Thin Air

"My mother was with many men. Many Anglo men. My father might have been Anglo. My mother would bring them to our room because she had nowhere else to bring them. We had only a room, with a sink and a stove and a television. My mother hung up a blanket to hide my part of the room, but I could peek around, and I could hear, even when she turned up the television. I did not like being there, but I had nowhere else to go."

His breathing was short and he stared at the floor in front of them while she patted his shoulder.

"And afterwards my mother would say to me that she didn't love these men. She would say that she only loved me. But that the men had to come here and she had to pretend to love them. We could pretend too, she told me. We could pretend that we were living in a high room in a great castle. And we could pretend that the men were handsome knights who bravely stormed the castle and climbed up to the room to seek her hand in marriage."

"And that's what you pretended," she said.

"Yes."

They were quiet for a moment. She could feel tremors run through him as he breathed. The room was dim, and it smelled dank. She heard a sound that might have been rain falling outside the boarded windows.

"Every Sunday," he said, "she would take me to the movies. There were no men on Sundays. We would go sometimes to the movies all day. We loved the movies. It is why she bought me the camera. She said maybe I could be a movie person someday."

The pictures of his mother and the men she was with moved jerkily on the monitors. Luis stood up suddenly and disappeared behind the scenery. The monitors went black for the first time since she'd been in the room. Luis came back and stood looking at the blank screens. The room seemed dark without their glow… and damp. She shivered and hugged herself.

"How did she die, Luis?"

"She was killed by Freddie Santiago."

Chapter 37

It was 8:30 in the morning when we entered Club del Aguadillano. There were six people in the place, drinking beer mostly, though one guy appeared to be drinking tequila and washing it down with beer. Made decaf seem better. Even inside the club, you could smell the river smell lurking behind the beer smell, and hear the faint thunder of the falls upstream, as a kind of undertone to the harsh sounds of the juke box. Dolly the bartender was wearing an attractive green tee shirt today, with the sleeves cut off. His massive upper arms were illuminated with tattoos of intertwined figures. He studied us as we came in. Chollo spoke to him in Spanish and Dolly answered. He put two glasses up on the bar and poured some tequila in them. Then he walked down to the far end of the bar and stood, staring at nothing. Chollo and I ignored the tequila.

After a while the guy with the tequila and beer stood up and yelled something in Spanish at one of the beer drinkers. The beer drinker muttered something back, and the tequila drinker started toward him. He was a squat guy with thick hands that suggested a lifetime of heavy labor. The beer drinker stood. He was a tallish guy, with a medium build. A very large and startling belly pushed incongruously out under his dingy white ice shirt like something he'd hidden under there. The tequila drinker grabbed him by the shirt front.

"They are arguing about whether the guy with the belly is a fucking faggot," Chollo murmured.

Without a word Dolly lumbered out from behind the har. He took the sawed-off baseball bat out of his hip pocket and hit the tequila drinker hard behind the knees. The tequila drinker howled and fell over backwards. Dolly took him by the collar and dragged him howling to the front door, into the parking lot, dropped him, hit him hard once on each knee with the sawed off bat and came back in, closing the door behind him. He put the sawed-off bat back into his hip pocket and went back behind the bar.

"Forceful," Chollo said.

"Well, he didn't bite him," I said.

"But, oh so gentle," Chollo said.

The door to Santiago's office opened and the grayhaired guy with the horn-rims nodded for us to enter. Santiago was there, behind his desk. Besides the gray-haired man and Santiago there were four gu

"He says if this time, I would like-to see if I can get my gun out before he pulls the trigger, he would be happy to try it."

Without looking at him, Santiago said, "Silencio!" to the guy with the shotgun.

"He's telling him to shut up," Chollo said.

"Is that what that means?" I said.

Santiago looked at me.

"You have a proposition?"

"If something happened to Luis Deleon, who would be in charge?" I said.

Santiago smiled. "Eventually I would be."

"In the short run?" I said. "Ramon Gonzalez, but he would not last very long."

"Because?"

"Because Ramon Gonzalez is a jitterbug, a man who runs on cocaine and angel dust. Luis is the one holds out against me. It is hatred, as if somehow it is my fault about his mother. If he were not there, sooner or later the others would be happy to join with me for a better Proctor."

Whatever he said was tinged with self-mockery so that it was never easy to know what he cared about and what he didn't. Which, I suppose, might have been the point.

"But they won't go against him?"

"They fear him more than they fear me. He is so crazy. It makes him"-he looked at Chollo-"feroz?"

"Ferocious," Chollo said.

"Si, ferocious. Everyone is afraid of him, because he is so ferocious, and because no one knows what he will do. He is able to bring a lot of business in because so many fear him."

"What happened to his mother?" I said.

"She O.D.'d here, in the ladies' room," Santiago said. "Got hold of some uncut heroin and it popped her. Luis would not believe his mother was a junkie as he would not believe his mother was a whore. So he says I killed her." He shrugged. "Why would I bother to kill her? She was just a whore."

"One of yours?" I said.

Santiago smiled.

"Most things in Proctor are mine."

"Except San Juan Hill."

He nodded.

"Except that," he said softly.

"That could change," I said.

"All things do," Santiago said.

"We're going to take him out," I said.

"If you can."

"We can, but we'd like a little help from you."

"I do not wish to be seen as one who turns on a fellow Hispanic," Santiago said. "It would not help people to think of me as the liberator of Proctor."

"Of course it wouldn't," I said. "We'll be the ones who turn on him. What we want from you is logistical support."

"I could consider that," Santiago said. "Have you a plan?"

"Nothing so formal," I said. "But I've been thinking."

Santiago smiled. "Tell me," he said.

"You tell him, Chollo, in Spanish. I want everything clear when the time comes. Give him the layout, make sure he knows where everyone is likely to be."

Chollo spoke in Spanish.

When he was through, Santiago said, "That is all? A show of force?"