He heard the boy before he saw him.
“Hey, señor, do you want some Xanax?”
Ethan looked up from his beer. The boy stood on the curb where the plaza met the street. He wiped his black hair out of his face with his wrist and held out his wooden medicine kit. On it there had once been a painted red cross. Now it was just the faintest, faded outline. Ethan knew he should have chosen an indoor cantina.
“It’s cheap,” the boy said. “It’s almost free.”
“No, thanks.”
“It’s safe. The doctor’s my uncle.”
Ethan picked his beer back up, drank from it, and found it empty.
“Can’t you shine shoes or something?”
The boy dropped the medicine kit and whistled, whistled and waved as across the street, another boy leapt out from under the ripped awning of the farmacia and came hobbling toward them. Ethan saw by the way he dragged and stumbled and worked his crutch through the dirt that he was missing his right foot.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t need a shoeshine,” Ethan said.
A taxi lay on its horn as it swung off one of the side streets and into the boulevard. In Nuevo Laredo everyone blew their horns—to greet, to signal, to celebrate a football win or holiday—and the boy crossing the street didn’t pay any attention. When he saw it finally, the taxi, he stumbled back, fell in the street and sat there as the swerving cab washed a cloud of red dust over him. Then he was pulling himself up, brushing dirt from his face, hobbling again, and standing before them on the curb.
“Shoeshine, señor?”
“I wasn’t serious,” Ethan said to the first boy.
The boy looked up at him, again wiped his hair from his face.
“He only has one foot,” he said. “He lost it in an explosion where both his brothers were killed. Isn’t that right, Juan?”
“That’s right,” said the boy with one foot.
“He lives with his grandmother because his mother ran off across the border to Laredo.”
“Laredo’s not that far,” Ethan said.
“It’s too far for a boy with one foot.”
“It’s too far for me, señor,” Juan said.
“And his sister is a puta.”
The boy spat on the cracked tiles by Ethan’s feet.
“A King Kong puta,” Juan said.
Ethan looked out at the street of red dust. There were no sidewalks and the gutters from the cantinas funneled into ditches that ran along the road. You could smell it always: urine and beer and the rot of heat. A shoeshine, he thought. Like everything else here, you could wreck it in under an hour.
“Okay, I’ll have a shoeshine,” Ethan said.
“Gracias, señor.”
Juan dropped to his knees and began working on his shoes.
“How much?” Ethan asked as he buffed.
“Ten dollars.”
“Fuck off.”
He stopped a moment. “Five?”
“Three. Or you’re getting it in pesos.”
Ethan had never liked to haggle, but haggling was the norm here. A necessary part of the ceremony of the gringo in the border town. If you didn’t do it you’d be taken as a mark, someone with everything still to lose.
Juan began to work again. The first boy pulled up a plastic chair, sat down next to Ethan. He picked up the beer bottle, shook it and looked disappointed. He pointed at his medicine box.
“Want some Viagra?”
“Do I look like I need Viagra to you?” Ethan asked.
He tipped Ethan’s bottle over. It rolled off the table and broke on the tiles by his feet. Juan didn’t flinch.
“You look like you need something, señor.”
A wind came up. It was the worst here, Ethan thought, when the wind was up. The kicked dust rose and billowed, followed you like a tumbleweed. About a hundred yards off, near the border, the Mexican flag snapped in the new breeze. Ethan saw his ambered reflection in the fragments of bottle on the ground. The boy was right.
“Go away,” Ethan said.
The boy did not go away. Instead he said, “Hey, señor, do you want to go to Boystown?”
A moment, then, when Ethan smelled the sewage from the Rio Grande wafting on the wind. A truck of teenagers in uniform pointing machine guns into the street, driving by in their pickup truck—policía or cartel men or some combination of the two. He knew that every so often you could make a choice that was worse than all the ones you’d made before. He dropped three dollars to the ground and stood up.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go to Boystown.”
SOMEHOW THE BOY had found himself a donkey cart. They were walking together in the street, walking away from the cantina and the border and the hassle of shoeshine boys and drug hawkers when, as if the boy had conjured them out of air, an old man in a donkey cart appeared at the curb with his straw hat pulled down over his eyes.
“Here, señor,” the boy said. “Get in the cart.”
The old man seemed asleep. His face looked like a plum left out in the sun and the tips of his white mustache were stained yellow with tobacco.
“Is he awake?” asked Ethan.
“Of course he is awake. How else could he drive the cart?”
Ethan looked for a step up, couldn’t find one, and pulled himself up and onto the wood plank seat.
The boy slapped one of the donkeys, shouted, “Wake up, Uncle,” and jumped onto the seat beside Ethan.
The old man lifted his hat from his eyes, turned and looked back at Ethan.
“You want some Xanax?” he said.
“Christ,” Ethan said.
“Viagra?”
“No, Uncle,” said the boy. “Zona de Tolerencia.”
“Okay, okay,” he said and winked at Ethan. “Boystown.”
He whistled and took up the reins but didn’t crack them. The donkeys stomped and brayed and began to trot. Dust rose from the road and Ethan pulled his aviator sunglasses off his collar and put them on. The boy snickered.
“Look like a real gringo now, eh?” Ethan asked.
“Sure, sure,” the boy said. “If you want more sunglasses, I can get them for you cheap.”
Ethan nodded at the old man.
“I thought your uncle was a doctor?” he said.
“I have many uncles, señor.”
“Of course you do.”
Jeeps and taxis with blown-out windows passed them in the street; pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the back rumbled slowly by. Ethan stared through his sunglasses at the teenagers who manned the guns. They were skinny and dust-covered and scared-looking. Three weeks earlier, in a saloon in Arizona, he had watched as a Navajo talked down a drunken trucker who had decided to pull a gun on him.
“You know, I’m half Indian myself,” the trucker had said. “My mother was an Anasazi.”
“No, she wasn’t,” the Navajo said.
“What are you saying about my mother?”
“I’m saying that she probably wasn’t a thousand years old.”
When the driver pulled the gun, the Navajo laughed and bought him a beer, broke a bottle across his face and then bought him another beer. After the trucker left Ethan said, “Shit, man, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking he didn’t look too mad and he didn’t look too scared,” the Navajo said.
THEY PASSED A PLAZA with a fountain in the center and park benches under jacaranda trees where people sat and ate their lunches and read the papers and whistled at the police trucks that circled through the square. They went on and the donkeys brayed and snorted in the sun and to their left streets opened into strip malls: used cars, farmacias, Burger King, and yes, Ethan saw it and couldn’t believe it—Taco Bell. They continued on to where the buildings became smaller: whitewashed Spanish bodegas, pawn shops, cantinas with sloping tin roofs slicing sun-glare off the splintered windshields of parked cars, and on into the maze of streets where thin and gangly dogs slunk between houses; on and on into the town and out
of it again and through a new strip of bars and saloons, vanilla stands and knickknack shops. Ethan could see it, then, in the distance, Zona de Tolerencia, the walled city of the whores—Boystown.
“You excited?” the boy asked him.
“What?”
“Going to have some fun, eh?”
“Probably not,” Ethan said.
“You don’t like Mexican women, is that it?”
“I don’t like prostitutes.”
“Don’t worry, they are not Mexican.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Ethan said.
“Migrants from Copal, Honduras, El Salvador, working their way across the border.”
It was early enough that the streets weren’t too congested. They turned right and began loping toward the walled city. Ethan took off his sunglasses and rubbed his face—they had been in the donkey cart over an hour.
He wondered what he’d do when he got there and then knew he didn’t want to know. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun bleached the sky into the pale brown of the desert. He’d go inside and find a cantina, he’d sit down. He’d start with a few drinks. What happened then—he was finding this more and more often—he couldn’t predict.
In the days following her release from the hospital, he used to watch Samantha sleep. At that point, still, he was spending his nights on the couch—she couldn’t sleep yet, she said, with another person next to her.
“I wake up,” she said, “and I think you’re him.”
Still, sometimes in the night, lying on the couch, he’d hear the sound of it from their room and he’d get up and walk to the door and watch her there with the covers tangled around her and her teeth grinding: molar on molar and jawbone suddenly tense, standing out. Then he’d go to her, sit slowly so as not to shake the bed, and put his hand on her brow. He’d touch her and say, “Easy, love. You’re grinding your teeth again.” He rubbed her brow and murmured and touched her hair and her jaw and then when she stopped, but stayed sleeping, he wiped his tears from her skin. Sometimes he’d say, “We’ll work it out, love, we’ll get through this like everything else,” and other times he just waited and said nothing because already she was turning in her sleep or his voice was broken and gone and now any sound could be too much.
Ethan paid the boy and his uncle at the gate and hopped off the cart.
“Good luck, señor,” the boy said. And then, as if he were quoting a movie: “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Ethan laughed and felt for his wallet at the same time. It was still there.
“What could you do anyway, chico?” he said.
“Eh, there is nothing I cannot do. You should see me. I am the best dancer in the town. Isn’t that right, Uncle?”
The old man touched the straw brim of his hat and lifted the reins again. The donkeys stamped their feet and began to walk.
“When I was your age,” Ethan heard him say to the boy, “I was already a grandfather.”
ETHAN STOOD ALONE for a moment outside the main gate. Boystown. He’d heard about it for years—some sick city out of truckers’ myth. Walled in with concrete and adobe and sealed with a Plexiglas roof, it was its own little village: six streets of bars and cantinas, back rooms and alleys, motels where no one spends the night. Zona de Tolerencia—an olive branch from la policía to the cartels—here whatever you wanted was legal, and whatever was legal was cheap.
A car passing in the street honked its horn. He looked away from the walled compound. Gradually, the land rose and the city sprawled out into towns and villages, hills in the far distance of crooked pine and gray rock, highways turning south and into the interior, turning east and running to the Gulf. There was no reason anymore not to go inside and see this. If only to hold its damage up to his own.
He turned back to the walled city, its four street blocks of bare gray wall broken only by a walk-in police station, and alongside the station, a barred gate cut into the wall—the only way in or out of Boystown.
Once, before they married, in Boston in the winter, he’d wandered the streets with Samantha at four in the morning. They’d just left an after-hours bar and, starving for some food, they stumbled down Park Street through the haze of blown snow off the Public Garden, turned right into the dense twist of buildings and wandered through the crooked haze of a city in sleep. When they came to Tremont Street, they walked till again there were lights, the neon glow of a new city: Chinatown, with its teahouses and apothecaries, sex stores and peep theaters, their signs flickering out into the street, into the puddles and gutters and the alley sluice of slush and trash like beacons from bad shores.
They found an all-night dim sum restaurant and sat by the window while men in the back, near the door to the kitchen, drank and played mahjong. Ethan poured Samantha tea and she poured it for him and sat with her right elbow on the table, her head resting in the brace of her hand, and smiled at him while he slid his fingers through her hair and talked and laughed and ate as the winter sun broke across the city. She took his hand and kissed his fingers—knuckle by knuckle, finger by finger—and then watched and pointed as the drunk white men stood from the mahjong table and hobbled out into morning, out and across the street to the peep houses and to the women already up, or not yet asleep, waiting in the cover of back alleys. “God,” she said pointing at the men, at the girls sucking on diet sodas and shivering still in the rising blanket of kicked steam. “What do they want there? What’s attractive about that?”
Now Ethan could tell her, if she were ever to ask again: they want to feel some hurt so much greater than their own. They want something different from their lives, something they can break, irreparably break, and then walk away from.
Ethan took off his sunglasses and shielded his eyes from the glare of sudden light. Then he went to the gate, nodded at the police guard, waited a moment on the threshold, and stepped into the dark city.
INSIDE, THEN, and the metal clang of the gate sliding shut. The sun came bleary and dull through the smoky gray Plexiglas ceiling and Ethan stood just beyond the threshold on the packed dirt road and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark of the compound. He began to walk. The road ran down and away into the gray distance; it was lined with bars and Texas-style saloons with chili-shaped lights, dark cantinas with wood-plank floors and, he saw through the open doors, rows of square concrete tables, adobe walls, a bar with no visible bottles, no windows anywhere. And then also opening from the road, well-lit lounges as luxurious as hotel bars; he saw marble bartops and brass light fixtures, bartenders in tuxedos and women in cocktail dresses even the roughest cowboy wouldn’t want to rip. Light cut off the bottles, gleamed off brass and chrome and polished marble and he kept walking though now he heard music rising from every doorway, jazz and big band and country and punta.
The road splayed side streets the way a river does tributaries. They twisted and curved into shadow and there he saw open doors, women sitting on stools outside in the road, alleys branching into alleys, and coming from them, the hoots and whistles and catcalls of women and men and men dressed as women. He stopped and looked up because he heard, or more sensed than heard, from far overhead the thumping of birds trapped inside the compound, flying against the Plexiglas roof. They rose and dropped and rose again—sparrows and crows, a red parrot and a canary—he watched them flutter from the roofs of saloons, flutter and bang against the glass and land only to flush again at the constant cacophony of music and laughter and everything else. He came to a raised boardwalk and walked under a saloon’s green light. In the mud just off the planks, a rat gnawed a dead parrot under the neon pulse. Everywhere, he noticed now, there were dead birds.
Farther down the boardwalk, past the saloon, he found a lounge that opened off the street into a well-lit bar. He didn’t want to go in but knew he didn’t want to stay standing in the street. Inside, a man sat and played the piano. Ethan remembered a jazz club once, in New York, ice popping in a whiskied glass, the taste of bourbon on Samantha’s lips
. Again, now, he was sweating, and he felt it suddenly, the ache pulsing in the back of his throat. He stepped to the door and turned the brass knob. Birds startled behind him at the wave of music rushing outward.
He descended an ebony staircase and played his left hand over the brass banister as he went. For a moment, the strike of his ring against metal surprised him; it seemed something distant, an action and sound wholly external to him—a desk bell rung and rung somewhere upstairs in the hotel lobby that wasn’t really there. And then he reached the floor, reached the floor and stepped into the lounge with the piano and the blue leather couches and the bar and the walls and the columns all sharp with light slicking on marble. And everything, the whole room, was empty but for him and a few others sitting on couches or at the bar, and the women whom he didn’t see but knew must be there.
He went to the bar and ordered a scotch, which wasn’t something you ordered in a Mexican border town, that much he knew, but still he ordered it here and the bartender who wore a tuxedo didn’t scoff or anything worse but turned to the bar rack and pointed to where a full row of scotch glinted under the wide play of light from the hung chandeliers and the backlighting of the accent bar lights.
“Balvenie,” Ethan said. “If you have it.”
The bartender slipped a crystal glass from a rack beneath the bar, turned for the bottle.
“Rocks, sir?” he said.
“No, neat,” Ethan said. A habit from another life it seemed: he always drank his scotch neat. And one of Doyle’s lessons just remembered: never trust that the ice isn’t made from tap water, never trust that the tap water won’t wreck your bowels for a week.
Horse Latitudes Page 4