The Dog Fighter (10 page)

I came from this dream when a drunk grabbed my arm through the fencing. Clamped between his teeth a corn husk cigarette burned inches from my face. His eyes rattled behind a pair of glasses. He yelled at me over the yelling men.

Are you ready to die for us!

As he spoke the crowd swelled around this man. His shoulders hunched as he crumpled into himself laughing. None of the men owned the expressions their faces took. She was lost to me in the crowd of men. Searching among their teeth and noses and eyes for her I did not notice the ragmen leave. I did not hear the leash end slip through the fence. I only looked down at the dog that biting onto the rug took me to the ground. Specks of white fire danced across my vision. I smelled the sour warmth of the ragmen. The strength of the dogs jaws tearing at the rug. In the blur of fury I fell before her. Hot claws singed the flesh of my chest. My mind had not come away from the greasy faces. The laughing drunk. The wealth of her beauty. Finally I was there and there were no shadows traipsing across the corners of the bedroom of my memory. Only myself on the ground at its center losing. The fear of having my eyes taken from her tremendous.

Without thinking I threw the dog to the side. My grandfathers voice had been in me too long for there to be any other reaction. The eyes of the men widened unblinking. Several of the mistresses already crying when the dog sprang again. Instinctively I put the rug before it. As the dog tore at the rug snarling I grabbed a hind leg with my hands and broke it. The men yelled for more. But I turned from the dog to look for her. The men cheered. They mistook my searching for part of the show. It was as if I had dropped the knife just as I was lowering myself into the tank of water. The dog came at me again but weakly and again with my hands I snapped another of its legs. The dog limped to a corner of the ring where it toppled over like a broken chair.

Hot from the fighting and angry that I could not find her in the crowd of ugly faces I kicked the dog in the soft of its stomach. I refused to believe that she was a dream. The dog snapped pitifully at my feet. Then with the men yelling and mistresses on the arms of the businessmen watching I clenched the wire fence with my fingers and jumped with both feet down onto the ribs of the dog. Blood came from its mouth and mierda rushed onto the floor from behind. I stood in the pooling mess desperate to prove her existence when a loud roar came from the hollows of my chest over the growing sound of men chanting my name. I did not hear the men I was so lost for her in myself then. I did not feel the dream within me pass from sleep into what surrounded me continuously.

The drunk had wedged himself against the fencing of the ring again. His glasses crooked on his face. We looked into each others eyes for a moment before he was again trampled to the floor by the yelling men storming the ring. But before he disappeared he smiled and showed me his teeth. His gums were purple and those few teeth he had were black.

Inside the ring the ragmen fell to their work. I had imagined her. The mens hands were cold on my flesh. Unremarkable. One ragman dragged the dog by its legs that were not broken to a split in the fence. He dragged what I had done. The result of my grandfathers hiss. I was ashamed of myself. But this ragman led me to her again. She stood next to Cantana. Her right palm cupped over his right forearm. Her face free of black tears. Her green eyes lovely and calm. My legs tingled and the blood from the cuts in my chest ran cool down my legs. There was no judgment in her eyes when her painted lips blossomed into the tiniest of smiles. She took her hand from Cantanas arm and lowered it to her side. It was a handsome gesture.

Our eyes remained fixed as the ragmen tugged at the maguey ties holding the rug around my arm. Removing the claws. Then Cantana stepped to where she had been facing me. He stood between us so that I could see myself in the mirror of his sunglasses. I could not feel the yelling men with their hands on my arms and shoulders and back surrounding me. But the sight of myself in the businessmans sunglasses with blood on my neck and chest filled me with shame. Cantanas eyes lurked behind my reflection in those glasses. Hot and satisfied. He had seen us together. Her and me. I suddenly heard the sound of the men around me chanting my name and it was disappointing. I dropped my eyes weak in the stare of Cantana showing me to myself then. Of what my mother had fought my grandfather for me not to become. Of the choices I had made to place myself there for his pleasure and games. I was not scared of Cantana but of what this beautiful woman at his side thought of me now that I had suddenly seen myself. Cantana stepped aside and placed his hand in the small of her back just beneath the line of her dark hair. She bit into her lower lip. Shied from his touch.

Cantana also won that night. She was the only mistress not to have cried. It was rare for mistresses not to cry and it meant that she would return to the fighting until she did.

 

I
did not walk with the men or go to the plaza to hear my name in their stories that night. Hot flashes of humiliation coursed through my body each time I remembered jumping onto the stomach of the dog. Of myself roaring like some beast. I had felt the tiny ribs splintering beneath my feet and piercing through the skin. But mostly I thought only of how I wanted to see her again.

That night fire overcame the thatched roofs of a small village in the mountains beyond Canción. Amber firelight and the twinkle of stars through rising smoke. The people of Canción stood in the streets looking to the west. The glow of flames taking over the dark of their eyes.

When the fights on the rooftop had begun the last of that days sunlight wedged through the cracks around the small door. But after the bald doctor had sewn the cuts in my chest and I left the depósito the stars shone silver and bright in the sky. Coins falling to the bottom of some bottomless well. I knew that the cantinas and cafés on the plaza were busy with men from the fights. Suffocated by thoughts of her I walked unnoticed among those admiring the fire in the mountains. My shirt sticking to the cuts in my chest. I went down to the sea. The cigarette smoke from the fighting thick in my clothes. The breath of the drunk and his awful teeth. The tide was out and the fire in the hills reflected small but vividly on the black mirror of the bay. The hotel stood ominously to the north. Its rooms exposed. The small cook fires of the lonely guards.

Leaving my clothes crumpled on the beach I eased my fevered body into the cool water. The salt stinging my wounds. Naked I swam out until I could no longer touch the cold sand of the earth with my bare toes. The backs of small waves carried the wavering lights of Canción. Shimmering flecks of gold. I tried to relax. I let my arms slack. My shoulders loosen. I slipped beneath the surface of the water and swam with my eyelids closed until I came to the surface and to her again.

I spoke to her in whispers. Then I yelled for her under the water. Above the water I whispered for her again and her answer was that of the waves lapping against my neck. I was lost to the drifting. Floating on my back I matched my breaths with those of the passing waves. Her dark hair spilled over the cuts in my chest like a soothing balm. The straps of her red dress fell about her dark shoulders. Her cool breath along my neck. Our lips moist from kissing. Difficult breathing when kissing again after not having kissed for so long. She washed over my body as the stars fell onto the water around us and we were together there as she sang in a voice reserved for me alone. And in this voice she forgave me for the fighting of dogs.

Four

W
ith the money I won from my first fight I quit the work on the hotel and rented a room on the third floor of a three story compound several blocks south of the plaza mayor. The compound was owned by a dentist named Jorge who lived on the middle floor across the courtyard from me with his blind mother. Jorge was a slender man handsome in his sixties. His hair a messy gray but thick black eyebrows.

The dentist sat his patients in a chair on the bottom floor of the compound in front of a large window that opened onto the street. He left the window open during the day to allow the breeze from the sea to pass through to the tiled courtyard where his mother spent her days in a chair with a thin cotton blanket over her lap napping. Children gathered on the cracked and broken sidewalk in front of this window where Jorge worked. The dentist gave them candy to enjoy while they played waiting to watch him drill and pull teeth from the mouths of his patients.

They find it very entertaining to watch my patients dig their fingernails into the leather arms of the chair. Jorge said to me once. Their knuckles turn white and the children make faces as if they are in pain with them. Often I get very distracted because the children are so amusing.

The dentist was always something of a showman. He was known to spring back from the mouth of some man or woman with a bloody tooth raised above his head bowing to the childrens applause.

This is not good señor. Jorge said to very nervous patients sitting in the chair. He sucked the tip of his tongue down sharp from the top of his teeth. I think we are going to have to extract.

The ears of the children were trained to these words. They dropped their iron hoops and marbles at the sound of them. Every now and then for effect Jorge ran a razor he never used along a worn strop to produce the grisly sound of it sharpening.

I don't like the looks of this one. He smiled to the children over the patients shoulder. We might have to amputate.

Applause was not uncommon when the dentist was at his finest. Once he confided in me that he frequently dreamt of being showered in roses.

But when not passing out candy to the children or leaning over his patients Jorge spent his days comfortably in the cool of a large room at the back of the courtyard. With the doorway shaded by flowering palms the dentist relaxed with his records. This compound was a very pleasant place to live. Along the south wall there grew a red bougainvillea the owner before Jorge had planted some years before when his wife died. After swimming in the morning I would return to my room and lie on my bed listening to the records Jorge played while staring out at the beautiful little red flowers on the vines. Daydreaming of how I was to be with her someday.

Most afternoons and evenings however the dentist took time from his work to visit in the back room with a group of young men that often stayed very late into the night. The young men made selections from Jorges records to play on his Victrola. They spread out over the cushions of couches smoking cigarettes and talking in soft but serious voices I strained to understand the meaning of. Many times I heard them laugh over the music. Drinking cola Jorge bought especially for these visits. In the young mens company the dentist was careless with his gestures. The muscles in his face eased. In his work with the windows opened to the street Jorge was like a fine actor but one who is always onstage. Only in the back room was he himself.

My own room at the dentists compound was large enough for only a small bed and a wood chair. I hung my clothes from the chair at night and placed my huaraches under this. A window with iron shutters opened over a garden the dentist had made for his blind mother on the roof that went around the courtyard below. For many years Jorge had worked to train the bougainvillea to creep along the low inside walls of the rooftop. In pots along the walls there were other bougainvillea and these he trained to hide shards of glass buried in the walls to keep others out. Sitting in my wood chair on the rooftop I focused my eyes many times to see these vines grow over the city like thin paint strokes on a moving canvas. The bright red flowers and brown vines decorated the colorful buildings and swaying palms of Canción. Delicate succulents and flowering cacti filled dozens of other but smaller terra cotta pots. For his mother Jorge painted tiles with blue and red and yellow designs of waves and suns and more flowers. I sat for hours in this garden thinking of this young woman I had witnessed at the fighting. Now and then distracted by the tall mountains to the west and to the east the shining Sea of Cortés.

Each night after the sun set but there was still some light the dentist gently guided his mother by the arm from pot to pot through the garden. The young men played record after record below as he described to her the flowers and cacti.

The pink bougainvillea is doing well. He said to her.

How many blooms? She asked him.

More than four dozen.

And the color of our little weak one?

More red each day. Like the sunset after a fire in the hills.

A week from now it will be the color of velvet.

I think so too.

Jorge rubbed waxy hibiscus blooms in the small of her palm. Once I saw him delicately place her fingertip to the sharp spine of a cactus and it brought a smile to her face. Watching Jorge with his mother often made me very sad. She was old and frail and he was very good to her. She wore the same flimsy dress every day to keep her cool in the constant sun and heat of Baja. When she was not napping in the courtyard she spent her time with a woman Jorge hired to cook and to clean the compound. This woman washed clothes and stretched them over a line below my window to drip over the soil of the terra cotta pots to give them water. Jorge richened the soil of his garden with eggshells and guava rinds and limón halves. The dentist was a smart man. He wasted little.

I woke in the mornings to the sound of the woman sweeping the courtyard. Mopping the tiles. For the first time since leaving my father I was not working every day but also I was not drinking or fighting. The frustration I felt from the energy I did not exhaust when working usually had turned into violence. But I did not feel this living in my room at the compound. After encountering her at the fight there was some peace now in my life. I exhausted the frustration there was not being able to be with her by walking for hours. Swimming in the early mornings and late at night. I was feverish only with thoughts of her. I thought nothing of myself and was the most content I had ever been.

But still I had to fight dogs to be near to her. Some nights I was unable to sleep my mind was so busy imaging her. Without the work on the crane to gain strength I did sit ups and push ups in the dark of my room. I jogged in place. During the day after the woman hung the clothes on the line to drip I snuck onto the roof garden and twisted the wet towels and shirts dry over the pots until the muscles in my forearms felt like fire with strength.

One night not long after I moved into the small room I heard a gentle knock on the door of the compound. Immediately I convinced myself that it was her. That she had found me. I hurried to the window only to witness the shadow of the slender dentist cross beneath the palm fronds of the courtyard with another shadow I did not recognize. I was very disappointed that it was not her. Minutes later I heard music from the back room. This knocking came regularly. Late in the night. After the mother of the dentist had gone to sleep and after the young men were gone. The young man who came to visit the dentist always dressed in black and his movements across the courtyard were secretive. Then I suspected nothing.

At the compound I lived listening closely for her in the common noises of others living in the buildings around me. The muffled arguments. The bedtime conversations. The sounds of the dentist waking up in the middle of the night to piss. As I lay in my bed the compound shifted around me in the calm of night. I memorized its songs as I had done in my fathers home. The winds came through the cracks in the shutters. The clothes on the lines tapped flatly against the stucco walls. The mother of the dentist coughing on the other side of the courtyard a floor below. Beneath my window the young men as they left trying not to wake the mother. It had been four years since I had lived in a house with others.

Desperate to find her I began to walk the streets of Canción at night. Often I returned to the hotel to convince the guards to allow me to sit on the top floor. Word of my fight had passed through the city in the way that fire consumes dry grass. My name was finally in the voices of many men. It was what I had dreamed of but now I preferred people not to know me. Still the view from the top of the hotel had changed none. Little work had been done to continue building more floors. The workers instead concentrated on fixing the damaged north corner. The destroyed scaffolding had been rebuilt. The windows of the city below were lit for her. All were for her to stand and comb her hair in at night. Looking out for me as I searched for her.

I slept only a few hours each morning before going out and walking more. I began to pray to God for the chance to encounter her on the street. I did not care that it was begging or that I had never asked Him for anything before and that I never prayed to Him in thanks. As a young man I did not think in this way.

I walked the mercado on Saturdays. I bought vegetables from women with wrinkled faces and from women surrounded by cilantro whose bodies I remember being shaped like teardrops from sitting on pallets all day long. Women who sold tomatoes and peppers brought over on the ferry. Others sorted through heaping baskets of beans with fingers gnarled by years of this work. The market smelled of leather. Raw meat and raw fish. The aisles busy with children screaming and laughing and chasing each other or chickens and pigs.

On Saturdays the market was particularly busy. I enjoyed being among the women who at first did not know who I was. They argued yelling at each other over and across the stalls and aisles. But one day when I passed they were suspiciously quiet. I decided then that they had learned I was a dog fighter and feared how I would act toward the children. None of the women looked me in the eyes or encouraged me to buy from them. One woman known for her outrages wore a sly smile that showed awkwardly in the lines of her stubborn face. In my suspicion I did not notice a boy following me from stall to stall. I did not see him hiding among the goods that hung in the aisles.

At one stall I asked a woman to choose some of her best onions for me. I was still learning how to use my voice again and often I had to repeat myself I was so quiet. While the woman chose the onions I turned from her to look at the other women. In a nearby stall filled with typewriters sat an old man. There were very few men working in the mercado and this man particularly stood out. He wore eyeglasses. A full white mustache stained yellow beneath his nostrils from smoking cigarettes. He held a newspaper before him. As the woman weighed the onions this man lowered the newspaper then and looked me in the eyes over the tops of his eyeglasses. He looked at me very purposefully but I did not understand why. Confused by the old mans look I did not feel the boy brush against me. When I went to pay for the onions my money was gone. The woman held the bag out for me to take and it shook with her giggling. Then all the women nearby were laughing at me loudly while I searched my pockets. I looked up to see the old man shake his head.

A small pickpocket took your money. He said folding the paper. I tried warning you.

The old man set down the newspaper before him. From one of several ashtrays in the stall he lit a fresh cigarette using the end of one he was already smoking.

I thought you meant something different. I said to him.

You thought?

I thought.

You thought wrong my friend. The women laughed when he said this. I am a poet of women.

The women in the market around this laughed even more. But the poet only smiled and said a vulgar phrase to them in English. His teeth stained and crooked. Smoke rose before his face. Between his glasses and his dark eyes. The women did not understand what he said but they understood the teeth of his smile and cursed at him for his words.

No one writes poems for ugly women. He responded to their curses. Waving the back of his hand over the whole of the market.

And only men without women write poems. Said the woman whose stubborn face looked awkward when she smiled.

You should have warned me. I interrupted.

Why? The poet asked.

Because I. I stammered but stopped. And when I did not answer the poet understood immediately how poor I was with my words.

I see this little pickpocket every day. His voice rising. But this is the first time I have seen you. It is not my fault that you are a fool and did not understand my warning. The poet picked up his newspaper again. Now leave me alone.

Leave me alone. A woman mocked the poet in a deep voice.

I left the market like a boy scolded by his father. That night in my room the typewriters surrounding the poet haunted my restless sleep like the books that had lined the walls of my fathers study. Just as it was when my father asked me questions as a boy I had been unable to mouth an answer.

The next day I returned to the poets stall and stood before him. He smoked as if I were not present.

I want to learn English. I said.

Why? He asked without looking me in the eyes.

So I can say things without people understanding what they mean.