Part 7, Conclusion: Loma Larga

The men picked Lobo up and pushed him into the back seat of a car. Two of them got in the back with him, one on each side. As soon as they pulled away, they started pounding on Lobo with their fists, first blinding him with blows to his face then gagging him with shots to his stomach when he made the mistake of blocking his head. He hunched forward convulsively, and one of the men pinned him down like that while the other one walloped his back. He couldn't breathe.

The driver turned on the radio, blasting that sort of polka-beat music from the speakers that Lobo had always hated. He'd always called it "nacho-dip music," it made him think of tourist-traps where White people would get trashed on margaritas at lunch.

Lobo was halfway passed out, they had eased up some on the pounding so long as he didn't try to talk or move, just an occasional whack to the ribs or kidneys. Their hands must have been sore. The music bounced along in a staccato beat, whining nasal lyrics sing-songing up and down.

God, how Lobo hated that nacho-dip music.

“Quit hitting him I said!"

"What the hell do you care, Rupert? You like this pendejo now?"

"Fuck him. It's my car, ass-hole. You hit him too much, he's gonna puke blood in my car."

They threw him out of the car onto the street, and then pulled away. Lobo lay there for a minute getting the feel of the asphalt on his cheek and palms, tasting the blood in his mouth.

It could have been worse.

He dragged himself into a sitting position. At least his legs felt OK. His side hurt whenever he breathed. His teeth were bloody, a split lip, but his nose and eyes felt OK. There'd be bad bruises, but not much worse.

Fucking pussies. He would have been dead if they'd had any balls.

At least his legs felt OK. He looked around the neighborhood. He had no idea where this street was. It was a third-world dream of shaky home-made houses with rebar sticking out of the tops of buildings, tires stacked on the flat roofs.

Lobo guessed he was in some raw section of town on the outskirts of the city, he figured those guys ditched him out here just so somebody local could enjoy finishing him off.

Lobo stood up. He didn't feel faint, and that surprised him.

So. The cops were after him, Marisol and Juan had turned traitor, and he was broke, with some new enemies, in a town way down in Mexico. There was nothing to do but hide. The States weren't safe, Monterrey sure wasn't safe. He had to get out of town before the cops noticed him. Beat all blue like this and stinking, they'd notice him. Lobo decided to head for the countryside. He wasn't afraid of the country like some people were. There would be farms.

He wondered what time it was. His watch was missing now too. He guessed it must be three or four in the morning.

Lobo started shuffling uphill, on crooked empty streets past blind shuttered windows. Somewhere up this hillside, he knew the town would peter out into squatters' shacks, tents even. He'd seen them before and started to see them again as the streets changed into irregular steps, the houses became huts, with corrugated metal roofs held down by large rocks, and water dripping from rusty pipes.

Cats scuttled away as Lobo climbed past their sleeping places. He ignored them, sniffing, searching for any sign of chickens.

After about a half-hour's climb, the ground leveled off and opened up. It was a large garbage dump. Lobo thought he heard pigs. He picked his way through the rotting filth, and soon he stood at the other edge of the cleared area.

But instead of seeing the blackness of open country, he found himself looking at the twinkling of more street lights in a valley down below. He backtracked through the dump and stared back in the direction from whence he'd come, which he now knew to be north.

Lobo knew where he was now. He wasn't anywhere near the edge of Monterrey yet. On the contrary, this hill he was on was Loma Larga, the big ridge near the middle of things, and north of him was downtown, all lit up even at this hour in a grid pattern. South of here would be the new part of town, stretching for miles, with back-stabbing Juan's El Escarabajo night-club somewhere among its broad, open streets. If he were to go down there, he'd stand out like a leper at the beach during Spring Break.

Up here in this shanty-town on Loma Larga, he was in as much of a prison as he'd ever been—safe from the cops, maybe—but unable to slip out unnoticed.

Lobo sat down where he could see the downtown, the cathedral, that big orange monument thing, the new hotels rising up. That big building with the Coca-Cola sign was next to where he used to catch movies with Marisol.

He felt around him on the damp ground. Old cans, loose bricks, rags, something slimy that smelled like rotten cabbage. There wouldn't be any bottles even, those would all get scrounged for deposits.

Well, a piece of brick would do. It was hefty, with a jagged end.

Lobo put his head in his hands. Think, think. He heard the footsteps coming up behind him, and he sat up straight, listening, palming the piece of broken brick.

A reedy voice scraggled out at him: "Jose... hey... Jose..."

"What do you want?"

"Damn, guey, you scared me—hey, you're not Jose..."

"No."

Lobo could barely make out a skinny man with bushy hair who looked young. He had the goofy smile and vague manner of a glue-sniffer, and Lobo untensed. Huffers like this guy were the lowest of the low—they'd get that smile after hours of sucking down fumes from paint, gasoline, any kind of solvents—goofy, and usually harmless too.

Lobo lowered the brick out of sight. The young man sat down next to him and said, "This is the nicest view of the city...uh... Are you a Gringo?"

"Yeah. That's Mr. Gringo to you."

"Mr. Gringo... huh huh huh... It's a nice view of the city... you see the brewery there and the cathedral there and the palace..."

"Look," Lobo interrupted, "That's nice, but I personally don't give a fuck about the cathedral or any of that shit."

The young man seemed to concentrate and said "Are you in trouble, guey? Are you hungry? I got some friends, they'll give you some breakfast, help you out..."

When Lobo didn't respond, the young man reached out and shook Lobo's shoulder, saying "Hey, you OK? Hey..."

"Don't touch me, you goddam faggot," snapped Lobo, smacking away the man's hand.

"Hey... I just... I just..."

"Fuck you," snarled Lobo, turning his head to face the man as he cursed him.

The young man peered at Lobo's face: "Hey, somebody fucked you up, guey... I got some friends, they'll clean you up, they always look out for me..."

He reached out, brushing Lobo's face with his fingertips as he gestured, misjudging the distance.

"Fuck you, faggot!" bellowed Lobo as the brick was rebounding backwards from the young man's skull before he even realized he had struck him, then the man was rolling backwards and Lobo was on his feet, kicking and stomping him wherever there was an opening as the stricken man twisted and writhed. Only when Lobo almost tripped did he realize he had been screaming as he attacked the man, the echo came back from across the dump.

Lobo stopped for a second, out of breath. The young man was rocking back and forth on the ground, moaning, holding his head. Lobo threw the brick against his shoulder, gave him another kick, and said in English: "Get the fuck away from me. Get out, get out."

Then he kicked the young man several more times as he crawled away whimpering in that broken reedy voice of his. His weakness made Lobo want to keep hurting him, but at the same time he was very tired. He let the man crawl off into the darkness of the dump, then he walked back to his spot and sat down again, breathing a deep sigh.

Christ, that felt good. His ankles and toes hurt from some of the wilder kicks he'd dished out, but it still felt good. Lobo idly considered going back and finding the young man, wherever he'd crawled off to, and kicking him into a broken-bone coma. But it wasn't worth the effort. Anyway, he'd already busted that weaslely little huffer up good enough that he'd just slide down the hill and die. Lobo thought of some little kid opening the front door in a few hours to go to school and finding that mangled piece of shit on the stoop, flies buzzing, choked blue on his own vomit, or dead from internal injuries.

Lobo chuckled.

He relaxed then. He'd just done a public service for his new neighborhood. Sure, that huffer had friends. So he said. Not the kind of friends who would ever come try and avenge him. Still, just in case, Lobo pawed around some more and easily found another broken brick. In the daylight he'd get something better. The garbage dump must be a treasure-trove of makeshift weapons, splintered hunks of wood with nails poking out, rusty iron bars, shattered glass or lengths of pipe, all sorts of things you could use to murder a man here. Lobo felt secure.

He watched over the peaceful city.

For once, he could just sit and think. All this running and fighting the last 24 hours had kept him from thinking.

Marisol had been his big hope for changing the way he was. He had known where he was headed without her. Months back, when she had told him she was pregnant, for the first time ever he had a map, a plan. Then after the abortion, it was as if it had never been.

The sky lightened a bit to the east.

Then the second time she got pregnant, and swore she'd have it, he'd given it everything he'd had.

It was so hard to remember things sometimes. Lobo knew it was because he could make himself forget things he didn't want to see again. His mom's trailer with the cheap panelling you could split with a fist. Cousins backing away wide-eyed after a game had gone too far. And that jail, he could really block that memory out, of when he'd been 18 and skinny and cocky and the cops said he'd resisted, so they put him in with—with those—the bastard cops had laughed, he could hear their self-conscious chuckling between his screams.

No. It was good to forget bad things. Lobo couldn't look at those things again.

The round white moon rose over the Cerro de la Silla and picked out every detail around him with sharp blue lines, and Lobo remembered his last night with Marisol.

He saw her anxious face again as she begged for his understanding, they were sitting in the cab of his Toyota pickup there in the alley in Laredo. He remembered understanding what she meant just a moment too late, "I just couldn't let you go around thinking that you were the father..."

It wasn't that the words weren't clear, it was just that they would slip out of his head before he could put them together again, and he saw her face again, smiling for a second as it was lit orange from beneath by the muzzle-blast of the Beretta, then her moans and convulsions that took forever to end while he sat there frozen next to her with the pistol in his hand.

He saw his truck as it must have looked to Lawson the cop, two young lovers out parking, trespassing perhaps...

Marisol hadn't answered her phone a single time he'd tried to call since he'd come to Mexico. She couldn't. All day long she'd been on a table in a morgue in Laredo. He knew that.

He knew that.

Lobo slowly started shaking, and he slumped backwards into the trash. He lay there sobbing, moaning, laughing a forgotten prayer: "Oh God oh God forgive me God..."

The prayer rang false. He was alone. He sniffled a bit, then tried the words again: "Oh God…"

It was no good. Lobo kept crying, but it wasn't for Marisol. It wasn't for the baby, hell, the kid wasn't even his. He was crying for himself.

He had deserved so much better.

Lobo was still sobbing and and trying to pray a few minutes later. He wondered if God heard him. Lobo certainly never heard the footsteps, several sets of footsteps, coming from the same direction that the injured young man had crawled away, creeping like hunters, coming carefully, stealthfully, and with cold deadly intent.

THE END

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