Chapter Thirty-Three
Abuse in the Dark
The other villagers greeted him enthusiastically. The men wanted to buy him drinks and hear about his visit to El Presidente. The women wanted to know if he still needed a wife, and the children wanted, as ever, a fresh adult to play their games with them. No one asked if he had brought them another fortune from his travels, so El didn't bring it up. He hadn't yet figured out how to safely fence Delgado's diamonds.
El was warmed by the reception, and he warned everyone about his - he had to use the word "friend" in order to not explain more than he had time for - who was kicking a cocaine habit. If he should get free, he needed everyone to stay clear of him and to find El. And not to shoot him.
And, as always, he needed them not to talk to anyone else about El's whereabouts, or about his friend.
As El gathered food, a carton of cigarettes, and everything he could think of that a blind man could entertain himself with, he realized his one serious logistical problem. He couldn't enter the room and still have it locked from the outside. He needed the Padre.
The priest agreed to come, and the two of them stopped in the kitchen, still well out of Sands's hearing. Father Soto switched on his industrial-strength portable floodlight.
"Father, I don't want you to get hurt. If he gets past me, just stay out of his way."
El removed any paper wrappings from the food. Anything that could burn. He put all the food in a plastic box.
"Why don't you hold a gun on him?"
"For that to work, Father, he has to see I have a gun. He has to give a shit whether he gets shot or not - sorry Father - and most of all, I have to be willing to use it on him. No guns. It's safer."
They entered the corridor. Sands heard them.
"El!" he called. "El! Did you bring my stuff? Have you got it?"
"I have your cigarettes."
"Cigarettes? No, damn it, I need . . ." His voice trailed off. "Shit."
El frowned. It had barely been half a day since the agent's last fix, but already his symptoms had progressed to this kind of mental confusion?
"El, listen, we've got to stop this. We've got to stop this now. We can do this another time. Not now. I can't do this now."
El shook his head. He glanced at the Padre, but his face by flashlight was hard to read.
"Sands, I'm coming in. Back away from the door."
"Did you hear me, you fucking cunt?!!" Sands roared. "I said I can't do this! Get me some fucking cocaine!"
El licked his dry lips. Maybe this wasn't the best time to go in. He looked at the Padre, who smiled and tipped his head toward the door, encouraging him.
El sighed. "Sands, get away from the door, or you're not getting anything. Let me hear you from the other side of the room."
"Fuck you!"
"Still too close."
"You've got coke, right? You're bringing me coke?" The man's voice came from a little farther back.
El frowned again. "I'm not lying to you. I don't have coke. There isn't any cocaine I know of in this whole region. I'm bringing you food and cigarettes and some other things."
Sands's voice came from as far away as El estimated was possible. "No, you've got some. I know you. You wouldn't have wasted it."
With a nod at Father Soto, El opened the door and ducked in. As he struggled to bring in the things, including a guitar, Sands launched himself out of the darkness at the door. Father Soto tried to close it as Sands tried to force it open. El struggled with the man in the dark and finally heard the door close and lock.
The sound sickened him. He hadn't entirely recovered, apparently, from the experience at the Delgado estate. Even Sands sagged in his arms, and El had the odd feeling that he was stunned by memories of the sound, too. And he had many more of them. El pushed Sands away from him, and groped around for his flashlight.
The beam showed Sands sitting where he'd fallen, a picture of dejection.
"El, please," Sands panted. "Get me a fix. Somewhere. I know you can do it." His words begged, but his listless tone told the tale that Sands knew it was pointless.
"Here are your cigarettes, and some lighters. There is food in this box here." El thumped the box as he set it down. Here is a radio and guitar. And this . . ." El felt silly getting these things out in the darkness, but he knew Sands could hear and mark where he set them. "This is a little game of my daughter's. It's . . ." He found his English insufficient for explaining a little girl's loom with elastic bands for weaving into potholders. These were things he'd never had to say in English. "You use these . . . bands. They stretch across. Over and under. It makes . . . for hot things." El gave up.
"Oh, my Christ," moaned Sands. "Give me the cigs. God." He sounded like a man in pain from a wound.
El pushed the carton across the floor in Sands's general direction, followed by a lighter.
As the American fumbled with the cigarettes, El said, "If you set your clothing or the bedding on fire, I will take them away from you."
"Fuck you," Sands said shakily. Sands's inhuman face glowed eerily in the trembling flame from a lighter. A cigarette glowed.
The smell abruptly made El want a cigarette, and he had given them up long ago, even before he met Carolina, when he had realized how they impaired him physically. El set the flashlight on the floor.
"I didn't know you smoked."
Sands said nothing, sucking down the cigarette so fast he hardly seemed to exhale. He stubbed the butt out against the floor and lit another one. The smoke was thick.
"Esta bien?" asked the Padre.
"It's all right," El called, reassured to know the man was still out there. Not that he wouldn't be, but it took a lot of trust to let someone lock you in a room
"Who's out there?" Sands asked, between frantic puffs.
"Father Soto, the priest from the village."
"Friend of yours?" Sands asked, too innocently.
"Sands . . . " El said with a warning.
Sands stubbed out the second cigarette angrily, and got to his feet. "Yes? What is it, oh great fucking mariachi?" He paced to the wall and then to the other wall.
"What is your name?" El asked. "Your Christian name?"
"There's nothing wrong with Sands." Still pacing.
"It's difficult to say."
"Only for a fucking Mexican." Sands stopped at one wall and banged his forehead against it repeatedly.
El told him his own name. His Christian name only.
"So why . . ." Sands stopped and leaned over, as if he needed blood in his head. "Do you keep it such a secret?" he gasped.
"I have family."
"Oh, that's right!" Sands yelled. "You're this big fucking legend! The great mariachi, scourge of the drug cartels. The man who couldn't even protect his wife and daughter against one motherfucker general."
El got to his feet, flashlight in hand.
"So you beat up on everyone else, huh? Overcompensating a bit, were we, El?"
El knocked on the door, trying not to remember the Delgado estate. "Time to go," he said, keeping a wary eye on Sands.
Sands approached him as the lock slid free. "What did she think of you in those last seconds of life, El? As her daughter died in her arms?"
The door cracked open.
"Maybe she didn't marry that well, after all?"
El clocked the asshole with the hand holding the flashlight. Strictly in order to prevent him escaping, of course.