Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Wes groaned as he pulled the belt tight with his teeth. So much for the tough guy act.

“C’mon. You’ll be all right.” I started driving, nice and slow. “Anyway, the guy’s with a human rights group. Seems some Mexican politico got one too many complaints about illegals who cross the border near Amigo never making it to where they’re going. The politician is a man of the people. Claims to be, anyway. So he sent our friend with the machine pistol to check out the story.

“Here’s the real funny part about our pal. The guy’s actually a Mexican citizen. A white Mexican.”

I laughed out loud.

“He told me that his family is German. That’s where the weird accent comes from — it’s German with a splash of salsa. Guy’s grandfather was a brewmeister. Came to Mexico to make beer, along with a whole bunch of other Germans. Our boy is a third-generation German-Mexican, and damn proud of it.” Man, I couldn’t stop laughing. In spite of his pain, Wes laughed too. He couldn’t help himself.

“Jesus,” he said. “A German wetback.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s getting so you can’t trust anyone anymore.”

The white-skinned Mexican was pretty worn out by the time I chained him to a big eyebolt set in a concrete block. He sat down in the dirt and stared at the mouth of the cave.

We steer strangers away from this place. The ones that do stumble onto it have a way of disappearing. Forever.

Wes honked the horn. Now that the Mex was chained up, he was ready to go and then some.

I wasn’t. Not quite yet.

I squatted down next to the Mexican and got as comfortable as I could. “I’ve never seen a Martian myself,” I told him. “At least, I don’t think I have. I shoveled something off the highway one time that might have been a Martian, but I can’t say so for sure. It was big and blackish green and scaly, I can tell you that much. But for all I know it might have been an alligator, though I sure can’t explain what an alligator was doing on a highway in New Mexico.”

The white Mexican didn’t say anything. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was too tired.

Or maybe he figured it would be smarter to listen.

So I kept on talking. “When the stories first started back in the fifties, no one took them seriously. I mean, a few lights in the sky… who knows what causes stuff like that? Could be some secret government aircraft. Could be an optical illusion. Hell, I guess it could be Martians, too.

“But lights in the sky don’t exactly make you sit up and take notice in a serious way. No. It takes more than that, even around a flyspeck town like Amigo.

“Once folks started disappearing… well, that was a different story.” I sighed. “That’s serious. My dad was one of the first. He went for a walk one night and never came back. Now, maybe he just left town. Maybe he was sick of me and my mom and Amigo. But he wasn’t the only one. Around the same time, a lot of other folks vanished without a trace. One man disappears, you can explain that away. But ten or twenty, and women and children, too…

“So the sheriff started sniffing around out in the desert. He was a real go-getter. He found the caves and the tunnels, even made a trip a couple of miles down one of the tunnels, if you believe the story. Not that he saw anything. He was smart enough to trust his gut instincts, and he turned tail when he got to feeling like he was in over his head.

“Not that he was yellow. He formed a posse — some town roughnecks, a couple ex-lawmen, a few border patrol guys -— and went back to one of the caves. That’s when he found these things.”

I pointed to the concrete block with the eyebolt that held the Mexican’s chain. “There were fifty of ’em scattered around a quarter-mile area. Each one had a chain, and at the end of each chain was a shackle with a key already in it. And chained to the ten slabs nearest the mouth of the cave were corpses, folks everyone recognized who had disappeared from town.

“The men who saw them — or claim they did — say that those corpses looked like they’d been through the meanest part of hell. However they looked, the sheriff got the message, all right. That’s when we started rounding up the wetbacks. And that’s when folks stopped disappearing from town.

“We hear stories. Sure. Every now and then, one of those wetbacks slips out of some hole in the desert and tries to make a run for it. Usually they end up in Amigo. I’ve heard that they talk about man-eating aliens and caves that stink like slaughterhouses and all kinds of crazy shit. Not that I could say so myself — I don’t speak Mexican and I sure as hell wouldn’t talk to anyone like that even if I did.

“What I think is that it’s better not to listen to any of it. You run across a wetback like that, I think it’s better to stuff a rag in his mouth and chain him up out here where he belongs, and turn your back and forget him, and try to get on with your life the best way you know how.

“I’ve never seen a black helicopter. I’ve never seen any men in black. I can’t tell you how we went from vacuum tubes to transistors to microchips so damn fast. I’m not one of those who thinks that salvation comes from knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I think that sometimes it’s better not to know.

“I don’t know what lives down in those caves. I don’t want to know. Martians or government agents or Nazis from the earth’s core, it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that no one from Amigo is going to end up down there.”

Wes honked again. I knew it was time to go. I got up. Really, there was no reason to hang around. The whole thing was out of my hands now that the white Mexican was chained to the concrete block.

He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t say a word. He just stared at the mouth of the cave, and he kept his mouth shut.

That was fine with me.

“Folks from Amigo, we’re safe out here,” I said.

I turned my back on the Mexican.

“We have been for a long time.”

I opened the door to Wes’ van.

“We want to keep it that way.”

That was when I heard him move behind me. The chain played out, but he couldn’t get far.

He took a breath. “Don’t leave me here,” he said. “For the love of God… please… ”

His voice was very small. In a high wind, you’d hardly notice it.

I stood there for a minute, listening to him beg, but I wasn’t going to turn around. If I didn’t do that, it would be just like I was listening to nobody.

If I didn’t turn around, there was no white Mexican behind me.

No white Mexican at all.

DO NOT HASTEN TO BID ME ADIEU

ONE

He was done up all mysterious-like–black bandanna covering half his face, black duster, black boots and hat. Traveling incognito, just like that coachman who picked up Harker at the Borgo Pass.

Yeah. As a red man might figure it, that was many moons ago… at the beginning of the story. Stoker’s story, anyway. But that tale of mannered woe and stiff-upper-lip bravado was as crazy as the lies Texans told about Crockett and his Alamo bunch. Harker didn’t exist. Leastways, the man in black had never met him.

Nobody argued sweet-told lies, though. Nobody in England, anyhow. Especially with Stoker tying things up so neat and proper, and the count gone to dust and dirt and all.

A grin wrinkled the masked man’s face as he remembered the vampire crumbling to nothing finger-snap quick, like the remnants of a cow-flop campfire worried by an unbridled prairie wind. Son of a bitch must have been mucho old. Count Dracula had departed this vale of tears, gone off to suckle the devil’s own tit… though the man in black doubted that Dracula’s scientific turn of mind would allow him to believe in Old Scratch.