The Guardians (27 page)

And lately, Gabo don't hardly eat at all.

It started the morning we woke up and found la Tuerta Winnie dead. She was lying in the kitchen next to her bowls. Without saying a word,
we wrapped her in a colchita. Gabo and I carried the dog outside. We buried her next to the staghorn cactus that had claimed her eye. Now it had all of Winnie.

We went back in and silently got ready for our day.

That was weeks ago, but it feels like a lot longer than that. More bad was to come. That very night the sheriff and a deputy came to our door. Gabo had just got home from el Shur Sav. I was getting ready for bed. It had been a sad day because of how it had started. So when Gabo came in, we were still not speaking. We hardly spoke no more, anyway.

The pounding on the door startled us both. No more Winnie to warn us. Anybody could come up here, and we wouldn't know until it was too late. Too late for what? Just too late. The men wanted to ask Gabo a few questions, they said. Of course I knew the sheriff. We went back a long way. We were even in a class at the community college when we were young. He got his associate's degree. I didn't. He wasn't married back then. Now he was. “Buenas noches, Regina,” he said. He had come to tell us about Miguel's ex-wife. She was gone. Nobody knew nothing.

“What do you think happened to her?” I asked.

The sheriff shook his head. “We just need to ask your nephew some questions.”

I had to sit down. They came to ask Gabo about a note he'd gotten from Tiny Tears. The sheriff had an idea that Tiny Tears, or at least the Palominos, might have something to do with the kidnapping of Crucita Betancourt.

Kidnapping?

“Do you know for sure that she's really missing?” I asked. For a moment, I thought maybe she'd run off to elope with the preacher.

“Yes, ma'am, she's missing,” the deputy replied, but didn't say how exactly they were so sure.

First one person's loved one has gone missing and before you find him, someone else's goes missing. Things that terrible don't just keep happening to people, I thought. To what people? Just people. That's when I imagined the canyon. It was a canyon as treacherous as I could possibly visualize it. My mamá was born in La Barranca. She spent her life trying to get out. I wasn't born in the Copper Canyon like her. But I exist in a different kind of canyon. There's a lot of gente down here, too. Not just me. So it's not like I feel sorry for myself or even alone about it. I am sure not everyone in this canyon is condemned to stay down here with no way out his whole life. I was determined to see that my Gabo got out. Stand
on my shoulders, I'd say to mi sobrino. On my cabezahead, if you have to. Now all I could hear in my head were echoes. Gabo! Gabo! Gabo! I kept calling. Don't let him be lost in here, I prayed.

“Are you sure you did not mention Miguel's name to your friend María at school?” the sheriff asked Gabo.

“Who's María?” I asked.

María was Tiny Tears's name, María Dolores. She was a pain, all right, muchos dolores.

The sheriff was not being mean to my nephew. He even said he'd prefer not to have to take Gabo into the station. He was just trying to establish if there was a connection between the message Tiny Tears had given him, that Miguel told the authorities about, and the anonymous ransom letter that was left in the teacher's car.

“A note was left in Miguel Betancourt's car?” I asked. The sheriff nodded but offered no details. Gabo went to his room. He brought out the letter and handed it over. “I told her on the telephone that I couldn't help them. I said that I had promised someone on the grave of my mother.”

“You didn't ever say who that someone was?” the deputy asked Gabo.

“No, sir,” Gabo said. We were clutching hands.

“The note here states they had information about your missing dad,” the deputy said. I looked at Gabo. This was all news to me.

“Satan always lies to mock you,” Gabo told the deputy. The deputy and the sheriff exchanged looks, quién sabe what they thought. The sheriff assured me that he did not consider Gabo a suspect but his questioning him about the woman's disappearance made me feel no better.

Miguel was being questioned, too. “Ex-husbands are always persons of interest,” the sheriff told me when I stopped by the station and spoke to him about it. The El Paso police were questioning Miguel, not our sheriff from Cabuche, New Mexico. When it comes to legalities, living in a town divided into two states can make life somewhat confusing. Otherwise, as long as you're going about your own business, it really don't matter.

Crucita disappearing after Miguel tried to have a talk with my nephew was probably too much for el Chongo Man, because right away he stopped talking to me. Maybe he thought Gabo had something to do with it, even if only indirectly. Then again, he stopped talking to mostly everybody at the school. “Poor guy—it must be rough,” Mrs. Martínez whispered to me when he seemed to not see us in the office one day.

“I know how he feels,” I said to la secretary, who just looked at me. Me and Gabo had been in a private state of near-mourning over Rafa for
more than nine months. No one at the middle school but Miguel knew. I followed him out to his car as he was leaving the building, “Wait, please!” I called. “Wait.” Miguel could hear me, I was sure of it, but he kept walking, lanky strides carrying him fast toward his vehicle. “Es-pérate,” I then called in Spanish, like it was a language problem between us and not the preponderance of tragedies in our lives building sound barriers.

Finally, he stopped, but did not turn around to look at me. I was right behind him, looking up at his ample back and at that ponytail of his that I had come to adore. Yes, adore. Adore as in found very endearing or adore as in I had in fact fallen in love with the man, which one it was, I wasn't sure. “Miguel,” I pleaded, “you must believe Gabo. He don't know nothing. You never wanted to see him hurt and he never wanted to hurt you.”

Miguel turned around slowly. He couldn't even look me in the eye. “Regina, I don't blame Gabo. And I am not angry with you.” I pulled my sweater tight around me like I was cold all of a sudden. Then, getting in his car, he said, “Right now, I don't know who to blame. Most of all, my kids just need their mother back.”

MIGUEL

I have repeated it a dozen times. I don't know how it got left on the dashboard of my Mustang. It was parked in the teachers’ lot at the school. The top had been up. The car did not look tampered with to indicate any break-in, not the tiniest scratch by the lock. I checked it all out before I even read the note. I looked all around, too, as if I might catch whoever had messed with my ride. No one in sight.

Exactly two days after I saw Gabe, I got a little note of my own. My note wasn't in large, loopy writing. And it was very brief. The briefest of messages and direct. Composed of letters cut out from the newspaper, pasted on with school glue:
BETANCORT
—my surname was not the only misspelling—
A THUOSAND DOLLARS FOR YOUR WIFE. DONT CALL THE POLIC.

Yeah, it could've been Tiny Tears. But with no trace or clue about anything, I got no choice but to suspect everyone.

For a while I was the main suspect for the cops.

They thought I might have made that anonymous ransom note myself. After they asked me to take a polygraph, which I passed, I heard that Prescott Burke had volunteered to take a polygraph. Yeah, they checked Silver City, where her “fiancé,” the preacher, lives. The only thing they found out was that the Reverend Prescott Burke and Crucita would not have been getting married anytime soon since the man already had a wife. So you can just imagine his old lady's surprise when the FBI came to their door. It seems he hadn't seen Crucita for a while before she disappeared. And he had plenty of alibis to prove it. After we each were cleared, the officials on both sides no longer seemed predisposed to finding
her. Since she was involved with someone while we were still married and it was a married dude to boot, it seemed they thought she was capable of any kind of duplicitous behavior. So there was some speculation that maybe Crucita had just run off, maybe even with someone new.

Perfect, I thought. The victim herself was now a suspect.

The Feds took Crucita's computer so I never got a crack at going through her files myself. I just needed something to go on. One day I decided to go to the women's crisis center over in J-Town where she had been volunteering. I parked my car near the Puente and walked across. I found Casa de la Mujer by asking around. Yeah, the director told me, they knew my ex and had heard. “Women who come to the center sometimes disappear.” She said it as plain as that, like there was no point in sparing my feelings. Maybe she was jaded. One more woman obliterated, like a foot soldier lost in an undeclared war. “Sometimes their tragic fates are not left to the imagination,” she said. The director, an older, rubia, well-dressed woman, was a volunteer herself. The year before, their receptionist had been shot and killed in their own parking lot by her estranged husband. It was no surprise to anyone that abusive husbands would target a place that offered refuge for wives who, in their minds, had been so bold as to leave them. “Around here, Señor Betancourt,” the director said in English, “men still think they own the women.” Aside from being left with yet one more possibility as to what may have happened to Crucita, I had nothing else.

I stay up nights reading, all the while thinking how bad I've messed up.

Maybe she did decide to leave everybody, but I can't stop thinking the worst.

During the last month, I've gone through every single article I ever collected for my book on the dirty drug wars searching for a clue to something. I ran across all kinds of reports on the killings of hundreds of women all along the border in the last fifteen years. When I'd look over them before, just like with all the levantones—the kidnappings off the street of people who were suspected in some way of being a threat to a cartel—I could only ask myself, With so much money involved, how can anyone ever expect this savagery to stop? How much does a Mexican cop make? Forget that. How much did the former Mexican president make who took off to Switzerland after he left office?

It was hard to fathom how little girls and young women fit into the
equation of omnipotent kingpins’ power. But you start thinking about what drugs do to people's heads and how mutilated the bodies were and you can figure out the rest. There were snuff-film theories and theories about rich sadists. At least ten women have accused police of sexual assault and violence. So the cops are always suspect.

The governor of Chihuahua who was in office when the first murdered victims turned up actually blamed the girls, stating they had asked for it by being out at night. When he was reminded that girls worked the night shift in the maquilas, he still blamed the victims. No good girl would be out unescorted. And surely, he said, the girls were dressed provocatively, so they got what they deserved.

There was the case of an Egyptian who left the U.S. because of sexual-assault charges and in México was accused of at least one of the murders, but suspected to be behind others. He got arrested but the killings continued. Women kidnapped for organ harvesters was another conjecture since some women's bodies were found with vital organs missing—like Gabo's mom.

One guy was convicted of a couple of murders then he got away. He's still at large. There were the maquila bus drivers who were accused of some of the murders. Many others are suspected to be related to the drug cartels. Some Mexican gang members were picked up in the U.S. There have been all kinds of theories, all kinds of patsies, and even a few convictions. Usually when they bust someone it's a case of domestic violence. In México, a woman can't even press charges of domestic violence unless the wounds last longer than fifteen days. Some years back, if the judge did find a man guilty, the fine was a grand total of about twenty bucks.

That was four hundred victims ago.
Femicide
is the term that's been given to all of it. And the murders continue.

Tracing my ex's steps on that day myself has only made me go in circles. She crossed over about eleven in the morning. The customs officer remembered her because he knew her. It seems she went over to the other side almost every day at the same time. She was intent on getting that church started. She went to the storefront she was getting ready and met with several of her “brothers and sisters.” They were all questioned. More than once. By everyone, including me.