Chapter 24
Loving
Disclaimer: Sands and El Mariachi do not belong to me, but to Robert Rodriguez
Rating: R for language and sexual situations
Summary: How it all ends
Author's Note: Slash warning ahead.
The words Sands says later in this chapter to Chiclet are one half of the motto of the Central Intelligence Agency.
****
Noon found them still in bed.
He had asked once about Chiclet, worried that the boy would find them here, naked sweat-slicked limbs still entwined. El had shushed him, saying it was Tuesday, a school day. That was the last time they had spoken, and that had been a few hours ago. Words had not been needed on this morning.
He was lying flat on his back. El's head rested on his left hip, below the sling and his damaged hand. El's left arm was draped across his thighs, El's fingers idly tracing patterns on his right hip. It tickled a little, but Sands didn't move. At that moment, it didn't matter that his hand felt like someone had shoved it full of broken glass. It didn't matter that he had no eyes, or that he couldn't see. Right then, at that particular moment in time, he had never felt so content.
El began to croon something, a soft song. The lyrics were in English, but the mariachi only sang maybe one word in three. The tune was nothing Sands had heard before.
El slid down and scooted up, so he could lay with his head on the pillow and his cheek resting on Sands' shoulder. He pressed a kiss to the patch of skin he could reach. "Que quieres en la vida?"
What do you want in life?
Sands let out a long, slow breath. "I don't know," he said. "No sé."
He wanted.... What did he want?
He wanted things to remain like this forever. These feelings of contentment, of peace. The feeling of belonging, something he had never known before. The silence in his head. The security of knowing El was there beside him. El's breath warm on his skin. To hell with the rest of the world. Why couldn't he stay like this forever?
"What about you?" he asked. "What do you want?"
"You," El said. "Only you." The mariachi's arm slid about him, El's fingers coming to rest lightly on his stomach. Three days ago he had been beaten so badly he was still pissing blood, but today none of that seemed to matter. El knew how to touch him, how to coax pleasure from his body. El was the one.
And then El said those words again, the words that filled him with a blend of scornful disbelief and trembling hope. I love you.
"Why?" he asked. "I'm a psychotic murderer. You can't love me."
"That is who you were," El said, and pressed another kiss atop his shoulder. "That is not who you are. Not anymore. Now tell me you love me."
He did. He said the words, but they still felt strange in his mouth. He had never in his life said them to anyone and meant them. He didn't even know what love was. Was it really love that he felt? How could he know for sure?
"El." Those good feelings were leaking away. "Why did you lie to me?"
The mariachi went very still. "What do you mean?"
Thinking about it still made him angry, but the emotion was muted, and not as strong as it had been. It was still mixed, however, with deep hurt, and wounded betrayal. "Why didn't you tell me about the letter Belinda Harrison wrote Barillo?"
El sucked in a sharp breath. "How did you find out about that?"
The fact that El did not deny it made him angrier. "Does it matter? Diego Sanchez told me. Why didn't you? You knew about it, didn't you?"
El was silent for a long time. Then he rolled onto his back. "I knew," he said, to the ceiling.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me?" Sands demanded. He sat up, angry enough now that he scarcely felt any pain. "Don't you think I had a right to know?"
El sat up, too. The sheet rustled and slid along his knee as the mariachi pulled it up, hiding his nakedness. As if it mattered. "I was going to tell you," El said. "But she nearly killed you, and I was hurt myself. By the time we were healthy enough to talk about it, it didn't seem that important."
"Important to who?" Sands cried. "This is my life we're talking about here!"
"Lorenzo had just died," El went on, as if he hadn't interrupted. "I held myself responsible for that. Fideo blamed me, too. I started to think I was bad luck to all my friends. I tried to find ways to make you want to leave."
"You mean you made my life miserable," Sands said. He remembered how baffled he had been all last summer, trying to understand the petty torments El had pulled. "But that isn't the point. The point is, you knew about the letter, and you didn't tell me. You expect me to trust you, but you give me no reason to."
El did not respond to this. He merely rose from the bed and walked out of the room.
"Fine!" Sands shouted after him, cursing the fact that he didn't yet dare chase after El. If he tried, he'd probably collapse in the hall. "But you can't run away from the truth!"
Footsteps sounded as El's bare feet marched back into the room. The bed sank as the mariachi sat. Something rustled, and then El grabbed his right hand and thrust a folded square of paper at his fingers. "Here," El said. "Here is the letter."
Sands crushed it in his fist. "That's great, El. Maybe if I try real hard I can feel the indentations the printer left behind, and then I can read it."
El snatched it from him. In a very cold voice, he read the letter aloud.
It said just what Diego Sanchez had said it did. The warning about the payoff money. His badge number. An urgent desire to be taken seriously. I trust you will handle this matter with the speed and discretion it requires.
Handle this matter.
Oh, he had been handled, all right.
"Are you happy now?" El asked, when he had finished reading it. "I found it on the day she came to the house. Lorenzo discovered the hiding place in her bookcase, and I found the letter. I showed it to no one."
Sands said nothing. He didn't trust himself to speak just yet.
"I wonder sometimes," El said, "what would have happened if I had set out to find you before the coup." He laid the letter aside and moved closer. "If I could have stopped it."
El's fingers touched his face. They lifted the blindfold, just enough for El to lean down and kiss the place where the hollow of his eyesocket began. He flinched away. "Don't." It was bad enough that he tortured himself constantly with regrets and second guesses; he could not bear to think that El did the same.
"If there was a way," El breathed, and kissed him again. Lower this time, on the scar running across his cheek, the result of his first visit to Sanchez's house, when it hadn't yet belonged to Sanchez.
"Don't," Sands said again, louder.
"I should have told you," El said. "My silence was not deliberate. I want you to trust me." Now the kiss was placed on the corner of his mouth.
"I do," he said. "God knows why, but I trust you."
"Then trust me to love you," El said, and claimed his mouth in a possessive kiss.
El trailed kisses down his neck. Sands tipped his head back. "All right," he whispered, and surrendered.
****
That evening, with El's help, he hobbled outside and sat on the porch. Literally. The chairs had been smashed into kindling, and there was nowhere else to sit. El had told him about the destruction inside the house, but until that moment he hadn't realized just how thorough Sanchez's men had been.
He sat on the porch boards, leaning up against the house, sifting through a pile of wood splinters leftover from the chair he had once favored. "We need to discuss this whole 'you buying me' thing."
He could practically hear El flush. The mariachi was standing, or maybe sitting on the porch railing, strumming at his guitar. "I didn't know what else to say."
"Why didn't you just shoot him?" Sands snapped. "You fucking humiliated me, El."
"He had a gun aimed at my head," El said, sounding rather pissed off himself. The music came to an abrupt end. "What did you expect me to do?"
"Since when have you let that stop you?"
"I didn't mean it," El said. "I only said it so we could get out of there."
"Well you should have thought of something else to say! Christ, El, you don't even know what you did, do you?"
"Evidently not," the mariachi said stiffly. "If you really think I would have treated you like I owned you, then you don't know me at all."
Sands sighed. All right. Time to let it go. No, he didn't think El would have done that to him. And now El knew how pissed off he was at the whole thing, and that was really the point, wasn't it?
"So what happens now?" he asked. "A new cartel takes over and we go shoot them up, too?"
"Why not," El said, as if they were discussing whether or not to go out for a few beers. He picked out a few isolated notes on the guitar.
"Well, why not," Sands muttered. He turned over the chunk of wood he was holding. It had one fat end and one pointy end, and he thought it would make a fair weapon if push ever came to shove.
El continued to noodle away on the guitar. Not a whole song, or anything. Just a few notes here, a few notes there. The random music made Sands feel restless. He would have preferred it if El played a proper tune.
He reached down into his boot and pulled out the scorpion dagger. The music coming from El's direction faltered for a moment, then continued on.
Sands gripped the chunk of wood between his knees and brought the dagger to it. Just a touch-up on the right, but the left side was too oblique, and would need to be evened out. A little off the top, too. Maybe slim it down. The hilt wasn't that thick.
El stopped screwing around and settled into a real song. Something of moderate tempo, not too mournful, not too energetic. Sands set the dagger down, felt along the chunk of wood, frowned, and picked up the knife again.
The first song ended. A second began. And then another. At some point, El began to sing. Mariachi's Greatest Hits. Sands thought of the piano inside, a ruin of wood and ivory, like his hand. Fuck them all, he had already decided. He was going to play the guitar again, and shoot, and hold a fork so he could cut his own food, and do all the things he had once taken for granted. He didn't care how long it took. He was not going to be a cripple. No one else was going to exert control over his life.
He ran his fingers over the wood and grinned. Not quite, but close enough. It would do. He held it up. "Here you go, El. You can have your dagger back now."
The railing creaked, and a guitar string twanged in protest as the instrument was set down. El stepped toward him and took the chunk of wood. "What is this? You did this?"
"No, Mother Nature did," Sands said. "I just found it."
"It is incredible," El said. "It looks just like the original."
The grin was back. "Really?" The moment the word was out of his mouth he winced. Christ he sounded like a kid, eager for praise.
"Really," El said. "I didn't know you could carve."
Sands shrugged, trying not to let his delight show. "Neither did I."
****
Later that night, as they lay together, El kissed each finger of his right hand. "Such talented fingers," the mariachi whispered. "I knew that had to be true, for how else could you bring me to such heights, but now I see the hidden talents, as well."
When El said things like that, anything seemed possible. "Yeah, well just you wait and see what I can do when I have both my hands back."
"I will wait," El said solemnly.
****
The next afternoon Chiclet came by. Sands was sitting on the porch, waiting for him. When the boy mounted the porch steps, Sands beckoned him over. His wrist hurt from all the activity of the day before, so he quickly lowered his hand back to his lap. "Come here."
The kid walked over, a little reluctantly, and Sands thought, I don't even know what he looks like anymore.
"What you did was very stupid," he said.
Chiclet said nothing.
"I don't ever want to hear of you doing anything like that again, or I will kick your ass myself. Is that understood?"
"Sí," Chiclet whispered.
"Now go bug El, or something." When the boy continued to just stand there, Sands flapped a hand at him. "Go on. Fuck off."
"I was so worried!" Chiclet exclaimed. "I had to do it."
"I know," Sands said.
The boy closed the distance between them, knelt, and gave him a cautious hug. He stiffened, but it didn't hurt as much as he had anticipated, so he was able to relax and even half-heartedly return the hug. "I'm fine," he said. "I'm always fine."
Chiclet didn't say anything to this. Little Chiclet, who had lost the last of his innocence a few days ago. Who had started losing it the moment a bleeding CIA agent had reached out and grabbed him off his bike on a dusty street.
"Where were you going that day?" he asked.
"What?" Chiclet asked, and it suddenly occurred to Sands that the boy spoke in English now, that he had done so for quite some time. He couldn't even remember when that had happened.
"The Day of the Dead. Where were you going on your bike?"
"I don't know. I don't remember. To watch the parade, I think."
To watch a parade. Shit. It didn't get much more innocent than that. And then he had come along and grabbed the kid and fucked up Chiclet's life. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Por que?" Chiclet asked, lapsing into his native tongue.
"Why? Because…shit, because I am, all right? For everything."
Chiclet seemed to think about this for a long time. Then he shrugged, the movement communicating itself to Sands where their arms still touched. "It's okay. I'm glad you found me that day."
"You're glad. Oh my Christ." He gave the boy a bit of a push, trying to get him to stand up. "Don't ever say that again."
"It's true," Chiclet said.
"Listen," Sands said. "I want you to do something for me." He gave the boy very explicit directions, then waited as Chiclet walked away.
It was funny, the way he felt right now. I am putting my affairs in order, he thought.
The screen door banged, and Chiclet came back. "Señor?" He sounded breathless, as if he had either run through the house, or as if he didn't know what to expect next.
"Give it to me." Sands held his hand out.
Chiclet gave him the leather billfold. His CIA badge. The last tie he had to his past. He flipped it open and ran his thumb over the plastic laminate. Even after all this time, he could clearly remember what it looked like.
"And the truth shall set you free," he whispered.
He closed the badge and handed it out. "I want you to have this. You know I love you, right?"
Chiclet uttered a strange little hiccuping noise, and he braced himself for the fierce hug he knew was coming.
Strangely enough, this one didn't hurt at all.
****
Two months later, he decided it was time.
It was the middle of June. Time to be moving on.
He was healed. Almost. He could use his left hand, although sometimes the pain left him breathless. But he persisted, flexing his fingers and making a fist and picking things up until he felt sick with pain and had to stop. He had not tried to play guitar. El had suggested one night that he could still use the slide, perhaps, and for some reason that had pissed him off so badly he had punched El right in the nose.
Two and a half years, he thought. My, how time flies when you're having fun.
He wanted to sneak off in the middle of the night, maybe with a scribbled note left behind, but he couldn't. He owed El the truth.
So one fine morning, as they sat on the back porch, he said, "I have to go away."
El had been picking at the ever-present guitar on his lap, but the music abruptly stopped. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, I have to go away."
"Why? Where?"
"I don't know where," he said truthfully. "As to why…" He sighed. "I can't stay here. Like this. Not as I am."
El put the guitar down. It thonked on the porch boards. "As you are? What are you talking about? Do you mean the cartels?"
"No," he snapped. Christ, El just didn't get it. "Listen to me," he drawled. "I am not a whole person, El. And I am not going to be, as long as I stay here." He paused. He had spent many long hours thinking about this, and he knew he was right.
"I'm not alone in my head, El. And I need to be. And the only way that is going to happen is if I beat it. If I crush it out. Make it go away. It's going to be messy and violent and…and I don't want you or anyone else getting hurt. So I need to go away for a while. So I can do this."
"I understand," El said.
Which was bullshit because El didn't understand. Nobody understood. But it was nice of El to pretend.
"But I can't let you do it," El said.
"Let me?" he repeated.
"I can't let you," El said again.
"It's not your decision," Sands shot back. "It's mine."
"No!" El said, his voice surprisingly loud. "It is our decision to make. It affects both of us. Together."
That was the kind of sentimental bullshit that belonged on the inside of a greeting card. "What's with all the 'us' talk? You make it sound like we've got this long and glorious future ahead of us."
El said nothing.
"What do you want out of this?" Sands demanded. "What do you want from me? This isn't a movie, El. This is real life. The lame do not walk again, the blind do not see, and the insane do not get better!" He stood up, intending to go inside. He would grab some money and some extra ammunition, and then he was walking out the door.
"But you could," El protested.
"No!" He pointed angrily at the mariachi. "Don't you get it yet? There is no 'better!' There is no happy ending for us."
"You are only saying that because you are afraid," El said.
"Oh, I'm afraid," Sands said, speaking lightly. "I'm afraid that one morning I'm going to wake up and discover I slit your throat while someone else was in charge of my brain. I'm afraid that one day I'm going to eat my own gun because I think the sound of the gunshot will drown the voice out for a little bit. Do you see what I'm getting at, El? Can you even attempt to understand this?"
"If those things were going to happen, they would have happened long before now," El said. "You are only using them as an excuse."
Sands shook his head. "Fuck you. I'm going."
El moved. Off the railing, across the porch, to stand in his way. "No you're not."
"Are you going to try and stop me?" he asked, still in that light-hearted tone of voice, as if they weren't talking about anything of importance.
"I agree with you," El said, "that you must fight the madness in your head. But that is a battle we will fight together. You cannot win it alone."
"Yeah? How the hell do you know?"
"I know because I have watched you," El said. "All this time, when you have fought alone. You win the battle, but only for a time. Always it comes back. The only way you can hope to win is if we fight it together."
El went on talking. Sands just listened. He had known what he had to do – go away and do battle with himself – but he had been not at all convinced that he would win. Now here was El, talking about standing beside him, acting as though there was nothing more in the world that he wanted to do than help his insane lover.
"Why?" he asked. El still stood between him and the door, but he could turn around and walk off the porch any time he wanted. Walk on down the driveway, into town and beyond, walk and keep walking, never looking back.
"Because I love you," El said simply, as if this explained everything.
Sands bit his lip. These days he was more willing to believe when El said that, but there was still doubt and scorn in his heart. Part of him kept waiting for El to pull the rug out from under him. That part of him belonged to the seven-year old child who had had everything secure ripped away from him one horrible summer. He knew that, but he couldn't let himself take the final step and believe that El meant those three little words.
He had tried to tell El that once, but he hadn't gotten far when he had realized that El already knew. El knew, and that was why El told him so often. The mariachi surrounded him with those words, and of late Sands had begun to hear them with less cynicism, and more acceptance. Maybe it was possible. Maybe El really did love him.
"Sit down," El said. "I had something I wanted to ask you."
El took his hand and led him down the porch, to the swing. They had replaced their chairs, and El had found a slat-backed bench that he had attached to two long chains hanging from the porch ceiling, creating a swing. Chiclet loved to sit there and kick himself back and forth all day long, but Sands hated it. He didn't like the slow rocking motion, and the fact that he couldn't see where he was going.
He sat down, removing his hand from El's. "So ask me."
He heard El retrieve the guitar, then the mariachi sat beside him, setting the swing to rocking. Sands scowled and had to refrain from reaching out and grabbing the arm of the bench.
"I know you're bored all day," El said.
Sands shrugged, and did not deny this. There was never anything good on TV, and it wasn't like he could really follow what was going on, anyway. Even if he had been able to, he wasn't like El, who could sit for hours with just a guitar on his lap, whiling away the afternoon. That left a whole fat lot of nothing to fill his time with.
"You work well with wood," El said. "And with your hands."
He didn't deny this, either. The splinters of their former furniture had provided plenty of wood for him to practice carving with. Once he had been able to start using his left hand to hold the pieces, he had done even better.
"I wondered," El said, "if you would like to learn how to make a guitar."
Sands said nothing to this. Here it was. El was mocking him. Soon the mariachi would start to laugh, and the moment he did Sands was going to jam a gun in his face and pull the trigger.
"I would be happy to teach you," El said. "I think you would do very well. You have talented hands." He raised Sands' right hand to his lips and kissed the back.
In fury he jerked his hand away, managing to give El a half-slap as he did. "That's real funny, El. Fuck you." He started to get off the swing.
"Wait!" El grabbed his arm and pulled him back down. It was the kind of gesture that would have gotten him shot once, or punched in the mouth, at least. Now Sands just waited, and El removed his hand on his own. "Just listen to me."
"I think I've heard enough," Sands said. "That is the worst idea I have ever heard, and let me tell you why. First of all, it's not like we need to be selling things to make money. We have plenty of money. Second, I'm not about to sit my ass down at the market in that village and get robbed blind by people walking by and taking shit because I can't see it. Robbed blind? Get it yet?"
He was getting angrier with every word. "And I don't need your fucking pity, or your charity. I can manage quite fine on my own, thank you very much. I've been doing it for over two years." El started to say something, but Sands refused to let him. "So what is this, then? The great El Mariachi can't live without music in his life. But since his blind lover can't play guitar anymore, oh I know, let's teach him how to make them instead? Fuck you!" He reached out and snatched the guitar from El's lap.
"No!" El cried, grabbing for it. "Don't!"
He flailed out with the guitar. It was unwieldy and heavy, but El still shied back, not wanting to be struck with it.
Sands slammed the guitar onto his lap. "Fuck you," he snarled. "Fuck you all." He forced his left hand to curl around the neck, fingers jabbing at random frets, and raked his right hand across the strings.
An angry, jangling sound filled the air. El stopped trying to take the guitar away. Sands shifted his grip, cursing at the pain and weakness in his fingers, and this time managed a decent chord.
He tried another, and palsy shook his hand, the fingers crying out at being forced to bend and apply pressure to the frets. He had to let go.
"You did it," El breathed.
You did it.
Deep inside, a small voice exulted.
He had made music again. It wasn't much, but it was a start. Sands ran his right hand over the curve in the guitar's body. He could do this. Maybe not right away, but he could learn how. Already he knew how to command wood and make it take basic shapes -- it couldn't take too long to learn how to make music this way, as well.
"All right," he said, forgetting that just a minute ago he had been angry enough to hurt El. He handed the guitar back to the mariachi. "You teach me. Teach me to make your music your way." He flexed his left hand. "I'm going to teach myself, my way."
El set the guitar on the floor. Warm lips brushed the side of his face. "I will teach you."
He turned his head so he could kiss El's mouth. "Good."
"Does this mean you are staying?" El asked, pulling away just enough so he could speak.
Sands shrugged, and gave El a crooked smile. "Looks like it."
El pulled him up, off the swing. "Then let's go inside and celebrate."
They kissed hungrily, groping for the door behind them, for bare skin. "Tell me you love me," El demanded.
"I love you," Sands growled in El's ear. He nibbled on El's earlobe. "Happy now?"
A shiver went through the mariachi. "Very happy." He finally found the door, and pulled it open. He started to walk backwards, taking Sands with him.
"Wait, wait." Sands tore himself loose from El's grasp. He walked across the porch and went to stand at the railing. Once, two and a half years ago, he had stood here, listening to El approach him from behind, and he had vowed to kill the mariachi.
He turned around to face El. "After everything we've been through," he said. "We're still standing, El. Who would have guessed it?"
"I would have," El said. He crossed the porch and went to stand beside him. "Men like us always end up on their feet."
"When they're not on their backs," Sands said, wishing he could see the look on El's face as he said it.
El made a slight choking noise. "I think I prefer to think of us as still standing," he said.
Sands had to admit he liked that better too. They had been through hell, but they had come out the other side.
Together.
"All right then," Sands said, and smiled. "We're still standing, El."
******
THE END