Oscar Casares (12 page)

“Torres…”

“To hell with you, Sanchez!”

“Torres…”

“And to hell with that pinche perro of yours.”

The next day was Sunday, the day he had promised to take Olivia and the boys to church and to visit her mother's grave in the upper Valley. This was always a sacrifice for Marcelo since her family had never cared for him. The mother had been of the opinion that her only daughter could have done better than to marry a man who was twelve years older and raised in the country. She never accepted that he'd walked away from that world, from everything he knew, in order to provide a better life for her daughter.

Marcelo had lived most of his life on El Rancho Capote, where his father had taught him how to work. The ranch was located northwest of Brownsville, along a small bend in the Rio Grande. Now his government job provided him with a decent salary and medical benefits for the family: Marcelo, Olivia, Junior, and the baby, Arturo. He spent his days—whether it was 102 degrees outside or pouring rain—checking on ranches and farms in the county, answering calls about stray animals, spraying livestock for ticks and other diseases, and patrolling the river on horseback to stop animals from being smuggled into the U.S. He'd been shot at three different times when he accidentally rode into brushy areas where drugs were being crossed over. One of Marcelo's good friends was chasing a stray calf when his horse fell into the river. Ed Zamora's body was dragged out by the county the next morning. Some of the men complained about having to patrol the river, but Marcelo wasn't one of them. He'd ridden practically every twisting mile from Santa Maria to the mouth of the river. He had never met the women who washed their clothes along the banks on the other side, but he waved to them every day. He could tell you where the currents weren't as dangerous and people were most likely to cross and fight their way through the tall grass near the levee, half dressed with their dry clothes in hand. He didn't bother them, and they didn't bother him. But mainly, the long rides along the river gave Marcelo time to go over his life, how he'd been raised to live and work on a ranch, but now he had a job where he only visited ranches and always in a light green truck marked USDA.

He had been doing this work for almost fourteen years. Olivia's mother used to tell people that he was like a dog-catcher for large animals. But this Sunday he tried to put aside his feelings. At first he had wanted to tell Olivia that he didn't feel like spending the afternoon visiting her mother, except he knew she'd be disappointed. He held the words in his chest, refusing to let them come to the surface.

After church, Marcelo stopped at the Fina station to fill the tank for the long drive to the cemetery. He was nearly on empty. The station had switched over to self-service a year earlier, but he had avoided stopping there because he hated these new places that didn't offer at least some service. He thought they owed people a little more for their money. Olivia stayed in the car with the boys, and Marcelo filled the Oldsmo-bile's tank. He looked down at his clothes while he pumped the gas. He'd felt uncomfortable wearing his old boots in church. The leather was cracked and the heels were worn down along the edges. During mass he noticed he'd missed a spot when he was cleaning them that morning. He was so distracted that he couldn't find anything to pray for except patience during the drive to the cemetery.

Marcelo had already finished filling the tank when he saw the attendant talking on the phone behind the counter. He was a teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen years at the most, wearing a baseball cap backwards.

“¡Eh!” Marcelo said. He was holding the money in the air. The attendant didn't hear and turned his back to Marcelo.

He tried whistling to get his attention. If the boy was going to pretend to be as dumb as a farm animal, he'd treat him that way. The kid finally turned around when he heard the high-pitched whistle, but he didn't hang up the phone. Marcelo felt some bitter words rise in his throat.

“Hey, who do you think I'm talking to? You think I'm here because I like the smell of gasoline? ¿Crees qué estoy loco o qué? Get out here, güerco arrastrado! Or you want me to drag you out here with that phone? I'm talking to you. Yeah, you!”

The teenager put down the phone when he realized that the crazy man waving the dollar bills was actually yelling at him. Olivia told the boys to sit back and stop staring at their father. Junior, the older boy, was already rolling down the window. The attendant stood inside the doorway and refused to step outside for the money. Marcelo finally stuffed the end of the dollar bills inside the gas pump and stuck the nozzle right in after them. He started up the Oldsmobile and drove to the cemetery without saying another word for the rest of the trip.

The dog stopped coming to Marcelo's window at night. He only heard it barking from a distance as it ran through the neighborhood. When he called the police in the morning, they told him the city answered complaints only if the animal was threatening people. The woman at the dog pound said they'd send someone over, but if the dog was in its yard during the day, there was nothing they could do.

These days Marcelo was patrolling a few miles from the mouth of the river. He had to be careful in the areas where the bank dropped off and the trail continued again a little farther downstream. If he wasn't in a hurry, he might stop in the shade and watch the men on the other side of the river herding their cattle from one pasture to another. Some of the men had dogs to help them with the cattle. Marcelo's father used to have a dog that killed rattlesnakes. The dog would bite a snake in the midsection and pound its head against the ground until it died. The dog survived more than a few bites over the years and finally passed away from old age. Marcelo laughed when he imagined Sanchez's dog on the ranch. It wouldn't have lasted a day. Animals had to work for their food like everyone else. It didn't matter what Sanchez said, the dog wasn't protecting his lawn mowers or the neighborhood. What the dog needed was to learn a lesson or two about respect.

One Saturday morning Marcelo woke up early to work around the house. Olivia and the boys were sleeping late. He had planned to clean out the carport, but when he walked outside he saw Charro sleeping by the Oldsmobile. Marcelo was about to grab a stick and show the animal how welcome it was on his property, but he thought of a better idea. He walked back inside and grabbed two wienies out of the refrigerator. The dog swallowed the first wienie in one bite. Marcelo dangled the second one higher than the dog could reach. It leaped several times but never high enough. Then he opened the trunk of the car and tossed the wienie inside. Charro jumped in after it, and Marcelo shut the trunk.

He drove on International with the radio turned to his favorite station. A few minutes later he was feeling the heavy rhythm of his tires rolling over the deep cracks on State Highway 4, the narrow two-lane road that followed the Rio Grande until it became the Gulf. Like most mornings, there was hardly any traffic. Dark gray clouds hung low over the flat brushland on both sides of the highway. Marcelo saw only two animals along the road. The first was a hawk perched on a rotting mesquite. He honked a couple of times to see if he could scare the bird into spreading its wings and flying off, but it stayed where it had landed. Later he drove around a bend in the road and had to swerve in order to miss what he guessed was a dead coyote, although by then it didn't look like anything that had ever been alive. The highway ended more than twenty miles from the city limits. Marcelo drove from the pavement onto the sand at Boca Chica. The beach was deserted except for a rusted-out washer and dryer, a torched car, dirty Pampers, and the rest of the junk people always dumped there. Marcelo rolled down the window and let the Gulf breeze fill the car. He drove along the shore with his arm sticking out the window as he listened to his polkas. And at the farthest point—where there was no sign of life but an abandoned beach house that had somehow survived the last few hurricanes, where the jetty rose from the sand with jagged blocks of concrete, and where a quarter mile of choppy sea water separated this lonely beach from the resort hotels on South Padre Island—Marcelo stopped the car.

He pulled the dog out of the trunk and it ran circles around him as though it wanted to play in the sand. “Ven pa'ca, perro desgraciado. Come on, here, dog.”

It bolted in a different direction each time Marcelo went near it. He finally crouched on all fours to see if it would come closer. The dog turned its head to one side and stared at him as if it were looking into a mirror.

“Ven, Charro, ven.”

The dog inched closer and he grabbed it long enough to slip off its leather collar and ID tags. Marcelo used his hands to help himself climb the rocks on the jetty. He flung the collar and tags into the water. They floated for a few seconds before they sank. When Marcelo walked back to the car, the dog was still in the mood to play and it jumped high enough to put its dirty paws on his chest. He knocked the animal down and kicked it in the stomach, but even that didn't stop it from chasing the car.

“¡Perro chingado, cállate el hocico!” Marcelo honked the horn over and over as he watched the dog fade to a tiny brown spot in his rearview mirror.

Two days passed before Sanchez knocked on Marcelo's front door. He brought his little boy. They came to ask if Marcelo had seen Charro. The boy was crying to himself and chewing on a piece of his father's pants. Marcelo felt sorry for him and said he was sure the dog would come back.

Sanchez walked over again the next day, this time alone.

“Ya te dije, Sanchez, I haven't seen your dog. What more do you want?”

“Torres, it's not my fault you don't like Charro.”

“¿Y qué, everybody's supposed to love your dog? I'm supposed to like the little presents he leaves in my yard every night?”

“You can't say for sure it's Charro. There's other dogs.”

“¿Mira, sabes qué? Next time I'll put it in a plastic bag and bring it over so you can look at it and tell me for sure.”

“Torres, all I'm saying is that you might have seen what happened to him.”

“Are you blaming me?” He opened the screen door, and Sanchez backed down off the porch.

“No.”

“It sounds like you are. It sounds like you're standing in front of my house blaming me because your dog hasn't come home.”

“I didn't say that.”

“¿Entonces?”

“All I'm saying is that if you see him to call me.”

“For what? So he can wake me up in the middle of the night again?”

“It's the boy's dog, Torres. Por favor, he misses his dog.”

“Wait until he has a job and a family and see how much he misses the dog.”

Marcelo thought he was dreaming when he heard the barking a week later. But looking out his bedroom window, he saw Charro staring straight at him. The dog was louder and more playful than before, as if its time away had been some sort of dog vacation.

Marcelo ran outside with a broom just as Charro was hiking a leg on his bougainvilleas. The dog moved before he could hit it, and his first swing went into the bushes. When he finally recovered the broom, the dog began running large circles around him. Marcelo swung wildly like a kid trying to hit a piñata at a birthday party. “¡Méndigo…desgraciado…sanavabiche!” he yelled out after each swing. He was getting closer to hitting the dog when it suddenly turned and chased a cat down the alley.

He walked back inside and rested on the bed. Olivia asked him what he was doing and he told her he'd been in the bathroom. She rolled over on her side and fell asleep. Part of him wanted to go back and look for the dog, but it was almost three o'clock in the morning. He stared at the ceiling and watched the fan go round and round. Another hour went by before he was able to fall asleep.

The next morning, Monday, he overslept and arrived late for work. He had to hear his supervisor tell him, in front of the other men, that if he couldn't be on time for their weekly meetings maybe they needed to talk. The room fell silent and all the men—except for Marcelo and the supervisor—looked down at the tips of their boots. Marcelo told him it wouldn't happen again.

Of all the things he'd learned over the years, he knew that playing around with a man's work was something you didn't do. Marcelo rode along the edge of the river for an extra hour that day. All he could think of was how he wasn't going to lose his job because of a dog. He remembered when he was fifteen and his family moved across the river to Reynosa. They'd been there a month when his father got into an argument with a man named Norberto Valdez. The men exchanged words after Valdez accused Marcelo's father of stealing some cattle. Valdez threatened to report the Torres family to the authorities and force them off their ranch. The fight that almost broke out ended with both men warning each other about the trouble they'd started. Back at the ranch, Marcelo's father gathered his sons, all five of them, and told them he was giving them each a gun. The first one to see Norberto Valdez was to shoot him. Benito, the oldest, was the lucky son. He spent ten years in the Reynosa jail. Nobody ever stopped to question whether it had been the right thing to do. All they knew was that their family had been threatened. Marcelo had to do something about the dog.

He stopped at Lopez Supermarket on the way home. The meat department was located at the back of the store, next to the milk and cheese. They were having a special on H&H chorizo, his favorite. The wienies had worked the first time, but he wanted to try something different. The meat cutter said the ground round was fresh and had been put out that afternoon. The steaks in the glass case looked nice and juicy, but they were kind of expensive. Marcelo thought about the past two months with the dog barking in the middle of the night and he asked himself how he would feel after giving it something to make it sick. Would he be able to sleep at night, knowing that he'd killed an animal, a little boy's dog? He couldn't exactly answer yes, but he didn't have any better ideas. He bought a medium-size package of ground round.

Marcelo finished off two servings of carne guisada for dinner. Olivia had made her famous rice and reheated some pinto beans from the day before. He thought her flour tortillas were the best he'd ever tasted and he told her again that night. After dinner, Marcelo said he needed to check if he'd locked the doors to the truck. The sun had been down for a couple of hours. He used his keys to unlock the toolbox. The narrow metal container was suspended from both sides directly behind the cab. On one side of the box he stored hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, wire cutters, and a leather hole puncher. On the other side, sectioned off by a divider, he put away his bridles, bits, spurs, and leather gloves. This was also the side where he had hidden the meat.