If I had seen another plane head towards my direction in the next moment, I would have thought that it was an invasion by the Mexican Air Force but the sound faded away and I was again in total silence on a crisp Fall day, with crystal blue sky and a slight chill in the air...some people call this a big sky day.
I had four days in a row off from work so at the moment the plane flew over I thought to myself, "What the fuck are you doing here?" I gathered some gear together, stopped by the bank (where they still typed out everything on a bank typewriter) withdrew some greenbacks and started hammering down the highway as fast as possible, rolling stripes underneath me, heading for Ojinaga, Chihuahua. I was gonna get a room, find some moonshine, drive around town, and sit on a bar stool at my favorite Ojinaga bar and strike up a conversation with a pretty puta. Hell, I would pay her $10USD just to sit, talk and keep me company...that would be OK with her too. An easy $10 on a warm, lazy, slow afternoon. Yeah...us yankees throw it away or spend it on the wrong fucking things every time.
Fall days there are bliss, no wind, warm and NOT hot. There, you can sit and talk your head off in any language, listen to those talking or pay another $10USD for a blowjob in the back. Hell, for $50USD you can watch two putas go at it together.
But not today, not for me anyway. It was just not meant to be.
...Where I find myself in a rather odd and upright position somewhere
While working on the bottle of Presidente brandy we were joined by another puta. She remembered me from the last time I was in Ojinaga. I thought that things would have gotten real interesting had it not been for my first clue that things would not be right today. This was my fate for today. Two lovely latinas on each side and the three of us warming ourselves like a Mountain Boomer in the sun.
Across the plaza, on the south side, is the federales garrision. When I think all is right with the world and that the next three days might end up better than I thought, two trucks enter the plaza loaded with troups, then enters the garrison. I certainly don't know what's going on with that, but then no one else does either. People try to ignore them around the northern frontera.
Every so often, society simply breaks down and goes kaput. I am not sure if it is a blip in the cultural fabric or if someone's genes gets swizzled by the cosmic swizzle-stick. Maybe the answer is that all of earth is actually hell and we are all on the different levels. Unknown to me at the time, on that warm afternoon, a day earlier hell seemed to have clearly opened up. The day before, a crease in the fabric of society ripped open and exposed all its ugliness, violence and desparation.
----
The teacher had her back to the room. After the school day was over she had began writing on the blackboard tomorrow's lessons. Unknown to her that moment, in this small school house a man was standing outside the school room door. The teacher hadn't noticed this nor would she needed to notice it. Yet, that day would not be a normal for her and the same would be true the rest of her days.
The man walked in as if he was a concerned parent that cared about his child's progress in school. With the speed of a predator, he covered the five feet between them. With a ferocity and viciousness of a predator he began to beat the teacher senseless until she was bloody and half-conscious. She tried to scream and struggle in the few seconds with which this happened but the force of his blows were too sudden. He slapped her again and told her that she had better shut up or when he was finished he would kill her. She kept quiet.
Within minutes of the rape, he vanished and the teacher was able to call the sheriff but in this tiny border town it took 30 minutes. As they rushed her to the hospital that was over 100 miles away she was able to give a good description of the man. The manhunt was on. It only took an hour to figure out that he had slipped immediately across the border into Mexico.
It didn't matter to the men on the American side that the federales were dispatched to the Mexican village and within an hour or so had the suspect cornered and eventually jailed. It didn't matter that there were two legal systems involved. It didn't matter whether or not the Mexican government would give out justice either. What mattered to the men that night was that he would be brought back quickly to the American side of things. That indeed is what mattered most.
----
RT my friend, pulls up and rolls down the window. He catches the 3 of us laughing. I look up and recognize that look. Something is up, he is the ONLY one that knows I am here and I sense that he would not do this if something was not wrong.
"Hey come join us fuckwad! I have an extra sittin' here next to me and...it's on me." I tell him.
"Hey Jag, come here for a second. I have something to tell you."
I really don't like the look on his face.
"We need a driver. Someone that knows these river roads on this side of the border." he said.
I am having too much fun and so are my two lady friends.
"There are lots of people that know these roads, damn it." I tell him.
"Yeah well, most of them are running drugs across the border. We can't trust those kind of people." he said looking anxious.
He tells me what happened to the school teacher and why they want me. His idea sucks, I am having fun, it is dangerous and I am looking forward to a party weekend.
----
...Where I find myself on a dirt road in the middle of the night...in Mexico again.
Felonious crimes (other than drug trafficking) were not that common for hundreds of miles in any direction around here, especially in Mexico. When one happened that was all the talk. If facts were missing, people tend to fill them in. I always realized this. So I was not sure the story was correct that I was being told.
My decision came down what kind of exciting weekend I wanted to have. As ludicrous as it sounded, the more curious I became. All I had to do was drive and know where I was going.
"Ladies...con permiso I must leave." I told them and they each giggled. No one, especially federale troops treat putas that way.
I peeled off another $10USD each, gave the money to the ladies and jumped in RT's souped up Ford Bronco. I pined as I looked back and watched as my lost weekend faded away from my grasp. RT noticed me looking back and waving to my senoritas.
"Sorry to do this to ya." RT told me. "I will make it up to you some time."
The two of us roared off back across the Rio Bravo del Norte and another hour or so down the river road; "Fuck it." I thought.
----
The sun drops to the deck quickly that time of year and as we approached the small border town it was getting dark. We met another car load of men and drove up a dirt road that gave us a view of the river, the small border town and the village on the Mexican town on the other side. The men in the Bronco focused their discussions and attentions to the bodega below in the small village in Mexico.
For the next four hours we sat and went over the plans a number of times until there was no doubt in anyone's mind about what to do. The other men had been planning this before hand but they had to make sure that I knew what was to happen.
At 23:00 we proceeded down to the river crossing. The other men in the Bronco checked their weapons. M16s, AK-47s were abundant here, they're just not visible to most people. I was nervous and the plan was for four men to go in commando-style, get the prisoner, bring him back across the border and turn him in; the sheriff would take care of the rest.
The men then, dressed in dark clothes, bail out of the Bronco and left the doors opened for their return. They ran about fifty yards and entered the bodega yelling in Spanish for everyone to hit the deck. Minutes that seemed like hours passed. The fact that there was no gunfire, seemed to me to be a good sign. I was to wait for a signal to start the Bronco when they signaled me. I waited...
Yelling started up again and then a gunshot echoed down the river in the previously silent night and I started worrying. Shit, what a fucked up mess this could have turned out to be.
"WHY DID I LEAVE OJINAGA, YOU DIP SHIT?"
My biggest concern was getting caught by the federales. Had I known at the time I wouldn't have worried. He was going to be transported the next day. The long wait finally ended as I noticed that they were dragging the prisoner towards the truck as if he were dead weight. As the men approached they signaled me to start the truck. They were close enough for me to see desert dust trailing the prisoner from behind.
The prisoner was bound with his hands behind him as they went to the back of the Bronco. They opened the back and threw him in and bound his feet. Another man jumped in with him to guard him. The rest of the men got in, slammed the doors and started yelling for me to go, go, go. I tore ass out of there. I was driving like hell in the dark, with only a spot light on until I hit the crossing into the U.S. Finally, we made the highway and I sped twenty miles down the road and far enough away so that had anyone been chasing us would have been seen. We stopped for a few minutes to collect our thoughts. A mile or so ahead was a Border Patrol checkpoint we needed to get past.
"Don't worry about that." one of the men pointed out to me. "Just drive up to the checkpoint like you normally would do. They will just wave you through."
"What then? What are we gonna do with this scum?" I asked. They hadn't really said what we were going to do with this guy.
"Turn him in." was the short answer from the back.
As we approached the county seat and climbed up and through the pass, a voice blurted out, "Stop at the roadside park when you get there."
I was freaked, "what were they planning?" I thought.
I pulled off the road and shut down. There was a definite chill in the air. There was a rumbling and scuffling in the back as the men threw the prisoner to the ground. They started duct taping his mouth and adding more tape to his already bound hands and feet. Then from the plastic bag they pulled out a pair of scissors, bolt cutters and a knife.
I stood there with a racing mind scared and totally freaked out. Again I asked myself why in ever-loving hell would I have even thought of doing this instead of being soused, in a hot tub with two latina ladies? What possessed me to make such a stupid decision? To throw law and order out the window and have the winds decide his fate? Leave him for the buzzards as they sun themselves in the morning's first light? Even a small mob rules.
As I went through this moralizing and mental hand-wringing, three men began to cut and rip the bound prisoner's clothes off until he was completely naked. I thought for a moment they were going to rape him with something. The fourth man brought out a roll of barbed wire while the others drug the man over to a tree. All of the men were swearing and cursing the poor fuck as they bound him to the tree and wrapped him in barbed wire. When they finished, all of them at the same time urinated on his face.
"Let's go!" one of them said. "Yeah, let's leave this fuck here until we call it in or someone finds 'im!"
----
I woke up that morning as if it were a normal day. I made pancakes and the thought did occur to me about going back down to Ojinaga. The thought was only a fleeting one. The next afternoon, the Pirate called me.
"Turn on CNN man our town made the news!" he said. "They caught that guy that raped the teacher, tied up with barbed wire!
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