Ron Argo

Chapter One


     Sanchez had popped peyote in Caborca and now he was seeing objects in the headlights—a salsa-drenched carne asada tortas chasing a bowl of red menudo. The menudo spilt over the sides as the bowl danced across the asphalt. Weird. The coyote was too fascinated by the Carl’s Jr burger somersaulting behind the other stuff to bother analyzing his altered vision.
    He glanced at his partner. “We’re stopping at the focking safehouse. Don’t give me any shit.”
  Chacon frowned. He turned to the blackness through his window. There was a desert racing by out there but he couldn’t see it. “El jefe will be pissed we don’t get there tonight.”
    At the wheel, Sanchez sneered but kept his eyes on the steady line of Carl’s Jr burgers in the road, scooting along like a whiplash of ducklings. He shook his head and mooned his eyeballs but the crazy images wouldn’t get off the road. His glazed eyes shimmered in the dashboard light as if coated in oil. After a few miles he sharply broke the ton-and-a-half and wheeled off the highway onto a weedy dirt road, careless that it might shake up his passengers in the truck bed. "It’s down this way I think. We’re focking stopping."
    After driving seventeen hundred miles, the smugglers had less than a hundred before reaching Ensenada, their destination.
    A few scattered lights illuminated ranch houses across the ejido, a settlers’ community. The first ranch was supposed to be the safehouse. Sanchez cut the engine behind a grove of yucca near the closest lighted adobe. “Keep them quiet,” he said and got out.
    The usual commotion of baby cries, shushes, bumping noises commenced in the rear of the truck, though subdued under the thick cocoon of canvas. Chacon tossed open the cover against the harsh odor of diesel fumes and shined a light on the huddled migrants. Tiny knotted fists quaked as caretakers tried to quell the infants’ cries.
    Chacon doused the light, whispered, "Shh, keep them quiet. Climb on out." The migrants eased over the tailgate, nervous-looking but quiet.
    “Gather some firewood," he said, "I will see about some food.” He handed one of the men a book of matches and walked off toward the house.
    The flickering light from an inside lantern danced among the shadows across the moonless desert floor. Chacon ignored the dog at the doorway and acknowledged with a tooth-sucking sound the stooped farmer standing in the curtained doorway. He pointed toward the yuccas and said seven people needed food. The old man nodded.
    Out back, Sanchez sat on a rock eating a meatless plate of beans and corn tortillas, staring up at the black night. "It’s focking perfect." He could have been talking about the food satiating his craving or the glorious heavens.
    Chacon squatted. He drank from his bottle of mescal, sputtering as if he might throw up. He spooned some of the steaming beans onto a cold tortilla. "We can get there by midnight," he said. "El jefe said any later and we would be out of favor. He talks polite but he means we won’t get paid. Or worse."
    Sanchez flashed a wolfish grin, the metal caps on his teeth catching light and slashing at Chacon like razors. “Fock the boss. We’ll get paid all right.”
    “You gotta stop doing that shit, cousin, it’s fucking up your thinking.” Chacon watched a scorpion as he spoke.
    Sanchez pushed the last bite of burrito into his mouth and spoke with food protruding from his lips. “Chacon, you want to be poor all your miserable life?”
    Chacon screwed his face into disgust without looking at his cousin, knowing there would be particles of food spewing into the light. He sipped mescal and bit into his burrito.
    “Well I don’t. I want to be rich. I want to be king of my focking destiny--Un rey. My destiny is to be as Al Pacino.”
    Chacon chewed and listened to the peyote talking. He pushed a dead ocotillo branch under the scorpion and waited till it climbed aboard. He brought it eye level. “You want to pick its legs?”
    Sanchez knocked the scorpion off the stick and stepped on it, twisting his boot into the sand.
    “You don’t know who I’m talking about, do you? Old Scarface, you imbecile. . . . You will be rich too, because we are going to take these focking babies and sell them ourselves.”
    He punched Chacon on the shoulder.
    Chacon narrowed his eyes. “What gringo will buy babies?” he said, sneering. “What kind of story will you tell the boss? . . . What about them?” he said, nodding toward the campesinos.
    “Ha! You think I haven’t thought of that stuff already? . . . I have a plan. We will be wolves--As Al Pacino!”
    Chacon lured the worm from the bottle of mescal with his tongue then raked an arm across his mouth. “I think you’re full of shit.”
    The migrants had taken orders from the ill-tempered Sanchez for eight days. They had traveled across mountains and avoided the cities and conquered a huge desert, tolerating the cruel coyote all the while. They stood helplessly by as Sanchez violated the group’s only teenage girl at his whim and cowered pitifully when he put a stick to the older ones. They had no choice; the other smuggler, Chacon, did nothing to stop him. When he now said, “In the truck, we’re going,” they scrambled.
    Sanchez used fog lights along the arroyos of the dry Rio Coyote, the vehicle bouncing and rocking on the pitted desert floor. A rare cloudy sky cloaked the moonlight like a great eyelid.
    In time the truck came to a railroad track and Sanchez cut the engine. He backhanded his pouty partner and pointed through the dusty windshield to the vague outline of a train car.
    “There it is, just as I remember. . . . You know what to do.”
    An empty mescal bottle tumbled off the floorboard and shattered as Chacon got out. He stood aside as Sanchez untied and threw back the canvas, then shined a torch into the bed.
    “Get out.” Sanchez waved his stick. “Leave those squawking babies in the truck.”
    The migrants at first appeared confused, then reluctant. “Tell us what is going on,” a large woman said.
    Sanchez took hold of the woman’s thick forearm and pulled to get her out. No one at first saw the knife in his hand. “You stinking pollo, get out of the truck!”
    The woman was bigger and stronger than Sanchez and she pushed him to the ground.
    Again she asked, “What is happening?” The woman’s name was Jovita.
    Sanchez this time held a beam of light on the woman so the others could see as he pushed the knife into her stomach. He twisted it to make her cry. His breath came in gasps, like hers.
    Jovita swung her elbow around and caught Sanchez in the nose, again knocking him down. Quietly, she fell to her knees and moaned. She rested on hands and knees, like a dog, unable now to get back to her feet.
From his knees Sanchez plunged the serrated knife again into the thick of her body. Then again, until his arm lost power and he could no longer raise it.
The campesinos huddled in pathetic silence, hearing the last breath of their companion slip away.
    Sanchez held his shirttail to his bleeding nose. Panting, he hastened the group into the boxcar at knife point. “Not you,” he said to the teenager. "Stay with the babies."
    He told the others, “Don’t worry, you will be picked up in the morning and given jobs. You are in el norte now!”
    Chacon could have stopped his cousin with a quick punch to the throat; Sanchez was an addict and a runt, but he was blood. It took Chacon’s help sliding the big Lackawanna door shut.
    The girl climbed all the way into the back corner of the truck bed, crying out when the torch hit her eyes.
    “Be quiet,” Sanchez said. “Get up front, and bring them.”
    Emboldened by his own savagery and full of grandeur, Sanchez became reckless on the return, driving fast across the black landscape, the girl beside him and the babies in hers and Chacon’s arms.
    A searing flood of light broke on them. Bullhorns blared, commands to halt.
    Chacon screamed, “See what you’ve done, cousin. We are dead!”
    “You idiot, we are in Mexico. La migra can do nothing.”
    Sanchez baited the enemy with a bleep of his horn. He didn’t slow. Chacon watched in amazement. The armed agents did nothing, as his cousin, Al Pacino, had said.