"I don't know."
"There's a storm down there. I got cut off before I could make sense out of this drug agent. . . Get a flight this afternoon. Take Helen with you. Americans with no backup tend to have problems down there."
"We have money for this?"
"Bring me a sombrero."
CHAPTER 10
We flew into El Paso late that night. By dawn of the next day we were on a shuttle flight to a windswept dusty airport set among brown hills five hundred miles into Mexico. The Mexican drug agent who met us wore boots and jeans, a badge on his belt and a pistol and a sports coat over a wash-faded blue golf shirt. His name was Heriberto, and he was unshaved and had been up all night.
"The guy try to kill you, huh?" he said, as he unlocked the doors to the Cherokee in the parking lot.
"That's right," I said.
"I wouldn't want a guy like that after me. Es indio, man, know what I mean? Guy like that will cook your heart over a fire," he said. He looked at Helen. "Gringita, you want to use the rest room? Where we going, there ain't any bushes along the road."
He looked indolently at the flat stare in her face.
"What did you call her?" I asked.
"Maybe you all didn't get no sleep last night," he said. "You can sleep while I drive. I never had a accident on this road. Last night, with no moon, I come down with one headlight."
The sun rose in an orange haze above hills that looked made of slag, with cactus and burnt mesquite and chaparral on the sides. The dirt road twisted through a series of arroyos where the sandstone walls were scorched by grass fires, then we forded a river that splayed like coffee-stained milk over a broken wood dam and overflowed the banks into willows and rain trees and a roofless mud brick train station by tracks that seemed to disappear into a h
illside.
"You looking at where those tracks go?" Heriberto said. "The mine company had a tunnel there. The train's still inside."
"Inside?" I said.
"Pancho Villa blew the mountain down on the tunnel. When a train full of Huerta's jackals was coming through. They're still in there, man. They ain't coming out."
I took my notebook out of my shirt pocket and opened it.
"What's bugarron mean?" I asked.
Helen had fallen asleep in back, her head on her chest.
"It's like maricon, except the bugarron considers himself the guy."
"You're talking about homosexuals? I don't get it."
"He's adicto, man. Guy's got meth and lab shit in his head. Those double-ought buckshots in him don't help his thinking too good, either."
"What lab shit?"
He concentrated on the road, ignoring my question, and swerved around an emaciated dog.
"Why'd you bring us down here?" I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.
"The priest is my wife's cousin. He says you're in danger. Except what he knows he knows from the confession. That means he can't tell it himself. You want to go back to the airport, man, tell me now."
The sun rose higher in an empty cobalt sky. We crossed a flat plain with sloughs and reeds by the roadside and stone mountains razored against the horizon and Indian families who seemed to have walked enormous distances from no visible site in order to beg by the road. Then the road began to climb and the air grew cooler. We passed an abandoned ironworks dotted with broken windows, and went through villages where the streets were no more than crushed rock and the doors to all the houses were painted either green or blue. The mountains above the villages were gray and bare and the wind swept down the sheer sides and blew dust out of the streets.
"It's all Indians here. They think you paint the door a certain color, evil spirits can't walk inside," Heriberto said.
Helen was awake now and looking out the window.