The Highway Kind(87)

“?Qué onda, pinche mula?” he called.

Panfilo lifted his head and peeled back his lip and waited for Benigno’s carrots. Benigno always brought carrots from the damned Baptists’ larder. He hated carrots. He patted the mule’s neck and went inside the shack.

“?Qué onda, Wilo?” he said.

“?Don Benigno! ?Qué hay?”

“Aquí nomás.”

Benigno sat down and picked up a Mexican magazine featuring vividly crimson dead bodies basted in their own blood. A poster of a topless woman was taped to the bathroom door.

“Got pliers I can borrow?” he said.

“Sure.”

Wilo shuffled over to a workbench and rattled around. Guy looked like a vulture, Benigno thought. Wilo handed him the pliers.

“Thanks.”

Benigno opened his mouth and reached in and clamped the molar.

“Oh Jesus,” Wilo said.

Benigno used both hands to twist it. Tears fell from his eyes. He grunted. He ripped the tooth out of his head. Noxious fluids choked him. He hurried to the toilet and spit red globs into the bowl.

“Jesus!” Wilo cried.

When Benigno sat back down, he had wads of toilet paper stuffed in that side of his maw. He showed Wilo the dark tooth. He was very proud of himself. He had done that. Nobody else could do that. But he wasn’t stupid or crazy. He also knew he had just terrified poor Wilo. Now he could negotiate. Wilo understood he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

“I want the mule,” he said.

“My mule?”

“Sí.”

“But that mule, es muy caro. I don’t think you can afford him. No offense.”

“I’ll trade you a car engine for him.”

Wilo stroked his chin.

“What kind of engine?”

Benigno had done his research. He wasn’t much on beauty. Not interested in nature. But he loved machines. Machines he could understand. When he was a boy in the garbage dumps, he would pour ground glass into the fuel tanks of the big tractors and watch them die when their operators tried to start them.

Later, the gringo-skateboard Baptists brought him old car magazines. He couldn’t read a word. But he laughed at Rat Fink cartoons and studied hot-rod flatheads and full-blown hemi engines as if the magazines were scriptures. In his spare time, he drew fantastic dragsters and Formula One cars on notebook paper he stole from the kids.

The only time Maria spoke to him was when he showed her a modified ’36 Ford with chrome blowers and upswept pipes in a magazine centerfold.

“Muy bonito,” she had said.

He lit a cigarette and said, “Ah, cabrón!”

Now he grinned at Wilo—something Wilo did not want to see, considering the grisly tooth on a rag on his bench.

“Porsche,” Benigno said. “A 1986 Carrera, rebuilt, fuel-injected, geared to a VW transmission.”

He had looked at the van many times out in the lot, chatted with the buchones leaning on it with their stupid narco cowboy clothes, guarding it ostentatiously.

Wilo’s eyes widened.

“Nice,” he said.

“You can have the transmission too if you give me a few other things.”

“Condition of the engine?” Wilo said.

“Better than new.”

Wilo wasn’t a fool either—that Porsche engine was worth ten mules. Twenty.

“Did you kill somebody?” he asked.

“Not yet, no.”

Wilo laughed nervously.

“Decide,” the old man said.

They shook on the deal. Wilo put the supplies Benigno requested into a paper bag.

Benigno told him he’d be back for the mule in three days. He hoisted the garden hose over his shoulder, took the sack Wilo handed him, and set off toward Ensenada. He kept laughing all the way down the alley. He had missionary money in his front pocket, and he had the bottle of codeine they had given him for his toothache in his ass pocket.

Life was fulsome and redolent.

Nobody would tell him where El Surfo hung out. That culero had served two years in La Mesa and had walked. They knew better than to rat him out to anyone. But Pemexes all along the main drag were full of bored men waiting between cars to pump gas. “Man,” he said at each one. “Have you seen that yellow Volks van? It’s a beauty.”

Cowards looked at the ground and mumbled, “No, no.”

But it didn’t take long.

The tenth guy had seen it. He wore a baseball cap with a homemade logo inked on it. In Sharpie he had written KISS in LIVE! Puro rocanrol. The van? The Volkswagen with the loud engine? It was always parked at the Farolito, a cantina off the docks not far from the cannery.

“Just follow the gulls,” he said. “And the stink.”

Benigno gave him twenty dollars.

“I need you to meet me beside the cannery,” he said. “At five in the morning. Yes. Five, vato. I need a can of gas. And you need to drive me to Wilo’s yonke. I’ll give you fifty more dollars and two new surfboards.”

“órale.”

They shook.

Benigno started to whistle.


He walked past the bar. Yeah, it all stank. Stank of bad old fish. Pelicans squatted on the pilings of the dock. Boats out there bobbing. Benigno thought Maria might have found this romantic once. Now, she’d just cover her eyes and chuckle. His vieja Abigail would just want to get some cheap fish. Why lie? He desired Maria, not Abigail. It made him hot. Maria was still young enough. He thought he might be able to teach her to talk again, though he preferred silence. He stuck his tongue in the wound in his jaw and jerked himself back into the day.