Dr. Brinkley's Tower (32 page)

Violeta stood, indecorously wiped her mouth, and prepared for the row that was about to come. Instead, Malfil's eyes filled with tears. She turned and walked slowly back into the house. Violeta followed, saying
Mami, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Malfil seemed not to hear. She crawled into the hammock in the main room, her back to her daughter. There she lay, weeping. When Violeta went to touch her shoulder, she batted it away. It was, Violeta thought, the cruellest thing that Malfil could have done, and recognizing this inspired tears that were nearly as plentiful as her mother's.

IN THE MAYOR'S DREAM HE WAS RUNNING FASTER
than was possible for a human, over plains stretching to the point of disappearance, his breath inexhaustible and his muscles impervious to pain, unbothered by heat or sand or infirmity — it was as though he were soaring, his perfect feet touching down in only the most cursory of ways. He ran for kilometres and kilometres, never tiring, never caring, his body made newly whole, outrunning buzzards and roadrunners and the rays of the sun and, most of all, the responsibility that now pursued him like a posse of lawmen.

Miguel Orozco awoke with a start and sat straight up in his little adobe room just down from the plaza. He was perspiring, and he could still feel the remnants of his dream course darkly through his blood. After catching his breath, he rose from his hammock and walked out to the little mesquite-stick porch that extended from the rear of his casa. There he kept a large tin bucket filled with river water. He bent over and dumped a ladleful of water over his head, his
black hair drying quickly in the sun creeping through the slats of the ramada.

He dressed in the same garb he'd worn to Laura's funeral a week ago: gabardine trousers, a white cotton shirt that looked perpetually bleached, a donkey jacket, and a homburg. He then drank charred coffee and ate a leftover tamale filled with calf's brains and green pepper. When he had finished, he checked himself in the mirror and limped down his street towards Avenida Cinco de Mayo. As he walked, his neighbours all noticed his garb, rightly concluding that the mayor was about to conduct important business, quite likely on the gringo side of the border.

When he reached the avenida, Miguel Orozco turned right and limped towards the bridge, where the Mexican border guard, upon hearing an explanation of the mayor's mission, let him pass without the usual fiduciary demands. Miguel thanked the man and walked across the wood-slat bridge. In the middle he paused and looked east, closing his eyes against the heating orange glow of the sun. He let the soft, aloe-scented air drift gently against his face. How wonderful, he thought, it would be if the whole world existed
between
countries, in places unmolested by the governments formed by people.

He sighed, continued walking, and greeted the toll keeper on the other side of the bridge, who wore a customs uniform, an identification badge, and an air of proprietorship. After enacting the obligatory negotiations, Miguel paid him one dollar and entered los Estados Unidos. A small lane connected to the paved road that ran into Del Rio. The mayor stuck out his thumb and was picked up within minutes by a
Mexican-American driving a truck filled with undocumented yard workers. Miguel nodded his thanks and crouched in the back with the workers and several dozen flats of marigolds. By the time he was let out in front of the Roswell Hotel, his knees were stained orange, and he briefly considered returning to Corazón to change. Instead he again thanked the driver and went inside the building that housed Radio XER and Dr. Brinkley's medical practice.

The reception desk was manned by an attractive young woman with thick eyelashes.

— I very much would like to speak with Dr. Brinkley, Miguel said.

She blinked. — And you are?

— Señor Miguel Orozco. I am the mayor of Corazón de la Fuente.

— Señor Orozco! I'm so sorry … I didn't recognize you! Please, please, sign in and I'll give you an identification card and you can go straight up to the fifth floor.

A minute later the mayor entered the first elevator he had ever been in. Around his neck was a visitor's badge on which the receptionist had misspelled his first name. The doors closed and his heart began to pound, for the elevator was coffin-shaped and the air inside it clammy. As he rose towards the top of the building, he was nervous that something would happen so that the doors of the elevator would not open.
The lengths
, he thought,
that gringos will go, just to avoid a few stairs.

Miguel stepped into another reception area, this one staffed by another attractive woman who, the mayor thought, could have been the sister of the receptionist on the first floor.

— Buenos días, she said.

— Good morning.

—I'm told you would like to see Dr. Brinkley.

— Sí, that is correct.

She smiled. — Well, I know the doctor will be more than glad to make time for the mayor of Corazón de la Fuente. How are things across the river?

— They are no so good, he said. — That is why I am here.

— Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Such a pretty little town. Dr. Brinkley is always telling us what a marvellous little gem it is.

As she spoke she flipped through the pages of a large leather appointment book. She stopped and looked up at him.

— Tell you what, I could slot you in for, mmm, one-thirty on Friday. Would that work for you?

— I can no seeing him now?

— I'm afraid not, Señor Orozco. As you can imagine, Dr. Brinkley is a very, very busy man.

The mayor paused, as if to mentally sift through his own schedule. This, of course, was for show; he had owned an appointment book about three years earlier and had used it only to remind himself of Christmas and the celebrations surrounding the Independencia, both of which he would have remembered anyway. He'd ended up giving it to a local orphan, who put the book to good use as a kindergarten scribbler. He eventually nodded, tipped his homburg, and found the stairs.

That Friday, he again dressed in his funeral suit and crossed into los Estados. This time he had no luck thumbing a ride; with a start, he remembered it was the national holiday known as el Día de la Raza, on which Mexicanos either celebrated the
arrival of Christopher Columbus or, depending on their point of view, lamented it. In either case it meant the same thing: every Mexicano in the whole of the north was at home, preparing for a day of parades, piñata bashing, and binge eating. Meanwhile, car after car piloted by gringos passed by. The mayor began walking in the direction of town, his bad foot already aching. By the time he reached the Roswell Hotel, he was tired, thirsty, and forty-five minutes late. He stepped into the first-floor reception area.

— Señor Orozco! called the receptionist. — We were beginning to wonder what had happened to you …

— I had … mmm … I had car troubles.

— Well, that's too bad. I'm afraid Dr. Brinkley assumed you weren't coming, and after waiting for many minutes he decided to attend to his next piece of business.

The mayor's mind clouded with self-accusations, the majority of which involved his stupid, stupid decision to be born Mexicano. The receptionist, meanwhile, wrote down the date of another appointment on a slip of paper and passed it to him with a grin that bordered on the patronizing. He walked to the border in a sulk and trudged, exhausted, to the town hall, where he hid his face behind a newspaper for several hours, refusing to speak even to the old woman who brought his mid-afternoon sweet roll.

One week later, to avoid the fiasco of his previous trip to Del Rio, he left early. Naturally, a truck filled with itinerant garbage pickers stopped to pick him up even before he had a chance to stick his thumb in the air. As a result, he arrived at the Roswell Hotel before the sun had completed its transition from a blazing orange ball to a solid white-light sphere. He
entered the hotel with the cleaning staff and waited for a full hour, only to be informed that Dr. Brinkley had been called away to perform an emergency procedure on the governor of Mississippi, who was suffering from an inflammation of the excretory tract. They rescheduled, yet again. The mayor left, his skin purple with anger.

When he returned five days later, this time punctually, the receptionist again apologized for Brinkley's absence, explaining that he was in his native state, scouting locations for a new clinic.

— Señor Orozco, she said. — I tried to contact you but you didn't leave your telephone number. Really, I'm so dreadfully, dreadfully sorry, but I'm sure that if we reschedule your appointment, Dr. Brinkley will do everything in his power to make himself available. Although it had better be soon: the doctor will be taking an extended leave in the near future. Expanding his base of operations, I'm happy to say.

The mayor stood there, speechless and reddening, his fingertips twitching at his sides. He was about to say something when, surprising even himself, he turned without responding. As he dragged his bad foot towards the door, he felt as if the eyes of the world were upon him, their collective judgement an arrow.

Late that afternoon he sought out Father Alvarez, the cantina owner, and the hacendero and asked them to come with him to his office. Though it was an unprecedented request, they each nodded grimly, and did not ask why the mayor wanted to see them. Under shimmering greenish skies, Miguel unlocked the chain that now maintained the security of city hall. They marched wordlessly up to the
mayor's office. Miguel took his chair while the other three stood. Outside, the sun shone brilliantly over the vagrants, whores, thieves, beggars, and malcontents crowded into the plaza.

The mayor let a few seconds tick by, during which he looked from amigo to amigo.

— Brinkley won't see me.

The others did not look surprised.

— I think he knows what's going on in our town, and is embarrassed. If you ask me, I think he's packed up and buggered off already. I could be wrong, but I think he's washed his hands of us.

There was a long, freighted pause.

— Compadres, said the cantina owner, — you know what we are? We're a town of mujeres. First we got fucked by Porfirio Díaz, then we got fucked by the revolution, and now we're getting fucked by that pendejo Brinkley. Listen to me, primos. We're becoming a town of weak, whimpering, womanly cowards.

No one said a word, and in that extended moment of quiet there was sad agreement.

— So, Father Alvarez said with a deep, shuddering breath, — what do we do?

— I'll tell you one thing, said the hacendero. — I won't put up with it this time.

— No, said the cantina owner. — Me neither.

Again there was a long, drifting silence, during which the men mulled over their own, individual reasons for hating John Brinkley and the rancour he had brought to their once quiet pueblo.

Just a week and a half earlier, as he crept over to Margarita's side of the bed, the cantina owner had been visited with renewed visions of that leering captain. Suddenly nauseated, he'd retreated from his wife's surrender, complaining of fatigue, his face burning with frustration, his will molested. Since then he'd been forced to conclude that the benefits of the Compound Operation were temporary, if not out-and-out illusory.

The hacendero's stallion, meanwhile, had recently started raking his ears against the earth, causing them to bleed and attract bugs. In response, the hacendero was now ridding his house of all metals, his last meal eaten with a spoon he'd carved, rather roughly, from a huizache branch. As for the father, his mood was only further darkened by the Pentecostal nonsense beaming out of Brinkley's tower — on the way over he had passed a house topped by a metal weathervane from which he could clearly hear an evangelist ranting about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

— I have an idea, the hacendero finally said.

— What is it? grumbled the father.

— I know how we're going to get that hijo de puta.

The men listened as the hacendero solemnly voiced his idea. It was a simple proposition, savage and brutish and alive with finality. It was the resort of desperate men, and he used few words to describe it. When he was finished, his friends looked downwards, as though afraid to see the reaction of the others. They all knew that, under normal circumstances, they would have done nothing other than play with the idea, enjoying the temptation it represented, revelling in the lushness of its timbre. Yet the mayor and the father and the cantina
owner kept their eyes fixed on the knotted, splintering floorboards, their heads filled with the echoes of past humiliations. Outside, voices rose from the crowded, filthy plaza — some sort of violent commotion was occurring outside, of a sort so common now that it didn't even occur to them to go to the window and look.

The mayor opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out the bottle of tequila he had bought to replace his recently looted mescal. In the drawer he kept a single shot glass; he put this on his desktop next to an empty coffee cup. The cantina owner spotted a pair of water glasses on the mayor's filing cabinet, and he put them on the desk as well. Miguel Orozco poured four tequilas; he kept one and handed out the other three.

The men lifted their tequilas and downed them in a single, warming toss, their toast having to do with the rescue of their town, their old lives, and their sense of themselves. Then they solemnly walked down the chipped hallway staircase. Once on the street they turned left, in that way avoiding the dirt-faced throngs living in the plaza. At the next street they turned south and entered the store operated by Fajardo Jimenez, who was known to keep certain contraband items in his cellar, items that included explosives, hallucinatory roots, various models of handguns, and playing cards featuring photographs of naked Chiapan women.

Fajardo, upon seeing them, smiled through the fur covering his otherwise handsome features.