Savages

nice Mexicans who dress up on Sundays and after mass go to the park or down to the grassy strips along the harbor in Dana Point and have cookouts. Sunday is Mexicans’ Day Out, pray to Jesus and pass the tortillas
por favor.
    Lado is not a nice Mexican.
    He’s one of those scary Mexicans.
    A former Baja State cop, he has big hands with broken knuckles, scars from blades and bullets. Black black obsidian eyes. He’s seen that Mel Gibson movie about Mexico back in the Majan days when they ripped people’s bellies open with obsidian blades and his
viejos
say that he has eyes like those knives.
    Back in the day Lado was one of Los Zetas, the special counter-narcotics task force in Baja. He survived the narco wars of the nineties, saw a lot of men killed, more than a few at his own hands, busted a lot of the narcos himself, took them into alleys and made them give up their secrets.
    He laughs at the news reports about “torture” in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were using waterboarding in Mexico since before Lado canremember, except they didn’t use water but Coca-Cola—the carbonation gave it a little more zing and motivated your narco to bubble up with useful information.
    Now the U.S. Congress is going to investigate.
    Investigate what?
    The
world
?
    Life?
    What goes on between men?
    How else do you make a bad man tell you the truth? You think you smile at him, give him sandwiches and cigarettes, become his friend? He’ll smile back and lie to you and think what a
cabrón
you are.
    But that was back in the old days, before he and the rest of the Zetas got tired of busting drugs and making no money, of working their asses off and dying while they watched the narcos get rich, before they decided to get rich themselves.
    Lado’s eyes are cold stone?
    Maybe because those eyes have seen—
    His own hands holding a chain saw
    Swooping through a man’s neck as
    Blood sprayed.
    Your eyes would be hard, too.
    Your eyes would turn to stone.
    Some of those seven men they begged, they cried, they pleaded to God, to their mamas, they said they had families, they pissed their trousers. Others said nothing, just looked with the silent resignation that Lado thinks is the expression of Mexico itself. Bad things are going to happen, it is simply a matter of when. They should stitch that on the flag.
    He’s glad to be El Norte.
    He goes now to find this kid Esteban.

13
     
    Esteban lives in the big housing project and has an inquiring attitude.
    Questions for the Anglo world.
    You want me to get a job? Mow your lawn? Clean your pool, flip your burgers, make your tacos? This is what we came here for? Paid the coyotes? Crawled under the fence, trudged across the desert?
    You want me to be one of those good Mexicans, one of those hardworking, churchgoing, family-valuing, get dressed in my best clothes on Sunday and walk with my cousins down those broad sun-baked boulevards to a park named after Chavez, humble respectful nigger taco Mexicans, the ones we all love and respect and pay subminimum wage?
    Like my
papi
?
    Out in his pickup before the sun, the truck with the rakes sticking out, trimming the
gueros’
lawns so they look so green and pretty. Comes home at night so
chingada
tired he don’t want to talk, he don’t want to do nothing except eat, drink a beer, go to sleep. Does this six days a week, stops only on Sunday to be a humble respectful nigger taco Mexican to God, give the money he sweats for to God and the faggot priests. Sunday is his
papi
’s big day, the day he puts on a clean white shirt, clean white pants (no grass stains on the knees), shoes that come out once a week, wiped off with a clean cloth, and he takes his family to church and after church they get together with all the aunts and aunties, the
tios
and
tias
, with all the cousins, and they go to the park and cook
carne
and
pollo
and smile at their pretty daughters in their pretty little Sunday dresses and it is so
chingada
boring that Esteban would lose it if he hadn’t snuck off after church for a hit, drawn the sweet smoke in, chilled himself out.
    Like
mi madre
? Works in the hotels, cleans the
gueros’
toilets, scrubs their shit and puke out of the bowls? Always on her knees, if not on bathroom tiles, then on church pews. A devout woman, she always smells like disinfectant.
    Esteban had a job for a while at one of Machado’s taco stands. Worked his ass off chopping onions, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, and for what? Pocket change.