The Dogs of Mexico Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Quotes

  1 Home Is Where the Heart Is

  2 Inner Sanctum

  3 Wayfarer

  4 Unannounced

  5 The Big Book

  6 Downsize

  7 Jail

  8 Gift Basket

  9 Sojourner

  10 Guests

  11 Travel Arrangements

  12 One for the Road

  13 Contact

  14 Photos

  15 Slip out the Back Jack

  16 Abandoned

  17 Puerto Escondido

  18 Night Sweats

  19 El Perro Rojo

  20 The Uninvitedd

  21 Alleyway Number Seven

  22 Mabel

  23 Silverglitter Digit

  24 Dust to Dust

  25 Eatery

  26 Pursuit

  27 Pickup Truck

  28 Oaxaca

  29 Valdez

  30 A Difference of Opinion

  31 Helmut

  32 Csptives

  33 Madness

  34 Geraldo

  35 Hemorrhagic Pox

  36 Run

  37 Cleansing

  38 Disposables

  39 Nick

  40 Reentry

  41 Civil Disobedience

  42 Shot

  43 Exit

  44 Dr. Ayala

  45 Guanajuato

  Acknowledgments

  The

  Dogs of Mexico

  by

  John J Asher

  Brazos River Press

  Austin, Texas

  Copyright © 2012 John J Asher

  All rights reserved. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Places and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  “Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States.”

  —Porfirio Díaz 1830 – 1915

  “Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”

  —Mark Anthony

  1

  Home Is Where the Heart Is

  ROBERT BOHNERT PUSHED an old chug-popping lawnmower he had stolen from the maintenance shed, mowing his way back and forth toward the entrance to the state hospital. There wasn’t a gate, only two brick columns, one on either side of the narrow blacktop where it intersected Highway 87 on the outskirts of Big Spring, Texas.

  The iffy patients were kept under lock and key, but Robert had exhibited model behavior in the week he had been under observation, and Dr. Eisenberg had pretty much given him the run of the place. Eisenberg had lost his grandparents at Auschwitz and perhaps had a built-in resentment against anything resembling a police state. And it had been the police who peeled Robert’s hairline back with a marble-based desk lamp, delivering him first to the emergency room in Hardwater and then to Dr. Eisenberg at Big Spring. Robert saw the irony in it—that both Dr. Eisenberg and the police may have reacted differently had they known what he did for a living.

  If Robert had entertained any hope that the Company might intervene on his behalf, he wasn’t surprised by their silence. After all, the CIA frowned on its operatives making public spectacles of themselves. Just as well. He was done with them anyway.

  He took the plastic hospital bracelet he had cut off in the tool shed from his pocket and fed it through the mower with a short snapety-pop-snap sound. He idled the engine down, then knelt and pretended to tinker with the carburetor while scanning the compound. The grounds were empty but for an attendant standing watch over two wheelchair patients in a designated smoking area near the north end of the complex. Beyond, the sun touched down toward a stand of live oaks. Long shadows reached toward the maze of three-story redbrick buildings that comprised the hospital. The air smelled of the day’s heat, engine exhaust and fresh-cut grass.

  Robert left the mower idling and slipped behind one of the brick columns where he stripped off the baggy pants and gray shirt with STATE HOSPITAL stenciled across the back. Underneath, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. He spotted someone watching him from a second-floor window. But the window was barred.

  A hundred yards down the highway, he stepped off the shoulder and hid the rolled-up hospital garb in a clump of bristle grass along the fencerow. A hot dry wind lifted white caliche dust from the shoulder ahead, carried it toward him and let it down in silence. In addition to a natural absence of trees the scattered buildings on the outskirts of Big Spring were low and flat, pale with dust. Even the utility poles were invasive against the thin sky, and Robert felt singularly conspicuous—a lone figure on an endless plain, walking, in a part of the country where no one ever walked anywhere.

  A roar like a distant waterfall sounded from a quarter of a mile farther on where Highway 87 intersected I-20 near a truckstop. The complex was already lit though the sun hadn’t quite touched down, dragging stringy red contrails in its wake.

  A black-and-white patrol car sat nosed up to the curb in front of the adjoining restaurant. Any law officer seeing him would doubtless check him out—a man with a bandaged head, hitching the Interstate? If so, he was done for, having no identification and no money, his personal belongings confiscated by the Hardwater police, then transferred by a deputy sheriff to the Big Spring facility after his wife had had him committed for observation.

  He sauntered past the patrol car, inhaling the smell of grilled hamburger and onions, hot asphalt and diesel exhaust. He crossed the access road and half slid down the embankment alongside the overpass to the I-20 shoulder below. He dusted himself off, then dodged across west- and eastbound lanes, traffic whooping past. A state highway sign on the eastbound side read: FORT WORTH – 258 MILES. He stood under the overpass looking toward the bridge abutment opposite, only the truckstop’s sign on its high pole visible above.

  He stepped out from the overpass’s long shadow, thumb out. Traffic whipped by, the whappety-whappety-whappety of eighteen-wheelers on asphalt ridges, semis trailing heat-wrinkled exhaust from twin stacks.

  Five minutes later a patrol car appeared in the distance behind. Robert considered making a run for it. But run where? The cruiser slowed, turned his overheads on, then eased off the pavement and came to a stop on the apron of dust-powdered grass between Robert and the frontage road atop the slope to his right. A city cop. Watching him steady through the open window. The radio making noise, somebody saying Jeff had just called in a ten-sixty-six over on the interstate.

  The officer squinted. “Evening, Where you headed if I might ask?”

  Robert took a step toward the car. “Sure. Separation. About twenty miles south of Hardwater.”

  The officer eyed him closely. “What happened to your head?”

  “Got mugged. I’m trying to get home.”

  “Identification?”

  Robert’s pulse had picked up, but there wasn’t a lot more anyone could do to him. “That’s the thing,” he said. “They took my wallet, money, credit cards, everything.”

  “Yeah? Where’d this happen at?”

  “El Paso,” he said, not thinking it through.

  That got the officer’s attention—El Paso, Texas’s own backyard to the land of drug cartels and murder by the truckload.

  “Okay. Stand back. Put your hands on your head.”

  Robert did as told. “Took my damn pickup too.”

  “Spread your legs,” the officer said, stepping out, right hand cupped over his holstered pistol. “Put your hands on the car. Now!”

  He put his hands on the car. “Why? What’d I do?”

  “Okay, spread your legs. Hands behind your back. Easy.”

  “You’r
e taking me in? For what? Getting mugged?”

  The radio was going again, a note of urgency in the dispatcher: “Jeff? Anson? We got a two-one-one, guy with a sawed-off shotgun at the 7-Eleven on Birdwell. Repeat, this is a two-one-one, a thirty-three priority. Use caution. Repeat.”

  “God damn,” said the officer, looking at Robert. A moment of indecision as the dispatcher continued to issue orders for all units to converge on the 7-Eleven—a thirty-three, urgent.

  The officer already had his handcuffs out, but replaced them in the cuff holster on his belt. He snapped the flap shut, opened the cruiser door and slid in behind the wheel—calling the dispatcher: “Dispatch? Jeff here. I’m on my way. ETA five minutes”—yelling back at Robert—“God damn son, this is your lucky day.” He threw the cruiser in gear and peeled out onto the Interstate east, lights flashing, siren winding out, traffic getting out of the way. A few hundred yards down, he braked hard, throwing up a cloud of dust as he skidded across the median back onto the Interstate west before shooting off onto the frontage road. Lights, siren, engine—wide open. The cruiser disappeared behind the embankment with only the truckstop’s sign visible above. Robert could hear the siren. Then another one in the distance.

  Whoa. Thank you, thank you, Robert breathed, either to himself or to whoever was in charge of the fortuitous timing of human events.

  He put his thumb out and within minutes a Silverado Crew Cab pulling a horse trailer braked and slowed to a stop. Robert trotted up alongside and hopped in.

  The driver, a middle-aged Mexican in jeans and a shirt with snaps and piping, eyed him closely, wishing perhaps he hadn’t been so quick to stop.

  “Where to?” The driver’s gaze lingered briefly on Robert’s bandaged head.

  “Hardwater. About sixty miles straight on down the road here, if you’re going that far.”

  Robert explained that he had wrecked his pickup and bunged himself up a bit. They talked ranching, the lack of rain, the pros and cons of miles and miles of wind turbines standing out across the country—ugly as hell, said the driver, unless you owned a dozen or so.

  Robert spotted one Highway Patrol just off a side road, radaring traffic, and another coming out of Colorado City. But that was it. Darkness had closed over the long country when the driver pulled off near an overpass skirting Hardwater and let him out.

  “Thanks again,” Robert said.

  He walked steadfast in the lingering heat past shotgun houses of stucco and native rock interspersed with prefabricated metal buildings—pawnshops, insurance offices, auto repair. Crickets made gritty music from the shadows. June bugs banged over and over into the outside lighting, popped under the tires of traffic and smelled like burnt plastic. Staying to the shadows, Robert strolled past the darkened courthouse and skirted the Texas State Bank. In semidarkness he crossed the railroad tracks, the ground flagged with pinches of cotton from the cottonseed oil mill. He made his way through a neighborhood of rundown houses and barking dogs to where his pickup waited under a high porch fronting the old boarded-up Igloo Ice House.

  He took a key from under the frame and unlocked the drivers door, smiling now, seeing the cab full of cardboard boxes. He hadn’t realized he was hungry until the smell of fried chicken and homemade rolls caused his saliva glands to act up. In addition to chicken and rolls Ziploc’d beneath two towels, there were Tupperware containers of garden-fresh tomatoes, sliced cantaloupe, a big serving of peach cobbler and a quart Mason jar of tea, the ice melted. Three more boxes contained clothes and a Dopp kit with a safety razor, toothbrush, floss, aftershave.

  An envelope taped beneath a box flap held ten hundred-dollar bills, ten twenties and a note:

  Dear Robbie, I pray we are

  all doing the right thing.

  Let us know where you are.

  We love you, Mom and Dad.

  Robert sat for a moment, already missing the life he was never to have again—his parents, Tricia, little Nick. Robert visualized his four-year-old son in his room surrounded by his toys.

  His son. Nick. Dead.

  If only to stand once more in Nick’s little world, his personal space, to breathe some residual essence. And, since Trish and Stanford were out of the country…

  He folded the note into his pocket, then drove south out of Hardwater, chicken wing in hand. The loamy odor of fresh-plowed earth and the perfumed smell of wildflowers seeped through the air vents, stirring his memory—tractors and combines and long fields of red sorghum….

  In another twenty minutes he drove into Separation.

  More than fifteen years before, he and the other FFA boys at the high school had put up a sign between the blacktop and the football field: GO MUSTANGS, and under that, SEPARATION TEXAS – POP 347.

  On his left a brick schoolhouse and gymnasium stood back from the highway. On the right a general store, post office and cafe huddled shoulder to shoulder among a half-dozen little shoebox houses. Here and there a window was lit, TVs flickering behind drawn shades.

  Five miles farther he slowed and turned in over a cattleguard near a mailbox that still had his name on it. As expected the house was dark. Empty.

  He stepped down out of the pickup and stood in the yard, listening to the silence, gazing up at the Milky Way—a shower of crushed ice tossed across the night sky. He recalled a night some two years before standing on this same spot with a rapt Nick cradled on his forearm, both of them looking at a big full moon as Robert tried to explain it in terms of the autumnal equinox. But of course Nick was too young to— Goodnight Moon! Nick’s picture book. That’s the memento he would take.

  He removed the spare key from behind the rain gauge on the stone fence and let himself in. Already the house was airless and smelled of dust. He turned the lights on, drawn immediately to the master bedroom where for five years he and Tricia had slept cuddled in intimacy, forever catching up after months of separation. His chest felt constricted. Hard to breathe.

  He slid open the mirrored doors to Tricia’s closets. Her things were typically disordered. Expensive clothes wadded into closet corners, strewn on the floor. He smelled her intimate musky scent, experienced a moment of déjà vu, the two of them together.

  Stanford’s banking suits filled Robert’s closets. Neater than Tricia’s.

  Robert stepped into the hallway and paused before his son's door. He braced himself for the emotional impact of standing once again among Nick’s things—his bed with its stuffed animals, the toy box with his trucks and balls and LEGO’s, the table with his Thomas and Friends train set—each item so identifiable with Nick that his very presence was palpable. Robert relived moments—tucking Nick in at night, the clean baby-powder smell, the eager, trusting eyes, the mop of unkempt hair.

  He pushed the door open and stopped cold. It took a moment to accept that the room was entirely bare. Not a stick of furniture. Not a single Sesame Street poster. Nothing.

  Robert stumbled back against the wall and slid to the floor, hugging himself, clutching his elbows. A grainy blackness began to materialize in the peripheral of his vision, drifting, floating down like a thin curtain of metal filings. He sat still, barely breathing, determined to keep his wits. The curtain began to dissolve and soon disappeared into nothingness. Willful, scrabbling on hands and knees, he managed to get to his feet.

  He tore open Nick’s closets. Empty. He ripped through the hall closets, scattered blankets and sheets, towels, placemats, and tablecloths. He went through the boxes in Tricia’s closets.

  No Goodnight Moon.

  No anything.

  Tricia’s Honda Pilot was parked in the garage, but his tools were gone. Table saw. Air compressor. Lawnmower. The pegboard above the workbench, empty.

  Two cardboard boxes stood at the rear, stacked one on the other. Inside, wrapped in newspapers, he found cut-crystal bowls and porcelain platters that had belonged to his great-grandmother. Folded within a baby blanket was an eight-by-ten framed photo, one of those Olan Mills jobs with the soft backgroun
d. In the photo Robert stood with Tricia, three-year-old Nick between. She was a beautiful woman, a blue-eyed brunette smiling with what he had once thought of as innocent seductiveness. They had sat for it the previous year when he was home on leave. Later, she sent a copy to him in Afghanistan and the Company forwarded it to his NSP address in Cairo—NSP: No Such Place. The photo had been signed: Love Always, Trish.

  He took it back inside and propped it near the front door.

  He lit six candles in the candelabras on the teak dining table. After propping open the French doors to the kitchen, he pulled the gas range out of its slot in the island, took hold of the flexible metal line behind and jerked it back and forth until a hissing noise jetted out and he smelled the rotten-egg stink of propane.

  He took a last look around. Then picked up the Trish photo, locked the door on his way out and replaced the key behind the rain gauge.

  He was driving past the GO MUSTANGS sign when a flare of light blossomed on the horizon in his rearview mirror. Almost immediately a soft thud shivered the pickup.

  2

  Inner Sanctum

  Three Years Later

  DUANE FOWLER SAT at the Louis XVI roll-top secretary in his study. The upstairs room was little more than an alcove in a large redbrick 1880s Georgian he shared with his wife Susan in Society Hill, an upscale neighborhood of tree-lined cobblestone streets near the downtown center of Historic Philadelphia.

  It was a house he could scarcely afford, the desk a repository of accumulating bills Susan dutifully collected in an old Easter basket that she kept out of sight beneath the roll-top, awaiting his attention.

  At forty-five, when many of his peers were already anticipating early retirement, Duane was wrestling with the specter of financial ruin. He hated the damn house, he hated the faggy Marie Antoinette French Provincial furniture, and at the moment he hated his wife and his two sons. Bankrupting him. His wife by way of Saks and Bergdorf’s, the boys by way of Yale and Purdue.