They ran after the brigands. In a swirl of dust, shrieking empty threats at the disappearing hijackers, Mike was now yards ahead of the boy, both still running.
Rafo ran out of breath and stopped. Mike also slowed down and finally came to a halt, gasping, filling his lungs with the hot, gritty air. He heard the boy shouting devout prayers in both languages that all the robbers’ vital appendages should shrivel, shorten and fall off.
They walked back to the camp to pick up Macho and it was only then that they addressed themselves to their trouble. They had no truck, they were stranded.
“Maybe we will get it back,” Rafo said.
“How—by calling the cops?”
It was grimmer than funny and neither of them laughed. Rafo offered the philosophic thought that things would be better in the world if you could use the cops when you needed them and spit in their eye when you didn’t. Mike, promising to vote for such an arrangement as soon as it got on the ballot, wasn’t paying much attention. He was abstractedly looking around the camping spot, trying to find his coat.
“I wonder what I did with it,” he said. The very sound of his own words made him remember. He let out a yowl of pain. “My coat, my coat! It was in the truck!”
Rafo said something about its being a small loss compared to the theft of the vehicle.
“My money was in it,” Mike said.
“Your money?” Aghast. “All?”
“All.”
Rafo groaned. So did Mike, saying Jesus a number of times and rooting through his trousers pockets. He came up with one peso, fifty centavos, worth exactly twelve cents, and asked Rafo how much money he had left from what he’d collected from Zafiro.
“Me? Nada,” he answered. “Yesterday I buy cigarettes.”
Mike gave him a disgusted look. The subject of cigarettes again brought up the matter of breath. Rafo admitted that Mike had outrun him, but he refused to admit it had anything to do with cigarettes. It was simply that Mike had longer legs. To prove he still had no faith in Mike’s theory, he arrogantly stuck a cigarette in his mouth. But he didn’t light it, merely kept it there, dry and dangling.
They were ready to leave the camp, all packed up. They didn’t have much to carry: an unopened can of refried beans, a can of tacos, two cherimoyas, a half gallon of spring water, probably not purificada. And one and a half pesos. The prospect was dismal.
“My hat is too big,” Rafo said.
The boy was wearing no hat, probably owned no hat.
“What the hell does that mean?” Mike asked.
“If you are wearing an old hat that somebody gave you because you are poor, it is too big, it comes down over your eyes—and the world is black.”
“Well, we got a big hat, all right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Walk.”
“To where?”
“To the nearest town.”
“Where is the nearest town?”
“I don’t know. Texas.”
Rafo was appalled. “Walk to Texas?”
“Oh, Christ, I’m going to run to Texas!” Mike moaned. Undoing his trousers, he rushed to the bushes.
Mike’s crisis restored Rafo’s good humor. He spied one last cold tortilla where he had left it, dead on the rock. He picked it up and, waving it, yelled into the bushes, “Eh—you need a tortilla?” As he threw it toward Mike he was splitting with hysterics.
Mike didn’t laugh. Not once during the rest of the day did he find any amusement in the diarrhea joke. The less so because the day was scorching hot and, walking toward a town that didn’t show on the map and might not exist, there was no escape from the punishing sun. Nor was there a single car, bus or truck to pick them up off the torrid road. Once, a man with a burro, laden heavily with kindling wood and dead ocotillo shrubs; another time, a herdsman with a half-dozen dusty gray goats. Nothing else. The travelers debated whether they should make their way back to the main road and risk being picked up by the national patrol car. Deciding against it, they trudged onward in the broiling heat.
Unlike Macho, who didn’t seem to mind the sun at all, neither of them took the discomfort with good grace. They bickered, complained, needled each other. When the food and water ran out, in the middle of the afternoon, Rafo decided he wouldn’t walk anymore, so he simply sat down at the side of the road and refused to budge. Running the flag up on his rebellion, he got out his cigarettes and lighted up.
“Come on,” Mike said.
“No! I’m hot. Also I’m thirsty.”
“Sucking that smoke into your mouth will sure keep you from being hot and thirsty.”
“Is my business if I smoke.”
“It bothers my stomach.”
“Then don’t smoke!”
He laughed so hard at his own wit that the smoke went down the wrong pipe and he started to cough.
Mike said, “Eleven years old and you’re ready for the oxygen tent.”
The boy started walking again, complaining, muttering under his breath that his eyes were so dry he couldn’t “blank” his eyeballs. Mike observed that the boy was “blanking” his eyeballs, to which Rafo replied he was convinced his tongue was getting black.
“You can’t see your tongue,” Mike said. “How do you know it’s getting black?”
“Because it feels black—it’s thirsty.”
“If you’re thirsty—swallow.”
“Swallow what? I ain’t got no spit.”
“Where do you want it?”
Well, Mike thought, our squabbling wit has gotten about as low as it can get. But he hadn’t counted on the resources of his antagonist. Rafo, making a careful assessment of Mike’s weaknesses, went to work on the man’s queasy stomach, talking about food—chili mondongo made out of intestines, jelly out of a goat’s head—until Mike wound up in the bushes again.
Rafo didn’t enjoy Mike’s wretchedness for long. He heard the sound of a vehicle. No burro this time, no goats—he heard a motor. He couldn’t see it around the bend but even the scrunch of wheels was audible now. He looked toward the bushes but Mike made no sign he had heard anything—perhaps Rafo was mistaken. But he wasn’t.
It was a bus. He could see it, down below, making a turn upward into the hills. Not a big bus, not a fancy one like the Tres Estrellas de Oro buses, nonetheless a public conveyance.
He called, “Look—a bus! Hurry up! A bus!”
From where he was hunched in the shrubbery Mike could neither see nor hear any vehicle. Nor did he believe Rafo saw any—the kid was just trying to run him bareass into the middle of the road.
“Sure, you lying bastard—sure.”
“Is true!”
It was so true that Rafo grabbed Macho and ran into the middle of the road, frantically waving his free arm and blocking the roadway.
The bus came to a shivering stop. As it appeared, Mike at last stood up and saw it. “Oh, Jesus,” he yelled. “Hold it!”
The door of the bus was opening and Rafo was rushing to enter.
“Wait,” Mike shouted. “Wait for me!”
He ran, bareass after all, yanking at his pants. “Wait!”
The bus started to move.
Rafo stood in the open doorway, refusing to budge, shoving the door back every time it started to close, ignoring the curses of the driver.
“Wait—wait!” Running alongside the moving vehicle, he was losing ground, yard by yard, but then the bus had to switch gears on the ascent and Mike, in one last gasping sprint, ran abreast of the open door.
“Now!” Rafo yelled and stepped back.
Mike jumped. He made it.
They stood inside the front of the bus, Rafo flushed with triumph, Mike with embarrassment, still adjusting his trousers.
The driver kept on cursing. Ignoring the man, Rafo said to Mike, “Is a chicken b
us.”
Which indeed it was. A dilapidated, creaking vehicle held together with hemp and bailing wire, carrying not many people but a full complement of chickens, two goats and a small black pig.
The driver, an ugly mammoth with one gold tooth and several green ones, enraged at having been outwitted by Rafo, would not allow the new passengers to disregard him an instant longer. He addressed himself to Mike and when the latter didn’t understand, he shouted at Rafo. His gestures were explicit: pay the fare or suffer violence.
Rafo started to negotiate. No good. “He say the next town is Janasco,” Rafo translated. “It is a far distance and it cost thirty pesos each—and if we do not give him sixty pesos we must get off the bus.”
“Tell him we’ll give him what we have and your grandmother is meeting you in Janasco and she is very rich and will give him double his money and will say a prayer for him.”
Rafo repeated it in Spanish. The driver responded with a few words and a gesture. “He say,” Rafo interpreted, “the money he will take, but the prayer you can . . .”
“Yes, I got it,” Mike said. In his most ingratiating manner he saluted the bus driver who mystified him by saluting the same way. The man’s mood had so unexpectedly changed to friendliness that Mike got uneasy wondering what was going on in him. They soon found what it was: tequila. He had a bottle of it tucked away to the left of his seat and he took a swig at it. Simultaneously, not worried at all by the extra demand on his dexterity, he shifted gears. The bus coasted, then lurched and there was a scream from a passenger in the rear.
The scream occurred at frequent intervals. It came from an obese woman who had as many chins as she had children, all quivering in terror. An elderly couple kept heartening her, promising she would be safe, but it was clear that they had little faith in their own reassurances.
The animals didn’t seem at all discomfited. The pig was walled up between two empty seats and a mound of gallon-sized Pemex cans. The chickens, three skinny hens, were in a string bag which hung from the overhead luggage rack; they clucked from time to time, to show they were alive. The goats were tethered to a window handle. One of them chewed serenely on the dirty remnant of a burlap bag; the second nuzzled the first, seeming to find morsels of live interest in his companion’s coat.
Even Macho was at peace in the bus. He strutted up and down the aisle for a few moments, establishing his mastery over the domain, but paid no attention whatsoever to the hanging chickens—they were as alien as the pig and goats. Then he slipped down under one of the seats and wasn’t seen or heard.
As the trip wore on the driver referred more often to the tequila bottle than he did to the road. It wasn’t so bad when the road curved in long gentle arcs, as it had when Mike and Rafo first got into the bus, but the turns were getting sharper all the time, and the hills steeper. On the upgrade it was touch and go whether the man would shift quickly enough from gear to gear and, in the overlong moments he remained in neutral, the bus would lose momentum and slip backward with the driver unaware that the rear wheels might be perilously close to a mountain drop. On the downgrade, it was sheer panic. Lurching, zigging, zagging, plummeting downward, the bus never seemed to go straight except toward the edge of the precipice.
The passengers laughed as often as they could, elaborately proving they were not terrified, comforting one another, laying hands of kindness all around them, telling tales of bus trips that had been more hazardous than this one. But there was a lot more kissing of children than seemed necessary, more clutching at crucifixes, more crossing of breasts.
Mike wasn’t sure what the boy was doing with the forefinger of his right hand. A tiny little movement, but it seemed to be working, somewhere on his stomach, a little higher than his navel, moving this way, that way, a steady pattern. Maybe he wasn’t making the sign of the cross, Mike decided; maybe he just had an itch.
At nightfall, it appeared that no prayer was going to help them. The driver was totally drunk by this time and the dark was treacherous. The corkscrew turnings of the road were even tighter and the drop-off into every chasm more precipitous. The passengers had now given up all pretense of bravery. It was soul-shriving time and the preparation for kingdom come.
The bus driver’s drunkenness went into a new phase. Elation. The ecstatic jubilation that comes to a man when it is revealed to him that he can conquer all space. Wheels became wings to him, flight was how he had sprung from his mother’s knee, he was on a moonlift to Janasco.
Mike whispered into Rafo’s ear. The boy listened but made no sign he understood what Mike was saying. His expression was vacant. Why was the boy so slow-witted? Then Mike realized Rafo had caught onto the plan immediately but was too alarmed to admit he comprehended it. Mike hadn’t expected Rafo to show even a flutter of nervousness—the boy had always been so bullheadedly arrogant—it made him uneasy about pursuing his plan. But Rafo had quickly recovered and was out of his seat.
The boy went down to the front of the bus—alone. Rafo made a friendly gesture to the bus driver, then plastered his nose against the windshield of the vehicle and stared forward, gazing at the yellow headlights on the black road. When the kid had been there so long that the driver no longer noticed his presence, Mike walked forward. He slipped into the empty seat directly behind the driver and slid over toward the window. The driver turned a little, aware of someone’s presence behind him, but Mike was studiedly looking out the side window. For a while it was only window gazing—Mike to the left, Rafo straight ahead. Then in the darkness Rafo heard Mike make the hissing sound. The boy twisted sideways to the steering wheel and grabbed it. The driver, shocked, infuriated, lurched toward Rafo but the latter, with all his strength, held the wheel to the road. Mike grabbed for the emergency brake. He yanked it. The bus came shakingly to a halt. The passengers cried out, certain they had crashed. Some fell off their seats. Luggage cascaded out of racks.
Crazed, uncertain what had happened, not even seeing Mike, the driver reached for Rafo. His huge hands went around the boy’s neck; he started to throttle him.
Mike smashed his fist into the driver’s face. Rafo burst free and gasped for breath. The driver turned to Mike now, grappled with him, shoved him against the windshield and began to use his elbow as a battering ram, into Mike’s face, once, twice. As the elbow was coming back for the third time, Mike let his whole body collapse; the driver’s elbow shot out again, this time hitting the windshield. It shattered. Twisting to Mike who was now behind him, the man turned right into a punch. He reeled back and might have slashed himself on the windshield but Mike grabbed him, mauled him, hit him once and again and the man tottered backward in the aisle and fell. As he started to pull himself up from the floor, Mike threw himself on the driver’s body. He pummeled the man a few times. He didn’t want to kill him, just put him out of commission for a while, until he sobered up—but he was a thick-skulled brute, a rhinoceros. And every time Mike thought he had finished the job and started getting up off the floor, the rhino heaved up after him. He would have to lie on the bastard all night, Mike thought. Stalemate.
Suddenly the stalemate was broken. Mike thought he was getting dizzy again, for he had the queasy feeling the bus was moving. He lifted his body as high as he safely could to look out the window. It was too dark to see anything for a moment, but then—the stars going too fast, a moon racing—the bus was moving. He looked to the front of the vehicle.
Rafo was driving it.
“No!” Mike yelled. “Stop the bus!”
The boy didn’t even turn. He kept his eyes on the road.
“Stop it!” Mike continued. “Stop the bus! Rafo!”
Rafo went right on driving. Mike made one more effort to get off the driver but felt the man’s body surging upward with his own.
“Stop the bus, goddamn it!”
“Shut up,” Rafo yelled back. “And don’t worry.” Then the boy made a happy sound that Mike co
uldn’t for the moment identify.
The sound was repeated from another quarter. An old man in the back of the bus took it up. “Olé!” he said. Then, in a cracked voice, echoing himself, “Olé!”
Somebody else said it louder. “Olé!” Then, others, “Olé!”
Rafo turned a little, acknowledged their applause with a little wave. As he turned, taking his eye off the road, the bus veered—not much, a little.
“Keep your eye on the road, you dumb bastard!” Mike shouted.
The tone and the words were something less than flattering, but there was no question: the boy had his permission to drive. And, grudgingly, his approval.
* * *
• • •
Hours later, toward dawn, when the driver was snoring in the aisle, Rafo willingly gave the driving of the bus over to Mike so that he himself could get some sleep.
But he didn’t sleep. It wasn’t only that Rafo was keeping watch over the drunken driver whose head was right next to his seat. It was something else. He was trying to figure out how they had come to be so quickly victorious over the giant. He might give credit to Mike’s plan, he might even give credit to the way Mike had beaten the driver in the fight. But the plan was not really that great, Rafo told himself. And what was so heroic about flooring a drunk? No, he’d be damned if he’d give the gringo all that credit—especially since so much of the credit belonged to Rafo himself.
For his Ave Marias.
Always, before every fight he ever engaged in, he made it a point to cross himself and say an Ave Maria or two, as many as time would allow. One of the reasons, possibly the most important reason, Mike had got the best of him in their fight back in the city was because Rafo had forgotten to say an Ave Maria. Going into a fight without saying one single Ave Maria puts a person at a major disadvantage, he reminded himself—and next time he engaged in a battle with the gringo he’d go in armed with a couple of them.
But no such oversight had happened in the fight with the bus driver. Rafo had crossed himself a number of times and had said two Ave Marias completely and was going into his third when the gringo signaled him to grab the wheel. He certainly would never be fool enough to tell the gringo what the secret of their success had been; it was his own.
Cry Macho Page 16
