SHOWERED, SHAVED, AND HIGH, WITH HIS HAND ON A CHROME.45 automatic and a cigarette dangling from his lip, Teuch rode beside Adulio, his brother-King. Slouched down in the front seat of Adulio's pimped-out '73 Impala, they rumbled down the steaming street past the Catholic church in Wilmer. The church's doors swung open and there stood the priest. Teuch might have thought the priest meant to welcome them, except he knew the priest could not have known that Teuch would be back in Wilmer.
"Stop," Teuch told Adulio in Spanish, taking a final drag before pitching his cigarette out the open window.
"Que?" Adulio asked, looking around, his bald brown head swiveling.
"Back up," Teuch said. "To the church."
They did, and the priest studied them without moving from the stoop, a watering can cradled in his arms. The priest's face suddenly relaxed and he approached the car.
"You look terrible," the priest said, in Spanish. "I didn't recognize you."
"Guess I fucked up," Teuch said in Spanish, offering up a placid grin. "Last time I saw you, Father, you offered me a blessing. I should have taken it."
Teuch pointed at the white helmet atop his head. "Cop blew half my fucking brains out, Father. Now I got some sense."
"To blow out half of his?" the priest asked, raising an eyebrow and switching to English.
"To see what you wanted me to see before, Father," Teuch said in Spanish, "to take your blessings this time. Bring me some luck."
"I hope to bring you the Lord's blessings by showing you the work I believe your brother died for," the priest said, returning to Spanish, resting his watering can on the gravel next to the small plot of flowers surrounding the stunted belfries. "I told you that days ago. Did the men who killed your brother do that to you?"
Teuch touched the dressing and smiled at the pain, now muted by heroin. "Yes. I'd like to know more."
Teuch got out of the car and followed the priest up the hard-packed dirt walk lined with small round stones. The priest swung open the dark door and they entered a musty nave with rough-cut dark wood pews that faced an altar lit by a single arched piece of stained glass and watched over by a large wooden Jesus, bleeding on his cross. Along one wall the priest went, turning in to a flickering chapel no bigger than a motel room. Teuch eyed the wooden Jesus above the main altar and sniffed before turning in to the chapel himself and seeing a hundred or more small photographs taped to the plaster wall in rows. Beneath them stood two racks of candles, their small orange flames guttering low and dribbling clear white wax.
"The people say 'Triangulo de Bermudas' behind my back," the priest said. "These are the missing, their photographs. Some from right here, they simply disappear. Most of them have sent word that they are coming and then, nothing. Back home, in Mexico, the people say they went. Here, they wait, but no one comes."
"Coyotes," Teuch said with a nod.
"Maybe," the priest said. "But why hasn't anyone heard? Some of them are bad, these coyotes. They take advantage of the weak. But their stories are told. These people"-the priest nodded at the wall-"there is nothing. They simply vanish."
"And my brother?" Teuch said.
The priest nodded vigorously. "He didn't tell me what it was, but I found him here in this chapel, late one night, just before he died. I don't know how he got here, or what he was doing, but when I asked him, he told me these souls might not be lost. That was all he would say, but I took it to mean something."
Teuch studied the souls. A young girl. A man with a full white beard. A fat mother with two grinning children. Smiling, random faces with no connection to one another beyond their Mexican heritage and their quest for a better place. Teuch chuckled and turned away, waving his hand.
"Ghosts and demons and smoke and mirrors," he said. "The work of priests."
Teuch stopped in the middle of the nave. The priest had followed him, but with a head hung in disappointment.
"Bless me anyway, Father," Teuch said, turning toward him and eyeing the bloody wooden savior. "For luck. I can't say it's God's work, but it is work I think He'd want done."