Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

Around midnight the following evening the entire orphanage was awoken by screams of intense pain. No one had ever heard such screams, even the nuns, who had witnessed some terrible things in their time. There was a moon out and there they could see Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez in the yard with no pants, holding their groins in a way that left little doubt as to the location of their agony, which seemed to increase with every minute. They jumped into the well, but this seemed to have no effect. By now the sisters had habited themselves and were trying to get from the wretched three some clue as to the cause of their pain, but they could give no coherent explanation. They just screamed and ran around in circles until the doctor came. He gave them injections that made them pass out. When they came to, he questioned them. He went to the tractor shed and examined the axle grease, found small bits of Serrano pepper mixed up in it. He suspected the nuns. The sisters locked up Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez in the root cellar for a couple of days. They emerged blinking like salamanders and scratching at chigger bites. They ran off a few days later and never returned. Shortly afterward, Carlos' powers of speech returned, an event the nuns celebrated by holding a candlelit prayer vigil on the top of a small hill nearby, where they planted a small wooden cross made by old Raul.

Four years passed and the Depression was on and there was not much to eat, mostly rotten produce wriggly with weevils and tortillas so thin the sunlight shone through them. One night while they were sipping mescal to take the edge off the hunger, Raul started to tell Carlos about a still someone had over in Pharr and what money they were making selling bootleg liquor. Raul had a small still for his mescal; it only produced a bottle every two days. Raul made a sketch on a piece of cardboard.

Next day Carlos organized the boys into teams. He and the first team stole the twenty feet of copper tubing from Ambrose's hardware; the second took a hundred pounds of corn from the troughs of Diefenbocker's hog farm. They set it up in an abandoned chicken shed a quarter mile down the road. The first few batches proofed out at somewhere over the lethal limit, occasioning one case of temporary blindness. Raul fine-tuned the proportions, sending the boys off to steal various ingredients-vanilla, ipecac, molasses, sugar-until it got so it went down without taking the esophagus with it. Raul knew a man named Geronimo, in Donna who said he'd take all he could get and sell it to the truckers on the Harlingen run. Carlos negotiated Geronimo's price up by half and within a month they were bringing in fifty dollars a week, a fortune. Carlos and Raul kept ten for themselves, and gave the rest to the nuns in the form of anonymous weekly donations of chickens, rice, chocolate bars and comics. The nuns held another candlelit vigil on the hill and planted another small cross of thanksgiving. Then Geronimo got arrested for stealing tires.

This was not Geronimo's first arrest and this time the Hidalgo County sheriff said he was going to put him away forever. Geronimo used his only bargaining chip and-nursing a grudge over Carlos' knocking his price up so-told about Carlos and the still, leaving out that he was a boy over at the Mexican nuns' orphanage outside of town. Thinking that it might enhance his situation, he embroidered some, telling the sheriff that this Carlos had got a little carried away and killed a man; he laid it on thicker than barbecue sauce. By the time he was finished the sheriff was passing out shotguns and calling in extra deputies and giving the order, as they lay in wait in a ditch by the chicken shed, to fire at the first sign of trouble. Then the sheriff barked, "Put your hands up in the air or we'll shoot!" A figure darted out of the shack and started to run, the moon caught his tin belt buckle and one of the deputies thought it was a gun and opened fire and soon they were all shooting and by the time it was over nine-year-old Irving Mayer-named for the town haberdasher-was on the ground with his legs and back full of buckshot. Charley took some pellets from the same blast in his thigh, but kept going, disappearing into the high grass in the darkness.

The bishop up in Corpus handled it cleverly, bringing the reporter with him to Irving's hospital bed and apostrophizing in his heavy brogue: What kind of a monster does this to hungry orphan children? -leaving aside for a moment the Eighteenth Amendment. It went all the way up to the governor's office in Austin. The sheriff had to resign and ended up as a six-dollar-a-week guard at the state penitentiary, the only consolation being that was where Geronimo was putting in his time.

Two nights after the shooting, Raul was on his knees in front of his little shrine to the Virgin, begging her for the fiftieth time that day to keep him from being arrested, when he heard the door creak open and saw Carlos, filthy, limping and one leg covered in dried blood.

He poured moonshine over his leg and removed what pellets he could. He kept the boy hidden there with him for a week until he had his strength back.

"I'll go tonight," said Carlos. "You want to come with me?"

Raul shook his head and pointed to his eyes, opalescent with cataracts. He packed some food for him and they stood outside and embraced. "Wait," said Raul. He went back into the shack and emerged with a rosary that he said Pancho Villa had once personally spat on and pressed it into Carlos' palm.

Carlos had gone half a mile when he turned back. There was a row of sycamores along the road outside the orphanage, and he kept in their shadows until he reached the mailbox. He had often dreamed about his mother, very clearly. He could hear her weeping as she carried him to it, hear her tears falling on the newspaper she'd wrapped around him. In the dream he tried to hold on to her as she put him inside the mailbox; then he was inside the mailbox, suffocating and trying to get out. He always woke up at this point, crying for his mother. Once one of the nuns-a young one-took him back to her bed with him and caressed him, even his lugar del diablo , which gave him wonderful sensations of warmth and happiness. Unfortunately, the nun went away not long afterward.

He pried the mailbox off its oak post and, cradling it in his arms, ran along the dirt road to the barking of dogs. It was five miles to the railroad tracks and by the time he reached them his wounds were running. The tracks ran north, to Alice and Corpus Christi. He knelt by the rails and dug a hole and buried the mailbox, marking the spot with a cairn of stones. He said a prayer over it, swearing an oath to come back and get it someday, then stretched out by the mound of stones and fell asleep. The sky was just turning blue over the Gulf when the whistle woke him. It was a fast train and it nearly killed him climbing on.

Charley stood. Spook's head jerked upright as it always did when he thought there might be a walk in the offing. His eyes watched Charley as he went to the phone by his bed. The one word he recognized-"Felix"-did not signify a walk. He put his head back on the warm carpet and went back to sleep.

They were sitting in the front of the black sedan, trying to keep awake by drinking strong, hot Cuban coffee out of the thermos the cook had packed for their duck-hunting trip in the Chesapeake. Everyone thought it was a good idea for the two of them to get away. Tasha's death had been so hard. A little shivering in a duck blind off the Eastern Shore would be just the thing, no telephones, no staff, only the two of them, passing the flask in the pre-dawn chill waiting for a flight of mallards.

They were in Alphabet Town, a herniated bulge of lower Manhattan jutting out into the East River, where the avenues are named after letters.