The Dog Fighter (3 page)

You need to be more calm. I heard my father say to her one night when they thought I was sleeping. For the child. He said.

Hearing this secret they had I only did more to trouble my mother. Between rows of corn in her garden I dug small holes for mice I found almost dead in their traps. With oil I filled the holes and threw into them matches. I stood over this with other children watching while my own eyes alone were narrow and dark and lit by fire. I stole from these children in their houses if I was invited into them. I beat girls. And when my mother learned of this even as she was more with child she beat me more and more until the strain was so great her jaw and cheeks reddened and I no more needed to pray for the child in her to die because I knew she was doing it herself.

Your blood is the blood of the men in these stories. My grandfather had said.

I was fourteen years old when my mother died. In this time while my grandfather was dead my mother was often the most happy I had ever known her. My parents like young lovers. For years I think she was able to end pregnancy in her without my fathers help. I do not think she would allow herself to be with him and for him to be with her and this was much that was difficult in their marriage. Even then I knew I had much to do with this. That the words of my grandfather in me ruined her. But my father was a quiet man. The words he chose were the ones that worked most powerfully.

He is dead. I heard my father say to my mother about my grandfather. This one will be our own.

But I prayed for the death of the child within my mother. I prayed to my grandfather. His hissing whisper my God. And the day my mother died a nurse led my father from their room with his face buried in his bloody hands. The room dark but for a candle like the one she had placed beside my grandfathers bed. The smell of blood clean in my memory as the smell of iron rust in cold snow. My mother curled on her side in a drift of white sheets. Her body still. A mess of blood to her side. The candle flame dancing shadows along the walls and up into the corners of the room. I stood in the doorway unable to cry.

Later that night my father sat in the kitchen by the fire of the stove staring down into his great hands. Dried blood still beneath his fingernails. I stayed to the shadows. At this time I was almost as great in size as my father. And this only at fourteen years of age. My father spoke to his hands as if they were my mother. Begging them to forgive him and hating them for not being strong enough to save her. To keep his words. My father had long despised my grandfather. But for all his strength my father was a weak man. Even in his mind. The stories of my grandfather had been too great. And when my father could not stand the pain of losing my mother and his only son to my grandfather because he did not use those hands he stood and buried them in the hot coals of the stove.

I did nothing. My father mumbled to the nurse when she wrapped his hands in aloe rags. This is the most strong I ever was.

I hated this weakness in my father. My grandfathers voice told me that to keep it from myself meant to kill him. But this was not so easy. For weeks after the death of my mother my father sat in his chair surrounded by his books. His hands wrapped in rags healing. Because my father was much respected as a doctor the rooms of our house had more than most. The openings at the tops of the stone walls between the oak beams allowed for the breeze of the Gulf to pass through bringing his crying from corners of all the rooms I listened to. I snuck at night like a murdering thief through the house holding knives in my hand and making hilarious smiles in the reflection of the blade lit by the moon. I studied our staircase to learn where the footsteps made the loudest creaks. I memorized the shadows to move in without being noticed.

I stood in the door of the room looking onto the empty bed pretending to cry for my mother. Wondering how it felt. The bed the nurse made was never again creased by my fathers weight. He slept sitting in a chair in his study. I stood for hours in the night or sat in a chair by the empty bed watching the moon slowly bring shadows to the room. I sat not asking my mother to forgive me for killing the child in her and herself but thinking of how I was to kill my father. My voice that of my grandfather telling me that he was to blame. How I would hide the blood on my own hands when I killed him. How my father was to blame for my own sins.

From the fire my fathers hands healed so smooth that he had much difficulty when turning the pages of his books. He sat for hours staring at the words unable to concentrate. He did not return to his work as a doctor. The careful words he had were almost gone now and he spoke only in mumbles. The nurse and some other women came to our house dressed in black shawls. They came with platters of rice and steaming dishes of beans pumpkin and squash. Eyes with much blame and hatred for me. These women they sat with my father in his study holding the beads of their rosary murmuring their prayers before my father silent. At night I crept through the hallways to stand over him where he slept in his chair with a knife blade in my hand held at his throat wondering what the cutting would feel like in the muscles of my forearm. Many times I heard him crying by the fire of the kitchen stove. Talking to my mother in his mumbles after the women had gone. His shoulders hunched. His greasy hair growing long and thin over his eyes. Many of those who knew and visited him believed he had given himself to drink. But we had no money for this. The food we had came from the nurse and the women who came to pray around my father. They sat with my father for some months before one day he stood suddenly with their eyes on him. He began laughing and showing them his scarred hands and his feet dancing before them.

If your hands cause you to stumble then you must cut them off. He yelled. The women became suddenly terrified of my father and hurried from the room. It is better your Savior said for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell. My father chased them into the street yelling and singing. One woman dropped her rosary and my father twirled it around his finger like a toy and then wore it like a necklace yelling after them. Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin. These are the words of your Lord!

After this my father began to wander from our house for days. He slept on the beach or in the sugarcane plantations outside Veracruz. He slept in the tall grass alongside muddy dirt roads where he begged for money from travelers and laughed at those who gave it to him. One time I saw him arguing with a man for stealing bananas from this mans stall in the market. The man pushed my father to the ground and for all his strength my father did nothing. I broke the jaw of a boy who said to me that he had seen my father stealing crumbs from the buzzards in the zócalo. Then I told myself that it was not because I cared about my father but because it was a chance to fight. It embarrassed me that my father was now a name followed by laughter and whispers. I refused to admit this but only told myself that my father knew I hated him and so he forgot me. He did not want to see the blame I placed on him with my eyes. The anger. His mind still alive some he learned how to forget who he was.

Because the nurse and the praying women no longer came to us I fought and stole for food. The old men of Veracruz arranged for me to fight for money boys that were older but not much stronger. I fought wild and lost many times at first. When I was fifteen I fought a man more than twice my age. We fought down by the water in an old warehouse whose blocks were made of crushed stones and sandy cement. The men stood us facing each other and we swung only one at a time and I beat him by receiving less of his punches to my face than his from mine. After this I could not see for two days. Several men carried me through the door of our house and left me on the cold tile floor of our kitchen. My head swollen and my ears hissing a high ring.

After the fights I lost my eyes were hot with tears from breaking my promise to my grandfather. Snot hung from my nose on my split lips bleeding. My chest breathing heavy fighting breaths. This was the only time I cried and I hated the feeling so much I promised my grandfather I would not lose anymore. But I did still. But not many more.

By losing you are learning how to win. My grandfather whispered to me and I believe this is true.

Soon the men of Veracruz came to know my name for something more than the begging of my father. I could not stop thinking of what they said about me. I began drinking some with sailors who told stories of men fighting bears in rings made of snow. Of tigers in distant jungles. I drank with the men I fought before until my eyes were blind with anger and fury and woke the next day with the knuckles of my fists torn and bloody and not remembering how. Occasionally officers from the military with their sunglasses and mustaches came to watch me fight in the alleyways or in abandoned depósitos and they like the other men placed their bets. And then when I was caught stealing by the police they pretended to yell at me but only pushed me around a corner to brush me off and smile. Some even handed me money that I had won them.

One night after I had been drinking I came upon my father lying in the doorway of a house that was not our own. I had not seen him for some time and was very surprised. More than a year had passed since my mothers death. One of his eyes swollen shut. His ear bleeding from mange like a dogs. The edge of some book hidden uncomfortably behind him. I touched the cold metal of the switchblade knife I kept to his throat. When he felt the cold of the blade his eyes jumped open and I dropped the knife. Startled. But while the sound of it on the stones still rang in my ears he picked up the knife and returned it to my hand. He held it in my hand to his throat.

In this world there are men of books and men who know what is not in books. My grandfather had told me about my father when I was a boy. Fighting always is more than just words. It is the most beautiful and difficult thing.

But for all my fighting I had never killed a man. And then I could not do this. So I left my father lying in the dark of a door that opened into the house of someone else. I left Veracruz with his laughter following me. I walked that night over railroad ties beneath the stars until I was no longer in the lights of the city but in the shadow and dark beyond like walking from the light of some fire into an even brighter darkness.

 

F
or four years I traveled with work around northern Mexico and into the United States. Fighting and drinking and imposing my great size on others as I went. Hopping trains or by foot I traveled north through Zacatecas and Durango. Through country where the faint blue hills and mountains are honeycombed from so many abandoned mines. Unable to sleep in the rickety cold of a boxcar one night I passed under the full moon a small mountain city that shone blue with silver so much in the stones of its houses and buildings left from a time when reducing the ore did not remove all the precious metal. I remember sleeping by a long narrow lake and waking to the sounds of geese and ducks in the reeds. I once saw a mountain lion that did not see me come down an arroyo to drink from a fresh spring that I camped near. I witnessed half wild mustangs eating rich buffalo grass in the low country of the Bajío region. I rode trains past plowmen trenching dry sandy topsoil with wooden plows like those my father had taught me the Egyptians used.

When I was sixteen in the rock mountains of Sonora I found hard dusty work moving rock behind bulldozers and power shovels carving roads to link Mexico and the United States through the border towns of Nogales and Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. I watched great explosions take entire copper colored hillsides away momentarily coloring the sky orange. Below these explosions hundreds of shirtless men stood. Covering our ears as dust clouds settled on the sweat of our forearms like flecks of raining red gold. I watched graders scrape miles of shrubs and trees to expose dirt to use to level the roads over the desert of Chihuahua and Coahuila. We lived for weeks at a time in a land so desolate and dry we drank water warm from pouches with mold brought to us on the backs of burros. Over land so flat and barren small animals seemed great in size and where curious mirages consumed our imaginations. I worked to build roads for trucks to carry loads from the gypsum and silver mines into the United States. Gypsum and silver and copper and gold and iron and mica and marble and alabaster. These mines in Mexico but owned by American companies.

On the plains of Texas when I was seventeen I cut my hands on barbed wire stretching fences miles without end under that cornerless blue sky. Measuring days by the number of holes I dug and posts I set. At night setting fence posts in my sleep. Nightmares about bushes that if you touch them and then rub your eyes you will go blind. Death if you eat the leaves. Waking beside campfires doused in the mornings with orange piss from men who drink little water but much whiskey and tequila. Eating canned meat. I hid beside pickup trucks from great dust storms. Woke in the middle of the night by quiet wolves. Listened to men tell stories about work in the mines of Zacatecas. Of a worker lowered by rope into the smoking crater of Popocatépetl for sulfur.

By wide shallow sandy rivers ferried down by drowsy river men and by trains heavy with iron ore I traveled south to Ciudad México. When I was eighteen I hung from ropes tied around my waist dangling from the sides of concrete and glass buildings. Buildings built taller than those of the once great Tenochtitlán. Stories above the earth in black air braiding ropes to hold my great weight I coughed and spit black and green coins of snot near to those below. Daring men to fight me. My laugh muted in the roar of machines but my smile telling all.

And during all this work my hands only grew more strong each day. My shoulders more perfect for throwing my fists. The desire to put myself before other men more within me as my grandfather promised it was to be.