Caldo Del Cielo, Part II...

"They say everything can be replaced,
They say every distance is not near..."
- Nina Simone, I Shall Be Released

By RUDOLF VON BULOW
The Paz Files

BOCA GRANDE, Texas - He lay face-down on the taco stand, a hot tortilla in his hand. That was the photo taken by the Boca Grande Herald photographer, a skinny, frizzy and Afro-haired guy whose work dominated the front page. El Alcalde was dead, but the photographer, perhaps wanting to, but unable to do it, had not included the knife in the mayor's back in the frame. By noon, the bordertown was abuzz, with a sprinkling of facts, loads of rumors and innuendo as to who did it and why. At the corner of all downtown intersections, young Mexican boys screamed the sensational unfolding of the day's news.

Something was up. Someone had sent a bloody message.

El Alcalde, a philandering slob, had nonetheless been liked by some in town, irrespective of his penchant for drinking, for being arrested while driving drunk and for chasing the town's young ladies. One of the bronze-skinned beauties had been routed from a closet in his office at City Hall by his first wife, the one that now worked at the U.S. Post Office, handling money orders bound for Mexico. The knife had been a dull one, said one policeman at the scene. Too bad for El Alcalde; a dull knife is no way to be stabbed. He'd gasped when the blade cut through his shoulder blades, said a woman manning the taco stand. And then he'd blurted out an obscenity before his head fell on the half-gone plate of Tacos de Trompo. The Big Haired employee had grabbed her cellphone and dialed the emergency number. "What?!" she'd heard someone say, before she told them the mayor had a knife in his fat back.

The rain had washed away the blood by the time the television reporters arrived. That evening, the news on TV had it that the killer may have been a man believed to have been seeing the mayor's wife on the side. The side of the road, the side of the bed and the side of her body, mused an onlooker at the murder scene.

Laughter chased the story, for El Alcalde was more than just the mayor. He was a local celebrity and everyone knew that those were the people to laugh at, to mock.

On the Blogs, the killing was sensationalized even more. One blogger offered to host a wake at a Blues bar, where he said the action would reflect the mayor's manmountain addiction to young breasts. Another said such a barbaric act would never have taken place in his native Seattle, where not even calamitous snow was something to be feared. Yet another blogger blamed the county district attorney just for the sake of stirring unrest.

At home, Clara Hernandez-Hernandez, a woman who had met the mayor the night before and bedded him at a Central Boulevard motel, tested her brain for a motive, a reason. El Alcalde had treated her well, given her $200 for her sexual performance and promised more would come her way. She'd been heading home from work, from the maquiladora, when she'd heard of his murder. It was uncharted emotional waters for her. No one she'd made love to had been killed like this. El Alcalde was in his 60s and she thought his age had something to do with her thinking in those terms. All of her lovers had been in her age-range, the 30s. Suddenly, she felt dirty for having undressed alongside the old man, looked at him with feigned affection and worked her midsection as if for real. The afternoon sun would be a killer. Already, the temperature was in the low-100s. For sure. Humidity rising. The price of hamburger meat at the H-E-B almost $4 a pound. Crows flew freely across the harsh geography.

"Que pasa con ese pinche mundo?" she asked photos of JFK, The Pope and the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging over the couch in her living room. "Que hare yo, mi Dios?"

Radio news reports were saying El Alcalde's funeral mass would be a private affair...

- 30 -