Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Read online

  Still, he entertained the fantasy of revenge, getting back at a corrupt police detective like Manolo, by extension taking his revenge on the syndicates and all the evil men in this world. Los hombres malos, like the farmer Tranquilino had said. Then Bellacosa reflected on that man, Tranquilino, and remembered the way he’d described being attacked in front of his family while his wife was violated.

  When pigs fly, Bellacosa thought. That’s what the saying used to be, but nowadays we see pigs fly every day. Fat, super-rich, homicidal, stinking of impunity, greedy for even more power and making the weak suffer. The saying should be, “When pigs fry their own bacon,” a voice peeling down from the kitchen’s blue wallpaper seemed to respond.

  Bellacosa showered and got in his old Jeep, turned the stereo up after adjusting the needle for a clean signal. The speakers rattled: “And in the yellow cigs we watch the limelight fall, and we tip our way to the Holy Land, y’all, tip our way to the Holy Land, y’all—” The song was catchy enough that he could ignore it.

  He thought about driving to see his friend Ximena and have her read his coffee grounds again, then, stuck to his old ways, told himself he didn’t want to be a bother. When he discovered his pack of cigarettes was empty he made a U-turn on Tenth Street and went looking for a store instead.

  Bellacosa drove into Edinburgh City and parked at the far end of a Hatfield’s Supercenter, where everything was always cheaper. As he walked in a young man with a blue Hatfield’s vest said, “Welcome to Hatfield’s Supercenter. If you can find it cheaper we’ll match it,” in a muddy, monotonous voice. As Bellacosa made it deeper into the store, he heard the young man repeat the phrase many times over.

  Bellacosa wandered through a few aisles of snack food and beverages in a daze. He ended up in front of stacks of brand-new color replicas all broadcasting different networks, when he remembered what he came for. He bought a pack of Herzegovina Flor cigarettes, cracked it open, and sparked one as soon as he was outside again. It was cool and breezy, police sirens could be heard from the expressway, and for a few puffs of smoke the world in South Texas made sense to Bellacosa. Shoppers wheeled carts in and out of Hatfield’s at an aardvark’s pace, and Bellacosa watched as two men his age pushed a train of them back into the store.

  “The next police officer I see I am going to pull out and give a good sacudida, and beat the shit out of him. I’m going to pull that copper out and sock it to him real good, make him feel it. I’ve never called the police for anything in my life, but if I do it’ll be only for this. If it’s a lady officer I’ll let her be, but I hope it’s a strong, arrogant, disgusting male cop,” Bellacosa said, thinking of Manolo and clenching his teeth with anger as he drove out of the Hatfield’s Supercenter parking lot.

  Bellacosa recalled the girl in the pastel dress at dinner, and for the hundred-and-twelfth time wondered who the hell the other people could have been. He had a distinct memory of each of the other ten guests, like characters in a board game. The images of the shrunken Mapuche heads, and the baby chick dodos in the aquarium, running around like fools on a holographic desert island, couldn’t escape him.

  Then his thoughts turned to Oswaldo. It broke Bellacosa’s heart to think of his brother in this new terrible way. The figure that had appeared to him was no longer his brother, but a man with a death sentence. He’d been hexed. Bellacosa could see that Oswaldo had come to terms with the fact that there was no way back to his old life, and had his own personal business now to straighten out—of which visiting him at his shack was a part.

  He drove to the restaurant El Caballo Ballo. It was pricier than anything at Baby Grand Central, but he wasn’t very hungry and only looking for a cup of black coffee. Also, the joint was owned by his client Don Villaseñor. Now that he had spent some of the fifteen grand he owed him, Bellacosa planned to ask Don Villaseñor for a loan of three grand and refund him only twelve thousand.

  Bellacosa didn’t recognize the stylish hostess wearing a gold-sequined outfit at El Caballo Ballo. She directed him to sit where he liked and he thanked her.

  He made his way toward the back and noticed there was another occupied table, with a blonde lady in a ponytail and business attire, sitting across from a man Bellacosa recognized as the mayor of MacArthur, Luis Mercedesanto Paz. Bellacosa scowled inwardly and clenched his right fist in his coat pocket.

  “Ingeniero,” Bellacosa heard from behind him. It was the waiter Quintero, a barrel of a man who always dressed sharply, with a rock of copal quartz as a left earring. Quintero also had a couple of gold chains and rings on both pinkie fingers, and his hair was slicked back and to the side.

  “Qué onda, Quintero,” Bellacosa said, and the men shook hands. Bellacosa liked Quintero, though he rarely got along with male waiters, and always seemed to attract the poorer of the bunch. But Quintero was different, always sniffing around and ready to report the order of the day with a good sense of justice. He had no gauge for humor but had charisma, and always called him Ingeniero, though Bellacosa lacked every sense of an academic degree, much less one in engineering.

  “Sit wherever you like, Ingeniero. I’ll be with you shortly.”

  Bellacosa sat far from the mayor and the lady, and put them away from his mind. When Quintero came back Bellacosa asked for a cup of black coffee, and they brewed a fresh pot just for him.

  Quintero brought a mug over with sugar packets and cream as Bellacosa asked him, “Oye, Quintero, has Don Villaseñor returned? From his trip in Mexico? I was doing a job for him and can’t quite reach him, even at his offices.”

  The waiter, wearing a silly grin that didn’t express humor, said, “No, Ingeniero. El Patrón was taken by los hombres. They kidnapped him, no mames.”

  “Kidnapped him? How do you mean?”

  “It happened about five days ago. He was leaving his office in Piedras Negras, they took him along with two friends going to a business lunch. And men with machine guns and masks put them in a truck, no mames. They found the two friends outside the city, naked with their hands tied and bodies burned, and nobody knows what happened to Don Villaseñor.”

  “No me diga. Don Villaseñor? But he is already a little old, no, to have dealings with those people? The man is older than me.”

  “Who knows, Ingeniero,” Quintero said. “They never tell us anything, we’re just employees at his restaurant here. I only know because of the things I pick up here and there. I tell you, because of your business relationship to Don Villaseñor. You are sometimes on his payroll, correct? I’m sorry to tell you, but if he owes you money you’re probably not getting it today. They say they’re asking a lot for his ransom. Don Villaseñor has money and connections in Mexico, maybe these people caught wind of it. They’re the same people who have dealings with the fake animals, no mames. Les vale madre a esos cabrónes.”

  Quintero excused himself and took a pitcher of unsweetened iced tea to his other table. He asked the blonde lady and the mayor a few questions, had a few laughs, then walked to the back of the restaurant. Bellacosa sipped carefully at the steaming coffee, and it was good.

  On a napkin, using the black ballpoint pen he always carried, he started doodling.

  When Quintero walked by he smiled that humorless smile again and said, looking down at the napkin, “What’s that? The Huixtepeltinicopatl?”

  “The what?” Bellacosa exclaimed.

  “El cerdo de los sueños. No mames, Ingeniero, why are you drawing that? Somebody’s going to catch you, and then what?”

  Quintero quickly moved away from Bellacosa. Drinking his coffee, Bellacosa took a good look at his little sketch: a very amateur rendition of the Trufflepig he’d met at the illegal dinner. “The pig of dreams?” he asked himself, repeating what Quintero had said.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, on the other side of town, Paco Herbert sat on an aluminum table painted like a chessboard at a taqueria named Yum-Yum. He was reviewing notes he’d scribbled hastily in his blue notebook that read: “old house / fancy / loo
ny dodos / fried dodos / spicy sauce, yellow, damn / guests except one middle-aged / teenage girl / the pig / skin like alligator / beak / disgusting / stub for tail / salivating / can’t move / harmless / with teenage girl likes / mounted heads / mounted eels / skeleton visions / heads of Mapuche / commemorating plaques / steak, Charlemagne bull / old king / remember no guests made eye contact / remember girl, she spoke to Bellacosa / French wine / goose fat sauce / find the bird / the Galapagos soup, standard staple, and gizzards / the pig gone / concerto music speakers / short waiters / hip waitress / Josie, fake name / meal satisfactory / Aranaña, pig connection according to Bellacosa / lizard pig / beady eyes / fed carrots / casual environ / nothing threatening / top-dollar clientele.”

  Paco Herbert was eating sopes with refried beans and queso fresco dowsed in Yum-Yum’s red house salsa. He nodded, flipped through the notebook, reading through every single word.

  He popped an orange upper, swallowed it with tropical punch soda, and walked three blocks to the city library, sat at one of their booths, and hooked up to an information thread. First he searched for the native Aranaña tribe. He came across current articles about the Olmec heads heist and minor immigration and labor disputes in Cameron County. Then he got distracted and walked outside, called his employer’s only office in the States, which patched him through to his boss in South America. It was a madhouse at their end and Cecilia sounded to him like the scribbles in his notebook. Paco Herbert was able to make out the phrases: “Insanity / scandal / where the hell are you / this information quick / thirteen of the Olmec heads / disappeared / filtering syndicates / still a mystery / tied in to the filtering / hijacking indigenous articles and culture and crafts / conspiracy / new struggle for power / corruption up high all the way down the ladder / elected officials / what are you still doing in South Texas / the action’s farther south / can’t hear a thing / call back with real results / no more cash flow your way / growing bad reputation / ruin us / eyes wide open / better hear back soon.”

  Paco Herbert hung up, walked back to the information thread in the library, and, after considering how to specify his search, typed “Aranaña” and “pig,” then hit enter. It yielded zero results. He typed in only “Aranaña,” at first with the “ñ,” then using the “n,” and two monographs came up, which he immediately queued up. He searched again for “pig” and hundreds of articles resulted. He felt stupid and narrowed it to “reptile skin pig beak hooves,” and yielded articles related to veterinary studies and a couple of books for children on natural habitats and parts of animals.

  Paco Herbert walked to the front desk and a middle-aged woman made him sign for the monographs he queued. One was Understanding Native Texans by Joel Campos Phillips, the other was a book on metaphysics called Reflections of Our Collective Psyche, by Johanna Crowfoot-Skye. He started with the former, and in the table of contents immediately noticed a few lines had been blacked out very carefully—pages seventy-seven through eighty-one, which were missing entirely from the book.

  Paco Herbert got a strange feeling he was on to something, and looked over his shoulders. There were only everyday-looking people and young students scuttling around the library while the sleepy security guard read a medieval fantasy paperback. Paco Herbert glanced over to the only other person who knew what he had queued, the librarian, but she was busy, looking bored. He opened Reflections of Our Collective Psyche, and it didn’t have a table of contents. He skimmed through it page by page until he got to pages thirty-six through thirty-nine, which weren’t removed but blacked out, in a much sloppier fashion than the methodical job performed with Understanding Native Texans.

  He looked at the publication dates of both books. The history book was published twenty years prior, and the metaphysical one was only five years old. He jotted down their publishing houses. Back in the information thread he searched “Olmec heads,” queued The Idiot’s Guide to Mexican Monuments, and signed for it at the desk. He made a couple of calls to check the state of his finances in both work and personal accounts, summoned a taxicab, and paid to be driven to Mission Public Library thirty minutes away with the company card. He performed the same searches there as in MacArthur. There they only carried Understanding Native Texans, and in the table of contents the same lines were blacked out and the same pages were missing. Handling the book, Paco Herbert’s hands were drenched in sweat, his heart was pumping hard, and from a tin in his coat pocket he pulled an orange pill and swallowed it dry. He walked to the men’s room and washed his face, dried it with paper towels, rinsed his mouth. When he spit the water into the sink it came out bright pink.

  Paco Herbert needed a smoke and outside sparked one of his Caballero Lights on a bench, chatting up one of the young librarians on lunch break. She had tattoos of scripture he recognized as Armenian.

  “Is this Armenian?” he asked her.

  “It is,” she said, genuinely surprised. “You know the language?”

  “My fiancée is Armenian. Well, my ex-fiancée.”

  “Really? I don’t know. I felt I needed to get them. To commemorate my ancestors and all. Pay tribute.”

  The librarian checked the time, then hastily packed up her lunch and excused herself.

  “Thank you for telling me that,” Paco Herbert said, stubbing out his cigarette.

  “No problem. Thank you for asking. Most of the time men just grab my arm to try and make out what it is.”

  Running on mercurial instinct, Paco Herbert hurried back inside and searched for “El Gordo Pacheco,” and queued the most recently published monograph on his life and the rise of filtering syndicates, how their power structures worked. He also searched for scientific studies on the Rosokhovatsky Filtering Method, which had been the most effective way to extract and filter fruits, vegetables, and animal species. He found two studies along with a nature publication entitled Mother Balance. The studies were put out by Jamestown University Press in Connecticut. One was called Complete Rosokhovatsky, which was a thick university-level textbook, and the other was Filtering Sciences Today. Paco Herbert signed for all the books, called another taxicab, and later locked himself at his place near downtown MacArthur, with some coffee and serious drugs for all the reading he had ahead of him.

  TWELVE

  The public classics network was airing a black-and-white Cagney picture, Frankie’s Ride. Cagney played Frankie McClint, a poor boy from the Bronx who made it big in the bootlegging racket during Prohibition. Never knowing his own father, the only real paternal figure Frankie rebelled against in his life was Father Andrews, the Irish Catholic priest. The famous scene of the picture was playing—Father Andrews is pleading with a sharply dressed, wisecracking Cagney to quit the bootlegging business and become a positive role model for the neighborhood youths.

  “Don’t you see, Frankie, that these boys have grown up idolizing you? You’ve got them picking pockets and running numbers. And for what, I wonder? I wonder, Frankie, do you ever see anything of yourself in these boys anymore?”

  “Firstly, Father,” Cagney responds, slyly fixing the cuff links on his suit, “if you’re accusing me of asking these boys to commit crimes then you are mistaken. I’m a businessman, not a barbarian. These boys have a right to be boys, and if they’re able to contribute a little to their families then nobody can argue that what they’re doing is entirely bad. Now, if I’m supposed to lose sleep because my success has an influence on these boys’ futures, then you are sorely out of line, Father. We all know the hero you’d like them to have is up there on the cross, and the Church ain’t putting food on the table for any of these youngsters.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Frankie. What the Church puts on the table goes a lot farther than food.”

  Bellacosa was watching and enjoying the picture. It was his second time catching it as it aired, but he had never seen it from the beginning. The depiction of poverty in those old pictures, for Bellacosa, always reminded him of his boyhood in Reinahermosa. It didn’t matter if the film was Italian,
German, Swedish, Japanese. The poverty depicted, especially in the two decades of cinema around World War II, was always a visceral, universal poverty. Once he’d seen a Japanese film about a murder in the Tokyo ghetto, and he felt he knew the smell of those shantytown, underworld locations, the rubble of the buildings, the children playing in trash heaps looking for diamond rings. If the actors had been Mexican he would’ve sworn it was a picture about his own childhood.

  Bellacosa didn’t care to watch Cagney die in the unfortunate climax again and turned off the black-and-white replica, put it back in the closet. He walked over to his altar, grabbed the stick of white sage by the picture of his wife holding their daughter, moments after her birth. He lit the stick and watched the white sage burn a green smoke that carried the smell of something infinite, like it was cut from the tree of life itself, and he placed it on the onyx rock. He grabbed the Bengali quartz crystal, the agave stone, midnight-rose-quartz rock, the jawbone of the Texas coyote. The stones he placed in a glass jar with Himalayan pink salt mixed in water to clear their energies, and the bone he placed on the windowsill to absorb cold sunshine. He grabbed the old silver Mexican coin with an etching of the priest Miguel Hidalgo and finally got the accumulated gunk out of it using baby oil and a cloth. He wiped his wife’s sunglasses clean, wiped the tiny simian and lion marble sculptures, and rang one of the gray bells his wife gave out to people as gifts the week after their daughter died.

  When Bellacosa felt he was getting too emotional about his family again he took a long, hot shower, shaved, and after he dressed and combed his hair put his pair of ostrich-knee Wingham shoes away. He shined his backup pair of the same-style shoes, slipped them on, and admired them in the long, vertical hallway mirror.