He finished his drink and looked at the glass. “What’ll happen if I have another one?”
Her mask was softening. “I’ll turn blonde,” she said.
“What makes you think I like blondes?”
“Because I do.”
He moved closer to her. “There are times when all hair’s the same.”
“I hope you’ll remind me of that,” she said. “Blondes have been a sickness with me. I used to marry them. Then I started to buy them. Now I just rent them for the evening.”
“You’re not as sick as you used to be.”
“Convalescing,” she said.
“Each one cures you a little.”
“Yes,” she said. “Medicine.”
“A dose.”
“Well said.”
She moved the remainder of the distance to him. She took his hand and put it on her breast. He held it there a moment. Then he said, “If I weren’t holding this glass, I could do the same with the other hand.”
She took the glass from him and set it down. He stroked her a little, then slid one hand down her thigh. She moved forward to kiss him, to cling to him. Then, turning her head, she indicated the door to her bedroom.
“I’m going in there,” she said. “You think you can find your way?”
“I’ll try not to get lost.”
She went into the bedroom. Left alone, he helped himself to another shot of mescal, a small one, then went into the bedroom.
It was a sumptuous room, crowded with furniture, as if decorated by someone terrified of emptiness. She was not in it. He could hear her through the open door of the adjoining dressing room, hear the soft sounds of the woman getting rid of her clothes. Once he heard a strange sigh—no, not a sigh, a quick deep inhalation, like a fainting person gasping for breath.
He took his coat off. He was just undoing the buttons of his shirt when he heard her call. “There’s another bathroom to the right. If you would like to have a shower . . .”
“No, thanks,” he said.
There was a silence. Then: “I would like you to,” she said.
He wasn’t sure he had heard her. “What?”
“I can’t manage it if you’re not clean!”
It was uttered by a voice that matched the mask. Too violent, too full of rage. A chiling voice.
He rebuttoned his shirt and put his coat on. He would have liked to sneak away, but couldn’t be that weak, or that cruel. He waited.
She came out of the dressing room, naked. When she saw how fully clothed he was, she started to say something, then couldn’t. Her face was even more naked than her body. Humiliated. Mortified by his clothedness and her nudity. Her breasts were beautiful and as high as a girl’s but when she tried to cover them with her hands it was if her palms were not large enough to hide the nipples. She made a caught sound in her throat and fled to the dressing room. In a moment she reappeared in a loose-fitting robe. Her humiliation had turned to fury.
“What were you trying to do—tease me?”
“No.”
“Humiliate—shame me?”
“No—please—!” He wanted, some way, to spare her. “I just couldn’t make it.”
Her violence intensified. “You were making it, you dirty liar, you were!”
“Please—I take all the blame—it’s my fault.”
She was unreasoning, out of control. “You’re lying! You think there’s something wrong with me.”
“No!”
“You think I’m not clean. You think I’m a dirty greaser. You are the dirty one—you! You’re a dirty gringo—a dirty gringo!”
She kept repeating it, she was rabid.
He left the bedroom. She raced after him. He was crossing the sitting room, making for the door, and she pursued him, shouting curses and obscenities at him. Just as he opened the door, she screamed and called, “Alma! Pacas! Pacas!”
Pacas was there first, as though he’d been waiting just the other side of the door. In a moment, Alma arrived. Lexa shouted to them in a spew of Spanish—threats and profanities he could guess at—pointing to Mike, screaming filth at him.
Pacas hit him. Mike struck back and was about to follow the first punch with a harder one when Alma went at him from behind, with a brutal blow on the neck. Pacas was busier now, punching, and, at last, kicking. They were all over him. Pacas and Alma, quick, well-timed, experienced, punishing. Mike could feel himself falling and as he dropped to one knee Alma worked her hand across his face, once, then again and again. He lay on the floor, bleeding. Lexa stood over him, vituperating.
“Now listen, you dirty gringo. You keep your hands off my son, you understand? I hate him like I hate you—but he’s mine. You understand that? He’s my property! And nobody takes my property. Tell that to the other gringo—nobody takes my property. And if you try, I’ll have them rip out your cojones! You understand? Your cojones.” She caught her breath. “Get up.”
He wasn’t sure he could stand up but, wobbling a little, he did it.
When Lexa spoke again her voice was quieter and the threat was deeper. “Now—wherever you go, we’ll be watching you. You understand that?” When he didn’t respond, she repeated, “Answer me. You understand?”
“Yes.”
She saw him close his eyes; she wasn’t sure he was really hearing her. “What do you understand?”
He opened his eyes a little and said obediently, “You’ll be . . . watching me.”
“Good—and what else have you learned?”
He smiled. Question-and-answer time: a schoolboy. “I learned . . . don’t drink mescal . . . in high altitudes.”
“Good.” She smiled too, enjoying his breathlessness. “What else?”
“Don’t eat the lettuce. Don’t drink the water—there’s Mexicans in it. Clean ones.”
“Let him go,” she said.
They released him. He stumbled out of the room.
7
He kept hearing Pacas everywhere he went, but when he turned, the man was never there. Yet, always, Mike felt the man must actually be present, somewhere at his heels. And if Lexa had told him the truth about Rafo and the cockfights, one of these evenings he would stumble into an illegal cockfight—and the boy—and Pacas. And he wasn’t sure whether he could handle everything at once.
Nevertheless, the cockfights were his last lead to the boy and beyond them, failure. So he divided the underworld of the city into six divisions and systematically scoured one neighborhood after another, asking questions in whatever words and pantomime were convenient, offering tips, bribes, widespread little gratuities to anybody who might have even a hint of information about fighting roosters. When he had done the round of all six vicinities, he toured them all over again.
One day, on an eccentric hunch, he decided to concentrate on the wholesale poultry section of the city. He knew the connection between wholesale poultry and cockfighting was at best a tenuous one, but he was looking for any strand to follow. And he found a fine thread.
Two little boys, hardly school age, much younger than Rafo would be, were playing a game. Each of them had a tiny pullet in his hands; they were pretending to have a cockfight. As the boys, yelling and shrieking bloodthirstily, pushed the chick heads at each other, they occasionally screamed a word that sounded to Mike like “Gotcha!” But the Spanish-speaking boys could hardly have been using a Yankee cops-and-robbers expression.
Nearby, the older sister of one of them was tending their father’s chicken coops. She wore spectacles and looked studious and Mike asked her if she understood English. When she said she did, he inquired what word the boys were shouting.
“Cacha,” she said. She spelled it for him.
“What does it mean?”
“It does not mean something,” she told him. “Cacha is street.”
He tried to engage her
further but his questions started to worry her and she pretended her English was not as good as she had already proved it to be.
It was more the girl’s distrust of him than the word itself that hinted to Mike he might be on to something. The word, in fact, was not much good to him. Cacha is street, he told himself, said nothing about cockfighting. Then the conspicuous thought: maybe cacha doesn’t mean street, maybe it means a street, the name of a street. Cacha Street.
Calle Cacha. He had seen that name. Somewhere he had come upon it, he couldn’t remember where. He pored over his map of the city. He couldn’t find it. He thumbed his way through his pocket-sized street directory and there it was—Calle Cacha—in the Tepito section, and that was all the information given.
* * *
• • •
It was a mean neighborhood, dirty, dismal. Since there was poverty here, there was violence. It lurked in doorways, it stalked the alleys. He had been to this particular part of Tepito only once, in the daytime. Nighttime, it was deserted.
Mike walked for hours seeking the Calle Cacha, doubling back on alleys he had trod, finding nothing. Where the directory said the street was, it didn’t exist. Only twice did Mike encounter other pedestrians. The first had never heard of the street. To the second the name was familiar but the Mexican was vague and in a hurry to get away.
When at last he decided to give up and go back to his hotel, Mike couldn’t find his way out. He was lost. No alley seemed to lead to a wider street; it was just one narrow passage after another, tangled, twisting, dark. Even the paving was mean here—slippery and slimy cobblestones—and he was certain the old walls were rat-infested. He would have given anything to see a person or even a dog—there were always homeless dogs roaming the streets of the city—but there was nothing, only blackness, chilly damp and a dull uneasy quiet. And the sense that somehow it had been planned for him to get lost, rejected in an alley, an unnecessary man about whom nobody would ask questions. Disintegrating into the darkness.
There was a dim light. It came through the window of a shop. The lettering on the glass said zapatero de vieje and, looking through the pane, he saw it was a shoemaker’s shop. The clock on the wall said it was only nine—it seemed nearer midnight. There was nobody inside to help him with directions. So he turned, his back to the window, to see if the faint illumination behind him would give him a hint where he should go.
Diagonally to his right, an alleyway, on the far wall of which he saw the words scrawled in paint now nearly faded: Calle Cacha.
The irony was he remembered having seen this very alleyway once, in broad daylight—and he even obscurely recalled those selfsame letters on the wall.
He crossed and entered the Calle Cacha. Despite its name it was not a street but an even narrower passage than the others and, like the others, pitch-black. Nothing to see but his breath in the damp air, nothing to hear but the slide of his footsteps on the wet cobbles.
Then he did hear something. Behind him. So faint that it had to mean stealth. He turned. Out of nowhere, out of the blank wall itself, the man appeared. Mike couldn’t make him out in the dark. He thought, at first, it was Pacas. But he was older than Pacas, shorter, more powerful, and there was something distorted about his face. With a deft, strong movement he shoved Mike against the wall. As he was about to defend himself, Mike saw the other man, taller and more wiry, young, stinking of some pungent herb or spice.
The older man muttered something in Spanish.
“I don’t understand,” Mike said, “No Spanish.”
In broken English: “What you do here?”
“Tourist,” Mike said. He pointed to his camera. “Came to see a cockfight.”
Sharply a light flared. It was the flame from a cigarette lighter held by the younger man. He moved it nakedly close to Mike’s face, to scrutinize him. The older man shoved the young man’s hand away and said quietly, “Give five hundred pesos.”
Mike paused. He knew the moment they saw his money he’d be in worse danger than before. Showing it was taking a foolish chance, but the alternative was a brainless fight—against a knife, perhaps. Still, the man had asked for a specific amount. Mike pulled out a roll of Mexican money. He looked at it, then at the men. He peeled off five one-hundred peso bills and handed them to the older man.
The Mexican pointed into the blackness of the alley. “You go there,” he said. “To the end. At the end, another alley—that way. Go there.”
He made no demand for a single peso more. Both Mexicans hurried away.
Mike put his money in his pocket and started farther into the blackness of the Calle Cacha. Slowly, one cautious foot after another, until he was at what he thought was the end of the alley. But it continued, turning sharply right, and he followed it. Here the cobblestones stopped and the ground was bare earth and mucky. Slogging his way in the mud he began to think the alley was endless when unpredictably it gave access to a wider, open place. He was in a plaza of some sort, a tiny one, junk-strewn, illuminated by an obsolete lamp with an unsteady gas flame, flickering and struggling to remain alight. The courtyard was hemmed in by a broken fence, an abandoned warehouse with a long loading platform, and a junkyard created by an accumulation of disasters, broken wheels and bent axles, a demolished water tank, wrecked cars.
Rubbish, debris, slime. No people.
Nor a sound.
No cockfighting here. He couldn’t believe the men in the alley had taken him for a mere five hundred pesos when they could have robbed him of every peso in his pocket, his camera and clothes to boot.
But the testimony of his eyes and ears was undeniable—he had been taken. No cockfight. No nothing. Only dirt and darkness. Disgusted by his own gullibility, depressed by everything, he turned to leave.
A light flashed. Not much of a light. Just a blink of it, like a match struck and extinguished. At a distance, the other side of the courtyard. He squinted into the darkness and moved slowly across the plaza. As he got closer to what he thought was the source of the light, he saw another entrance to the courtyard, wider than the alley he had come through, actually a narrow street. But there was nobody there.
The light again. More clearly now, to his right.
It came from the warehouse. A long narrow light—not moving this time—not disappearing—vertical and still—as thin as a knife blade.
He stared a moment, to get it in focus, to understand what it meant. If the place was a dead warehouse, as he had guessed it to be, the light was coming from behind the loading platform. He moved a little, just close enough to see the storage stalls. There were three of them. Two were sheltered by awnings which extended outward, overhanging the platform and supported on a framework of metal. The third stall had no awning—or, more accurately, its canvas had been dropped and was now being used as a curtain to close the stall from view. But not entirely from view—a sliver of light was showing.
The canvas moved and the light was gone. But before Mike could regret the loss of it he had something to replace it: a sound.
Not loud, almost inaudible. The chooking of a rooster.
More slowly than before and just as quietly he moved toward the warehouse. Human voices, low, murmuring, whispering. Then, unmistakably, a crowing sound.
Mike was close to the platform now. He jumped up, trod warily toward where the light had been. The voices were more distinct now, muted but clearly audible. He approached the canvas curtain, moved it very slightly.
There wasn’t much illumination inside the stall, for it came from a smoking kerosene lamp. It hung low, by a wire, and cast an unsteady glow on the cock ring. He couldn’t see the roosters at first, because the ring was circled by the spectators. Perhaps a dozen of them were men; six or seven, boys. All of them were roughly dressed, iron-faced, with expressionless, opaque eyes. When one of the men got up from his squat position, Mike could see him more clearly. He had too narrow a head to be
Indian: lean, eyes darkly caverned and he moved lithely. In his hands he clutched a gamecock, a beautiful animal of gleaming bronze, its wing tips edged in jet black. He took the rooster around among the circle of bystanders, apparently to offer its feet for inspection. The men looked at the animal’s talons cursorily but the boys examined every toe. Then it was the boys’ turn to offer their rooster for inspection, but they weren’t doing it. Mike heard the owner of the bronze animal say something with sharp impatience, then mutter the name:
“Rafo.”
The boy got up from his crouched position on the floor. He was no cleaner than the others—dirtier, in fact, as if he wore grime as the badge of his toughness. He looked older than eleven, indeed as old as his companions who were all well into their teens. And more confident than any of them, especially in the way he handled the gamecock. It was as beautiful as the bronze but not as murderous looking—spotlessly white with a delicately cut red comb that crested high and proud.
The boy carried the rooster around the circle and they all examined it, their silence giving it approval. Thereupon some coins and a few bills were thrown on top of an old oil drum and when the bets were laid the man and the boy took their gamecocks to opposite positions on the circle. Still standing, they both made low utterances to their animals, not speech but irritating noises, rasping, grating. The man pulled a wing feather, further provoking his animal; the boy held the rooster’s beak so the cock for an instant could barely breathe. A quick signal to each other. They stooped simultaneously and let their roosters go. The fight began.
Mike moved a little closer. Just as he got a good view of the cock ring he heard the police whistle. It came from the alleyway. Then he saw someone running. Instantaneously he heard the siren. Suddenly the plaza was ablaze with lights—flashlights and a motorcycle at one end and the headlights of a police car at the other.
Mike jumped from the platform and scurried under it. There were policemen everywhere, shouting, blowing whistles, giving cry to their sirens. Overhead he could hear the cockfighting spectators cursing and scrambling. Somebody threw the kerosene lantern out into the courtyard, possibly to give the cockfighters the shelter of darkness. The oil spilled and the lantern burst into a bonfire. One of the policemen yelled, “Aquí! Aquí!” There was a gunshot and, seconds later, another. The fugitives heeded the warning. The raid was over.
Cry Macho Page 11