yustyoking

I

Standing on a street corner under an overhanging white-painted tin roof pockmarked with rust, Antonio of the Barrio was tired. Not bone-weary or battle-weary tired, but irritated, after spending all morning vainly trying to hook up with Carlos Fuentes, a bearded drug kingpin in the los Hipopótamos cartel. Also known as los Hipos, it was difficult to say if they were better known as hippos or hiccups. It made little diff in the drug world they dominated with curt, violent death. No policeman or circuit court judge in the vicinity of the barrio said “¡No, gracias!” to a greasy, sweat-drenched roll of Mexican pesos, when the alternativa was certain death.

II

Sitting on a cracked, wobbly cane chair in a smoky room loud with voices, trussed up in rainbow-colored frou-frou regalia, Valentina batted her eyelashes at him. A pale beauty with startling black hair and eyes as dark as gun barrels, she smelled of oregano, with just a touch of cinnamon. “Where you been, Antonio?” she asked in fluty, accented Spanish. “I ain’t seen you in maybe a month.”

“Ridiculous! I was in here yesterday,” he protested. “Nobody gets nothing for free around here.”

“¡Hola!” she exclaimed archly, hiking up her skirt.

“Muslos dulces,” he muttered, silently accepting a drink from the bartender. Muslos dulces, sweet thighs. Reaching across the counter, he brushed an orange cockroach to the floor with the back of his hand.

“¡Pendejo!” Valentina swore softly, twirling an unlit cigarette between her fingers flirtatiously and toying with a silver-colored lighter. She was calling him a jerk, an idiot.

“Venga conmigo,” he demanded, dropping bills on the counter. Come with me. “¡Vamos!”  He led her out through the doorway to the street. There was a breeze and it was perceptively cooler outside, the sun an orange globe hanging in a sky as drained of color as a head of cauliflower. Everything smelled of dust.

He kissed her cheek as she pointedly turned her head away. “I’m no slut,” she exclaimed.

“When did I ever say otherwise?” he asked, a paragon of innocence.

III

He said buenas tardes to Valentina’s mother. She was built like a tank, with Valentina’s black hair, slaving away in their tiny kitchen, wearing a dirty apron. It never hurts to be polite. Besides, they liked each other. She was more forgiving than her daughter. The country had a woman president, Sheinbaum, a Jewish woman president. First they had Peña Nieto, then Obrador, now Sheinbaum, but nada had changed. Life as portrayed in telenovelas.   

The gringo president was on the tele. “We are warning Canada and Mexico today that we are introducing a 240% tariff on fentanyl imports to this great country of ours,” he threatened. “A big, beautiful tariff that I dare say will steer our addicts toward consumption of home-grown Class Two substances. American substances for Americans,” he harrumphed, looking grim.

What could Antonio say to that? This could throw a real monkey wrench into the local economy. Where was that jerk Carlos when he was truly needed?

“Give me some money and I’ll get you guavas,” Valentina’s mother offered.

“They have guavas?”

“Sí, just now they have guavas,” she confirmed. Antonio gave her some money.

It was dark by the time he left Valentina’s hovel. At least they had given him dinner.

Still no Carlos.

Sitting in his own shack, Antonio was thoroughly fed up with Mexico, but where was one to go? Honduras? Colombia? That was just asking for trouble. Maybe Cuba if the Cubans weren’t such hardasses politically. There were some breath-takingly lovely women in Cuba. Poverty was the same everywhere.

¿Dónde estaba Carlos? Cabron.

IV

Without so much as a “by your leave,” los Hipos came rolling into the barrio in a caravan of six vehicles, American convertibles from the 1950’s with huge fins up the back, their tops down, open to the night sky, pink Cadillacs, two-tone blue and white Plymouths, cherry-red Chevies, treasure from the drug trade, renovated to optimum splendor. Dressed in red shirts and shiny black suits, the bandidos carried automatic rifles over their shoulders and cradled in their laps. Grinning but vigilant, they paraded throughout their domain, the air filled with the roar of engines and the metallic stench of gunpowder.

Carlos had arrived.

“¿Cómo estás?” he shouted. Perched in the first car, he called jovially to Antonio who had come outside to see what the noise was about. Waving him over, he asked “¿Qué onda?”

“I’m scraping by,” Antonio admitted.

“Come here!” Carlos insisted, pulling him in close where he could pass him a wad of bills without the whole world witnessing this unusual act of kindness. After all, they had gone to school together in their youth. 

“The gringos are fucking round with the drug trade,” Antonio pointed out.

“This is not news,” replied Carlos with a barking laugh totally free of humor.

“Big baby Carlos / Size ten boot / He shoots first / Asks later,” played on the car’s tape deck, the opening lines of Carlos’ narcocorrido, his drug ballad, commissioned from one of the country’s top folksingers.  

Shots rang out from two cars back and instinctively, everyone ducked. “¡Qué chingados!” Carlos swore in Spanish through clenched teeth. What the fuck! Hunched over, he jumped to the curb and released the safety on his rifle.

“No pasa nada!” someone shouted out and people began to straighten up and look tough again.

“¡Chinga tu madre!” Carlos swore. Fuck your mother. “So, el amigo,” he asked, “what can I do you for?”

“I’m not involved,” Antonio insisted. He saw no reason to defend his job in construction. Secretly, he was proud of being a good carpenter, but he didn’t expect that to carry much weight among gangsters. “Call me Jesús,” he joked. “My toolkit is full.”

“Let’s roll!” shouted Carlos and waved to Antonio as they continued parading through the crowded streets of the barrio.

Antonio couldn’t fault his friend. When he needed a loan, Carlos always helped him out, with never a dream of repayment. Antonio went back inside his hovel and connected his phone, fired up his laptop and logged onto the net.

Cryptocurrency was a bitch, but it only worked if you got in at the very beginning. A ponzi scheme, later investors were the suckers who padded out the value of the mythological coinage. Even America’s president had a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP, a presidential meme coin. So far, Antonio had never managed to ride one of those waves onto the beach of good fortune.

Behold! The Boeing 747 jetliner “gift” from Qatar was originally a sales proposal. The Pentagon offered to buy the aircraft, but Trump announced that Qatar would give it to him for free and there went the ballgame.

The gang who can’t shoot straight, with 365 days to choose from, Trump’s Pentagon has scheduled the Army’s 250th birthday celebration and military parade on his birthday, June 14th, displacing the 32nd annual Vietnam Veterans Memorial Weekend, souring veterans across the country. There’s irony in a draft dodger’s parade displacing a memorial service for those who valiantly served in Vietnam. People at the Pentagon say that the Army had no idea that the Vietnam vets hold a yearly memorial service at The Wall on the day before Father’s Day. Well, d’oh.

President Trump has signed an executive order calling for the establishment of a National Garden of American Heroes consisting of 250 life-size statues in marble, granite, copper, brass or bronze to be completed by June 1, 2026, which is cutting it close by anyone’s standard. The government is offering $200,000 for each statue, no abstract or modernist designs accepted. With only 69 fine-art foundries in the USA, China is the country best equipped and staffed to fill the order for that many statues in the realist style. As for the list of 250 heroes, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Pesley and Frank Sinatra made the cut, but not Frank Zappa.

Having experienced in his first term the bitter limits of presidential power, Trump’s modus operandi in his second term is to “flood the zone” with so many executive orders and presidential decrees, his opponents have little chance to keep up, much less mount any meaningful opposition. Since January 20, 2025, the president has signed 157 executive orders and 62 proclamations. Trump has even had his staff prepare a stack of executive orders in reserve, so he can announce them to fit current events or his mood. When an angry Egyptian man visiting America on an expired tourist visa threw Molotov cocktails at pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, Trump used the occasion to unleash a travel ban that had been sitting on a shelf in the White House for months. Presented as originally written, Egypt is not included on the list of over a dozen countries whose citizens are prohibited from entering the USA. 

Antonio logged onto the website of minihaha.net, but in spite of the jazzy text, they weren’t offering employment. Storytellers. He could tell them a story or two! Spin a yarn with the best of them. Maybe write porno films. Whatever gets you through the night, as John Lennon said. It drove him nuts, waiting for his moment. He logged onto TikTok and recorded a video, handheld, jumping around the shack. “Hey, amigas, is your ol’ buddy Antonio of the Barrio here telling you that times ahead looking very bright for the well-endowed and we all know what that means, so don’ give up nothing and just keep plugging away because inna end, we gonna make it! Chin up, face forward and go for it! ¡Gen Z vive! See U later, alligator.” Okay, maybe it wouldn’t make him any money, but he was glad that he had said that. Give the gals some encouragement.

V

It was on a Friday afternoon as he took the bus back to the barrio from a building site downtown that his phone began vibrating. It was Carlos and he wanted to see him that evening. They met in the public park across from the Hall of Justice, a block down from the police station. “¿Qué pasa?” he asked, sitting down next to Carlos on a green-painted bench. A Mexican magnolia tree, yolloxochitl in Aztec, left stains on the sidewalk.

“I maybe getting tired of bailing you out all the time, so when I hear that A-rabs are gonna build an office tower in the city, I gonna hook you up so you got plenty of money,” Carlos explained, taking out a cigar from a suit pocket and slowly lighting it with a back and forth motion of his lighter. Blowing a cloud of white smoke, he asked, “You interested?”

“Yes, of course I’m interested.”

“ ‘Cause it ain’t what you think.”

“I assume it’s carpentry?”

“Carpentry, sí, but there’s politics mixed up in it,” Carlos explained obliquely, concentrating on his cigar. He blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate in the wind.

Antonio laughed. “There’s always politics mixed up in everything, you know that. It’s Mexico!”

“Yes, okay, but I want to let you in on the secret from the ground floor.”

“I’m listening.”

“Good. When this building is finished, the A-rabs are gifting it to that President Trump. So he can put his name on it, lease office suites to Mexican businessmen and multi-nationals and make a ton of money.”

“Carpentry is still carpentry. Construction is construction. Commercial real estate—”

“ ’Cause we Hippos may plow some capital into the venture, too, you know. That’s where you could make a good bit of coin. You can be our gopher, our mule, carry freight for us between our people and the A-rabs. Big business is money laundering, not for the faint of heart.”

“I said I’ll do it.”

“¡Bueno! That’s a very nice decision on your part.”

As if he had a choice!

VI

It was a week later and the adamant honking of a car horn brought him outside where Carlos waited in a black SUV with tinted windows. Beckoning him into the vehicle, a gun tucked conspicuously in his belt, Carlos provided him with a briefcase on a chain, a handcuff, a key and an address. “The recipient’s name is Abdullah. Biblically, that means ‘Servant of God.’ Only not this hombre. Okay, pequeña piñata, my little piñata, deliver the goods,” Carlos suggested.

Antonio took a red, four-door taxi with a white roof to the address. The taxi smelled of garlic. In front of the building, a flash mob in striped yellow and black honeybee costumes was chanting “You can run, you can hide, but we don’t want your genocide!” They carried signs that said “No pests aside for your pesticide” and “Keep your greedy chemicals off my beeswax!” He didn’t make it halfway up the steps before a huge lummox with a brown moustache and bulging muscles, dressed in a Day-Glo yellow T-shirt, jeans and black leather boots, stopped him cold. “Are you with Agroquímica?” he demanded menacingly.

“Never heard of them.”

“Let’s see what’s in the briefcase.”

“Why do you think it’s chained to my wrist? This is more problema than you can even imagine.”

“Why? What’s in it?”

“Tons of money, sonny,” Antonio said, laughing. “I have an appointment with someone you don’t want to know. ¿Estamos de acuerdo?” Are we agreed?

So the brute let him pass.

Taking the elevator to the top floor, a security goon frisked him before leading him to Abdullah’s office. Wearing a flowing white robe and black headdress, Abdullah stood behind his desk, a rough hombre, his face as dark as a thunder cloud. Antonio wouldn’t want to meet him on a street corner. He uncuffed the briefcase, put it on the desk and pivoted it to face his host.

“Let us assume these are unmarked bills and liquid assets that by their very nature will not jump up and bite me on the ass,” Abdullah declared in boardroom English.

“I have no idea. I’m only the courier,” Antonio insisted. “Nobody tells me nada.” The last thing he expected was that Abdullah would refuse the money.

“Go back from whence you came and tell whoever sent you—”

“Carlos.”

“— that I beware of Greeks bearing gifts and other assorted improprieties.”

“You don’t want the money?”

“Go!”

Antonio went.

Standing in Carlos’ wood-paneled, gray-carpeted office suite on the eleventh floor of the Mercado Commerce Building, flanked by gun-toting goons on either side, Antonio got quite the dressing-down of Carlos. “It’s a simple enough process,” he explained. “You handcuff the briefcase to your wrist, you place the key in your shoe, you march to a taxi out front, you get in the taxi, you ride to the destination, you exit the taxi, enter the foyer of the office building, take the elevator to the top floor…” Apparently, nothing Antonio had accomplished up to now had been satisfactory. Listening to this near-endless litany of complaint, he considered the nature of their friendship. Antonio supposed that Carlos was charismatic, insightful, imaginative, discerning, broadminded, egalitarian, prescient, forthright, affable, chipper, somewhat baffling and quite possibly an admirable fellow. Antonio supposed. That didn’t make Carlos an easy boss.

VII

The man in the pin-stripe suit was a typical americano, very tall and slender with a scruffy beard. “I want what I want,” he insisted. A dealmaker, he had just flown in from Kuwait City.

They were meeting in Carlos office. When confronting gringos, Mexicans often feel vertically challenged. “Yes, s’okay,” Antonio stammered. “I can show you some great land on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s got—”

“Gulf of America,” the American interrupted.

“On the Gulf,” Antonio explained. “Rolling hills and the azure blue sea, ideal for golf and a sport center. Scuba diving—”

“Show me on a map.”

So Antonio got out a map, unfolded it and showed the coastline he had in mind. “I know it like the back of my hand.”

“It’s too far away!” complained the American. “For cryin’ out loud, I want something that’s convenient to the office tower. A five minute drive, ten maximum. You build something out in the boonies, people gotta fly in a helicopter to reach the damn place. Your poor people’s slum is a perfect location for urban redevelopment. Eighteen holes, beautiful fairways, sumptuous greens, low carbon footprint, goodbye to an eyesore. Everybody wins!”

“There’s plenty of fallow land further out, but still within city limits,” Antonio suggested. “It’s—”

“Exactly! That’s where all you people should move! We’ll keep the close-in real estate for high-end development,” exclaimed the American, ripping the map into quarters. “I’ve never understood why you indigenous people are so anchored to the land.” He seemed very pleased with himself.

VIII

“He talks of urban renewal, but what he wants is to bulldoze the barrio and build an 18-hole golf course,” Antonio complained.

“What a crock of shit,” swore Carlos, his face red with fury. “We’re nobody’s punching bag. We are los Hippies. Anybody fucks with us, he does so at his own risk.”

IX

It was a private petting zoo off the main highway. Zoológico de mascotas said the sign, and if you didn’t know any better, you would think that’s all there was. Howler monkees swung from tree branches inside their enclosure. An aquatic tank housed stingrays you could pet. Three kinds of cattle mooed and meandered. Sheep and goats grazed the hills. There was also a blockhouse out back with rings set in the walls, chains, blood-stained chairs and a worktable containing many implements of torture.

“Listen, there was minimal damage,” Carlos babbled, driving too fast on the side road, kicking up a thick plume of brown dust. For 30 minutes, he had said nothing, and now this. “Are you listening? There was minimal damage.”

“How many people did you shoot?”

It seemed really important to Carlos that Antonio accept his version of events.

“Two. Security guards. We wounded the driver.”

“You can see where I’m not happy to be involved in this?”

“It’s business!” Carlos yelped. “Be a friend and help me out.”

“What do you need me to do?” Antonio groaned.

“What you always do best. Comunicación.”

“This thoroughly sucks!” complained the American as soon as he laid eyes on Antonio. “Even if you were going to kidnap me, at least put me up in a JW Marriott or a Holiday Inn. Someplace with a hot tub.”

“I’ll check on possible accommodations. How about a plantation out in the country?”

“Do tell!” swore the American.

Which was why they took him blindfolded for a three-hour drive to a hacienda well off the beaten path. “I want a hot shower!” roared the americano the moment they arrived, tearing off his blindfold and storming from the vehicle despite armed guards with rifles on every side. “I want a steak dinner with french fries! And I want my phone back so I can notify my wife that I haven’t run off with a hot-blooded señorita.”

“Cellphone traffic is hopelessly monitored by the americanos. Give us an email address and we’ll email her,” Carlos offered. “We have hackers who can ghost the return address.”

“Ass-holes!”

“Enjoy your stay!” Carlos replied, leaving instructions that the gringo was not to be harmed.

“I would prefer Club Med in Cancún,” insisted the American.

X

The Immediate Response Force of the U.S. military mobilized both air and ground units, utilizing the 82nd Airborne Division to conduct forcible entry assaults.

“This will be an excellent opportunity to deal a DEATH SENTENCE to the MEXICAN CARTELS who for so long have bedeviled America,” announced the president. “I am in constant contact with Mexican President Sheinbaum and there is no daylight between the positions of our two governments. We are in complete agreement regarding active force, regrettably necessary to free the hostage and return order to the region south of our border.”

He didn’t mention that the hostage was Don Jr.

American military personnel swept across Mexico, carrying out pinpoint raids at specific locations. Sadly, the cutbacks to America’s intelligence infrastructure made it extremely difficult for the armed forces to glean actionable intelligence.

“We just want a better deal on the golf course,” announced Subcomandante Insurgente Carlos for the Municipio autónomo rebelde Pancho Villa via Reuters and CNN. The American government immediately labeled the Rebel Pancho Villa Autonomous Municipality a terrorist organization.

Within a week, 100,000 Mexicans had been rounded up as potential suspects. Don Jr. was eventually liberated from his forced leisure and a relative calm returned to México.

XI

Sitting on the pitted concrete floor of a prison cell at CECOT Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in El Salvador, jammed fifty prisoners to a cell, Antonio stared at the dull gray metal bars, waiting for Carlos to come spring him. And waited.

And waited.

Waiting for Carlos, who could be anywhere… or nowhere at all. ¡Cabron!