5 Dias

Take a drive with the Southpaw, Chingón and el Jefé

---

Without seeing it, he knows the hand is shattered. Beneath the skin, it's a spiderweb of broken glass. ¡Pinche avispas! Who knows if that hand will ever again hold a cerveza, a mujer, a fistful of cash. Right, the money. Maybe that could fix it. Except he didn't have the money. Not yet.

He remembered watching the brightly lit embers float up from his fire at the campsite, carried away by the ocean breeze. Scorching days working the horses and cleaning stables were traded for an afternoon swim, supper, and a spot to sleep. The ranch was hers but not the horses, beautiful and expensive. They were part of a different story, one she rarely mentioned–a gift that came with strings attached. He caught her looking at him sometimes, her smile warming as she grew fond of his company. And sometimes, a shared bed in her house, long after dark, only when she invited him. Her signal: an open window he could see from his camp. As promised, he'd vanish before dawn, returning to the dying embers of his fire. But he grew accustomed to her scent, her warmth. That wasn’t part of the plan but it sure as hell was now.

He knew to expect the man with the snakeskin boots–el Jefé. “They’ll have metal tips; they all do,” the woman had told him. He heard it clearly and nodded but later told himself mañana for so long he’d gotten comfortable, unaware of how time slithered away in this paraiso. Instead of a last swig of mescal, he remembers a black Mercedes and a hammer. It was the rusted ball-peen from his own toolbox, and a gloved hand swinging it.

As he awoke in the sweltering trunk, he conjured the voice of a baseball announcer: "Bases loaded..." he imagined the voice booming. "Can the rookie southpaw deliver under pressure?" This padded hotbox was as close to the majors as he’d ever get. He knew, if anybody did, he was a rental, a player with a pretty face and a strong back for carrying someone else’s grudge.

The other one – the gordito – held him down so the man could do his work. Even by the light of the dying fire the southpaw saw the circular grains of wood in the stump below his hand. Grooves in a record. He remembers thinking the music skipped when the hammer made contact before he screamed himself to sleep.

Now, in the suffocating darkness, the announcer's voice echoed in his mind once more: "Run!" But he didn't. He stared at the faintly glowing handle of the release latch. Just a few more miles, he thought, and then...

---

Northbound on the topside of the Arizona border, sky as far as the eye can see. This isn’t the picturesque valleys of the high desert but flat dirt. It’s where a rag of wild colts might dot the terrain, and where coyotes fight for scraps of a spring rabbit. It’s Nowheresville at the edge of the Navajo Nation.

On the radio, Blood, Sweat & Tears tells us some truth at full volume:

"What goes up must come down
Spinning wheel gotta go round"

Victor’s boot taps the floorboard. His cigarette ash dances along the edge of the window. It’s a bad habit he likes. Black coffee and a cigarette makes the mud run. He smiles as the scenery flies by; it’s a fine day. There’s nothing to be seen for miles, but he keeps checking the rearview.

The passenger, a round-bellied Chingón that Victor had picked up a dozen years ago, was edgy. His stash was low, and he was due for another bump. He popped pills like a kid eating…whatever the fuck kids eat. Later, Chingón would get his fix, but Victor had to play wet nurse until then. His partner’s habit did have advantages; it meant they could roll all night without stopping.

"Stop adjusting the mirror," Victor says.

Chingón puts it back. His head whips back and forth to Victor, looking for approval—a junkie twitch he’s recently developed.

"You hear something?" Chingón says, yelling to the open window.

In the wind, the sound of his voice becomes thinner as it rushes back the length of the car, wisping over the trunk as it mixes into nothing.

Victor checks the mirror again. He’s the one you want in control, not Chingón. No vices except the ones we’ve already discussed. He’s sober, married, and, barring any issues with his affinity for 70s yacht rock, exactly the guy you call if there’s a problem looking for a solution.

"Ya got no money and ya got no home
Spinning wheel all alone"

Victor’s hands keep time with the music. He was in a good mood. A moon ago, he’d used his favorite tool, one he never needed to carry: a hammer. In every town, gas station, and toolbox, there’s always a hammer. Being good at torture doesn’t come easy, but it needn’t be expensive either. Victor thought of it as a love tap, the right sort of thing to bring a man in line. Ordinarily, he liked a shattered foot—a hobbled patita made it easy for Chingón. But if he chose the hand, it was with a special purpose, a message hard to forget in bones that would never heal the right way. And true to his exacting nature, Victor always chose the dominant hand.

Victor and Chingón stood in the moonlight, as they had countless times, staring at a poor sack of shit marked for death. His usual work of sorting out cartel grudges sucked, but money was money, and Victor had a reasonable, flat rate. This time, though, it wasn’t about the payday. This pendejo southpaw was personal.

Victor picked up the kid, the one from his own hometown, living it up on her hippy farm south of Puerto Vallarta. Victor wondered, did he know whose mistress he was fucking? But Victor couldn’t kill him—that’s bad voodoo in your own town, like shitting where you eat. No, he’d drop him in the dirty crossroads at home as an example. People had to understand the cost of stepping out of bounds.

"Drop all your troubles by the riverside
Catch a painted pony on the spinning wheel ride"

The Mercedes hits a bump, sending waves of pain up Southpaw’s arm. The grinding of bones was unsettling. His ribs are bruised, too. He didn’t remember that part. Without light, he doesn’t know exactly how long he’s been here. A day, maybe? If so, that makes two days from the coast.

He rolls onto his back, shaking the life back into his good hand, the way a switch-hitter might flex both wrists before stepping into the batter's box. He hears something and stops. In the car are voices with music playing over them. One of them is the same voice he remembers walking up the gravel road, the one with the metal-tipped boots.

The farm was simple, but it was a cielo compared to the dirt city he grew up in, where los jefes ran the show. He followed the map south and west along the coast, until he found this place, her hidden Eden. She’d made him the offer of a few chores in exchange for meals and all the open sky he wanted. He couldn’t help being taken in by the surroundings – the cliffside villa, the garden with tropical fruit, and hidden playas below for swimming or just staring out at the pacific.

All his life he heard people curse the sky as the sun rose, their workday beginning, while they prayed for night to fall, to finally rest. Their words felt peasant-simple because it wasn’t the sky they cursed, it was their life. Out here, the sun’s path across the land changed him, waking him from that shared but forgettable future. But even as he waited, she, too, changed him. Where he might have once seen only toil he began to see a life he couldn’t easily forget. Knowing the jefe would soon be close by, Southpaw watched the sun inch toward the water in a calm orange, before plummeting, furiously blood-red, behind the waves.

He held that image and the shape of her face in mind as the man with the swagger and snakeskin boots appeared at the edge of the property. Southpaw saw him clearly as the polished metal “V” of his boot stubbed out a cigarette in the dirt.

The man held up his palm. “I’m lost. Thought you might help me.” The man didn’t move, but Southpaw could see his eyes search from behind mirrored shades. There could be no mistaking him. Tourists, not the kind who made it out this far, ever wear boots.

Southpaw put on his most welcoming smile, “Nobody is ever lost here, Amigo.”

Pulling hard on the release, the trunk lid flies open. Southpaw is immediately blinded by the daylight. His eyes are adjusting as he sees an open road to nowhere, unspooling beyond the bumper of the car. Behind the wheel, Victor spots the black lid in the rearview and slams on the brakes. Smoke plumes from the tires as the anti-lock brakes skip-p-p on the asphalt.

A hard brake at that speed generates about ten times normal gravity. This means our fellas in the car weigh about a ton each as the car slides to a stop. That same inertia affects objects in the car: a cigarette pack collapses as it impacts the windshield, Chingón’s bulging eyes dislodge a contact lens, a flailing hand smacks the radio knob, and a revolver neatly placed on the back seat disappears. Physics is a funny bitch that way.

Pianos start playing in stereophonic sound. Victor stiff-arms the wheel, trying to keep it straight on the road. It’s not that there’s anything to hit, just reflex. Chingón swipes at his face, half-blind in one eye. Victor’s door flies open even while the car slides to a stop. He’s out in a sprint toward the trunk. It’s empty.

"She musters a smile
For his nostalgic tale"

Victor circles the back of the car, his head on a swivel as he looks across the landscape for anything, everything. He’s looking for the jackrabbit of a man they put there 12 hours ago, the man with the hand as good as a sack of wet napkins.

"Only to realize
It never really was"

The passenger door bursts open. Chingón stumbles out with one hand over his face, muttering at full volume, the unintelligible rambling of a junkie. He bobs up and down, looking toward the backseat for his pistol. He can’t tell if it’s lost or if he’s just blind until he spots it under the front seat and begins to dig for it. He frees his gun and yells, "Where’d he—!?"

Victor yells back. "The rabbit hasn’t gone far."

Standing in the open doorway, Chingón turns in circles, his arms at full length. His twitchy hands can’t hold anything steady in the sights. He’s blinking and closing one eye to make the world focus. He’s a blob of blind adrenaline and whatever that other shit was in his system.

"Amigo!" Southpaw yells. Chingón turns and is instantly pinned by a body slam between the door and car. Both men grunt in pain as Southpaw takes his gun. Enough of being rabbit, it’s time to be the coyote.

Victor spins toward the noise. Chingón screams again as Southpaw crushes him between the door and frame, half-blind and all stupid. Southpaw stares Chingón in the face and aims the gun low. The trigger doesn’t need to move far. It’s a light click—the bullet flows through the air and collides with the top of Chingón’s foot, exiting without paying a fare. It stops abruptly in the soft asphalt. The slug, still hot as blood drips on it, sizzles out of earshot.

"What a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away"

Both men watch Chingón slide to the ground, Southpaw steps back as he screams in pain. Around the front of the car, Southpaw moves. He can’t leave the man in silver-toed boots with a clear shot. Not that pendejo. Not the man that dragged him from the farm and buried a hammer deep into a tree stump through his hand.

“That is not a nice thing to do to Chingón,” Victor says. Southpaw can’t see the man’s eyes, but he knows he’s looking for the next move.

“My ribs disagree,” Southpaw yells back. The air in his lungs is thin; he’s panting. Southpaw can feel the throbbing in his mangled hand as he grips the pistol. At best, he’s a mediocre shot with his left; who knows how bad he is with the right.

Twenty paces back from the car, Southpaw can hear the man’s boots scrape on the asphalt. He wonders, how fast can a man sprint in boots?

“I’d like to talk, are you up for that? Can we be civilized?” Victor says. The tone has changed. It’s almost…friendly?

“I’m not much of a talker,” Southpaw says.

Buzzards are nature’s garbage disposal. The ones circling overhead have a better view than either of them. Their black eyes look for the easiest meal below and see both men circling the car. The man in boots is further, slowly cutting back across the road, trying to close the distance.

“It’s usually just business. I don’t do personal jobs. But you…” Victor says, leaving the implied hanging out there like a dog’s tongue on a hot day. He’s moving carefully. Slowly. “Doesn’t matter, does it? Here we are. Tell me who your boss is, seguro somos carnales?”

“No boss. Just me,” Southpaw says, moving toward the driver’s door.

“Good to be the boss? Make your own hours, keep all your money,” Victor says.

“Fuckin’ A,” Southpaw mumbles back, adding, “Your wife, does she know about your girlfriend?”

Victor stops. A smirk bubbles up on Southpaw’s face, “Your wife said you’d eventually come down and check things out. To tell you the truth, I was getting a bit bored.”

“You don’t know anything about my wife,” Victor snaps back.

Southpaw winces as he checks his pistol—six rounds. That stupid junkie couldn’t even be bothered to fill the clip.

“Very true. She’s secretive, your wife. How long have you been gone?”

“Alright, amigo. Enough of civility. It’s time to feed you to the buzzards,” Victor says, this conversation is getting the better of him. Good, Southpaw thinks, mistakes happen easier when you’re rattled.

“Four? Five days? I figure a stop or two on the way down, maybe another day watching me.”

“About that. So?”

“Bueno, cinco es mejor. Yeah, that’s what we agreed to. She’ll definitely be gone by now.”

“You’re one crazy pendejo…”

“You keep a pile of cash around the house?”

A shot rings out from Victor’s revolver. Southpaw ducks; it’s instinctive but the slug only dings the side of the car. Chingón cries an incoherent long vowel somewhere on the other side. He’s probably rolling on the ground in the hot sun still below the passenger door.

“She said to mention the emerald pythons. I didn’t know what that meant until I saw your boots,” Southpaw says.

“How the fu—”

“Ohh…is that where the money is? She says there’s probably five million. Half is mine if I keep you away long enough.”

Victor’s snakeskin boots twist on the asphalt. The metal toe scrapes as he crouches, pivoting toward the trunk.

"What seems to be
Is always better than nothing"

Southpaw steps around the driver side of the car. His ears are tuned into everything around him. Here in the middle of nowhere, it’s every reptile for itself. The two are rounding opposite sides.

"There’s nothing at all
But what a fool believes he sees"

There’s nothing in Southpaw’s vision to shoot. He looks through the car's rear glass and sees it—between the gap in the trunk lid—the other man moving. Victor is still wide of the car and creeping toward the passenger side. He licks his lips in the hot sun. Each of them at a stalemate until one makes a move. Even the light wind has paused to watch.

Southpaw looks into the car, he’s taking inventory—phone—pill bottle—keys—hamburger wrappers.

“Oh, you should know we sold the horses. And, your girlfriend…”

He prays for the seconds to do it. That’s all he’s got.

“…she says tienes el pene chiquito.”

Southpaw drops to the ground using his mangled hand to stop. Every bone collapses in a crunch of potato chips. The splinters of what’s left poke through the surface. On the ground, he sights a crouching Victor and fires.

The bullets from his secondary right hand are wild. They’re just the fireworks he needs to scare the kids. They’re the BOO in the horror movie. They ricochet off the ground as Victor stands, backpedaling for the edge of the road.

Southpaw moves like a rattlesnake backed into a corner, self-preservation veiled as fury. He is in the driver’s seat and hits the keyless start. The engine roars to life.

Victor’s boots slip as he tries to make a running start toward the Mercedes. His gun is out front, leaping to grab anything with a bullet.

"What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
There’s nothing at all
But what a fool believes he sees"

The car is accelerating at full tilt. Mach schnell, puta!

Southpaw watched the scene in the rearview mirror shrink until the man in the boots, Jefé, was no longer even a dot—he simply ceased to exist. The sun inched lower, staying a calm orange that never needed to turn furious and blood-red again. It was a new sky, one unburdened by his past. Her scent drifted on the wind, a reminder of fresh beginnings and untold possibilities.

He took a deep breath, savoring the moment.

Now, it was a fine day.

---

Music to read by:

Stabat Master by Guadalupe Plata

Spinning Wheel by Blood, Sweat & Tears

What A Fool Believes by The Doobie Brothers

En Mi Tumba by Guadalupe Plata