The Sinaloa Story
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Epigraph
Prelude
PART ONE - Sinaloa
DelRay and Ava
East to Sinaloa
Elijah’s Angel
Only the Lonely Know Time
The Big Empty
Saint’s Preserve Us
Drugstore Cowboys
A Message to Mudo
The Oracle
Trinity
Moo Yang
A Short Visit to La Viuda
The Sadness Express
Wild Country
Lonely Teardrops
Ava’s Dream
DelRay’s Dream
Believers
The One-Eyed Lizard
The Great Heat
Rififi
Nocturnal Admission
Desert Time
PART TWO - La Villanía
Cobra and Leander
Bad Head
The Red Scorpion
The Chance of a Lifetime
Land of the Pandas
Payback
PART THREE - The Good Fight
The Great White North
Passport
Pilgrimage
The Mouth of Trouth
Everything Depends on the Weather
Abogado
Cobra Gets It Right
Correo Aéreo
How Heaven Slipped Up
Children of Paradise
Flying Down to Cairo
Christmas in New Orleans,
Bible Story
Naked
PART FOUR - El Cuaderno amoratado
Ball of Fire
PART FIVE - Coda
Diminuendo
Con Much Cariño
I, Cairo Fly
Books by Barry Gifford
About the Author
Copyright Page
PRAISE FOR
The Sinaloa Story
“[A] rather beautifully weird and laconic tale.”
—The Guardian
“Gifford is one of those brave writers who go their own way, and challenge readers to follow ... An absolutely original stylist, he has a great ear for dialogue and dialect.... He knows exactly what wacky and deadly things people get up to when they think he’s not looking, and he holds them to terrible account.”
—Alan Ryan, Atlanta Journal Constitution
“Like Sailor and Lula of Gifford’s previous novels, DelRay and Ava can’t avoid the violence that surrounds them (nor do they always want to), but, in Gifford’s hands, their troubles are elevated to a gritty, visceral poetry of the marginalized.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Gifford cuts right through to the heart of what makes a good novel readable and entertaining.... [T]he way Barry Gifford does it, it’s high art.”
—Elmore Leonard
“Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora’s Box of uncontainable emotions.... Gifford’s manner is mandarin; he doesn’t waste words, preach, or point out morals.... There is a wild streak of black humor running through nearly everything.... There’s no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him.”
—Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
Acknowledgments
Portions of this novel, mostly in different form, appeared in the following magazines: Shenandoah (Lexington), Exquisite Corpse (Baton Rouge), and First Intensity (New York).
For Michael Swindle
I am waiting for death.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE
I lay down last night on the wrong side of town.
—Don COVAY
Prelude
The Mother of the Light
The interior of a house. A dim hallway, lit only by extremely low-watt bulbs. The hallway is silent, empty. A door opens and a small man emerges from a room. He is carrying a hat. He closes the door to the room, puts on his hat and walks to the far end of the hallway, turns left and disappears. The sound of a woman’s voice faintly enters the passageway : A record is playing somewhere in the house, Yolanda del Rio singing “Tus Maletas en la Puerta.” Suddenly there is a loud noise, a thump, followed by an agonized cry. More thumps follow, then a louder cry. Two short, thick-shouldered men appear at the distant end of the hallway. They hurry down the corridor toward the source of the noise. They enter a room off the corridor—not the room the man with the hat departed—and there is a shout, a muffled yell, several thudding sounds, body punches. The two thick-shouldered men appear again in the hallway, holding between them another man, whose legs are not working. The thick-shouldered men hold the seemingly lifeless man under his armpits as they drag him away along the corridor. They turn left at the end of the hall and disappear from view. The door to the room from which the limp man was taken remains open, spilling an additional sliver of pale light into the corridor. Quiet sobs are coming from the room, inside of which a small brown girl, no older than sixteen, sits naked on a narrow cot, crying. Her thick black hair falls far below her shoulders. Bruises are visible on her face and upper arms. There is a mirrored dresser next to the bed. Religious items festoon the mirror: rosary beads, silver chains with dangling crucifixes, postcard pictures of various saints stuck into the sides between glass and frame. On the other side of the room is a washbasin, next to that a toilet. Yolanda del Rio is singing “Hoy Te Toca Dormir en el Suelo.” The girl stands, her shoulders shaking, chest heaving, eyes streaming. She rises unsteadily, walks with small, tentative steps toward the door, and slowly closes it.
PART ONE
Sinaloa
DelRay and Ava
A wrinkled ribbon of blue lightning lit up the landscape like a birthday cake. DelRay Mudo was driving on the outskirts of Sinaloa, Texas, listening to Dr. Nuca Picabia’s tape The Losing Battle Against Low Self-Esteem and How Not to Fight It. “I do not like people of taste,” snarled the former Santo Domingo horse doctor who’d turned psychologist to the masses via cable television; “they remind me of game hung too long.”
In Nuca Picabia, DelRay thought, the Mexican bandit and revolutionary Pancho Villa would have found a genuine companion. Both were rugged individualists, leaders, men from humble backgrounds who despised elitism and despotism, however those evils might be disguised. When Villa assumed control of the government of Chihuahua in 1913, he ordered that any Spaniard caught within the boundaries of that state would be escorted to the nearest wall by a firing squad. When the American consul objected to what seemed to him an irrational and savage policy decision, Villa responded: “Señor Consul, we Mexicans have had three hundred years of the Spaniards. They have not changed in character since the conquistadores. They disrupted the Indian Empire and enslaved the people. We did not ask them to mingle their blood with ours. Twice we drove them out of Mexico and allowed them to return with the same rights as Mexicans, and they used these rights to steal away our land, to make the people slaves, and to take up arms against the cause of liberty.... They thrust on us the greatest superstition the world has ever known—the Catholic Church. They ought to be killed for that alone.”
The horse doctor advocated assassination as an antidote to proselytizers of organized religion, a prescription with which DelRay Mudo could not disagree. The problem with religion, thought DelRay, was that it had no soul. Señor Picabia’s panegyric, however, wore him out after twenty minutes or so, and DelRay turned off the tape and tuned in his favorite local radio station, KILO.
“How do, South Texas,” a crackly male voice announced. “Rumors are flyin’ that Excello’s Red Devil service station will not be here in Sinaloa much longer. Well, sir, this is Excello Pomus himself speakin’, and I own the property at number eight Gorch Street, as reco
rded in the chancery clerk’s office, Comanche County courthouse. The next time I move, Sparky and Buddy’s Funeral Home and Dump Truck Rental will be in charge. Any real questions, call me—Excello Pomus, owner and operator of Excello’s Red Devil, 555-1814, in Sinaloa,Texas. Thank you, and praise the Lord.”
“Thank you, Excello,” came a youthful male voice. “Hope that straightens out that situation. Got one more announcement, this from Pellejo y Hijo Pet Food. We pay for dead livestock, restaurant grease, and store meat scraps. Toll-free long distance. InTexas, the number is 1-800-555-hook. That’s 1-800-555-4663. Outside the great state, it’s 1-800-55-MOUTH. That’s right, 1-800-556-6884.”
Heavy water hit the windshield, followed by a whipcrack of lightning that blinded DelRay and caused him to lose control of the car momentarily. DelRay switched off the ignition and glided to a complete stop on the shoulder of the road. Mudo needed some downtime to consider his situation anyway, seeing as how it was at least as serious as the weather.
He thought about Ava Varazo and wondered where she was. The last time DelRay had seen her, Ava was wearing the green scarf with purple and yellow parrots on it that he had bought for her in Nogales. If she were here now, with him in the Cutlass, he might have a hard time deciding whether to strangle her or fuck her. He would probably do both, but he could not be certain of the order of events.
Ava Varazo was working as a carhop whore at Puma Charlie’s Eat-It and Beat-It, a drive-in on the outskirts of La Paz, Arizona, when she met DelRay Mudo. He had heard about the Puma, as it was familiarly known, for several months before checking out what his long-haul trucker buddies said was the finest cathouse upside the border. Puma Charlie, who passed himself off as part Quechua Indian on his Bolivian mother’s side, was actually a Sicilian-American named Carmine Ricobene, born and raised in the Belmont neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Puma Charlie had fled the East Coast, where the mob put a price on his head for pulling a double cross during a drug deal, and landed in the southwestern bordertown of La Paz, pimping.
The drive-in was a sweet setup—the state police and INS agents took la mordida half in flesh, half in cash, with the occasional cheese-burger or piece of pie thrown in as lagniappe. Customers parked their vehicles in stalls and ordered blondes, brunettes or redheads over an intercom, specifying preference for shape, height, etc. If they were regulars, the men had only to mention the name of their choice morsel, and they would be informed as to her availability. If a customer were required to wait longer than twenty minutes, a burger with onion rings or fries and a soft drink was provided free of charge. The Eat-It and Beat-It employed mostly illegal aliens, young girls smuggled in from Mexico, whom Puma Charlie housed in trailers behind the drive-in.
The former Queens racketeer had named his establishment and himself after the Andean myth that eclipses of the sun are caused by its being devoured by a puma. “My Bolivian grandmother, mi abuela, told me,” the erstwhile Carmine Ricobene liked to lie to customers, “that an eclipse means the sun is sick. Our people, the Quechua, would light fires to warm the earth, and children would scream and shout and beat animals with sticks to make them cry out, in order to frighten the puma away.”
Ava Varazo had come from the tiny town of La Villania, forty miles south of the border. Legend had it that the pueblo’s name (“the despicable act”) derived from a slaughter of defenseless women and children by U.S. soldiers on that spot during the Mexican-American War in 1847. Ever since then, Ava had told DelRay, women from her village had within their hearts a murderous agenda where gringos were concerned.
“You mean I’d better watch out,” DelRay joked.
“I mean you’d better watch out for me,” said Ava.
DelRay Mudo had chosen Ava Varazo from among the other carhops because of the way the early-evening redness highlighted her practically waistlength silky black hair. Her nickname at the Puma was La Crin, “the horse’s mane.” None of the prostitutes had naturally colored hair other than black, she told DelRay, and since he patronized only Ava, he had no basis by which to disbelieve her.
DelRay was living in Phoenix when he met Ava, working as a mechanic at Chifla Miguel’s Motorcycle Repair on Fifty-eighth Street in Guadalupe. It was Ava who convinced him to quit his dead-end gig at Chifla Miguel’s and do something meaningful with his life.
“Like what?” DelRay asked her, as they lay on freshly soiled sheets in Ava’s Airstream, listening to the Carrier drone.
“Help me run a number on a rich pimp I know in Texas. Then we get married, have kids, make a life together.”
“My daddy, Domingo ‘Duro’ Mudo, used to say, ‘The Lord’s rule is nothin’ good ever happens in Texas.’”
Ava licked the sweat beads on DelRay’s chest, then stuck the tip of her tongue into his right ear.
“No disrespect to your father, mi amor,” she whispered, “but maybe God will make an exception in this case.”
East to Sinaloa
So they went to Sinaloa, Texas, unemployed DelRay and his marvelous, evil Ava. What was so marvelous about her, mused DelRay as he nudged the Cutlass forward. Not only her coal-lustrous mane, reptilian green eyes, thumb-length knife scar high on her left cheek that glowed amber when she got hot—it was the way Ava moved that captured DelRay. Her head, her hips, her mobility. All of Ava. DelRay lit up an unfiltered Lucky Strike and replayed the Sinaloa story in his head, hoping to make sense of it.
“Indio Desacato is a dangerous man,” Ava had warned DelRay before they left La Paz. “But he’s hooked on me. Hooked on a hooker. Funny, huh?”
“Like me,” said DelRay.
“Right, honey. Only with a difference.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m with you, not him.”
Ava kissed DelRay and he kissed back. They were sitting in the front seat of his car, parked next to the gas pumps at Plata Argentina’s Mercury Service Station. Mudo had just fueled up preparatory to their leaving La Paz.
“I guess I’m a lucky boy, then.”
“What, you think you’re not?”
DelRay fired the Cutlass and headed out.
“Tell me again about this deal.”
“Dope, baby. Indio Desacato got a chain of whore-houses across Texas. He lives in Sinaloa, near the border, on a fancy estate.”
“You been there?”
“No, but he told me about it. Indio invited me to come live with him.”
“Why didn’t you go before?”
“Because he’s a beast. Beats his girls. Famous for it. Always treated me good when he come to La Paz, but I know that wouldn’t last once he got me to Texas.”
“What about Puma Charlie?”
“Charlie’s easy about it. Girls want to go, he lets ‘em. More comin’ in all the time from Mexico. Ain’t exactly a shortage of women wantin’to work.”
“So how you figure we can take this Desacato? Given that he’s such a dangerous character.”
“S-H-C.”
“S-what?”
“S-H-C. Spontaneous human combustion. After we take out his safe, we’re gonna nail him and make it look like he exploded. Read about an hombre stopped his car by a road, got out to bleed his snake, and all of a sudden glowed blue before collapsing dead on the ground.”
“Who saw this happen?”
“His wife, who was in the car. She didn’t want to touch his body because it was smokin’. Cops called the medical people, who discovered a hole in the guy’s stomach, which had turned to carbon.”
“What?!”
“Yeah. Apparently an electrical current of some kind had entered his body through the earth and caused him to spontaneously combust, right where he stood with his snake in his hand. Scientists later said he mighta been electrocuted from his piss, which coulda acted as a conductor of the electricity. Turns out he was takin’ a leak underneath power lines in open country. There’s invisible electrical fields all around places like that, and the charge jumped right up inside his prick, calcified his internal or
gans. None of this could be a hundred percent verified, of course, so they called it SHC. I figure we can make Desacato’s death look like a case of spontaneous human combustion.”
“You’re a more complicated woman than I thought,” said DelRay.
Ava laughed and tossed her mane. “What you think can make you crazy,” she said.
Elijah’s Angel
Indio’s main man in Sinaloa, a one-eyed, six-foot-seven, 380-pound former professional football player named Thankful Priest, took care of the day-to-day business operations, leaving Desacato free to travel and recruit. Thankful Priest once asked his boss how it was that the whorehouse flourished regardless of shifts in local government. Indio Desacato just laughed and said, “Elijah outran the chariot of King Ahab, boy. Remember that.”
Thankful Priest’s Christian name had been chosen by his mother, Jezebel Bone Toussaint, so that he would be forever reminded of man’s need to be beholden to the Lord for his place on earth. Thankful’s father, Arturo Okazaki Priest, a half Mexican, half Hawaiian-Japanese pilot, had died two months prior to his son’s birth when the crop duster he was flying was struck by a twelve-stroke lightning flash over Big Tuna,Texas, igniting the tank’s mixture of oxygen and fuel vapor.
Thankful’s athletic career had been cut short after he enucleated his own left eyeball from its socket two hours after ingesting Ecstasy at a team party. Thankful popped the eyeball from his head and used a Bugeye Bob Fish Skinner to sever the connective muscles and tendons before collapsing on the kitchen floor in the house of his teammate, all-pro offensive tackle Frank “Fighting Chicken” Chicarelli. After doctors failed to reattach his orb, Priest told police investigating the incident that the eyeball had imprinted upon it a pentagram, a five-pointed star he believed to be the sign of Satan.