He tried to piss but nothing came of it. He flushed the urinal anyway. It wouldn’t turn off. He slapped at the handle with the side of his hand several times before the water stopped.
He made his way back out to the bar, walking slowly, looking toward the bartender now who spoke on the phone.
Is he calling them? Tito thought.
A woman sat alone at the bar. She had been texting on her phone and then she put the phone down and stirred her drink. The bartender, a balding heavy man wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt, hung up the phone when Tito approached. “Que te paso?” he asked.
Tito ignored the bartender’s question. He sat beside the woman, his hand on the back of his neck.
“Oh my god!” the woman beside him screamed in English. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Tito, oh my god! What are you doing here?”
Tito turned to her. After several seconds of drawing a blank he recognized her. “Gloria. What happened?”
“Do you know him?” the bartender asked her in Spanish.
“Yes,” she said. “He’s a friend of mine. Can you bring him a beer?”
The bartender nodded and walked to the fridge and pulled out a Dos Equis. He opened it and placed a small napkin in front of Tito, placing the beer on it. Tito looked at the beer but did not pick it up.
“What happened to you?” she asked. She ran her hand gently over his face. He pulled away although she had been careful not to touch any of the wounded skin. “What happened? Where are the others?”
Tito shook his head. He tried not to sob. “They’re dead. I got away. You don’t know what they did to us. They killed Roger and Michael. You have to help me.”
“I will. Have a drink. Yes, no, not too quick, yes, slower. Drink it slower.” She was helping him lift the bottle. Some beer missed his mouth and dribbled down his chin. She smiled weakly, motherly. She eyed his wounds, the bulge at the back of his neck. He ran his hand to the bulge and she pulled his hand away, “Careful with that. It looks bad.”
“How did you know where we were?”
“I didn’t. You didn’t make it last night. This is a bad country these days. I figured something happened and I drove the route I knew you’d be taking, looking for any sign of a car wreck. I stopped in a couple of towns and asked the police if some young Americans had come through. I talked to them in this town too but they said nothing happened. I stopped in for a drink before heading north. But tell me what happened. Are you sure they’re dead?”
Tito nodded, drinking hard from his beer, craving the buzz that would come from it.
“Roger’s dead?”
Tito grabbed her hand. “Yes, Roger died. I’m sorry.”
“What the fuck happened!”
Tito finished the rest of his beer and then ordered another. He felt the bulge behind his neck and noticed it was bigger, firmer. The bartender came back with another beer and placed it in front of him. Tito drank, winced at the bitter taste and looked at the bartender who walked away. The bitterness soon vanished as he drank. He felt lighter of head, better. He turned to Gloria. He said that cartel members had pulled them over on the road at gunpoint outside of a small gas station, had tied their hands behind their backs and blindfolded them with electrical tape. They then drove them to a ranch. When the tape was removed the boys found themselves in a large room with a concrete floor. There was a large wooden table at the center of the room and several men lulled about dressed in western clothes.
Because Tito knew Spanish, the leader of the cartel members, a tall man with longish hair and an acne-scarred face, questioned him as to their intentions in the country. When the leader learned that the boys had no other intention than having a good time in Monterrey he smiled, his acne-scarred face stretching to reveal a gold brace over his two front teeth. The leader said, “You boys are innocent. Do you know what today is? It is la Día De Los Inocentes, the day of the innocents. You see, once a year we find boys like you, not always Americans, sometimes boys lost on the street, sometimes a young girl who has strayed from her mother at the Mercado, and we introduce you to Gonzalo. Gonzalo is our leader, our spiritual center. You’ll all meet him tonight. Let’s start with your quiet friend, Michael.”
Four men in the room had stripped Michael nude and tied him face down to the large wooden table. A tall and very muscular man entered the room with a hammer in his hand. It had the appearance of a meat mallet but much larger. While Michael screamed the muscular man begin to hammer his legs, back, and arms. He lifted and dropped the mallet with precise movements, sending a jolt of pain through Michael’s brain that made his screaming seem unreal and when his lungs could no longer produce sound from the pain Michael closed his eyes.
The muscular man then oiled the naked body from a bucket by the table. He was using the end of a small broom to do it and when he satisfied himself he wiped his hands on a rag, picked up the mallet and began hammering Michael’s body again: the arms, the hands which cracked with each thud of the mallet, the legs, buttocks, and back. The muscular man, while Tito and Roger screamed for him to stop, then placed his hand over the boy’s face and said Gonzalo would be pleased.
Roger tried to run when his turn came up. Two of the men caught him before he made it to the door. All three fell to the floor and one of the gangsters pulled out a 9 mm. and hit Roger at the back of the head with it. He was out cold.
The two gangsters dragged him to the table, stripped him and strapped him down. The large muscular man cleaned the oil off of the mallet, raised it, took a deep breath and brought the mallet down at the back of Roger’s legs. Roger screamed himself awake, his eyes wild while scanning the room. The acne-faced leader laughed. The hammer came down again and again. Roger couldn’t handle it as well as Michael. He kept passing out from the pain. The muscular man would reach near the bucket where he had a bottle of ammonia. The ammonia would wake Roger up in time for further beatings.
Then it was Tito’s turn. As they led him to the table his legs buckled but two men held him by the armpits and made sure he made it the whole way. He asked the leader why they were doing this. “Gonzalo is now very old. He can no longer bite from the apple of youth with the teeth of the aged.”
Tito couldn’t remember the beating. He took his mind back to Austin, back to a night he has spent in a hotel with a girl from St. Edwards University who had a boyfriend at the time. He hadn’t felt guilty. He had been madly in love with her for a long time before her boyfriend entered the picture. He had relished every moment, every touch, every smell, and when it was over she broke all ties with him. He was wondering, as the mallet fell on his body, as the oil was placed on his back and legs, what her breath smelled like now, what her hand felt like. Tito had always thought it took a lot of will power to detach your mind from your body but he had been wrong; it took a lot of pain.
The cartel members then dragged the three boys out to the back of the ranch, pulling their limp bodies by the arms toward a tall wooden statue of a man with the head of a goat and a grotesquely enlarged penis. The acne-scarred cartel leader laughed and wiped some spit from his lips. He turned to Tito and said in Spanish, “Now you boys are going to meet Gonzalo. You’ll see how we do things here on la Día De Los Inocentes. Gonzalo isn’t what he used to be in his prime. He doesn’t perform like he used to. His heart is fading and our power is fading too. We get our trucks in without being seen. We get invisibility from him. You…you will get plenty more, hermanito.”
They took Roger before the statue first. Roger had passed out during Tito’s torture and had not yet awaken. They lay him in the grass. Michael and Tito both looked on absently. The ritual of pain had made their bodies useless, their emotions drained of urgency. The muscular man who had beaten their bodies with the mallet neared with a large knife and plunged it deep into Roger’s chest. He cut his heart out quickly as if he had performed the operation numerous times before. He held the heart up to the night sky and said that here was the heart of an innocent. The cartel members lowered their heads and whispered solemn words as if at mass. The muscular man walked toward the statue with the heart in his hand held high. Tito noticed that the statue was licking its lips.