The Sinaloa Story

Whoa! There's a lot going on here in paucas palabras. We're in one of those border nightmares where Texas, Arizona, and Mexico all ooze together into some kind of sharp southwestern guisado with enough lard and chiles to singe your lips and leave a brownish cloud around your cabeza. Add jeans that are too tight, old cars, bad norteno music, and chicas that are muy guapa and hot to trot -- and you get Barry Gifford, the Sage of Big Tuna, at his very best.I've seen David Lynch's WILD AT HEART and LOST HIGHWAYS, both based on Gifford books, but straight Gifford hits you right upside the gut with a haymaker. The hot relationship between DelRay Mudo and Ava Varazo is interrupted when the latter blows away her pimp, Indio Desacato, and runs off to La Villania (Nasty), Mexico, to take up with an obscure political cause. Everything goes to hell when Cobra Box, her associate, goes to Bad Leopard, Idaho, to buy guns. Nobody ultimately gets together with anybody: just overheated bodies caroming around in a ranchero beat with the occasional gratuitous sex or violence. As Cairo Fly put it in his diary that closes the book, "Is it possible for a person's soul to stray away or be stolen and without it the person has no peace in their heart? I feel I am one of those now."There is something mesmerizing about Gifford's staccato chapters. Try too hard to follow the story, and you wind up like Thankful Priest with a bullet in your head in some godforsaken south of the border hellhole. No, man, just keep going to the beat. Sometimes, you fall off the edge of the world; sometimes you get good Tequila with your chilaquiles. I've got to get me some more of those Gifford books -- if this one's any indicator.