Randy White - Night Vision

She said, “This place has sin and ugliness all around. It’s no wonder you’re unhappy. You should leave this dirty life behind while you still can. You would like the mountains. We live closer to God in the mountains. It is cool there, even in summer, and the rains will begin soon. You can stay a week or a month. Maybe you will like it and want to build a home. The police won’t find you if we leave Florida. They can’t ask me questions.”

“Drive you clear to Mexico?” Squires said like it was a stupid idea. But at least he was thinking about it. Tula could see that his mind was working it through.

“Guatemala, not Mexico,” Tula corrected him. “It’s much more beautiful than Mexico. And the villages aren’t so dirty. Most of them, anyway.”

Yes, Squires was giving the idea some consideration because he asked, “Where’s Guatemala? Is it farther than Mexico? Mexico’s a hell of a long way.”

“I’m not sure of the exact distance,” Tula said, coming as close to lying as she could allow herself.

“But it’s farther than Mexico, that’s what you’re telling me.”

Tula replied, “What does distance matter when there are roads and you own a truck? You can drive the whole way. Or take a train, once we’re across the border. I hear the coaches are nice. I’ve never been inside a train, but I rode on the top of boxcars from Chiapas to San Luis Potosi. Three different train lines, I had to board.”

“You’re shitting me. You climbed up and rode on the top of a train when it was moving? Christ, what do those things do, fifty, sixty miles an hour?”

Tula replied, “One night, an old man told me we were traveling almost three hundred miles an hour, but I think he was drunk. It’s the way even adults travel if they want to come north. Sometimes, riding on top of the train was nice. We could pick green mangoes if the trees were close enough, and it only rained once.

“In Chiapas, though, it was dangerous. There are a lot of Mexican gangs there that wear bandannas and tattoos. At three stops, they robbed some of the men. And I think they attacked two girls who were on one of the cars behind me.”

Tula started to add that she hadn’t seen it happen, but she had heard the girls screaming. Her voice caught, and she couldn’t continue with the story.

Mentioning gangs and tattoos reminded Squires that the police weren’t the only ones looking for him. Laziro Victorino would be cruising Red Citrus the moment he heard about the alligator with a dead girl’s bones in its belly. Victorino was a little guy, but he was all muscle and attitude, a scary little shit who enjoyed killing people. Cutting them up with that box cutter of his or shooting them behind the ear and feeding them to his dogs.

Squires had heard the stories and he had seen a couple of the V-man’s snuff films. The teardrop tattoo beneath the dude’s eye was so weird it was scary.

What Squires hoped was that Victorino would run into Frankie, who might well kick the shit out of that vicious little wetback. Or vice versa. Either way, it was okay with Squires. He hoped he never saw either one of them again in his life. He was sick of the whole goddamn business.

A question formed in Squires’s head as he reviewed his predicament: Why the hell did he have to stay in Florida?

The answer was simple: He couldn’t think of a single goddamn reason.

Not the way things were now. Almost everyone he knew was an asshole or a drug dealer or a crackhead killer like the V-man. The girl, Tula, was a weirdo Jesus freak, but she had hit the nail on the head when it came to the life he was living. It was a dirty life. It made him feel dirty-Squires could admit that to himself now that he was on the run from a murder rap. So why not make a change before it was too late? Maybe going to Mexico wasn’t such a bad idea.

He said to the girl, “I drove to New Orleans once and it took me twelve hours. How much farther is the border? I think you have to drive clear across Texas, too.”

Squires placed the tequila bottle, then the revolver, on a magazine stand, and sat up a little as he tried to picture the geography of the southern United States. In his mind, everything south of Texas was just a hazy design, with curves and bulges bordered on both sides by oceans.

“First,” Tula reminded him, “we must go to Immokalee and ask about my mother. I’m not going home without my family. People call her Mary. Mary Choimha. Or Maria sometimes, too. She lived at your trailer park for a while, that’s why I went there first.”

“Every chula in Florida is named Mary or Maria,” Squires said. “I can’t keep track of everyone who rents at my place. You Mexicans are always coming and going.”

Tula said, “Then you lied to me. You said you had met her, that you could take me to her. You told me that at the trailer park last night.”

Squires shrugged. “So what? We’re not all perfect like you.”

“You would remember my mother,” the girl insisted. “She’s very beautiful-much prettier than me. Carlson said, last year, he saw your wife talking to my mother. That she gave my mother a cell phone… or maybe you gave it to her, Carlson wasn’t sure. But the phone stopped working two months ago, which is why I came here. My mother would have called me if her phone was working.”

Squires told the girl, “I don’t have a wife, especially not the bitch you mean,” as he leaned back to think about what he’d just heard.

The information was disturbing. All kids thought their mothers were pretty-Squires all too aware that he was a rare exception, because his mother was a chain-smoking witch. But why would Frankie give Tula’s mother a cell phone unless Frankie had something to gain?

Squires had given dozens of cheap phones to Mexicans, the cell phones that charged a flat fee with a limited number of minutes. Usually, he gave them to men who were good workers-and it was always for selfish reasons: It was a way of controlling the guy, make him indebted, and a little scared, too, that the phone would be taken away or the service canceled.

Christ, Frankie had run so many Mexican girls through the hunting camp and their double-wide at Red Citrus, he would have needed a calculator to keep track.

Was it possible that this kid’s mother was one of the chulas Frankie had used? Squires considered the girl’s age, which would put the mother in her mid- to late twenties, Mexican girls being prone to marrying young.

The possibility was too upsetting, though, and Squires decided that it wasn’t something he wanted to think about. He stared at the girl intensely for a moment, then looked away, suddenly aware there was something eerily familiar about the girl’s eyes and high cheekbones.

“Why would you listen to that crazy old drunk, Carlson?” Squires said to the girl. “I don’t want to hear any more about your mother. Understand?”

Aware of the man’s sudden mood change, Tula said, “Let me fix you some food while we talk. You need to eat for strength if we’re going to drive to Immokalee.”

The man laced his fingers together-Tula had never seen hands so huge-and sat up in the recliner. He was trying to remember how many Marys and Marias he or Frankie had screwed or used one way or another. But then felt a withering guilt descending, so he stopped himself. Instead, he let his mind shift back to the girl’s idea about leaving Florida.

Squires had thought of traveling to Mexico many times. Most of the big steroid manufactures were there because it was legal to make and sell gear. Hell, the place was bodybuilder heaven. In fact, Squires’s first supplier, before he got into the business, was an Internet place called mexgear. com. Mexgear’s shit was good to go, and they had good prices. Squires had bought Test C, Tren, EQ and Masteron from the online Mexicans there for less than fifty bucks a vial, and they’d always thrown in some extra gear if it was a big order.