Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Read online

  Manolo cracked his knuckles against his own thighs and yawned, revealing silver- and gold-capped molars in the back of his mouth.

  “Sorry for all the driving, too. I had been wanting to come and see if the ducks were still out here. Saw our meeting as a good opportunity for it. What do the Americans say, kill two birds with one stone? Plus, this whole area is secluded, a perfect place to talk. The last mayor laundered city funds for the roads and left connections like these half-finished all over. Get in the car, I have another cab waiting for you at the nearby Super Siete.”

  Manolo drove Bellacosa to a white cab shaped like an egg, which took him close to the border, and he asked to be dropped off at La Zona Rosa in downtown Reinahermosa. The streets were drunk with rumbling motor vehicles and loud pedestrians, made even more vertiginous by the pulsating neon lights of different businesses, which faced the sidewalks of the old buildings. The air-conditioning units sticking out of the windows up above dripped water like hanging lambs after a bloodletting. Bellacosa walked between these drops and American border crossers, Mexican working-class men and women, and people who made their living in the streets.

  He passed a young family closing the fruit stand El Tropical, as a little girl accosted him, holding a basket of chicharrones, chocolates, and mint-flavored Chiclets.

  “Oiga, señor, chicharrones and candy here for your children.”

  Bellacosa politely declined with a wave of his hand, and the little girl moved along.

  He reached La Calle del Taco as nighttime crawled out of the sewers and tailpipes of zooming automobiles, walked through a babel of cheap portable radios playing Norteño classics in different busy taco stands, until he found his preferred spot, Don Ecuador’s Tacos. Bellacosa took a seat on the empty stool under the tiny green awning. To his right sat three men dressed like charro musicians without their big, round hats, chatting casually and slurping their tacos. The grill hissed like a beast’s open mouth, and Don Ecuador nodded at his new customer.

  “Y usted?” Don Ecuador asked Bellacosa as he quickly cooked diced fajitas, prepared a plate of tacos al pastor, popped a bottled soda, and took another order from a young boy all at once.

  “I’ll have an order of bistec tacos and a papa asada with everything on it, por favor.”

  “Sale y vale,” Don Ecuador said, and slapped eight tiny corn tortillas on the grill while whistling at an approaching mangy dog in an attempt to scare it.

  FOUR

  The pedestrian line to cross back into the U.S. was relatively short. Bellacosa stood in line for only fifteen minutes until he approached the Inspection and Declaration of Goods Station. He watched as two officers hassled an empty-handed elderly man ahead of him. The Border Protectors scanned the elderly man’s hands and held the facial recognition scanner in front of his face as they asked him over and over where he was born, where he lived, where he’d attended school, where his children and grandchildren attended school, even asked him who the previous and current presidents of the United States were. Bellacosa got aggravated for the old man, but knew better than to interfere in any way. The Border Protectors let the old man pass; one of them cracked open a candy bar as the other took a big chug of water and signaled Bellacosa to approach. They eyed him up and down, scanned his face, and let him cross without any questions.

  Back on the American side, as Bellacosa drove the old Jeep away from the Nevarez Lot, the phosphorus blue night was young and smelled like a dry water fountain. Bellacosa hardly drank, but the idea of a drink wasn’t so bad at the moment. He couldn’t help overthinking this situation with his brother. Knowing that harm was inflicted upon Oswaldo hurt Bellacosa deep down to his pickled bones, a pain that shot outward and then clawed at his entire body. It was the same pain he’d felt when his daughter died, and in those long months when Lupita was slipping away, months it took him even longer to stop reliving in his mind, insisting on how it could have gone differently if this or that had happened. But the Creator had it planned another way, whatever that may mean, he thought now, and was lucky to leave it at that with no remorse.

  Bellacosa phoned Tío Primo’s Towing Service and confirmed the flatbed would be at the property in Calantula County the following day before noon to haul away the 7900 Rig. He pulled over at a Casa de Cambio and with his bank card had twelve thousand dollars wired to Mr. McMasters’s business account, which Bellacosa counted on clearing the following morning as per the agreement.

  After that, Bellacosa admitted to himself he was rocking-chair tired. He pointed his old Jeep to MacArthur, the city where he lived, and drove to the shack he rented on the north side.

  He parked in his usual spot along the curb and walked inside his place. Bellacosa chugged a bottle of water that was on the kitchen counter. Then, across the dark living room by his small altar, he saw the flare of a cigarette and the purple silhouette of a smoker. Bellacosa didn’t panic, didn’t wish he still owned a gun, and walked slowly to the altar he kept for all the dead in his life. He saw it was only the two votive candles he’d bought the previous day and had kept lit, the flames biting the bottom of the glass, burning the last of the wax. One candle was for St. Martha, and she was depicted holding a bouquet of burning branches: the artist had drawn a winged reptile behind her, but it wasn’t clear if St. Martha was fending off the beast or if it was on her side. Bellacosa knew his wife, Lupita, would have appreciated this touch.

  The other candle was for La Santa Muerte, hooded and holding a scythe like a landlord coming for the rent. He watched the last of the wax in both candles be consumed, the flames fizzed out and turned to powdery, stringy ribbons of smoke. Bellacosa admired his altar, the photos between the candles; one of his wife as a young woman, another of the two of them together when she was older; a small sonogram photo of his daughter, Yadira, and a Polaroid of her in purple pajamas, surrounded by presents in a hospital bed on her fourth and last birthday; a photograph of his teenage parents in the old neighborhood in Reinahermosa. He ran his fingers over the Bengali quartz crystal; the palo santo from Cuzco; an old brass pocket watch with the engraving of a tank engine; the tooth of a Panhandle coyote; a wax seal with his family’s supposed coat of arms, stained with red paint; a petrified piece of turquoise coral; and a tiny chunk of meteorite he and his wife once hid from the authorities when they went yard to yard looking for remains.

  From his breast pocket Bellacosa pulled out an old black-and-white photograph of his brother, Oswaldo, taken when they were boys. He’d found it sitting on a pile of suitcases earlier in the week, to his surprise and wonder, at the storage space he rented monthly. In the photograph Oswaldo was speaking into a telephone in the alley of an old building—the telephone had been discarded, and Oswaldo was having a good time pretending to be using it. Bellacosa couldn’t remember who had taken the photograph, or how it was he’d had it in storage for it to just randomly appear. He added it to the altar and lit the edge of the palo santo, waving the smoke around.

  Bellacosa felt emotionally exhausted, took his clothes off, and fell asleep in his underwear on the living room couch.

  * * *

  EARLIER THAT EVENING, a couple of blocks east of downtown MacArthur, the man Bellacosa referred to as Tcheco walked on the sidewalk down Neches Street carrying a brown paper bag of groceries. He had learned from a waitress at Marselita’s of a long alley named Nogales Row—a location deemed by the city as free game to graffiti, after studies showed it helped lower vandalism if there was a designated place for it. The city also gave away prizes for the best art throughout the year, and a lot of low-level vandals developed into popular muralists and community organizers.

  The man who was Tcheco in Bellacosa’s eyes was actually a journalist named Paco Herbert, and when he arrived in a new city he was always more interested in the street art than his story assignment and would go out of his way to find it. It was his belief that every city was trying to tell its own story. The obsession of big galleries is always with the past, and the only way Paco Herb
ert could read the story of a city’s present reality was through the street art—beyond the artists simply tagging their name, like SHERRYZ, or LAUTRÉMONTALVO, which actually Paco Herbert admired. But among the mediocre was always something visually admirable, poetic with its slogans or lyrics, which told him something about the current social climate.

  Paco Herbert found Nogales Row and went in with the curiosity and caution of walking into a forest. He’d been told there were usually kids hanging out getting stoned and banging on trash cans, but this evening the alley was vacant. The first piece he saw—which ended up being a phrase he’d have stuck in his head all day—read MASTICATED OSTRICHES & PARROTS MAKE ME HUNGRY, in a Paraíso-style font.

  He walked straight to the far end, and on the left building saw the mural of a nightingale flying out of a ripe grapefruit, the juice from the fruit gushing like blood; on the right building was a mural of the actor Mimoso Kline dancing a tango with the first lady of Mexico—slightly to their right were paparazzi snapping photographs, and slightly to their left and in the background was an elaborate, iridescent mushroom cloud. He saw another mural, wheat-pasted to the brick wall at the far end of the alley in lifelike scale, of a young immigrant girl holding the hand of a drowned older woman Paco Herbert assumed to be her mother—the mother lay on the shore of a beach, which was propped up on a stage, as theatergoers looked on. At the bottom right of the mural the word ALDEA was written, which Paco Herbert knew to be the Spanish word for “hamlet.”

  Emerging from the alley as if he’d had a mystical vision, Paco Herbert spotted a cab and took it a few blocks south to the empty apartment he’d subleased for six more weeks.

  He opened the refrigerator and took his blue one-subject notebook out of the brown bag, then stuffed the groceries inside and shut the door. Paco Herbert moved toward the living room. Along one of the beige walls were various yellowing newspaper clippings pinned in every direction like a giant crossword puzzle. Some of the headlines read: “Great Apes Die Off at Gladys Porter Zoo”; “Fifth Filtering Warehouse Raid in Weslaco, Phantom Recruits Credited”; “Phantom Recruits: Real or Urban Myth?”; “Third Border Wall Quickly Becoming Reality”; “Five Border Protectors Indicted for Corruption”; “The Vanished Nightingales of San Juan”; “Australian Man Scales Border Walls as Protest, Deported.”

  Using thumbtacks, Paco Herbert pinned up El Gordo Pacheco’s obituary from the Times, along with an article about the Food Shortage Truther Movement, both below a clipping on Galapagos Gumbo, the most coveted black-market culinary dish.

  Paco Herbert had left the phone cable unplugged in the empty living room. He knelt on the floor by the old-fashioned touchtone phone and a dusty blue boom box. Immediately after he plugged the phone cable into the wall it rang, crying like a calf getting slaughtered.

  He picked up the phone, and instead of saying anything he whistled into the receiver.

  “Francisco,” he heard—a voice not from a human, but from a mossy boulder resting between two frosty, gloomy mountains.

  “How can I direct your call?” Paco Herbert answered.

  “Very funny, Paco, you should’ve been a sideshow clown. Not the main act, the one supporting the star, playing the slide whistle. I’ve been dancing around my office all day trying to get ahold of you, what’ve you been doing?”

  “I’m getting to know this city again, Cecilia. I haven’t been here in a long time, remember? I’ve gotta get a feel for it, you know. But to what do I owe this call? Did you find out anything for me about the Phantom Recruits?”

  The moment this conversation began Paco Herbert remembered the CD—carrying the telephone, and dragging its cable around like a tail, he opened the refrigerator, reached into the grocery bag to fish it out. It was a burned copy in a plastic case devoid of artwork. He unplugged the dusty boom box in the living room and placed it on the ground in the empty bedroom, plugged it in. He inserted the CD, pressed play, and picked up the volume all the way, left the bedroom door open only a crack. The boom box blasted with drums and distorted guitars as if from deep inside a well.

  Paco Herbert walked to the far end of the living room and sat on the floor looking up at the newspaper clippings as the conversation continued:

  “That’s something I’m still working on,” Cecilia said. “We have the relations lined up, it all just needs time to cook. Francisco, you’re on a landline, right? We are safe to be talking?”

  Paco Herbert pictured Cecilia’s office, saw her holding the phone and looking out the window past the empty soccer field and toward the monastery, while the newsroom on the other side of her door was a madhouse.

  “Yes, Cecilia, of course.”

  “I assume so, but I always have to ask. You heard about Pacheco’s death already, huh? What a tragedy, boo-hoo. You’re in a great spot right now, Paco, at the border. I hear things are going to get out of control there with the syndicates fighting to usurp Sindicato Casablanca’s power. Keep an eye out. Be safe. When the kingpin dies he’s only replaced. The filtering facilities, equipment, and people are still around. Anyway. Great news. The angel investor and our dinner connection came through.”

  “For the dinner-dinner?”

  “Yes, the dinner-dinner. Paco, we’ve pushed this as far as you and I possibly can with the budget we have to work with. Without this angel investor we’d have nothing, so it’s all in your hands now to produce a story that’s worth breaking. Didn’t you receive the package already? It should contain two tickets.”

  Just then Paco Herbert saw there was a white envelope with a brown string tied around it on the floor by the front door. Moving toward it and opening the envelope, Paco Herbert was slightly disappointed in his cognitive and journalistic senses for not having spotted it upon entering.

  Inside was a blank business card. When he turned it over there were two words typed out in lowercase: “pollo asado.”

  “I didn’t get the tickets,” Paco Herbert said into the phone.

  “If you didn’t, I’m sure you will at any moment.”

  “No, I mean I did. But they’re not tickets, it’s just a card that says ‘pollo asado’ on it.”

  “Pollo asado?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well. You got me. I don’t know how the actual ticket part is done, you figure it out. Those words might be the tickets. All right, I’ll call and confirm and will let you know. Don’t leave the phone again today. Remember the tickets are for two people. You’re the only one we have in that region, Paco, so I need to confirm that you are fine with finding a reliable person to take with you. I also have to tell you the rules. Please write them down.”

  Paco Herbert thought he heard Cecilia bite into an apple.

  “What’s that sound going on, are you at the club? No, you can’t be at a club, this is a landline, right?” Cecilia said.

  As Paco Herbert fumbled with a pen and shuffled through his blue one-subject notebook for a blank page he said, “It’s punk rock. A local all-girl punk band. It helps me concentrate when I have local music blaring in another room. Cecilia, what about a rental car, I need one bad, did you work it out?”

  “I did, I did, but hold on a second and write what I’m about to tell you. This is important.”

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Bellacosa woke up, showered, and gave his ostrich-knee Wingham shoes a good polish, all before sunup. He bought a cup of coffee at La Gloria Panaderia, and drove the old Jeep to Calantula County once again, ready to finalize the deal with the farmer, Mr. McMasters, and the 7900 Rig.

  “What trigger, what napalm?” a man with a French accent on the radio was preaching. “These things are reflections of ourselves, we are the triggers, we are the napalm. The syndicates, El Gordo Pacheco, the filtering of exotic species, and the counterfeit dinners that’ve been thriving with the rich and privileged: these excesses are inside all of us, and we in a sense encourage this type of criminal activity simply by projecting it. I am guilty of this, we are all guilty of this. But if w
e begin to try shifting our way of thinking then maybe our collective mind will also shift and push away all these negative projections that have produced so many dead bodies. Not only dead human bodies, but the bodies of species being filtered and smuggled, and at the cost of our selves, of our inherent humanity and the planet that is our duty to protect. After all, these creatures, these animals created in underground laboratories, aren’t completely manufactured, because souls can’t be manufactured. But they can be replaced. In order for artificial life to be created, souls, the fabric of our existence, have to be taken from one animal, to be given to another. Humans cannot keep playing God, because we don’t know the cost, which one day will be collected…”

  Bellacosa couldn’t help himself and drove again past the shack where he suspected he was born, but this time didn’t stop. He recalled the time shortly after his daughter, Yadira, was diagnosed with Wittinger’s, the degenerative blood disease, and required round-the-clock supervision. The medical expenses had gotten out of hand for Bellacosa and Lupita—a debt he was paying off to the present day. Bellacosa had walked into his brother Oswaldo’s practice after many failed attempts at reaching him by phone. There were no scheduled patients at that hour, and the two brothers had lunch together at a burger joint a couple of blocks away. Bellacosa explained to Oswaldo he’d found a part-time job changing tires at a corporate mechanic shop after working full days at the screen-printing spot, and was still barely making it. Lupita had devotedly become their daughter’s full-time caretaker. With nobody else to turn to, and aware of the improbability of actually getting it, Bellacosa asked Oswaldo for a loan. Not a lot, just what his family needed to float by. This was before Mexico’s economic collapse, which broke down the peso into a cubic denomination equaling a tenth of its original worth. Oswaldo owned several properties around the Reinahermosa conservatory and his two dental practices were doing well. Even then, he declined Bellacosa the loan, citing his own son’s music and English lessons, car payments, and personal debts.