Gun Work

Mano held the puke bucket, wrapped Barney’s feet in aloe, administered eyedrops from Dr. Mendez, re-bandaged his ruined hands, drained and dressed the gunshot wounds.

It took Barney more than a week to work his stamina up to handling solid food.

I was dead once, Mojica had said. They killed my ass. And I’m still here.

The unseen clock kept ticking. Barney was always aware of it, but the passage of linear time remained a befuddlement, clouded by shifting tempo and sudden reversals. He imagined (or dreamt he could see through his closed eyelids) the second Bleeding Room, obviously a minimalist ward in some rural medical facility. No beeping machines, very basic — IV stands, worn but clean linens, and a broad toadlike man (Dr. Mendez?) leaning close, his wide, thick-lipped face speaking with no audio. He looked stern but kind. He gingerly lifted one of Barney’s mangled hands. Barney saw in great detail what would later be described as a crude transverse cut of the proximal phalange above the metacarpophalangeal joint, or halfway between the base knuckle and first finger knuckle.

His trigger finger, gone. He had swallowed it.

Barney could not feel a thing as Dr. Mendez disinfected a small row of sutures on the finger stump, where dying flesh had been trimmed and closed over the protruding stub of bone.

Sucio could have taken his thumbs, or both his hands, to incapacitate Barney more hideously. There was a sinister motive in his choice, a perverse editorialization. He could have applied his cutters to the penis or testicles, the eyelids, the tongue. Instead, he had unmanned Barney in a way that would do the most damage on the inside; obliterating Barney’s carefully guarded sense of self, the identity that even Mojica had perceived — Barney was el hombre de las armas no more.

Mano was the proprietor of a modest gem and mineral shop in the district of Xochimilco, once on the outskirts of Mexico City but now incorporated into its urban sprawl. Many of his repeat customers were Mexican wrestlers of considerable fame and standing in the Lucha Libre community, patrons of an adjacent shop where a retired grappler named Tigre Loco designed and manufactured masks, costumes and a few props for the wildly popular bouts held at Arena Coliseo and other venues. The luchadors spread the word, and their more well-heeled friends sought out Mano for handcrafted jewelry, hammered silver and uniquely designed mounts for his meticulously cut and polished stones.

For most of the years of his life, Mano had grimly watched the fashion of kidnapping wax and corrupt Mexico like a metastasizing cancer. He had been robbed at gunpoint seventeen separate times (successfully and unsuccessfully), mugged on the street, and randomly assaulted by the cocky, the desperate and the drug-addicted. But these miscreants were few when balanced against the average Mexican citizen, so Mano remained in business, conceding to grated windows, iron doors, alarms.

One abortive robbery attempt was rendered almost hilarious when three punks entered Mano’s emporium with one malfunctioning Saturday Night Special among them, and proceeded to yell threats because they’d seen too many movies. Next door in Tigre’s were no fewer than seven wrestlers who heard the commotion, bracketed Mano’s store from front and rear, and proceeded to pummel the fluid out of the trio of would-be highwaymen. This was neither fake brawl nor stunt show, and the kids were all hospitalized with a wealth of broken noses, lost teeth, splintered bones, concussions and dislocations. Typically, the wrestlers were hailed as local superheroes and no lawsuits materialized. This was not the United States.

Mano settled into his role as Barney’s caretaker, relating such stories as these in a calm monotone as though telling tales around a campfire. The kind of stories a friend tells a friend as a matter of course. His daughter-in-law continued her prayers and vigils for Barney’s recovery.

When Barney mentioned the ghostly woman’s voice he had heard while in the river, Mano told him three different versions of the La Llorona myth, after which the tributary had been named.

It was a fundamental parable in Mexican culture, percolating through many iterations throughout all of Latin America and the southwestern United States. The Weeping Woman, the Crying Woman, or the Woman in White was the ghost of a mother forced to murder her children, nearly always by drowning them in a waterway. The stories varied as to her motivation, but her curse was to haunt riverbanks, calling out in a mournful voice in an attempt to re-locate her lost little ones.