Adrian McKinty - Fifty Grand

“Help me!” he screams, his eyes darting madly. Expecting what? Duck hunter? Ice fisherman?

No. No one comes here in the winter, and just to be on the safe side I’ve put up a sign, I’ve locked the gate, I’ve wiped the footprints.

“Help me! Heelp meee!” he screams.

The words hang for a moment and then freeze onto the ice.

His lips are turning blue. His skin, red.

He’s whispering. I can barely hear. I lean in. “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,” he says.

Words are finite. The set of all the words that will ever be spoken is small and the subset of each human’s allotment is tiny. These could be your last. Is this really what you want to leave the Earth proclaiming?

“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”

Apparently so. Well, you’re going to have to give me more than that if you want to get out of this alive.

After a minute the mantra changes but not by much: “Bitch, bitch, bitch, get you, bitch, you’ll see, won’t be fun for you, get you, teach you, yeah, bitch.”

But then he whispers something else. Something surprising. “Bitch, you’ve got no goddamn shame.”

That’s more like it. Where did that line come from? Shame-how old-fashioned. Hector says that shame was one of the casualties of the twentieth century. Hector comes out with a lot of stuff like that. Hector says that Cuba is a woman’s mouth, her lips squeezed together in a grimace, bruised and twisted at one end from all the beatings she’s taken over the years. You’d dig Hec, maybe we could get him a job in Hollywood. A character actor. A cigar-chomping Miami cop. Do they still make cop movies?

“No shame, get you, bitch…”

But you’re wrong. I have no morals, no husband, no children, but shame I have by the bucketload.

He starts to scream again.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

The duct tape is still in the backpack. I could cover his mouth, but what’s the point? Let him scream.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

In a minute he wears himself out.

His teeth chattering. His eyes closing.

I pull out the pack of Faros and put two in my mouth. I flip the Zippo and light both. I offer him one of the cigarettes. He nods and I put it between his lips. It’ll help him. In a couple of seconds the dissolved nicotine molecules will be firing neurotransmitters that’ll release small quantities of dopamine into his brain. As the cold starts to get to him, blood will retreat from his extremities and his brain will become overoxygenated, perhaps releasing more dopamine and endorphins. The feeling will not be unpleasant.

I put my hand beneath his armpit and lift him a little.

He draws on the cigarette and nods a thank-you.

“I just g-gave up. M-man, this is ironic, it r-really is,” he says.

Oh, compañero , don’t you read the poets? Irony is the revenge of slaves. Americans are not permitted to speak of irony, certainly not Americans like you.

He grins.

He probably thinks I’m starting to crack, that I’ll change my mind about this business.

I won’t but I am so caught up in that grisly smile and the fading blue of his eyes that I don’t see the black Cadillac Escalade idle its way to the locked gate behind us. I don’t see the doors open, I don’t see the men with guns get out.

I don’t see anything.

I’m in this moment with this man.

Are you ready?

Are you ready to speak the truth?

Or do you want to wait until the black angel joins us on the ice?

“D-d-don’t d-do this. D-don’t d-d-do this.” His voice drops half an octave, keeps the imperative, but loses the tone . “Don’t, p-please.”

Much more effective.

A call to prayer in the wilderness.

We Cubans are the vagabond descendants of the Muslim kingdom of Granada. We appreciate that kind of thing.

A call to prayer. Yes.

The dogwood minarets.

The ice lake sajadah.

The raven muezzins.

“How d-did it c-come to this?” he asks, crying now.

How did it come to this?

Mi amigo , we’ve got time. I’ll tell you.

The future paid a shivery visit to the back of the car. I woke, half opened my left eye. A yellow desert. Morning. I let the eyelid fall. Blackness. But not the blackness of negation. Nothing so fortunate. Merely the absence of light. Too hot to sleep. Too uncomfortable, too much background noise: radio in the front cab, annoying chitchat, stones churning against the bottom of the vehicle like lotto balls.

I felt weak, my bones ached, my jeans and sneakers were drenched with sweat.

The Land Rover rattled over a bump on the coyote road, the engine grumbling like an old horse.

No, no point trying to sleep now. I removed the cheap plastic sunglasses, wiped the perspiration from my forehead, rubbed at the dirt on the rear window.

Vapor trails. Red sun. Hot air seething over the vast expanse of the Sonora. No cacti, no shrubs. Not even a big rock.

Where were we? Was this a double cross? Easiest thing in the world, drive half a dozen desperate wetbacks to the middle of nowhere, kill ’em, rob ’em. Happens all the time.

I turned to look at Pedro, our driver. He caught my eye in the rearview, nodded, and gave me a tombstone grin. I nodded back.

“Yes, we’re across,” he said.

We crunched into a pothole. Pedro grabbed the wheel and cursed under his breath.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” someone said.

“What road?” Pedro replied.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

“We’re across the border? We’re in the United States?” I asked.

“For the last kilometer,” Pedro confirmed. Both of us waited for any kind of emotion from the others. Nothing. No one applauded, cheered, reacted in any way.

Most of them had probably done this journey dozens of times. Pedro, however, was disappointed. “We made it,” he said again.

I peered through the window and wondered how he could be so sure. It looked like fucking Mars out there. A thin brown sand worrying itself over a bleached yellow ground. Nothing alive, all the rocks weathered into dust.

“The land of Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Lopez, Jorge Bush,” Pedro was saying to himself.

“Thanks for getting us over,” I said.

Pedro tilted the mirror down to look at me. He gave me an ironic half smile. My friend, I don’t do this dangerous job for praise, but I certainly appreciate it.

I’d made my first mistake. Now Pedro had singled me out in his mind as a classy sort of person, different somehow from the others. Someone with enough old-fashioned manners to say thank you. That, my demeanor, and my odd accent-all of it more than enough to burn my way into his consciousness.

Keep your mouth shut in future. Don’t do anything different. Don’t say a goddamn word.

I stole a look at him, and of course all this was in my head, not his-he was far too busy. The windshield wipers were on, he was smoking, he was steering with one hand, shifting gears with the other, while repeatedly scanning the radio, tapping the ash from his cigarette, and touching a Virgin of Guadalupe on the dashboard every time we survived a pothole.

He was about fifty, dyed black hair, white shirt with frills on the collar. The M19 spiderweb tattoo on his left hand meant that he’d probably feel bad about leaving us for the vultures but he’d do it if it came to that.

The kid looked at me. “United States?” he asked, pointing out the window.

“What’s the matter with you, don’t you speak Spanish?” I was going to say but didn’t. He was an Indian kid from some jungle town in Guatemala. His Spanish probably wasn’t so great.

“Yeah, we’re across the border.”