DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (47 page)

     
"You know how
many educational and honor societies she belongs to? She'd be disgraced. The
irony is she didn't need to cheat. She was a good student on her own."

     
But not number one, I
thought.

     
He studied my eyes
and seemed to see the thought buried there.

     
"If you tell
anybody this, I'll sue you for libel. Then I'll personally kick your ass,"
he said.

     
"I'm not your
problem."

     
His face was puffed,
naked, the eyes like brown marbles in a pan of water.

     
I picked up my coffee
and the sausage paddy I'd wrapped in a piece of French bread and walked to my
truck. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke through the trees. Buford still
sat at the plank table, his forehead on his palm, oblivious to the camellias
that were in full bloom along the banks of Bayou Teche.

I
didn't tell Buford all the content of my conversation with my
friend Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Minos and his colleagues were
about to raid the ranch of Clay Mason seven hundred miles below the Texas
border, in the state of Jalisco.
      

     
And Helen Soileau and
I were invited.

CHAPTER
 
35

W
e flew into
Guadalajara at noon
with
Minos and two other DEA agents. Minos was a tall, lean, cynical, good-natured
man with blond close-cropped hair that was starting to whiten. When he had
played forward for L.S.U. years ago, sportswriters had nicknamed him "Dr.
Dunkenstein" for the ferocious rim-jarring slam dunks that were his
trademark. As we taxied toward the hangar, he pulled back the curtain on the
charter plane's window and looked at the hills in the distance, then at a
parked van with three wide backseats and, leaning against it, an unshaved man
in blue jeans and a maroon football jersey with a holstered pistol and a gold
shield clipped onto his belt.

     
"There's our
ride," he said.

     
Helen stared out the
window.

     
"I don't believe
it. It's that's smart-ass, what's-his-name, Heriberto, the one looks like his
hair was cut with garden clippers," she said.

     
"You know that
guy?" Minos asked.

     
"He's a Mexican
drug agent. A priest up in the mountains told us he's dirty," I said.

     
"They all are.
One of our guys got sold out here and tortured to death," Minos said.
"This guy's fairly harmless."

     
"Great character
reference," Helen said.

     
We drove out of the
city and through the small village of Zapopan. In the center of the village
square was a gazebo, surrounded by rain trees, where a band was playing and
children were firing out of milk bottles rockets that popped high in the sky.
On one side of the square was a grayish pink eighteenth-century cathedral whose
stone steps had been worn smooth and cupped down the center by the knees of
thousands of penitents who worked themselves painfully up the steps on their
birthdays, simultaneously saying a rosary.

     
"That's a famous
church. The statue of the Virgin of Zapopan's in there. There been a lot of
miracles here, man," Heriberto said.

     
"This is the
place," I said to Helen.

     
"What
place?" she said.

 
    
"Mingo Bloomberg told me the guy
named Arana was from a village in Jalisco that had a famous religious statue in
it," I said.

     
Heriberto steered
around a parked bus, on top of which sat two soldiers in camouflage fatigues
and steel pots. A third soldier was urinating in the street. The street sign on
the corner said
emiliano zapata.

     
"The guy the
rurales
shot by the mines? Yeah, he should have gone to church a lot more. But was
Indio,
you know. One day they're in church, the next day they're drunk, chasing
puta,
causing a lot of shit with the government. See, man, their real problem is
they ain't big on work," he said.

     
Helen leaned forward
from the seat behind us. "How about shutting the fuck up?" she said.

     
"Gringita,
I
ain't got nothing against these people. But in the south they been killing our
soldiers. You want to see what happens?" Heriberto said, lifting a shoe
box of photographs from under the seat.

     
The photos were black
and white, creased and hand-soiled around the edges, as though they had been
passed around for viewing many times. In one photo three dead rebels lay by the
side of a road, their bandannas still tied over the lower half of their faces.
They had on U.S. Army web gear and bandoliers and looked like they had been
killed while running. Several other photos showed another scene from different
angles; a half dozen male corpses had been strung up
by their feet from an adobe colonnade, their fingers inches above
the dirt, their faces featureless with dried blood.

     
"The old guy we
gonna see this afternoon? He encourages these guys, gives them money for guns,
gets them killed. The guy comes from your country,
Gringita,"
Heriberto
said.

     
"If I were you,
I wouldn't say any more," I said.

     
He opened his fingers
in the air, as though he were releasing an invisible bird from them, and drove
out of the village toward the mountains and a place that could have been sawed
out of the revolutionary year of 1910.

W
e drove on a high switchback rock road through dead trees and a
boulder-strewn landscape and rain that covered the windows like running
plastic, then crested a ridge that was blackened by a forest fire, dancing with
lightning, and dropped down out of the storm into sunlight again and a long
cultivated valley with green hills in the distance and a volcano that was
beveled across the top as though it had been sheared by tin snips. The road
followed a river with wide, red clay alluvial banks that were scissored with
the tracks of livestock, then we were inside another village, this one with
cobblestone streets, buff-colored colonnades, a stone watering trough in front
of the
cervecería, a.
tiny open-air market where bees combs and uncured
meat were sold off wood carts that were boxed with screens to keep out the
blowflies.

     
The streets and
walkways under the colonnades were filled with soldiers. They were all young
and carried World War II M-l rifles and M-16's. Some of the M-16's had a knob
welded onto the bolt, which meant they were early Vietnam-era issue, notorious
among grunts for the bolt that often jammed and had to be driven into the
chamber with the heel of the hand.

     
We stood in the
street while Minos talked with a collection of Mexican drug agents gathered
around the tailgate of an army six-by. The air was shining and cool after the
rain, and you could see for miles. Heriberto stared off in the distance at a
rambling white ranch house with a blue tile roof on the slope of a hill. His
legs were spread slightly, his expression contemplative.

     
"Big day for the
Tejano.
We gonna fuck him up good, man," he said.

     
"That's where he
lives? You think maybe he's seen us coming?" I asked.

     
"We cut his
phone. He ain't going nowhere."

     
I took Minos aside.

     
"What are they
expecting to find up there, the Russian Army?" I said.

     
"A lot of these
guys speak English, Dave."

     
"They've blown
the operation."

     
"Not in their
mind. This is how they say 'get out of town' to people they normally can't
touch. Mason should be flattered."

     
"You don't like
him?"

     
"My sister was a
flowerchild back in the sixties. She thought this guy was a great man. She got
loaded on hash and acid and floated out on the sunset from a ten-story
window."

     
We followed a caravan
of six army trucks down a winding dirt road to the walled compound that
surrounded Clay Mason's ranch. The walls were topped with broken glass and
spirals of razor wire, and the wood gates at the entrance were chain-locked and
barred with a crossbeam inside. The lead truck, which was fronted with a
plow-shaped dozer blade, gained speed, roaring across the potholes, the
soldiers in back rocking back and forth, then crashed through the gates and
blew them off their hinges.

     
The soldiers trashed
the house, fanned out into the yards and outbuildings, kicked chickens out of
their way like exploding sacks of feathers, and for no apparent reason shot a
pig running from a barn and threw it down the well.

     
"Can you put a
stop to this bullshit?" I said to Minos.

     
"You see that
fat slob with the Sam Browne belt on? He's a graduate of the School of the
Americas at Fort Benning. He also owns a whorehouse. He knocked the glass eye
out of a girl for sassing him. No, thanks."

     
While his house was
being torn apart, Clay Mason leaned against a cedar post on his front porch and
smoked a hand-rolled cigarette, his pixie eyes fixed on me and Minos. His hair
extended like white straw from under his domed Stetson hat.

     
"Karyn warned me
you're a vindictive man," he said.

     
"I'm sorry about
your place. It's not my doing," I said.

     
"Like hell it
isn't." Then a yellow tooth glinted behind his lip and he added, "You
little pisspot."

     
He flipped his
cigarette away, walked to the corner of his house on his cane, and urinated in
the yard, audibly passing gas with his back turned to us, shaking his penis, a
small, hatted, booted man, in a narrow, ratty coat, whose power had touched
thousands of young lives. Helen and I walked behind the ranch house, where the
soldiers had forced five field hands to lean spread-eagled against the stone
wall of the barn. The field hands were young and frightened and kept turning
their heads to see if guns were being pointed at their backs. The soldiers
shook them down but kept them leaning on their arms against the wall.

     
"I don't like
being in on this one, Dave," Helen said.

     
"Don't watch it.
We'll be out of here soon," I said.

     
We walked inside the
barn. The loft was filled with hay, the horse stalls slatted with light, the
dirt floor soft as foam rubber with dried manure. Through the doors at the far
end I could see horses belly-deep in grass against a blue mountain.

     
Hanging from pegs on
a wood post, like a set used by only one man, were a pair of leather chaps, a bridle,
a yellow rain slicker, a sleeveless knitted riding vest, flared gloves made
from deer hide, and two heavy Mexican spurs with rowels as big as half dollars.
I rotated one of the rowels with my thumb. The points were sticky and coated
with tiny pieces of brown hair.

     
Behind the post, a
silver saddle was splayed atop a sawhorse. I ran my hand across the leather,
the cool ridges of metal, the seared brand of a Texas cattle company on one
flap. The cantle was incised with roses, and in the back of the cantle was a
mother-of-pearl inlay of an opened camellia.

     
"What is
it?" Helen said.

     
"Remember, the
guy named Arana said the
bugarron
rode a silver saddle carved with
flowers? I think Clay Mason's our man."

     
"What can you do
about it?"

 
    
"Nothing."

     
"That's
it?"

     
"Who
knows?" I said.

     
We walked back into
the sun's glare and the freshness of the day and the wind that smelled of water
and grass and horses in the fields.

     
But the young field
hands spread-eagled against the stone wall of the barn were not having a good
day at all. The shade was cool in the lee of the barn, but they were sweating
heavily, their arms trembling with tension and exertion. One boy had a dark
inverted V running down his pants legs, and the soldiers were grinning at his
shame.