Harriet Doerr (13 page)

“No one will harm this house,” she said, without explaining that in medieval times, though warlords and traitors and the king of hell himself besieged a citadel, it still held fast when a man known to be beyond reproach stood sentry at the gate.

The sun is scarcely up and coral still streaks the sky over El Nopal when three top-heavy carnival trucks lurch into the village square. They come to a stop outside the
cantina,
which is not yet open for business. Directly across the plaza, the sexton is standing on the church steps with a broom.

Now here come a boy and girl, running, but not to early mass. They want to watch the roustabouts unload the carnival. Before the day is over, they will ride the carousel, or so they believe.

These barefoot children are Paco Ortiz and Gloria Valdés, cousins and lifelong friends. Paco is eight and looks too thin and too old for his age. There is an anxious line between his eyes. Gloria is taller, three years older, and has a dancer’s grace and a dancer’s flower stem neck, as well as the beginning of full lips and breasts. She is Paco’s mother, sister, and unrecognized bride.

Paco’s dog, a mongrel bitch, runs after him. Though she is fully grown, she appears to be half-size, her coat matted on her low frame and tangled in a fringe over her glistening eyes. When she was small, Paco named her La Loba, after the female wolf he believed she would eventually resemble.

In the village, the children and the animal are referred to as “the three.” “The three are in the arroyo,” people say, or “The three are at the well.”

Now they wait for the carnival men to set up the rides. The children sit quietly on a bench, while La Loba tracks the gutter right and left in her perpetual search for food. She makes sudden forays on short, shaggy legs to a blackened banana skin or to a scattered heap of corn husks.

More than an hour has passed, and the carousel horses are still roped in the vans, when a long shadow falls across the children from behind. It is Máximo Ortiz, who lays his good hand on his niece’s shoulder and his maimed hand on the shoulder of his son. Both turn their heads to look up at him. They see that he is sober. Máximo is known to be the strongest man in El Nopal. Unless he is drunk, he can outreach, outhit, and outrun any man in the village. But since his bad luck, he is not always sober. No sooner did his wife die, bearing the scars he had inflicted to her grave, than an accident at the limestone quarry where he worked tore off two fingers and the thumb of his right hand.

Now, to remove this hand from his shoulder, Paco stands. “There are the horses. Come on,” he says to Gloria, and he practices a whistle he has just learned to summon La Loba.

Máximo watches them approach the trucks, watches La Loba following them, and thinks: I should have killed her two years ago with the rest of the litter. And remembering the annoyances that have plagued his life, along with the great injustices, he allows rage to possess him, lets it burn hot and blind and pure, until at last he strikes the back of the bench and bloodies his good hand.

Paco and Gloria, at the front of a small crowd that is gathering, see that two men have emerged from each cab, pulling away torn sheets of canvas and revealing to the spectators their toppling cargo. They bring four swan boats that will rise and dip not far above the ground, a Ferris wheel, and a carousel. The disassembled frame and the cars of the Ferris wheel fill one truck. In another, the imperial necks of swans are being separated from machinery. The third is apparently entirely filled with the prancing legs of horses. Somewhere among them a golden hoof flashes.

By ten o‘clock the crowd has filled the street, but the carnival men are in no hurry. Not a ticket can be sold until after a special twelve o’clock mass to honor the Virgin of Help, the patron saint of this town. To celebrate this mass, the bishop himself is coming from the cathedral in the state capital, seventy-five miles away. And by the time he arrives in his black Buick, which will be dusty from traveling roads not always good, the three palsied motors that operate the rides will already have been set up in the street across from the café and poolroom. Spliced cables will extend out of sight to power lines.

Máximo is not among the spectators. He is on a bench in the middle of the plaza, nursing his throbbing hand. He sees Gloria leave the crowd and start across the square in the direction of her house, where she has left her mother to do all the work alone. She starts to run.

“Stop,” says her uncle. “Sit.”

She hesitates. He takes her arm and pulls her down beside him. He does not release her hand, which is the color of copper, but holds it on his lap.

“How old are you now?” he says, and she says, “Eleven.”

People are passing on their way to find good seats in church. They nod good morning.

“I have to go,” says Gloria, and Máximo presses her hand before slowly releasing it.

During the next half hour he first watches the arrival of the bishop, then investigates to see if, by chance, the cantina has opened early. He sees Paco standing so close to the carnival trucks that a roustabout has to tell him to stand back. La Loba is at the boy’s feet.

Máximo is back on a bench at twelve o’clock when his sister, Catalina, with Gloria combed and sandaled behind her, hurries past him. For an hour music and prayer and the bishop’s voice raised in sermon overflow from the nave of the church into the square, empty now except for Máximo and a few beggars. But by the time mass is over and Catalina and Gloria emerge from the church, Paco is sitting at his father’s side, and Máximo holds a large Pepsi in each hand.

He lifts the bottles. “Refreshments for the children,” he says.

Catalina, a widow who takes in boarders, examines her brother and sees he has a bloodshot eye, a three-day beard, and a bruise on his lip. She notices his freshly scraped hand and says to herself, Another fight.

Aloud she says, “For a man who lost his wife and his job in one year, you are generous,” adding, “and the corn, ripe for the harvest, rotted in last summer’s rain.”

Máximo holds up his two-fingered hand. “Until a month ago, I was paid for disability.”

As she turns away, Catalina says, “You have recovered enough to take light jobs, but instead you loiter all day in the square, a place for children to amuse themselves.”

When she is out of sight, Gloria and Paco sit, one on each side of Máximo, and drink their Pepsis without a word. Máximo’s left hand lies on the back of the bench behind his son, and his two-fingered right hand rests on his niece’s slender thigh. Gloria is one of God’s loveliest creations and still incomplete. Her skin is still a child’s, her bones have still to grow. Máximo’s hand has discovered that.

When the bottles are empty, Paco is sent to return them to the grocer. But three minutes later he is back. “Come on,” he says to Gloria. “They have unloaded the horses. I think there is one that is gold.”

Máximo has not removed his hand from Gloria’s leg. He is staring at the two dark braids that have fallen forward on her pink sweater. He sees that his niece has been growing so fast that three pearl buttons have been pulled off. Gloria is looking up at him.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Choose the horse you will ride tonight.” He watches her move with head high through the crowd. She is barefoot again.

It is already two in the afternoon, and the horses still lie on their sides on the floor of the carousel. Even in this position they are rearing, plunging, and opening their blood-red mouths to bare the bit between their fierce ivory teeth.

“Here it is,” says Paco.

He is looking at a charger as black as night, its mane whipped back by a savage gale, its bulging eyes fixed on glory. Its reins and saddle are gem-studded, and its four golden hoofs strike hard at the air. Now the men who are setting the horses in place pierce each one with a golden pole.

Gloria and Paco turn as Máximo comes up behind them. “Later on, I will buy you each a ride,” he says.

Gloria is leaning back against a folded ladder. Her half-unbuttoned sweater gapes between young breasts that are still no more than promises.

“Your mother wants you,” the uncle tells his niece at last. “There are clothes to wash.” Then he calls her back as she starts away. “But meet me here at five o’clock. For your ride.”

At the same time, Paco leaves the plaza to engage in business. He will spend the afternoon searching El Nopal for empty bottles and, later on, collect from the grocer the refunds due. In this way he can pay for a ticket or two on the carnival rides. Even if his father remembers the ticket he promised, Paco already knows that one will not be enough.

So until dusk, Paco, dragging a sack and tagged by La Loba, walks the stony streets of the town as if he were a stranger here, with his head down, looking from left to right, moving from dusty lane to dusty lane and circling back again. Three times he rounds the post office and three times the house of the widow Ortega, who sells goat’s milk. He hunts bottles as far as the thatched lean-to of old Josefina, who performs cures, and as far as the baseball field. La Loba is at his heels.

Paco is about to return to the plaza with eighteen bottles for refunds, when La Loba suddenly yelps in pain. But it is more than a yelp. It is a sustained howl, carried on a single high note that paralyzes time and makes the air too cold to breathe. Paco turns to see his father looming tall behind him. Máximo holds a second stone in his good hand. La Loba, dragging one of her hind legs, has crawled to the protection of the thorned mesquite bush. Her moans diminish.

“Your dog was after that hen,” Máximo says, and points to a stringy pullet, cackling and running in maddened zigzags from one side of the road to the other. “I can’t afford to pay the owner for a dead chicken.” Now he notices Paco’s sack. “But perhaps you can.” He counts the bottles.

He fingers the stone in his hand, then tosses it away, allowing it to fall short of La Loba. He feels regret for the second time that day.

“She should have died with the rest of the litter,” he says.

Paco remembers the occasion well. This litter, of which La Loba is the sole survivor, perished at Máximo’s hand two years before. Paco was six then, and his mother, a frail, fearful woman, was still alive. She lived in grief, orphaned as she was by the deaths of the three children who had followed Paco. On the day of the killing, Paco, as soon as he perceived his father’s intentions, had run to his mother for help. She neither looked at him nor moved from where she sat on the edge of the bed, her elbows on her knees, her thin fingers pressed to her eyes, rocking back and forth, as if the rocking itself might serve for something. As if it, more than tears, might speak for her.

So Paco by himself attempted to stay his father’s arm as Máximo carried the five young animals into the corner of the corral. Here he took them, one after another, by their hind legs, which had bones no bigger than a quail’s, swung them high, and brought their heads down sharp and hard against the wall.

Paco watched the blood splatter and screamed so loud that old Walterio, who lived next door and was eighty-seven, put his head over the wall, regarded the scene, and said, “Wait.”

Four of the litter already lay dead in the dirt, and the fifth was shivering and dripping in Máximo’s hand, when old Walterio said, “Stop. What is the matter with him?” And he pointed to Paco, who clung with such determination to his father’s arm that he was lifted, still weeping, off his feet and into the air.

Receiving no answer, Walterio exercised the authority of his years and said to Máximo, “Give that animal to the child, and let us put an end to the disturbance.”

Máximo, reflecting that Walterio was his mother’s cousin and that the dog might develop a nose for game and be of some use, shrugged and handed La Loba to Paco.

Then Walterio said, “Peace is God’s gift to the aged. Remember that,” and disappeared.

Now, on the saint’s day of El Nopal, with the church bells about to ring for vespers and La Loba fully grown, Paco decides to stop at old Walterio’s house to show him the dog.

Old Walterio has forgotten everything. “Whose animal is that?” he says, and to Paco, “What’s your name?”

When Paco explains, “I am the son of Máximo,” all old Walterio says is, “Who?”

At this same time Máximo is calling at his sister’s house. They talk in the doorway. Over Catalina’s shoulder, Máximo can see Gloria, in her open pink sweater, ironing the boarders’ shirts.

“Come outside,” Máximo tells his sister. Catalina already knows that he is going to ask for money, and that she will give him some, even if he intends to cheat her, even if he lies. Even if, so early in the evening, he smells of
mescal.

Máximo is stringing together his fictions.

“A friend of mine is here today,” he says, and speaks a name. “He is offering me work on a ranch he owns, fifty kilometers to the south.” And Catalina regards him silently, watching him invent.