The Starshine Connection (15 page)

The monotony of the buzzing flies was broken by the commotion in the cell at the back. Fuentes loved to make his diversion
last, and Cholla sensed that he needed no help. Cholla’s lunch was starting its own revolution in his stomach, and he wanted
to avoid agitating the mess if at all possible. He also knew that Fuentes preferred to take his sadistic pleasures alone for
more than one reason—sometimes it was the only sexual relief he got.

In the back, the banging and thrashing stopped, and Cholla nodded to himself.
Madre de Dios,
but Fuentes was a
basural

But Fuentes was not conforming to the fantasy with which Cholla pleased his own prejudices at the moment, since he called
out for Cholla’s assistance—nothing urgent; he only called out once, and casually. Cholla, a stickler for form—this being
a reactionary trait, with an eye toward Fuentes’s sloppiness—unholstered his pistol nevertheless, as he approached the second
cell. It was the cell at the end of the abbreviated “hallway,” more properly a cave passage. The door was open.

Warily—it seemed
too
quiet in there—Cholla entered.

Slayton caught him gun-first, vising Cholla’s extended arm and whipping him into the cell with a snapping action that tore
the pistol from his grasp and propelled him against the adobe wall. Cholla caught the impact on his shoulder blades with a
grunt, rebounding off the wall, charging Slayton in the narrow space.

The long-barreled Colt came up in Slayton’s other hand and spit a hot wad of lead into Cholla’s right shoulder. The blast,
in the tiny cell, smacked the eardrums with vacuum force. In a second the room was exuding the acrid stench of burning gunpowder.
The jacketed slug lifted Cholla off the floor and piled him into the corner next to the prostrate Fuentes. Slayton had opened
Fuentes’s head up along the eyebrow ridge, taking advantage of the man’s obesity to drive him into the rough edge of the hewn
bunk that was the cell’s only furniture. The sharp bones of his brow split the fatty tissue and burst scalp veins; the result
was redly messy. Fuentes was not seriously hurt, but his entire face and chest were drenched in blood. Cholla’s eyes opened
to wide circles at the sight, before the instant shock from the bullet wound put him under. His head sagged, and he was out
cold.

Slayton did not regret roping the
compadres
together and locking them in the cell; they’d both live. Reflex and instinct were his principal motivators now, and he had
little interest in fairness or legality. His consciousness had shifted over to the jungle-cat aspect that often serves men
in deep shock or extreme exhaustion: stress so severe that it breaches physical limitations and taps a basic, core energy
for the tasks at hand.

Slayton stripped away Cholla’s boots, since they had taken his own shoes before chucking him into the cell. He found the jeep
keys in Fuentes’s shirt pocket, and a scatter of small-coin cash on both. He had left his ID and personals in the hotel. The
only thing on him in the warehouse had been cash, which of course was nowhere to be found.

There was no telephone in the station. Slayton took both pistols and tossed them onto the suicide seat of the jeep. He loaded
an ice chest full of beer he found in the office, and, after checking around quickly, found an ancient bottle of aspirin and
a pot of cold coffee. The coffee was nauseating, but the taste assured him it was practically pure caffeine. He washed down
a fistful of the chalky tablets with it, and threw the pot aside.

Minutes later he was barreling down the solitary trail in the jeep, looking for signs of life in the desert. He had absolutely
no idea of where he was, other than somewhere in Mexico. Frustration plied his mind, and knife-keen pain prodded his arms
and legs as he labored through the motions of simple driving. Every rut and chuckhole in the crude road announced itself to
his nerve endings. He grimaced, teeth throbbing, and drove on.

It was high noon. The sun fried his eyeballs.

There were almost a hundred well-weathered signs clinging to and leaning against the interconnected series of shacks. The
CURIOS and CERVEZA signs seemed to stitch the buildings together. The gritty plumes of dust rearing up from under Slayton’s
jeep wheels were the only signs of life for miles, and Slayton himself knew little except that he was on a northbound road.
That much he could deduce from the slow passage of the sun toward its grave in the west. The radio in the jeep was deader
than the thick, hot air. Even if Slayton had not been injured, it would have been painful to breathe.

The ramshackle structure had front windows, but the only clean one was obscured by a massive, rusting COCA-COLA disk. The
metal of the various signs clicked in the heat. Slayton dismounted the jeep, and took a cursory look around. The place was
not nearly shabby enough to be abandoned or unoccupied. He would have called out if he could have.

He became aware of a baleful eye, glaring at him over the pitted rim of the Coca-Cola sign. It vanished, and a moment later
a nearly unhinged screen door was kicked out of the way by the proprietor of the strange place.

“Buenos dias,”
the man said, simply enough. He rolled his baleful gaze up and down Slayton in a single sweep, and then said, “I speak English,
señor.
You have been hunting in the desert?”

He was a withered and short man, baked to an almost fleshless nutty brown by the sun. He was skeletal, but his eyes blazed
with life and intelligence. A pale blue chambray workshirt at least ten years old fluttered from his frame, and he moved along
with an odd gait that kept him immobile from the waist up, knees bending and feet stepping mechanically, rather in the fashion
of a marionette whose puppeteer is not yet adept. Slayton let the piercing gaze transfix him, knowing that, to the little
man at least, he must look like a lost soul up from hell for a quick beer.

As the man asked about hunting, his eyes fell to the pistols still resting on the front seat of the jeep.

“You don’t have to worry about the guns,
compadre,”
Slayton said. It emitted from his throat like a croak. He had destroyed a beer or two en route, but knew the alcohol would
only make him thirstier in the desert—and worse, it would act as a mild sedative, dulling him. It might blunt the pain, but
the pain was keeping him awake, and, so far, alive.

“I don’t worry about the guns,” the man answered. His voice was a kind of reedy nasal buzz with overpowering Spanish inflections.
“You have blood all over your shirt-front,” he noted dispassionately.

“Somebody tried to kill me,” Slayton said, equally detached. “I have to get to a telephone. I have to call the United States.”

“You are driving the police jeep.”

“It was the police who tried to kill me,
señor,”
Slayton said, wondering if a jump toward the pistols on the seat would be worth it.

The old man seemed to consider this for a moment. He showed absolutely no sign of fear, or any indication that anything was
wrong. His expression was more one of idle curiosity. The last thing Slayton expected him to do was laugh.

His laughter was thin and pallid, but it was honest. The little man’s face seamed into a thousand-wrinkled map of smile furrows;
what few yellow teeth he had left were exposed. He pointed as he laughed.

“That is Fuentes’s gun. His
pistola.”
He seemed to find that even more amusing.

“They aren’t dead,” Slayton said, a bit giddy.

“I know,” said the man, as though he were some kind of mystic. “Those two are deserving of death, but not yet prepared to
die. Fuentes and Cholla.” He laughed again. “You are the first man ever to escape their place of murder and torture. For that
you deserve respect. You will probably not live very long if they are still alive.” He related this with a pragmatic deadness
of tone.

“Is there a telephone?” Slayton said. His skull was pounding sickly; he suddenly felt the urge to vomit. It was the heat.

“There is no telephone,” the man said. “No telephone for two hundred miles.” He turned back toward the screen door. “Come
inside, out of the sun. You cannot drive two hundred miles.” He was right.

Dazed, and realizing the old man had the more sense of the two of them at that moment, Slayton obediently followed him into
the cool, damp sanctuary of the building.

The old man’s name was Ramon Dagoberto Enrique Lucia Jesus de la Villa Ortega. He had been called “Wheelo” as a boy, and was
nicknamed Chispa, which meant “quick-witted.” “You may call me
señor
Ortega,” he told Slayton helpfully.

Slayton had sunk into the comfortable shadows of an easy chair, his stomach loaded with citrus juice and cold tea into which
Ortega had sprinkled a combination of powders. Slayton did not want to know what they were. The headache, the nausea, and
the grinding pain in his bones subsided, and now he was quite naturally exhausted—drained dry and beaten thin. The prospect
of eating was not as disgusting as it had been several hours before. He felt pretty chipper for a man who, according to Ortega,
should have been dead.

He sat quietly, knocked out of time-sync by whatever medicinal mickey Ortega had slipped him, while the old man rattled about
doing his chores and talking in his general direction. The room in which Slayton sat was filled with arcane bric-a-brac. His
eyes wandered sleepily over it all as Ortega talked.

“I grew to know both men well,” Ortega said. “Fuentes was an
hijo de puta,
the kind that feeds a scorpion to a hill of ants and watches while the scorpion stings itself to death. I once swore to kill
him after he struck me and knocked me to the ground, bleeding from the mouth.”

“What happened?” said Slayton. “If anyone deserves a death of vengeance, it’s a sadist like Fuentes.” He recalled being held
by the hair and having his teeth jarred by the hammy fist. Slayton dimly remembered the sensations of spit in his face, of
crawling on the dirt floor to the rhythm of Fuentes’s boot.

“I was a younger man, and angry all the time,” Ortega said. “I used to plot to kill him; now I sell him
cerveza.
I understood that he would not change, but that I might. I did not wish to become like him.” He shrugged. “Can you understand
such a thing?”

Slayton could have blown away both men in the cell with their own guns. His not doing so he had excused for reasons of expediency,
the need to escape. He knew it was not entirely true. But he knew that Fuentes had run up a huge bill that would someday be
due and payable on behalf of the old man, of himself, of other victims. His ethics and his sense of justice warred.

“Cholla was different,” Ortega continued, “but just as bad. As Fuentes was cruel, so was Cholla corrupt. It was not difficult
for them to end up in uniform.”

“Why didn’t Fuentes just kill me right away?” said Slayton.

“Fuentes hates the Anglos, the
gabachos.
He probably wanted to make you last. Did they give you drugs? Did they give you the
agua fria?
Fuentes made the mistake of taking so much pleasure that he forgot he was letting the drugs wear off.”

“How do you know that?”

Ortega shrugged again, like someone to whom everything is equally obvious. “Do you think you are the first man the
mero-meros
have sent down here to be killed? Fuentes would get a sparkle in his eye whenever there was a new one. There have been many
times I have seen such a sparkle, when he comes down to buy supplies to take to the desert station. It is in the middle of
nowhere, near the Mesa Locote. What other purpose could it serve?

“You know all this, and yet—?”

“I know,” Ortega interrupted. “But I am, as I have said and as you no doubt can see, an old man. I will live in this place
until I die. I am prepared to die. I say this without sorrow, for everyone dies, and I have had a full life. But I am not
willing to be killed by Fuentes, or his kind, or the American masters they serve.” He motioned toward the curtain, on the
other side of which was his little shop with its small stock of staples, desert gear, and utility items. The little shelf
of liquor. The Coca-Cola machine from the Middle Ages—the kind with bottles trapped by the neck in a coin maze. The cooler
of beer. Under the counter, cartridges in faded boxes. A cigar box half-f of fresh smokes, another with the receipts from
the gasoline pump outside, another full of screws and bolts that might someday find use.

“This is all I have,” he said, conclusively.

Slayton relaxed, not into unconsciousness, but calm sleep. While he was out, Ortega applied an astringent to his more serious
cuts and wounds, chatting as though Slayton were still awake. It did not matter. He got so few people with whom to pass the
time in pleasant conversation that it did not matter whether they were paying attention or not.

A small backwater of Slayton’s mind did manage to find excitement, even though he was drifting off fast. The
cholo
barrio dwellers were the functionaries of the Star-shine ring, not the leaders.
El mero mew,
the head man, the big cheese, was a
gringo.

Ortega improvised some clean bandages and set Slayton’s nose, applying a swath of bandage across it that was to impede Slayton’s
vision over the next few weeks. As evening rolled into chilly night, he cut away Slayton’s shirt with a bone-handled hunting
knife. The edge, stone-whetted until the blade would split the lines on the pad of a man’s thumb at the slightest touch, halved
the bloody and stinking fabric with a tiny ringing sound. Ortega covered Slayton with a blanket, and Slayton automatically
drew it around him. He slept deeply, hardly moving at all throughout the night.

Slayton awoke alone, cataloging the hurts even before opening his eyes. His mouth tasted like a jockstrap locker, but the
sleep-numbness throughout his body deadened the pain a litttle. Until he tried to move. His joints were particularly raw,
sanded down to the nerve endings and sealed up with molten slag that had cooled into solid lead. But he felt better. He discovered
he was bandaged and shirtless. The danger of infection in some of his more serious gashes and cuts had been staved off by
Ortega’s ministrations, and the wounds seemed less tender and inflamed.