The Dog Fighter (14 page)

I knew very little of the dentist then. We had spoken only a handful of times and never about more than the weather or of what I was cooking in the kitchen. Once he had asked me in passing to help him trim a stray bougainvillea vine that was out of his reach. For all of the attention the dentist craved when the window was open to the street for all to see him work I knew that he was a very private man. Sitting at the windowsill I watched him and the shadowy figure disappear into the back room where they could be alone.

This behavior disgusted me. The calm of the compound had been broken.

 

I
n Canción sand collects against the bottoms of unused doors blown each evening by the heavy winds. The buildings are colorful but dusty low along the walls and only when the rains come is the mierda of burros and dogs in the gutters and depressions dissolved some. In tiny squares throughout the city goats stand tied with rope to limbs of date trees while chickens peck at the ground for seeds that are not there. In the outskirts of the city children play in oil drums. Laughing and squealing. Walking each day I felt very much a part of the city. I believe now that lonely young men in love do much walking.

A young man with thoughts needs no other company. The poet once said to me.

At this time my mind was very open to the poet. I practiced copying out his poems in my room or at his stall. In the corners of my mind swimming in the bay I pronounced the sweet words over and over. In the streets where people noticed and would have pointed laughing if not for my size. I was fascinated as a boy with how my father had shaped these same words with his own mouth but differently. His clean fingers around my jaw. Once he held my tongue and I bit him.

Never hit a man in the head when you have your hand in his mouth. He said playfully. His riddling words between us a fathers game.

At night the black water is still warm from the sun of the day but cool where I kicked down beneath the surface. I tried not to think of my father much though. More and more often I followed my thoughts like waking dreams to those of my mother lying dead. The heart of the deep bloodstain next to her black. Exhausted.

During the days I swam with the ragged groups of boys in their canoes made of cordón logs. Racing them over the ribboned water. The waves slapped against the hulls regular as laughter. Treading water among them to work on the strength of my legs I kept the time by telling my own stories.

In Northern California there are trees packed into fields until the limbs grow into one another they are planted so close. And the grass around these trees is lush as this bay but a deep green beneath the charcoal colored limbs. When spring comes the orchards are filled with blossoms. But winter lingers some and a cold wind knocks the early petals from the trees. They fall like snowflakes.

Snowflakes? One boy asked another.

Snow.

What are the girls like there? One boy asked.

Nothing but trouble. I smiled. Now race me back to the beach. See if you can keep up this time.

I had listened to the stories of my grandfather carelessly. Greed and anger were his truths.

They have been for all time. He had whispered.

But they did not have to be mine.

Long iron harpoons lay at the bottom of the boys canoes. They carried them like walking sticks into the city with twine or thin rope tied to the ends. The barbed ends sharpened and made with a cord to open inside the fish once it had pierced the skin and the fish went to escape. The boys jumped from the steep rocks at the mouth of the bay. Turning and twisting in the air to show off yelling before the ferry and fishing boats.

One afternoon I sat on the docks with them watching as two boys stole the skiff of a drunk fisherman while he slept. The skiff weighed down some by an engine that leaked gasoline into the bay. They ran the skiff in tight circles churning water behind them. Steering back into it. They chased their friends in the canoes chasing them to get on the skiff. An endless game. On the dock some of us sat laughing while the drunk went from fisherman to fisherman and even the women repairing the nets pleading with them for help. When the skiff finally ran out of gas at the middle of the bay the boys left it floating. They disappeared among the others. All their smiles the same.

Canción is a poem. The old poet liked to say when things like this happened. We like to think we are hidden and unique to the world.

I sat with the poet in the market but some days I also went to chase the children and buy them brown sugar cakes. Panocha. The women argued in hard voices over vegetables with other women. Women sent to the market by other women. Some of the stalls displayed colorful bonito and other skinny mackerel lying over beds of dirty ice. Men sank scarred hands in tanks of salt water after fast pink crabs that changed color when you took them struggling for air from the water. Sea turtle shells gutted and scraped clean with shiny dull blades hung to dry. The faces and legs of the men who sold carbon for fires were sooty and black. The fingers of the basket weavers old but nimble and quick weaving coarse reeds. The children hid behind all this or one another holding their laughter as I stalked them through the aisles growling like some horrible monster with one eye closed and my hands searching the air for tiny arms and smiling lips glistening with sugar. When I caught the children I lifted them above my head or swung them above the ground close to my chest. They loved being caught. The market was a maze I came to know very well.

When I visited the hotel after the workingmen had gone for the day the heat was nothing more than a pleasant breeze for the guards to smoke their cigarettes in while the sun went down. I climbed to the top floor where work on another story had begun since the scaffolding had been rebuilt. Below mangy dogs followed refuse carts pulled by burros leaving the plaza mayor. In the small squares throughout the city hunchbacked women gathered their wares after leaning daylong over creaking looms. The warehouse of the abandoned mine a glint of silver in the distance. A building covering a hand dug shaft that drove toward the center of the earth. The mountains dry red. At twilight gold. The metal of the tractors working on the road glimmered like glass on a beach. From the top floor of the hotel I watched the canoe boys throw their harpoons at black cormorants from the raised malecón now that the tide was high. Somewhere she was reading a book by some window. Napping on a couch with her fine dark hair splayed over some pillow. I enjoyed the view the hotel allowed me. The comfort it afforded. It was as if it was from the overlook above the mine but more because it was closer to the city. A part of it. I wanted for the poet to share in all of this. To be able to see what the hotel allowed for all his talk of not wanting it in Canción. I wanted Cantana to build the hotel if only to allow the poet to see Canción the way the workingmen saw it within it. But the poet never thought of it in this way.

It is easier to see things from a distance. He had said to me.

Think of the man who has lived here his entire life. The poet said sitting at his stall in the market cleaning sand from the oiled underside of one of his typewriters. Think of the woman who wakes up each day with the sun over the bay coming through her windows. Reflecting in the mirror she puts her hair up in. Wait until this hotel is finished. The poet said to me. When the money comes to build taller ones there will be no view for this woman. Less light for her mirror. This man will see only the back of these monsters where the tourists wake up with his view. They pay for it. Yes. But we pay more. This hotel is only the beginning. He said to me. After this we will be even more lost to this world. We will be servants to it.

Many times I did not know what to feel for Canción. But for the canoe boys and the children of the women in the market I cared very much. I never spoke to them in my grandfathers hiss. I never told the stories he buried in me. Instead for them I bought great bags of hard candy. Honey drops and sugar cubes. I bought metal toy cars for the boys and paper dolls for the girls. For the poet I bought expensive cigarillos like the ones Cantana smoked.

A dog fighter who plays Santa Claus. He laughed at me.

In the market the children came to me snarling like dogs with snot dripping from their noses into their smiles. I held my giant fists before them and they ran shrieking with laughter. The meat hung in the aisles of the market touching the ground where the women threw their dirty water at night. The smell heavy with cilantro and smoke from a beautiful young woman who stood over a grill serving food to men who sat at her counter. The air thick with limón and dirty water where the children and I played for hours. And in their laughter I heard echoes of my ferry journey to Canción. Of the laughs the toothless man with the scorpion gave them and the delight he felt. I enjoyed this attention.

There is little in this world better than the attention of children. The poet told me once. It is a simple and generous thing.

The children ran from me with candy spilling from their pockets and sticky hands. Stopping only when their mothers caught them by their arms and held them squirming. When playing with the children in the market I did not feel so alone. I thought nothing of myself.

One evening some weeks after Christmas during a game of hide and seek an American and his wife wandered down the aisles of the mercado. Tourists at this time were not rare in Canción but they were not many either. In their limited Spanish the Americans asked one of the old women for a photograph with the children. The old woman would not touch the camera. The poet approached the Americans in a humble voice pretending that the English he spoke was not much. He called to the small pickpocket who had stolen my money and stood him next to the man. I watched from the poets stall as he gathered other children around the Americans and their white smiles. Then the poet stood back with the camera and winked. The wife told the American to give the poet some pesos for this help but the poet refused.

Bienvenidos a Canción. He smiled his terrible smile. The wife shuddered when she noticed his teeth.

After the Americans were gone the small pickpocket came to the poet with the wallet of the American. That afternoon the children all had candy and the poet drank cold beer and grilled steak with grilled onions from the young womans counter.

To small victories. The poet raised his bottle of beer.

The small pickpocket and I had made friends soon after I became friends with the poet. This boy was very brave. Never afraid of me. One day as a present I gave him my switchblade. I told him not to tell the other children.

Only with you do I share this secret. I said.

He held it in both hands watching the light gleam off the blade when it flicked open immediately.

But when the American returned looking for his wallet I was teaching the small pickpocket where to place his thumb when he made a fist and where are the best places to punch a man in the neck so not to break a bone in the hand or hurt the wrist when hitting the face. The small pickpocket practiced into my hands before him.

You have stolen from me! The American yelled slowly at the poet who only shrugged and said.

Yo no comprendo inglés.

The women and I laughed. I kept the small pickpocket next to me. But when the American cursed at the poet pointing his finger near to the chest of my friend I stood and the American was quiet then and left looking behind to see if I followed.

Often after the poet closed his stall in the evenings he asked me to play billiards with him and his old friends he called them.

What do you do with yourself all night dog fighter so that you are too busy to come and meet some old friends of mine who I tell so much about you?

I copy your poems. I said. I walk.

I think. He smiled and stepped closer. You have a woman that you are not telling me about.

No. I blushed.

The old poet put his hand on my shoulder.

You can lie to yourself my friend but you cannot lie to me.

Still I wandered the streets of Canción looking for signs of her. Memorizing the buildings of the streets. Admiring their design. Naming the doors and windows and roofs and pots in English quietly to myself. The words my fathers voice in my head.

In January my twentieth birthday passed without my telling anyone but her. On this night after being together with her in the water I went home and dreamed of Cantana. He stood at the foot of my bed as a fat little boy smoking with his sunglasses on. Toying with the knife he had used to take the eyes of the man from the market. In our bed I turned to her sleeping next to me as he watched. Only when she awoke and put her lips to my eyelids did the businessman disappear.

 

I
lay one night late listening to the sounds of the city beyond my window. To a cart rolling over stones. Two men discussing war. The smell of the garden pleasantly woven into a cool breeze that came over me. I had finished earlier in the night copying out a new poem the dentist had given me. I was reciting the words in a whisper when a loud knocking came on the door. I leaped from the bed to the window in time to see the dentist hurry across the courtyard. Almost tripping in the worn slippers he only walked slowly in. I dressed quickly. The violence of the knocking made me realize that it was for me. Hurrying down the stairwell I heard muffled yells coming from the entrance to the compound. My hands clenched into fists. My eyelids pulled back. I awoke then and lowered my head into my neck to ready myself for a fight.