THE RAIN THINNED. HE TRUDGED AWAY FROM THE BRIDGE through small globes of weak streetlight. The cars returning to the country whooshed past, spraying puddle water. One- and two-story brick apartment houses pressed in on the street. Well-lit billboards over the darkened buildings. He paused at the next intersection in front of a stucco facade covered with bright, hand-painted Spanish words. A padlocked door.
The lamp overhead was out, and the intersecting street had been blocked off to the left. A congregation of police cars and black trucks and a fire engine. Men, faceless in balaclavas, held weapons. Others, dressed in suits and ties, slouched beneath umbrellas. The flashers of the different vehicles cast the scene in a halting progression of blue and white, red and yellow. Jonah couldn’t tell what, if anything, had been blown up.
The traffic hummed. A driver rubbernecked and turned slowly in front of Jonah, away from the roadblock. The headlights bored through the dark. The power seemed to be out for a block, but there was a working stoplight at the next intersection. Jonah found a tavern sandwiched between taller structures, a small neon sign in the tinted front window. He wanted to get out of his wet clothes and ask for directions to the bus station.
The air-conditioning in the silent barroom soaked into his skin. The walls were painted a deep red color and seemed to absorb the dim light. A short bar and a few tables, and a jukebox mutely flashing. The lone patron at the bar rested his forehead on his forearms. The bartender, a wide-faced, mustached man, watched Jonah but didn’t speak, and Jonah crossed directly to the washroom.
The smell assaulted him. Graffiti on the walls. Boots scuffed against the tile inside the stall. Jonah put his bag on the counter, stripped out of his clothes, and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that were filthy but dry.
The stall door creaked, and the man who came out said, “Where the hell did you come from?”
Jonah stammered.
“American, aren’t you?” The man wore jeans and a long-sleeved T. He had carrot-colored hair and a beard. His eyeballs swam.
“Are you?” Jonah asked.
“Hell yeah, brother.” The man zipped his fly. “You must be a writer, huh?” He bent to wash his hands. “Name’s Kurtis.” He glanced at Jonah to emphasize: “With a K.”
Jonah introduced himself and asked about the bus station. “I’ve got a map,” he said, “but it’s not real good with the local stuff.”
“Sure, man. Not far. Buy you a beer first.” Kurtis started for the door.
“Uh,” Jonah said, “I’m kind of in a rush.”
“Shit.” Kurtis grinned. “Rookie, huh? You’re not walking across town right now, and you ain’t taking a cab. I’ll get you there. Come on, beer first. We’ll trade notes.” He punched the swinging door open and clopped out.
Kurtis ordered beers in Spanish and told Jonah he was from California but hadn’t been back in years. Two beers in clear bottles arrived without the bartender uttering a word, and Kurtis slid money across the bar. “Where you say you were from?”
“I didn’t,” Jonah said.
“Well, where?”
“New Orleans.”
Kurtis’s throat jumped while he drank. “I was there in oh-five, reporting.”
Jonah sipped his own beer and it tasted a little skunky, but here he was, in a Mexican bar, having a drink with a journalist. Luz felt slightly more within reach.
“So,” Kurtis said, “you’re down here for the car bomb, too. I asked around, but nobody’s saying shit.” He grinned, his eyelids half-closed, and spread his arms. “So here I am.” He sipped his beer. He whistled. “A car bomb. That is some new shit, I tell you what.”
“I saw it from across the river,” Jonah said.
Kurtis nearly spewed beer, laughing. With awe: “Fuck.”
“Who blew it up?” Jonah asked. He noticed the other patron lift his head from the bar and cross the room to the jukebox.
“Hell.” Kurtis waved his hand. He scratched his cheek through the bramble. “Could be anybody. They all know each other.”
The jukebox started to pump American rap music. Kurtis made a face like something stank. “Can’t get away from this shit.” He drained his beer, set the empty on the bar, and got up to go, and Jonah, at a loss, followed.
Kurtis listed down the sidewalk and made a spectacle of peering in either direction before pissing on somebody’s door.
“So, the bus station,” Jonah said after Kurtis had composed himself.
“Hotel’s this way,” the journalist replied. “I’ll take a gander at your map, but let’s get off the fuckin’ street.”
Around the corner, the old hotel took up much of the block. A four- or five-story stone building. Palms grew from cutouts in the sidewalk. The lobby was varnished floors and crimson rugs. The kid at the desk nodded in sleep.
“Nice place, huh?” Kurtis said. “Magazine I wrote for used to have their headquarters here.”
“Used to?”
“What I said, brother. I’m freelance, now, all the way.”
Clothes everywhere in his room. An overflowing ashtray on the dresser. A laptop with a darkened screen sat on the desk, papers stacked alongside it. The sound of a motorcycle climbing through gears came up through the open window. The damp glow of the city. Kurtis went to the window and sat on the sill and peered out at the rooftops.
“Kurtis.”
The journalist jerked like he’d fallen asleep. “You probably want a beer, huh?” He went to the small refrigerator and withdrew a couple bottles and tossed one to Jonah.
Jonah set the bottle down and took off his backpack to rummage for his map. “Maybe you could—”
Kurtis raised a hand, asking for silence. “Listen,” he said.
Wind. A car engine. Tires through rainwater.
“I love it,” Kurtis whispered. “The way this place sounds at night, peaceful when nothing’s going off.” He returned to the window and peered earthward. “Not as exciting, sure. But you need the quiet moments. You need both.”
Jonah spread the map on the foot of the bed. “The bus station?”
Kurtis lifted away from the window and bent over the map. He tapped. “We here. Bus station’s here.” Only a handful of blocks away by the look of it, near the nexus of a couple of highways cutting west and south. “Where you gotta get to, anyway?”
“Las Monarcas.”
“Never heard of it. Some little shit dump?”
“I dunno.”
“Show me.”
Jonah pointed it out, across the state line into Coahuila.
Kurtis covered his mouth with a fist and belched. “You won’t be getting a bus there, bro. Maybe to here—” He tapped a place called Lampazos de Naranjo. “And that’s a maybe. Once you’re in Lampazos, you better hope there’s another bus, or else you gonna have to hire a car service or rent a car or something, if you got the scratch. Must be some story you’re sniffing. I figured you were here for the car bomb.”
It took Jonah a moment to understand Kurtis’s meaning. He started to correct him when several distant but sharp reports rang out, and Kurtis raised a finger. “Ah,” he said. “You know how to tell the difference between firecrackers and gunshots?”
Jonah did, but Kurtis didn’t give him the opportunity to answer.
“You gotta know the difference, because there’s a shitload of both. Place is a trip.” He smiled and swigged his beer and walked to the window to peer at the city. He went on: “A rifle shot is like brr-app. Brr-app. The shot and the noise the round makes splitting the air, a little echo. Fireworks just pop. That’s it. Pop. Pop.”
Jonah refolded his map and shoved it back in his bag.
Kurtis shook his head. “Them cartel fuckers are smart, man. When a fight breaks out, you get buses hijacked to block the roads. Then the federales or the army, or the Marines if someone’s serious, can’t get to the fight.” Kurtis glanced at Jonah and then looked at the street below again. “But you gotta know, too, all of Mexico isn’t crazy like this. It’s like your home, bro—America isn’t as crazy as New Orleans. I’m talking about pockets, you know, areas in Mexico. The border, the gulf. The Pacific. But I could live here for a long time, man. Good people. The violence isn’t random, I promise you. Extreme, no doubt, but it isn’t senseless. Well. Not most of the time. People like me and you, we find out the why. We dig out the truth, that’s our job, right? So here we are, where shit happens. The frenetic edges. You know what I mean.” He lifted his bottle and glanced as if to toast something. “Outposts of progress. Why would you want to be anywhere else?”
Kurtis spun from the window and saw Jonah slinging his bag over his shoulder. “You’re new in country,” he went on, “so here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll go with you. We’ll bus to Lampazos and I’ll find us a way to Las Marcas or whatever your shit dump’s called. Hell, maybe we can work together on your story. I speak español if you don’t, hombre. Who you say you write for again?”
“I don’t write for anybody,” Jonah said. “I don’t write at all.”
“What?”
“I never told you I write.”
Kurtis pushed away from the window. “You told me you were a writer,” he said.
There was a gleam in his eye that Jonah didn’t like. “No, I didn’t.”
“Did you lie to me, bro?”
“No.”
Kurtis pointed at Jonah. “I invite you up to my home and you”—he pointed to his own chest—“you fucking lied to me?”
Jonah backed toward the door, frightened even as anger stirred.
Kurtis advanced. “I can tell you don’t get it. You think you’re a writer because you got some story down here, but you don’t fucking get it. It ain’t gold we’re talking about here, it ain’t ivory. It’s truth, man. Nothing more valuable than that. People crave it. And if you want the real stuff, if you want the good shit, you gotta make that place your home.”
Kurtis stopped in front of him. He was very close. Jonah’s backpack pressed into the door. It wasn’t a good position to be in. He tried to anticipate Kurtis’s first move. They were about the same height and the journalist was drunk—favorable details. Jonah balled his fists at his sides and said, “I’m not here to write.”
“Do you get it?” Kurtis whispered. “Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “Sure.”
“Good.” Kurtis nodded. His face slackened and warped into a smile, and he seemed very relieved. “Good, bro.” He turned and went to the dresser and took out a glass pipe and a baggie of pot. “Wanna smoke?” Jonah didn’t answer and Kurtis didn’t look at him as he went on speaking: “You know how I learned that about gunshots, how they sound?” He pinched some of the weed out of the baggie and tapped it into the bowl with his pinkie. “I was out on this story when a fight broke out. They just happen, no telling when. Like the fights are all part of one thing, one amoebic thing, just waiting in the doorways, the windows.” He gestured grandly: “It rises out of the sidewalks. I had a big beard, bigger than this. And, dude, a stray fucking bullet goes right like this. Zip. A high fastball under the chin. I heard the shot and all. Took off some of my beard. Had to trim it down.” He laughed and finally looked at Jonah. Red, gleeful eyes.
Kurtis walked again to the window with the pipe and a plastic lighter. “If you want to get all you can out of this place, you got to let it take you.” He held the flame to the bowl and inhaled and blew the smoke out the window. He stared at the street below and spoke quietly. “You got to let it swallow you up.”
Jonah yanked the door open and ran out of the room, dashing down the hall. He shouldered the exit open and bounded down the stairs.
He stopped at the bottom, breathless and sweating. He felt Kurtis’s voice on his skin, a crawling, wormy residue. He didn’t hear anything; Kurtis never called out, never came into the hall after him. Jonah gathered himself and crossed the lobby.
The kid at the desk had disappeared and Jonah jogged into the wet night, listening for sharp, distant reports, but he didn’t hear any. The city was peaceful.