I was in Ciudad Chihuahua, in a bar in a restaurant close to the Hotel Victoria. I was delivering the title to a Chevy Suburban of disputed ownership to the owner of a sawmill in Creel. My mission was legal and benign, but it might have been dangerous if the other parties to the dispute had known I was carrying the documentation. I arrived in Chihuahua unchallenged and unmolested.
The mill owner was short. He had a broad smile nearly smothered by a thick black moustache and black eyes that gleamed in the bar’s muted lights. His belly hung out in front of his thin frame like it was added as an afterthought. He offered me a drink, and then another, and then I lost count.
Somewhere between my second and tenth drink, he told me about the manager of his sawmill.
He steals, he said.
If he steals, then why don’t you fire him?
I know how much he steals. It’s a sawmill. It’s not a gold mine. He might sell enough lumber for a campesino to put a floor on his cabin. But I don’t think I can hire someone else as good as he is.