James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

"You were on 'Morning Edition'?"

The room was silent. He opened the blinds, and an eye-watering light fell through the window.

"Maybe I should explain," I said.

"I'd appreciate that."

When I finished he picked up the sheet of notebook paper and looked at it again.

"I wish you hadn't done that," he said.

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

"You don't understand. I wanted to believe the Mexican with the machete was simply a deranged man, not an assassin. I wanted to believe he had no connection with the Crown business."

"I'm not with you."

"I don't want to see you at risk, for God's sake. We got two calls from Mexico this morning, one from a priest in some shithole down in the interior, the other from a Mexican drug agent who says he's worked with the DEA in El Paso… The guy with the spiderweb tattoos, the lunatic, some rurales popped holes all over him. He's dying and he says you will too… He says 'for the bugarron.' What's a bugarron?"

"I don't know."

"There's a storm down there. I got cut off before I could make sense out of this drug agent… Get a flight this afternoon. Take Helen with you. Americans with no backup tend to have problems down there."

"We have money for this?"

"Bring me a sombrero."

We flew into El Paso late that night. By dawn of the next day we were on a shuttle flight to a windswept dusty airport set among brown hills five hundred miles into Mexico. The Mexican drug agent who met us wore boots and jeans, a badge on his belt and a pistol and a sports coat over a wash-faded blue golf shirt. His name was Heriberto, and he was unshaved and had been up all night.

"The guy try to kill you, huh?" he said, as he unlocked the doors to the Cherokee in the parking lot.

"That's right," I said.

"I wouldn't want a guy like that after me. Es indio, man, know what I mean? Guy like that will cook your heart over a fire," he said. He looked at Helen. "Gringita, you want to use the rest room? Where we going, there ain't any bushes along the road."

He looked indolently at the flat stare in her face.

"What did you call her?" I asked.

"Maybe you all didn't get no sleep last night," he said. "You can sleep while I drive. I never had a accident on this road. Last night, with no moon, I come down with one headlight."

The sun rose in an orange haze above hills that looked made of slag, with cactus and burnt mesquite and chaparral on the sides. The dirt road twisted through a series of arroyos where the sandstone walls were scorched by grass fires, then we forded a river that splayed like coffee-stained milk over a broken wood dam and overflowed the banks into willows and rain trees and a roofless mud brick train station by tracks that seemed to disappear into a hillside.

"You looking at where those tracks go?" Heriberto said. "The mine company had a tunnel there. The train's still inside."

"Inside?" I said.

"Pancho Villa blew the mountain down on the tunnel. When a train full of Huerta's jackals was coming through. They're still in there, man. They ain't coming out."

I took my notebook out of my shirt pocket and opened it.

"What's bugarron mean?" I asked.

Helen had fallen asleep in back, her head on her chest.

"It's like maricon, except the bugarron considers himself the guy."

"You're talking about homosexuals? I don't get it."

"He's adicto, man. Guy's got meth and lab shit in his head. Those double-ought buckshots in him don't help his thinking too good, either."

"What lab shit?"

He concentrated on the road, ignoring my question, and swerved around an emaciated dog.

"Why'd you bring us down here?" I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

"The priest is my wife's cousin. He says you're in danger. Except what he knows he knows from the confession. That means he can't tell it himself. You want to go back to the airport, man, tell me now."

The sun rose higher in an empty cobalt sky. We crossed a flat plain with sloughs and reeds by the roadside and stone mountains razored against the horizon and Indian families who seemed to have walked enormous distances from no visible site in order to beg by the road. Then the road began to climb and the air grew cooler. We passed an abandoned ironworks dotted with broken windows, and went through villages where the streets were no more than crushed rock and the doors to all the houses were painted either green or blue. The mountains above the villages were gray and bare and the wind swept down the sheer sides and blew dust out of the streets.

"It's all Indians here. They think you paint the door a certain color, evil spirits can't walk inside," Heriberto said.

Helen was awake now and looking out the window.

"This is what hell must look like," she said.

"I grew up here. I tell you something, we don't got guys like Arana here. He's from Jalisco. I tell you something else, they don't even got guys like Arana there. Guys like him got to go to the United States to get like that, you understand what I'm saying?"

"No," she answered, looking at the back of his neck.

"My English ain't too good. It's a big problem I got," he said.

We pulled into a village that was wedged like a toothache in a steep-sided, narrow canyon strewn with the tailings from a deserted open-pit mine on the mountain above. Some of the houses had no outbuildings, only a piece of concrete sewer pipe inserted vertically into the dirt yard for a community toilet. Next to the cantina was the police station, a squat, white-washed building with green shutters that were latched shut on the windows. A jeep carrying three rurales and a civilian with a bloody ear and hair like a lion's mane came up the road in a flume of dust from the direction of the mine and parked in front. The three rurales wore dirty brown uniforms and caps with lacquered brims and World War I thumb-buster U.S. Army.45 revolvers. The civilian's clothes were in rags and his hands were roped behind him. The rurales took him inside the building and closed the door.

"Are these the guys who popped Arana?" I asked.

"Yeah, man, but you don't want to be asking them no questions about it, know what I'm saying?" Heriberto said.

"No, I don't."

He scratched his nose, then told me a story.

The village had been visited by a carnival that featured a pedal-operated Ferris wheel, a donkey with a fifth leg that grew like a soft carrot out of its side, a concessionaire who sold hand-corked bottles of mescal that swam with thread worms, and Arana, the Spider, a magical man who swallowed flame and blew it like a red handkerchief into the air, whose scarlet, webbed tattoos, Indian-length hair, blackened mouth, and chemical green eyes could charm mountain women from their marital beds. His sexual energies were legendary.

"Arana was in the sack with the wrong man's wife?" I said.

"They gonna tell you that. You go away with that, take that story back home, everything's gonna be fine. You don't, you keep asking questions, maybe we got a problem. You see that guy they just took in? You don't want to go in there today."

"What'd he do?" Helen asked.

"Two children went in those empty buildings up at the mines and didn't come back. See, where all those pieces of tin are flapping in the wind. He lives in there by himself, he don't ever take a bath, comes down at night and steals food from people."

"Why'd they shoot Arana?" I said.

"Look, man, how I'm gonna tell you? This ain't no marijuanista we're talking about. This guy takes high-powered stuff into the States sometimes. These local guys know that. It's called la mordita, you got to pay the bite, man, or maybe you have a shitload of trouble. Like the guy behind those green shutters now. He don't want to see nobody light a cigar."