Esteban is preparing to roll Maria’s body onto a tarp he brought in from outside. He crouches beside the corpse and takes hold of her dress.
“Before you do that, call our friend at La Mesa,” Rolando says. “I want to see El Apache.”
“Now?” Esteban replies, exasperated.
“Yes, now,” Rolando snaps, then goes back to his desk to once again watch Luz look up at him, point the pistol, pull the trigger, and run out the door like a woman on fire.
J
ERÓNIMO
C
RUZ,
E
L APACHE ON THE STREET, REACHES UP TO
adjust the reading lamp mounted on the wall above his bunk, shifting the beam to better illuminate the pages of the worn paperback romance novel that he’s a few pages from finishing. He’ll forget the story as soon as he’s done, but books are scarce in La Mesa, so he reads everything that comes along, in Spanish or in English. One week it’s Stephen King, the next something about white women shopping in New York. Doesn’t matter to him. He can only pump so much iron and watch so much TV. Reading forces his mind to work, helps pass the time, and keeps him off the yard, which is where most trouble starts.
Ronald McDonald pokes his head into the cell, his bright red hair standing up like he just saw something that scared the shit out of him. He has freckles, too, and the joke is his mom fucked a clown.
“Spare a Fanta?” he asks.
“Go ahead,” Jerónimo replies.
Ronald slips inside and bends to pull a cold can of soda out of the small refrigerator under Jerónimo’s bunk. “They locked the block up early,” he says. “I can’t get over to the commissary.”
“The Jew isn’t open?”
Ronald backs out and looks down the tier to where the old man called the Jew peddles soft drinks and snacks out of his cell. You can buy whatever you want in this place, from tacos to dope to TVs to birthday cards for your kids. Jerónimo has never seen anything like it in any of the prisons he’s done time in on both sides of the border.
“He might be in the infirmary,” Ronald says, stepping back into the cell. “I heard his liver is fucked.”
“Have a seat.”
A square of plywood covers the open toilet, and there’s a cushion on top of it for visitors. That’s where Ronald sits now and sips from his Fanta.
“I heard something else too,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“That
pendejo
Salazar over in B Block says he’s going to kill you for disrespecting him.”
“I didn’t disrespect him,” Jerónimo says.
Ronald shrugs.
“He asked me to play cards, and I didn’t want to,” Jerónimo continues.
He’s made an effort to keep to himself this time around, and a year into his three-year bit has only had to fight twice. That’s an accomplishment, considering what a sensitive bunch convicts are, always looking for reasons to get their feelings hurt and stomp a mudhole in someone’s ass.
That he’s under the protection of El Príncipe helps, because nobody wants to piss off the Prince. But the association also leads to resentment. Less well-connected prisoners see his one-man cell, his TV and microwave and electric fan, then look around the filthy, sweltering dormitory they share with five hundred other snoring, farting, stinking prisoners and say, “Fuck that ass-licker.”
Salazar is one of the jealous ones.
“You’re too good to play with us, huh?” he said when Jerónimo declined his offer to join the poker game. “So go to hell then.”
The kind of threat Ronald just reported usually goes in one of Jerónimo’s ears and out the other, another dumbshit talking tough. But Salazar is something else. He’s serving max time for murder and has killed two other men while inside, left them holding their guts in their hands. A loco like that, you take seriously.
Somewhere on the block someone starts singing a hymn at the top of his lungs. Another prisoner yells at him to shut up.
“Jesus is coming,” the singing con roars, slurring drunk. “Better get ready.”
“Jesus can suck my cock,” is the reply.
Ronald hands Jerónimo a cigarette, and he sits up on his bunk and leans forward to reach the match.
“They say Salazar cut someone’s head off during the riot,” Ronald says. “Then ate the guy’s eyes.”
In 2008, before Jerónimo began his stint, the inmates here rioted to protest the overcrowded, unsanitary condition of the prison and the brutality of the guards. At that time eight thousand men and women were packed into the facility, which had originally been designed to hold three thousand. The authorities regained control after three days by storming the cellblocks and opening fire on the rioters. The official death toll was twenty-one inmates killed and scores injured, but darker rumors swirled that hundreds of additional bodies were bulldozed into a common grave in the prison cemetery.
Everyone who was here then has a riot story: nightmare atrocities committed by prisoners or guards, harrowing close calls, selfless rescues performed under fire. A whole new pantheon of heroes and villains was born out of the blood and flames. Jerónimo listens politely to the tales but doesn’t put any stock in them. He’s spent enough time behind bars to understand that myth quickly eclipses truth in places where the truth is always suspect.
So, “Ate his eyes?” he says to Ronald. “Fuck.”
“Just so you know,” Ronald says.
“What I’m up against, huh?”
Ronald finishes his Fanta and checks his watch. “
Malcolm in the Middle’
s on,” he says. He has a cell to himself, too, and a TV, paid for by his parents. He’s halfway through two years for beating his wife and says he’d do it again tomorrow if the bitch spoke to him like she did the night he lost control.
Jerónimo shuts out the light when Ronald goes, lies back on his bunk and closes his eyes. He thinks about his own wife, Irma, and their kids, Jerónimo Jr. and Ariel. They’re living with Irma’s sister now, and Irma says everything is fine, there’s enough money, enough room, and the children are happy. She offers to bring them to visit, but Jerónimo won’t let them see him here. He won’t let Irma come for conjugals, either, because he isn’t even sure he’d be able to get it up in one of the dirty little rooms they stick you in. Junior will be five when he gets out, Ariel, seven. Three years for kids that age is half their lives. They’ll barely remember him.
Before Irma, before the kids, he didn’t give a shit about anything, not even himself. He was born in El Paso, the fourth of eight children. His mom and dad were illegals but got amnesty in 1986 and moved the family to L.A., to Inglewood. Dad repaired sewing machines in a clothing factory downtown, and they lived in a converted garage off Prairie, near Hollywood Park, the four boys sharing one bedroom, the four girls the other. They had decent food, clean clothes, cable TV, but Jerónimo always felt like he was just crashing there. One of his sisters was retarded, so she got most of Mom’s attention, and all his dad did was work and sleep.
His oldest brother, Arturo, joined Inglewood 13 at age twelve and was wounded in a drive-by a few years later. He’s been sitting in a wheelchair and shitting in a bag ever since. Tony, two years older than Jerónimo, joined the gang next, and at sixteen was tried as an adult for the murder of a liquor store clerk and sentenced to fifty years. Jerónimo was jumped in shortly afterward. He started as a lookout for one of the set’s drug corners, soon wound up slinging crack himself, and then became a tax collector, shaking down local merchants and forcing them to pay for protection.
He committed his first murder at eighteen, killed some punk who was messing with his crippled brother, trying to muscle in on the little slice of the dope business the gang had given him. Jerónimo warned the dude a bunch of times to back off, but he wouldn’t listen, so Jerónimo stepped up to him one day, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. He didn’t feel any guilt afterward, had no nightmares or regrets. It was something that had to be done, and he did it. Like a soldier.
The cops never even came close to solving that one, but his luck ran out soon afterward, when he put together a crew of his own and began robbing other drug dealers, relieving them of their stash and cash. The money was rolling in until they hit a rock house that turned out to be an LAPD sting operation. Jerónimo ended up doing five years in Corcoran behind that.
He got out when he was twenty-four, went back in at twenty-six for robbery, got out at twenty-eight, and was back in by the end of that year for some bullshit assault charge. Looking at serious time if he was popped in the U.S. again, he moved down to Mexico, to Juárez, after his release. A cousin there set him up with a job at a
maquiladora,
a place that made TVs. It was supposed to be a new start, but six months later he was busted for selling flat screens he’d smuggled out of the factory.
An inmate laughs maniacally, another gives a
grito.
Steel doors clang, toilets flush, and someone bounces a basketball off a wall. Jerónimo is usually able to block out the ceaseless cacophony of prison life, but not this evening. Tonight every sound makes him squirm.
He rolls off his bunk and washes up at the sink, shaves his face and head, then changes out of his shorts into a prison-issue gray T-shirt and sweatpants. Leaving his cell, he walks down the tier to see Armando. Armando is a little guy with one eye who also did work for El Príncipe on the outside. He has a phone hidden in his cell.
“You know anybody in B Block you can call?” Jerónimo asks. He doesn’t have to say “anybody you can trust.”
Armando looks up from a magazine. “Sure.”
“Can you find out which bunk Salazar’s in? You know, the killer?”
Armando has Jerónimo keep a lookout while he retrieves the phone from behind the air shaft grate and makes the call. Two minutes later Jerónimo has the information he needs: last row, last bunks, bottom.
Jerónimo has a small shank hidden inside his mattress, but this calls for something more certain. He walks down the stairs to the second tier. El Punisher is sitting on the edge of his bunk, doing bicep curls with a dumbbell and watching a beauty pageant on TV.
“Órale, hombre,”
Jerónimo says.
The big man motions him into the cell with a nod.
“I need something nice for like half an hour,” Jerónimo says.
El Punisher drops the barbell and reaches for a Bible. The pages of the book have been glued together and a space carved out to hold contraband. There’s an ice pick inside, a steak knife, and two good-sized blades with duct-tape grips.
“I can get bigger,” El Punisher says. A tattoo of two dogs fucking covers his bare chest.
“I bet you can,” Jerónimo says, reaching for the pick. He tests the point with his thumb.
“Seriously. You need a gun, give me an hour,” El Punisher says.
“This’ll do,” Jerónimo says. He drops a twenty-dollar bill onto El Punisher’s bunk, stashes the pick in his sweats, and leaves the cell. Glancing up at the skylight in the ceiling of the corridor, he sees that night has come down.
He did a year in the federal pen at Juárez for the TVs. With no money coming in from outside, he had to find a way to rent a bunk and buy decent food, because everything costs in a Mexican prison, right down to the guards charging fifty centavos a day to mark you present at head count.
A stroke of luck saved him from having to shine shoes or wash clothes or fetch meals for the more well-off inmates. His second day in, a
vato
from L.A. who didn’t like his Inglewood tattoos jumped him. Jerónimo managed to twist the shank out of his hand and turn it on him. Dude was dead and Jerónimo was back playing dominos before the guards knew what was happening.
Vincente, El Príncipe’s brother, saw it all go down and was impressed by how Jerónimo handled himself. He was doing time for shooting a judge and had a thriving drug business in the prison. He summoned Jerónimo to his cell and offered him a job delivering heroin to his customers. You didn’t say no to someone like Vincente, so Jerónimo spent the rest of his time in Juárez running tar and coming down hard on junkies who fell behind on their payments.
When he was released, Vincente gave him a thousand-dollar bonus and told him to see his brother in Tijuana if he needed work. A month later Jerónimo joined El Príncipe’s crew. By day he acted as muscle for the Prince, collecting on loans he had on the street, and at night he lay in his tiny, noisy room—a room no bigger than his cell had been—and tried to figure out what next. Because death was closing in on him, he was sure of it. There were no old gangsters. You were considered ancient if you made it to forty, and Jerónimo wanted to live longer than that, didn’t want to be shot down doing someone else’s dirty work. Staring up at the ceiling, his mind aflame, he prayed and made promises. “Help me change the end of my story,” he begged.
The central corridor of A Block is called Revolución, after Tijuana’s main drag. The inmates congregate there, playing cards on the picnic tables and sitting stoned against the concrete walls, seeing nothing and everything. Music blares out of a hundred radios, and cons stand in the middle of the corridor and carry on shouted conversations with other prisoners in the three tiers of cells towering above them. Jerónimo nods to a couple of acquaintances as he moves through the chaos. He keeps his circle small. The fewer motherfuckers who know your business, the better, especially if you’re trying to avoid trouble.
When he reaches the guard station at the end of Revolución, he motions to the pig inside to get his ass up from his desk and come to the window.
“Hey, boss,” he says. “I need to take a walk.”
“So?” the pig replies.
Tío Pelón,
the inmates call him, Uncle Baldy. He has a thing for young cons, trades them cigarettes and Cup O’ Noodles for blow jobs. Jerónimo unfolds a twenty and presses it to the scratched and smeared Plexiglas that separates them. Baldy waves him to the door. When the buzzer sounds, Jerónimo steps into the sally port. Baldy is waiting for him there. He takes the money and signals another guard in the office through a barred window. Another buzzer goes off, and Baldy pushes the door that opens onto the yard.
“How long?” he says to Jerónimo.
“Fifteen minutes,” Jerónimo says, stepping outside.
Baldy stands in the doorway and whistles. The guard in the east tower waves his rifle. Baldy points at Jerónimo and gives the thumbs up. The tower guard waves his rifle again. Baldy moves back inside the cellblock and closes the door.
Jerónimo pauses for a few breaths of fresh air. The sounds of a Tijuana night rise over the wall and drift across the deserted yard. A car honks, music plays, a mother shouts for her children to come inside for dinner. The prison festers right in the middle of the city, surrounded by houses, restaurants, and shops. During the riot, people with loved ones inside climbed onto the roofs of neighboring buildings and tried to catch glimpses of their fathers, sons, and lovers when the assault team finally herded the surviving inmates onto the yard.