The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  El Pepe’s got a bloody cut above his eyebrow. El Piolín and El Jíbaro are leaking mole sauce from their snouts. La Toña Peluches’s plaid shirt is torn, and lumps are already swelling on his cheek and temple. There are also a few other paisas, the ones from the table in the back. And the table in the middle. All of them badly beaten, staring at the floor. There must be a good twenty of us. They dump me next to El Pepe and try to bind my wrists, but since my hands are smeared with shit, they don’t secure them tightly.

  They think I’m disgusting.

  The agent just puts the ties on my wrists and tugs, trying not to touch me to avoid getting crappified. He’s got to keep his professional gloves spotless.

  A vato at the other end gets up and takes off running down 87, trying to disappear into the thick scrub. He’s got his hands tied behind his back; he looks like a dancing earthworm. Two agents chase after him, and a few minutes later shots ring out. El Pepe just closes his eyes and hangs his head even lower. Blood is now running out of his nose and dripping onto the ground, making tiny volcanoes in the loose earth. We have no words.

  An agent goes up to the old man who was bartending and hands him a wad of bills. I don’t understand English for shit, but I assume the money is compensation for the damage they’ve caused to his rathole.

  Three civilian trucks arrive, and they herd us into them like cattle. They shove us into the back and toss us down like a flock of fish.

  When I started working on the farm, El Pepe told me, “We’re the ones who clean up their shit, and they still treat us like crap. Not all of them, just some of them. Those fucking gringo bastards want us to lose the last of our dignity, but someday . . . someday . . .” And he sat staring at the cotton plants. And I sat staring at him in bewilderment, and when he noticed he yelled at me, “Listen, chiquito, don’t sit there gaping at me like a moron—go pick that shit. If we fall behind, we don’t get paid this week.”

  And we worked there for hours, doubled over at the waist, wearing cotton-picking gloves and hats to shade our necks under the sultry sun.]

  Here in the city, on the other hand, the sun is less catastrophic. Here it seems like the sunlight’s been filtered by the windows of the skyscrapers. I scoot back closer to the chickadee’s building and notice that there are lots of people on the street now. The blood on my feet has dried. I pick up the chickadee’s dishes and clutch them as if they were part of her; I don’t know, I think there are a few things in the universe that tell us about people. I close my eyes again to run away once more.

  “What would I have wanted to be if I could have fucking been something else?”

  Things work better inside my head than they do out there.

  Here inside it’s easier to live.

  Out there it’s a disaster zone.

  * * *

  [“Fucking stupid brat,” the aunt who was not my aunt but rather my godmother used to say, “you’re always getting into trouble. Why don’t you start sweeping and dusting so you can earn all that food you eat instead of sitting there watching the flies buzz past.”

  “If the shitters aren’t spick-and-span, there won’t be any dinner for you. You spend the whole day woolgathering.”

  “If your mother were alive, devil spawn, she’d up and die for a second time at seeing what a retard you are. You don’t even know how to talk right.”

  “Yes, doctor, seems like he’s retarded, though he does grunt occasionally.”

  “I don’t know, doctor, mightn’t he just be hardheaded like his mother, may she rest in peace? Because given the way she was, God rest her soul, she’s got to be in the pits of hell now.”

  “Look, doctor, no matter how much I tell this pigheaded kid to do something, he gets more stubborn every day. Isn’t there some shot you can give him to make him obey?”

  “You can’t get anything into that thick skull of his, not even with a whipping. The other day I beat him with the lamp cord, and he didn’t even move. He’s like a mule. Won’t budge forward or back.”

  “Yes, doctor, the other day he stole the little locket that used to belong to his mother. But she left it to me because that was the right thing to do—it’s no small task, after all, taking care of a little brat, and it’s not cheap either. It was the right thing to give it to me, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what he did with that locket, officer. I gave him a whupping but he didn’t say boo.”

  “Nothing, he’s worse than a mule. Yes, I’d rather you take him off to jail than have him here with me, because one day he’s going to kill me in a fit of rage. He pounds the walls with his fists when he gets upset—what if he hits me one day?”

  “No, no, I can’t take it anymore, and after everything I’ve done for him.”]

  “Are you asleep again, dude?”

  I open my eyes and there’s Aireen. I’m still clutching the dishes; they’re infused with my heat.

  “Let’s see if these fit you.”

  She puts some tennis shoes down in front of me. I’m afraid to pick them up. She’s done a lot for me already and I don’t want to wear her out, I mustn’t wear her out—it’s so easy to wear people out.

  “Come on, dude, take them—my boss gave them to me for you!”

  “Qué?”

  “Candy’s owner. I told him a friend of mine had been assaulted and asked if he had any clothes he didn’t need, and he gave me these. He’s really good to me.”

  I pick up the tennis shoes, look at them. They’re cool. The soles are wearing out, but they look like the kind they show on the big Nike billboards. I’m about to put them on when the chickadee yells and snatches them out of my hand.

  “You can’t put them on those filthy feet of yours! Come on.”

  She takes my arm and helps me up. The dishes almost slip out of my hands, but my reflexes are quick enough that I catch them in the air.

  The floor hurts me.

  I feel blisters ready to pop under the weight of my own fire.

  She opens the door to her building and leads me by the arm.

  I look like a combatant who’s been wounded in some solitary war and is oozing shrapnel. And yes, everything on this side of the world seems to be against me, battling to exterminate me, using even insecticide and mosquito coils as its weapons.

  “You opened the door for me one day,” the chickadee suddenly says as she pushes it closed. “Do you remember?”

  My knees are chattering. She’s firmly buttressing me upright. I feel like a marionette and her fingers are the strings that keep me standing.

  We reach a sliding door near the staircase, and she opens it. It’s the building’s maintenance room. We go in and she leads me to a sink behind two dilapidated washing machines. She picks up a bucket and starts to fill it with water.

  “Lo siento, dude,” she says. “Gas is really expensive and the super doesn’t turn on the main water heater till after ten, so the water’s cold right now.”

  She pulls up a bench and sits me down. She picks up a bowl of powdered detergent and sets it on the floor; then she takes the dishes from me and places them in the sink.

  She lowers the bucket of water and puts it in front of me.

  “Vamos,” she instructs me.

  I roll up my pants to my knees and put my right foot in. Though the water is cold, it feels warm to me. The dried blood starts to dissolve along with the dirt and leaves. I stick in my other foot, and the searing sensation in my wounds starts to fade.

  The chickadee takes a little of the powdered detergent and pours it into the bucket. She rolls up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, squats down, and starts stirring up the water to form bubbles.

  I look down at her hair, which smells of sunsets.

  The tattoo behind her ear is beautiful, calligraphed in precise lines and curves.

  One of her fingers brushes my ankle. I feel a shive
r vibrating through me from my guts to my heart. I stammer frantically. I hate for her to see me like this, I don’t know, beaten all to hell inside and out, and without meaning to, without being able to stop it, a fat fucking tear slips out of me, like that, and rolls down my cheek.

  I don’t want her to see me like this. But she looks up just then and sees me. I feel the way her eyes drill into me, down to my soul. I try to smile to avoid what I’m feeling just now, but I can’t, and more fucking tears slide silently down my cheeks to my mouth. They’re salty; they’re hermit tears that have never left home before.

  My heart is in tatters.

  She doesn’t say anything; she just looks into my eyes, and I, adrift in that bucket of water, feel like a castaway.

  The chickadee reaches down to the bottom of the bucket, lifts my foot, and starts to wash it, still looking at me.

  Her hands begin to heal all my wounds one by one as her gorgeous eyes open new ones.

  My heart, I already know, hasn’t belonged to me for a long time, since the first moment I saw her.

  Aireen runs her fingers over my blisters, over my lancinated toes. I’m seized by childlike emotion and start to wheeze.

  My nose is stuffed up. I gulp down oceans of saliva. My eyes keep squeezing out salty thumbtacks that leak into the corner of my mouth.

  In all the fucking novels I read up in the loft or in Wells Park, love started another way—rationally, like a jigsaw puzzle assembled by the writer to create a fictitious yet lifelike construction in which, as soon as their feelings come to a boil, the lovers kiss. But literature isn’t at all like fucking life—like here, in this boiling moment, as Aireen makes my pains disappear, my chest splits in half to take her words into my core when she says: “I think the two of us are going to be good friends, sabes.”

  And I don’t care if we’re just friends. For me, who was so far from her, on the other side of the world, on the other side of the street, in the antipodes of any encounter with the most beautiful woman on earth, invisible even to the air, having her as a friend is more than enough.

  I don’t need anything else.

  Just looking at her, I feel as if the world is working more smoothly.

  I smile at her, with a pure, natural smile, full of all my gratitude and all her kindness, because she makes me into something less huddled than I am.

  “What’s your name, dude?” she asks as she starts washing my other foot; her hands are fire. I look at her white, white teeth, straight like the idealization of the most perfect, exuberant ivory.

  I smile even harder; the tears keep tumbling from my lashes.

  As long as I can remember, they’ve always called me whatever they felt like calling me. Hardly anybody ever asked my name—they didn’t need to know it. To the world, I’m the idiot kid, the goddamn putz, vato, pipsqueak, bastard, scruff, dude, barefoot Indian, negri warrior, boy, fucking punk, young man, illegal beaner—all names bestowed according to the circumstance. Here I want to tell her my name is Liborio, Liborio, Liborio, but suddenly I feel ashamed.

  “I don’t remember,” I tell her, hanging my head and shrugging my shoulders, waterlogged with fucking tears.

  “I’m Aireen, your new friend.” And she smiles.

  And me downcast, adrift, just like that, humble, immersed in beauty again. And she must understand what I’m feeling, because she smiles even more as she stands up.

  “Oh, dude, one day you’ll have a name that will fill your soul with pride.”

  She lopes out of the room, drying her hands on the hem of her sweatshirt.

  I watch her leave.

  My eyes are still wet, as if the earthen jugs inside me had cracked.

  * * *

  [In the truck, El Pepe told me about the Border Patrol as we turned off Highway 87 and headed down a dirt road toward the desert:

  “We’re not going back anywhere now, paisa. We’ll be staying here. These fucking bastards aren’t taking us to prison. They’re going to murder us in the goddamn desert.”

  He gave a loud snort, full of bloody spittle, and expectorated, making a cavernitious noise.

  “But we’re already dead men, right? So the hell with it. They’re not going to take me out without a fight.”

  His nose still clogged with blood, El Pepe prodded me with his foot, signaling to me to spring at the nearest agent like a rabid dog. At his urging, I leaped out of the truck.

  Zoooom! Plop!

  When I fell, the cable ties slipped off my wrists.

  The air evacuated my body.

  I couldn’t see what happened next because of the dust, but I imagine Pepe must have been put down with a blow to the skull. The trucks kept going another thirty or forty yards, jolting along the dirt track.

  Just then the last truck came to a stop, and again I told myself, all covered with dirt and shit, “Run, motherfucker.”]

  Aireen comes back with a towel.

  I’ve already taken my feet out of the bucket and am dripping. The blisters have turned into white, wrinkly flaps of skin. She hands me the towel and I start drying my feet.

  She unrolls some blue athletic socks with pink stripes and holds them out to me.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “They’re the only ones I had.”

  I don’t say anything; I put on the socks and slip on the tennis shoes she holds out and suddenly, just like that, I feel as if I were not walking on land but instead floating in congested space. Skimming just above the earth.

  I figure this is the weightlessness of paradise.

  “They look good on you—a little big, but they’ll do for now,” the chickadee says, smiling. Then she turns away and starts gathering everything up—the bucket, the soap, the towel, the dishes—and says to me, “Let me see if I can find you a place to stay tonight. You don’t have a place to stay, right?”

  “I do have a place,” I say without thinking, as if leaping to rescue the two of us—especially me—determined not to destroy everything I’ve achieved with her, because she’s already done too much for me and everything has a limit.

  I stare at the floor, and my eyes turn to horchata.

  Aireen turns around and softly approaches me. With her right hand she lifts my chin and says, “Come on, dude, it’s hard to find a friend these days. You can’t throw it away before you even start. Sí? We’re friends, amigos, no? So do you have a place to stay or not?”

  And she looks into my eyes, straight into my eyes like a meteor, like that, a supernova that scorches my guts as it touches the most naked fibers of my soul.

  My stomach twinges.

  Suddenly I feel a shiver that runs from the base of my spine to my navel and back several times. I don’t know how to describe it—it’s something that has no words, and there’s no dictionary to find them in. I feel caught between a rock and her beautiful eyes.

  Her fingertips on my chin are a trident of fire.

  I once read in Jefe’s bookstore that love is incredibly difficult to find, so when you find it you should never let it go because it might never appear to you again.

  “I do have somewhere to go,” I say, so quietly that I have to repeat it to myself several times so the chickadee and I both realize what a load of crap I’m telling her. “I do have somewhere to go,” I repeat.

  * * *

  [There are some branches nearby. I can barely see them. It’s a moonless night and there are tricksy stars perspiring diamantine on high. On the horizon I can see the rocky mountains outlined in a tenous aquamarine light. Without the cable ties around my wrists, I can wriggle among the rocks in the desert and the scrub. The trucks are driving in circles like spinning tops. The agents are pissed. I see them get down and start pointing their rifles everywhere. They fire two or three rounds in different directions. Then one of them aims at something that’s moving off in the other direction.

  H
e shoots at it.

  He walks toward what I think is a dead animal.

  “Come over here!” the hunter shouts.

  The others go up to him and examine what he’s perforated. I don’t know what it is, and while they pick up their rifles again to fire bullets into the thing that’s lying there on the ground and barely moving, I scrabble through some brush until I find the hole of some fucking animal. It’s not very big, so I cram myself in, twisting my bones in all different directions. With my right hand, I start throwing dirt on top of myself to cover the hole with me inside it. I take a breath and expel it like the cherry on top of my improvised tomb, that earthen womb from which I hope the goddamn migrant-hunting gringos won’t manage to abort me.

  Everything is darkness.

  I don’t know if it’s a cramp, but suddenly I feel a tickling in my ankle, something that moves up my shin and starts to slither up my leg. Then it stops. Outside, the guards’ footsteps are pacing back and forth like they’re trying to trample every rock in the desert. Cold cramps crawl up and down my body. There are a number of them now. I feel a bit of fuzz rolling around in my ear. I have the urge to burst out of my hiding place and take off running. But I’d be leaving one hole only to enter another.]

  Why the fuck did I do it? Why the hell did I tell her I’ve got a place to go? I don’t know, maybe because I think I don’t deserve her, that I don’t deserve her or her friendship; that the laudatory epiphany of happiness is for the gods alone, and we fucking mortals are left to grind ourselves to bits with our own teeth—unremarkably to perish, bewallowed in the guts of everyday suffering, addled, delirious, without a goddamn shred of hope. But perhaps I also say it because, at bottom, I’m just a pendejo. And a pendejo doesn’t think beyond his own head.

  “All right, there you go, dude.”

  Hope is always there, in the distance, and though very few ever achieve what they desire, having it so close makes me want to inhale more deeply so I can expel the air in the form of sighs.