Alacran y el Pistolero

An old man walks across the desert, ready to meet his fate.

The sun had become the old man’s worst enemy.

            It beat against him without any remorse, lashes of heat hitting his back and sending painful jolts up his shoulders. Reaching into his coat pocket he took out a handkerchief and wiped it across his forehead and brow, collecting the sweat that threatened to take his vision away.

            Not that there was much to see anyways. The barren plains of the desert hadn’t changed much ever since he stepped off the bus a couple of hours ago. The old man frowned and reached into his coat pocket one more time, producing a watch. It was a cheap thing, the sort of watch one could pick up from one of the many aldeanos that made their living selling trinkets and assorted mementos from bus stops. It had cost him one big coin, two small ones, and a medium sized one. He killed the first hour of his journey trying to figure out if that was a good price to pay or not.

            He could have taken the bus all the way towards his destination, but truth be told, the combination of a driver that was apparently blind to all the speed signs (few as they were), loud Mariachi music, and a ride with more bounce than a grasshopper had made him get off in the first station they stopped at.

            Plus they’ll be watching the buses. Better this way.

            He almost reached into his pocket again but stopped himself. There was no need too, the gun was still there. He could feel the cool touch of the barrel pressing against his ribs, a little piece of heaven in this hell. Or maybe it was the other way around. . He glared up to the sun with a tight smile on his lips. Sooner or later it would give up and move down behind the mountains to rest. But not him. He was an old man, but not too old. He could continue walking like this for months.

            He tried not to wince when another pain shot up his shoulder, this time the companion of one that started at his right leg. Okay, maybe not months, but certainly days.

            The old man took no breaks. When he became thirsty, he reached into the small backpack he’d bought at the bus station (five big coins, three medium ones) and took out a bottled water ( three small coins). Hunger wasn’t much of an issue, but he forced himself to eat, grabbing along with the water a sandwich (two small coins). There was no taste to the sandwich, and the old man timed his chews with his footsteps just to have something to do. 

            It was in the seventh hour that he got company. He knew it was the seventh hour because he had just checked his watch to see how long he’d been walking, and when he looked up a stranger was standing out in the distance.

            “Hello,” the old man said when he was within speaking distance. He stopped, hand in pocket, his fingers already snaking around the grip of the gun.

            “Hey,” the man turned and looked at him.

            He was young, and for a second the old man felt an ugly twang of jealousy. Good looking too, with that dark brown skin that most of the people around here seemed to have.  His hair reminded the old man of the charro beans he’d had for breakfast every day for the last twenty years, black and greasy. It was cut short in the front, with the back ending in a long braided pony tail that reached down past the man’s shoulders.

            Like a rat’s tail.

            He wore a pair of blue jeans that had to be magical, or at least blessed, for no dirt or sand clung to them. The old man’s own jeans on the other hand were matted with so much dust that any one would be hard pressed to figure out the original color. The young man wore no shirt, only a leather jacket also untouched by the kisses of the desert. No shoes either. Anywhere else he’d been under dressed, but here in the sweltering heat it oddly seemed like the perfect thing to wear.

            They spent a moment in the type of silence that strolls casually into a conversation and  makes itself comfortable like a big lazy cat.  The old man had yet to loosen the grip on his gun, if anything he held it tighter. He briefly wondered how far the sound of a gun would travel. Far enough to reach the ears of the man the six bullets were really intended for?

            “Taking a walk.” A statement rather than a question from the young man. His voice was soft, and he enunciated each word carefully, as if every sound was a work of art in progress. The old man imagined that was the sort of thing the tourist girls swooned for. He could only imagined, because it been a long time since any girl had swooned for him.

            “Yeah,” the old man’s voice on the other hand sounded like well, an old man’s voice. One that smoke and drank too much.

            Tilting his head, the man looked past the old man and whistled. “Hell of a long walk.”

            Shrugging, the old man said. “I done longer.” It was true too. For the last twenty years he’d been walking. The only difference since stepping off the bus, he now he was actually getting somewhere.  “You? Waiting for someone?”

            An important question,. The old man was ready to use the gun if it looked as if he would get a response he didn’t like. But the man just mimicked the old man and shrugged. “Not really. I just like to come out sometimes and enjoy this place. It’s beautiful don’t you think?”
            The old man had a limited vocabulary, and as such he hated to use beautiful on a piece of land like this one. Better one of the filthy words he only used in poker games and bars. Not that he said this out loud. Instead;

            “So you live nearby?”

            The man grinned, his lips stretching from one end to the other, a flash of white that didn‘t belong in the desert. “Yep, not to far from here at all.” He pointed towards the mountains and made a general gesture. “Nice little place. Got the necessities. A bed to sleep in, a hole to s**t in, a bottle to drink out off, and a woman to f**k.”

            “What about you?” The man asked. “Where’s your home?”

            “Far away from here. Not as nice as your place though. Have a bed and a hole, but little else.” It really wasn’t his home anymore, but it been for so long that the old man figured he would always think of it as such.

            “No?” The man sounded truly shocked. “Then you must come to mine! I’ll share the bottle, and if I’m generous….the woman.”

            He shook his head. “Can’t. There’s someone I have to meet. And I’m late as it is.” He took out the watch and looked at it, as if to remind himself of how late he really was. “I gave my word.”

            “Hmm..” the man said, eyeing the old man’s watch and nodding. “Appointments must be kept, specially if they’re bonded by your word. It’s the only thing a man really has right?”

             The old man nodded. That and a backpack, a watch, and a gun.

            “Still, you must at the very least accompany me to my home. It’s on your way correct? Company isn’t easy to come by here, at least at this time.” He pointed to the sun, “once that goes down, the desert really comes alive.”

            The old man made a resolution to reach his destination before nightfall.

            “So what’s your name?”

            Recluso numero 787. The old man threw out a name he hadn’t used in a long time, and figured he wouldn’t use again.

            The man nodded and pointed to himself. “Alacran.”

            “Strange name to have.”

            Alacran just smiled. “It fits me.” As if that settled everything, he begun to walk towards the mountains. The old man followed after a few seconds, his hand still cradling the gun in his pocket.

            “So who are you meeting? A friend?”

            “No.” No, the person the old man was meeting was many things, but not a friend. “An old business partner of mine,” he said after a moment of thinking.

            “Been a while since you seen him?”

            “Yea.” Twenty years, five months, and three days.

            “What type of business are you in?”

            “Was, I’m no longer in it,” the old man answered.

            “Okay then, what type of business were you in?”
            The old man stayed silent for a few minutes, and then answered. “Drugs”

            If Alacran found this surprising, he didn’t show it in his face. Then again, around here, everyone probably knew someone that was involved in the Cartel. Sometimes there were even whole towns involved, down to the youngest kids who would act as runners.

            “I was pretty high up,” the old man continued, although not quite sure why he was telling him all this. Maybe it was because he never had told his story. Not to the cops, the judges, or even his own wife. “I started young, just as another runner, moving the merchandise around. I used to live a few blocks away from the precinct, and every other day I would walk past it, my backpack loaded with cocaine, and the cops did nothing but wave at me. I started to move up because of my willingness to do almost anything. It was good money back then, and little risk of getting caught. And even if you did, a bribe usually took care of the matter.”

            “You mean things have changed now?”

            The old man smiled and nodded. “Bribes gotten bigger. Before, you could pay off a cop and still have enough money to make it worthwhile. Now? You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t ask for the shoes off your feet.”

             “If I had any,” Alacran said.

            “If you had any. So I kept moving up, doing bigger and bigger things and making more money off it as well. My trick was that I never got hooked into the stuff. I sold it, bought it and everything else, but I never touched the stuff myself. I finally caught the eyes of the big bosses, the ones living down in the capital and running things. They send to me this guy, this little guy, to run the books for me and be my new partner. I wasn’t happy, it meant less money for me. The bosses always got half, and now I had to divide the rest between him and I. But what could I do? Say no? That would have gotten me a bullet in the forehead. So I went along with it, got used to the arrangement. Everything was going fine until my partner, the man the bosses sent down to me, decided he wanted to get out. And there’s really only two ways to get out of the business. They either kill you, or you run to the cops and turn on the business, for immunity.

            Guess the cops wanted bigger bribes. Or who knows, maybe a clean one finally made it to to top, who knows. Either way, they came busting into my house one night, raided all my businesses. Only took them a day for them to indict me.

            “Ouch.”

            “Yeah.”

            They walked in silence after that, and it wasn’t until the sun finally started dipping into the mountains that Alacran spoke.

            “Are you going to kill him?”

            The old man didn’t have to ask who Alacran meant. “I’ll try. He robbed me of twenty years of my life. My wife is dead. My friends are in hospitals hooked to monitors that keep them alive. Hell, even the bosses I knew of the Cartel have now been replaced by younger versions of themselves. But my old partner is still alive. So I’ll go to him and rob him of the twenty years he probably has left in his life.”

            “And if he’s suppose to live longer?”

            “Interest.”

            Alacran pointed to a small wooden shack out in the distance. “That’s my home. Sure you won’t join me for a drink?”

            The old man shook his head. “I still have ways to go I think.”

            Looking out to beyond the mountains, Alacran nodded. “Yea, I guess you still do.” Offering his hand, he looked into the eyes of the old man. “Someone once told me that sometimes it’s actually the journey that’s more important than the destination. You think that’s true?”
            The old man met the gaze and shook Alacran’s hand. Soft and without calluses. “No.”

            “Take care.”
            “You too.”
            He turned his back on Alacran and begun to walk away. He gotten a good few feet away before he felt the first bullet tear into his back. The second one slammed into his shoulder, spinning him around. Third one brought him on the floor, where already blood was pooling. He was surprised to find that he wasn’t in pain. In fact, he was relieve to finally be able to lay down, his feet, heavy as they felt seemed thankful for that. He didn’t hear him until he was kneeling next to him. No shoes to crunch any stones.

            “You’re his spitting image,” the old man said, trying not to let the blood gurgle to the surface.

            “That’s what they tell me.”

            He was dimly aware that his pockets were being searched. The gun was taken out. Good, he’d been tired of holding on to it.

            “You could have shot me.”

            “No I couldn‘t,” the old man coughed not being able to keep the blood from flying out. “You’ll live longer than twenty more years. Even with any amount of interest tacked on.”

            “You should have joined me for a drink. I think I could have convinced you not to keep walking.”

            His eye lids felt heavy, and so he closed them. After hours of the bright sun, the darkness felt nice.  “Why the name?

             “Ever heard the ballad of the gunman?”

            The old man tried to shake his head and found that to be too heavy as well. “No.”

            “A long time ago, although I guess really not that long ago, there used to be a pistolero. The way it’s told, it was like his gun was an extension of his arm, he was that good. No one could touch him, mostly because he would shoot them down before they got a chance too. Thing was, people liked him. He was one of the few good guys. Honest, clean, all that.  So one night, this pistolero falls sleep under the stars of a desert, only to wake up to find a large scorpion right on his chest. ‘Scorpion, do not sting me,’ the gunman whispered, not daring to move his lips more than that. “I am a good man, one that is needed by many. And the scorpion answered, ‘I know you are a good man pistolero. It is in your nature to be good, just as it is in my nature to sting you. Whether you are a good man or not.’ They found the gunman dead the next morning, the scorpion still sitting on his chest, its needle piercing the man right above the heart.”

            “But I never claimed to be a good man.” The old man found his voice leaving him.

            “I know. But it was in my nature to sting you. Good or bad.”

           

Reviews

[Jimmy.]

Great piece of work! Very desriptive, so it was easy for me to imagine in my head.
Check out my work if you have the time!

[Tony]

Esta historia es muy bien. Having lived in Mexico for a long time I can see and feel the culture as well as enjoy the story. Andele' pues.

[Dave Lounsbury]

I really liked this piece. It was an original. Plus I really enjoyed the writing; you painted a very vivid picture with your words.
It flowed well and the dialogue was very natural. All and all a very good read throughout.