They walked and walked, through every neighborhood of the town, and, hours later, came upon a general store that was still open. It said abacería on the tin awning but it was more than a grocery. It sold clothes and huaraches and blankets and a variety of patent medicines. They stocked up the truck with all sorts of food—Rafo was rhapsodic at finding packages of frozen tortillas and Mike found canned herring in tomato sauce—and each grimaced at the taste of the other.
Mike wanted to find another sleeping bag. The next leg of the trip would be a long one over bad roads and sleeping in the cab of the truck had been uncomfortable. There being no sleeping bag available, he settled for an Indian blanket from Michoacán.
They deposited all their purchases in the truck, locked it and went walking again. It seemed only a short time after they’d eaten an enormous meal that Rafo once more pointed to his mouth.
Mike couldn’t believe it. “Christ, you’re not hungry again.”
“Thirsty.”
Nothing was open this time of night, except a bar. They entered it, made their way to the counter and sat on stools. It was a pleasant enough place, with tin ornaments hanging everywhere, some pretty, some hideous, all slightly in motion, glinting cheerily in the low light.
The bartender had a genial face, all moustache. When he asked them what they wanted, Rafo said, “Amarillo.”
Mike thought amarillo was another soft drink like Orange Crush so he ordered his Carta Blanca beer and wondered why the bartender didn’t go and fetch the drinks. The man just waited there, looking at Mike inquiringly. Finally he pointed to Rafo and said to Mike, “Amarillo?”
“What’s amarillo?” Mike asked Rafo.
The boy shrugged innocently. “Something I drink sometime.”
The bartender saw the dilemma and brought the bottle of amarillo for Mike to look at the label. Amarillo meant yellow. The little bastard had ordered yellow tequila. Mike thanked the bartender and, pointing to Rafo, said, “Orange Crush.”
The man brought the drinks and went away. When Mike started to drink his beer, Rafo didn’t touch his Orange Crush. The kid glowered. “Why can’t I have tequila?”
“You’ll get sick.”
“Cojones! I drink tequila once, I didn’t get sick.”
“You were lucky.”
“I will be lucky again.”
“You can’t have it.”
“Is my business if I get sick.”
“No, it’s not—it’s mine,” Mike snapped. “Once I deliver you to your father, you can drink tequila, you can get smashed, you can kill yourself! But as long as you’re with me, you don’t get sick—you got that?”
The boy sat there smoldering, not touching the soft drink in front of him. In silence Mike had a sip of his beer, then got up and went to the john. When he came back Rafo still hadn’t had a single drop of his Orange Crush, but all of Mike’s beer was gone.
Rafo smiled complacently. “Have another beer,” he said.
Mike took it in good humor, had another beer and Rafo, still thirsty, sloshed his Orange Crush to mix with the Carta Blanca while Mike marveled at how unprejudiced the boy’s gut must be.
Then Beatriz appeared. Rafo was sitting to Mike’s left, so Beatriz sat to Mike’s right. She had two sets of enormities, breasts and earrings, and all four hung low. The breasts sagged not because Beatriz was old but because they had no visible means of support. She had an amiable smile and a breath that smelled not unpleasantly of lime juice. Mike wasn’t certain the girl was a hustler until she touched him. It was only the slightest contact, just a hand on his forearm, but he had the instinctive sense that the fingers had lost their innocence. Her hand was certainly more revealing than her conversation, for Mike understood not one word of it. This didn’t discourage the girl. She simply asked the boy to translate for her. Rafo was only too willing.
Beatriz began an unbroken spiel, sentence after sentence of animated palaver, happy, unstoppable, as cheery as a birthday party. At last she paused for breath.
“What did she say?” Mike asked Rafo.
“She fucks.”
“It took her that long to say it?”
“She is telling how clean she is. She make a list of all the diseases she never have. Smallpox, chicken pox, malaria, scarlet fever, sleeping sickness.”
“How about the clap?”
“I will ask her,” Rafo said and stretched across Mike to talk more intimately with her. Hindered in some way, he paused—he had a peculiar problem. He knew more Spanish than English, but he knew more obscenities in English than he did in Spanish. Obscene or not, the word clap was not in his Spanish vocabulary. He tried to translate it, to transliterate it, to do it in pantomime by striking his hands together and when he was about to walk like someone stricken by it, Mike stopped him.
“Never mind,” Mike said. “Tell her I’m not interested.”
“What?”
“Tell her no.”
“You don’t want to fuck her?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not? She has big tits.”
Mike was getting irritated. “I said no.”
“You will never find tits like this. You can go anywhere and never find big ones like this.” And he pointed across Mike at the objects in question while Beatriz raised them a little.
Then Rafo asked Beatriz a question and she said, “Sí.” Rafo made a little gesture of invitation. “She says you can touch them.”
“Stop it, you’re acting like a pimp,” Mike said.
Rafo was outraged. “Don’t you call me that! I am not a pimp! I don’t get no money from her—I don’t want no money from her! I am not a pimp!”
“Then what do you want, you little bastard? You want to watch?”
“No!”
Even before the boy’s outcry, Mike was sorry he had said it. He suddenly felt certain that the boy had no payment or voyeurism in mind. Then why was he trying to promote the arrangement with the girl, what vicarious pleasure would he derive from it? He wondered if it might simply be that the boy wanted to join a more powerful banda, the banda of grown-ups, wanted to be part of the tequila gang from which he was as yet excluded. He certainly didn’t belong to a child’s world any longer.
Mike was just beginning to feel some small concern for the boy when Rafo said: “Eh, big man! Big gringo with a big cock but he’s afraid to use it!”
So that was it. Rafo had simply been challenging his manliness. It was going to be a humiliating trick of some sort. Rankling over the fight he’d lost, Rafo was merely trying to prove the Yankee was something less than all powerful. Maybe even impotent.
Jesus, Mike thought, whatever gave me that notion? It probably wasn’t at all in the boy’s mind. Why would a little snot like that be thinking in such terms, how could they ever occur to him, what could he know of the sick, the dizzying sense of a man’s failure? Besides, if there was any impotence involved it certainly didn’t have anything to do with a bar whore—he could have laid her if he wanted to—or even with women in general. It had something to do with the drying up of other vital fluids than semen, with failure in his work, with the fact he would never be a young man again, would never adventure in other arenas than the sexual one—might no longer be brave enough for any arena at all, ever again.
No, that wouldn’t be in the boy’s mind, but it was in his—and it stayed with him through the night, keeping him wakeful. It was a bad night for sleeping anyway. The truck was parked in a wide-open place, off the highway, and a cold wind blew all around it. Gusting erratically from all directions, the gale would be still for a moment, then sound a ghostly warning and suddenly crack-slap against the side of the truck, threatening to break in. The blanket Mike lay on and under was none too warm, and he imagined Rafo was cold even in the sleeping bag, for the boy was restive and muttered unintelligibly in his sleep. When Macho added to t
he night’s nuisance—chooking, pecking at the air, walking all over them—Mike gave up.
Before daylight he was in the cab of the truck and driving. He didn’t hear Rafo stir and was surprised, right after dawn, to see the boy sitting up, quietly gazing out the rear window. It puzzled Mike that he seemed content to ride back there, sitting uncomfortably on the hard floor, while the truck jounced over rough and rutted roads. It was, Mike realized, a measure of the kid’s hostility that he’d rather travel uncomfortably in second class than ride up front with the driver. What surprised Mike even more was that Rafo hadn’t yet started foraging through the bags for something to eat. By mid-morning, however, he was eating again.
Their eating place was at a distance from the truck, off the road in a grove of trees. A grove of cactus, really, all kinds of bristly and succulent growths, some tall and thorny, others with huge fleshy arms. Rafo cleaned off a wide flat stone that was squarely in the blazing sun, scrubbed it with spring water out of a plastic gallon, and spread the tortillas to fry on the improvised griddle. He was so proud of his results that he started eating them plain, one after another, rolling them up and stuffing them in his mouth. Then he went to work on the beans and onions, canned guavas and cherimoyas, cheese melted from the broiling heat, gorging, racing to get next meal’s food in his mouth before this meal was chewed.
Mike couldn’t stand to watch him and turned away.
“You want another tortilla?” the boy asked. He held up the floppy pancake.
“No more. I’m finished.” When Mike looked back, Rafo was wiping his fingers with the tortilla which he then wedged into whatever space was left inside his cheek.
“What else can you do with a tortilla?” Mike asked disgustedly.
“What?”
“You use it for a fork and a spoon. And before you eat it, you wipe your plate with it, wipe the bean can, wipe your fingers and wipe your mouth. What else can you do with it?”
“You want me to tell you?” the boy leered.
“No.” He watched the kid go after the last errant bean. “I wish you wouldn’t eat all those beans. Last night—in the truck . . .”
“I make too much fart?” Rafo asked.
“You sure did.”
“I am a strong man.”
“You were strong last night, kid.”
“Strong is macho.” He said it with quiet authority.
“Here we go again,” Mike said. “Everything is macho. Eat a lot, fight a lot, fart a lot.”
“Also fuck.”
Once more. So his speculation that the kid had been testing his manliness was, after all, correct. And annoying. “Listen,” he said, “you’re getting to be a pain in the ass. Now, no more talk about that, you get it?”
The boy answered quite amiably. “Sure.”
When Rafo spoke again it was on another subject. “Tell me something,” he said, “if my father wants me, why he did not send me a letter, or talk to me on the telephone?”
Mike addressed himself cautiously to the question. “Where was he going to reach you—in an alley?”
The boy thought it over. “Sí, you are right.” Then: “Why he did not come for me hisself?”
Treading carefully, “Well, he’s a busy man.”
That had a pleasurable effect on him. “Big rodeo, yes? Big, big!”
“Oh, big.”
“My father is a big man, yes?”
“Oh, a mountain.”
“Macho!”
“Macho, macho.”
Rafo was so caught up in the dream that he missed the sarcasm in Mike’s voice. For the moment, he forgot his ill will against his father, forgot all the broken promises, the dereliction. The dream father fulfilled all promises. His voice mounted with excitement. “He’s a big rider, yes? Big rider on a horse—on a bull. Wild horse—wild bull!”
“Wild Daddy.”
This time the jeer was so plain the boy was struck by it. Cold water in the face. An insult—to himself, to his father, to his dream.
“Don’t say nothing bad about him!” He didn’t try to control his temper. “Don’t say nothing bad about a man who owns a rodeo. He is a big man. A big rider on a horse. My father have maybe twenty horses—maybe thirty!”
Mike made amends by being generous. “Your father has over a hundred horses, kid.”
It was the truth but the boy acted as if Mike had revealed a miracle. “A hundred horses? A hundred, a hundred, a hundred? Oh, machismo!”
He raced from cactus to rock to cactus to rock, not touching base anywhere, counting horses, counting the bountiful measure of his happiness. To settle down and calm his nerves he lit a cigarette.
Watching him smoke so expertly, Mike asked, “You really like to smoke?”
“Yes,” he answered positively. “You don’t?”
“No. I quit long ago.”
“Why?”
“I was starting to get winded,” he said. “I couldn’t run as fast.”
“I could smoke a thousand cigarettes and run faster than you.”
“Maybe you could.”
“I run like a wild horse. You know how fast a wild horse can go?”
“How fast?” Mike asked.
The boy backed off as he apparently remembered that the man was in some way connected with a rodeo and might, perhaps, actually know something about a wild horse. Feeling his way: “You ever rode a wild horse?”
“. . . Yes.”
The response had come so slowly that Rafo misinterpreted it and thought Mike was lying. “Caja de mierda!”
Mike couldn’t remember what the words meant, something about shit, so he decided he’d had enough of the conversation and got up. He didn’t care whether the boy believed him or not. What he cared about right now was his stomach which was doing peculiar things, sending messages he didn’t like. Simultaneously he began to feel a disturbingly energetic activity in his intestines. Then he felt a flush, a chill, a flush again. His face was changing color.
“What’s the matter?” Rafo asked.
“. . . Maybe it was the enchilada,” he said. “Or the water.”
Rafo burst into laughter, he nearly ruptured himself laughing. “Oh, you got The Belly Dance!” Rafo yelled. He laughed, he rolled on the ground. “La Turista! The Dance of the Gringo!”
Mike tried to straighten up. He wasn’t going to give the boy the pleasure of seeing him in further misery. “Why the hell do you Mexicans think it’s so damn funny when we get sick from drinking your dirty water?”
“Is not the water that is dirty—is you. We drink and we are healthy—you drink and die in the toilet!”
Mike’s pains subsided a little but didn’t totally disappear. Soon they came back with an onslaught. Suddenly a gripe more painful than any: “Oh, Jesus!”
Rafo heard the sharpness of the cry and sobered. Starting a curious activity, he ran from cactus to cactus, inspecting one, then another, poking a fingernail into succulent after succulent, examining the milky juices. At last, finding the plant he was searching for, he broke off a small fleshy stem, rubbed its spines off on a stone, split the stem in half and handed one of the pieces to Mike.
As the white liquid was running out, he said, “Suck the juice. Drink it.”
“Drink a cactus? Are you crazy?”
The liquid was spilling on the ground. “Hurry up—you lose it,” Rafo yelled. “Drink it!”
Mike put the cactus to his lips and sucked a mouthful of it. With a yelp of pain he spat it out. It was hotter than the hottest chili; it was boiling oil.
“You son of a bitch!” he yelled.
“Drink, you dumb gringo! Here—I show you.” Shoving the remaining half of the cactus stem to his lips, Rafo sucked at the white ooze. “See?” he yelled. “See? I do not die!”
It was no trick. The boy was actually drinking the
stuff. More cautiously this time, Mike put the cactus to his lips. It was even worse than before. This time he had the clear certainty his mouth was being cut by hot knives. “Oh, Jesus!” he yelled. “Fire! Jesus! Murder! Fire!”
Rafo started laughing again, but Mike noticed the boy’s mirth was different from before. Some of the scatterbrained giggle was out of it. In its place, a new note, a kind of exhilaration, the sound of the victor. The boy had proven his superiority over Mike, if only in his sufferance of cactus fire. It was something to boast about. And, like his gamecock, he was crowing.
Rafo’s gamecock was actually crowing. They heard him a good distance away, somewhere near the road, setting up a fierce racket. Outraged squawking in the midst of battle.
Alert, Rafo turned toward it. From where he stood he couldn’t see the rooster. Neither could Mike. But the squawking went on, louder now.
Then they heard the men’s voices.
10
The voices were muted, barely audible at first.
Rafo and Mike started, at a run, toward the road.
They saw only one of the three men. He wore dirty white calzones which hung from his waist like a torn bedsheet. He had his sombrero in his hand and was trying to capture Macho with it, pouncing on the rooster, cursing the animal under his breath. The gamecock screaked and complained at him, but was having trouble getting away.
Rafo yelled. The poacher, seeing the boy, stopped pursuing the bird, cursed louder this time and let out a shout. It was then that Mike saw the other marauders and their horses. One of the men was still mounted and tending the three horses, the other side of the truck. The youngest of the three was in the truck, trying to start it. It was the man in the truck that the cock-stealer was addressing.
“Carlos! Carlos!”
“Stop!” Mike shouted.
The truck started to move. The man in the white calzones was now up on one of the horses. All three horses, with two riders, were off in a dust cloud, already far ahead of the truck. But the vehicle started picking up speed.
“No!” Rafo yelled. “No—no!”
Cry Macho Page 15
