The Highway Kind(85)

He spit. He normally would save it in this heat, would suck a rock as he walked to make himself salivate. But he had two Pepsi bottles full of water strung across his shoulders on a rope. It was only twenty kilometers. He should have worn shoes for this hike, though. But he didn’t have any good walking shoes. He wore his huaraches—and they made him furious. Leather straps and soles made of old tires. A cactus thorn had worked its way deep into his left foot, and he couldn’t carve it out with his knife. He stomped harder with that foot, rubbing the pain into his flesh so the infection would swell and force the thorn out. He wasn’t afraid of infections—the bad molar was leaking black-tasting poison into his mouth and swelling his cheek. When he got to town, he’d find some pliers. He’d show God and everyone else what he was made of.

He walked on. Not far now. He had walked out of Sal Si Puedes, his little blister of a fishing town hugging the cliffs, with one thing on his mind: revenge. Especially now—man, he was going to ride, but thanks to those cabrones, he had to walk. That he had to walk to Ensenada made him madder than he usually was. Life was generous: it gave a man a thousand things to be pissed off about. He was old, after all. Old men had the right to be mad all day. Just a kilometer to go till he reached Guadalupe, a small community on the outskirts of the city. There was a guy there with a wrecking yard. He could get pliers there. And the guy had a mule. The old man had a deal in mind. He was going to trade for that mule. And he was going to collect what he wanted.

“I get what I want,” he said to the air. “When I want it.”

He would have ridden his old moped up the highway, but those narco assholes had backed into it and broken the back wheel and fork. Well, he could have walked up the frontage road, nice and level, except they had hung naked bodies off the bridge after they crunched his moto. The policías had shut the whole road down. God damn them. Made him walk over the mountains and get thorns in his feet, and him with this rotten tooth leaking pus into his mouth.

He smiled again.

“We will see what we see,” he said.

They had that yellow VW van, though, those pinches narcos. He liked that van. He was going to take it when he was done with them. He would shit in their mothers’ milk first. Then park their van beside the sea.

His ridiculous mother came into his mind. She had named him Benigno, a stupid peasant name he never forgave her for giving him. But her sayings, her dichos, came back to him sometimes. Her tone came into his voice when he didn’t want it. Usually advising a course of mayhem. She hadn’t survived as a trash picker by being soft. He shook his head and grimaced at the memory of that little leather-faced demon. He saw a flash of her striking a pit bull over the head with a pipe. Today, Mother’s voice said: Vengeance is the pleasure of God. Oh yes, he had heard that one before.

“Bueno, pues, Mama,” he said out loud. “I must be God, then.”

He descended.


He first saw that VW van at the prison.

Before Benigno got into the orphanage racket, marrying the widow Abigail in Tijuana and opening their house to street kids and abandoned waifs and attracting Baptist missionaries with their endless vanloads of food and clothes and toys and doughnuts—and cash—Benigno had been a guard at La Mesa. The penitentiary, that stink hole east of town. He’d been hired because he was good with guns and was meaner than any inmate. He met Abigail when she brought the pinches gringos there. Translating Bible stories for the scumbags inside. But she was just what he liked—a bustling fat woman with a big bottom. And a car.

“You cook?” he asked her. “I know you drive.”

It was his idea of courtship.

He shacked up with her shortly after that. The Christians gave him a Bible and a cross he wore. He drank only when they weren’t around. They feared him—he was smaller than the blond gringas with their folk guitars, but his red eyes and grimace repelled them like a force field. He sometimes sat outside the little house and listened to them all shrieking their hymns, and he’d smoke and watch the street. You couldn’t own guns in Mexico, but he was a guard, and to hell with them all. He kept a Glock in the back of his pants, and if anyone did not return his smile, he thought: I know what you would look like with your brains on the street, chingado. Those were good afternoons. Plus doughnuts.

The yellow van had appeared at the prison in the midst of the uproar surrounding the capture of El Surfo. Shit, Benigno thought now. He had to spit every time he heard that stupid name: El Surfo. Jesus Christ, they had enough Mexican narcos and sicarios, but this red-haired asshole was raised in California and had come down here chopping heads. Big celebrity. American accent. Calling himself the Surfer.

Benigno liked walking guard duty on the wall. Nobody in his right mind went down into the yard or into the cell complexes. It was a den of monsters. There was nothing like it outside of Mexico. Gangsters with La-Z-Boy loungers and big-screen TVs. Transvestite hookers and children. Women washing laundry and doing chores and marrying and cooking and working as whores. Booths selling tacos and knives, and babies playing in the dirt. Smoke. Screams. Music. Barbers. They had their own little city in there, and the gangsters sliced up anybody they disliked. Guards got Christmas bonuses from the narcos. Life went on. Benigno stayed up above it—aside from the smell, it was all right. It was like watching TV.

Then that fat red-haired bastard was dragged in, wrapped in chains. Helicopters and TV news crews swarmed. He’d grinned as he was led in. Smug. Looking around like a big movie star. His chained hands out in front, his big body laid back against the cops. He started to laugh. “?Me vale madre!” he called.