Borderlands (14 page)

He folded the blade back into the haft and put the knife in his pocket. He scooped the money off the counter—five dollars and some change—and went back to the bedroom and entered on tiptoe. The woman was lying on her side, her face in dark shadow. He carefully placed the money on the dresser and then quietly opened the closet door and took his hat from its hook.

As he retraced his steps to the bedroom door, she said distinctly, “God will damn you for your stupidity.”

He did not falter in his stride. He went down the hallway and through the living room and out the front door. He walked fast across the yard and turned down the street into the gusting wind as the first drops of rain stung his face and he left behind the house of Esperanza.

LA VIDA LOCA

THE LOSS

Check it out. I knew this dude worked as a ticket seller for a while at a dog track in T.J. He had a cousin down there got him the job. Dude was living in Chula Vista, crossing to Mexico every day to work this job. A million beaners trying to cross over to
here
, every day, you know, for the American Dream and all that shit—and
this
pocho’s crossing over to
there
every day to make his nut. Crazy, eh? La vida loca, man.

Anyway, this dude—Cisco his name was—had a routine for boosting his take-home. Strictly legit, too, man. And tax-free. (
You
tell the IRS everything? Not in this life.) What he did was, every time a guy at the window asked him what number to play, he’d tell him. Every race, there’s guys asking him the winning number. He’s selling tickets, they figure he’s got to be in the know, he’s hip to the winner. Assholes, sure, but there’s plenty of them in the world—I’m right, que no? So check it out: these guys are asking Cisco what number dog’s gonna win and Cisco’s telling them. Only he gives a different number to every guy that asks him. He’d go right down the list of entries, man—tell the first guy who asks it’s the number one dog, tell the next guy it’s number two, and so on. Every time he went through all the entries, he had to be giving the winner to
one
guy for sure. Some races he got asked by so many guys he’d go through all the entries nine, ten times before he closed the window. A lot of those guys never bothered to thank him, but plenty of them were real sports about it. They’d come back to the window with a big grin and kick him a ten, a twenty, depending on the payoff. End of the night it added up. Told me he was taking it home in a wheelbarrow some nights. Pretty good, eh? Fucken bulletproof, man.

The only problem was, some of the guys he gave a bum number didn’t take it too good, you know?
They
came back to the window, he’d get an earful, a lot of hard-ass looks. Sometimes he’d shrug, try to look like he’d been fucked too, you know, like
he
got a bum tip. Mostly he just acted like he didn’t hear them. Tried not to make eye contact.

One night a couple of pendejos who lost heavy on one of his numbers laid for him. Big mothers, man. And
real
bad losers. Followed him out to the parking lot. Took him off to the last nickel and then stomped him for laughs. Nearly killed him, man. Both arms busted, one leg, his cheekbones, lost some top teeth, some vision in one eye. You name it, man, they did it to him. He was all fuckedup for months. Went broke on the hospital bills.

I hear he’s in L.A. now. Sells insurance in the barrios.

THE ROUST

Every man’s got his own good reasons to be bitter, but you can’t give in to them any old time you feel like it. There’s a time and place for everything. The world’s anyhow not about to give a shit. A lot a these guys have a hard time understanding that, especially the Mexes. Chico, he never understood it for a minute.

There me and him were, killing a pint out by the bridge that runs out to Mustang, and Chico’s already a little pissed because there’s not but a couple of slugs left and we haven’t got enough money between us to buy another bottle. Then here comes this cop car with its siren going and its blue lights flicking and it bounces up over the curb and screeches to a stop right in front of us, damn near runs us both over. Shook me so bad I dropped and broke the bottle and that was it for the last two swallows.

It’s just one cop, some Mex kid with wetback parents if he ain’t one himself, and here he is in the Corpus P.D. Looks about to piss his pants, too, when he jumps out of the car yelling, “On the groun’, on the
groun
’! Hands behin’ joor head!” But as he yanks his gun out of the holster he loses his grip on it and the thing comes skidding over to me. Never saw anything like that in my life.

Chico yells, “
Get
it!” and I snatch it up and point it at the cop with both hands. I hadn’t held a gun since the army.

The cop’s eyes are
this
big. Up go his hands. “Don’t choot!” he says. “Don’t choot!” He starts talking a mile a goddamn minute and you can hardly understand him, saying they’re looking for two guys just hit the McDonald’s six blocks away—one Anglo, one Mex—but he can see we’re not the same two, so please don’t shoot. I can feel myself shaking and I’m wondering what the hell I think I’m doing.

Chico tells him shut up and cusses him good. I’m saying, “Let’s
go
, man, let’s get
gone
!” but Chico
is pissed
. He picks up a big chunk of cinder block and goes over to the cop’s car and POW!—he cobwebs the windshield of the driver’s side. I couldn’t goddamn believe it.

“
Sick
a gettin rousted!” he hollers. Picks up the chunk of block again and POW!—busts the other side of the windshield. The cop’s still got his hands up but now his mouth’s hanging open. Mine too, probly.

POW! Chico takes out a headlight, saying, “Fuck it
all
!” Then the other light. Then the party lights on the roof. And all the while he’s smashing up the car he’s going, “Goddamn cops! Goddamn People! Goddamn Marisol, you whore!”

Marisol’s his ex. Got remarried down in the valley last year.

Now we got sirens closing in on us from all sides like walls, but Chico doesn’t even seem to hear them, he just goes on busting that cop car all to hell with the piece of cinder block, yelling, “Sick of it! Fucken
sick
of it!”

Forget running. I hand the cop the piece and put my hands behind my back for him to cuff and we stand there and watch as the backups come tearing in. They see what’s going down and they all go at Chico with their billies swinging. He made a fight of it for about five seconds before they coldcocked him good and gave him a bunch more for good measure.

I drew six months on the county farm. Chico had a bunch of priors so he got eighteen months in Huntsville.

Probably spending every day of it brooding on all the things he’s sick of.

THE HOLDUP

We hit this convenience store in El Paso just off I-10 last Thursday night nearly did us in.

The routine went fine at first. Ramos braced the redheaded chick at the register while I watched the doors and kept the others covered. He worked smooth and fast like always, Ramos, a real pro. Red went big-eyed and said something, probably trying to bullshit Ramos about no key, a timelock, something, but we’d scoped this place good and knew better. Ramos talked to her nice and soft and she nodded and punched open the register and quick started sticking the bills in a plastic bag.

The fat guy by the ice cream freezer was freaked but smart enough to stand fast and keep his mouth shut. So was the big Mexican momma holding a little girl against her legs. They couldn’t keep their eyes off the gun. That’s why I use the .44. It’s a bitch to lug around and try to hide even under a loose shirt, but a cannon like that gets their complete attention and they remember it a lot better than my face.

But there’s this guy in a UTEP shirt who’s had his head way in the deli cooler from the time we came in and he still doesn’t know what’s going down. He’s already chomping on a sandwich when he turns around and catches the action. Next thing I know he’s bent over and gagging and he drops down on all fours and he’s making these godawful choking noises and he’s turning fucken
blue
. All I can think is, if the sonofabitch dies we’ve had it. In Texas, somebody dies of anything during a felony—trips on his damn shoelace and busts his head open—it’s a murder rap for the perps. We’d worked maybe fourteen-fifteen jobs together and nobody dead yet. Never had to shoot, no heart attacks on us, nothing. Now this guy.

Ramos sees what’s happening and I see his lips say
shit
and he quick comes over and gets busy working on the guy—who’s now
purple
, starting to twitch, eyes rolled way up in his head, tongue bulging like you wouldn’t believe. Ramos hugs him from behind and locks his hands together in the middle of the guy’s chest and gives one fast hard squeeze after another. Even as I’m thinking we are royally fucked, I’m wondering where the hell he learned to do that. Everybody’s watching him like it’s TV.

Suddenly a big glob of sandwich shoots out of the guy’s mouth and splats against a
People
magazine in the rack a good ten feet away and the guy starts sucking breath like an air brake.

Ramos runs over to the counter and grabs the money bag and we run out of there like cats with our tails on fire. I wheel the Mustang down the frontage road and onto the freeway and we’re gone.

We’re halfway to Tucson when Ramos counts the take. Hundred and thirty-two bucks. Jesus, this business. I usually have me two beers every night. That night I quit counting after the first six-pack.

REFEREE

I was best friends with Mato in grammar school, but I wouldn’t say we liked each other all that much. He always had to show everybody he was tougher, he could take me. We’d wrestle at recess and he’d get me in a headlock and wouldn’t let go till we drew a bigger crowd of classmates, a bigger bunch of laughing witnesses. Kids who wouldn’t dare laugh at me on their own would laugh along with Mato like he was just having some good fun with his best friend. After he’d finally let me go he’d throw an arm over my shoulder, and all I could do to save face was grin back at him, the good loser, my ear swollen, all the time just burning inside, wanting to smash his smile.

By the time we were in high school we were the toughest kids in San Antonio, and I’m including the Anglos, the biggest ones. We didn’t give a damn about size—we’d fight anybody, anytime, kick their ass. That’s when Rita came in the picture, a transfer from California. From L.A. First day there she had every guy in school walking into walls. Killer green eyes, hair like honey to her ass, great legs, skin more like a tan gringa than the Chicana she was. Sure as hell of herself, too, way cooler than most you’d ever find in Texas. Quick smart mouth on her. When the homecoming committee asked her to be one of the queen’s maids of honor, she said why not, the strapless gown would show off the spider tattoos over her titties real nice. They took back the offer and she laughed every time she told the story. She was like that. Loved to shock the straight arrows. She’d been in school about a month when her and a faculty guy, an English teacher, were spotted in a nightclub, drinking and dirty dancing. The school board got wind of it and it turned into a big deal in the newspapers. The guy ended up getting fired. Rita, she just
beamed
about the whole thing. I heard she taped the news clippings to her wall, next to the movie star pictures.

I know she’d seen me watching her sometimes in the halls between classes. One day I’m at my locker and I feel somebody blow on the back of my ear, I turn around and she says, “Hey, Rudy Cortes, you don’t look like such a Mister Bad-Ass to
me
.” Mister Bad-Ass was what the guys at school called me. Mato they called Killer. She was looking at me with nothing but daring in her face, those eyes like green fire. That night we parked out in the boonies and she let me touch her everywhere, but no more than that. She didn’t have a pair of tattoos like she’d said, just the one: a little blue heart on her left tit.

Mato usually preferred morenas, Mexican-looking ones, but when he saw how much I dug Rita he naturally started coming on to her too. We told each other we were scoring, but I don’t think he was getting anything I wasn’t, not then, not yet. But her teasing was driving me crazy. I was going around so revved up I picked a fight for no reason with a guy on the football team and whipped his ass in the lot behind Min’s Pharmacy, where all the after-school fights took place. Rita watched it, and that night in the car she used her mouth on me for the first time. I loved the look on Mato’s face when I told him about it the next day. He called me a bullshit artist but he knew it was true, and I could tell by his face she hadn’t done it for him. That afternoon in the locker room he made out like he was just horsing around but kept popping me good ones on the ass with a towel till I said cut the crap. He said why don’t I make him cut the crap behind Min’s at 3:15. I said you’re on. It’d been coming since way before Rita and we both knew it.