liquor they could hold. He had them stripped naked and drowned in barrels of rum. The barrels were then sealed with clear glass tops so you could see the menâs upturned faces, their bulging eyes and bared teeth. The barrels were said to be in the courtyard of the Bossâs Culiacán offices where everyone who comes and goes can have a good look. A sign on the barrels says âDrink Responsibly.â
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It is easy to understand why there are so few willing to be a rancho guard. Almost the only ones who volunteer for the job are young recruits ready to do anythingâlive in the desert, forgo liquor and phone communication, make do with unattractive whoresâjust to be part of the Company. But the Boss understands how hard it can be for a man to live in such isolate conditions for very long, and he permits reassignment to any guard who wants it after a year at the rancho. A guard who likes the job can keep it as long as he wishes, but it seems to Eddie that only a man of reclusive nature and minimal appetites could ever choose to stay here longer than the requisite year.
Like the other guards, Eddie is not a heavy drinker, so the booze restriction is no burden. But unlike the others, he receives no pleasure at all from the village whores and very little from those of the Hotel Rey. Their lack of allure has limited his satisfaction to that of scratching an itch. He keenly misses the sort of girls he has enjoyed since he was thirteen. None of them less than very pretty and all of them sweetly clean. He misses the fun of sexual banter, of seducing and being seduced. But this job was the only ready entry into the sort of life he desires and he took it with the certainty that he could bear its privations until he earned a transfer to a better post. A smuggling crew is his ambition. If he canât have that at first, well, the job of an enforcer or a bodyguard or collector will suit him too. Even chauffeur to a chief will suffice, if that is the only position open. Any such duty would not only be more exciting than this one but also get him closer to a smuggling branch of the Company. And of course would offer him more interesting cities than Obregón. Larger cities, with their greater numbers of pretty women.
Still, before he can get a transfer he must endure eight more months at the rancho, and the boredom of the job already weighs on him. He no longer even wears his watch, having no desire to remind himself how slowly time is passing.
The Boss
âRanchoâ is too thin a term for this retreat at the foot of the western slope of the Sierra Madre. It is a renovated hacienda, an expansive property whose walled compound contains several courtyards and a sprawling main house of two stories with dozens of small suites. The estateâs most exceptional feature is the cold-water stream running down to it from the mountains, so that even in this lower reach of the Sonoran Desert the courtyard trees and gardens are lush and the swimming pool is always full. The summer days are of course very hot, but under the looming sierra the rancho nights are often cool even during the dog days.
The Bossâwhom the news media have made widely known as La Navaja but to his people is always and simply the Bossâloves the seclusion here. Loves the clear dry air of such contrast to the mugginess of Culiacán. Loves the black nightâs trove of stars and its howls of wolves. He has been heard to rue that his business keeps him from visiting the rancho more often than every few months and only for three or four days at a time. But for all his professed love of the place, his intimates know he could never be at home anywhere other than Culiacán, where he was born and has lived all his life and whose every street and alleyway he is familiar with. Where he gained early fame as the foremost assassin in the state of Sinaloa.
It is a secure haven, this rancho, impossible for anyone to approach, even in the dark,
The Marquess Takes a Fall