Raintree Feed and Grain

by David Shawn Klein (June 2026)

Frida was on her knees scrubbing blood from the floor. Two weeks ago she’d crawled out of a tunnel to what she thought would be L.A. Now the smell of horse guts and blood saturated her skin, though she scoured her body raw. Their cries for mercy while they thrashed in their chains haunted her nights. On the mattress she was forced to rent in one of the workers’ houses downtown, she drew escape routes across the ceiling. A few more days and she’d forget that she was destined to be like Paty Cantu, singing her songs for the whole world. She’d be just like the other mojados who’d been told the price for crossing had doubled, and were taken to work it off at Raintree’s. They never talked about the destinies they’d hoped to find waiting outside the tunnel. They were carniceros now, and that’s all they were.

A stranger walked in. Everyone froze as if the devil himself had appeared. Frida didn’t get it. He wore a brushed denim jacket with woolly collar and boots with snakes running up and down, like some wannabe vaquero. He was short and slender, with pale yellow hair and pale green eyes, and the face of a boy barely old enough to shave. No one turned to look at him. He seemed indifferent to the effect he had on the carniceros, as if they weren’t worthy of notice.

Frida hated the vaquero on sight. He made her feel uneasy, like he was a mal viento walking over her grave.

Chicas hustled out of his office and down the stairs. Chicas, so brutal everyone called him el Degollador behind his back, nearly weeping with joy.

“Mr. Raintree! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” So there was a Raintree, after all. He wasn’t some Charo Negro in the minds of these simple carniceros.

The carniceros all started working again, but with a fever now, like when a new shipment of horses arrived. In whispers late at night they said Raintree was a government agent who hid his trafficking cash in the slaughterhouse walls, that he controlled a satellite that watched over Los Huesos 24/7. But how could this man who had no hatred in his eyes, or love, but nothing, nothing in his eyes at all, be the god of her prison of blood and death? This man who was bland as a bolillo?

He strolled the killing floor with Chicas at his heels, Chicas running his mouth like he was pleading for his life, how great a job he was doing whipping Raintree’s lazy-ass carniceros into shape. Raintree ignored him. He inspected the rows of horses suspended upside-down from chains wrapped around their ankles. Carniceros sliced them open from belly to neck to get at their entrails. Raintree stopped to watch a mare with a foal exposed in its belly, the mare thrashing at her chain. A carnicero was about to put the horse out of her misery, but Raintree lifted his hand. He watched without expression as the horse slowly died, but his pale eyes darkened, and he seemed to wage war with himself, keeping his face a mask. When it was over,  he made a point of imprinting the bottom of his snake boots on the blood-soaked floor as he strolled away.

Frida worried about Blackie, out in the corral. But Raintree would never hurt Blackie. Not ever. He needed him.

Turning from the horses, Raintree headed over to a toolstand sitting along the east-facing wall. A handful of women sat on wooden stools, cleaning the butchering tools. They lowered their heads as he passed. Frida had heard what happened when Raintree came. She pitied the women for fearing him. She was still plain and flat-chested, and her father said she had scorpions for eyes. But if Raintree chose her, she’d make sure to get something in return. She’d never been with a man, but this underbaked bolillo could never hurt her. The only thing she couldn’t figure out was why he gave her a chill, like a mal viento haunting a graveyard.

The women didn’t seem to interest him. He wandered outside, pausing to run his hand against a seam in the wall. Frida grabbed a pail and followed. Burning under a brutal sun, carniceros sat at picnic tables, breaking down the horses. Shoulder-to-shoulder they worked their machetes, their blood running with the horses’ blood through holes drilled into the tables, collecting into buckets set below.

Raintree strode up and down the tables inspecting his carniceros as he had his horses. They drove their machetes harder and harder, each carnicero to the next. Raintree stopped to size up a woman who was bending under a table. He was the god of Raintree Feed and Grain. Every inch of it was his, from the El Conde River to the asphalt lot, and all its creatures, men, horses, and women, were put to use according to his will.

The woman turned around with a small cry. It was Inez, the “Good Little Maria,” like the girl in the novel by Jorge Isaacs, so pure and sincere, and impossibly pale-faced out here under the sun every day, with her big black eyes not seeing anything, unlike Frida, who her teachers were forced to admit was the smartest in her class, even though they called her hija del diablo.

Raintree placed two fingers under Inez’s chin and made her look at him while he stared back. She gave the mal viento a look of defiance, but his mean little smile made her eyes plead for mercy she knew would never come.

The drumming grew louder and more insistent.

Raintree reached for the chain around Inez’s neck. He had a red tattoo on his forearm: AUTHORITY + SPLENDOR, the plus sign in the shape of a cross. He snaked his fingers down her shirt, drawing out a medallion of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She shut her eyes. He held the medallian on his palm. If the medallion was made of ice, it would not have melted. The women stopped working, as if with one mind counting the cost of leaping at him. The men, stooped low to their tables, took all the care in the world how they butchered their horse parts. Raintree played the medallion between his fingers.

Frida gripped the handle of her bucket, imagining it cracking open Raintree’s head. But what was this Little Maria to her? Just because on Frida’s first night she’d tried to make friends—even giving Frida one of her Pulparindo bars? Or because she’d asked to hear one of the songs that were soon going to make Frida legendary?

The carniceros drummed as one now. Raintree let the medallion drop against Inez’s chest.

“I’ve got some business up at Zapata,” he said, talking past Inez to Chicas. “Buy her a new dress and steak dinner. Leave your office unlocked. One of your men will drive her up after midnight.”

He turned away toward the killing floor with Chicas stammering what an honor it always was to share his office. The Little Maria ran off to the river. Her sobs carried up to the tables. Who is she to me? Frida thought again. Frida was getting out—she was destined to—and no Little Maria was going to stop her. Filling her pail with hooves and bones, she climbed the rise to the open pit. Her breath was rasping and her skin throbbed from the fever that never broke. From the top, she saw Inez sitting on a rock at the riverbank, watching the current. She must have sensed Frida watching, because she jumped to her feet and wiped the tears from her eyes. This beautiful good girl was the daughter Frida’s mother would have loved. But for some reason Frida didn’t hate her. She reached for Inez’s Pulparindo bar, thinking to give it back, that it might make her feel better. But before Frida could start down the rise, Inez shook her head. Chicas was marching out from the killing floor. Inez hurried back to the butchering tables without another glance at Frida.

Frida turned to the pit and tossed her hooves and bones. She crossed herself, pretending to brush away the swarming flies. Her parents wouldn’t believe it. Their only daughter, who on Sundays sang Daddy Yankee songs under her breath during Father Humberto’s sermons, praying now, for real. “Show me a way out today. Please. I can’t be here tomorrow.” That night one of Raintree’s guacos would come to their bedroom and collect Inez. Frida could shut her eyes and wrap a pillow around her ears. But in the morning—no, Frida would be far away by then, and never have to face the Little Maria, ever again.

Chicas’ back was turned. Frida scanned the grounds. She could run right now, follow the river wherever it ran—but it was the first place Raintree would look. Or ride out in a van, curled up in one of the coolers waiting to be filled with dry ice and horsemeat wrapped for sale. But she’d have to ask someone to seal the lid, and risk getting ratted out. Along the west side of the building, the kill box and concrete chute led out to the corral. A few yards west of the corral sat an asphalt lot where trailers pulled up with their doomed horses. Chicas parked his Jeep there too. She could jack it—that would make her a legend at Raintree’s forever. But what if he really does have a satellite? she thought, squinting at the sky.

Chicas called up to her with a radio at his ear. “Hey, Nina Fea! The trailer’s coming. Go clean the corral.”

He thought it hurt to be called nina fea, as if she cared that he found her ugly.

“Should I say it in Spanish?” he growled.

She stood there not moving, as if to say no one bosses me.

“Crazy little molly,” he laughed, slipping off his belt and wrapping it around a fist.

She stood her ground, counted to three, then hurried down the hill, around the slaughterhouse, past the heaped-up gas cans, following the chute toward the corral. Blackie lifted his head, sensing her approach. She didn’t dare call his name or someone might hear and know she loved him. Frida had never been one of those stupid girls who loved animals, except for hawks and killer cats. But Blackie was different. Alone in the corral, he looked like any other horse, a common breed, black from hoof to head. But when he mingled with other horses he had a supernatural calm, a strange inner poise, which was why Chicas let him live, to pacify the others as they waited to be led through the chute to the kill box. Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, she ran up and threw her arms around his neck. Then she dug into the dirt and pulled out a brown quartered apple wrapped in freezer paper, and he ate from her hand. “I’ll ride you out of here,” she told him. He looked at her with his sad black eyes as if to remind her that he was the calming horse. She had her destiny, and that was his.

An unmarked eighteen-wheeler approached from the desert road. Two carniceros walked down the chute slipping on work gloves. Frida saw her way out. While the driver was unloading his horses, she’d sneak under the chassis and hold on tight. She turned to Blackie and whispered where he could find the two remaining apple slices she’d hidden in the dirt. The trailer pulled onto the asphalt lot and exhaled. The driver stepped out, grinding a cigarette under his heel. It would be hotter and dirtier than she’d imagined, hugging the chassis mile after mile. She’d write a song to get her through. About her epic escape, how even Raintree couldn’t hold her.

The carniceros led the horses from the trailer toward the corral. The beasts were skittish, blinded by the sun after hundreds of miles in the windowless trailer. Chicas ran up to greet the driver as if they were old friends, and they headed to Chicas’s Jeep. This was her moment. She’d race behind the horses and roll between the tires.

Suddenly a little Connemara snorted and reared; the other horses pawed the ground, stalling the line. The carniceros reached into their pockets, each removing a worn sap. They bludgeoned the Connemara over and over, driving the other horses wild with panic. Blackie pushed past the bucking horses to stand between the carniceros and the pony. They turned on Blackie now with pleasureless grunts, like the men in the carniceros’ house, going at women in the dead of night.

Blackie’s expression never changed, and he never made a sound. Then the pain became too much and he began to whimper, igniting a frenzy in the carniceros. They beat him to the ground as if driven by demons who wouldn’t stop until the men collapsed dead. Frida threw herself over Blackie. A carnicero pulled her up by the hair, tossing her across the corral. She ran to protect Blackie again through searing pain.

“What’s going on here?” Chicas shouted, rushing over with the driver at his heels.

“The calming horse gave us trouble. He gave us trouble, boss, so we had to beat him. Then this crazy bitch tried to stop us.”

Chicas laughed, “Nina Fea’s in love!”

“I’m not,” she spat, pushing to her feet.

Blackie lay on the dirt, breathing fitfully.

“Put the thing out of its misery,” the driver told Chicas. “We should have been through a fifth of Jack by now.”

Chicas aimed his pistol at Blackie’s head. Frida ran in front of the gun and fell over him again.

“That beast is like our Nina Fea, made of fire,” Chicas said, holstering his gun. “Tomorrow we may still have our calming horse.”

He turned for his Jeep, the driver following behind. The carniceros pulled Frida to her feet and pushed her out of the corral. They locked the gate and joined the other workers climbing into school buses to be driven downtown for the night. Frida waited, eyeing the distance to the trailer. A short sprint and she’d be underneath. It had to be now, before someone caught her standing there alone. But if she did run and got caught, that would be so much worse. She had no choice but to rush over to a schoolbus and find a way to get back to the trailer that night.

From where she stood at the back of the bus, Frida watched Raintree’s recede into the desert. It had once been a warehouse, though none of the carniceros knew what its purpose had been. Families had lived in the houses where the carniceros now slept five to a room. The stores, the little church—that warehouse had been the lifeblood of Los Huesos until Raintree came. It reminded Frida of home and how the drought had scorched its lifeblood. Why had God allowed El Fuente to turn to dust, and Raintree’s shadow to fall over Los Huesos?

She imagined Blackie and the Connemara in the corral. The Connemara dreamed of days ahead, with no idea what Chicas had planned for him in the morning, while Blackie rested on a pile of hay, conserving his energy. At first light Chicas would return to run the Connemara through the chute. Blackie would rise to fight again. Over and over he’d rise, even knowing that after Chicas had finally taken his life, the little Connemara was fated for the killing floor.

God didn’t care about Raintree. But Frida would make Raintree pay. She’d break a hole in the wall and fill her pockets with his treasure. She’d leave some cash beneath the gaping hole so everyone would know what the nina fea had done to the great Raintree.

***

Frida reached under her mattress for Inez’s Pulparindo bar and slipped it into a pocket. The moon burning through the window lit the mattresses of the sleeping carniceros. Halfway to the door she heard a small gasp. Inez sat against the wall, working her Saint Guadalupe medallion like a rosary. She wasn’t at all pretty now. She reminded Frida of home, a child of the drought. Frida reached a hand to the Pulparindo bar in her pocket. The carniceros snored and mumbled in their sleep. Not one would stop Raintree’s man when he came after midnight to collect Raintree’s prize. Words began to rise from Frida’s belly—run with me! But what if Inez stumbled and cried out or froze in fear? Frida let her hand fall away from the candy. No, Inez wasn’t made of fire. Not like Frida and Blackie.

No one stirred as she walked out.

Just two weeks ago, she’d turned to say goodbye to her parents’ house, on a night as alive as this one. Now she pulled her hoodie over her head so Raintree’s satellite would think she was nothing but a creature racing up the road. Then she ran.

Back home she’d climbed her mountain barefoot on nothing but a strip of dried beef. Now she struggled to breathe. The moon was full and brilliant. It was L.A.’s moon too—she ran toward it full out, under millions of stars, imagining they were lighters held by her fans, and she was singing the song of her escape.

Finally Raintree’s appeared up ahead. In the corral, the horses breathed lightly, sleeping beside Blackie. Of course he was alive—hadn’t Chicas said nothing could kill his calming horse? She’d feed him an apple slice and get to jacking Raintree’s cash.

The corral was locked. She climbed over the fence and found Blackie lying on a bed of hay. She kneeled beside him. The Connemara ambled over. Frida rested her ear against Blackie’s flank, waiting for his failing heartbeat. She’d never cried, not once, but now her tears rolled down Blackie’s hide. She pushed up to search his eyes. They stared up at the Connemara—but with a look of love and courage that men like Chicas could never kill.

Headlights appeared from the workers’ houses. Raintree’s man had come to collect Inez.

Frida looked over at the trailer. All she had to do was slide under and ride out to L.A. She looked up at the sky, at all those lighters, and her song receded, and the lighters burst into flames.

“Don’t close your eyes just yet, Blackie,” she said, kissing him goodbye. “We’re the same, just watch.”

The Jeep lights were moving now. Raintree’s man had collected Inez.

Frida turned from the Jeep to the desert road. The headlights of Raintree’s Jeep approached out of the darkness. She climbed over the corral fence and raced to the cans of gasoline stacked against the slaughterhouse wall. She opened a can, splashing gas from the chute to the kill box and all along the wall, emptying the can on the butchering tables and pit. She raced back for another can, tossing gas against the other side of the building and the front doors. Sprinting to the hay baled at a corral post, she cut the rope, scattering a trail from the killing tables to under the fuel tank of the truck.

Raintree’s lights moved steadily up the road. Inez’s Jeep was coming closer as well.

Frida opened a third can and drizzled gas on the hay trail to make a fuse. She saturated the mound of hay under the fuel tank. Then she stepped up through the driver’s door and rummaged in the glove box for his cigarette lighter. With the lighter in hand, she ran until she reached the Raintree Feed and Grain sign.

A door slammed like a shotgun. She tried to flick the lighter, but the presence of Raintree standing behind her made it impossible.

“Give me the lighter,” he said, low in his throat.

She turned and saw him, a man alone in the widening desert. She flicked the lighter and a flame jumped out.

He reached out his tattooed arm opening his hand. “Give it to me, carnicera.”

She stepped back and let the lighter fall into the gas. Raintree made a strange grunting sound.

“Stop,” he said.

Frida ran, throwing open the corral gate, whooping to wake the horses. They pawed the ground but refused to run. Raintree tried to save his cash with an ax, approaching and stepping back from the heat, and approaching again. Smoke rose up; the horses bucked and whinnied. “Run!” Frida cried, shooing them out. They galloped now, but instead of escaping into the desert, they panicked, circling the trailer. Only the Connemara waited quietly as Frida mounted him. Fire took the killing floor, the butchering tables, the pit and the chute. Raintree was still now in the wild light.

Inez’s Jeep backed away down the road.

The hay burned toward the trailer.

“You can close your eyes now, Blackie,” Frida said.

She steered the Connemara toward the desert, the horses following behind. The trailer exploded. The desert fell away as they raced toward the horizon. The Connemara galloped faster. She leaned forward with her face on his neck, sensing he knew where her destiny waited.

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