The Sinaloa Story Page 2

  Indio Desacato’s primary method of bringing girls into the country was simply to marry them in Mexico and drive them across the border. On his next trip to Mexico he would obtain, with the woman’s written and witnessed consent, a divorce. He married only the “special” girls, however, women Indio knew would attract a high-paying clientele. Other women heard about his operation and presented themselves for an audition.

  Indio had been extraordinarily taken with Ava Varazo the first time he saw her in that La Paz pesthole. When Puma Charlie called him and said she was coming, Desacato told Charlie he would compensate him generously. Puma Charlie said it wasn’t necessary but that he appreciated the thought. “My thought will be in your hands the day after she shows up,” said Indio.

  Indio thought about a black Labrador retriever named Andy who used to walk with him to school every day when he was a kid in Waxahachie. Andy belonged to a neighbor but he loved Indio, who always fed his lunch to the dog on the way to school. Indio would take another student’s lunch for himself. AvaVarazo reminded Indio of Andy. She was lively and beautiful, sleek and dark like that Lab, and he assumed that as long as he fed her well, as the Lord’s angel did Elijah, she would remain just as loyal.

  Only the Lonely Know Time

  Hand printed On a board nailed to the wall behind the front desk of the Tom Horn Hotel on Ethiopia Street in Sinaloa were the words, “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.—Deut. 10:19.”

  DelRay had taken a room on the third floor. He now sat in the lobby, smoking a Lucky, waiting to hear from Ava, whom he had dropped off at Indio Desacato’s mansion. The Tom Horn was an old hotel, built in 1910. Never a particularly grand idea, the lobby was nevertheless spacious, and large ceiling fans spun wearily but noiselessly above the several old men seated in the scattered maroon leather armchairs that occupied the room.

  “First time in Sinaloa?”

  DelRay turned his head twenty-two degrees to the west and identified his would-be interlocutor, an octogenarian gentleman outfitted in a shiny double-breasted blue suit with a longhorn string tie. The old man’s hands and face were littered with liver spots the size of Susan B. Anthonys.

  “Yes, sir,” answered DelRay. “First time.”

  “I was born here in Sinaloa, same year as this hotel opened for business. Both the Tom Horn and I are eighty-five come October. What’s this, September?”

  “September nineteen.”

  “October last, that’s me. Day Jeff Davis died.”

  The man extended his calico right hand.

  “Name is Smith, Arkadelphia Quantrill Smith. Call me Arky.”

  “DelRay Mudo. Call me Del.”

  The two men shook hands. DelRay was impressed by the strength in the old fellow’s fingers.

  “Quite a grip you got there, Arky. Quite a name, too.”

  Arky chortled. “My grandpap rode with Shelby in the Iron Brigade. You heard of them, I suppose.”

  “No, sir, can’t say as I have.”

  “Durin’ the Unpleasantness this was—War Between the States—about this month of ’sixty-three—that’s eighteen sixty-three—Cap’n Jo Shelby and his six hundred, includin’ my grandpappy, Dockery ‘Doc’ Smith, started out at Arkadelphia—my nameplace—crossed the Arkansas River into Missouri, where they was joined by as many or more border Confederates, and proceeded to whup Yankee butt, burn bridges and supply posts, and disrupt lines of communication clear to Boonville. Shelby’s cavalry disguised themselves by wearin’ Union uniforms with sprigs of red sumac in their hats, which was supposed to be the secret sign identifyin’ Federal troops. Oh, Shelby’s boys foxed ‘em good! In forty-one days the Iron Brigade destroyed millions of dollars of Union rollin’ stock and comestibles, killed and wounded hundreds of Yankee soldiers, and made it back to Arkansas with more men than they’d started with. Those Missouri bushwhackers signed on with Shelby in a NewYork minute.”

  “Quite a story, Mr. Smith.”

  “The endin’, of course, ain’t so glorified.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They was drove down into Texas, finally. At Cascadia, Shelby knew the cause was lost but he refused to surrender. Two hundred men followed him into Mexico, where Maximilian, the Austrian puppet put into power by the French, who’d driven out Benito Juárez, was kindly disposed toward the Confederacy. On the way Shelby’s troopers stopped to wrap their bullet-riddled flags around rocks and buried ’em in the Rio Grande.”

  “What happened to them in Mexico?”

  “Maximilian offered ‘em some land around Vera Cruz, and a few went there. Others just used Mexico as a restin’ place before movin’ on to Cuba and Brazil, where they was welcome. Maximilian got drove out of Old Mexico not long later, though. The French got scared by the Union Army, led by Little Phil Sheridan, that gathered at the border, and abandoned Maximilian. Soon as Juárez retook Mexico City, the Johnny Rebs who’d settled at Vera Cruz took off, includin’ Doc Smith. He come up to Brownsville, where he was recruited by Rip Ford for McCook’s command that regulated Messican bandits around Old Sal del Rey. Wasn’t ’til later he moved up to Sinaloa. That was after he married my grandmother, Quintana Fayette Quantrill, who was an illegitimate daughter of Colonel William Quantrill—though she used his name—the man who led the bloody raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where a hundred and fifty people were murdered in their beds.”

  DelRay lit a new Lucky off the old one.

  “Those were some days, I guess,” he said.

  “Ferocious times, son,” said Arkadelphia Smith. “Now, my own parents, Stand and Quantrilla McCurly Smith, they run a feed store until they died, and I run it after them. Sold it to a man named Ramos ten years ago. Daddy was named after Stand Watie, a mixed-blood Cherokee who become a Confederate brigadier general and was the last officer to surrender his command. My mother was mixed-blood herself, part Messican on her daddy’s side and French Negro on her mama’s—man named Francis Xavier Bonaparte, fought with the Second Kansas Colored Infantry, all I know.”

  “You know a hell of a lot about back in the days, Mr. Smith.”

  “Call me Arky. Only the lonely know time, son. Sixty years from now—provided the planet got sixty big ones left in her—you won’t disagree, I bet.”

  The late-afternoon sun had diminished considerably while DelRay listened. Only the slenderest rays slithered through the heavy blinds fixed over the front windows of the hotel lobby. DelRay was startled by a sudden loud snore. He glanced west and saw that Arkadelphia Quantrill Smith was sound asleep in his chair. DelRay wondered what Ava Varazo was up to with Indio Desacato right now.

  “I’m sure I won’t, Arky,” he said.

  The Big Empty

  “Only two ways to run a business—the right way and the wrong way. Trick is, of course, knowing which’s which before it’s too late. There are people on the street would rather shoot you than say good-evening.”

  Indio Desacato sat alone on an immaculate white couch, smoking a Royal Jamaica.

  “My experience,” responded Ava Varazo, who stood by a picture window staring out at acres of arid land, holding a tequila sunrise in her right hand, “men don’t get to choose the direction their dicks bend.”

  She sipped her sunrise through a plastic accordion straw and shook her mane.

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “Just look at all that nothin’ out there. You know how New Orleans is called the Big Easy? Well, southwest Texas ought to be called the Big Empty.”

  Indio laughed. “Lots of bones buried out there, makin’ crude.”

  “What I mean,” said Ava.

  “I’m pleased to have you with me, Ava. This is not a decision you’ll regret. You will be the highest-priced girl in my domain.”

  “And here I been dreamin’ maybe you had the idea to make an honest woman of me.”

  Desacato laughed harder than before. “Nobody is honest, Ava. Each person knows this if he is honest with himself.”

  “All that ‘he’ and ‘him.’ You wouldn’t think there was really such a being as a woman to begin with.”

  “Sure, a woman started everything—and a man will finish it.”

  “Of that I never had no doubt,” said Ava.

  Indio was a wide-shouldered man, stocky, short but powerful, a few weeks shy of his fortieth birthday. His face was the shade of Madeira and his orbital cavities so sunken that sometimes it seemed as if he hadn’t any eyes. Before he spoke he licked the ends of his trim mustache.

  “Come to me, chica. Show me what I’m paying for.”

  Ava glared at him for a moment, then softened. “You got it comin’, okay,” she said, then finished her drink with one swallow.

  Indio unzipped his trousers and took out his cock. It was short and thick, mud-colored like the rest of him. Ava thought Desacato’s dick resembled a turd.

  “Come, pretty,” he said.

  Ava put down her glass on a table, walked over, knelt in front of him and pretended that she was eating shit. Indio closed his eyes and pictured the buttocks of a nine-year-old girl wearing tight red shorts who he had seen the day before bending over to drink from a water fountain.

  Saint’s Preserve Us

  Ava had a thumbnail-sized scar high on her left cheek. When DelRay inquired about it she turned sullen and the pink mark became crimson. A shudder, visible to Mudo, passed through the length of her body, concluding with a brief facial twist and audible soft gasp. At the moment, the two were semi-entwined, standing under a xanthic desert moon in front of Ava’s trailer.

  “You know what day this is?” asked Ava.

  “February twenty-ninth,” he said. “Had a extra day before rent’s due.”

  “El Día de Santa Niña de las Putas, the patron saint of Satan’s prisoners. It comes o
nly when there is a second full moon in the month on the final day of February in a leap year.”

  “Knew about the blue moon. Never heard of Satan’s prisoners, though.”

  “Those are souls sold to Satan during the person’s lifetime. People who reformed before their death and tried to undo the deal.”

  DelRay disentwined himself, lit a Lucky, inhaled, coughed. The night air felt chilly now that he wasn’t pressed against Ava. He rubbed his hands together, then shoved them into his pants pockets, letting the cigarette dangle from between his lips.

  “Who was Santa Niña?” he mumbled.

  “A peasant girl, like me,” said Ava, “born in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. Her father had bargained with the devil in order to save the life of his wife, who was dying from a cancer. Satan told him his wife would live only if the man promised also the souls of his three sons.”

  “Not the daughter?”

  “Niña was not yet born. She was the youngest of four children. The father was horrified to do this but consented, thinking that later he could persuade Satan not to take his sons. The mother recovered and, of course, no matter how passionately her husband begged, the devil would not relent. The thought that he and his sons were doomed to hell destroyed the poor man, and he died of grief soon after the birth of his daughter.”

  “Did the mother know about this deal?”

  “Not until her husband confessed on his deathbed. When Niña was twelve years old her brothers were killed when a donkey cart in which they were riding broke its axle on a steep mountain road and crashed with the donkey to the bottom of a ravine. Niña’s mother then told her about the fate of the boys’ souls, so the girl vowed to save them and her father.”

  DelRay spat out the cigarette. “Did she?”

  “Yes. That night she called to Satan, telling him she could not live without her brothers, that she wanted to join them immediately When Satan appeared she took his hand and allowed him to lead her to hell, where she became his mistress.”

  “No shit!” Suddenly DelRay no longer felt the cold.

  “Satan’s attachment to Niña was soon complete. She beguiled him in ways even the King of Cruelty had never imagined. In this way was it possible for her to gain a kind of power over the devil and convince him to allow her father and brothers to pass out of hell and enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Niña, of course, had to remain in hell as Satan’s whore. It is the prostitutes who honor her on this, the rarest of days, for her sacrifice.”

  “Saint Niña of the Whores.”

  “Our own and only. This is the one day no whore should feel ashamed in the eyes of God.”

  “But what about your scar? How did you get it?”

  “After I was fucked by a man for money for the first time I cut myself on the face with the sharp edge of a rock.”

  “But why?You were so beautiful—You still are, of course.”

  “To never be as beautiful again. I was marked inside and out.”

  DelRay embraced her. “My poor Ava.”

  She pulled away and glared at him. “No,” she said, “there is nothing about me that is poor.”

  Drugstore Cowboys

  Thankful Priest strode boldly into Zambo Fike’s Farmacia Cafe and deposited his considerable bulk on two well-worn red leatherette stools. Zambo, whose real name was Jesus Maria, had earned his nickname from his part-time job as a rodeo clown whose specialty was to hop spread-legged directly over the horns of a Brahma bull. He had discontinued this secondary occupation several years before, after a particularly unruly dun-colored beast named Y gdrasill had speared the pharmacologist-clown’s left testicle as Zambo was attempting a fingertip three-sixty. Zambo kept a photograph of Ygdrasill tacked to the wall behind the toilet in his establishment, so that every time he took a piss he could remind himself why he had quit rodeoing.

  “Gimme some beans and beer and pray nobody’s near!” Thankful shouted at the toad-faced, bowlegged proprietor who stood behind the counter sucking on a bad crook. “Hell, Zambo, time you treated yourself to a decent-smellin’ smoke, don’t you think?”

  “These suit me, Thankful,” said Zambo, staring as he always did at Priest’s discolored glass eye. Thankful had once accidentally dropped the eye into an open can of magenta paint. He had cleaned it but the eye was permanently tinted and gave his face a peculiar, otherworldly glow, adding to his already menacing appearance.

  DelRay Mudo had been standing by the magazine rack, leafing through the latest issue of Trackdown, the monthly report about activities of bounty hunters, when Thankful Priest entered. After ordering his lunch, the monster noticed DelRay reading the magazine.

  “Sinaloa ain’t got no regular library,” Thankful said. “Zambo’s be it.”

  DelRay looked up and stared at him. “Pardon me?”

  “I said, you fixin’ to buy that magazine?”

  “What business is it of yours if I do or don’t?”

  “Hey, Zambo, this skinny crust of white trash is in my face over an innocent remark. I want you should remember that when the sheriff asks how come there’s a bloody pile of dogshit used to once maybe been some measly type of person on your floor here.”

  “You got to fool with it, Thankful, take it outside. Don’t need no drugstore cowboys bustin’ the place up.”

  “How about it, pardner?” Thankful Priest said to DelRay Mudo.

  “How about what?” asked DelRay.

  “We take it to the street.”

  DelRay replaced Trackdown in the rack, looked at the cockeyed hulk spread over the better part of two stools, and said, “You must be the famous Polyphemus I’ve heard about.”

  “Polly who?” Thankful laughed. “Do I look like a Polly to you?”

  DelRay went to the door and opened it.

  “What’s your name?” asked Priest.

  “Ulysses,” said DelRay, just before stepping out. “Keep an eye out for me.”

  A Message to Mudo

  DelRay had not heard from Ava for almost a full week before Framboyán Lanzar delivered a message late one morning. Mudo was still in bed at the Tom Horn when there came two rapid taps on his door. DelRay was not asleep but he was in a bit of a trance, daydreaming about Cherry Layne, a character in Nurse’s Night Off, a paperback novel he’d been reading the night before. In the novel, Cherry Layne, a nubile young nurse in a big city hospital, has oral and/or anal sex with three different doctors, two interns, an anesthesiologist, and another female nurse during her first week on the job. All of these activities take place at the hospital, during her regular shift; DelRay had not yet gotten to her night off. Cherry refuses to have conventional sexual intercourse, saving herself, as she explains to her various partners, for marriage. “Only my husband, whoever he may turn out to be, can come through the front door,” Cherry says to Dr. Ramses “Ram” Melville, an internationally renowned brain surgeon who monitors his own heartbeat through a stethoscope as he and Nurse Layne cavort standing at the bedside of a very recently deceased patient. DelRay was imagining himself tongueing Cherry’s rosebud as a second set of rapid-fire taps pierced his reverie.

  “Who’s there?”

  “¡Un mensajero!” said a voice from the hallway. “I have a message for Señor Mudo.”

  “Uno momento.”

  DelRay reluctantly climbed out of bed, bending his half-master back into his undershorts, and went to the door. He was wearing a badly frayed and soiled T-shirt proclaiming Chifla Miguel Makes Motorcycles Mo’Better. DelRay opened the door and saw a short kid with a crewcut staring at him. The kid looked to be about sixteen or seventeen years old.

  “A message for me?”

  The kid bounced up and down on the balls of his feet as he said, “If your name’s DelRay Mudo.”

  “I’m him.”

  “How I can be sure?” the vertically inclined kid asked. “Lady said be certero.”