18

Cacho arrived at Zanco in the early spring under the name of Carlos Ramirez, the name on his Texas driver’s license, and three weeks later was assigned to Axel’s maintenance crew. They sat next to each other at the midday meal and the kid said to call him Cacho, which Axel knew was a common nickname for Carlos. There was nothing of the toady about him, and Axel liked his sense of humor, and when they finished eating they went out to the yard together. The kid already knew the rules of convict life well enough not to pry beyond the permissible limits of asking what Axel was in for and for how long. When Axel told him he was doing thirty for armed robbery plus another five for assault of a CO, Cacho said, “Damn, old-timer, you’re hardcore.” On learning he had been at Zanco for ten years, the kid said, “No shit? Man, I guess you know this joint pretty good by now.”

“Like a zoo monkey knows its cage.”

Cacho scratched at his ribs like a monkey and said, “Uh-uh-uh,” and they both laughed.

They continued to converse through the afternoon maintenance jobs, shutting up whenever a CO or even another con was within earshot. At the end of that first workday together, when Axel said he was going to take a jog before supper, Cacho asked if he could join him. He considered for a moment and had to admit to himself he liked the kid. And so said, “Why not?”

Thus did he accept the first friend he’d ever had inside the walls.

Cacho told him he had been born in Monterrey and lived in Mexico all his life, mostly on the border, but was familiar with a lot of Texas border towns, plus San Antonio. He was orphaned at twelve when the bus his parents were taking to visit Sabinas went off a bridge and into a river. He then went to live with his much older half-brother, Joaquín, who had grown up in the riverside border town of Nuevo Laredo and now owned a real estate company there. Joaquín spoke English fluently and Cacho had learned it from him and from watching gringo TV shows.

Before coming to Zanco, he’d been in two processing units at the start of a ten-year sentence for a fight he got into in San Antonio. He was standing outside a nightclub with his date when some dude grabbed her ass, so he went at him with both fists. Next thing he knew somebody was whacking him from behind with a club and so he tore into him, too, and fucked him up pretty bad—facial fractures, damage to one eye. Turned out the guy was a security guard. From jail he called his brother, who got him a lawyer who couldn’t do much against a dozen witnesses who’d seen him pounding the guard. He drew ten years for aggravated assault. The lawyer told him that as soon as he was processed into the system and assigned to a regular unit, another lawyer would go to see him and handle his appeal. Cacho had been at Zanco a week when an El Paso attorney named Somoza came to visit and promised he would visit on every Saturday to come.

From the start, the kid was impressed by Axel’s store of knowledge and wanted to know how he’d acquired it. “I read, you oughta try it,” Axel said, but soon after admitted that he’d gone to college for three years.

“You were in college and got jammed for armed robbery?” Cacho said. “How does that happen?”

“I fell in with wayward companions.”

“Yeah, right. I hear that happens to a lot of college guys, making friends with robbers and falling into the life. You got some strange ways, old-timer, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told.”

Other than the facts of having gone to college and of his prison record, Axel told Cacho no other truth about his past. He claimed to be an orphan, too, to have no living kin at all. The only visitor he got, he told Cacho, was an old college buddy named Charlie. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t trust the kid with the truth but that all his convict years had made it second nature to lie, to hide things about himself. The unknown truths about you are among the few things you can truly possess in prison, that you can refuse to relinquish. So he did.

He had known the kid only six weeks on the day they were walking in the yard after the midday meal and Cacho said, “Hey, old man, what say we bust out of this zoo?”