Iron River (33 page)

They continued down. The pine and juniper gradually gave way to oak and to tan grasses that seemed to grow from the rocks themselves. Then yucca and scrub oak appeared as they descended farther into the barranca. The temperature rose. Hood wriggled out of the new sweater and threw it into the back. Hours later, Hood realized that they had dropped into the lowland vegetation of agave and mesquite and cactus and he smelled the Urique River below them, marked by the palm trees that grew along its winding course. The outdoor thermometer in the Tahoe read eighty degrees. Here, nearer the river, there was no wind and the air was humid and still.

Around a turn a blue mountain rose from the canyon floor, a blue softer than the sky. He had never seen such blue, much less a mountain of it.

“Copper tailings from the mine works at Bufa,” said Luna. “La Bufa village is not far.”

In La Bufa they met with
agente de policía
Evangelista Limones in a small office with a rough-hewn pine desk and three metal folding chairs and a timber-pole ceiling. There was a framed picture of St. Christopher on the wall and a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and bright afternoon sunlight rushing through a window. Limones was slender and wore jeans and a big buckled belt and a short-sleeve plaid shirt knotted over his navel, as did many of the vaqueros of the Sierra Madre. He spoke in English for the benefit of Hood.

“First there were rumors of Zetas in Batopilas. Then the government soldiers come here two days ago. They confiscate my pistol and ammunition. They were fourteen men in four vehicles. Three were . . . how you say, Jeeps? Jeeps with machine guns on them. One vehicle was armored. They leave La Bufa after only one hour. They drive toward Batopilas. The soldiers they have not return. Since they leave here, no vehicles are coming from Batopilas. Two days, no vehicles. No Tarahumara. No burros. Nothing. And now no vehicles are leaving La Bufa for Batopilas. People are afraid of what has happen. When no one comes from Batopilas, they become afraid and they do not go down the road.”

“We will go down the road,” said Luna.

“Yes, I know.”

“Were the soldiers
Federales
or Chihuahua police?”

“Federales
from Calderón.”

“Tell us the rumors of Zetas in Batopilas.”

“A Tarahumara boy say he saw them. Maybe ten men. If this is true, then they come from another direction. Not through La Bufa. Through San Ignacio or Satevo or from the river. Or maybe they fly. Do Los Zetas have airplanes?”

“I have not heard that,” said Luna. “But it must be possible.”

“The Tarahumara boy is the only witness. If he is lying, then the soldiers have come for nothing.”

Hood looked through the window to the narrow rock street where a pig snorted along the gutter and a shopkeeper swept the sidewalk outside her door. Two vaqueros walked by, looking into the police station silently.

Hood and Luna slept at the one
pensión
in La Bufa. Early in the morning they had eggs and tortillas and coffee, then set out for Batopilas.

 

 

 

 

T
he darkness gave way to fog, and Hood never got out of first gear. One hour into the journey, Hood saw that Evangelista Limones had been telling the truth. Not a vehicle came their way, no mules or horses, no man, woman, or child. He saw one cow and one coyote and one rabbit, then two hours later, as the heat of the day climbed out of the canyon around them, Hood saw vultures circling far away in the blank sky.

“Batopilas gave the world its silver and copper,” said Luna. “The Spanish took it, then the Americans. An American named Shepherd developed the mines in the late nineteenth century. He built a castle and a hacienda and a foundry. He brought turbines from the United States and made hydroelectricity from the Batopilas River. At that time it was the only city in Mexico with the luxury of electricity, apart from Mexico City. After the big wars, the mining collapsed. Now Batopilas is a ghost town. There are mansions and buildings abandoned. There are tons of opium and yerba grown in the canyons. Occasionally the government sends in soldiers. The growers bribe the soldiers to leave them alone. If the soldiers find a grower who has not arranged his bribes then the grower is given three choices. He can choose
bote—
prison for ten years. Or, he can choose
leña—
to be beaten half to death with wooden clubs. Or he can choose
plomo—
lead. This means the grower is given a head start into the bushes then the soldiers cut him down with machine guns. He has a small chance of getting away.
Plomo
is the most popular choice. It is considered
valiente.
Valiant. Very Mexican. There are a few tourists but not now, with the violence and the summer heat. There are telephones, but they don’t always work.”

Outside of town, Shepherd’s castle lay hollowed and crumbling by the river. It was three stories high, with Gothic windows through which Hood could see the walls of the opposite side. There were towers at both ends and these were partially engulfed by tree branches that grew through the window openings. The roof was gone, and the masonry had long sloughed off the walls.

Hood put the vehicle into park, then he and Luna hoisted their weapons from the back and checked their ammunition and placed the combat shotgun and the automatic M16 between them, barrels down on either side of the transmission hump, the butts resting against their seats.

Around the next bend, four vultures raised their pink faces from a dead man on the side of the road. They looked at Hood irritably but didn’t move. Hood drove the Tahoe forward and they hopped away and managed to take flight. Hood and Luna got out and saw that the man was a soldier and he had been shot several times and beheaded, but they saw no head. Flies buzzed in the still heat, endlessly repositioning themselves on the man. One quarter mile closer to town they came upon two more soldiers similarly killed and mutilated. Still seated, Hood looked down at the bloating bodies, and their smell mixed with the sweet scent of the Batopilas River nearby, and these smells and the heat tried to sicken him.

He drove. Then there was a steep descent and another tight switchback that straightened to reveal the three heads on the left side of the road, the faces eaten by the birds but still with expressions somehow forlorn and regretful. The vultures stood blinking twenty feet away in the scant shade of an agave.

“There’s no excuse for this,” said Hood. “What does this signify? Who is it for?”

“Us.”

Just outside the village, another six soldiers lay dead and piled upon the road. The vultures stood atop them, fanning their wings in the heat. Hood saw that the men had been dragged and left there as a roadblock, and he wondered if the remaining five were blocking the road on the other side of Batopilas. They were abundantly shot but not mutilated.

Hood and Luna stepped from the Tahoe and together dragged three bodies to the side of the road so they could drive past. Hood thought his chances of dying in an ambush right there and then were very good. He was willing to strike a protective deal with any god or devil who would offer him one, but he heard no voices in this place or in his heart and he felt forsaken.

Two mules stared at them as they entered the village. In Batopilas plaza, two ancient men watched them from a bench. Their faces were dark and wrinkled and they squinted at the Tahoe as if facing a storm. One of the men lifted his hand and pointed them onward down the street of river stones. A woman in a bright-yellow-and-orange shawl refused to look at them, then scuttled quickly around a corner. There was a small store open and two Zetas with AK-47s stood on either side of the door and there were two more across the street outside a
carnicería.
They were young and dressed in uniforms of solid green, with black boots and black vests and helmets, and they had emblems of some kind on their shirt sleeves up by the shoulder. They bulged with ammunition. The Zetas stared at them with bored expressions, but their fingers were inside the trigger guards of their weapons. One gestured slightly with his gun and Hood drove. Outside the police office was a streetlamp and from it hung by his neck was a man with a badge pinned to his shirt pocket. His face was black and his eyes bulged on stems like a crab’s and his neck was stretched obscenely, and beneath his dangling boots a black straw cowboy hat sat upturned on the sidewalk. Another Zeta stood in the open doorway of the office and he pointed his gun at Hood’s face and tracked him in the sights as Hood drove by. He looked sixteen. He wore a pendant bearing the image of a bearded man, Jesus Malverde, Hood knew, patron saint of
narcos.

“And he takes his bullets to Malverde shrines to get them blessed,” said Luna. “So they fly straight and kill his enemies. And Malverde blesses his shipments, too, for safe passage to the United States. Look how eager he is to kill. It is his passionate desire.”

Outside a cantina at the far end of town a slender, older Zeta waved Hood over and told him to park. Two more men came from the cantina with their guns lowered, and Hood now understood Luna’s amusement at the weapons they had brought. Faint music played from inside the cantina.

Hood stepped from the vehicle, and the Zetas pushed him against the car and took his weapons except the derringer in his boot heel. They took the cash from his pocket. They dragged the heavy packs from the back of the Tahoe, and Hood heard them crunch to the street next to him. They opened the packs and looked in but did not touch the money. Then one of the Zetas motioned with his gun, and Luna and Hood each knelt and hoisted the heavy packs to their shoulders. Then Hood felt a gun barrel poke the back of his head, aiming him down the road.

There were three Zetas ahead of him and three behind. Past town, they came to the five dead soldiers strewn across the road beheaded and they stepped over and around them while the vultures scattered into the brush. A hundred yards farther were the heads lying beside the road. After half a mile, they went left onto a trail through the palms by the river, and the trail narrowed, then it opened on a broad flat beach of brown sand and boulders along the thin, slow Batopilas River, and there were four men on horseback waiting. One of them was Jimmy. He sat on the horse hunched and wavering, and he stared blankly at Hood and Luna. His wrists were tethered to the pommel and the big bandaged mitts of his tortured hands rested on either side of it. They had dressed him in a gold-and-blue Mexican football jersey.

“Hi, Jimmy.”

Jimmy didn’t look at him.

Vascano was a big man with a heavy face and curly black hair, and he wore the same uniform and armored vest as the other Zetas. Hood could see that Vascano’s face was pale and sagging and dark around the eyes, and he could see that the teenaged boy on the horse beside him was a young version of his father, stout and alert and handsome. The son sat with an AK-47 ready across his saddle, and the fourth man brought his horse around and lowered the barrel of his shotgun at them.

Hood shrugged off the pack and let it drop to the ground and so did Luna. Two of the men on foot dragged the packs toward the horsemen and they opened the flaps and upended the packs and the one-pound bundles of drug money tumbled out into the sand. The men sifted through the packets, looking for dye and transponders.

Jimmy’s horse snorted and lowered his head in search of grass, and Hood saw that Holdstock was weak and his balance was bad. Jimmy looked down as if to help the horse find something.

“Jimmy, look at me,” he said.

After a moment he looked up, but Hood wasn’t sure if Jimmy recognized him or not.

“Luna,” said Vascano. He spoke Spanish, and Hood could follow his meaning if not all of his words. “I am pleased to meet you. When I heard your name, I decided to sell this man to you and not to Armenta. It wasn’t only the money. It was because of you. You run your enemies down like dogs. You kill with guns and a bow and arrow. You accept no bribes. You are loyal. You are an unusual man. Step forward.”

Luna stopped halfway to the horses.

“But you are poor as a peon and your family has nothing and your department is corrupt. Your government is corrupt. The soul of your country is corrupt. So what are you loyal to but your own foolishness? You are a dog chasing its tail. Come and work for me. I’ll pay you ten times what they pay you now.”

Luna looked up at Vascano but said nothing.

“Say something,” said Vascano.

“We choose. We decide and that is final.”

“Who says what is final?”

“Each man.”

“Prove to me that you profit from your loyalty.”

“There is no profit. There is want and need and humiliation at the hands of the weak. But that does not change things.”

“But your wife wears old clothes, and one of your sons needs surgery and your daughters have no prospects because they are thick and bullish and built for fighting, like you are. I know these things, Luna. They are facts.”

“My wife is still beautiful in old clothes and the bones of my son will heal. My daughters will marry warriors like themselves.”

Vascano nudged his horse forward. Hood saw that it was black and beautiful and there were silver studs in the black leather of the harness and rimming the shiny black saddle. Vascano looked down at Luna and he coughed, and the cough multiplied itself until Vascano evacuated it with one deep convulsion. Vascano’s face was white and his hair was a madman’s. His son rode forward to wait beside him, and the Zeta with the lowered shotgun shuffled left to keep a clean line of fire.

“It is not you and me,” said Vascano. “It is Mexico. Everything must be torn down. Everything must be rebuilt. The age of privilege and corruption is nearly over. There is always revolution in the hearts of men, and now those men have guns to match our hearts. We will cut the head from the snake. We will stamp the last life from the body and then Mexico will have new life and a new body.”