Sierra Negra , Episode 2: The Laughing Man

The laugh came before the man.

That was the thing about Alfredo. He announced himself without knowing he did it. The sound rolled up the hill ahead of him, through the dark pines, past the mule in its pen, past the dogs that had stopped barking and now stood with their tails down and their ears flat. The laugh was a circle. It had no edges. It went through a man and kept going.

Braulio stood on the porch with the machete in his hand and watched the shapes take form in the moonlight. Alfredo in front. Taller than his brother. Broader. A gold chain caught the light at his throat. Behind him, three men. Maybe four. Hard to count in the dark. They carried rifles slung across their backs, the barrels pointed down. A gesture. A courtesy. The kind of courtesy that means nothing when the guns are real and the hands holding them are steady.

Primo, Alfredo said when he reached the top of the hill. He was breathing hard but smiling. His teeth were white and even. You are a hard man to find.

I am here, Braulio said.

Here you are. Alfredo spread his arms like a man greeting an old friend. And still standing. I told them you would be standing. The old ones are tough. The old ones have roots. They go deep. They do not pull out easy.

He walked past Braulio into the yard without being invited. He went straight to the pit. The tarps were weighted down with stones. The earth around them was dark with the heat that still rose from below. Alfredo crouched and put his palm flat on the tarp. He held it there for a long moment.

Still warm, he said. You are cooking.

Braulio said nothing. The machete hung at his side. The weight of it was a language he understood.

Alfredo stood up and moved to the still. A copper pot that had belonged to Braulio's grandfather. The pipes were dark with use. The seals were wax and cloth, replaced each season. Alfredo ran his hand along the copper and brought his fingers to his nose and sniffed.

Good copper, he said. You can smell it. The cheap stuff leaves a taste. Tinny. You know what I mean. I have tasted cheap copper. It makes your teeth hurt. Your mezcal does not taste like that. Someone taught you right.

He turned and looked at the house. A single bulb burned over the door. Moths circled it, throwing small shadows on the wall. The paint was peeling. The porch boards were gray with age. The mule stamped in its pen and blew air through its nose.

My brother came to see you, Alfredo said.

He did.

My brother is a businessman. He likes to talk about percentages and partnerships and the future. He reads books about business. He thinks about things. He plans. He has notebooks with numbers in them.

Alfredo walked to the porch steps and stopped. He was close enough now that Braulio could smell him. Aftershave with something sweet underneath. Cigarette smoke. The chemical smell of something that came from a lab. Meth. Coke. Something that burned in the blood.

I am not like my brother, he said. I do not like to wait.

His smile did not change. It was the same smile it had been since he reached the top of the hill. Fixed. Polished. A thing that had been practiced in front of a mirror until it was perfect and empty.

You told my brother you needed to think. That was a week ago. Have you thought enough?

Braulio looked at the men in the yard. They were not looking at him. They were looking at the house. At the mule. At the still. At the barrels. They were looking at everything the way a coyote looks at a chicken coop. Casually. Without hurry. Because time is on its side and the chickens are not going anywhere.

I am thinking, Braulio said.

Alfredo laughed again. The same warm round laugh. It bounced off the walls of the house and came back. It was the most terrifying sound Braulio had ever heard.

Thinking, he said. That is good. A man should think. A man should be careful. But there is thinking and there is hiding, Primo. And you are starting to confuse the two.

He reached into his pocket and Braulio tightened his grip on the machete. But Alfredo only pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Faros. The red pack. He tapped one out and lit it with a silver lighter that had something engraved on the side. He took a long drag and let the smoke curl up into the light. The smoke smelled like everything Braulio hated about the city.

I am going to tell you what is going to happen, Alfredo said. Not because I am giving you an order. Because I am doing you a kindness. You are my blood. My mother's cousin was your mother. That means something to me. I want you to understand so there is no confusion later.

He tapped ash onto the porch boards.

You are going to give us twenty percent of your production. Every batch. We will take it in barrels. We will handle the distribution. You will not have to think about anything except making your little mezcal. You will be protected. Nobody will steal from you. Nobody will burn your agave. Nobody will touch your water or your mule. You will be part of our family. And our family takes care of each other.

Braulio looked at the men in the yard. One of them had moved closer to the still. He was looking at the copper with the same look Alfredo had. Appraising. Counting.

And if I do not, Braulio said.

The smile did not change. But something in Alfredo's eyes went flat. Like a door closing in a room where something bad was happening.

If you do not, the smile will go away. And you do not want that. The smile is the only thing keeping this friendly. The smile is the only reason I am talking to you instead of letting my friends here have a conversation with your wife while you watch.

He flicked the cigarette into the yard. It landed in the dirt and burned.

You have until Sunday, he said. Sunday at noon. I will come back with a truck and two empty barrels. The barrels will be full or they will not. That is your choice. But choose by noon. I do not like to wait past noon. It makes me thirsty.

He walked back down the hill without looking back. The men followed. One of them spat on the ground near the still. The trucks started. The headlights swept across the agave fields and then they were gone and the sierra was quiet again.

Braulio stood on the porch until his hands stopped shaking. Then he went inside and sat at the table and did not sleep. Leticia came to the doorway once. She looked at him and he looked at her and neither of them spoke. She went back to the bedroom. The door stayed open.

Three days later, on a Wednesday morning, he found the fence posts.

He walked the boundary of his property the way he did every week. Checking the wire. Checking the trees. Listening to the sierra the way a doctor listens to a chest. The posts were oak. Driven into the rocky soil by his father thirty years before. They had lasted through storms and droughts and the slow rot of time. The wire was tight. The goats could not get through. The deer could not get through. Nothing got through.

Someone had cut them.

Not all of them. Just the ones along the eastern boundary. Where the land met the road. Six posts. Sawed clean at the base. The cuts were straight. Whoever did it knew how to use a saw. The wire lay on the ground in loops, like a dead snake in the dirt.

Braulio knelt and touched the cut. Fresh. The sawdust was still pale and smelled of wood. This had been done in the night. While he sat in the kitchen with the lights off. His machete across his knees. Listening to the dogs bark at nothing.

He gathered the wire. It took three trips. He carried it back to the house in coils over his shoulder. Leticia was in the yard feeding the chickens. She saw the wire. She saw his face. She stopped.

What happened, she said.

The fence, he said. They cut the fence.

She closed her eyes. Her hands went still in the feed bag. The chickens pecked at her feet, ignored.

We should go, she said. We should go now. To Morelia. To your daughter. Anywhere.

He did not answer. He dropped the wire by the porch and went to the shed for the sledgehammer and the spare posts. He had eight posts in the shed. He had not planned to use them this year. He had not planned to use them at all.

The work was hard. The ground was dry and rocky. The holes had to be dug by hand. He swung the hammer and the iron rang against the rock. His arms ached. His back ached. The sun burned the back of his neck.

He worked through the morning and into the afternoon. At noon he stopped to drink water. The water was warm in the bottle. He looked at the sierra. The pines stood in rows like soldiers. The wind moved through them and there was nothing in the sound but the wind. No birds. No trucks. Nothing.

He went back to work.

The water line went the next day.

Braulio did not discover it until evening. He went to fill the mule's trough and the hose coughed air. A thin brown trickle and then nothing. He checked the valve. Dry. He checked the tank. Empty.

He walked the line. A kilometer of black pipe that snaked through the brush and down into the ravine where the water ran clear and cold all year. He had laid the pipe himself, ten years ago, with help from Sergio. They had dug the trench with shovels. They had buried the pipe and covered it with stones to keep the animals from chewing through it.

He found the break where the pipe crossed the road. Someone had driven over it with a truck. Not once. Several times. Back and forth. The pipe was crushed flat. Ground into the dirt. The plastic was split and the torn edges curled up like petals.

He stood there for a long time. The sun was going down behind the mountain. The shadows were long. The air smelled of dust and dry grass and the distant smell of someone else's cooking fire.

He thought about the barrels in the shed. The water he had stored for the next batch. Enough for two weeks if he was careful. Not enough for the harvest. Not enough for summer. Not enough for anything.

He walked back to the house. He did not tell Leticia. But she knew. She always knew. She could read him the way the old women read the bones of a chicken. She could see the future in his silence.

That night she came to him in the dark. Her hand found his in the bed. Her fingers were cold and thin.

Braulio, she said. Please.

He looked at the ceiling. The beams were black with age. His father had cut them. His father had set them. His father had built this room with his own hands and then died in a cantina in Apatzingán with his brains on the floor. Nobody had cleaned the blood. Nobody had looked.

Give them the mezcal, she said. Give them whatever they want. Everything. All of it. We can start again somewhere else.

And leave this? he said.

Yes.

He turned his head and looked at her. Her face was a shadow in the dark. Her hair was gray now. She was fifty one years old and she looked seventy.

I cannot, he said.

Then you will die, she said. And I will die. And your daughter will be alone. Is that what you want? Is that the legacy you are building? A hole in the ground where your body will rot?

He had no answer. He had no answer because she was right and he knew it and he could not do what she asked anyway. The pit was in his bones. The still was in his blood. The agave was in the ground and it was waiting and he could not leave it. It was not a choice. It was not a decision. It was the same thing as breathing.

He did not sleep. He lay in the dark with his eyes open and listened to the sierra and thought about the sound of the laugh coming down the hill.

Sunday came slow.

The night before, Braulio did something he had not done since the day they buried his father. He walked to the cemetery above the pueblo.

The path was steep and dark. The moon was a sliver behind thin clouds. The wind was cold. It moved through his shirt and touched his skin. He did not bring a light. He did not need one. He knew the way. He had walked it a thousand times as a boy. Running ahead of his mother. Counting the stones. Throwing rocks at the goats that wandered into the graves.

The cemetery was on a hill that faced the lake. The graves faced east. Some had crosses. Some had names. Some had nothing but the shape of the ground where the body had been laid and the weeds had grown over.

Sergio's grave was new. The earth was still raised. The flowers on it were brown and dead. Nobody had come to put fresh ones. Nobody would. Sergio's brother was in Michoacán City and the rest of the family was scattered like seeds in the wind.

There was a wooden cross with his name burned into it. SERGIO RANGEL VIEYRA. The dates were wrong. Sergio was fifty seven. The cross said he was forty one. Whoever made the cross had guessed. Nobody had corrected it. Nobody would bother.

Braulio sat on the ground beside the grave. The dirt was cold through his pants. He did not pray. He did not talk. He sat and listened to the wind and the distant sound of dogs in the pueblo below. The lake was invisible in the dark but he could smell it. Water and mud and the green smell of reeds.

He thought about the last jarro they had shared. The laughter. The way Sergio had put his hand on his shoulder and told him to go.

You knew, Braulio said.

The wind took the words.

You knew they would come for you. You knew and you stayed anyway. Just like I am staying. We are the same. We are the same kind of fool.

He picked up a handful of the loose dirt from the grave. It was dry. It ran through his fingers like water. Like time. Like everything.

I am going to give them what they want, he said. I am going to give them the mezcal. Twenty percent. Maybe that will be enough. Maybe it will not. But I am going to try. For Leticia. For my daughter.

He sat there until his legs went numb and the cold got into his bones. Then he stood up and walked home.

He returned before dawn.

Leticia was in the kitchen. She had made coffee. She had put on her good dress. The one she wore to mass on Sundays. She was sitting at the table with her hands folded and her face was empty. She had been waiting for him. She had been waiting all night.

He sat across from her. She poured him coffee. The cup was chipped. He drank. The coffee was hot and bitter. It tasted like the morning. It tasted like surrender.

I will talk to them, he said.

She looked at him. Her eyes were wet but she did not cry. She had not cried since Sergio died. Maybe she had no tears left. Maybe she was saving them for something worse.

I will tell them we accept, he said. The twenty percent. But I want it in writing. I want a price per liter. I want it fair. I want it in pesos. I want to know what I am giving and what I am getting.

She nodded. Her hands did not move. They lay on the table like two birds that had fallen out of the sky.

He finished the coffee and stood up. He went to the shed and opened the barrels. The mezcal was ready. The batch he had been working on the day Sergio died. It was good. Maybe the best he had ever made. He dipped a finger and tasted it. Smoke. Agave. The mountain. The years. Everything.

He went back to the porch and sat down. He waited.

Noon came.

Noon passed.

One o'clock. Two. Three.

The truck did not come.

Braulio sat on the porch and watched the road. The road stayed empty. The sun moved across the sky in its slow arc. The shadows grew longer. The air was hot and still. A fly landed on his arm and he did not brush it away.

He thought about Alfredo's smile. The way it stayed in place no matter what. He thought about the fence posts. The water line. The way the men had stood in the yard and looked at everything like it was already theirs. Like Braulio was already gone and they were just waiting for the body to catch up.

He thought about waiting. About what waiting meant. About what kind of message it sent when a man said he would come and then did not. The message was clear. The message was that the schedule belonged to them. The time belonged to them. Everything belonged to them.

The dogs started barking at dusk.

Braulio stood up. The machete was on the porch beside him. He had not put it down all day. He picked it up. The handle was warm from the sun.

The barking did not stop. It grew louder. More urgent. The dogs were at the bottom of the hill. Near the road. Where the trucks had parked the week before. They were barking at something. Something they did not like.

He walked to the edge of the yard and looked down.

The road was empty.

The dogs were barking at nothing.

He stood there for a long time. The machete in his hand. The dark coming down around him like water rising. The sierra was full of sounds. The creak of trees. The scuttle of something in the brush. The distant howl of a coyote, thin and lonely.

And something else.

A voice. Far away. Carried on the wind.

Laughing.

Braulio turned his head and listened. His heart was a stone in his chest.

The laugh came again. Fainter this time. From the east. From the ridge where the old logging road led up into the high pines. Where the trees were thick and the light never reached.

He looked at the ridge. There was nothing there. Just the dark shapes of trees against the sky.

But he felt it. The weight of being watched. The certainty of it. The same way the mule felt it at dawn. Ears flicking at something only it could see or hear. The same way the dogs felt it now. The same way every animal in the sierra knew when it was being hunted.

He did not go inside.

He sat on the porch with the machete across his knees and watched the ridge. The stars came out. The wind changed direction. The laugh did not come again.

But it was out there.

Waiting.

The sierra did not sleep.

Neither did he.

To be continued...