The Dog Fighter (5 page)

Content now I dozed. In and out of the drone of the engine. The smacking waves. The constant sunlight and conversation muffled. The children had stopped trying to play marbles on the gritty surface of the ferry deck above the rolling waves and this led them to a game of tag. One boy strayed from the game. He came on tiptoes to my side. A piece of papaya in his small hand. I let the boy reach out to touch my forearm and then I caught him by the wrist. I felt his skin goose pimple when I narrowed my eyes and growled. The boys own eyes shook and in their reflection several men stood off to my side and rolled their shoulders. One man slid his hand into the pocket of his pants for the cool handle of a knife. In my own hand I opened my switchblade knife and at the sound of it the men straightened. I brought the end of the knife to the papaya and then I looked from his eyes to the tip of the blade. When the boy understood I let go of his wrist and smiled and ran my other hand through his hair. I was hungry and the papaya was delicious.

By evening the wind was strong. In the west mountains rose from the horizon small and insignificant at first but then high and steep above the colorful buildings of the city of Canción nestled before them. Soon two story rows of yellow and pink and blue and white buildings came into view. The last of the sun glinted off iron shutters that were to be closed over the windows to protect the glass from rainstorms that come sudden over the sea in late summer and early fall. Rainstorms with winds so strong they uproot palm trees. Topple windmills and peel back roofs. But now the cool of the wind brought some relief from the heat. From the shore came the smell of coarse grasses and sweet flowering cacti across the salty water to the ferry heavy with the stink of unwashed men. The women held their faces to the low sun with eyelids closed. The wind noisy in the folds of their serapes. Men held their sombreros palm flat against their heads. In the distance coconut palms swayed along the malecón. The stone walk stretching the length of a wide crescent beach.

As the ferry came into the bay the water ribboned with many small waves folding over themselves white in the wind. A rowboat with a loud outboard motor piloted by a man with an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth led the ferry through the narrow mouth that opened from the sea into the Bay of Canción. Half naked boys jumped from high rocks of the mouth calling to us. Dried by the wind from when they left the water to climb back to from where they jumped laughing nonsense words and curses. Some few masts of fishing and old oyster boats wavered above the docks ahead. The docks built of large sand colored stones quarried in the mountain range beyond. I noticed the clay brick and stone towers of the massive cathedral rising above the center of the city. Only the mountains then were more tall than the towers of the cathedral in Canción.

Workingmen lined the rails of the ferry as the women hurried below for their possessions. One man pointed to the north end of the wide bay and called through the wind for the men to look where the hotel had already begun to take its great shape. The three stories were without outside walls then but surrounded by wood scaffolding. Steel bars for reinforcement pierced the concrete and cinder block sides. The empty hallways allowed the last of the days light and through these rose the wind moaning.

It looks like some monster. One man said.

Good. Answered another quick. Then I will not have to listen to you crying at night about how much you miss your wife.

Men without shirts scrambled up slender wood ladders of the scaffolding but stopped when they noticed the ferry. We stared back. Our eyes so distant from each other they did not meet but the postures we let our bodies take were still enough to tell that we were judging one another.

When the ferry docked the men that played cards on the back of the drunk rolled him into the water holding their laughter to not wake him. He came to the surface coughing. On the stone dock a short man with a muscular chest and a proud chin struggled to hold papers in that wind. He was well dressed and impatient looking. He cursed in front of the women without apologizing. This stocky foreman took the names of workers carrying their worn canvas sacks and baskets of woven maguey with handles coming undone. Those coming down the wood planks of the ferry held their hands in front of their eyes to shield sand blown by the wind. The workingmen stood in a line where I was a foot more tall than the man that was tallest. Meanwhile the short but confident foreman yelling at us to come to the hotel at dawn the next morning.

If work cannot be found for you. He yelled. You will not be paid for having made the journey. At this he smiled and turned to leave.

Most of the men from the ferry followed this foreman to a building near the hotel where cots were rented and the other workers slept. But with my sack over my shoulder I went to be on my own. Passing through the crowd with the wind I did not hear the toothless man sneaking behind me with his knife drawn. In the darting eyes of a pretty young girl before me I understood something to be wrong. I turned quickly and caught the toothless man by the wrist. The knife clattered on the stones. He fell to his knees holding his wrist above where his hand now dangled limp. The men left him crying on the ground hunched over himself. I smiled at the young girl and then walked on.

When the wind had died some and the sun had lowered behind the mountains to the west the last of the day was warm in the blue and green walls now dark as night settled upon the city completely. The wind had taken the heat of the day. The humidity was not like that of Veracruz but the warmth a dry heat from the surrounding desert. The mouth of the bay choked with shadows of fishing boats and the boys in their canoes tiny alongside. Down an alley a record played from a second story window. I could smell meat cooking. Oregano and chili. Behind wrought iron fencing of a balcony a young boy in cloth diapers played with a rag doll. His hand balancing himself dangerously as his dimpled knees held him up unsteadily. I walked through the streets of Canción content with where I was. Narrow streets led up from the water of the bay to the base of the steep mountains. These streets crossed by wide stone avenues that took the curve of the bay over the city like continuing ripples of water. Avenues lined with flickering electric lamps atop tall cordón log poles. Intersecting all these streets and avenues in an intricate maze were dim hard dirt alleys leading to tiny hidden squares with small cantinas and cafés where old men sat arguing. Around them mud walls crumbling to show bare the stones within them. And on these walls written in red paint the words.

Cantana a la chingada! Canción por los Cancioneros!

But these words meant nothing to me then.

As I continued to walk the moon rose and the spines of short round cacti in pots along the roof edges glowed in the dark. These same spines the Guaycurans used for fishing hooks and the large round bodies of them in the desert for ovens. Bougainvillea also grew but on trellises above alleys from rooftop to rooftop. Along electrical wires in the more wealthy neighborhoods. In beautiful glazed pots I saw white cuts healing in dark green bodies of nopal. The broad flat stems taken for meals. The red of hibiscus in that sweet smelling night the red of a bloodstained bedsheet in lamplight.

I walked alone those dark streets staying from the cantinas where the laughter of women and music welcomed workingmen each night. These cantinas where the women smiled and whispered while searching empty pockets before moving on to search for ones full. Instead that night I went down to the sand and ate salted papaya that I had stolen from a man in the market when his back was turned closing his stall. I cut it with my knife and enjoyed it with salt I kept folded in newspaper in my sack. Afterward I lay in the sand and picked at my teeth with my knife. I had not bathed in some time and so now I dove into the warm water naked. I swam until my feet no longer touched the earth and there I stopped to float on my back and admire the stars. I let my body be moved by the waves in all directions. My arms and legs dangled and my muscles relaxed and I realized then that I was very tired but with no place to sleep but the sand on the beach.

I enjoyed very much the warm salt water and the sound of the dark when I slipped beneath the surface with my eyelids closed. Underwater was the only time in my life that I allowed my body to be not my own but part of a drifting. My mind empty of voices. With my eyelids closed and the sound of the water in and out of my ears I was drunk. As a lonely young man that was the most easy way to be. I was floating for some time when I surprised myself and woke from a delicate sleep. Disappointed some that I woke I was so comfortable. The lights of Canción candles on the water around me. Little flames the size of coins swaying but without leaving their place on that gentle water.

 

A
dozen men had come on the ferry to join more than one hundred others already working on the hotel. When we arrived that next morning the stocky foreman separated us into groups based on our skills or size if we had none. Immediately my strength was noticed and working alone for two days I was chosen to reveal with shovels and picks the roots of a coconut palm. The palm was then uprooted using chains looped around the metal elbow of a steam shovel. The salt air had peeled the paint and corroded the joints of the steam shovel but still it lifted the palm entire and placed it in a hole only twenty three feet away to create space for an open air dance floor and concrete bandstand.

But what impressed me most was the scaffolding. Using warped planks tied to sun bleached cordón logs with leather straps and wire the workingmen had built an unsteady framework that rose just above the third story of the hotel itself. As the cinder block and steel walls of the hotel grew taller within the scaffolding the workers built the scaffolding higher.

Do you think we could go on like this forever? I overheard one man ask another.

You do not remember what God did the last time we tried.

At the base of the scaffolding diesel tractors struggled over light colored rock and sand like slow moving animals put on the dry landscape to carve out terraces for shrubs and trees to be brought into. Near the edge of the beach an area was saved for a large swimming pool that was to have a bar made of cut palm trees and a thatched palm roof. Down to this strong shouldered masons built stout rock walls and beautiful arches intricately detailed with tiny azulejos over stone paths to be lined with bougainvillea.

The work from dawn until just before dark was long and taxing but never more than any other work we had done with our hands in our lives. The faces of the workingmen raw from the sun. Noses swollen from drink. In the mornings we put on our chapped lips animal fat that grew overnight in cast iron pots heavy with stew. When the palms of the masons split from lye I watched them fill these splits with wood sap or tobacco juice to stop the bleeding. Those men working stories above the rest of us rubbed candle wax along the handles of their hammers and trowels to prevent them from slipping from their sweaty hands. We worked with our shirts wrapped around our heads. The men calling out vulgar jokes to one another over sunburned shoulders and backs.

Soon I was given the work of hoisting boards to the top levels of the scaffolding. I operated a crane using hemp ropes and an old pulley to lift as many boards and cinder blocks as was possible up to where two other men unloaded them for the scaffolding and inside walls. The men watched in awe of my great strength. Rumors of what had happened with the toothless man and the scorpion on the ferry took like fire among them. They feared me and preferred that I work alone.

During the day concrete dust fell through the light of the hallways as it had done through blinds of my fathers study. It settled around the base of the hotel for the feet of the men some bare to leave tracks in. Operating the crane at the center of all this working satisfied me greatly. I did not think of Veracruz or Perla much at all. The mens stares while I lifted great loads and the rumors they spread during lunch when I sat alone thrilled me. My own thoughts of others thinking of me was a great distraction. I spoke to no one to encourage the attention they gave me.

At the end of my first month on the hotel a worker returned drunk one afternoon staggering. Laughing to himself and pointing to the ground and sky. Some of the workers insisted he leave but the stocky foreman whose job it was to watch over the workers from a hammock he hung in the shade of two palms ordered the workingmen to let the drunk continue. Less than an hour later the drunk fell from the third floor of the scaffolding onto an uneven pile of cinder blocks below. His left leg bent out at an awkward angle from his hip. His neck broken. I did not witness this man fall but I did crowd around when several workers lifted him onto a cot to carry him away. This man went in and out of consciousness vomiting from the pain. But during the entire scene the foreman never rose from his hammock. Never uncradled the back of his head with his soft hands.

The name of this foreman was Eduardo. He would be the first to tell me of the fighting of dogs.

Until the scaffolding rose above the third story of the hotel for the construction of the fourth only the towers of the cathedral had stood taller than the two and three story buildings of Canción. But now the hotel was to have seven floors with more than one hundred rooms facing either the sea or the mountains beyond. A casino and restaurant were planned for the top floor where large glass windows would offer a tremendous view of the bay. After work at dusk I swam in the bay or relaxed underwater with my eyelids closed listening to the silence. I had not been drinking since my arrival in Canción. I slept most nights on the beach but also on the top floor of the hotel. I fell asleep to the most beautiful sky of stars and woke each morning to the most beautiful suns. Suns that were to be for American movie stars that would eat in the restaurant and lie by the pool and have their pictures taken to be sent back to the travel agencies to catch the attention of fishermen and tourists.