Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

Keller can’t explain why he undertook to care for the kid.

Maybe it’s penance.

Chuy stays around the house like another ghost in Keller’s life, sleeping in the spare room, playing video games on the Xbox Keller bought at the Walmart in El Paso, or wolfing down whatever meals Keller fixes for them, most of which come out of cans labeled HORMEL. Keller monitors Chuy’s cocktail of medications and makes sure that he takes them on schedule.

Keller escorts him to his psychiatric appointments and sits in the waiting room, leafing through Spanish editions of National Geographic and Newsweek . Then they take the bus home and Chuy settles in front of the television while Keller fixes dinner. They rarely speak. Sometimes Keller hears the screams coming from Chuy’s room and goes in to wake him from his nightmare. Even though he’s sometimes tempted to let the kid suffer, he never does.

Some nights Keller takes a beer and sits outside on the steps leading down to Ana’s small backyard, remembering the parties there—the music, the poetry, the passionate political arguments, the laughter. That’s where he first met Ana, and Pablo and Giorgio, and El Búho—“The Owl”—the dean of Mexican journalism who edited the newspaper that Ana and Pablo had worked for.

Other nights, when Marisol comes into the city to visit a patient she’s placed in the Juárez Hospital, she and Keller go out to dinner or maybe go to El Paso for a movie. Or sometimes he drives out to Valverde, meets her after clinic hours, and they take a quiet sunset walk through town.

It never goes further than that, and he drives home each time.

Life settles into a rhythm that is dreamlike, surreal.

Rumors of Barrera’s death or survival swirl through the city but Keller pays little attention. Every now and then a car cruises slowly past the house, and once Terry Blanco comes by to ask Keller if he’s heard anything, knows anything.

Keller hasn’t, he doesn’t.

But otherwise, as promised, they leave him alone.

Until they don’t.

Eddie Ruiz flushes the steel toilet bolted to the concrete wall. Then he sticks an empty toilet paper roll into the toilet drain and blows into it, sending the water lower into the trap. That done, he takes his foam mattress pad off his concrete bed slab, folds it over the toilet and presses on it as if he were giving it CPR. Then he takes the mattress pad off, stacks three toilet paper rolls into the john, puts his mouth against the top one and hollers, “El Señor!”

He waits a few seconds and then hears, “Eddie! ¿Qué pasa, m’ijo? ”

Eddie isn’t Rafael Caro’s son, but he’s glad that the old drug lord calls him that, maybe even thinks of him as a son.

Caro’s been in Florence virtually since it opened back in ’94, one of the first guests of the supermax. It fucking amazes Eddie: since 1994 Rafael Caro has been alone in a seven-by-twelve-foot concrete box—concrete bed, concrete table, concrete stool, concrete desk—and he still has all his marbles.

Kurt Cobain goes room temp, Caro’s in his cell. Bill Clinton gets his cigar smoked, Caro is in his cell. Fuckin’ ragheads fly planes into buildings, we invade the wrong fuckin’ country, a black dude gets elected president, Caro is sitting in that same seven-by-twelve.

Twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week.

Fuck, Eddie thinks, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school jerking off to Penthouse Letters, when they closed that door on Caro, and the guy is still here and he’s still sane. Rudolfo Sánchez did just eighteen months and left his balls here. I’m just coming on my second year in the place and I’m about to lose my shit. Probably would have already, I didn’t have Caro to talk to through the “toilet phone.”

Caro is still sharp as a blade—Eddie can see why he was once a major player in the drug game. The only mistake Caro made—but it was a terminal one—was to back the wrong horse in a two-pony race: Güero Méndez against Adán Barrera.

Always a bad bet, Eddie thinks.

Caro got what a lot of Adán’s enemies get—extradition to the US, which had major wood for him as they suspected he’d had a hand in the torture-murder of a DEA agent named Ernie Hidalgo. They couldn’t prove it, though, so he got the max on drug-trafficking charges—twenty-five-to-life instead of the LWOP.

Life without possibility of parole.

But the feds were jacked enough to send him to Florence, where they put cats like the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh before they did him, and a slew of terrorists. Osiel Contreras, the old boss of the Gulf cartel, is here, along with a few other major narcos.

And me, Eddie thinks.

Eddie freakin’ Ruiz, the first and only American to head up a Mexican cartel, for what that’s worth.

Actually, he knows exactly what it’s worth.

Four years.

Which is kind of a problem, because some people, not a few of them inhabitants of this institution, wonder why it’s only four years.

For a guy of Eddie’s stature.

Crazy Eddie.

The former “Narco Polo,” glossed for his choice of shirt. The guy who fought the Zetas to a standstill in Nuevo Laredo, who led Diego Tapia’s sicarios first against the Zetas, then against Barrera. Who survived the marines’ execution of Diego and then headed up his own outfit, a splinter of the old Tapia organization.

Some of these people wonder why Eddie would come back to the States—where he was already wanted on trafficking charges—why he would turn himself in, and why he would get only a double-deuce in a federal lockup.

The obvious speculation was that Eddie was a rat, that he flipped on his friends in exchange for a light bit. Eddie denied this emphatically to other inmates. “Name me one guy who has gone down since I got popped. One. ”

He knew there was no answer to that because there hasn’t been anyone.

“And if I was going to make myself a deal,” Eddie pushed, “you think I’d deal myself into Florence? The worst supermax in the country?”

No answer to this, either.

“And a seven-million-dollar fine?” Eddie asked. “The fuck kind of rat deal is that?”

But the clincher was his friendship with Caro, because everyone knew that Rafael Caro—a guy who’s taken a twenty-five-year hit without mumbling a word of complaint, never mind cooperation; would never deign to as much as look at a soplón, never mind be friends with one.

So if Eddie was good with Rafael Caro, he was good with everyone. Now he shouts back through the tube, “It’s all good, Señor. You?”

“I’m fine, thank you. What’s new?”

What’s new ? Eddie thinks.

Nothing.

Nothing is ever new in this place—every day is the same as the last. They wake you at six, shove something they call food through a metal slot. After “breakfast,” Eddie cleans his cell. Religiously, meticulously. The purpose of solitary confinement is to turn you into an animal, and Eddie isn’t gonna cooperate with that by living in filth. So he keeps himself, his cell, and his clothes clean and tight. After he wipes off every surface in his cell, he washes his clothes in the metal sink, wrings them out and hangs them up to dry.

Isn’t hard to keep track of his clothes.

He has two regulation orange pullover shirts, two pairs of khaki slacks, two pairs of white socks, two pairs of white underwear, a pair of plastic sandals.

After doing his laundry, he works out.

One hundred push-ups.

One hundred sit-ups.

Eddie is a young dude, still only thirty-two, and he doesn’t intend to let prison make him old. He’s going to hit the bricks at thirty-five in shape, looking good, with his mind still sharp.