It\u00a0came\u00a0from Oaxaca, from the deepest kind of south, from where the agave smolders in the sun and the fireflies melt through their jars at night.\u00a0The bottle’s long gone, but I can still taste the smoke in the sweat on my lips. There’s salt in there, too, and now I want\u00a0a lime.<\/p>\n
The crickets are so loud that we don’t hear the rattlesnake until it’s right under us, a coiled shadow quavering\u00a0in the tumbleweeds. My legs freeze but my torso is too drunk to react, and I\u00a0feel myself falling in slow motion, arms flailing wildly, vectoring in on the thing’s pitchfork\u00a0tongue\u00a0like some cartoon\u00a0farce.<\/p>\n
When it stops rattling,\u00a0I know I’m fucked.<\/p>\n
There’s a blur of fangs. A spray of venom. My left cheek goes numb and a cloud of dust puffs up from where my skull hits the ground.<\/p>\n
Rosa is laughing so hard she can’t stand up straight.<\/p>\n
The last thing I see before passing out is a squiggle on the graveyard\u00a0floor, racing back to Mictlan<\/em>\u00a0to brag\u00a0about the size of its prey.<\/p>\n Then — now — I’m staring at the dark side of my eyelids, and my mind is slithering back through time.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I never\u00a0planned to visit Juarez\u00a0on the Day of the Dead. This\u00a0city is frightful\u00a0enough without skeletons dancing through its slums and zombies marching across its streets.<\/p>\n I came here on business, to award a contract to the small manufacturing company\u00a0I’d selected to build parts for my company’s medical equipment.<\/p>\n In the States, we could have knocked out the whole meeting\u00a0over a coffee break. Signatures, handshakes. “Nice doing business with you.” “Excited about our new partnership.” And so on.\u00a0An hour, maybe two.<\/p>\n Here it takes eight. The Mexicans give us a tour of their facility — no brisk\u00a0walk-through, mind you, but something\u00a0you might expect\u00a0from a curator at the Louvre, a chronicle of\u00a0every last joint and cog in the place. We shake hands\u00a0with everyone from the CEO to the toothless crone washing dishes in the cafeteria. We spend another two hours rehashing\u00a0the prices that we’ve been negotiating the last two months\u00a0and, sure enough, the Mexicans try to squeeze another couple pesos-per-unit out of us, rambling on\u00a0about some rare earth metal shortage — but my lawyer’s having none of it. And the whole time they’re\u00a0calling for one recess after another, purportedly to converse among themselves but really, I suspect, to avoid whatever drudgery awaits them upon our departure.<\/p>\n Eventually we\u00a0sign the contracts, and I want nothing more than to drive\u00a0my rental car back through\u00a0the familiar grid system of El Paso\u00a0to\u00a0some soulless hotel with a bar full of bored, waylaid Texan women with wedding bands concealed\u00a0in their handbags.<\/p>\n But we’re not through yet.<\/p>\n The Mexicans lead us upstairs to an\u00a0executive lounge\u00a0with panoramic windows. Beyond them\u00a0lies a\u00a0labyrinth of hovels, a\u00a0squalid madness sprawling out in every direction. The streets of this city\u00a0are a tangle\u00a0of intestines\u00a0spilled by some Aztec war god: Roads loop back\u00a0and cross themselves, peter out into footpaths, terminate abruptly where the western fringes of the city collide with mountains of grime. The residents have\u00a0painted everything in wild flourishes\u00a0of yellow or green or red,\u00a0as though they\u00a0are\u00a0mounting\u00a0a\u00a0rebellion\u00a0against the desert’s drab palette. But the sun is a stubborn despot; it cracks all the colors, drains all their\u00a0verve.<\/p>\n Carlos circles\u00a0the room\u00a0and hands out cigars. After a few puffs I realize that they’re\u00a0good — mind-bogglingly, knee-bucklingly\u00a0good\u00a0— and I remember that\u00a0this country’s political relationship with Cuba was never predicated on\u00a0Soviet-era\u00a0dick-swinging.<\/p>\n At some point our legs give out and we collapse into leather couches. Carlos, looking from me to Arnie and back again, asks:\u00a0“You like drink? Women? You like smoke?” He pinches two fingers together and lifts\u00a0something imaginary and definitely-not-a-cigar\u00a0to his lips.<\/p>\n My company’s lawyer and I regard each other uneasily. We rarely interact outside of work, and I get the impression that we’re\u00a0both thinking the same thing but that neither of us wants\u00a0to risk saying it. Something like: “All of the above, amigo<\/em>, with a bag of coke on the side.”\u00a0I nearly call for a recess.<\/p>\n In the end, Arnie answers judiciously. “How about let’s start with food,” he says, “and we’ll see where the night takes us.”<\/p>\n The Mexicans — there are\u00a0four of them, all middle-aged men, with\u00a0roles at the company that seem largely fungible\u00a0— exchange some rapid-fire Spanish and a volley\u00a0of collusive grins. Then Carlos speaks\u00a0again: “Very good. We have a treat for you.”<\/p>\n Ten minutes later, the six of us are packed into an American-built SUV with bullet-proof windows, careening down streets so narrow that our side-view mirrors are whistling\u00a0over fences and scraping mailboxes. We change directions so many times that I feel like we’re the pea in a con-man’s shell game, and by the time we park, I have no idea how far we’ve traveled, or to what part of the city.<\/p>\n What I do know is that we’re staring up at\u00a0an unmarked\u00a0building that’s\u00a0like every other building in Juarez, all garish color and barred windows. Except that at this one, there are\u00a0small parties of suit-and-tie diners gathered around tables on the roof, each flirting with their assigned high-heeled, beer-hefting, bare-breasted\u00a0waitress.<\/p>\n This rooftop is clearly our destination, but to get there we must pass through the lobby\u00a0of the unremarkable building: a poorly lit, mostly empty cantina, peopled by\u00a0just a few old\u00a0men\u00a0sipping tequila. They’re watching soccer on a cathode-ray television\u00a0that looks like it might have survived the Alamo.\u00a0A\u00a0dark-skinned, top-heavy hostess appears from behind a pair of batwing doors toward the back of the room, greets us with a smile,\u00a0and curls her forefinger, as though such a gesture is\u00a0necessary to convince us to follow her.<\/p>\n I take up the rear behind the others. Just before we reach the batwing doors, four women file\u00a0out of another door to our right.<\/p>\n Arnie, who is directly in front of me, turns\u00a0and seizes my shoulder. We both stop where we stand, letting our Mexican hosts go on ahead of us.<\/p>\n “Holy shit,” he says, and he’s got his lawyer-smile on now.<\/p>\n I see what he means. All four of these women are beautiful, but one of them is looking directly at us, coming toward us, her heels clicking against the stone floor. She is\u00a0not an employee of the cantina– she is\u00a0not wearing the half-uniform of the waitresses or the hostess — but\u00a0she is clearly a\u00a0pro. Heavy make-up, red lipstick, push-up bra. All the signs.<\/p>\n And it doesn’t matter. The woman that approaches is an archetype, the first and last of her kind, Eve in the garden, juice dribbling from her lips, made\u00a0irresistible\u00a0by\u00a0her knowledge of forbidden things. She is my daughter’s age.<\/p>\n She puts one hand on each of our cheeks\u00a0and says, in a voice just louder than a whisper, “You go upstairs to eat now. But you come back down later for something else, yes?”<\/p>\n “Yes,” I’m saying, and Arnie is nodding his assent. “Yes, we’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”<\/p>\n Her smile widens and she whispers\u00a0her name. Rosa. Then she’s letting go, disconnecting,\u00a0sliding her fingers\u00a0down the fronts our bodies.<\/p>\n I watch her walk away, and for a moment time gets all slippery and the spot on my left cheek where her hand had been\u00a0goes numb.<\/p>\n There are stairs beyond the batwing doors, and once we’ve started the climb\u00a0Arnie\u00a0nudges me in the ribs. “We might have to share her,” he says. And I laugh.<\/p>\n I have no intention of sharing her.<\/p>\n The next couple of hours are a beer-tits-meat rotation fit for\u00a0a viking’s wet dream. As soon as we sit down there are frosted mugs in our hands and nipples in our faces, and before long we’re all three sheets to the wind, laughing uproariously\u00a0and watching things bounce. We eat three, maybe four courses,\u00a0a massacre of livestock slathered in peppers so\u00a0hot that our eyeballs spring leaks. We sample\u00a0delicacies I’ve never heard of: escamoles<\/em> and tripitas<\/em> and chicatanas<\/em>. When the Mexicans offer to translate, Arnie and I take one look at their mischievous grins and shake our heads. Ignorance is bliss.<\/p>\n When the meal is over, one of the waitresses mounts\u00a0my leg and rubs\u00a0my distended belly. “You are full?” she asks, giggling.<\/p>\n I nod idiotically.<\/p>\n “How long you stay in Juarez?” she asks.<\/p>\n “Until tomorrow,” I reply. \u00a0“I leave in the morning.”<\/p>\n “With your friend?” she asks, and she nods at Arnie.<\/p>\n “Yes,” I say. “We leave tomorrow morning. To El Paso, then to Chicago.”<\/p>\n “Then you must go out tonight,” she says. “Party!” She raises her arms and shakes her tits. She’s giggling again.<\/p>\n “I agree,” says Arnie, standing. “I’m going to hit the head. When I come back, I expect you and this lovely lady and our hosts to have a night of debauchery all planned out for us.”<\/p>\n We watch Arnie stumble away. Then the woman says: “You should stay tomorrow night, too. For the celebration.”<\/p>\n “What celebration?” I ask.<\/p>\n She and the Mexicans answer at the same time: “Dia de los Muertos.<\/em>”<\/p>\n I don’t need a translator for that one. I shake my head. “Too much fun for me,” I say.<\/p>\n Carlos waves\u00a0a hand dismissively. “Not in Juarez,” he says. “Down south, yes, it is a big party. But here we are far north, a border town. There will be a few neighborhoods\u00a0that celebrate, but nothing too crazy. Not like down south.”<\/p>\n The waitress\u00a0pushes her chest against mine and whispers into my ear: “I am from the south. There are many others like me. I know where the parties are,\u00a0tomorrow night.”<\/p>\n “Oh yeah?” I ask, my curiosity piqued. “What goes on at these parties?”<\/p>\n “Virgin sacrifices,” she says with a laugh, and she plunges an imaginary dagger\u00a0into my chest, letting her hand rest there afterwards.<\/p>\n “That’s horrible,” I reply, grinning. “We had better make sure there are no virgins in the city.”<\/p>\n At first she does not react, leaving me to wonder whether it’s my sense of humor or her grasp of the English language that’s at fault. “Some of the parties are very innocent. Families go see\u00a0graves and drink\u00a0afterwards, or before. But some are not so innocent. Some are much more\u00a0fun. Celebrate life,” she says, letting her hand slip to my lap. “The things that make life.”<\/p>\n “That does sound fun.”<\/p>\n “So you stay, yes?”<\/p>\n I shake my head again. “We really can’t. We need to get back to work.”<\/p>\n “Your friend is in no hurry to get back to work, I think,” says Carlos.<\/p>\n He points\u00a0over\u00a0the railing behind me, and I turn to find Arnie on the street below, waving up at us with one arm. The other is wrapped around Rosa’s waist.<\/p>\n “Nice doing business with you boys,” he calls out. Then he adds: “I’ll see you tomorrow.”<\/p>\n The Mexicans hoot and cheer. Carlos stands and makes a crude gesture with his hips. A party at a nearby table joins in.<\/p>\n I just shake my head. You son of a bitch<\/em>, I think. You snake-in-the-grass, underhanded prick.<\/p>\n Arnie bows — Rosa laughs — and we watch them sauntering away together until they round a street corner and disappear from view.<\/p>\n Carlos pays our bill and our waitress makes one last, spirited\u00a0attempt to sell me on some sordid Day of the Dead party. When I politely decline, she asks if maybe I just want a postprandial blowjob, nothing fancy, no costumes or parades, just a few minutes in a room downstairs, and I turn her down again.<\/p>\n The drive back to my hotel in El Paso takes nearly an hour, and the whole time I’m wallowing in jealousy, conjuring up images of Rosa, inwardly cursing our\u00a0company’s lawyer. I’m so busy cultivating vitriol that I’m ignoring the Mexicans’ polite questions, grunting noncommittally as they rattle off the names of restaurants where I can find the best menudo<\/em> the following morning.\u00a0It’s not until I’ve brushed my teeth and settled into bed that I’ve convinced myself that I’m being irrational, that I’m letting a\u00a0few glimpses of a Mexican prostitute poison my mind.<\/p>\n She wasn’t even that beautiful, I tell myself. Couldn’t have been. No one is. And even if she was — so what? I’ve got a wife at home, and two kids. Think about them<\/em>, I tell myself. Think about work. Think about this weekend’s football match-ups, or about that doctor’s appointment you’ve been meaning to make, or about famine in Africa. Turn on the TV and think about what’s playing. Rent a porn and think about that. Think about anything, other than Rosa.<\/p>\n She’s all that I dream about.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I wake up with a\u00a0hard-on and a clear mind, a combination so rare I wonder if it might be a sign of the apocalypse.\u00a0I make a decision: I’ll stay in Juarez one more day. I’ll call Carlos and get the address of the nameless cantina<\/em>\u00a0we’d visited\u00a0last night. Then I’ll swing by and have a few drinks with the old men in the lobby, see if Rosa’s there. I’ve got to get her out of my system, and I figure the best way to do that is to get into hers.<\/p>\n A few phone calls later, my flight has been changed and my hotel reservation extended. I consider calling Arnie to tell him not to expect me\u00a0at the airport, but I don’t want to hear him boast about last night’s\u00a0bedroom exploits. I send him an e-mail instead.<\/p>\n I spend the day in my hotel room, dialing in and out of conference calls, reviewing the details of our newly signed contract with my counterparts in supply chain. Before long\u00a0it’s five o-clock, and I’m showering and shaving and ironing my best shirt like I’m a\u00a0high schooler on a hot date. It’s pathetic.<\/p>\n When I finish ironing I look into the mirror and find that the shirt is still wrinkled. I\u00a0yell at myself for being so pathetic. I literally, audibly yell. I stare my reflection and berate it for being such a pathetic, lowlife piece of shit.<\/p>\n But inside the hotel’s elevator, on the surface of\u00a0the brushed aluminum door, I find a different reflection. This one is\u00a0still me. It’s the same person — I’m the same person — but I’ve been\u00a0deformed and perverted\u00a0by the warped, scarred\u00a0metal. There are wrinkles in my face, bulges in my figure, imperfections everywhere, and I smile because now I match my shirt. I decide that I prefer this reflection, and I take a step back to\u00a0fully appreciate it.<\/p>\n Fifth floor. Then the fourth.<\/p>\n I’m feeling better. Good, even. Excited about Juarez, about Rosa. Very excited. Maybe too excited. My breathing deepens, my heartbeat accelerates.<\/p>\n The third floor.<\/p>\n I’m at terms with my excitement. I’m relishing the adrenaline as it surges\u00a0through my veins, welcoming the waves of euphoria as they wash over my mind. My eyelids slump and my mouth drops\u00a0open.<\/p>\n Second floor, now.<\/p>\n Eons condense to seconds. I flex my muscles to keep my body from falling apart. I open my eyes for a split-second, just long enough to see the sweat on my reflection’s brow.<\/p>\n Lobby.<\/p>\n The doors open and my reflection is gone. I zip up my fly and hail a cab to Juarez.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I’m drunk on the streets of a\u00a0far-flung Juarez suburb, pushing my way through skeletons, shielding my ears against the din of the mariachis<\/em>, trying to find Rosa.<\/p>\n I ask three different people the time —\u00a0\u00bfQu\u00e9 hora es?<\/em> — and get\u00a0three different answers. There’s no time on these streets. Nothing objective. Just a\u00a0million individual\u00a0slipstreams,\u00a0intersecting randomly.<\/p>\n A skeleton takes off its face\u00a0to reveal a sweaty, wrinkled, yellow-toothed\u00a0human visage, and it puts one arm over my shoulder. The phalanges at the end of its other arm are wrapped around\u00a0a\u00a0bottle, which it thrusts into my chest.<\/p>\n The old man takes one look at my face and decides I can’t speak Spanish. He points at his bottle\u00a0and raises an imaginary glass to my\u00a0mouth. “Mezcal”, he says. “From Oaxaca.” He wants me to drink,\u00a0and who am I to turn down the dying\u00a0on the Day of the Dead? I upend the bottle and together we\u00a0salute whatever demon-gods preside over this infernal holiday, then I pour\u00a0hellfire down my throat. When I look at the old man again I’m\u00a0glassy-eyed\u00a0and pucker-mouthed,\u00a0and\u00a0I yell “A los muertos!<\/em>” because I can think of nothing else to say, and the old man grins wide as a\u00a0baboon\u00a0and repeats my toast in his own gravelly voice, and I\u00a0swill\u00a0more liquor.<\/p>\n When the skeleton dons its face again, the\u00a0mezcal is half gone and Rosa is tugging at my arm. I try\u00a0to stop her — to tell her that I have to return the old man’s\u00a0bottle — but when I turn around\u00a0he’s nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n “Where did you go?” I ask Rosa. And: “Where are we going?”<\/p>\n “I find bar. We sit down. Special drink.”<\/p>\n “But I’ve got all this,” I say, brandishing\u00a0the bottle of mezcal.<\/p>\n “It is okay,” she says. “But I find special drink. Very special. You must try.”<\/p>\n “Okay,” I say, and the asphalt seems to buckle under my feet as I’m dragged out of the crowd and into an alley.<\/p>\n We’re headed\u00a0for a\u00a0wooden door, unmarked and nearly\u00a0unhinged, barely visible at the far\u00a0end of the alley. There’s a troll perched\u00a0on a stool in front of it: a short, round Mexican with a stained undershirt and a mouth full of broken teeth. He looks up and flashes us\u00a0a grin that might have petrified Medusa, then he pushes open the door. Rosa passes through it but before I can follow the troll seizes my arm.<\/p>\n “She’s not your friend, my friend,” he whispers in perfect English.<\/p>\n No shit<\/em>, I want to tell him. But I only laugh, wrench my arm free, and stumble into the bar.<\/p>\n It’s a dim, damp place, an above-ground rathskeller with a grudge against Thomas Edison. The floorboards creak with every step I take, and there is no music to deaden\u00a0the sound. There are perhaps a dozen other customers distributed between\u00a0barrel-top tables and a row of wobbly bar stools, sipping booze and laughing and groping each other. A few of them are prostitutes, and I notice that they’re all staring daggers into Rosa, who is watching\u00a0me from her seat at the bar, patting the stool beside her.<\/p>\n I sit, and Rosa says something to the bartender in Spanish. The bartender looks at me and frowns, then turns away and reaches for a bottle.<\/p>\n “I want to fuck you on someone’s grave,” I say.<\/p>\n Rosa is unfazed. “I don’t think we can,” she says. “Not tonight. The graveyards are full of people celebrating the Day of the Dead.”<\/p>\n “They can watch,” I say.<\/p>\n She smiles and shakes her head. “We will get arrested. You do not want to get arrested in Juarez, coraz\u00f3n<\/em>.”<\/p>\n “Come on,” I say, and I set\u00a0my hand on her thigh. “There’s got to be a graveyard somewhere in this city with some shadows or bushes.”<\/p>\n The bartender has returned, and he’s holding two shooters\u00a0of milk-white liquid. They remind me of the ouzo I drank in Greece\u00a0years ago, when my wife and I were island-hopping on our honeymoon.<\/p>\n He\u00a0and Rosa speak in Spanish, too\u00a0quickly\u00a0for me to catch anything. During their conversation they\u00a0glance in my direction every so often, so that I can tell\u00a0they’re talking about me. I don’t mind; I like the attention.<\/p>\n Eventually the bartender sidles off to another customer\u00a0and Rosa leans in close. “He says there are no graveyards around here, not in the city. Not that we can visit\u00a0tonight. But if you really want, I can take you to a little graveyard in the desert. It is a scary place, though. Where the cartels bury their dead. Do you want to go there?”<\/p>\n “Absolutely,” I say without hesitating.<\/p>\n “Okay,” she says, but there is no eagerness in her voice. “I have to tell my boss.”<\/p>\n She whistles at the bartender and holds her thumb and pinkie to the side of her head, the\u00a0universal sign for a telephone. The bartender ambles over and produces a landline desk phone\u00a0from somewhere behind the counter. It’s the kind of thing you might have found blinking on a hotel’s nightstand in the 1970s, back when phones were anvil-heavy and indestructible. Rosa picks it up and punches a sequence of keys — the numbers are worn off — then rattles off some Spanish to whoever’s on the other end.<\/p>\n “All set,” she says. “Let’s celebrate.”<\/p>\n We drink the mysterious white liquor. It is smooth and unexpectedly spicy, a little like mulled wine only\u00a0thinner, stronger. My body warms as I sip it, and for a fleeting moment I’m outside the city, in the arid, sweltering, unpeopled\u00a0arroyo, and\u00a0I’d swear there’s sand on my lips.<\/p>\n “What is this?” I ask.<\/p>\n “Cajetotl<\/em>,” she says. “An Aztec drink. Very old, and very hard\u00a0to find.”<\/p>\n “And\u00a0very good. But I think I prefer mezcal.”<\/p>\n “Mezcal is good,” she says with a grin. She reaches out and grasps\u00a0my belt buckle and pulls gently. “But cajetotl<\/em> is, how do you say? Afrodis\u00edaco<\/em>.”<\/p>\n I grin and swill the rest of the white stuff.\u00a0Rosa does the same.<\/p>\n When I try to pay the bartender he holds out a hand and shakes his head.\u00a0“Gratuitamente<\/em>,” he says.<\/p>\n On our way out I lock eyes with a bearded American\u00a0sitting at a table in the corner. His pants are around his ankles and a hooker’s head is bobbing up and down in his lap. “Fuck you, gringo,” he says, and he flicks me off as we pass through the door and out into the alley.<\/p>\n I think we’re going to get back into the car, but we don’t.\u00a0Rosa takes my hand and we just start walking. Away from the lights. From the dusty cityscape. There are fewer skeletons here. The music is soft, distant. The asphalt crumbles we are walking on gravel. Then sand.<\/p>\n And then there are none of those things.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n When I come to, Rosa is straddling my chest sucking rattlesnake venom out of my face. I wait for her to spit before I kiss her.<\/p>\n Then she stands up and her lips are gone and I\u2019m staring up at the night sky. Only it doesn\u2019t look like any sky I\u2019ve seen before. The stars are like lightning bugs, darting back and forth, blazing trails of white light on my retinas. There was a moon around earlier, I\u2019d have sworn, but there\u2019s no sign of it now. When I try to hoist myself up my head swims and my elbows buckle. I\u2019m back in the dirt.<\/p>\n Something is wrong. Is it the mezcal? A lingering effect of the poison? I wonder if I should be in the hospital. Surely I should go to the hospital.<\/p>\n The soil here is loose, recently turned. There\u2019s a piece of plywood protruding from it at a rakish angle. Someone has carved two words into it with a pocket knife: Allison Gray<\/em>. No dates. No epitaph. Just the name. It doesn\u2019t sound like a drug dealer\u2019s name.<\/p>\n I look up again to see if the sky\u2019s gone back to normal, but instead I find Rosa standing over me with her hands on her hips, smiling. Even when she\u2019s blurry she\u2019s beautiful. Why is she so goddamn blurry?<\/p>\n When I motion for her to join me on the desert floor so that I can fuck her, she just shakes her head. For a moment I\u2019m confused. We came all the way out here, to the middle of the desert, in the middle of night, on the Day of the Dead, so that I could fuck Rosa in a graveyard. She can\u2019t just say no.<\/p>\n I ask her what\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did not come here to fuck,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI did.\u201d<\/p>\n But she shakes her head again.<\/p>\n For a long moment, I just watch her. I watch her blurry chest rise and fall with each breath. I watch her hips as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other. I watch her eyes divide and multiply. She says nothing. She just lets me watch.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s happening to me?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cPoison,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rattlesnake?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cThe drink. The white drink.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou poisoned me?\u201d I ask. I try to laugh but my mouth won\u2019t comply.<\/p>\n \u201cI drugged you,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n But I already know the answer. It\u2019s been following me around for the last twenty-four hours, slinking ariound\u00a0in the shadows. It\u2019s been disguised in lipstick and mascara, hiding on the invisible end of mysterious phone calls, obscuring itself in Spanish. It\u2019s not the skeleton behind the mask. It\u2019s not the snake in the tumbleweeds. It\u2019s not a cheek full of venom or a bottle full of liquor. It\u2019s a residue, an afterthought \u2013 a drop of poison in a strange white drink. It\u2019s a field full of dead Americans in the Mexican desert.<\/p>\n Christ, I\u2019d made things easy for her.<\/p>\n “Am I going to die?” I ask.<\/p>\n She shrugs. “Not yet. We need proof of life. Your company will pay, yes? So we will keep you drugged until then.”<\/p>\n Then<\/em>. Then<\/em> you’ll kill me. Then<\/em> I’ll die.<\/p>\n I peer up at Rosa’s face. She looks a little less blurry, now. \u00a0A little more smug. A little too upright. There\u2019s a strength in my hands that wasn\u2019t there before.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never raped anyone.<\/p>\n Her surprise lasts only a few seconds. Then she\u2019s face-down against the grave and I\u2019m tearing her clothes off. I press my hand against the back of her neck because I want maggots to crawl up out of the earth and fill her mouth and spill their seed in her throat. I want to fuck her so hard that Allison Gray gets off.<\/p>\n The drug she gave me slows me down, softens my resolve. Softens everything. Well, fuck that<\/em>, I think through the haze. She\u2019ll just have to suffer longer. Suffer until I\u2019m done.<\/p>\n After a few minutes of grinding and\u00a0squirming I’m hard enough to do some damage. I pry her legs apart and slam into her. I want\u00a0her to scream, I want her to hurt, I want her to remember pain<\/em> years from now when she tries to drug some other hapless American, but the truth is I’m enjoying things too much to\u00a0put my heart into it.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t bring myself to hit her. I try to tell myself that she deserves it, that she\u2019s literally been murdering me all night, that black eyes and broken teeth are the least she\u2019s got coming to her, that wrecking her beautiful face might be my parting gift to the world. And I laugh. I laugh while I\u2019m raping her because I feel too guilty to hit her. It\u2019s ridiculous. Just so goddamn preposterous.<\/p>\n When I stop laughing I realize she\u2019s not struggling. She\u2019s even bucking and moaning a little. When I take my hand off the back of her head she turns to me and smiles.<\/p>\n And then she\u2019s the one laughing.<\/p>\n I pull out, roll over, and retch\u00a0onto Allison\u2019s grave.<\/p>\n What a fucked-up way to die. Twenty-four hours ago I was a happily married technology executive lying in an El Paso hotel, scolding myself for contemplating infidelity. Now I\u2019m a rapist hunched over a shallow grave, staring into a puddle of my own vomit. I\u2019m vaguely aware of Rosa getting to her feet, pulling down her skirt, shuffling away.<\/p>\n When I look for her, all I see is makeshift gravestones. They fan out in every direction, crooked and misshapen and rotting, and I wonder which one is Arnie\u2019s.<\/p>\n Then Rosa is back with a switchblade and a piece of plywood. I think she might stab me but she only smiles. Fangs. My cheek goes numb.<\/p>\n I lie down again. The sky is worse than it was before. I close my eyes so I don\u2019t have to look at it, then find that I can\u2019t open them.<\/p>\n So I listen, instead.<\/p>\n I hear scraping. It\u2019s rhythmic, methodical. Rosa is carving something into her piece of plywood. I think I know what.<\/p>\n A rooster crows in the distance and I want to laugh. It must be three o’clock in the morning, nowhere near dawn. Even the roosters don\u2019t know what time it is in this fucking place.<\/p>\n A little bit later, I hear the faint but unmistakable rumble of an automobile engine in the distance. It grows louder, closer. Probably a truck or an SUV. There’s something wrong with the fuel pump or the chassis or god-knows-what, and there’s a faint, metallic rattle, like someone put shrapnel in a blender.<\/p>\n They’re coming to pick up Rosa, probably. Or to help bury me. Or maybe she’s been telling the truth and they’ll throw me in the trunk, take me to their hideout in the mountains. Snap a few photographs, record a quick video. Put a bullet in my forehead\u00a0and\u00a0pitch my body into a mass grave.<\/p>\n My eyes are shut\u00a0but there’s light dancing over their lids.\u00a0Twin beams. Headlamps.\u00a0The rattling is loud; the shrapnel from the blender has moved into my ears. I want to yell at the drugistas<\/em>\u00a0to fix their fucking engine.<\/p>\n There is a massive cross painted on the side of a mountain west of Juarez. There are letters painted there too, a Christian message in Spanish. I don’t know what it says. I do know that the letters are the height of a 13-storey building, and that they were\u00a0put there by church volunteers, Catholics\u00a0so destitute\u00a0that they can’t afford a hovel in the city itself. Instead they live\u00a0in the shadow of that mountain, sustaining themselves on corn tortillas while their children play with half-deflated soccer balls.<\/p>\n For a brief moment I think about God. Then a rooster crows and I laugh until I spit up blood.<\/p>\n The truck is here now. Its tires are cracking gravel and crunching twigs.<\/p>\n When it stops rattling, I know I’m fucked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u00a0came\u00a0from Oaxaca, from the deepest kind of south, from where the agave smolders in the sun and the fireflies melt through their jars at night.\u00a0The bottle’s long gone, but I can still taste the smoke in the sweat on my lips. There’s salt in there, too, and now I want\u00a0a lime. The crickets are so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=765"}],"version-history":[{"count":45,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1129,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765\/revisions\/1129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}