Cry Macho

by N. Richard Nash

  She was doing things at the sink, quietly mumbling—some complaint, no doubt, about children leaving messes—and he went to her and gently turned her around. She didn’t know what to do with her wet hands and she just stood there, letting her arms hang limply in the air while he kissed her and started to touch her breasts. She didn’t need her hands to embrace him, her body moved to it, he could feel her so close that suddenly he didn’t know what to do with himself in his clothes. She smiled and made vague gestures of frustration about the children being too near, right outside the window. Then quickly, drying her hands, she hurried from the house and he went after her.

  She ran so fast that he thought he had lost her, then thought she had gone into the jacal, but as he got to the front of the building, he saw her run across the poppy field, then disappear again into a little woods. When he arrived in the shade of it, he heard a sound that he thought was Marta laughing. Then he realized it was a water sound, a brook, a stream, a river.

  She was standing by a wide creek. The water was busy with rocks, noisy with the nuisance of them. Where the water struck on stone it was white confetti in the air, but where it was still it was so clear, it didn’t exist. It was clearest downstream, below a falls of water, where it made a pond, a narrow natural pool with the look of depth in it. Marta was throwing stones that way, toward the small pond, and Mike thought any minute she would tear her clothes off and throw herself into it.

  But she stayed there, pretending she didn’t know Mike had come up behind her. When he came close to touch her, she made a little startled sound and slipped away. It gave him a disquieting thought: he would have to play a game with her, and he might not know its rules. But no game. She wanted to say something to him. Some special thing, perhaps only one single perfect word, and couldn’t find it. And because she was unable to manage whatever it was she had no words for, she found words for everything else. She explained where the stream came from, upward in the hills, and how it would meander down to a lovely lake that was full of fish, and how one must be careful of a certain kind of water creature—she made insinuating, grasping motions with her hands—and he imagined it to be a leechlike thing, something that nipped at one’s flesh and clung there, clung.

  And she clung to him, laughing, pretending to be the water creature. He kissed her, took her rebozo off her shoulders and kissed her breasts, sucking her nipples gently, sometimes not gently, making her cry out and then want him to do it again the same ungentle way. When they were both unclothed and he entered her there was no shyness in her this time, nor was she silent as she had been in the jacal. She made a sound—a sob, a moan at first—then happier cries that echoed against the surface of the stream and up the inclines, and the echoes were as joyous as the voice itself. He started to come and kept on coming longer than he ever thought he could and when it was over she threw her arms back in the grass and laughed with such a rhapsody in her voice, he couldn’t believe it wasn’t a song.

  He never needed language for that song, never missed being able to talk to her in words. He felt he knew everything she ever said to him and felt she understood him equally as well. And they were rarely silent. They talked and chattered as if there weren’t a word—in any language—they couldn’t understand.

  Only once, the whole day, did he see a sad look on her face. Not even when she had spoken about her dead husband had she looked so forlorn. And he knew that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking: this was only one day—there wouldn’t be many like it—and he’d be gone. And reconciled as she was to it, there would always be a lament for him.

  He loved her. It would never do to love her; not for always, he knew that. He was wrong in this place and would always be wrong here. But for these few days he loved her. And a few days would have to be enough.

  15

  At dawn Mike and Rafo heard a stampede. They rushed out of the shrine house and saw more horses than they’d ever imagined could be running on this hill.

  They drove the truck out into the middle of the tableland and stopped it there. Mike attached one end of his lariat rope, not to the bumper as he had originally intended to do, but to the chassis. Then he spun the rope out a far distance, a hundred yards away, so that the horses would not be frightened by the closeness of the vehicle.

  He knew he’d have to wait patiently and still—and long enough for the horses to forget he had ever moved. He stood in the middle of the plateau, as silent as the mesa itself, a man-cactus. When it happened it happened so quickly that Rafo didn’t know it was over. A gray one, a small lean mustang, roped and running.

  It seemed he would never stop, that the rope would never play out. Oh, God, Mike thought, don’t halt too short, don’t break your neck. Or a leg; don’t fall and break a leg.

  The rope went taut. The animal seemed to strangle, then was still. He snorted at the sky, angry, pawed the ground, puzzled and still angry, tried to run again, got stopped, tried once more, less recklessly this time, then went still again, walked a little . . . and began to graze.

  The gray hadn’t nearly the mettle of the white one and responded more tractably to the bit. They bridled the mustang almost without any difficulty at all and Mike rode him for nearly two hours before they tethered him to the truck, drove down to the alameda and sold him to Jiménez for two hundred pesos.

  As they were walking into the abacería Rafo complained about eating lifeless canned goods again, and tortillas that were never hot enough. He was hinting at a great red earthenware pot full of a hot and aromatic stew.

  “What if we buy enough for ourselves and Marta’s family,” Mike said, as if he hadn’t suspected the hint, “and have her cook it?”

  Riding down the hill, the boy glowed. Mike knew he had a vision, not only of the food itself, but of a huge family dinner with all the kids eating noisily in a circle and Mike and Marta, eating with them, trying to keep the kids quiet, not succeeding, not minding. Mike too had the vision. But it didn’t happen.

  The instant they arrived at Marta’s house, they knew some misfortune had occurred. They saw Nita come rushing out of the jacal and into the house. She had noticed them but made no sign of it, as if she was annoyed that they had come. A few seconds later, she came outdoors again. This time she carried the pail of milk. She raised it high and threw its contents on the ground, wasting all of it. Then she started to tremble.

  Mike ran across the roadway into the jacal. Marta stood over the dying animal. Overnight the virulence had taken possession of the cow and its stench was almost unbearable. The beast lay on the ground, its body convulsed by spasms of pain. It had swellings all over its skin now, great tumors, some of them open, suppurating lymph and blood. And blood was pouring out of the animal’s nostrils.

  Marta muttered something and he couldn’t understand her.

  “What?” he said. And then—feeling betrayed that he couldn’t understand her language—he repeated senselessly, “What, what?”

  “She want to know what she should do.”

  He turned. Rafo was there.

  “Get back,” Mike said. “Go away.”

  “If I go away, you will not be able to talk to her. She wants to know what to do.”

  Mike looked more closely at the animal. The carbuncles were starting to explode now. The reek was so insufferable he tried not to breathe. “Tell her the animal has to be killed.”

  He heard Rafo say it to her and not a syllable from Marta. There would be worse to tell her. As he looked at the floor, at the hay and straw covered with the animal’s pus and blood, he knew they could never decontaminate the place. “And this barn has to be burned down.”

  “No,” said Rafo quietly.

  Mike felt like Croag. We inspect, we inoculate, we fumigate . . . and we condemn. Worse than Croag—only condemnation to offer.

  “Tell her the barn has to be burned,” he repeated.

  “No.”

  �
�Then get the hell out of here.”

  Rafo started to talk to her quietly and couldn’t go on. It was something in her voice that made him continue. She responded in a low murmur, seemingly without any kind of emotion. When she had finished talking, Rafo turned to Mike.

  “She say she will kill the animal, but she will not burn down the jacal.”

  “She has to. The place is diseased.”

  “We will wash it out, Mike,” Rafo cried.

  “It’s diseased! It’s in everything—you can’t wash a place like this—it’s in the straw, the wood—it’s in the ground!”

  Rafo repeated to her what Mike had said.

  Her face was strong as stone. “No,” she said, and he could see she wouldn’t do it.

  Desperately, “The place is no good anyway!” Mike said. “It’s a ruin. It hasn’t any roof, for Christ sake!”

  “She won’t do it, Mike!”

  “Tell her it’s anthrax!”

  “Antrax,” she repeated softly. She understood the word, she had heard it before, she knew its dreadfulness. She wavered only a moment, then shook her head no again.

  Mike was brutal. “Tell her people get it. Tell her they get pustules—people do—they start to bleed. Tell her they start to stink—like this thing—they stink! Tell her one of her kids will catch it—not maybe—will! Tell her!”

  The boy turned to Marta; his face was drawn. He had been on Marta’s side, now he was on Mike’s—he didn’t want her to say no this time. He spoke softly to her.

  She responded in a way Mike couldn’t understand. Not only did he not understand her words, there was nothing in her manner that gave him any clue to what she had decided to do. Rafo had to tell him.

  “She say she will get the can of kerosene. But she does not want the animal to die by burning. She want to know if you have a gun. I told her you don’t. Do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  That quickly, that quietly, she was gone. Following her outdoors a few steps, Mike noticed she didn’t stop for the kerosene can but rushed into the house. He crossed the yard, picked up the can of oil, brought it back to the jacal and started to pour the kerosene. He poured it on the outside timbers first, then on the canes where they joined the heavier members of the shack, finally on the mud adobe. As he was about to go inside the jacal, he saw Marta standing by the door.

  She had a long kitchen knife in her hand and she looked dazed, not knowing what to do with it. She held it loosely at her side, then started to go into the jacal.

  “Wait,” he said.

  He put the kerosene can down and took the knife out of her hand. Then he went inside with it. He walked past the place where he and Marta had made love, that first night, then two stalls down to where the animal heaved in pain, unable to catch her breath. As the creature saw him she tried to raise her head a little. He stared at the dying beast: don’t look pathetic, he almost said aloud; make me angry, make me mad. Pretending rage, he plunged the knife—performing the faena to a bull, he told himself—between the animal’s shoulder blades, to sever the artery. But the blade refused to enter and the beast shook, spurts of blood gushing everywhere. He pulled the knife out and struck with it again and again, until the beast didn’t move anymore.

  When he came outdoors, Marta had taken up the kerosene can and she was pouring oil on everything—wild, tossing it out of the can wherever it would fly, heedless whether it sprayed back onto herself.

  “Give me that,” he yelled. He snatched the can from her. “Stand back, for Christ sake!” Then, to Rafo, who was standing by, “Get her the hell away from here.”

  But Rafo was looking at the blood all over Mike, and could hardly hear what the man was saying. So Mike grabbed her and led her away, not too gently, a good distance from the jacal.

  He returned to the building and asked Rafo if he had any matches. Still the same dazed slowness from the boy and he repeated impatiently, “Matches—matches.”

  Rafo gave him a packet of them. He pointed for the kid to join Marta at a distance and when Rafo stood safely beside her, Mike too stood back a little way from the oil-saturated shack. He unfolded the packet of matches, struck one of them, then lighted the entire pack at once. He waited until the cardboard was well aflame. Then he moved a step or two closer to the jacal and threw the lighted pack.

  Unaccountably it didn’t all go at once. Only a small fire ignited on one side of the jacal. But now the blaze became larger. Just as the flame had enveloped half the hut, he heard an outcry from Marta. He didn’t know what she was saying.

  “Cuchillo!” she yelled.

  “What?” Mike called.

  “Cuchillo—cuchillo!”

  “What’s she saying?”

  “The knife.” Rafo called. “Where’s the knife?”

  “Oh, Christ! Tell her I’ll buy her a new one.”

  But she was, for the moment, out of her senses. Abruptly she broke loose and started to run. Toward the jacal.

  “No! Stop!”

  She didn’t get indoors. An ember flew from the house and caught her. It burst her kerosene-wet rebozo aflame. She ran, her clothes flaming, her hair flaming, a few steps more toward the jacal, then turned and ran, berserk, a flaming torch, racing in the wind, toward the poppy field.

  Mike ran after her. “No—don’t run! Stop!”

  She ran, she fell, she got up and ran again.

  “Marta! Stop!”

  He ran her down. In the middle of the field he caught her and threw her to the ground and threw himself on top of her. He rolled on her and rolled his body all over her, trying to roll the fire out. When it was altogether out, he didn’t trust that it was. He threw dirt on her, kicked the dirt on her body, to make sure every ember was extinguished. Then he lifted her into his arms and carried her back across the field, past the blazing jacal, into the house.

  * * *

  • • •

  For hours the doctor didn’t arrive, since he had to come from Mixuatl, a good distance away. He was a fussy little man with thick glasses and he kept making little sounds of shock about Marta’s hair which had burned to a ragged shortness on the left side of her head. He paid more attention to the singed smell of it than to her blistered right arm and her seared neck where the blaze had, likely, been the worst. But he apparently was a skilled man, for he administered the hypodermic of sedative so quickly and painlessly Marta didn’t realize it was done. He approved of the soap and water cleansings Mike had administered while waiting for the doctor to arrive. At the suggestion that oil or butter be put on the wounds, he wagged a hectic finger and said anticuada a few times, as if it were a personal slur for anyone to think he could be tricked into prescribing so outmoded a remedy. He put light gauzes on the wounds and nothing else, no ointment of any kind.

  The neighbors didn’t approve of the doctor. It hadn’t occurred to Mike that there were any neighbors, since there was no other house in sight. But the blaze brought them, bearing balms and prayers and food. The doctor ridiculed the prayers and forbade one of the balms, a poultice of rancid butter and pig’s brain which he tossed outdoors for the stray dogs to lick at. The old Indian medicine woman who had brought it, la curandera, became incensed at him and accused him of encouraging evil spirits, so he pointed out that the only evil in the room was the old woman’s sweaty armpits, her uncleanliness and acrid odor. She left, not making any distinction between him and his patient, cursing both of them.

  But the doctor didn’t object to the gifts of food and, taking up a bowl of steaming pozolo, he showed it to Marta. Mike was astonished, when Nita offered to feed her, to see the patient eat four or five tablespoons of it. Then Marta smiled and shook her head and, the sedative taking over, went to sleep.

  The doctor packed his things and started to go. There would be hardly any necessity for him to come back, he said, for if she kept clean and avoided the nostru
ms of neighbors, she would heal without help. He seemed less troubled about the patient than about the loss of the barn.

  The neighbors were even more troubled. A burned jacal was a terrible matter that should be investigated. How had it happened? Mike made the most of his language difficulty and shrugged a lot, answering nothing and asking as many unintelligible questions as anybody else.

  He was careful not to say the word anthrax. The disease was so dreaded that if Mexican practice was at all like Yankee methods, an agriculture official would come racketing in from a state capital. There would be other questions to answer, then more probing inquiries of officialdom, finally an interrogation by the police. He had no compunction about withholding the information, for he felt certain the outbreak was over; it had been contained and killed by the fire. As to the lingering odor of kerosene, nobody questioned it, for the house itself had nearly always had the smell of it, from the lamp, and the fumes were common to the countryside. So the neighbors dismissed it as such an accident as will happen, come what may, suceda lo que sucediera, and they departed.

  The only one who didn’t go was Porfirio. For hours he had been there, on the fringe of every conversation, never a part of it, watching stoically, at a distance. Sometimes he was so silent and motionless, his eyes so heavy-lidded that Mike thought he was standing there asleep. Even when his eyes were open, apparently observing, they didn’t seem to be looking at anything, except inwardly. It was not only this spiritual inwardness, Mike thought, that was Porfirio’s power. Whatever the old man’s age, he was still a mustang-breaker, so the power was in his bone and muscle too—strength was in all of him. Mike had thought, when he saw Porfirio the day they arrived at Janasco, how frightening, how foreboding—then, immediately, how kind. He was apparently a man the town respected—he had been chosen to be the árbitro of the cockfight. It had been explained to Mike that árbitro meant referee; he wondered if it might also mean judge. His eyes had steel judgment in them.