The Return: A Novel (40 page)

“Poor Daddy—the
patrón
is the last to know what his peasants are up to.”

“He’s sleeping with her?”

“I’ve always liked that euphemism. My room adjoins Skelly’s, and I can assure you, sleep is not involved in their connection.”

“That bastard!”

“I don’t see what your objection is. If she’s Skelly’s girl, it’ll suppress the other guys’ fighting over her. No one will challenge the big kahuna.”

“For God’s sake, Carmel, she’s sixteen.”

“She’ll be seventeen next month, which I believe was approximately my mother’s age when you took her out of here.”

“I was twenty-four. He’s sixty-something.”

“And sexy as hell. I’m sorry, but I don’t see what the big deal is. Girls fall for older men all the time. It’s a trade-off. They get a leg up in life, financially and career-wise, and the old guys get to feast on young flesh. And Skelly’s not going to slash her face or treat her like shit.”

Marder didn’t know what the big deal was either—not rationally at any rate—but, viscerally, thinking about them together made him want to kill his friend. Insane, insane, but there was burning in his belly, as if he’d eaten a spoonful of habaneros.

“Unless you’re envious…,” his daughter ventured.

“Oh, don’t be stupid! I have no sexual interest in that little girl.”

Statch studied her father for a moment, then said, “I believe you. I think your current sexual interest is sitting in your office.”

“What?”

“La Espinoza showed up a couple of hours ago. She’s going to do a story about us. I told her she could use your office. She was very concerned about your fate, perhaps a little more than journalistic interest would suggest.”

“Why are you always fantasizing sexual imbroglios for me? First Lourdes, now Pepa. It’s unseemly.”

Statch held a finger next to her nose and put on a knowing grin. “I call ’em like I see ’em, Dad. If you’ll excuse me, Skelly wanted me to check out the sandbagging on the diesel tank and take a look at the machine-gun nests that
los chinos
are supposed to be setting up.”

“Do you actually know anything about that kind of stuff?”

“Oh, I skipped the course on field fortifications, but we MIT engineers are pretty flexible.” She waved and tripped off, whistling. The song was “La Adelita,” the famous
corrido
of the 1910 revolution. She had learned it at her mother’s knee, as had Marder, a ballad of love and death, like every other Mexican
corrido
.

He entered his house and found it transformed. All the furniture in the living room had been pushed to the walls and stacked there, and men from the
colonia
swarmed about, heaving up walls of sandbags to cover the windows, cutting off the light from the sea, and changing the place into something more like a cavern or an immense bunker. The dining room had been lined with rows of pallets, and the dining table had been draped with cloths; the cabinets where the dishes had been kept now showed various sorts of medical apparatuses. A woman in pink scrubs, whom Marder had never seen before, was arranging supplies. She smiled at him but did not introduce herself. Proceeding to Amparo’s small office, in search of some explanation for the metamorphosis, he found twelve-year-old Epifania sitting at her mother’s desk. This had been cleared of everything but a couple of dozen cell phones, set in small groups and bearing labels neatly printed on masking tape. Epifania had a Bluetooth rig in her ear, and as Marder came in, she was talking, apparently, to thin air: “Copy that, alpha two-five. Feliz one out.”

“What are you doing, Epifania?” he asked, and she swung around in the swivel chair, startled. “Oh, hi, Don Ricardo. I’m doing a comm check. Don Eskelly said we had to have a comm check four times a day. This is our comm center, and I’m in charge from after school until my bedtime.” She smiled and rummaged through a drawer in the desk, retrieved a cell phone. “This is yours. All the command points and some of the actuals are preprogrammed into it.”

Marder took the phone. It was a “Nokla” made in China, and it had his name in marker on the back.

“Actuals,” he repeated.

“Yes, people in the chain of command. Don Eskelly explained it to us. Like if you wanted to talk to the alpha platoon leader or if he was on the line—”

“Yes, dear, I know what ‘actual’ means in this context. I just haven’t heard it used that way in a long time. I see we have a nurse.”

“Hilda Salinas, yes. She’s from the clinic in El Cielo. She’s a cousin of Chiquita Ferrar and she volunteered. Lots of people from El Cielo would like to come, but there’s not enough room for them. And some of them are afraid of
los otros
.”

But you’re not, thought Marder as he left, and he recalled the terrified child he had met on his arrival at Casa Feliz. He passed the kitchen with just a glance. It was crammed ridiculously full of large women chopping and chattering among steaming pots of what smelled like rice and beans, obviously a communal kitchen for the whole estate. He waved to the women, received their smiles, and went to his office.

Pepa Espinoza was at his desk, tapping at a laptop computer, and did not look up when he came in and sat on a couch. The room was growing dim as the men built up the sandbag barricades outside the windows. He rose and switched on the overhead lighting and sat down again. She finished what she was doing, closed her laptop, and looked up at him.

“So, Marder,” she said, “are you ready for your close-up?” She reached down and brought up a Sony HDR digital camcorder, then switched it on.

“You want to interview me?”

“I am interviewing you. My first question is, what do you hope to accomplish by turning your house and grounds into a fortress?”

“I don’t understand, I thought you were bringing a crew. I thought we’d sit on a couch like they do on TV. I always wondered how they got the logo in the corner of the screen to stay up there.”

She put the camera down on the desk and frowned. “There’s no crew because my producer turned me down. He doesn’t think you’re newsworthy.”

“Gosh, that’s a disappointment. I was hoping for the canonical fifteen minutes. And I’m surprised. An inside look at the newest chapter in the narco wars: ‘
Campesinos
beat back La Familia; American ex-Special Forces trooper trains militia to fight
malosos
.’ Probably the biggest story of the year, if not the decade. Did he say why not?”

“Oh, he got the canonical envelope in the mail—a photograph of his wife and children outside their school with black crosses drawn on their faces. I can’t say I blame him. On the other hand, I have no children and no one’s life I care much about saving. I’m here as a freelancer, recording for YouTube and posterity. And you’re right: it’s going to be gigantic.”

The door flew open and a group of dusty men appeared. The foremost said, “Oh, sorry, Señor, I thought no one was here; we have to make holes.” He indicated the walls generally.

“Let’s let these men have the room,” said Marder. “We’ll go up on the roof.”

Espinoza shoved her laptop and camera into a large red canvas bag and followed him out. “What are the holes for?” she asked as they climbed the stairs.

“Well, when they defend a building in the movies, they shoot out of the windows, but in real life they barricade the windows and shoot out of loopholes.”

“You planned all of this? That the narcos would attack you here?”

“Skelly did. I told you, I just came down here to retire in the sun, but that doesn’t seem to be possible at present. Given the situation that we would not be allowed to live in peace, Skelly decided that a showdown was inevitable at some point, and he arranged for us to have heavy weapons to defend ourselves.”

“And stealing these weapons from the Templos made it inevitable that your place would be attacked. Very neat.”

“You’re well informed, I see.”

“It’s my métier. But what I don’t quite get is why you think you can get away with defying the narcos. El Gordo must have four hundred men under arms, trained killers, completely merciless. They’re not going to have much trouble with a hundred or so
campesinos
.”

“That’s an odd statement coming from a Mexican patriot. Zapata and Villa did pretty well with just that kind of people.”

“And they failed.”

“Well, yes, but maybe we won’t.”

“They have tanks. Did you know that? Huge armored trucks with machine guns.”

“Mercy me! I guess we should surrender, then. But on the other hand, you’re here. You must not be that worried about your own safety. There’s a contract out on you. Don’t you think that one of your merciless killers will collect on it?”

“Perhaps. This is where I shrug fatalistically like a good Mexican and say, Everyone has to die.”

“Or it might not come to that,” said Marder. He pointed to where groups of men were constructing positions for the two huge Soviet DShK 12.7-mm machine guns, one commanding the road and the other the shoreline. “They might see that we’re well defended and look for easier prey. That’s why people keep dogs, you know. The kid who’s looking to smash a window and grab the computer would rather not deal with a dog, so he moves on to the quiet house down the street.”

“But El Gordo is not a street punk, and if he lets you off, people will see
him
as a punk, and he’ll be finished. His own people will take him out.”

“Then let them do their worst,” said Marder.

“You’re not concerned that you’re risking the lives of all these people?”

“I
am
concerned. What do you think I should do? Leave and let all these people go back to the barrios and decrepit
ranchos
they came from? Let the narcos fight over who gets to build a casino resort on my land? No one has to stay and fight. Some people have left, as a matter of fact, but others have come. A few people, at least, seem to be happy that someone is fighting the narcos.”

“And how long will you be able to survive a siege? How will you feed these people or get goods off the land, this absurd crafts thing you’ve concocted—”

“Why absurd?”

“Oh, crafts! People have been trying to make a go of Mexican crafts for decades, and as soon as a market is created it’s destroyed by mass production. You can buy embroidered
huipiles
in the market here in town that are made in Chinese factories. And hats—every village used to have women who wove straw into sombreros; each village was different, each hat was a creative act. A man would buy a hat and leave it to his son, that’s how long they lasted. But they were too expensive—a hat for a hen, they used to say—and so people started to buy hats made of crap in sweatshops, because poor people don’t need a work of art to keep the sun off their heads, and so the weavers, the women, all became beggars and starved.”

“Well, if you’re right, we won’t have to worry about the economics of the handmade; we’ll all be shot dead way before we can starve. And speaking of shooting…”

A crackle of small arms fire was coming from the far side of the
colonia
.

The men working on the gun emplacements looked up. Marder saw that one of them was Njaang, late of the shipping container. Marder saw him listen for a moment and then smile. He drew a circle in the air and jabbed his finger through it several times, then went back to work.

“It’s just target practice with the new rifles,” said Marder. “Shall we go down and look? I’m sure you’d like to get it recorded.”

They descended and walked through the
colonia
.

“It seems unusually bustling,” she said.

People were in fact moving more quickly than was common, carrying loads to and fro on wheelbarrows, carts, three-wheelers made from motorcycles, and there was an atmosphere of tension, or anticipation, as if everyone were preparing for a fiesta. Marder got the usual smiles and waves, except from one family who had everything they owned on a pushcart and were clearly going elsewhere. But another family, with a similar cart, was just as clearly waiting to take their little house; their children smiled shyly, and the woman stepped forward and introduced her family and said that the man was down at
el golf
, practicing on the new rifles.

They walked on, and Marder said, “Did you ever read Orwell’s description of what it was like in Barcelona when the anarchists took over during the civil war?”

“I may have,” she said. “Why?”

“He wrote that the most remarkable thing he saw was that, when you went into a restaurant or walked the streets, all signs of servility had disappeared. The waiters held themselves like grandees and refused tips. The signs of class had vanished overnight.”

“But they lost, didn’t they, Orwell’s people?”

“Yes, but they had something for a while, and we have it here now. I’ve been trying to stop people from treating me like I’m another rich asshole, and now they have. And what have we here?”

He had stopped in front of a metalworking shop belonging to a man named Enrique Valdes, who usually made candle lanterns and religious images out of tinned sheet metal. In front of his shop/house were now arranged a number of wide curved boxes, the size of small attaché cases, open at the top and with brazed-on legs that enabled them to either stand upright or be fixed vertically in soft earth. A teenaged boy was using an electric grinder to score lines in the concave faces, and his younger brother was cutting short pieces of heavy barbed wire off a spool and dropping them into a pail. Valdes himself was ladling a grayish paste from a fifty-five-gallon drum into one of the metal boxes.

“It’s amazing, you know—I live here and I had no idea that all this preparation was going on.”

“What are they making?”

“They’re claymore mines. That stuff he’s putting in there is fuel oil–fertilizer explosive. Well, we have enough of those ingredients, and I’m sure Skelly has arranged for detonators. When they’re set off, you get a one-directional blast—that’s why the kid is weakening the front face of the mine. The enemy gets a face full of shrapnel, which is barbed wire in this case. You’ll notice the kid is inscribing a slightly different pattern in each one. How horribly wonderful and Mexican!”