The Return: A Novel (32 page)

Thus it was that the two men’s heads were close together when Statch pulled out a bottle of the hottest chili sauce in Mexico and smashed it over the head of the toad, sending him to his knees and splashing the bulk of the bottle’s fiery contents into the face of his friend.

The two women ran down the alley and out into a street that led back to the plaza. Statch was looking around wildly to see if she could spot Skelly, but to her surprise Lourdes stopped and would go no farther.

“I can’t go out there with no blouse.”

“Girl, those guys are going to kill us if they catch us. Now, come on!”

“No, I need something to wear. Why did you hit Gabriel with that bottle?”

“Why did I…? For God’s sake, Lourdes, they were going to kidnap us and do who knows what. Don’t you have any sense at all? Here, put this on and let’s go!”

She handed the girl a T-shirt she’d just bought, black with rows of printed red skulls. Lourdes put it on and had to stop to admire herself in a window. When they heard the sound of the SUV’s motor, at last some primitive switch in Lourdes’s brain closed and they ran back to the market.

When they’d caught their breath and were standing by the red Ford, where Skelly and the others had gathered, Statch asked, “Who were those guys, by the way? It looked like you knew them.”

“I do know them. Salvador is my boyfriend.”

“Your
boyfriend
?”

“Yes. He wants to marry me, but I don’t know anymore, not since I have this opportunity. But it would be a big wedding, you know, he promised me, in the church and at the Hotel Diamante after. He’s very rich.”

“Lourdes, he’s a gangster.”

“Yes, but maybe he’ll do something else. Only I got mad when El Cochinillo said he wanted to fuck me at, you know, the same time as Salvador. I thought that wasn’t very nice. And Salvador didn’t say anything, he just stood there grinning. And I got mad. And then you came along.”

Lourdes said this with a faintly accusing tone, as if Statch had rudely interrupted a lovely party.

“And who’s El Cochinillo?”

“He’s Salvador’s best friend. They call him the Piglet because he’s the son of El Jabalí, the Boar; you know, the
jefe
of the plaza in Cárdenas.”

She lowered her voice, as the locals did when they discussed
los malosos
. “You know, La Familia Michoacána. They don’t usually hurt women, except El Jabalí lets El Cochinillo do it. I think you should go away from here, Carmel.”

“I think you should pick better boyfriends. Anyway, you’ll be in Defe soon and you’ll have plenty of non-gangster guys at your disposal.”

“Yes, I will,” said Lourdes. “Look, do you ever wear a padded bra? You know, with push-up?” She demonstrated on her own flawless examples.

“No, I don’t. Why do you ask?”

“Because men like it, and you’ll never get a boyfriend without a set of
bombas
. My girlfriend Pilar got one and she has a boyfriend now. You know, they’re probably going to kill your father. El Jabalí is very mad at him, Salvador said. And now they’ll probably kill you too, because you hit the Piglet with a bottle of hot sauce. But, really, it was very funny. Why did you go crazy like that? They weren’t going to rape you or anything.”

“Oh, you know that for a fact?”

“Yes. El Jabalí doesn’t like rapes, and he kills rapists and cuts off their
chiles
first. He’s a Christian. He only does what God says.”

13

Marder walked out on his terrace and watched his daughter helping Skelly and a crew of
colonia
men bolt the shaft of the cell-phone mast to one of the squat towers that guarded the four corners of Casa Feliz. The towers were actual rooms, unfinished but weather-tight, devised, he imagined, for the storage of terrace furniture. One of them was electrified and piped for a wet bar that had never been installed, and Skelly planned to use it for the base station of the cell. One of his “guys” was in contact with someone from Telmex, who, for the usual consideration, would mate the cell to his company’s system. This was not an unusual arrangement, Marder had learned, provided so that the wealthy in isolated haciendas need not give up the benefits of modern technology. Cheap cell phones had been distributed generally around the
colonia
—nice for the people and vital to what Skelly hoped to develop into an efficient little militia and threat-detection network.

With deep pleasure, Marder observed the fierce concentration with which his girl fired bolts into the concrete to hold the brackets for the antenna mast while also joking with Skelly and the crew as they worked. She seemed happy and unaffected by the encounter yesterday with the younger Cuello. Marder felt now that, curiously, he had come out on the other side of worry, because worry was useless and degrading. This was the upside of
no importa madre
—a man did not spend energy on obsessing about what could not be helped. His daughter’s breaking a bottle over the Piglet’s head would not make Cuello hate Marder more than he already did, and in a way it furthered Marder’s cause. He wanted Cuello enraged, in fact.

Marder himself had spent the day setting up a Web marketing system. He had edited a book about it some years back and found it a fairly painless exercise. Young Epifania had been tasked to go around to the small factories and take digital photos of their work, and the thing was coming along nicely. He’d hired an outfit in New York to set up fulfillment software and handle billing and tax matters and a firm in Santa Clara to market the goods to high-end crafts shops in big American and European cities. Thus commerce progressed in the wired global marketplace. He had no great hopes of making a fortune for these people, but he wished at least to secure a better living than they had been used to, as well as a place for them to live.

Life flowed on smoothly for the next week or so, and the house was indeed as happy as its name. The cell phones went on. A prefab steel building was delivered by flatbed truck and assembled on a concrete slab to serve as an office and warehouse. The animals (except poultry) were herded away from the humans and corralled at the northern end of the island. The septic field went in, and plastic pipes were laid to distribute water. Marder was startled and gratified by the way the people organized themselves for communal tasks like this. Skelly or Carmel would lay out the technical requirements, and they would set up the project and carry it forth without altercation or confusion, which was what one might expect from a people with a thousand years’ experience in self-directed communal water engineering and agriculture.

In this period, Marder was conscious of a kind of unreal lightness of spirit that was supposed to be typical of long sea voyages before the era of instant communication. Anything might be happening, anything may be waiting when one struck port, but now, in the instant, all was peace and contentment. He loved sitting with a drink in his hand, on his rooftop, looking at the lights of the
colonia
and listening to the music drift up, depending on the breeze, from this or that radio. In the other direction, from the pool, came the sound of Lourdes and her court of maidens. Since her audition, Lourdes had become the happy genius of the house and instantly the most popular figure at her school. Everyone wanted to be a friend of the future star, and this attention, far from making the girl insufferable, had tapped hitherto unsuspected springs of charity. She loaned clothing and baubles, she shared the makeup tips she had learned from Pepa herself, and if there was envy bubbling up from the maidens, somehow Lourdes floated above it on the fluffy cloud of satisfied aspiration.

In the mornings, Marder would often awaken to the sound of churned water—his daughter dutifully doing her hundred laps—and he would peer out through his shutters to watch her long body slice through the pool. It was amazing to him that she had the energy. She worked harder than anyone else; she was at every work site in her shorts and sweat-soaked T-shirt and her tin hard hat with the butterfly decal on it. She was cordial enough to him when they happened to get together, for meals or in passing, but she did not seem at all interested in a deeper relationship with her father; she appeared to be locked in some private quandary, excluding him. What he’d wanted when he left New York was a withdrawal from contact, so now this pain could not in decency be acknowledged. The joke was on him.

*   *   *

For her part, Carmel found herself full of joyful energy during most of her working day. There was something about dealing directly with mud and steel, stone, fire, glass, and clay that made her silly happy, like a little girl puttering around a sand pile, and there was also something about working with people like Rosita Morales that she did not get from sharing a cube with Karen Liu. It was like being with her mother again, learning how to make meals from scratch, from the raw foodstuffs brought home from Mexican markets. Yes, she understood intellectually that all that D. H. Lawrence stuff about primal-life-force energies and the moral superiority of the uncivilized was bullshit, but here it was, undeniable in her body. It annoyed her, this disconnect between what was supposed to be and how she felt, and she took it out on her father, the source.

And another thing: in the days that had passed since the visit to Mexico City, she had taken to avoiding breakfast at the house and having coffee at a little chica-hut place on the beach north of town. Amparo’s coffee was first-rate, and Casa Feliz was of course wonderful, but not, she had decided, every fucking minute of the day. She’d bought a motorcycle, a used Suzuki 250, so that she didn’t have to take one of the trucks every time she had to go to town or to Cárdenas to order supplies. She would ride it to Miguelito’s shack early in the morning and sit there with a c
afé con leche
and a tamarind
torta
or a
gordita,
the typical brown-sugar cookie of Michoacán, which she had baked innumerable times with her mother.

Now, sitting on her favorite bench, gazing at the ocean, with the sun rising over the sierra and just starting to warm her back, she felt, in that strange way, another kind of prickle in that spot and turned abruptly to see if someone was in fact staring at her or if she had descended another notch into crazy. But it was an actual stare: Major Naca, pretending not to be watching her through his aviator sunglasses.

Caught, he smiled, nodded, asked if he could join her. A slight bob of her head and he came over. A few pleasantries—the weather, the sea—and then, “I hear you’re doing wonderful things on the island,” he said. “Many busy hands, money flowing, trucks in and out all day. Everyone is impressed.”

“Even the army?”

“I can’t speak for the army. But the Casa Feliz is well regarded in the district. The army is more concerned with, can I say, the peripheral relationships you’ve established with the gangs. For example, we find it interesting that people from Casa Feliz, such as yourself, are typically followed around by vehicles full of gun thugs. There’s one such car on the road out there.”

“It’s no crime to hire security. This is a dangerous region, and you yourself observed that we have reason to fear at least one of the many drug gangs.”

“Yes, but in this part of the world it’s often the case that to protect is to own.”

“And if the army were doing its job properly, we would have no need to hire gun thugs.”

Naca looked startled for a moment and then laughed. “On the other hand, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, as my dear grandmother used to say. Of course we should do better, but the country is very large and the army is small and the drug gangs increase without limit. In fact, my unit is pulling out tomorrow.”

“Where are you going?”

“That is a state secret, I’m afraid.” He drew a thin cigar out of a case, asked her if she minded, got a no, lit it with a silver lighter, and left both case and lighter on the bench. He added, “You will have to rely on the federal drug police for the time being.”

“I thought they were corrupt.”

“Some are, and some are not. Again, poor Mexico. But I didn’t follow you here to discuss poor Mexico. How did you enjoy your trip to Chilangolandia?”

“It was fine.”

“It must have been. A shopping spree and an interview with a famous telenovela producer for that pretty girl. Did you buy anything yourself?”

“Not much,” she said. “I’m happy to see that the army is keeping track of our movements.”

“To an extent, and only for protective purposes. And, also, your father’s involvement with that little girl has set tongues wagging. It is very like a telenovela. The rich American comes to town, fights off the bad guys, scoops up the town beauty for himself—what could possibly happen next?”

“My father is not having an affair with Lourdes Almones. I thought the same when I came down here, but it’s not so. He decided to help her into a career as a TV star out of pure generosity.”

“Really. You amaze me.”

“Yes, well, my father is an amazing man in many ways. He believes in helping people obtain their heart’s desire. It’s part of his religious practice.”

“How so? I thought religion was about rejecting the world.”

“True. But people fixate on some secular prize they think will make them happy, and in general they don’t get it and so spend their lives thinking that they would achieve paradise if they did get it; therefore, they ignore God. Whereas if they did get it, they would realize it was all ashes and turn instead to the true source of happiness.”

“He has explained this to you?”

“Of course not. It’s just a theory, based on a lifetime of studying Richard Marder.”

“So you’re telling me he has bought this girl expensive clothing and obtained an opening for her with the biggest telenovela producer in Mexico so that eventually she will become a star and see that stardom is ashes compared to God?”

“Something like that. I see you’re astounded. You disbelieve it.”

“I would never doubt the word of a lady, Señorita. But it seems an unusually long game to play.”

“My father
is
unusual, Major, far more than he seems. He is certainly the most genuinely religious man in my experience, yet he didn’t insist that my brother and I participate in the Church, and we don’t. When we jumped ship, he barely said a word in defense of his religion, only … what you just said reminds me of an exception to that. He often used to say, ‘God plays a very long game.’ It was often in response to our childish challenges, as, for example, how do you believe in a good God when there’s so much misery around? God plays a very long game, and so does my father, I believe. Perhaps he will even provide you with your heart’s desire.”