you, but I never will.” Years later she would think that if he had not dropped his head in that manner, as if offering himself for sacrifice, she might not have struck. But he did and she did, swinging the ax into the back of his neck with the force and accuracy of an executioner, nearly decapitating him. Then with great calm (even now she remembered how calm she’d been) she went into the house and announced to her mother, “Dámaso is dead. I killed him.”

Rosario ran into the yard and stared at the corpse and the blood, an immense amount of it, for a long time without speaking a word. Finally she clasped Yvonne’s hand and said, “God did not bless me with a son, but He gave me one daughter with a man’s heart.” Yvonne was feeling the first twinges of panic. “I am going to have to run away or go to prison,” she cried. “You will do neither one,” said Rosario. “We have got to get rid of the body. The ax, too. Come on, we have a lot to do.”

They wrapped Dámaso’s body in a tarp, managed to load him into the bed of the rattletrap truck that carried his squash and melons to market, and drove far out into the desert, where Yvonne hacked out a shallow grave with the ax. His head had come off on the bumpy ride. They buried it with the body, threw in the ax, and covered the grave. “We will leave the truck out here,” Rosario said. “We are going to say that Dámaso got very drunk and drove away, never to be seen again.”

On the long walk back to the ejido, Yvonne sobbed, still fearing that her only choice was flight or prison. Why, she asked Rosario, why in the name of God had she married such a horrible man? “All those years I raised you and your sisters alone. I was tired of it. Then Dámaso came along. How was I to know he would be the way he was?” They walked on, following the tire tracks when they could. “You know, it is those gringos who are to blame. They killed your father and left me alone. They are the guilty ones.” It wasn’t the first time Yvonne had heard about the gringos who’d murdered her father. Actually, only one gringo, but Rosario always spoke as if the killer’s whole family had been in on it.

They got home at twilight, parched and exhausted. “Remember, mi hija, the story is, Dámaso abandoned us. We are going to have to move to town and find work, it is going to be tough, but now …” She embraced her daughter; there was a solidarity between them, the solidarity of conspirators, and she did not have to finish the sentence because Yvonne knew—now they were free.

How strong, how clearheaded her mother had been then, Yvonne reflected, shedding her dusty clothes. And how small and frail at the end. The cancer had reduced Rosario, never a big woman, to the size of a child; and she seemed to grow smaller each time Yvonne visited her, there in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tucson. Sometimes she expected to walk into that room and find nothing left of her mother but an empty hospital gown and a dent in the pillow.

She ejected the memory from her mind and stepped into the bathroom to shower. A sidelong glance in the full-length mirror on the door moved her to face herself straight on. A vieja, was she? Not a bad figure for a woman of fifty-two. Some sag in the tits, some thickening in the waist, and—turning to look over her shoulder—some flabbiness in the ass and thighs, but not bad all in all. Her height was an advantage, equitably distributing the few excess kilos she carried. She focused on her face and decided that it wasn’t bad, either. Its worst flaw were the tiny pits, remnants of adolescent acne, cratering her cheeks; but a light brush of powder and rouge took care of those.

The fiesta had started by the time she finished dressing and putting on her makeup. Loud voices, the bray of horns, and the high, warbling cries of the Golden Roosters came from outside. Through the bedroom window she saw the cabs of pickup trucks poking above the low wall enclosing the backyard. Also two army Humvees, with machine guns mounted on their roofs. Most of her guests were neighboring rancheros and ranch hands, or townspeople from Santa Cruz and San Lazaro; but she’d also invited the comandante of the local military zone. He had been recommended by a general, a personal friend. Carrasco had federal and state cops in his hip pocket; she had a general and a whole squad of colonels, as well the commander of the Agua Prieta garrison. Maintaining good relations with the army was critical to her operations: rural defense forces guarded her marijuana plantations; soldiers provided security for her shipments. The mordida amounted to many thousands a month but was worth every peso.

When she entered the study, she found Julián sitting at the desk, a virtual mesa of walnut that easily accommodated a desktop computer, a laptop, a printer, two telephones, and a fax machine. He was drinking a can of soda. Julián did not touch alcohol, and he never used product. That was what had fucked up his father, among other things. Fermín had been addicted to Marlboros laced with crack.

“¡Muy mota!” he said, admiring his mother’s outfit—a two-tone western shirt, cream across the shoulders, the rest emerald green; cream-colored pants with a silver concho belt; a pair of lizard-skin boots; and a silver and obsidian necklace with matching earrings. The shirt complemented her green eyes and the jewelry made a nice contrast with her hair.

“It is hardly elegant,” she sniffed. “A black cocktail dress would be elegant.”

“In a rustic way, it is. You are the rustically elegant ranchera.”

She winced as he swiveled the high-backed leather chair to one side and crossed his legs in an effeminate way, one pointy boot tapping the air. “Don’t sit like that,” she said.

He uncrossed his legs and spread them apart and grabbed his crotch. “Manly enough for you?”

She overlooked his impudence. They were, after all, a team. The union of her ruthlessness and cunning with his organizational talents had transformed the Menéndez organization—or the Agua Prieta Cartel, as the chotas called it—from a joke into a disciplined and efficient enterprise. If he was a maricón, at least he was a smart one, upon whom an expensive education had not been wasted. “This is a business, and it’s time we started running it like one,” Julián had declared not long after his father’s death, an event as liberating for him as it had been for her. Fermín was a peasant and a tyrant who had imposed on the cartel a despotism of outmoded methods better suited to running a corner grocery than a multimillion-dollar industry. Among his many other idiocies, he’d kept all the family profits in just two banks, both in Douglas. One seizure warrant from the FBI or U.S. Customs, and the Menéndezes would have been broke.

With the help of American and Mexican lawyers, Julián had distributed the accounts to twenty banks and investment firms throughout the United States and Mexico. He established the straw companies through which profits were washed in land deals and legitimate businesses from car washes to discos to restaurants. He’d computerized records—where the mota had been grown, the weight of each load and who it had been assigned to, and the amount of mordida and to whom it was paid (a roster that included U.S. Customs agents at the Douglas port of entry). Fermín had kept such information on scraps of paper or in his head, and since his crack habit had further shrunk his head’s naturally limited capacity, it was easy for disloyal people to rip him off or snitch out a shipment and get away with it. Yvonne often thought that she could have put up with his sexual perversions if he hadn’t been so stupid, or with his stupidities if he hadn’t been so perverse. The two together were intolerable. When Fermín turned down an offer from the Gulf Cartel to partner up in shipping Colombian coke through Agua Prieta—he wanted nothing to do with Colombians—Yvonne saw her opportunity. She got word to the Gulf boss, who was running his affairs from his cell in Palomas prison, that if he would rid her of Fermín, he would have a deal.

After she took over, the thieves and snitches thought they could get away with even more from her than they had from her late husband. Because of her sex, of course. She ended that misconception forever with the now-famous “Pond of Death” incident. Housecleaning, after all, was woman’s work. Yvonne herself had phoned the police with the “anonymous” tip that led them to the water hole. She wanted the bodies to be discovered and all the tabloid headlines the discovery could grab. It was important to set an example right away.

“You wanted to talk about the future,” Julián said. “No time like the present.”

Yvonne stood looking out the window, her back to him. Ghosts. “You know, I was thinking about the past when I was getting ready. About Abuela. How small she looked. Small. Small. Small. She could not have weighed more than thirty kilos.”

Julián sighed. His mother spoke in subdued tones, as she always did when the subject was Rosario. Though he welcomed these gentle contours of voice, a pleasing contrast to her normal sharps and flats, he was sick of hearing about his sanctified grandmother, dead for six months. “Let us not indulge in nostalgia,” he said. “The past is gone.”

“The hell it is!” she shot back, sounding more like herself, each word as piercing as a thorn. Looking at her tall figure from behind, crowned by red hair, he thought of an ocotillo wand in the spring, with its scarlet blossoms, its setaceous stalk. He said nothing.

Nor did Yvonne, gazing at the pond. Ducks swam on the polished surface mirroring the álamos trees, the tussocks of golden sacoton girdling its shores. Superimposed on this scene, like her reflection in the window, was an image of Rosario the day before she died, caged by the guardrails on the bed, skull as hairless as a stone, skin almost translucent, like wax paper except for the bruising. One skeletal hand was almost blue, and that hand had risen slowly toward Yvonne, risen slowly, as if the IV tube stuck in her wrist were heavy as a fire hose. Yet it gripped her hand with amazing strength.

“It will not be long now,” Rosario rasped. “You are going to do something, mi hija?”

“Yes, Mamá.”

“Tell me what you are going to do.”

“I will when it is done,” Yvonne answered, though she had no idea what action she was going to take. She did now, but not then.

“I pray to live to see it. Those people did very well for themselves while we suffered.”

All those love songs, Yvonne thought. All those love poems. All that drivel about love the priests preached at Sunday Mass. Why didn’t someone compose a song, a poem, or a sermon about hate? Hate was stronger than love. Hate had kept her mother alive longer than the doctors had predicted. It had coursed through her veins for half a century. Like mercury, it had poisoned the milk in her breasts, and on that hot and bitter drink Yvonne had suckled. Sometimes it seemed as though she, the daughter with a man’s heart, had known from infancy that she was destined to be the instrument of her mother’s revenge.

Rosario relaxed her fingers. The bloodless hand fell to the bed, causing the drip bottle to jiggle on its metal stand. “You have the power to act now,” she said in a hollow whisper. “It took you a long time to get it, but now you have it. Make use of it. Cuanto antes mejor—the sooner the better.”

“I will, Mamá. I vow it.”

“Alive or dead, do not fail me.”

“I won’t.”

The past is gone? Yvonne asked silently, continuing to look out the window. The past is never gone. The arrow of time was all one thing, the notch and feathers of what was, the shaft of what is, the tip of what is to come.

She motioned to Julián to shut the door, both for privacy and to dampen the racket outside, then took the chair he had just vacated. He sat in the only other one in the room, a worn armchair jammed against the wall opposite the desk, between two bookcases that reached almost to the ceiling. The shelves were empty, the books having been shipped out with the furniture.

“All right, the future,” Yvonne said. “As I said, I am going to buy the San Ignacio ranch.”

“And I had mentioned the slight problem that it isn’t for sale.”

“This place wasn’t for sale a few months ago, but I persuaded Señor Amador that it would be in his best interests to sell.”

“Your methods of persuasion will not work on the other side like they do on this side.”

“There are other methods. Listen. I am going to make those gringos suffer. I am going to make their lives miserable. When I get through with them, they will be begging for someone, anyone to take it off their hands.”

Again, the voice like a thorn, pricking, stabbing. “So this
is
all about Abuela, isn’t it? Abuela and her old nonsense.”

“It is about justice.”

Folding his hands on his lap, Julián looked up at the bookcases. “We should buy a library, fill up those empty shelves. It would warm up the room.”

“Stop being cute. Did you hear me?”

“Impossible not to,” he said, and bent toward her, hands on his knees, as if he were about to lunge at her. She could think straighter than his father ever did, except when it came to this. In this, she was as crazy as Abuela had been. “There is no room in business for sentiment. No room for waging some old woman’s vendetta with no profit in it. You did everything you could for Abuela. She died a rich woman. What need is there to do anymore? She is in her grave. Let her grievances lie there with her.”

“What a fine speech! Grievances—is that what you call them? Pues, they are
my
grievances, too. It was my father those people murdered and got away with it.”

“You never even knew him!” Julián said, raising his voice.

“I made a promise to her on her deathbed. A promise like that is sacred.”

“That word does not sound quite right on your lips. If you insist on settling old scores, why not send Marco and Heraclio over there and shoot the gringos? Blow their fucking heads off. Make an end of it.”

“You know, I had considered doing that very thing. I decided it would be too risky.”

Julián relaxed and slumped back into the chair. “That represents some evolution in your thinking.”