The statue sat now on a table in his study alongside a leather-covered writing tablet and a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and stared blankly out over the sweeping, close-trimmed lawn toward the briny waters of the fraudulent El Rio Pequeño de Magdalena.
“What d’you say to the cockfights?”
Franklin had been looking at his chest. His shirt was pulled open and he was pressing his finger into the skin there, and watching as the pale circle of flesh appeared momentarily, then was swallowed up again by the deep tan surrounding it. He tanned quite well, which surprised him. When he decided on Mexico after having seen a travel documentary on one of the new cable stations, his chief worry was that he would suffer constantly from sunburn. He’d always had a pallid complexion, as had his mother. It seemed such a silly worry now.
“Beg you pardon?” he said to Willy.
“The cockfights. I’ve got some that want to see the cockfights. Thought you might like to tag along.”
“Which ones?
“Which ones, which ones?” parroted Willy, shaking his head. “The proper ones, of course. Outside Punta Minta on the PV road.”
Willy Booth, Franklin knew, had a bit of a mean streak in him. It usually showed itself after he’d been drinking. It wasn’t so much that he could be cruel as mischievous—or at least mischievous with a touch of malice. He liked to frighten his guests. And the cockfights on the PV road would serve him well if he was in the mood. Unlike the fights that were organized by the franchised resorts in Nuevo Vallarta, the Punta Minta fights were real. The birds wore razors, the pit was bloodstained, and the locals wagered their hard-earned pay. And it wasn’t so uncommon for fights to break out among the spectators after they had finished up in the pit.
“What time?” asked Franklin.
“Say half-eight.” Willy smiled. “We’ll meet up in the bar and have a few drinks before we head out.”
Franklin liked Hemingway. And he thought, after he told the people he worked with at St Jude’s that he was moving to Mexico to write a book, that he might try something along the lines of To Have and Have Not rather than, say, The Sun Also Rises or The Old Man and the Sea, each of which he’d had to teach ad nauseam to his bored pupils. It was the adventure of the former that drew him: the idea of Harry Morgan sitting in the Perla eating black bean soup and looking out the new window that replaced the one that had been shot out, all the while waiting to meet the smugglers he’d been forced by necessity to work with. He liked to imagine himself as Harry, a good man driven to desperate measures. And that was how he saw himself as he sat at his table in La Bodequita, the Hotel Vivo’s little bar. He was drinking Dos Equis—he liked its black bottle—while Willy waited in the lobby to collect the guests who wanted to go to the cockfights.
Unlike the Hotel Vivo’s beach, La Bodequita was open to locals. It managed to avoid any unpleasantness by imposing a two-drink minimum for non-guests and selling its liquor at exorbitant prices. This, along with the other customary bar rules, was enforced by the same guards who looked after the beach, though in La Bodequita they exchanged their warden uniforms for dark trousers and white golf shirts with the hotel’s logo stitched over the breast. Still, Franklin liked to imagine that among the bar’s patrons there might be smugglers and gangsters and women of ill repute. And sipping his beer he glanced about with a wary eye, trying to spot the dangerous characters.
“Mr Sing show up yet?”
It was Willy; he’d come in from the lobby and stood behind Franklin’s chair. He had a grin on his face, and by the angle of it, it was clear that he already had a few drinks in him.
“Still waiting,” said Franklin.
“Any gallegos I should be worried about?” Willy asked as he motioned for Miguel at the bar to bring him a whisky.
“I think you’re all right for tonight,” replied Franklin, pushing out a chair for him.
“Good,” said Willy, and he sat down. “The last thing I need is to have my windows shot out again.”
This banter had become their private joke. Six months earlier, and two months after he had moved into La Casa de Mavis, Franklin, after a long night in the bar, had told Willy about his bookish ideas and the little fantasy game he played with himself in La Bodequita. It was, he had realized, probably a mistake. But the next morning, Willy drove into Puerto Vallarta and found a copy of To Have and Have Not and read it the same afternoon. He hadn’t thought much of the book, but agreed with Franklin that there was something appealing about Harry Morgan. “The way he gives it to that tourist cow in Freddy’s,” he said the next time they were drinking, “I liked that bit.”
At first Franklin was uncomfortable about Willy’s having read the book; it almost felt to Franklin as if something had been taken away from him. And he thought that Willy’d done it just so he could poke fun. But then Franklin found that he didn’t mind the gag so much, especially when he noted the few occasions when their little exchange caught the attention of those sitting at the nearer tables; he enjoyed the thought that it might lend him a slightly mysterious quality.
“Well,” said Willy, using his forefinger to stir the ice in his glass before taking a drink, “I think we might make a good showing tonight.”
Franklin knew that this meant one of two things: either Willy had his eye on one of the female guests, or, failing that, he had decided to amuse himself at the expense of his clientele. Either way, it made Franklin a touch uneasy.
Willy swallowed the rest of his whisky and offered Franklin a crooked smile: “It’s time, Fowler. Tengamos una aventura.”
“Sorry?”
“For God’s sake, man,” Willy said, his voice booming through the bar. “An adventure.”
He stood up and clapped his hands on Franklin’s shoulders.
“Let’s see if we can’t shake your life up a little.”
Franklin recognized early on that his needs were more a reflection of his mother’s neediness than of his own necessity. He was her life, or rather his life was hers. It had been conferred by his father’s betrayal, as if it were surety. And Mavis Fowler was determined that another would not get away from her. Franklin understood this—understood that constant companionship made up the terms of the agreement. At times he felt as if the house on Montrose Avenue were a prison, that the fence in the backyard was a high wall topped with razor wire and that the sounds coming from Bickford Park were the sounds of freedom. At other times he was plagued with a guilt that was not his own. For Franklin the might of guilt proved more powerful than hunger for liberty. And because it was so, he instigated very little in his life, waiting instead for direction from her. Until he was forty-one years old, he slept every night in the bedroom directly across the hallway from hers, his door open so he would hear if she called. Now, at La Casa de Mavis, he kept a picture of her on his bedside table.
Willy found it there on the one occasion that Franklin invited him round to see the estate.
“Who’s this, then?” he said, picking it up and studying it closely. “Pining after an old flame, are you, Fowler?”
“No,” Franklin said, taking the picture from him and carefully replacing it on the side table. “My mother.”
Willy stared at the photograph as if the notion was foreign to him, as if he was not quite certain what a mother was. Then he laughed.
“She’s a looker, your mum,” he said. “Bet she’d of liked me.”
“No,” Franklin replied. “I think it’s a safe bet that she wouldn’t have.”
The first time Franklin went to the cockfights on the PV road outside Punta Minta it had been Independence Day. The flat, hard-packed earth surrounding the low-slung wooden building had been turned into something of a fairground, with a Ferris wheel and swing rides and a brief midway crowded with carnival games and vendors selling carne asada and tamales and sopaipillas. In the small cramped arena the air was festive and families gathered to watch the fights; out back, children played in the dead piles.
But it was a different place during th
e night fights. No carnival, no families, no frivolity; at night it smelled of sweat and mescal and tobacco.
On the drive out, Franklin sat in the front passenger seat of the hotel van feeling queasy. He remained quiet as Willy, driving as well half-drunk as he did fully sober, chattered on to his guests in the back. Only three of the original six had decided to go through with the excursion. The others had timidly bowed out at the last moment. It hardly seemed worth it to Franklin, but Willy had his mind set. He’d charged each of the guests ten dollars American, though it only cost twelve pesos to get into the fights. The three gamers, as Willy called them, were a young married couple from Buffalo and a middle-aged woman from Bangor, Maine, whose girlfriend had begged off and stayed behind at the hotel. This was the one, Franklin decided, that Willy had his eye on.
“I was just thinking,” said the young husband, who worked in a bakery but fancied himself something of a photographer. “I’m probably gonna need to use a flash in there.”
“Well now, Mr Pollack,” Willy said, looking at the man in the rear-view mirror, “I wouldn’t suggest it.”
“That gonna be a problem?” the young baker asked. Franklin didn’t like his smug tone.
“No, not at all,” replied Willy, casting a sideways glance at Franklin and giving him a wink. “Not if you don’t mind some no-good gallego cutting the strap and making off with your lovely Minolta.”
“Is that likely to happen?” asked the woman from Bangor. “I mean, is this a dangerous place you’re taking us to, Mr Booth?”
“Well, Ms Leggett … Christina—d’you mind if I call you Christina? It’s a lovely name, that. Reminds me of Christmas.”
Franklin watched as Willy managed to flirt with the woman sitting directly behind him, impressed at how easily he did so without once taking his eyes from the road, and without giving in to the urge to witness her reaction.
“What you must understand, Christina,” he went on, “is that where I’m taking you is the real Mexico. Not the make-believe, play-land Mexico that the Jar Tar Village and Club Marival over in Nuevo Vallarta subject their guests to, but the real salt-of-the-earth Mexico. And I think it best we don’t draw too much attention to ourselves.”
“Maybe he’s right, Pat,” said the young baker’s doughy young wife, sounding nervous. “You should probably just leave the flash in the van.”
From their seats on the rickety wooden bleachers they had a clear view of the pit. The air in the arena was thick with the smell of damp hay, with the faint underlying scent of urine. The judges had weighed the birds and the odds were set. The cockfighters readied their gallos. The one nearest to where they were sitting sprayed a mouthful of beer into his bird’s face, while the other took his rooster’s beak between his lips and blew hard so that his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie’s. Then the two men came together in the centre of the pit, their birds held out at arm’s length. On the judge’s signal, they tossed the birds at one another.
Franklin could feel Christina Leggett flinch beside him. The pit below erupted in a cloud of dust and feathers, and there came mild sounds of encouragement from the crowd that, until that point, had seemed all but ignorant of the goings-on in the small wooden enclosure. As the birds pecked and chased one another in circles, interest grew audibly, punctuated by shrill whistles from someone on the bleacher off to the side.
“This isn’t so bad,” said the baker, who sat to Franklin’s left, eyeing it all through his camera lens.
“They haven’t started yet,” Franklin said.
“What do you mean?” the young man replied, looking accusingly at him.
Franklin hoped that Willy would get back soon. He’d left them after they’d found their seats, saying he was off to lay a bet. And when he disappeared beneath the bleachers, rather than going to one of the judges at ringside, Franklin reasoned that he must have decided to place his wager with a private bookie. It was often done at the night fights; the bookies tended to give better odds than did the judges. Then he saw Willy behind the stands on the far side of the arena passing money to two young men, one in dirty jeans and a checked shirt, the other dressed similarly but wearing a straw cowboy hat. Franklin just wanted him to hurry up and finish with it already. He didn’t relish the idea of having to play the host, especially to Mr Pollack, whom he found terribly unpleasant.
“They’re just warming up,” Franklin said, scanning the crowd, having lost sight of Willy again. “It’s like a trial run. They do it to get the birds agitated.”
“That seems rather cruel,” said Christina Leggett, leaning in slightly against Franklin’s shoulder.
“It is,” he said. “But it gets worse.”
Franklin liked very much that she was sitting beside him, he liked that their shoulders were touching, but he couldn’t help wonder what it was that made her want to be there. If the mock fight disturbed her, what would she think once the blades were unwrapped? Would she shudder at the sight? Clutch his arm? Or would she be fascinated, thrilled even, by the violence of it all? Franklin could accept it if she was, because he understood morbid curiosity, fathomed that impulse that drove people to regard the unseemly. It was there in the funeral home when he’d stood over Mavis’s open coffin, wondering what would happen if he gave in to the urge to press his fingers into her waxy face and push her lips into a smile and then a frown and a crooked smirk. Someone, he couldn’t remember who, had led him back to a chair, thinking that he was overcome, when really all he was doing was trying to decide if any of the expressions would hold, or whether there was enough resilience left in her flesh to draw her lips again into the eternal grimace she always wore.
“I trust Fowler’s been keeping you all entertained,” said Willy, who was making his way up the steps of the bleacher. He was carrying five quart bottles of beer, the necks of them wedged between his fat fingers. He shuffled his way along their row and plunked himself down on the other side of Ms Leggett. “When in Rome,” he said as he passed the bottles down the line.
“My God,” said Ms Leggett. “This tastes horrible.”
“Indeed it does, Christina,” said Willy. “But I promised you honest-to-goodness Mexico, and that’s what you shall have.” Then he looked along the row past Franklin and said, “Isn’t that right, Master Pollack?”
The young baker took a healthy swig from the bottle and swallowed, trying to hide his distaste, as if taking the drink had been a challenge. His wife held her bottle out in front of her as though it was something toxic.
“Go on, love,” Willy said to her. “Be a trooper. It’ll put hair on your chest, that.” Then quietly to himself: “Or take it off.”
Franklin drank his own without complaint. It was bitter, with a slightly chemical tang, but it was cold and quenched the thirst he had built up in Willy’s absence.
“Which did you take?” he asked, leaning forward to see around Ms Leggett.
“What’s that?” said Willy.
“Your bet?” said Franklin and pointed toward the pit. “The bantam or the Cornish?”
“Oh, that,” smiled Willy. “I decided to give it a miss. Both a little on the small side for my liking.”
The first fight was quick and bloody. When the birds were brought together again in the centre of the pit, blades tied to their spurs, it was the bantam that lunged first, using its diminutive size to get in low on the Cornish and sink a razor into its breast. The judge held up a hand to allow time for the Cornish to be revived. The owner picked up his bird and took its beak into his mouth, but unlike before he did not blow; rather he sucked, then spat a mouthful of blood into the dirt.
“Punctured lung,” Willy said. “Should of bet the wee one.”
Almost as soon as the fight was restarted it was over. The bantam rose up in a flap and came down again on the other’s back, its blades slicing through the Cornish’s neck, sending a thin spurt of blood out over the dirt floor, its intensity receding with each pulse. As the shouts rang out from the crowd, the bantam began to p
eck at the eyes of the dying bird.
While they remained for two more fights, it was clear to Franklin that the others’ hearts were no longer in it. Mrs Pollack had grown very quiet; so too had her husband, though he continued to snap photographs, even after she told him that he’d taken more than enough. Beside Franklin, Christina Leggett had physically stiffened; she sat with a very straight back and she’d wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t touch her somehow, just to let her know that it was all right, that what she’d seen was just something ugly and nothing more, like his mother in her casket—just a bit of unpleasantness. But Franklin was not good at offering comfort, just as he was not good at receiving it. The handshakes, the embraces, the sorry palms against his cheek were, for him, the most uncomfortable aspect of his mother’s funeral. Neither was he able to offer words of relief to the few old women who had come to mourn. It was not that he lacked compassion, simply the skill to act upon it.
Willy saw nothing unpleasant. He was enjoying himself immensely. He cheered as loud as the locals and placed bets on both the other fights. He lost each time, but did not seem bothered. Nor did he seem all that bothered when Franklin suggested they leave. He knew enough to know that his guests had had their fill. They’d seen their bit of native culture and were predictably put off by it. And Franklin had to admit that he’d been put off by it as well. All told, it had been a gruesome affair that left him feeling sick in his guts, which he did well to hide. Though he didn’t but wonder how Harry Morgan would have felt, or Hemingway himself for that matter—likely they wouldn’t have been bothered; likely they would have seen it as Willy had: an exciting sport and a worthy pastime.
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