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But kind of funny, in a Guillermo del Toro kind of way. The whole concept of a velorio is so people can view the body, but there is no body, not really; they just tossed the skeleton into a coffin that probably cost more than most people’s houses, so it’s kind of like going to a movie where there’s no picture, only sound.
Then there was the whole discussion of what to do with the suit, because you’re supposed to dress the deceased in his best suit so he’s not walking around in the next life looking shabby, but that clearly wasn’t going to work, so what they did was they folded up an Armani they found in one of Adán’s closets and laid it in the coffin.
Even funnier, though, was the dilemma about what else to throw in, because the tradition is you put in stuff that the dead guy liked to do in life, but no one could think of anything that Adán did for fun, anything that he actually liked.
“We could put money in there,” Iván muttered to Ric as they stood on the edge of this conversation. “He sure as shit liked money.”
“Or pussy,” Ric answered.
The word was that his godfather was a major player.
“Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to let you kill some hot bitch and lay her in there with him,” Iván said.
“I dunno,” Ric said. “There’s plenty of room.”
“I’ll give you a thousand bucks to suggest it,” Iván said.
“Not worth it,” Ric said, watching his father and Elena Sánchez in earnest discussion on the topic. No, his dad would not be amused and Elena already didn’t like him. And, anyway, he wouldn’t say anything like that in front of Eva—speaking of hot bitches—who looked … well, hot … in her black dress.
Ric would definitely fuck Eva, who was, after all, his own age, but he wasn’t going to say that, either, not in front of her brother Iván.
“I’d fuck her,” Belinda had said to Ric. “Definitely.”
“You think she goes both ways?”
“Baby,” Belinda said, “with me, they all go both ways. I get anyone I want.”
Ric thought about this for a second. “Not Elena. She has ice down there.”
“I’d melt it,” Belinda said, flicking out her tongue. “And turn it to tears of joy.”
Belinda never lacked for confidence.
Anyway, what they finally decided to put in the coffin was a baseball, because Adán sort of liked baseball—although no one there could remember him going to a single game—an old pair of boxing gloves from Adán’s teenage days as a wannabe boxing promoter, and a photo of the daughter who died so young, which made Ric feel a little bad about wanting to put a dead chick in with him.
So that was that discussion—the more serious debate had been where to hold the velorio in the first place. At first they thought they’d do it at Adán’s mother’s house in his home village of La Tuna, but then they reconsidered that it might be too much on the old lady and also—as Ric’s father had pointed out—“the rural location would present a host of logistical difficulties.”
Okay.
They decided to hold it in Culiacán, where the cemetery was, after all, at someone’s house. The problem was that everyone had a house—actually, houses—in or around the city, so an argument started about whose house they should do it in because it seemed to have some significance.
Elena wanted it at her house—Adán was her brother, after all; Iván wanted it at the Esparza family home—Adán was the son-in-law; Ric’s dad suggested their place in the suburbs of Eldorado, “farther away from prying eyes.”
The fuck difference does it make? Ric wondered, watching the debate get heated. Adán’s not going to care, the guy is dead. But it seemed to matter to them and they really got into it until Eva quietly said, “Adán and I also had a home. We’ll do it there.”
Ric noticed that Iván didn’t look too thrilled about his little sister speaking up. “It’s too much to ask you to host this.”
Why? Ric wondered. It’s not like Adán’s going to be too busy laying out bean dip or something to enjoy his own wake.
“It really is too much, dear,” Elena said.
Ric’s dad nodded. “It’s so far out in the country.”
They finally agree on something, Ric thought.
But Eva said, “We’ll do it there.”
So Ric and everyone else had to drive all the way out to East Buttfuck to Adán’s estancia, up twisting dirt roads, past blockades of state police providing security. Fucking caravans of narcos coming to pay their respects, some out of love, some out of obligation, some out of fear of not being seen there. You got an invitation to Adán Barrera’s velorio and you no-showed, you might be the guest of honor for the next one.
His dad and Elena had made most of the arrangements, so of course it was perfect. Helicopters circling overhead, armed security prowling the grounds, parking valets with nines strapped to their waists.
Guests crowded the sloping front lawn. Tables with white cloths had been set out and were heavy with platters of food, bottles of wine, and pitchers of beer, lemonade, and water. Waiters walked around with trays of hors d’oeuvres.
One of Rudolfo Sánchez’s norteño bands played from a gazebo.
The walkway up to the house was strewn with marigold petals, a tradition in a velorio.
“They really went all out,” Ric’s wife, Karin, said.
“What did you expect?”
Ric had attended the Autonomous University of Sinaloa for all of two semesters, majoring in business, and all he really learned about economics was that a cheap condom can be far more expensive than a good one. When he told his father that Karin was embarazada, Ricardo told him he was going to do the right thing.
Ric knew what that was: get rid of the thing and break up with Karin.
“No,” Núñez said. “You’re going to get married and raise your child.”
Ric Sr. thought the responsibility of having a family would “make a man” out of his son. It sort of did—it made a man who rarely came home and had a mistress who would do everything his wife wouldn’t. Not that he asked her—Karin, while pretty enough, was as dull as Sunday dinner. If he suggested some of the things that Belinda did, she would probably burst out crying and lock herself in the bathroom.
His father was unsympathetic. “You spend more time running around with the Esparzas than you do at home.”
“I need a boys’ night out now and again.”
“But you’re not a boy, you’re a man,” Núñez said. “A man spends time with his family.”
“You’ve met Karin?”
“You chose to have sex with her,” Núñez said. “Without adequate protection.”
“Once,” Ric said. “I don’t have to worry about sex with her much now.”
“Have a mistress,” Núñez said. “A man does that. But a man takes care of his family.”
Although his father would shit bricks sideways if he knew Ric’s choice of a mistress—an out-and-out psycho who is also his head of security. No, Dad would not approve of La Fósfora so they’ve kept it on the down low.
His old man had more to say. “To disrespect your marriage is to disrespect your godfather, and that I cannot allow.”
Ric went home that night, all right.
“Have you been bitching to my father?” he asked Karin.
“You’re never home!” she said. “You spend every night with your friends! You’re probably fucking some whore!”
Whores, plural, Ric thought, but he didn’t say that. What he said was “Do you like this big new house? How about the condo in Cabo, do you like that? The Rosarito beach cottage? Where do you think all that comes from? The clothes, the jewelry, the big flat-screen your eyes are always glued to. The nanny for your daughter so your telenovelas won’t be interrupted. Where do you think all that comes from? Me?”
Karin sneered. “You don’t even have a job.”
“My job,” Ric said, “is being that man’s son.”
Another sneer. “ ‘Mini-Ric.’ ”
“That’s right,” he said. “So someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch might think, ‘Hmm, the last thing I want to do is run my husband down to his dad and risk cutting all that off.’ Of course, that’s someone who’s not acting like a dumb bitch.”
“Get out.”
“Jesus Christ, make up your mind,” Ric said. “You want me home or you want me out, which is it? One fucking night with you and it turns into a life sentence.”
“How do you think I feel?” Karin asked.
That’s the best she can do, Ric thought. If he’d called Belinda a dumb cunt, she would have shot him in the dick and then sucked the bullet out.
“Here’s the point,” Ric said. “You want to bitch, bitch to your girlfriends over one of your lunches. Complain to the housekeeper, complain to the worthless little piece of shit dog I paid for. But you do not, ever, complain to my father.”
“Or you’ll what?” She got right in his face.
“I would never hit a woman,” Ric said. “You know that’s not me. But I will divorce you. You’ll get one of the houses and you’ll live in it alone, and good luck trying to find a new husband with a kid on your hip.”
Later that night he crawled into bed, drunk enough to soften a little. “Karin?”
“What?”
“I know I’m an asshole,” Ric said. “I’m an Hijo, I don’t know any different.”
“It’s just that you …”
“What?”
“You just play at life,” she said.
Ric laughed. “Baby, what else is there to do with it?”
As an Hijo, he’s seen friends, cousins, uncles killed. Most of them young, some younger than he is. You have to play while life gives you the time to play, because sooner or later, probably sooner, they’re going to be putting your favorite toys in a box with you.
Fast cars, fast boats, faster women. Good food, better booze, best drugs. Nice houses, nicer clothes, nicest guns. If there’s anything more to life than that, he hasn’t seen it.
“Play with me,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said. “We have a child.”
Now that she’s settled into young motherhood, raising their little girl, their marriage has evolved from open hostility to dull tolerance. And, of course, she had to accompany him to Adán’s velorio, anything else would have been “unseemly” in his father’s eyes.
But it didn’t help that Belinda was there, too.
On the job.
Karin noticed her. “That girl. Is she security?”
“She’s the head of security.”
“She’s striking,” Karin said. “Is she a tortillera, do you think?”
Ric laughed. “How do you know that word?”
“I know things. I don’t live in a cocoon.”
Yeah, sort of you do, Ric thought. “I don’t know if she’s lesbian or not. Probably.”
Now Karin sits next to Ric, looking every bit as miserable as he feels, but gazing dutifully at the coffin (Karin does duty like a nun does a rosary, Ric thinks) as befits the wife of the godson.
Which reminds Ric that he became Adán’s godson on the happy occasion of his wedding, an old Mexican tradition in which a man can “adopt” a godson on the celebration of a major event in his life, although Ric knows that Adán did this to honor his father more than to express any particular closeness to him.
Ric has heard the story of how his father hooked up with Adán Barrera at least a thousand times.
Ricardo Núñez was a young man then, just thirty-eight when Adán was brought to the gates of the prison, having been given “compassionate extradition” from the US to serve the remainder of his twenty-two-year sentence in Mexico.
It was a cold morning, Ric’s dad always said when relating the story. Adán was cuffed by the wrists and ankles, shivering as he changed from a blue down issue jacket into a brown uniform with the number 817 stitched on the front and back.
“I made a sanctimonious speech,” Núñez told Ric. (Does he make any other kind? Ric thought.) “Adán Barrera, you are now a prisoner of CEFERESO II. Do not think that your former status gives you any standing here. You are just another criminal.”
That was for the benefit of the cameras, which Adán completely understood. Inside, he graciously accepted Núñez’s apology and assurances that everything that could be done to make him comfortable would be done.
As indeed it was.
Diego Tapia had already arranged for complete security. A number of his most trusted men agreed to be arrested, convicted and sent to the facility so that they could guard “El Patrón.” And Núñez cooperated with Diego to provide Adán with a “cell” that was over six hundred square feet with a full kitchen, a well-stocked bar, an LED television, a computer, and a commercial refrigerator stocked with fresh groceries.
On some nights, the prison cafeteria would be converted into a theater for Adán to host “movie nights” for his friends, and Ric’s dad always made it a point to relate that the drug lord preferred G movies without sex or violence.
On other nights, prison guards would go into Guadalajara and return with a van full of ladies of the evening for the Barrera supports and employees. But Adán didn’t partake, and it wasn’t long before he started his affair with a beautiful convict, former Miss Sinaloa Magda Beltrán, who became his famous mistress.
“But that was Adán,” Núñez told Ric. “He always had a certain class, a certain dignity, and appreciation for quality, in people as well as things.”
Adán took care of people who took care of him.
So it was just like him when weeks before Christmas he came into the office and quietly suggested that Núñez resign. That a numbered bank account had been opened for him in the Caymans and he’d find the paperwork in his new house in Culiacán.
Núñez resigned his position and went back to Sinaloa.
On Christmas night, a helicopter whisked Adán Barrera and Magda Beltrán off the roof and rumors circulated that the “escape” cost more than four million dollars in payments to people in Mexico City.
