The Dog Fighter Read online

  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.

  For 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.

  In 1945 during World War II in the north of California I worked in the Bracero Program as a laborer. For an entire year in the farm town of Burnridge I worked on a prune farm. In this small town I encountered the first woman I was with without having to give her money. This woman was the wife of a Mexican I worked for who also labored for the Americans but spoke English. Her name was Perla. I did not care for the husband but I believed then that I cared very much for his wife and so much that I would do anything for her. She worked as a waitress in a café for Mexicans. After work and late into the night I drank coffee instead of beer or whiskey just to watch her wipe counters with steaming white cloths. Her hands dry from washing dishes. Her fingers long and delicate. The other waitresses giggled behind the counter and smiled over their shoulders at me. Once one of the other waitresses came to take my order but Perla hissed at this girl and then came to stand before me smiling as if nothing had passed between them. I spoke to no one but her. And then it was only.

  Café por favor.

  Nada más?

  Por favor.

  Late one night on my way to the café I stopped to comb my hair in the reflection of a front window of a hardware store. In the light of a streetlamp the windows of the other two story buildings and the redwood trees of the plaza were tall and dark in the window in front of me. The lights of the signs for the pharmacy and a clothing store dark around the plaza. A glowing white gazebo. Inside the hardware store a lamp shut off at the back. Then a young man came toward the front fixing his tie. He looked up to check himself in the reflection of the same window I was before but on the inside and there he found my eyes staring back at his. My hands making neat his blond hair. His hands at my neck. I startled him but then he smiled. We were two men preparing themselves to meet their women. At this time of my life I was working and earning money and I was taken with a woman. I thought little of Mexico and nothing of my father. If I spoke I chose not to speak in my grandfathers whisper. But still when this young blond man on his way to see his woman locked the door behind him he checked it twice. Then he nodded good night but said nothing. He did not look me in the eyes. Even as we had mistaken one for the other as the same. Both of us making ourselves handsome for the ones we wanted to impress. Later after walking Perla to her home I returned to that hardware store and threw a brick through the window. I have always enjoyed the sound of shattering glass.

  It was some time before I was able to bring myself to speak to Perla about more than coffee. But when I finally did I made up stories about my family. My life. I told her things I had heard the men I worked with say to each other. I told her so much that was not true that when I told her my mother was dead this also felt like a lie.

  At night after her work her husband did not come to walk her home to where they lived with many other Mexicans at a bend in the river to the east of the town. So I did. Perla and I walked slow and when I first kissed her we were below a railroad trestle. The light of the moon on the water and steel trusses. Some weeks later when I took her in my arms for the first time she kept her eyes closed from me. But I did not think this was important then.

  She had led me to their small building. Her husband was gone north for the apples in Washington. We went in through the back and only after she believed everyone was sleeping. In the hallway with one light Perla searched for her keys in her purse and then placed her finger to her mouth and smile
d. In the bed she shared with her husband she traced her fingers along my back as I lay with my face in her pillow awake but dreaming. She made jokes about how I did not fit into the bed. Later she spoke of how he hit her. Of putting makeup on her bruises. How smart he was never to hit her in the face. Of the other women he told her he loved more.

  I do not love him. Perla said to me after we were together again that night.

  This wife who in the sweet perfume of her bed one afternoon was to beg me to kill her husband. Pictures of them framed looking down on us from the walls. My eyes closed growing angry when I imagined him hitting her. Making love.

  I want to be with no one but you. She said. Do you not believe me?

  When her husband returned a month later Perla and I met down the Russian River on the bank of a creek that let into it. She washed his clothes and mine and while they hung from limbs or spread out to dry over bushes we were together on a quilt she laid over the sandy bank beneath some willow trees. Her husband playing cards somewhere or drinking someplace she said. A large bruise on her thigh she did not want me to see. The purple of the prunes we had picked in August and September. Yellow at the edges. Perla tilted her neck so that her face was to the sky. The clouds passing in the dark of her eyes she had opened now but not to look at me.

  Why do you never look much at me? I asked her then. I kissed her ears so that she shivered. Soap bubbles reflecting clouds floated on the surface of the creek water emptying into the river.

  I cannot think of anything but how much I hate still being with him even when I am with you. She told me.

  You are still with him? I asked.

  He forces himself on me.

  Then we will leave. I said.

  He will follow.

  I am not afraid of your husband. I told her honestly.

  I cannot be with you as long as he is alive.

  Now you are.

  But that is different. I am not as happy as I can be. Imagine how I will be able to look at you in the eyes and smile when he is gone.

  I needed nothing more than to hear this from her.

  Several nights later the bar for Mexicans in Burnridge was musky with the stink of workingmen who did not often wash. I had drunk there many times before I found Perla in the diner wiping down the tables. The music was loud and filled with cries in Spanish. I spoke to no one and the men in the bar pretended to ignore me. It was a game we played. This was sometime after midnight. When I knew that it was its most busy. The hands of the men in the bar cut and hard. Old mens faces gnarled as prunes after drying. Workingmen great distances from their families. Drinking.

  At the back of this room the husband sat playing cards. I ordered a whiskey and after drinking it I took the small glass with me. Earlier in the evening I had waited under the railroad trestle by myself drinking whiskey and feeling how it was to be in the muscles of my forearm that night. In my hands. Close to the side of my leg I undid the switchblade of my knife. The husband smiling over his cards at the other men when I approached. Then the men at the table and many of those in the bar turned to the sound of shattering glass in the corner. I sank the knife into the husbands chest. When they turned to see him dead they leaped back as if the table were with flames. The husband remained sitting looking down at the handle. After the glass shattered only the husband and I heard the sound of the knife enter his chest. Warm blood came over the blade when I twisted the handle and soaked his shirt. He smelled of Perlas perfume. With his eyes looking into mine wondering who I was doing this I bent over and spit at his feet and whispered the last words he heard. Whispered them in my grandfathers hiss.

  Tonight your wifes eyes are mine alone.

  Cigarettes and spilled glasses covered the table the husband sat before dead. His fingers rested delicately like a womans on the handle of the knife. The other dangled at his side. His eyes had gone black as oil I had seen used to harden sand roads in the desert of Coahuila. I left excited. My hands shaking some I buried them in my pockets. The men in the bar stumbled into falling chairs and loud voices. Each others arms. The music continued to play and smoke escaped at the top of the door into the night. Outside two men shoved one another in the street. Another laughing on the ground drunk.

  I spent that night along the creek under the willow tree where Perla and I had met in secret and planned her husbands death. Without a fire in the cold I slept little. I thought much of the husband dying in my hands. I said the words I had whispered to him over and over in my head like I had done before killing him. Then I whispered them aloud into the damp branch shadows moving closer to me soft in the wind. I began to think of what I was to say to my father now that I knew I could kill not only beasts but men.

  For several days and nights I stayed by this creek. I ate around the mold of bread and kept cheese under a moss covered rock where I knew it stayed cool. I drank water from the creek and slept near fallen logs decaying with the sweet smell of insects and nesting mice. Perla and I had planned it in this way. But when I returned to the building by the bend in the river where she lived with her husband she was gone. I broke a window to get in and once in her bedroom I punched holes in the empty walls where the picture frames once hung. My hands bloody from breaking the window. When a neighbor came to her apartment I beat him until he did nothing more than groan lying on the floor. That night I went looking for the ghost of her husband. Yelling his name down brick alleyways and into the dark of windows that held my reflection.

  One of the sheriffs deputies of Burnridge that arrested me was a short but strong young man with a blond mustache and serious blue eyes. I fought five deputies before he hit me in the back of the head with his revolver when I was not looking. He leaned against the bars of my cell picking at his teeth with the end of a key. I sat on the floor and held the knot in my head but I smiled at him and then he smiled back. His teeth straight and white and the most perfect in my memory.

  I bet that smile will be the end of many men. He spit on the concrete floor at my feet. And then I bet it will be the end of you.

  Because the man I killed was another Mexican the case was not looked into. For breaking into the empty apartment I forfeited the money I had and was only deported. On the train returning to Mexico I rubbed the palm of my hand with my thumb remembering how sweaty my hand slipped down the handle of the knife. I was surprised how easily the blade had entered the husbands chest. For three years I had spoken only a handful of words and most had been wasted on Perla. But in that time work turned a young mans body into a more terrible strength.

  At the age of nineteen I returned to Veracruz. In Tijuana I bought a bus ticket and in the noise of the engines I said over and over in my mind.

  You are a weak man. My voice once again that of my grandfathers whisper. Your wife and child died in your hands. And now you will die in mine.

  Feeling the words deep in the muscles of my forearm to remind myself how easily a knife can end another mans life.

  On the morning of the third day I found him. He wore tattered clothes and held a mud stained book tied with a leather strap close to his chest. For the entire day I followed him. Watched him argue with street vendors. A knife sharpener. Old religious women. Himself. His glasses were gone and he spent much of the day muttering or yelling and laughing and pointing at walls. The sky. He wore no shoes. At one time several boys less than half his size took the book from him and kept it. His words were not words when he yelled now but only yelling. They laughed wild and whistling. Swinging the book like some weapon above their heads. I chose to do nothing. They left him crying.

  By night I followed him to where he was searching for food. He smelled of urine and the cuffs of his shirt were stained from digging through trash heaps. The flesh of his face ruddy like that of a workingman and not a doctor. I opened the blade of my new switchblade knife alongside my leg and he turned at the sound.

  Anything. He begged.

  But I gave him nothing. Not even his own death. I wanted my father to fear me but he did n
ot recognize me when he turned with his scarred hands out in front of him. The burned out shadows of his eyes disappointed me. And there I left him for the last time.

  Two

  From Veracruz I traveled north to Guadalajara and then more north and to the west to the sunlit city of Topolobampo on the eastern edge of the Sea of Cortés. In this city I learned of the need for workingmen to cross the sea to the small city of Canción to construct a large hotel there. In a dim room in Topolobampo a man with a pockmarked face sat behind a writing desk swatting at flies and promising me hard work on the hotel but good pay also and the chance for more work on the hotels and roads that were to follow.

  First we need to fill the bones of this one. He spoke without looking in my eyes. Great things are happening in Baja. He said. You will tell your grandchildren one day that you were part of this.

  In beautiful Topolobampo the night before I chose to take the ferry to Canción I witnessed an American fight a shark in a tank of water. I walked alone but with families toward the lights of a circus tent at the north of the city. The whites of the eyes of the children tainted beneath strung lights painted different colors. The paint curling on the bulbs above long eyelashes. At the entrance to the tent an organ grinder with one arm stood tall and thin with no emotion on his face. He wore a tattered blue coat with shiny brass buttons down the front. The cuff of the one sleeve pinned flat to his chest. He kept the organ pressed tight against his body to be able to crank the arm into its tune. Only I was tall enough to look down into his eyes.

  Bienvenidos niños. He said flatly.

  Ahead a man sat behind black painted wood dowels confined to some cell. After giving him my money I had only enough left for the ferry to Canción for the next morning. It was a foolish decision but I had seen posters of this blond American and the shark on the walls of Topolobampo and felt a great desire to see the fighting for myself. Into a cloth hallway I passed with the children and their parents. Framed paintings hanging from woven gold cord. The wood frames lightened by the sun carried on the backs of wagons traveling throughout Mexico. There was one of a blindfolded knife thrower. A man bound in chains underwater. The American with a knife clenched in his teeth. I stayed to the shadows at the back of the tent while the others found their seats. All of us excited by what was to come.