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"Do
you want me to drive you to your motel?" asked Chucho Flores.

Rosa
Mendez smiled more broadly. It occurred to him that Chucho Flores might be gay.

"No need," he said, "I can handle it."

Chucho Flores let go of Rosa Mendez and took a step in his
direction. Fate got into the car and started the engine, looking away from
them. Goodbye, amigo, he heard the Mexican say, his voice somehow muted. Rosa
Mendez had her hands on her hips in what struck him as a completely artificial
pose, and she wasn't looking at him or his car as he drove away but at her
companion, who stood motionless, as if the night air had frozen him.

There was a new kid at the front desk of the motel, and
Fate asked him whether he could get something to eat. The boy said they didn't
have a kitchen but he could buy cookies or a candy bar from the machine out
front. Outside, trucks passed by now and then heading north and south, and
across the road were the lights of the service station. Fate headed that way.
When he was crossing the road, a car almost hit him. For a moment he thought it
was because he was drunk, but then he told himself that before he crossed,
drunk or not, he had looked both ways and he hadn't seen any lights on the
road. So where had the car come from? The service station was brightly lit and
almost empty. Behind the counter, a fifteen-year-old girl was reading a
magazine. It looked to Fate as if she had a very small head. Next to the
register was a woman, maybe twenty years old, who watched him as he went over
to a machine that sold hot dogs.

"You have to pay first," said the woman in Spanish.

"I
don't understand," said Fate, "I'm American."

The
woman repeated what she had said in English.

"Two
hot dogs and a beer," said Fate.

The woman took a pen out of the pocket of her uniform and wrote
down the amount of money Fate had to give her.

"Dollars
or pesos?" asked Fate.

"Pesos,"
said the woman.

Fate left some money next to the cash register and went to get a
beer out of the refrigerator case and then he held up two fingers to show the
small-headed teenager how many hot dogs he wanted. The girl brought
h
im the hot dogs and Fate asked her how the
condiments machine worked.

"Push
the button for the one you want," said the teenager in English.

Fate
put ketchup, mustard, and something that looked like guacamole on one of the
hot dogs and ate it right there.

"Nice," he said.

"Good,"
said the girl.

Then
he repeated the operation with the other hot dog and went to the register to
get his change. He took some coins and went back over to where the teenager was
and tipped her.

"Gracias,
senorita," he said in Spanish.

Then
he went out with his beer and hot dog. As he waited by the highway for three
trucks to go by on their way from Santa Teresa to
Arizona
, he remembered what he'd said to the
cashier. I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in
a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country
when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it
wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American
and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical
extension, I'm nobody?

When he got up he called the editor of the sports section
at the magazine and told him Pickett wasn't in Santa Teresa.

"That's
no surprise," said the editor of the sports section, "he's probably
at some ranch outside Vegas."

"So
how the hell am I supposed to interview him?" asked Fate. "You want
me to go to Vegas?"

"Interview?
You don't need any fucking interview, all we need is somebody to cover the
fight, you know, the atmosphere, the mood in the ring, the shape Pickett's in,
the impression he makes on the Mexicans.

"The mise-en-scene," said Fate.

"Mise-what?"
asked the editor of the sports section.

"Shit,
man, the atmosphere," said Fate.

"In
plain English," said the editor of the sports section, "like you're
telling a story at a bar and all your friends are there and people are gathered
around to listen to what you have to say."

"I hear you," said Fate, "I'll get it to you the
day after tomorrow."

"If there's anything you don't understand, don't worry about
it, we'll edit it here so it sounds like you spent your whole life
ringside." "All right, I hear you," said Fate.

When he stepped onto the landing outside his room he saw
three blond kids, almost albinos, playing with a white ball, a red bucket, and
some red plastic shovels. The oldest must have been five and the youngest
three. It wasn't a safe place for children to play. If they weren't careful
they might try to cross the road and be run over by a truck. He looked around:
sitting on a wooden bench in the shade, a very blond woman in sunglasses was
watching them. He waved to her. She glanced at him for a second and jerked her
chin as if she couldn't take her eyes off the kids. Fate went down the stairs
and got in his car. The heat inside was unbearable and he opened both windows.
Without knowing why, he thought about his mother again, the way she had watched
him when he was a boy. When he started the car one of the albino children got up
and stared at him. Fate smiled at him and waved. The boy dropped his ball and
stood to attention like a soldier. As the car turned out of the motel parking
lot, the boy lifted his right hand to his visor and stood that way until Fate's
car disappeared to the south.

As he was driving he thought about his mother again. He saw her
walking, saw her from behind, saw the back of her head as she watched a TV
show, heard her laugh, saw her washing dishes in the sink. Her face, however,
was always in shadows, as if in some way she were already dead or as if she
were telling him, in actions instead of words, that faces weren't important in
this life or the next. There weren't any reporters at the Sonora Resort, and he
had to ask the clerk how to get to the Arena del Norte. When he got to the
stadium he noticed some kind of commotion. He asked a shoeshine man who had set
up shop in one of the corridors what was going on and the shoeshine man said
that the American fighter had arrived.

He
found Count Pickett in the ring, dressed in a suit and tie and flashing a
broad, confident smile. The photographers were shooting pictures and the
reporters around the ring called to him by his first name and barked questions.
When'll you be up for the championship? Is it true Jesse Brentwood is scared of
you? What did you get to come to Santa Teresa? Is it true you eloped in
Las Vegas
? Pickett's
manager was
s
tanding next to him. He was a
short, fat little man and he was the one who answered most of the questions.
The Mexican reporters addressed him in Spanish and called him by name, Sol, Mr.
Sol, and Mr. Sol answered them in Spanish and sometimes he called the Mexican
reporters by name too. An American reporter, a big guy with a square face,
asked whether bringing Pickett to fight in Santa Teresa was politically
correct.

"What
do you mean politically correct?" asked the manager.

The
reporter was about to answer, but the manager cut him off.

"Boxing," he said, "is a sport, and sports, like
art, are beyond politics. Let's not mix sports and politics, Ralph."

"So
what you're saying is," said the reporter called Ralph, "you aren't
worried about bringing Count Pickett to Santa Teresa."

"Count
Pickett isn't afraid of anybody," said the manager.

"There's no man alive who can beat me," said Count
Pickett.

"Well,
Count's a man, that's for sure. So I guess the question ought to be: has he
brought any women with him?" asked Ralph.

A
Mexican reporter at the other end of the ring got up and told him to go fuck
himself. Somebody not far from Fate shouted that he'd better not talk shit
about Mexicans if he didn't want to get his ass kicked.

"Shut your mouth, man, or I'll shut it for you."

Ralph
seemed not to hear what they were saying and he stood there calmly, waiting for
the manager's answer. Some American reporters who were in a corner of the ring,
near the photographers, gave the manager a questioning look. The manager
cleared his throat and then he said:

"We
don't have any women with us, Ralph, you know we never travel with women."

"Not even Mrs. Alversohn?"

The manager laughed and so did some of the reporters.

"You
know very well my wife doesn't like boxing, Ralph," said the manager.

"What the hell were they talking about?" Fate
asked Chucho Flores as they were eating breakfast at a bar near the Arena del
Norte.

"About
the women who've been killed," said Chucho Flores glumly. "The
numbers are up," he said. "Every so often the numbers go up and it's
news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the
story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the
w
hole damn ball
melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work."

"They go back to work?" asked Fate.

"The fucking killings are like a strike, amigo, a
brutal fucking strike." The comparison of the killings to a strike was
odd. But Fate nodded his head and didn't say anything.

"This is a big city, a real city," said Chucho Flores.
"We have everything. Factories, maquiladoras, one of the lowest
unemployment rates in
Mexico
,
a cocaine cartel, a constant flow of workers from other cities, Central
American immigrants, an urban infrastructure that can't support the level of
demographic growth. We have plenty of money and poverty, we have imagination
and bureaucracy, we have violence and the desire to work in peace. There's just
one thing we haven't got," said Chucho Flores.

Oil, thought Fate, but he didn't say it. "What don't you
have?" he asked.

"Time," said Chucho Flores. "We haven't got any
fucking time." Time for what? thought Fate. Time for this shithole, equal
parts lost cemetery and garbage dump, to turn into a kind of
Detroit
? For a while they didn't talk. Chucho
Flores took out a pencil and notebook and started to draw women's faces. He did
it very quickly, completely absorbed in the effort, and also, it seemed to
Fate, with some talent, as if before he'd become a sportswriter Chucho Flores
had studied drawing and spent many hours sketching from life. None of his women
were smiling. Some had their eyes closed. Others were old and had their heads
turned as if they were waiting for something or someone to call their names.
None of them was pretty.

"You're good," said Fate as Chucho Flores started on his
seventh portrait.

"It's nothing," said Chucho Flores.

Then,
more than anything because it embarrassed him to keep talking about how well
the Mexican could draw, Fate asked about the dead
w
omen.

"Most of them are workers at the maquiladoras. Young girls
with long hair. But that isn't necessarily the mark of the killer. In Santa
Teresa almost all the girls have long hair," said Chucho Flores.

"Is
there a single killer?" asked Fate.

"That's what they say," said Chucho Flores, still
drawing. "A few peop
l
e have been arrested. Some cases have been solved. But according
to the legend, there's just one killer and he'll never be caught."

"How
many women have been killed?"

"I
don't know," said Chucho Flores, "lots, more than two hundred."

Fate
watched as the Mexican began to sketch his ninth portrait.

"That's
a lot for one person," he said.

"That's
right, amigo. Too many. Even for a Mexican killer."

"And
how are they killed?" asked Fate.

"Nobody's
sure. They disappear. They vanish into thin air, here one minute, gone the
next. And after a while their bodies turn up in the desert."

As
they were driving to the Sonora Resort, where he planned to check his e-mail,
it occurred to Fate that it would be much more interesting to write a story
about the women who were being killed than about the Pickett-Fernandez fight.
That was what he wrote to his editor. He asked if he could stay in the city for
another week and asked them to send a photographer. Then he went out to have a
drink at the bar, joining some American reporters. They were talking about the
fight and all of them agreed that Fernandez wouldn't last more than four
rounds. One of them told the story of the Mexican fighter Hercules Carreno.
Carreno was almost six and a half feet tall, unusually tall for
Mexico
, where
people tend to be short. And he was strong, too. He worked unloading sacks at a
market or butcher's, and someone convinced him to try boxing. He got a late
start. He might have been twenty-five. But in
Mexico
heavyweights are few and far
between, and he won all his fights. This is a country with good bantamweights,
good flyweights, good featherweights, even the occasional welterweight, but no
heavyweights or light heavyweights. It has to do with tradition and nutrition.
Morphology. Now
Mexico
has a
president who's taller than the president of the
United States
. This is the first
time it's ever happened. Gradually, the presidents here are getting taller. It
used to be unthinkable. A Mexican president would come up to the American
president's shoulder, at most. Sometimes the Mexican president's head would be
barely an inch or two above our presidents belly button. That's just how it
was. But now the Mexican upper class is changing. They're getting richer and
they go looking for wives north of the border. That's what you call
improving
the race.
A short Mexican sends his short son to college in
California
. The kid has
money and does whatever he wants and that impresses some girls. There's no
place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in
California
. Bottom line:
the kid gets himself a degree and a wife, who moves to
Mexico
with
him. So then the short Mexican grandkids aren't so short anymore, they're
medium, and meanwhile their skin's getting lighter too. These grandkids, when
the time comes, set off on the same journey of initiation as their father.
American college, American wife, taller and taller kids. What this means is
that the Mexican upper class, of its own accord, is doing what the Spaniards
did, but backward. The Spaniards, who were hot-blooded and didn't think too far
ahead, mixed with the Indian women, raped them, forced them to practice their religion,
and thought that meant they were turning the country white. Those Spaniards
believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that
was their mistake. You just can't rape that many people. It's mathematically
impossible. It's too hard on the body. You get tired. Plus, they were raping
from the bottom up, when what would've made more sense would be raping from the
top down. They might have gotten some results if they'd been capable of raping
their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their
bastard greatgrandchildren. But who's going to go out raping people when you're
seventy and you can hardly stand on your own two feet? You can see the results
all around you. The semen of those Spaniards, who thought they were titans,
just got lost in the amorphous mass of thousands of Indians. The first
mongrels, the ones with fifty-fifty blood, took charge of the country, those
were your ministers, your soldiers, your shopkeepers, your founders of new
cities. And they kept on raping, but it didn't yield the same fruits, since the
Indian women they were raping gave birth to mestizos with a smaller percentage
of white blood. And so on. Until we come to this fighter, Hercules Carreno, who
started out winning, either because his rivals were even worse than he was or
because the matches were fixed, which got some Mexicans to boast about having a
real heavyweight champion, and one fine day Hercules Carreno was taken to the
United States, and they matched him with a drunken Irishman and then a black
guy who'd been smoking pot and then a fat Russian, and he beat them all, and it
filled the Mexicans with happiness and pride: now their champion had hit the
big time. And then they set up a fight against Arthur Ashley, in
Los Angeles
. Any of you
guys see that fight? I did. They
c
alled
Arthur Ashley the Sadist. That's the fight where he got the name. Poor Hercules
Carreno was wiped right off the map. From round one you could tell it was going
to be a massacre. The Sadist took his time, he was in no hurry, picking the
perfect spots to land his hooks, turning each round into a monograph, round
three on the subject of the face, round four on the liver. In the end, it was
all Hercules Carreno could do to hang in till round eight. After that you could
still see him fighting in third-rate rings. He almost always went down in round
two. Then he tried to get work as a bouncer, but he was in such a fog he
couldn't hold down a job for more than a week. He never went back to
Mexico
. Maybe
he'd forgotten he was Mexican. The Mexicans, of course, forgot him. They say he
started to beg on the streets and that one day he died under a bridge. The
pride of the Mexican heavyweights, said the reporter.