Caldo Del Cielo, Part III...

"No llores, mi querida.
Dios, nos vigila..."
- Bob Dylan, Romance In Durango

By RUDOLF VON BULOW
The Paz Files

BOCA GRANDE, Texas - The blogger was late for work. Eight hours of jobbing in the dirty deguello awaited him, this after he'd spent more than an hour posting a breathless story on his blog, BrownsvilleGarbage.com, about a new bar opening in town. There, he'd written, a chubby, black-haired woman had captured his imagination with talk about border satanism, wild pills and rough sex.

"I was transported to the part of my brain where I'd never been before," he'd written in a burst of perspiration that soaked his $9 orange-striped, Mervyn's shirt. Here, as he walked the lonely streets at midnight for the graveyard shift, the balding blogger inhaled a lungful of warm, humid air and pondered his upcoming date with the woman. She'd said her name was Manuela Ochoa, but that she was better-known by her nickname, "La Negra Traicion."

Lately, things had gone badly for the blogger. He'd written a story about local corruption no one believed. That had been a bummer, but then he'd written another one about snow that fell in his hometown, one far to the northwest. It was all a blur now, but he did feel stupid. At least the stories he'd written about the blues were somewhere back there, thankfully now-forgotten. What's wrong with me, the blogger asked no one in particular. He was almost under a leaning streetlamp when the gunshot broke the evening's silence.

A long gong went off in his brain, like a boxing ring's bell ringing ceaselessly.

He was on the ground, staring at the dust-dulled streetlamp light, his eyes chasing the swarm of gnats playing around the buzzing brightness, the scene seemingly innocent. Blood moved down his face and he lifted a hand to wipe it off his eyes. Am I shot, he asked himself and got no answer. What the Hell. Quien es?

Fear was the worst part about living in Boca Grande. You never knew who was next to die. Everybody laughed laughter of the doomed, even the crippled, aged obreros who walked the streets like mummies, forever mumbling lyrics frlom long-gone Mexican songs. There was a song swirling in the blogger's dying brain, something about Chicano poetry and a Coca-Cola stolen from an adjacent table at a low-rent, Tex-Mex cafe. In his frame, a fattened cop lifted himself off a table over by the corner jukebox, adjusted his flowing pants and cleared his Kingfish-like throat. The blogger could see the cop stuffing a fajita into his shirt pocket, the one fronted by a rusting badge. Life was daily in this lousy bordertown. You could go away for weeks and come back to the same dogshit. He lowered his head back onto the drying weedpatch under his body.

The gnats were flying down in his direction.

He thought he heard the chubby woman's voice before one last shot tore through his skull. He'd been cute with her, flirted and patted her on the ass at the bar. She'd smiled from behind a row of yellowing teeth and thrown her chest forward, slightly lifting her breasts in his direction. The blogger had played along, thinking this one's in the bag, in the sack. He'd been wrong.

Nothing was ever what it seemed in Boca Grande...

- 30 -