The halcón nods back as the car drives on.
Sinaloa is keeping an eye on him.
Marisol doesn’t notice. Instead, she asks, “Did you kill him, Arturo?”
“Who?”
“Barrera.”
“There’s an old, bad joke,” Keller says, “about this woman on her wedding night. Her husband inquires if she’s a virgin and she answers, ‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’”
“Why does everyone keep asking you that?” Marisol knows an evasion when she hears one. They had made a promise that they would never lie to each other, and Arturo is a man of his word. By his not answering directly, she suspects what the truth is. “Just tell me the truth. Did you kill him?”
“No,” Keller says. “No, Mari, I didn’t.”
Keller has been living in Ana’s house in Juárez only a couple of days when Eddie Ruiz shows up. He made the veteran reporter an offer and she took it—the house had too many memories for her.
“Crazy Eddie” was on the Guatemala raid. Keller had watched as the young narco—a pocho, a Mexican American from El Paso—poured a can of paraffin over the wounded Zeta boss Heriberto Ochoa and then set him on fire.
When Eddie walks into Keller’s house in Juárez, he isn’t alone.
With him is Jesús Barajos—“Chuy”—a seventeen-year-old schizophrenic battered into psychosis by the horrors he endured, the horrors he witnessed, and the horrors he inflicted on others. A narco hit man at eleven years old, the kid never had a chance, and Keller found him in the Guatemalan jungle, calmly kicking a soccer ball onto which he had sewn the face of a man he had decapitated.
“Why did you bring him here?” Keller asks, looking at Chuy’s blank stare. He’d almost shot the kid himself down in Guatemala. An execution for murdering Erika Valles.
And Ruiz brought him here? To me?
“I didn’t know what else to do with him,” Eddie says.
“Turn him in.”
“They’ll kill him,” Eddie says. Chuy walks past them, curls up on the couch, and falls asleep. Small and scrawny, he has the feral look of an underfed coyote. “Anyway, I can’t take him where I’m going.”
“What are you going to do?” Keller asks.
“Cross the river and turn myself in,” Eddie says. “Four years and I’m out.”
It’s the bargain Keller had arranged for him.
“How about you?” Eddie asks.
“I don’t have a plan,” Keller says. “Just live, I guess.”
Except he has no idea how.
His war is over and he has no idea how to live.
Or what to do with Chuy Barajos.
Marisol vetoes his idea of turning the boy in to the Mexican authorities. “He wouldn’t survive.”
“Mari, he killed—”
“I know he did,” she says. “He’s sick, Arturo. He needs help. What kind of help will he get in the system?”
None, Keller knows, not really sure that he cares. He wants his war to be over, not to drag it around with him like a ball and chain in the person of a virtual catatonic who had slaughtered people he loved. “I’m not you. I can’t forgive like you do.”
“Your war won’t end until you do.”
“Then I guess it won’t end.”
But he doesn’t turn Chuy in.
Mari finds a psychiatrist who will treat the kid gratis and arranges for his meds through her clinic, but the prognosis is “guarded.” The best Chuy can hope for is a marginal existence, a shadow life with the worst of his memories at least muted if not erased.
Keller can’t explain why he undertook to care for the kid.
Maybe it’s penance.
Chuy stays around the house like another ghost in Keller’s life, sleeping in the spare room, playing video games on the Xbox Keller bought at the Walmart in El Paso, or wolfing down whatever meals Keller fixes for them, most of which come out of cans labeled HORMEL. Keller monitors Chuy’s cocktail of medications and makes sure that he takes them on schedule.
Keller escorts him to his psychiatric appointments and sits in the waiting room, leafing through Spanish editions of National Geographic and Newsweek. Then they take the bus home and Chuy settles in front of the television while Keller fixes dinner. They rarely speak. Sometimes Keller hears the screams coming from Chuy’s room and goes in to wake him from his nightmare. Even though he’s sometimes tempted to let the kid suffer, he never does.
Some nights Keller takes a beer and sits outside on the steps leading down to Ana’s small backyard, remembering the parties there—the music, the poetry, the passionate political arguments, the laughter. That’s where he first met Ana, and Pablo and Giorgio, and El Búho—“The Owl”—the dean of Mexican journalism who edited the newspaper that Ana and Pablo had worked for.
Other nights, when Marisol comes into the city to visit a patient she’s placed in the Juárez Hospital, she and Keller go out to dinner or maybe go to El Paso for a movie. Or sometimes he drives out to Valverde, meets her after clinic hours, and they take a quiet sunset walk through town.
It never goes further than that, and he drives home each time.
Life settles into a rhythm that is dreamlike, surreal.
Rumors of Barrera’s death or survival swirl through the city but Keller pays little attention. Every now and then a car cruises slowly past the house, and once Terry Blanco comes by to ask Keller if he’s heard anything, knows anything.
Keller hasn’t, he doesn’t.
But otherwise, as promised, they leave him alone.
Until they don’t.
Eddie Ruiz flushes the steel toilet bolted to the concrete wall. Then he sticks an empty toilet paper roll into the toilet drain and blows into it, sending the water lower into the trap. That done, he takes his foam mattress pad off his concrete bed slab, folds it over the toilet and presses on it as if he were giving it CPR. Then he takes the mattress pad off, stacks three toilet paper rolls into the john, puts his mouth against the top one and hollers, “El Señor!”
He waits a few seconds and then hears, “Eddie! ¿Qué pasa, m’ijo?”
Eddie isn’t Rafael Caro’s son, but he’s glad that the old drug lord calls him that, maybe even thinks of him as a son.
Caro’s been in Florence virtually
