Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Read online

  Bill sips his Tequila Sunrise. Ice tinkles. How many ice cubes in a Tequila Sunrise? wonders Jack. Jack’s mind races like the wheels of a pickup stuck in soft sand; he can’t concentrate on anything.

  “Say,” says Bill. “Aren’t you the CEO of that software company that went belly up in Dallas after the FBI raid? Some kind of SEC investigation?”

  Jack’s eyes glaze over. “Can’t talk about it.” He holds his palms aloft. They’re like two soft white wings. “Lawyers,” he adds as an afterthought.

  The raw clank of coins colliding overrides the ice-striking-glass sound. It’s Ray, jiggling the tip change in the pocket of his knee-length Abercrombies.

  “Twenty says you can’t guess how much money’s in Ray’s pocket plus or minus ten percent,” says Jack, his eyes unglazing.

  Bill cocks his head like a parrot, listening to the sound of the coins striking each other. Counting the dimes and nickels and quarters. He pouts his lips.

  “You’re on.”

  Two and a half hours and five Tequila Sunrises later, Jack Niles steers the Cadillac Escalade on to the cement causeway linking South Padre Island to the Texas mainland. His wife, in the white leather seat opposite, reaches out her fingers and squeezes his leg. Her given name is Jill. As in Jack and Jill. It still gets a laugh with strangers. Caught in the blasting stream of the air conditioner, her blonde hair sways across her austerely pretty face.

  “Don’t catch cold, hon,” she says.

  In the backseat Bill Oaks lounges sideways, the collar of his silk tropical shirt askance. “Hot back here,” he says. Jack turns on the back seat blower.

  The Escalade rolls like a sailor through the streets of Port Isabel. At last, just past the H-E-B supermarket, it turns onto the two-lane highway to Brownsville and Matamoros.

  It’s a dull dusty ride to the border. Bill Oaks, agent to the stars, regales Jack and Jill with strange tales from the Pacific edge. Mudslides and ecstasy parties in Malibu. A midnight run through the desert to Vegas—a famous starlet behind the wheel, naked except for a pink dog collar around her neck. The only difficulty arises when she sashays bare-assed across the lobby of the Bellagio and tries to check in without any luggage.

  “So,” ponders Jill. “What brings y’all to boring South Padre?”

  “Just taking a breather. Step out of the fast lane.” Then, after a pause: “Go some place where I won’t run into anyone I know or who knows me.”

  “Been coming to Padre Island since I was a kid.” says Jack. “Back when there was nothing but two lanes of cracked blacktop with a drawbridge out from Port Isabel. When a sailboat was going through the channel and the bridge was up, you just waited awhile.” Flooring the gas pedal, he swerves the Escalade around a minivan that has pulled partway on the shoulder to let Jack pass.

  The outskirts of Brownsville present a cluster fuck of dingy bars, taco joints, gas stations, junkyards and strip clubs, in no particular order. At the international bridge most of the traffic is coming north into the lone star state. They breeze across; on the Mexican side a mustachioed border cop in a green uniform waves them through. Under the bridge the Rio Grande glides by, brown and sluggish as a snake at midday.

  Jack parks the car at Garcia’s restaurant and gift shop and slips the private guard a hundred pesos. They catch a cab to the address Jack got from an old frat buddy.

  “I don’t understand why we’ve got to come to sombrero-land so you can gamble my money away,” Jill says in a certain unmistakable tone, as the bare skin of her thighs squeaks across the vinyl back seat of the cab. “It’s so damn hot away from the beach.”

  Jack looks at the photograph on the cab license, then at the driver’s profile. They don’t match up.

  “You should have stayed at the beach, honey bun.”

  “Maybe I’ll just find me a Mexican gigolo with a waxed mustache to fuck me silly.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Bill is looking uncomfortable. “I’m not a gambler either. Just along for the ride.”

  “I’ll bet,” says Jill.

  The cab drops them at a post-war palacio protected by a high wrought-iron fence. A buzzer opens the gate. The house is painted the same pink as a harlot’s toenails. Several lemon trees and a fig fill the otherwise bare front yard. From the second floor balcony, a man in a dark suit watches them go up the tiled walk and disappear through the deeply shaded front door.

  Inside a black man wearing a tuxedo serves drinks. You can play roulette, dice or poker. Jack leans over and turns up the leg of his cream-colored triple-pleated slacks. A rubber band around his ankle holds a roll of gringo bills.

  He hands the money to the croupier at the roulette table.

  In the meantime Jill has gotten hold of a drink. Something clear and lethal con hielo in a highball glass. While she and Bill watch, Jack loses the entire five thousand dollars in under an hour.

  “Shit,” Jack says, as the croupier rakes away his last pile of chips.

  “Asshole,” says Jill. “You did the same thing with your company.”

  After a brief scuffle, Bill manages to separate them. “Let’s go in the bar and get a free drink,” says Jack.

  Jill and Bill and Jack, in that order, walk single file into the bar. It’s in a separate room with heavy crown molding painted vampire red.

  As always in these circumstances, an ample woman in a black negligee leans against the bar, fanning herself. She gives Bill the twice-over.

  “You want something?” she asks.

  “A drink.”

  A barman is slicing limes with a dull knife. He curses when the knife slips off the tough rind and cuts him.

  They order cervezas. A dish of pickled jalapenos rests on the bar. Jack eats a jalapeno. After one bite, Bill drops his on the deeply polished wood. “Sensitive stomach,” he says, and orders a Diet Coke.

  Jill is sulking, her lips thrust out like a ripe seedpod about to burst.

  “If the Escalade wasn’t in my name, we’d have to walk home from here,” she says. “I have absolutely no idea how I ended up married to you.”

  “Must have been my boyish charm.”

  “I must have been out of my mind.”

  “You always were a little light in the head.”

  “Listen, buster. I’m not the one that pissed away a hundred million dollar company and then cooked the books to cover my tracks.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Jill.”

  “Just great, Jack. Next I suppose you’ll punch me in the face.”

  “Not if you shut up.”

  There is enough menace in his voice that Jill stops talking and takes a sip of her Corona. She looks anxiously up at the ceiling as if it might suddenly collapse.

  A thickset man in a navy blue suit and white shirt enters the room. Two young men in thin-lapelled sharkskin jackets follow him. The older man’s clean-shaven face is as dark and scarred as the earth. His nails are manicured. An immodest diamond ring circumscribes one finger.

  The barman sets a frothy lime-green daiquiri on the bar in front of these expensive hands. One of the younger men sits at a table. The other leans against the wall. Apparently they aren’t drinking. The man in the suit looks at Jill.

  He introduces himself as Demetrio Sandoval. His English is accent-less. “You’re very beautiful,” he says to her. She blushes.

  “You’re ten years too late, pal,” she says and takes a long pull on her beer.

  Demetrio looks past Jill to where Bill and Jack are standing against the bar. Jack is telling Bill about the eleven-foot hammerhead he caught off Port Aransas.

  “Is your husband a gambler?” Demetrio asks.

  “Jack’s a loser.”

  “That’s a tough situation to be in.” Demetrio raises his hand. “Jack,” he calls.

  They exchange pleasantries. In the next moment they’re into a game of liar’s poker, using a pair of hundred dollar bills. It’s all Jack has left -- his mad money for the coming week. He loses on the third round.


  Demetrio drinks the dregs of his daiquiri and smacks his lips.

  “How about a serious bet?” he proposes.

  “I’m dead broke,” says Jack.

  “What’ve you got?”

  Jack considers his doppelganger in the mirror behind the bar. His tongue curls over his bottom lip that is dry and chapped.

  “An ’05 Escalade. Silver.”

  “The fuck you do,” squeals Jill, her voice cracking. She stares at Demetrio. “The car belongs to me.”

  Jill’s mouth twitches.

  “I need to pee,” she says. Grabbing her snakeskin clutch, she strides out of the room. Jack and Bill and Demetrio watch her go.

  “Now there’s a fine piece of ass,” says Demetrio.

  “That’s my fucking wife you’re talking about.”

  “Fifty thousand U.S. or your wife. A fair exchange?”

  Silence descends over the room. Bill raises an eyebrow. The barman polishes an already too clean glass.

  “What shall we bet on?”

  In the ladies room, Jill rucks down her black lace boybriefs and squats over the toilet. Of course the toilet paper dispenser is empty.

  When Jill comes out of the stall, a woman in a beaded camisole is leaning over the sink adjusting her mascara. She’s attractive in an undernourished borderland sort of way. Her cheeks are pitted with old acne scars. In the mirror her eyes glance in Jill’s direction.

  “What a day,” says Jill, splashing water on her face.

  “You need somethin’ to pick you up?”

  “Probably.”

  “Me to, honey.”

  The woman taps out two lines of blow on the black marble countertop. It’s very pure. Jill leans on the countertop listening to her heart doing a wild tattoo.

  Tears roll down her cheeks. She tells the woman about Jack, more than she could ever want to know. The woman makes a satirical remark about men and their equipment.

  When Jill walks back into the bar, she’s still feeling woozy. Demetrio is working on a fresh daiquiri. The two young men are gone. So are Jack and Bill.

  “Jack and I made a bet,” says Demetrio. “He said you’d be back in less than five minutes. ‘A quick pisser,’ he said.”

  “I must have gotten sidetracked.”

  “You don’t belong to Jack any more.”

  A nervous smile quickens across her lips. “Where’s your waxed mustache, ace?”

  First Epilogue

  A week after Jack gets back to Dallas, an acquaintance asks him about Jill. Is she visiting her mother, perhaps? He tells the woman Jill was swept out to sea while swimming at a beach known for its treacherous currents, its riptide.

  Eventually the police take notice. Inquiries reveal no record of a gringa woman recently drowning in the Mexican coastal area Jack mentions. Jack is Jill’s sole heir. Four million dollars worth.

  Jack is arrested at DFW airport just as he’s about to board a flight for Nassau. The charge is murder.

  Second Epilogue

  Five years later, a tall thin woman walks naked out of the sea. She stands alone on a stretch of tropical beach. Her face conveys an austere beauty, etched by time and the pain of childbirth.

  At the edge of the beach she dons a terrycloth robe and walks through a grove of coconut palms to the glass doors of a sprawling postmodern beach house. The children are just sitting down to lunch. The boy, age four, is dark and sometimes cruel. The girl, a year younger, is an exact replica of her blonde mother. They’re too excited to eat, despite the best efforts of the cook and the live-in maid.

  The woman, whose name is Jill, is also excited. Demetrio’s flight from Bogotá will be landing in less than an hour. Cancun airport is just an hour’s drive north by armor-plated Mercedes.

  We Don’ Need No Stinkin’ Baggezz

  Univision Studios.

  Mexico City.

  Hola.

  I wink at the studio audience. Then come to rest on the chair next to Raymondo. He slips a lit menthol cigarette between my lips. Leans back and crosses his legs.

  It’s great to be on your show, Raymondo. Thanks for having me.

  A cup of coffee would be great. Black. Two sugars.

  My earliest memory?

  The click, click of the loom, as our mother, Margarita, worked through the long, cold winter of our gestation. Day after day sitting on the hard-packed earth, her hands moved back and forth, in and out, weaving wool blankets one homespun line at a time. Beautiful blankets, the gray of a rain-heavy sky. Geometric lines of red and yellow at either end, in the Toltec manner.

  Our father, Juan, carried them seven kilometers into Valle de Bravo and sold them on the street.

  What was it like in there?

  Crowded. With five of us floating around in that salty inland sea that grew as we grew. Five identical males. Needless to say, there was a certain amount of jockeying for position. An elbow here, a kick there. I took the high ground at the top of my mother’s womb. Strangely, during those months I came to see the world first through her eyes.

  What did my father do for a living?

  Whatever he could find.

  Which wasn’t much. It was a hard nine months. The eggs laid by our few feckless chickens froze in the bitter nights and turned black. Unusual rains rotted the corn harvest. One day my father appeared in the doorway.

  “What is it?” asked Margarita.

  “Another goat is dead.”

  My mother rose from her loom and we went outside. The goat lay like a ruptured and treadless tire in the dusty yard. A line of blood oozed from one nostril. A six-inch white worm wriggled from its anus.

  “How will we ever have enough milk when the baby comes?” moaned Margarita.

  “Something will turn up,” said Juan. “I’m going into town to look for work.”

  “God go with you.”

  He spat into the earth.

  Of course, he found none.

  He came home one morning just in time to see the last of us burp from between Margarita’s loins. That was a sight: five bloody, howling grubs writhing on the floor, kicking our feet, our tiny penises like wasp stingers.

  The next morning my mother found Juan hanging from the thorn tree at the edge of the yard. His tongue as black as a crow.

  Raymondo’s buxom assistant sits next to me and begins spooning sweet black coffee between my lips. The cigarette butt falls to the floor, where it burns a hole in the mint green industrial carpet before going out.

  No, Raymondo, that wasn’t the end of tragedy for us. You could say it was only the beginning.

  How did we survive?

  In the beginning, barely. Margarita set fire to her loom and our house of sticks, intending to throw herself and us on the pyre. But her nerve failed.

  Somehow we trekked into Valle de Bravo where we joined a traveling carnival. We were an oddity. A freak show. Identical male quintuplets. We were right up there with the bearded lady, the sheep with two heads and the gargoyle man.

  Four years later, in desperation Margarita fell in love with a drifter named Leon, who helped set up and dismantle the tents and rides. A sly opportunist, he told her they couldn’t run off to Acapulco without money.

  Then he told her about Don Silvester, a two-bit jefe mafioso. Childless and haunted by his desire for immortality.

  She dressed us up in our Sunday best and took us to meet him.

  “These are my five boys,” she said. “They’re fearless. And very loyal. They’ll do whatever you ask them to do. They’ll even kill for you.”

  Don Silvester fell in love with us. And we with him. We were to be his children that he couldn’t otherwise have.

  He paid Margarita a thousand pesos apiece.

  She kissed each of us on the forehead and tweaked our little dicks. That was the last time we saw her. Unless you count the black-and-white photo of her in La Independencia a week later. Lying in a nameless cul-de-sac with her throat cut.

  Our first hit?

  I assume this is off
the record, Raymondo. Ha, ha.

  When the five of us turned eighteen, Don Silvester threw a huge party at his hacienda. He invited all his friends and most of his enemies. It was the wedding in The Godfather, only for real. Wine from Don Silvester’s own vineyards in the Baja. Costa Rican anejo rum. Barbecued cabrito. Sexy girls and strolling mariachis.

  Don Silvester introduced us to the crowd. Quinto, the youngest, Ernesto, Jorge, Justinian and me, Pepe. Almost everyone there had watched us grow up, but they hooted and applauded as though we were movie stars.

  Then Don Silvester took me by the shoulder and we wandered amid the revelers. Through an opening in the throng, with a flick of an eye, he marked a man of medium height, in a medium-gray suit, white shirt and unmemorable tie with a medium knot.

  “Javier intends to kill me,” he said.

  At dusk the celebrants disbanded. An ambitious whore enticed Javier to a lonely lane at the edge of the hacienda grounds. We leaped upon him, each thrusting a knife into his mortal flesh before he could cry out or draw his revolver. He lay bleeding to death in the dusty byway. I thought of the dead goat lying in our yard that other time just before we were born.

  That was the first.

  Thank you, Raymondo. I just tried to recapture the moment.

  How many?

  Between the five of us, I’d say three hundred fifty, mas o menos.

  Remorse?

  For what!?

  They were all enemies of our stepfather. Every one of them wished him harm. To snuff out his life, steal his wealth, cut off his manhood and cram it down his throat, bask in the adoration of the common man.

  Payback? Yes. I guess in the end that’s what it was.

  My lips are dry. Raymondo’s assistant holds a glass of water to them. I take several sips, counting the moles on her largely exposed breasts.

  What happened was this:

  After kidnapping us from the beach in Acapulco where we were frolicking in the waves with our girlfriends, a rival crime cartel held us prisoner for three days. They kept us in a windowless latrine. We stank to Hell and back.

  When Don Silvester refused to negotiate, they did it quickly. I don’t blame him for that. If you negotiate with scum, you’re finished.