Cry Macho

by N. Richard Nash

  “Now!”

  Mike jumped.

  The wild horse kept on going as if he didn’t feel the weight upon him, going, going. Suddenly he stopped, rose, his forefeet tried to kick the moon, to kick the stars out of the sky, to be free of his terrifying burden.

  Mike held. He shouted at the top of his voice and held.

  The horse swerved off and Mike knew that as soon as it ran arcs instead of straight lines, the running would be slower. It surprised him how soon it happened.

  The mustang was still. It snorted angrily at betrayal it couldn’t comprehend. It pawed an enraged hole in the sand. But it didn’t move. Still.

  In the distance, the truck too came to a stop. Mike saw Rafo—on foot—running—racing toward him. The boy was in ecstasy. He was in full flight, waving his arms as if he had a dozen of them, and screaming something Mike couldn’t hear. As the boy got close enough his words resounded across the mesa.

  “Olé!” he was crying. “Olé, goddamn it, olé!”

  Nearby at last, he leaped, he jumped, he threw himself on the ground. “Olé! Olé!”

  When the kid could talk with a semblance of sanity he shouted, “So—after all—you can ride a wild horse, you can, you can!”

  Mike smiled. “And you were okay behind that wheel, kid.”

  He didn’t see the boy’s expression, for the mustang was getting restless again, pawing the ground. The animal started tossing its head at a strange angle and the froth flew from its lips.

  Rafo retreated a little from the wild horse.

  “Get back into the truck,” Mike said. He pointed to the chapel which he could barely see. It was farther away than he realized they had ridden, possibly more than a mile. “Drive back and I’ll ride alongside.”

  Rafo ran back to the truck—loped, cartwheeled, tumbled back to the vehicle with enough electricity in him to irradiate the whole mesa.

  All that excitement in the boy, Mike thought. It was infecting the man, making him feel a return of some kind of eagerness he had never expected to feel again. A quickening.

  Without dizziness. The kid needn’t have worried about it. He hadn’t felt unsteady in any way, not for an instant. Only excited.

  The boy was halfway toward the truck, running. No monkeyshines anymore—just straight running.

  God, how that little bastard could run!

  * * *

  • • •

  Rafo got into the truck and started it. He jammed his foot clear down on the gas pedal and made the motor shout. Not in anger this time—pure joy. The motor didn’t roar loud enough. He wanted it to trumpet, to thunder, he wanted it to match the booming of his mood.

  He had never seen anything so wonderful in his life. He had been to the Hipodromo possibly twenty times, at least that many times to the Charreadas where he had seen riding and roping, bronc-busting and acrobatics. But those were all showmen and show horses—this was wild flesh and murder, tame or be killed. And they had tamed it. Yes, both of them—he had been a part of it. That was what made him crazy with joy; he had been a part of it. And the man had said, “You were okay behind that wheel, kid.”

  I was okay, Rafo said to himself, I was okay.

  Because he couldn’t stand how happy it made him feel he drove the truck too fast, it went over a bump and stalled. He started it up again and more carefully this time drove alongside Mike and the mustang. Not too close, he told himself, for the horse was getting skittish.

  Not that Mike seemed to mind. He had the horse under quiet control now, clopping along as if it had horseshoes on, getting out of hand for a moment but in hand quickly again, still wild, testing its rider, feeling his mettle and its own. For a while the horse took easy strides ahead of the truck and Rafo wondered whether to speed up, but decided not to—Mike wanted the horse up front so the animal would have the headlights behind him and not be frightened by them.

  Rafo watched them through the windshield, thinking how beautiful they looked, both of them, the horse trotting almost in a prance, the man sitting the animal as if it were saddled and stirruped and reined to a certainty.

  Suddenly, as though he himself were riding the mustang, Rafo felt such a surge of pride that he thought he would lose his breath.

  “Macho!”

  He didn’t know the word was in his mind. Nor did he know he was going to utter it. And he was saying it of a man about whom he could never have said it yesterday, never dreamed he would ever say it.

  Macho . . . He repeated it quietly, surprised at himself for enjoying a quiet sound more than a loud one. And the quieter he said it the deeper he could feel it, deeper and deeper.

  Macho . . . The word he had found for the man he had found.

  Well, only temporarily, of course, for they each had their own ways to go. Besides, he knew that one compliment about his driving didn’t mean the man liked him—Rafo knew he didn’t. So . . . better say the word quietly—macho!—so quietly that the man would never hear. And when they parted, the man wouldn’t know Rafo had ever said it.

  13

  It was one thing to ride a horse down for the horse’s first time, taking advantage of his first-time shock. It was quite another to break him so others could ride him. Mike would never have enough time for that. The most he could do, if he could accomplish even that much, was to put a bridle on the animal.

  He made a bridle out of bits and pieces of nothing. A long bolt out of his tool kit became a bit, a hank of rope became the reins. The noseband, checkpieces and throatlatch, all made of rope, were tied together with snippets of wire. Rafo watched every step of the operation, asked a thousand questions, made a thousand senseless suggestions and got underfoot.

  When the bridle was finished, Mike looked at it and saw what a ridiculously makeshift thing it was, how impossible it would be to adjust it to the size of the mustang’s head, how inconceivable that the animal would stand still long enough for Mike even to hold it up to his muzzle.

  It was impossible. In four hours he tried four times. Twice the beast went crazy, trying to break the tether that tied him to the truck; the third time he kicked and kicked at the rear door, the only remaining one, and nearly stove it in; the fourth time he bit Mike’s forearm, giving him a bloody gash. Then . . . toward three o’clock in the afternoon, the capricious animal, standing as still as a sheep, whinnied sweetly when Mike approached and took the bridle as if he’d been begging for it all day.

  Riding down the mountain toward Janasco, with the mustang tied to the rear bumper and clop-clopping docilely behind them, Rafo was agog.

  “After he don’t take the bridle—and he don’t take it and he don’t take it and he’ll never take it—how you know he’s going to take it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You just keep going, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have to be very patient, yes?”

  “Or stubborn,” Mike said.

  “Or stupid.”

  It had been a dangerous word between them and suddenly it was not so dangerous. They both smiled, not looking at one another. They rode in silence for a while; the clippety-clop behind the truck was pleasant to both of them. When the boy spoke again he sounded more reticent than Mike had ever heard him.

  “When you learn about horses?”

  “When I was about your age.” Actually it was years before that time, but Mike didn’t want the boy to think he was that far behind.

  “With horses . . .” Rafo stopped. “You didn’t tell me you were so . . . uh . . . okay.”

  He had the sense the boy wanted to use a more complimentary word but couldn’t find it or wouldn’t say it.

  “My father—is he as good as you?”

  You’re in for it, Mike warned himself. “As good as I am?” he stalled. “In a way, yes.”

  Rafo took the half-note of compliment and sang it up to a
paean of praise. “I knew it, I knew it!” he said. “He is macho, yes?”

  “. . . Well . . . kind of.”

  “Yes. He has to be! If he is the boss of men like you, he has to be champino, yes? With medals. A medal for riding a bull, maybe—and maybe for riding a wild horse—and maybe the biggest medal for being the best goddamn cowboy in the world. Is right, yes?”

  “. . . Is right.”

  Mike had to face it; it was getting worse. The boy was pushing him from lie to lie, each one getting larger—soon it would be a monstrosity. He had to diminish the falsehood, take it back a step or two, retrench.

  “Listen, Rafo,” he said tentatively, “I want to tell you about your father—and I don’t want you to be disappointed. . . . He doesn’t ride much these days.”

  The boy’s disappointment was even greater than he had thought it would be. “No? Why?”

  “Because . . .” Warily, step by step, “. . . he had an accident.”

  “A horse?”

  Mike jumped for it. “A horse, yes. He got thrown and—” He couldn’t stop. The words came in a rush, pouring all over one another. “An accident—a big stallion. He had him broken, he thought he had him broken and—You see, a horse’ll never stomp on you. A bull will, but a horse—he wants to get out of the way! But this bastard—!”

  He stopped himself, aghast at what he was doing—and confused by the perverse need that made him ascribe his own accident to the boy’s father. More disturbingly, he was not only putting Howard in his place, he was also putting himself in Howard’s place.

  “The hell with this!” he said angrily. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore!”

  The boy couldn’t let it alone. “Why? You are jealous?”

  “Yes!” he snapped. “I’m jealous!”

  The boy shrugged in an understanding—almost a comforting way. He seemed to excuse such a natural, human weakness—who wouldn’t be jealous of his father?

  It was late afternoon when they rode into Janasco. The town was just waking up from its siesta. The streets were dry and drowsy. Only the children had come out into the nearly setting sun, and none of them knew where the gringo could sell a horse.

  As they finished exploring the upper town and were descending by a street they had never taken to the lower one, they saw the tiny alameda. It was not so large a plaza as the zócalo and its greenery was dustier. Tucked away in a far corner across from it was the saddlery. That was where they met Jiménez.

  He was a stolid block of a man, so stable, so steadfast that nothing about him could ever change—he was born middle-aged, born strong, muscular, immutable. The saddler of the town, Jiménez was also its ironmonger, blacksmith and, happily, horse trader. But unhappily he didn’t want to buy the white horse.

  “Mesteño,” he said, then added as many other words of contempt as he could think of.

  Rafo turned a baleful face to Mike. “He say mustangs are no good. They are killers, they will murder their mother. Also he has just bought two mustangs from Porfirio and doesn’t need any more.”

  “Tell him we’ll sell ours cheap.” As he said it, he wondered if Rafo would make the observation: the Yankee competing with the Mexican—doing him out of his livelihood.

  Rafo turned to Jiménez and started bargaining. It was clear that things weren’t going well.

  “He say he will give you fifty pesos.”

  “Fifty pesos?” Mike was shocked. “That’s only four bucks! Tell him to go fuck himself!”

  “He speaks a dialect. I don’t know how to say fuck in dialect.”

  “Christ, at this rate, I’ll need to break twenty horses to get us to Texas,” Mike said. “Ask him for two hundred and settle for a hundred.”

  But Jiménez had abandoned the bargaining. He wasn’t even on the street anymore. He had gone back into his forge and was working up the hand bellows. When he had blown up a fire he began clanging away at the anvil. Rafo went into the smithy. Jiménez didn’t bother to stop clanging at his horseshoes so Rafo had to shout over the din. It seemed to Mike that the bargaining was going on too long for it to be successful. The mustang was getting restless and Mike wanted to get rid of him as fast as he could. He was about to tell Rafo to take anything he could get when the boy came hurrying out. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?” Mike asked.

  The boy winked. “I ask for three hundred and I got two hundred.”

  Mike grinned. So did Rafo.

  Jiménez counted out the pesos, all in coins, mostly in little ones. Since Rafo had been such a good trader, Mike put him in charge of the first money. Rafo slipped all the change into one pocket and bounced up and down to hear the clink of it.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  He had a right to be. He had eaten nothing since yesterday’s bananas. Mike too was famished—his last meal seemed weeks ago.

  The abacería in Janasco was the best one he had ever seen, said Rafo. The boy pointed to one delicacy after another, canned goods not even always available in the city—pickled guavas and squid in its own ink and tripe in a thick soup. The kid started, as usual, with beans and tortillas, stone cold, and finished with two desserts—a candy made of cactus fruit and a gooey preserve called melcocha which he fed to his mouth, his eyebrows and his chin. Mike had Chicken-of-the-Sea Tuna, drained of oil, plain.

  The town was pleasantly busy for a few hours, readying itself for the nighttime meal; women carried groceries in string bags and men on bicycles carried huge crisp rolls in the brims of their sombreros.

  Nightfall came suddenly and all the public places were deserted. Only the kids chasing the homeless dogs into alleyways and bedeviling the cats. Then even the kids were gone.

  Mike and Rafo walked the dark streets, looking for some sign of life, and couldn’t even find a bar. Not a light anywhere, only the brightness of the moon. They walked in quiet for a while, the silence being part of the darkness.

  “Is a lively town, yes?”

  “Helluva carnival.”

  He was just going to suggest getting into the truck and riding up the mountain to the shrine when they heard the music. Rafo heard it first, not even sure it was actually music. It was a strange sound, a lovely incomplete one, like a mandolin on the way to being a guitar, and unlike either of them.

  “A bandurria,” Rafo said.

  They turned at the corner where the sound was clearer and followed the side street to where it joined the zócalo. The lovely melody came from a three-stringed instrument that Rafo had called a bandurria. It was played by one of four mariachi players who strolled in the dim yellow light, along the gravel paths of the zócalo. Soon the other players joined—violin, mandolin, guitar—and the evening air was filled with a mournful sweetness.

  It wasn’t until they sat down on one of the benches that Mike and Rafo realized that the plaza was full of listeners. As they became accustomed to the light, they saw people on nearly all the benches—young people, old ones, sleepy children, enjoying the gentleness of a breeze that was only light enough, and music that was only loud enough, to be there. One of the spectators, a man in his forties perhaps, a workingman with a checkered shirt, his wife asleep on his shoulder, caught Mike’s eye and smiled. It was a welcoming smile and Mike raised his hand a little, as easy as the music. Two little girls went by, eight or nine they were, whispering secrets, shushing each other, whispering again. An elderly man shuffled down the path, crunching gravel, saying buenas noches to everybody and a special word of kindness when he thought of it. He thought of one for Mike and made a point of greeting him. Mike made a little gesture of gratitude, with a pleasure he was at a loss to express.

  When the man had gone, Rafo’s voice was gentler than usual. “I did not tell you what the old man say because . . .” He smiled with unaccustomed bashfulness.

  Mike smiled too. “Yes, I know,” he said.

&nbs
p; “People have time here,” the boy said. “More time than in the city.” He didn’t know whether to be worried or pleased. “If you want to be nice, you have to have time.”

  Mike nodded. He almost touched the boy but didn’t.

  The tranquillity of the plaza was smashed. The headlights of a car came glaring around the corner. The vehicle moved fast, circled the zócalo, circled it again. As if the headlights were insufficient, the floodlight to the left of the driver flashed on and its sharp whiteness stabbed into the darkness, here, there, going quickly from one group of people to another.

  It was a national patrol car. It may have been the one they saw on the road, the one in the roadblock; it may have been another. But like the first one, it was on a search.

  Mike could feel Rafo stiffen. Even before the boy knew what he himself was going to do, Mike sensed it.

  “Don’t run,” Mike whispered. Furtively he pointed to his left. “Walk out that street.” Then, pointing to his right: “After you’ve gone, I’ll walk that way. I’ll meet you at the truck. Slowly now, and stay close to the music.” He indicated the mariachis.

  Rafo got up and ambled alongside the musicians as though he couldn’t bear to be too far away from the melody. When they got to the corner of the square, Mike saw Rafo dart across the street and disappear.

  Mike waited until he saw a largish group, two families, going home together. He sauntered behind them fairly close and was lucky—they moved out onto the main street where the truck was parked.

  Rafo wasn’t there. Mike got into the truck and was prepared to wait when he heard the voice. “I’m here, Mike.” He came out from under the pile of junk in the rear. “Where we go?” he asked. “To the shrine?”

  “No,” Mike said. “They’ll see our lights.”

  “We ride without lights.”

  “Up that mountain? We’d get wrecked.”

  He started the truck but didn’t switch the lights on. In the darkness he drove to the end of the main street, then turned right, downhill. In a few minutes they were blindly making their way through the twisting passages of the lower town. Finding a street so narrow that vehicle traffic never entered it, Mike inched the truck in with barely a feather of space on either side.