DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT BUBBA?
The Plane Went Down Somewhere in the Alte Mixteca Mountains.
About a year ago I was bellied up to the rail at the saloon counter in Bar Hardin in Oaxaca. Not the one at the end of the Portale de Flores where Flores Magon--the calle that leads to the big Mercados--begins but the one that serves zinc plated buckets of five Corona 'Shorties' for about $4.75 U.S. You know it, surely.
I was there mostly because I had just used--what we called in my day--the facilities. Now, the bathrooms in Mexico are not all alike. Details aren't important but they range from the primitive to the most elegant. Bar Hardin has the swellest men's room in the Portale des flores and it's on the ground floor, a plus. It has a seat on the toilet too. Unfortunately--if you are not a customer of theirs--they frown on the indiscriminate use of those facilities. So I always order a Mescal Reposado on the way to the men's room. This pacifies the staff. I drink the Mescal on the way out and tip well.
On this particular day--about a year ago now--I walked out of the caballeros and up to where my mescal stood ready with the lime and salt and chilies and all. Then I noticed the old Gringo next to me, bellied up as well with a mescal too. Very short dude, very stringy with a patch over one eye, some disreputably worn huaraches, a really beat-up two dollar straw hat from the cheapest hat booth in the mercado Juarez and--what was immediately apparent--a truly bad attitude. My sort of guy.
"Hi, I'm Bubba," he announced. "I'm from Texas."
Who could resist. All it eventually cost me was three nights of shelter on my floor, about 500 pesos worth of drink, and a couple of breakfasts...not so much.
Now we start getting into B. Traven and John Houston Country. It seems Bubba had been a pilot for the local Oaxacan drug cartel. Those wonderful folks that own the Marques de Valle Hotel here and that big shoe store around the corner from the Zocalo, and so much more of centro. Bubba didn't exactly work for the local cartel anymore, but he was a sort of pensioner. He had been their pilot in the seventies and eighties, moving Cesnas and even DC3's up from Oaxaca to little dirt roads and unidentifiable landing fields he remembered from his aeronautical and itinerant youth in south Texas as a crop duster.
One of the closely connected but junior members of that organization had been responsible for his loss of sight. In fact, had shot him in the head, right through Bubba's left eye, during a drunken, cocaine fueled dispute over nothing, I guess. The older and more responsible members of the cartel felt sorry for Bubba. After his miraculous recovery from a rather severe brain and visual impairment they set him up in a finca down in the jungle. There is a curandero down there who keeps him pretty much up to speed on traditional drugs and homemade mescal, but he craves the excitement of the city from time to time. He doesn't handle it very well though.
The problem is, he can't exercise his trade. You can take off and fly with instruments and one eye, but landing is a bit more dicey. The lack of depth perception and all. Still, Bubba told me the most wonderful story about aviation, the drug trade in Southern Mexico, the way the Zapotecas in the mountains think and why the Mexicans--or anybody else--will never control Oaxaca...
It seems while Bubba--a valued employee of the local cartel binocular vision yet intact--was still active, a large twin engined plane came down somewhere in the mountains here. This unregistered and uncharted flight was on its way from Columbia, loaded with Bolivian marching powder. It was headed, who knows where? North?
It went down in a remote part of the state, in the mountains, an area inhabited by the poorest, most neglected people of Oaxaca. No roads, no electricity, no phones, no sewers, no T.V., no water, no school. In a place like that, you notice the odd plane crash and check it out. There will be stuff you can use.
It took about a half hour to get from the nearest village to the crash site. They found a DC3 full of cocaine in five kilo bags. These people up in the alte Mixteca aren't stupid. They know this stuff is valuable. What they don't know is what it is good for. They tried using it as sugar in their coffee, it made their tongues numb and they felt odd and excitable. They didn't like it. Other culinary uses failed. Use as white wash was not satisfactory. But, somebody will want it. They'll come along. The villagers piled it up in a couple of old goat sheds.
Back in Oaxaca City, the local drug lords have learned, through the international drug cartels worldwide network, that the plane has gone down here. The Colombian folks plead for help in recovering their cargo. Valuable concessions are made and expeditions go out from their deceptively innocent headquarters in the shoe store near the Zocalo.
Meanwhile, back in the village, things are heating up. You gotta remember where we are. Most of the people up in those villages don't speak much Spanish. Whatever language they speak, there's no guarantee that their neighbors--whom they can see, across the mountain--will understand their dialect.
Yet, there is World Sport! They have a soccer field. They don't have running water or floors in their school. But! They have a locally notable soccer team. Furthermore, they were hosting a regional, four village tournament. Sadly, the guy who was supposed to get the powdered chalk to outline the playing field... well, he blew it. Forgot.
Of course, the white powder from the plane worked just fine. All ended well. When Bubba and his team of searchers found the village, they paid the villagers $15 US for each five Kilo plastic bag from the wreck.
So, this is the kind of fabulous nonsense that I love down here. You never know, it might all be true.
Max.
