The Highway Kind(89)

But the worst part was the highway being closed. That meant no Baptists. No clothes or toys or doughnuts. Who knew how long the highway would be closed. Cabrones.

The cops didn’t care that he had been a prison guard. They wouldn’t let him walk up the frontage road or cross the bridge. They made him run across the dead highway and climb the rocks on the other side.

Surfo, he thought. Just wait.


The next morning, Benigno awoke in his nest of rubber garden hose. He was stiff. His foot stung, but with a fierce prod from one fingernail, the red volcano of flesh burst and the cactus thorn popped out. The jaw was already better, though his breath was like some rotten beast beside the road. He pissed on the wall and stowed his bag and hose and trudged to the cantina.

Too early, even for degenerate fishermen or buchones. It was dark and abandoned. He grabbed one of the white plastic chairs on its shabby cement porch and sat in the sun, eyes closed like a lizard. The barkeep was the first to arrive, around noon.

“Viejo,” he said. “You can’t sit there.”

“I have a hundred gringo dollars that say I can,” he replied, not opening his eyes. The hole in his gums still dripped poison down his throat. “I want to drink it all.”

Abigail would be furious when she discovered he had emptied her coffee can of missionary money.

He could feel the man standing there, staring down at him.

After a few moments, there came the rattling of keys and the crack of the door lock snapping open.

The sicarios came in a pickup and two Japanese motorcycles. They stomped up to the porch and stood before him in a semicircle.

“?Y tu?” one of them said.

“Waiting for El Surfo,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

“Funny,” he said.

“We don’t know a Surfo.”

“I knew him at La Mesa.”

Silence.

“He was in cell block twenty. He had cells ten, eleven, and twelve. In the Penthouse. I was one block over. In a corner cell. I did him a favor once.”

Silence.

“Stand,” the same guy said. He stood, held out his arms. They frisked him. Took his knife. Felt the plastic bottle in his back pocket. The sicario pulled it out and inspected it.

“?Y esto?” he said.

“A gift for El Surfo. Got it from the gringos. I can get more. Lots more. Try one. It’s codeine. You’ll love your fucking life.”

The guy smiled and glanced at his associates.

“Look at this old guy,” he said.

“Viejo loco.”

They laughed, with no trace of warmth at all.

“Bueno,” his interrogator said. “You can stay.” He handed the plastic bottle back to Benigno.

They held open the door of the cantina.

“Sit in here. We’ll be watching you.”

Te vamos a wachar.


El Surfo was a bear-shaped bastard, all right. He was hilarious. He seemed to fill half of the bar. Chain-smoking and hugging his crew of killers and kissing his worshippers. Benigno watched him from a corner as he sipped a tepid beer. Damn, but that boy could eat. It was Ensenada—he had platters of shrimp tacos and fish tacos delivered to his corner booth. Women in tight dresses and piled-up dyed-blond hair ate bits of taco from his fingertips. He demonstrated the immense bad taste of displaying a gold-plated AK on the table beside his greasy wax-paper rubbish and empties. Benigno watched him squeeze chi-chis and tell jokes. You could almost forget good old Surfo liked to make videos of men getting their heads cut off with electric saws. That he once wrapped two teenage girls’ heads in duct tape and then filmed them writhing on the ground as they died of suffocation. And then he had come to Sal Si Puedes and pissed all over everything. Benigno’s eyes grew redder as he squinted.

Maria, he thought.

The first sicario gestured for him to stand. He stood. The thug leaned down and murmured in Surfo’s ear. Surfo looked over at Benigno and jerked his head in the universal Mexican gesture meaning What do you want?

Benigno stepped forward. He felt the pus bubble in his foot leak. His huarache was slippery. The pain was a small lightning bolt up his ankle, dissipating in his calf. Clean pain. Focus. He smiled.

“Jefe,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I knew you back in the day.”

“When?”

“When you were in La Mesa.”

Everybody knew El Surfo didn’t like to talk about prison.

“I don’t remember you,” he said.

“Why would you?” Benigno moved closer, went to sit. “May I?” he asked.

Surfo opened his hands like a king and nodded.

Benigno slid into the seat across from the great man. He was shorter than Surfo by a head at least. The sicarios all thought he looked like a monkey.

“Can I smoke?”

Surfo nodded. “Give me one.”

Benigno had Dominos, the notoriously rough Mexican cigs. Real men sucked the corrosive smoke into their lungs and let it slither out of their noses and never coughed. He shook one out for the narco and lipped out one for himself and lit them both from the same match.

“It’s like we’re on a date,” El Surfo said.

His men exploded in laughter.

“Not going to kiss you,” Benigno said.

“Look at this guy!” Surfo shouted.