The Lord of Opium

A scruffy brown animal with a long tail stood up abruptly and twitched its long nose at them. Ton-Ton reached for a rock, but Matt held his arm. “It’s a coati. They’re not dangerous.”

“Looks like a big rat,” said Ton-Ton, fingering the rock. The beast decided it didn’t like the visitors and loped off with a rolling gait. Its fur was untidy, and its tail had been chewed on. It paused to scratch its butt lavishly before moving on.

“¡Hombre! He looks like he’s been up all night drinking,” said Chacho.

Next to the stream was a smooth, flat rock, and here Daft Donald unpacked the basket he’d been carrying. He put out sandwiches, cupcakes, oranges, and bottles of strawberry soda. “I remember this!” said Fidelito, grabbing one of the bottles. “We drank it when we escaped from the plankton factory.”

Chacho turned away. Matt knew he was remembering the boneyard, and it wasn’t something he wanted to recall. The boy quenched his thirst from the stream instead.

A small stand of cottonwoods provided shade, and the wind blew through the leaves with a dry, rattling sound. “Do you hear those leaves? Tam Lin used to say—” Matt stopped. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about Tam Lin.

“He was l-like your father,” Ton-Ton remembered. “Where is he now?”

Daft Donald scribbled on the yellow notepad before Matt could answer. He was at El Patrón’s funeral.

“Oh! I’m sorry!” the big boy said.

Daft Donald wrote again. He was my friend. He saved my life.

“How did he do that?” asked Chacho, who had gotten used to the bodyguard’s way of communicating and was as comfortable with it as Mr. Ortega.

I was at the funeral too. Tam Lin told me not to drink the wine.

“Why did he drink it?” Chacho asked.

Daft Donald paused for a moment before answering. I think El Patrón had given him a direct order when they discussed the funeral. Tam Lin couldn’t disobey.

“Microchips,” concluded Ton-Ton. The bodyguard nodded.

Matt was overcome by such a feeling of desolation that he trembled. Tam Lin had not committed suicide as Celia had thought. He’d been murdered as surely as if El Patrón had held a gun to his head and fired. It was the same mindless compulsion that made Cienfuegos unable to disobey a direct order or to flee the country or to comfort a little girl. Matt imagined Tam Lin holding the fatal glass of wine and knowing exactly what it would do.

He bent his head and started sobbing. He couldn’t stop. It was like Listen’s night terrors, except that he knew what was going on around him. Chacho and Ton-Ton put their arms around him, and Fidelito looked up into his face with something approaching panic. “Please don’t cry,” he said. “Your padre was a great hero. Heroes, well, they don’t live so long. But they’re muy suave, and we all admire them.”

The little boy’s inventive attempt to console him got through to Matt. He shivered and wiped his face on his sleeve. “It’s okay, Fidelito. Tam Lin was a hero. I should remember that.”

“Hey, we all lose it sometimes. Remember when Jorge was rolling bread crumbs at dinner?” said Chacho, recalling the sadistic Keeper at the plankton factory.

“Heck, yes,” responded Ton-Ton. “He was g-giving us the big lecture about not having diseased opinions. He was rolling up crumbs and when he got a big glob, he popped it into his, uh, mouth.”

“Only, a roach crawled onto the table and he mashed it up with the rest,” Chacho crowed. “Huck! Huck! Huck! Blort! All over the table. Wonderful!”

“Yeah, he lost it big-time!” said Ton-Ton. “L-later, when we escaped, Luna, Flaco, and I locked the Keepers into their compound and covered all the exits with bags of salt. Th-they were in there a week, and the only water they had to drink was from the toilet.”

“Huck! Huck! Huck! Blort!” shrieked Fidelito, beside himself with glee.

Matt knew what they were doing. They were covering for him by coming up with more and more outrageous stories. By the time they’d finished, Matt’s breakdown was lost in a welter of crude jokes. Daft Donald wrote on his yellow pad, You have good friends, and Matt silently agreed.

When things had settled down and they were back to devouring cupcakes and oranges, Fidelito leaned against Matt and said, “What did Tam Lin used to say?”