The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories (3 page)

At noon, a betting festival commenced at the Plaza de Armas. There was a food court, free sotol, and music by
cumbia
and norteño groups. At six in the afternoon, the show ended with Valentín Elizalde. People were already drunk and crazy, and everybody, including the street vendors from Oaxaca, had gathered in front of La Cuauhnáuac. As in every gala, there was a red carpet. The star hosting the event was the editor of the
music magazine
Furia
. Carmen Salinas and the singer from Nilo Gallardo’s band, Mocorito, were among the distinguished guests. Also present were representatives from Noni Juice of Mexico, the technical director from Santos Laguna, and local superstar Wendolí, since phased out from the first generation of
La Academia
.

The public was yearning to see the masked men die onstage. The rapper Chico Ché’s famous rhymes could be heard coming from the speakers: El Santo, El Cavernario, Blue Demon, y El Bulldog. Beer spewed as if in an epiphany had by any Irishman with glaucoma.

There were thirty-two contestants. Two resigned when they realized there was no swimsuit competition. They all took their places. The Cowboy Bible’s rival behaved like an anxious swimmer, the kind who’s so nervous he dives in before the starting shot. The only person missing was the champion, who also had the record for the slowest speed onto the track. A world record and a Gatorade-ad image. The people were behind him. He had every right to be brazen; it’s not every day you can write an exemplary novel.

A limousine waited outside The Cowboy Bible’s house, the motor running. Inside, on his knees, looking very cowboyish in a chapel improvised Malverde-style, the champion prayed. He dedicated the fight to Saint Jude. In song, he asked that if he did not come back alive, his family be taken care
of.

Solemnly, he got up and made his way to his dressing room. He put on his cowboy suit and helmet, and went into the kitchen. Before each bout, he engaged in the ceremonious act of eating cooler burritos. He had to eat something greasy in order to deal with the brew. Sussy didn’t serve him from the stew in the pot. Instead, she pulled four pork burritos from her socks that she had spoiled earlier that day. She stripped them of their wrapping and threw them on the fire. Once warmed, she wrapped them in napkins, like astronaut food, and handed them to The Cowboy Bible, burrito master. He packed them up. The underworld needed entertainment. Fresh meat. It didn’t matter if it was sirloin steak or dried beef. Sussy didn’t want to go with him. She refused to get in the limousine. How can I possibly go dressed like this? Besides, I have to go take an order to some lady’s house so her little princess won’t cause a scene in the middle of her
quinceañera
.

On his way to the duel, the burritos began to have an effect on The Cowboy Bible. Digestion was not imperative. The limousine pulled to the side, and the champion exploded. Instead of flour and pork, it looked like he’d been stuffed with pig’s feet stew. It hurt so much, it felt as if the pig’s entire foot—hairy and chewed up and without a pedicure—had come up his throat.

An impatient Don Lucha Libre dialed the limousine’s number: Goddamn it, you sons of bitches, where are you, why the hell aren’t you here? The driver, also The Cowboy Bible’s bodyguard, answered, bewildered, The Kid has fallen apart, boss, he’s vomiting. It can’t be. Fucking Christ. Take him home. I’m on my way. Don’t tell anyone.

The winner of the competition to see who could lift more rolls of Bimbo bread with one finger walked inside trembling. He was in a cold sweat. A fever of a hundred and four degrees was burning his guts. He threw himself into
bed.

Once things were in motion, Sussy put on the new dress San Pedro had sent her. The six ice coolers fit in the taxi. The trip cost fifty pesos. She finished her task, and the lady of the house complimented her on her evening dress: How handsome, Susanita. She left with money in hand. She was looking really good; she looked like a narco’s woman.

She took another taxi to La Cuauhnáuac. The riot of the party could be heard four blocks away. Big rigs—brand name: Truckalicious—formed a long line of this year’s models as if in a showroom. Cars kept coming, and people kept jamming the streets. It was a herd of groupies. They came down from the trees, up from the gutter, and out from under rocks.

Security was thick, lots of former-drivers-turned-badass-bodyguards. It took Sussy ten minutes to reach the line separating the chosen from the undesirable. It was hard to tell which performance on which side of the line was more grotesque.

Sussy’s name wasn’t on the list. Like my mother told me, never trust a narco and even less one who had glass balls as a kid. And if her name wasn’t on the invite list, there was even less chance it’d be on the bettors list. Damn life, damn misery.

She hung around outside the bar for half an hour. The bartender looked out the door because he’d been accused of cheating. He’d given courtesy passes and sold memberships without permission from the narco bureaucracy. He saw Sussy and yelled at her: Hey you, what the fuck are you doing here? Get in the kitchen, we don’t have enough people to attend to our guests. And if you’re ever late again, I’ll kill you. Sussy started to head inside, but one of the guards stopped her. The boss had sent orders that she not go in. The bartender screamed at the guard that if she couldn’t come in he should wait tables himself. The other guard intervened: Let her go in. Mind your own business. You’re nobody here, and she’s not coming in. Yes, come on in. C’mon, c’mon, hurry up. But in spite of the tussle, she never got
in.

Inside, the booing and shouting was unstoppable. The Cowboy Bible was nowhere to be seen. San Pedro’s smile invited Don Lucha Libre’s suspicions. From the Stern-brand speakers came the announcement that the champion was trapped in a traffic jam. What a joke! A traffic jam in a town that small? He would be there any moment. In the meantime, let’s serve dinner. San Pedro didn’t protest. He could snatch up his money and go, but he wanted to see how far the show would go. In any case, he didn’t care about the money; the juicy part of the deal was that he’d get complete control of all of the drug-distribution points downtown.

The Cowboy Bible arrived with the championship belt held high and a green face. There was no fight in him. He cheapened the battle by only being able to hold down five cups of the brew. A new champion and a new distributor had stolen the spotlight. Don Lucha Libre was a good loser; he handed the business to San Pedro, and they continued drinking. Nobody left the bar. Los Capi were about to
play.

The limo driver approached Don Lucha Libre and let him know Sussy was outside. He gave him the lowdown: His Cowboy Bible had been poisoned. Without moving from his privileged seat, Don Lucha Libre pulled out his pistol and killed San Pedro with one shot. That single shot was all it took to spark the shootout that ended the lives of all those present, including the new monarch and The Cowboy Bible.

The following day’s newspaper had headlines across eight columns. There had been a great settling of scores in the world of organized crime. Extrafifí Agency, Thursday, December 27th: At five in the morning yesterday, police officers as well as officers from alcohol control, entered La Cuauhnáuac with the intention of closing it for its failure to observe blue laws. Instead, they found everyone inside had been killed, including the heads of the local drug underworld.

Sussy never again mentioned La Cuauhnáuac or the deaths or anything. The following week, she began from scratch once more outside the bar, but she couldn’t sell a single burrito. One night as she was putting away her things, a man came up and asked if she knew where he could get some coke. No. I don’t know. Damn it, said the
cholo
, I’m going fucking cold turkey. Aren’t there any narcos left in this city? No. There aren’t any anymore, young man. Here, buy one of my burritos. No. Fuck that burrito. What I need is to get some coke. I already told you, young man. There are no more narcos. There are no more narcos. It’s better if you just buy one of my burritos. C’mon, don’t be a bad guy. I have some machaca burritos.

For Fernando del Paso

She is Suffering,
Manic Street Preachers

The science of piracy
was a ghost that had always lived in The Country Bible’s heart. Ever since she was a kid, riding around on a
gallito
in this trashy town. Home to bootlegging, to contraband, to treason imported from all over, from Sevastopol, Anchorage, Cardiff.

Ever since she bought her ticket to this world (at Ticketmaster), one of the young Country Bible’s better features was her attachment to tradition. Since she herself was a product of the Tetra Pak generation, she was determined to pay tribute to the Old School. That was, in fact, our heroine’s specialty: to conduct herself in the old
ways.

We didn’t understand why she felt indebted to the Old Guard. It didn’t really come naturally. Even her parents, on a few drunken occasions (with national or imported brews), considered baptizing her Moderna Tenenbaum. They also considered Poliforma Multiforme, but in the end settled on The Country Bible, in honor of the sociodelic breakfast.

The Country Bible descended from a long line of fried-chicken vendors. Most recently, her grandfather, father, and siblings wore the obligatory apron at Henry’s Chicken. Since her dreams of travel were in check, she decided to place them alongside her aspirations to piracy and began to go to school.

The line that divides the client from the employer does not make them different from one another. The person who clerks at a record store, the guy who polarizes the windshield, and the server at the chicken stand are all spineless simpletons, incapable of rebelling.

Here’s the lowdown on The Country Bible: One of the reasons she stepped out from behind the counter was that her family, from the moment fast food came to the civilized world, had always been employed at Henry’s Chicken. Not a single relative, not even her grandfather, who, according to family lore, had been the most prosperous in their lineage, had ever managed to own one of the chain stores. Not one sad little franchise had ever come within reach of any of
them.

So began the militancy, the dissidence of The Country Bible. I don’t think anybody indoctrinated her, or even invited her; she made her own decision to join the Communist Youth, with the same enthusiasm an adolescent has when they join a rock band. Influenced by what was trendy, she adopted the look of a typical UNAM student. When she wasn’t working, and in order to complete her militant presentation, she dove into required readings every time she bit down on an apple. She transformed herself into an encyclopedia of Latin American folklore. She furnished her room with Willem de Kooning posters and built a piracy laboratory, equipped with a tower that could burn twelve records at once and was also multifunctional: It could photocopy covers and had an inscription device to make copies of the
text.

As a practitioner of piracy, The Country Bible tried to live covertly, like an infiltrator. She swung between the cool underground flavor of the marmalade of torture so that she could dedicate herself fully to the proletarian struggle, to her top spot serving breaded potatoes at the chicken joint. She stayed at Henry’s Chicken because she didn’t want to turn her back on tradition. But her revolutionary attitude began to cause her typical teenage problems.

The first sign of trouble came at work. Anxiety is expressed in three basic ways: random laughter, sweaty palms, and involuntary and inevitably absurd behavior. One boring afternoon at the chicken joint, The Country Bible was afflicted by the third kind. It was one of those days merchants call slow. At four in the afternoon, as a distraction, and with the wisdom of an indelible marker, she wrote nicknames for all the employees, manager included, on the workers’ punch cards.

The general discontent was over the top. The names themselves didn’t bother the employees; it was that they didn’t understand them. If only she’d written sly stuff like The Booger, The Flying Chimijuil, or The Pincher, then they would have tolerated it. Instead she designated the workers with names beloved to her leftist soul: Cienfuegos, John Lennon, Heberto Castillo, Lenin. Ever since The Country Bible had begun to express herself through protest songs, everybody said that she was distancing herself from the streets of the barrio. Every day she identified more with the Great Latin American Social Breach. But what neither the rechristened employees nor The Country Bible herself suspected was the split suffered by the fried-chicken vendor who would bring together the proletariat struggle and business interests in the events of October
2nd.

The following day, she received a notice from management. The workers demanded the traitor be burned. But they didn’t fire her. Because there was a superstition in the business that it was best to have at least one Country Bible at the counter to protect them from secondhand witchcraft. They suspended her for one
week.

She took advantage of her free time, with masterful use of forceps, to strengthen her ties to the Communist Party. Piracy, like LSD at the very beginning, was legal until the lunatics at the CIA decided that it wasn’t, that all those stoned adolescents shouldn’t listen to Violeta Parra all the time. They launched an attack they could have called You-Will-Cry against everyone involved in commercial piracy. So The Country Bible’s hobby changed. It transformed into something along the lines of Shit, dude, I didn’t bring the Serrat, but on this CD I have a Word version of the Communist Manifesto.

She became a wizard in everything that had to do with PCs and information. She was in charge of distributing copies of the CDs with instructions for the movement. From her post in the historic district, she would distribute records with covers that featured Paulina Rubio, El Viejo Paulino, Alejandra Guzmán, Polo Polo. In truth, they did not contain the hits of the day, nor poems recited by Paco Stanley, but rather specifications for a demonstration by the merchants from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas that would take place October
2nd.

The conflict had begun because of an uproar among peddlers. At the time, a kind of street market had grown around the merchants, but everyone gathered there had been rudely kept down by the cops. Sick of the abuse and ready for a fight with the Díaz Ordaz government, the merchants organized and subscribed to the
PC.

During a march on August 31st, TV cameras captured a dramatic moment: A young woman wearing a chicken-vendor uniform joined the protest. The young woman was The Country Bible herself, who had decided to wear her yellow suit, fuck people’s retinas. Her only other option was to have gone as Chabuca Granda.

This would change the direction the festivities would take. From the burning of the Judas figure, to the costumes worn decades later in gay pride marches, to the celebration of goals scored on the field—every apotheosis would be affected, on its outside, at its core, and in all the places where anti-wrinkle cream is effective, by The Country Bible’s proposed innovations on that historic date. The Díaz Ordaz government, which had always looked upon the merchants with red-rimmed eyes, now rushed to support them, terrified of the idea that the merchants could affect the buildup to the next Olympic Games.

Life went on like a giant jar of horchata. In Tlatelolco on October 2nd the merchants and the army faced off. The events created a deep black hole in the history of Mexico. A myth grew about thousands dead and disappeared. The officials claimed the merchants had begun the shooting. It was whispered that a special group of peddlers, the Olympic Battalion, had infiltrated the soldiers and begun firing. That was when those up front let themselves
go.

The army was now prepared to confront the merchants, whose weapons were like water pistols in comparison to those of their opponents. After the massacre, nonstop butchering was visited on the survivors. The merchants tried to run and hide in the apartments around Tlatelolco and its surroundings; they looked everywhere for hiding places, even under the last metro ticket, but it was useless. Hundreds were captured. Some were tortured, and others disappeared. It was all fucked
up.

That was the hell preceding the 1968 Olympic Games. The wound has remained open in this country’s memory to this day. In the following decades, the massacre would inspire innumerable songs, novels, movements, and films. Monuments, statues, and monoliths were erected, plazas and streets named in honor of the fallen.

The grievances against the government took a toll on its authority. Once the smoke of the massacre cleared, the party in power, with help from the FBI, proposed to capture the movement leadership and released a list with the names and photographs of those implicated. The Country Bible was among them. The star of the moment wore a flower costume in the photograph. It looked like a joke. We didn’t know if they were looking for a possible political prisoner or Peter Gabriel during his Genesis days. But the government found it impossible to find a photo in which she wasn’t dressed as some character. In the photo from her primary school graduation, she wore a Menace Jr. wrestling mask. In the one from high school, she was dressed as the old man from
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
.

The people were offended: How is it possible that the president would send soldiers, unprepared, without arms, to combat those bastards sent by the Tepito Merchants?

Every time something politically inconvenient comes up, the government creates a distraction. A few months before the Olympic Games, so that the people would forget the Jalisco-style massacre, Díaz Ordaz ordered Channel Eleven to create a reality show. Even though it was illegal, piracy had become fashionable, so it therefore became the theme of the show. The format was designed to reward the contestant who managed to copy the most records in a certain period of time. They settled on this because they’d run out of other ideas. There were already reality shows about people wrestling cows, about hip-hop stars, about wrestlers, about beauties and nerds, even one about aspiring comics.

With this move, Díaz Ordaz told his government secretary, Luis Echeverría, we’ll capture those involved in the pirating sector. Oh, yes, sir, said the secretary, but what about the smugglers, those who sell stolen auto parts, the ranch hands? Don’t get ahead of yourself, my dear right-hand man, everyone will get what they deserve. You just watch me play politics. These ones must fall first because they’re the biggest pinkos. In any case, the high command assures me that The Country Bible, a dangerous terrorist who leads the movement, will sign up for the contest.

The government wasn’t too far off base. To keep her head down for a while, The Country Bible tried out for the cast of
The Pirate Academy
and was accepted. Her popularity as a PC pirate member would give her away during the contest. She’d be arrested before the finale.

The Country Bible knew they were looking for her and, as a counterintelligence measure to avoid being recognized, she showed up dressed as a wrestler. Menace Jr., no
less.

She wore a mask with the following features:

STATUS
: She has not lost the
mask.

MATERIAL
: Dublin.

DESIGN
: One of the most minimalist masks in wrestling, it has a seriousness that elevates it practically to elegance. All black, this mask’s only aesthetic element is the silver border around the eyes, nose, and mouth. An engraved white cross adorns the forehead.

OBSERVATIONS
: Part of a great wrestling dynasty.

MANUFACTURER
: Jesús Andrade.

So as not to drag out the programming, the results were posted every day at eight o’clock on Channel Eleven on the
El Recreo Show
. The Country Bible made the finals thanks to the calls from the public, who saved her three times when she was nominated for expulsion.

The finale was broadcast from the Auditorio Nacional. The host, Raquel Bigorra, stirred up the audience, encouraging them to call call call right now and vote for their favorite. Menace Jr. was second out of the four candidates. The difference between the two top slots was small. The testosterone emitting from The Country Bible’s rival kept all the quinceañeras dialing. But Menace Jr. wanted the top prize. Fifty thousand pesos and a trip to Puerto Vallarta, all expenses paid. The package included three days and two nights in a suite for two at the Playa Hotel, but let’s get back to you, Raquel, to see how the voting is going:

Right now, there are 12,543 calls for Menace Jr. and 12,856 for Erasmo. A reminder that there are only twenty minutes left to vote, then we’ll stop the count. Our next participant is a native of San Pedro Rico. This is Menace Jr.’s last chance to convince the judges. Proceed.

To surprise the judges, The Country Bible ascended the stage wearing an outfit over her wrestling costume. She was disguised as Demis Roussos over her Country Bible Junior costume. While she burned CDs as fast as her prosthetic belly and beard would allow, the hits played in the background: Goodbye, my love, goodbye. The phones wouldn’t stop, and Menace Jr. came in first place. She’d won the third round.

A week later, the Mexican Federation of Reality Shows, presided over by Decio de María, voided the prize, fined Channel Eleven, and banned them from producing reality shows for an entire year. The argument was that Menace Jr., who’d never removed the mask, had turned out positive on the doping tests, with her blood rich in Nandrolone; steroids had helped her win. They took the award away and canceled the trip. Something similar had happened at the Reality World Championships in Italy, but Mexico hadn’t participated because of some
cachirules
.

Thirty years later, The Country Bible is still the glory of the neighborhood. She’s never been caught. She still does interviews, and there’s a new biopic about her that will premiere in the next few months. Around the same time, Echeverría will be coming up for trial. The files on the Tlatelolco massacre were reopened. It was finally revealed that it was he who gave the order to have the soldiers confront those merchant
cabrones
.