TZOQUITO
Dogs Descend on Chiapas
Dominic Ambrose
published by Ferrandina Press
New York
at Smashwords
Copyright © 2012 Dominic Ambrose
All rights reserved.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to all of my friends who have given me help and suggestions about this book. I appreciate all of your encouragement. Morphix, Pedro and Lynn in Paris and Fran Gendlin in Mexico, for your suggestions and technical help; Geri Powder and Toni Ambrose in New Jersey for your encouragement. I especially want to thank all of my good friends in the Bayville, NJ, Mexican American community whose journey inspired me to write this book.
Tzoquito
Dogs Descend on Chiapas
with illustrations by Carlo Benalis
ABOUT TZOQUITO AND SHAPE SHIFTERS
~~~~~
~~~~~
Tzoquito ran down the hill on his strong but unfamiliar legs and rested up against a fat tree. He looked around its trunk. The farm was very close now and he could watch the old man at his morning chores. He had seen this man before. Tzoquito had come down this way in the past, but only at night and only on agile forest legs, as he prowled to the edges of town. On those occasions he had caught mere glimpses of this farmer but that had been enough to let him see that the old man was a gentle creature of the earth. Every thing he did, there in his yard, every one of his movements, looked careful and good. Maybe Tzoquito could ask him for help.
Tzoquito wanted to approach the farmyard unnoticed. He wanted to get closer and introduce himself formally, at close range, though he hadn’t quite worked out all the details. Unfortunately, his body wouldn’t cooperate - he was not yet used to the big human form that he now possessed, the long dangling arms and the jogging legs and he was too excited to obey caution, so no matter how much he tried to run silently, as he had always been able to do unthinkingly on his soft padded paws, now he made a great thrashing sound through the weeds and tall grass. He himself was too excited to notice but the farmer wasn’t.
Don José heard the rustling in the weeds clearly and he turned around to see what the commotion was. The old man saw Tzoquito, this scrawny young man with wild hair, naked to the sun. He saw as he ran hunched up behind the wooden fence and then when the fence ran out, he saw as he dashed behind a bush, then from bush to bush until he got behind the chicken shed.
“Hey! Stop!” said Don José.
Now that the old man was actually speaking to him, Tzoquito lost his nerve. What would he say? He continued to run, in spite of the Spanish talk that the old man was shouting to him. He got to the far end of the shed and stopped for a moment, looking for escape.
“Hey, you! Come here!” Don José went on in Spanish.
Don José hurried to get a closer look, as Tzoquito tried unsuccessfully to hide behind a barrel. Then Don José fixed him with his stare and Tzoquito was trapped, not by any physical tie or rope, but by the penetrating gaze of that old man. So he stayed there crouching, naked, in full view between the barrel and a low wall of boxes stacked against the side of the shed, looking back as one human to another.
Don José approached cautiously.
“Eeeeeh. ¿Quién eres?” Don Jose asked who he was.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” Tzoquito answered fearfully in his own Mexican tongue.
“¿Qué? ¿No hablas español?”
But Tzoquito just stared back at the foreign words.
“¿Còmo te llamas?”
Tzoquito stared at him some more. Don José switched to their common language, the ancient language of this land.
“What’s your name?”
“Tzoquito.”
“Where are you from?”
Tzoquito nodded jerking toward the mountain.
“From around here.”
“Really? From around here and you don’t even speak one word of Spanish?”
Tzoquito shrugged oddly.
“You must be from the hills.”
“Yes.”
Don José stepped closer, observing Tzoquito’s every nervous little move. “Way up in the hills.”
Tzoquito stayed put. He was nervous but calming down a bit now that they were speaking Mexican and now that he was finally beginning to say who he was.
“Yes. From the hills.”
Don Jose was crouching very low, so as not to tower over him. Now at eye level, he spoke more softly, a kindled fire of interest and compassion coloring his words. “I can see that. One of those hill people from the forest.” He was down on all fours now and crawling closer still.
Tzoquito said nothing, looking away and back again. No words were necessary. The old man seemed to know a lot even before he asked. Let him know, rather than ask, Tzoquito thought, for Tzoquito didn’t have the words to tell him. No, the shame of his otherliness would be too difficult to admit in words.
“Tzoquito,” the old man said and Tzoquito heard his name on a human tongue. “I have never heard that name before.”
Don José gave a little knowing laugh and Tzoquito smiled at this kind old man sitting on the earth before him.
“You need some clothes. Stand up, let me see how tall you are.”
“Okay,” Tzoquito answered, deciding to trust this man. But when the old man got up efficiently to his feet, Tzoquito still didn’t move. There were suddenly too many things to think, too many parts to set in motion.
“Come on, stand up! It’s alright, Tzoquito. Can’t you stand up?”
“Yes, of course I can!” Tzoquito answered proudly, though he was not at all sure that this was true. He held onto the rim of the barrel and got up on his feet, bent forward in an uncomfortable way, like a four legged creature on his hind legs. Don José came up close.
“Here, let me help you,” Don Jose said kindly. He took hold of Tzoquito’s hand. One human hand nestled inside of another, Tzoquito noted with exquisite wonder. Now his hand was trembling like a pup’s paw and he couldn’t stop it. Don José was careful not to crowd this wonderful creature, but when he spoke it was as though his mouth were very close to Tzoquito’s ear and he whispered in the thinnest of voices, almost not a voice at all.
“Don’t worry, Tzoquito. I know who you are.”
Tzoquito looked in his eyes as Don Jose continued in this tranquilizing tone.
“I have lived a long time. I’ve met your kind before. We are all brothers here.”
Tzoquito came to life at these words. “Really? Are there others here?”
“Not anymore. A long, long time ago. It’s always the same. Young men like yourself. They always come looking for something: a pretty girl, fast talking words, they want to ride in a car, they want to sleep in a Spanish bed.”
Tzoquito smiled sheepishly. So he was not the first, after all.
“What do you want here, Tzoquito?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.
With his free hand, Don José gently pressed his palm into Tzoquito’s chest, to make him straighten up.
“There, slowly, slowly, up. Why did you come down from the forest, then?”
“I’m curious, that’s all. They call me Tzoquito the curious.”
He slowly raised himself to a fully erect position. Now he looked out at the horizon, marveling at the beauty of the earth, as seen from down here in the valley, practically sitting on the earth’s belly, practically nursing at its tit. Don José looked across the land along with him.
“Now you can go wherever you like. On two legs!”
Tzoquito looked down and his eyes widened. “The ground looks so far away!”
Don José laughed. “What, far away? It’s right there under your own two feet! Come on, come into the house, we will find some clothes for you and Abuelita will give you something to eat.”
Tzoquito began to walk, looking at the ground.
“No, not like that, Tzoquito. That’s how an animal walks, looking at the ground. A man walks with his head up. Looking straight ahead.”
Tzoquito looked at Don José and smiled. “A man,” he repeated in wonderment. Then he looked ahead at the farmhouse and slowly walked arm in arm with the old man. As they got close to the farmhouse door, Don José shouted out loud.
“Abuelita! Abuelita! Look who we have! Another little brother from the forest! After such a long time!”
Don José’s wife came to the door and let a big grin spread out on her face. She was “Abuelita,” grandma, because she had had seven or eight grandchildren running around this house in the past. But now, after everyone had gone, on to Mexico City or to Texas on the other side, she was thrilled to have someone to care for. It was not that she was bored or had nothing to do. Abuelita had daily chores to fill all of her time and more: caring for the chickens, growing vegetables and shelling and drying the coffee beans that Don José was harvesting throughout the dry season. But this was a welcome addition. She had given a lifetime of work to the earth and to this mountain forest and now in return, to have it entrust to her care an innocent young brother of the forest, that was something very special.
She took his free hand and ushered him into the house. This was a cool, unusual place where the sun had never shined and he was a bit afraid to enter.
“Come on, my son,” she said. “I’ll get you a blanket to wrap yourself in, to stop that shivering!”
He pulled the clinging manmade cloth around him and marveled at all the collected objects in the room. He watched as Abuelita fussed around fitting clothes to his height and preparing food. Don José took him back outside and showed him the farm. There were chickens and two pigs, rows of corn and vegetables and a whole patch of hillside where coffee plants grew in among the trees. The old farmer showed him the tools of the trade, all made of dense metal and dedicated to some one particular purpose. Then there were the baskets, the bins, the sheds, pumps and tubes; all made by men, all ingenious in their specificity.
They returned a while later to the house, where Abuelita served them soup and tortilla. He struggled to eat the soup, but found it deeply satisfying. He felt so comfortable here with these people, that he became very drowsy after that meal and began to nod his head, right there in that uncomfortable human chair.
“Come, I’ll set up a hammock for you on the porch,” Don José said.
Tzoquito liked the hammock, but would not sleep there, up in the air.
“I think I’ll just lay down out in the sun,” he said, as he wrapped himself more tightly in the blanket and stepped out into the road. There, in the middle of the driven down dirt, he lay down.
“No, Tzoquito, not there!” Don José said. “Never in the road and not under the sun, either!”
Tzoquito didn’t understand about the road, but he obeyed. As for the sun, he could tell that something was odd. “It’s strange, the sun is hurting my face,” he said with concern.
“Your skin is delicate now,” Don José explained. “You will have to get used to the sun little by little.”
Get used to the sun? Tzoquito wondered. The sun that he had known every day since the day he was born? But he followed Don José to the shade under a tree, thinking that perhaps the sun was a bit angry about all this and perhaps it was the sun that would have to get used to him. They sat down on the ground and Tzoquito curled up in his blanket and closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept much at all the previous night and the exhaustion of all this change was overwhelming him. Or perhaps it was more psychological, the need to close his eyes and withdraw from this great challenging world and return to the world behind his eyelids, his own personal world. He would dream and of course, since he had never been anything but a binquizac, a forest creature and knew nothing but the forest, in his dreams he would return to that world, to the home he had left behind.
Thus, with Don José’s protective hand laying softly on his shoulder, he surrendered to a deep, enveloping sleep. A sleep that brought him back through all the experiences that had lead him here, to this fateful day.
********
From a high rock, under the blazing sun, Tzoquito could see the whole valley of Cielitos. He contemplated it, with the chin of his hairy snout resting on the hard surface, his furry body curled up on the carved stone. There was Don José’s farm way, way down below, with the old farmer just a small dot. The rumbling little town lay beyond. Occasionally he could see movement there, cattle, carts, donkeys and metallic vehicles that would pop out from behind buildings and move about their inscrutable ways.
“Tzoquito!” he could hear his brother calling from the bushes behind him.
He ignored the call. He was Tzoquito, the curious and he was fascinated by the towns. And the stones, too, the ones that hid right here among them in the forest. He had seen so many of these stone carvings that littered the forest floor. What did they mean, these rock-hard faces? It seemed so strange to him that his brother could simply walk by these objects and never ask them what it was that they were trying to say, that he could forage in the bushes steps away from this vista and never sit spellbound by its mysteries.
Tzoquito was not the only curious one, of course. There were others among them and they would exchange stories about the towns or the great stone ruins that they had seen. Some claimed to have even spoken to these stones on the forest floor, or to have walked in those streets in the valley below. It was through this gossip that Tzoquito had heard of a great city not too far away, called San Cristóbal de las Casas. For a long time he had begged his father and his older brother to take him there. At last, when Tzoquito had reached his maturity, they agreed.
********
Tzoquito turned in his sleep and wondered if he must awaken and return to some duty or other. Then he felt the reassuring hand of Don José on his shoulder and dimly remembering where he was and who he now was, he decided against awakening. He was not ready and it was not necessary, better to return, even further back, to that wonderful city, where he had taken his first fateful steps. Thus, he fell further down again, back into sleep, back into the comfort of his past.
********
They had watched San Cristóbal from high on a ridge. Then at night, Tzoquito had snuck down alone to the city and entered the main square, the zócalo, a leafy park bordered by fine old buildings. He saw many things in the city: vehicles, stores, great flashing machines. But the most touching experience was when he talked to a group of young people while hidden in the park, among them a beautiful girl named Lupe. The success of this exchange inspired him. He could bridge this secular gap between jungle and the city, between the forest creatures and man. He could do it, he was now sure.
Then in the days that followed that visit, all along the way back to their native mountain, he looked down longingly at hamlets that they passed. On two or three occasions, fortified by the new courage and determination that he had found, he even went to the edge of the settlements near their campsites, but he dared not enter. Nevertheless, even from this distance, he saw marvelous things: lightboxes that spoke and showed pictures, toys of painted wood and string that children swung so skillfully. He had to see more!
By the time they had returned home to their mountain, Tzoquito’s thirst for knowledge had become obsessive. Instead of sleeping soundly at night, he spent the dark time sitting on a ridge contemplating the modern world of people. And in the daylight, instead of gathering food to store up or consume that evening, he spent all his days searching the forest floor for signs of the ancient world of knowledge. And so, on one warm afternoon, as he pursued his endless pastime, he found something that would change his life.
There, covered with mulch and clinging stems, was another of those puzzling ancient carvings. Tzoquito exposed a small area before his eyes with three scrapes of a paw. He admired the smooth stone face. He put his cheek to its cool cheek and rubbed his skin there dreaming. He licked the curves and grooves of the sculpture to taste its nourishment. He put his ear to its mouth to hear its words.
But it was silent.
"What have you found this time?"
As usual, his brother's warbling voice startled him...
Tzoquito always expected something entirely different to come from his lips.
"It's an Olmec figure. There must be a temple ruin here," he explained, though he knew these things meant nothing to him.
"Come, Tzoquito. Don't waste time on old things!"
His brother Tepiltzin trotted away on four legs and Tzoquito reluctantly followed.
"Those carvings are useless, Tzoquito. Why else would the many others discard them so?"
“The many others” was what they called the people in the valleys below.
“Come on, Tzoquito! You’re too slow!” And once again, as though to pass the time for the long walk back to camp, his brother started the same old lecture.
“Our wise ancestors predicted the devastation that the conquistadores would bring. When the many others could fight no more and resigned themselves to share the Earth with these alien people pledged to an alien king, our forefathers took us away to the forests. Here we have remained all these years, far away and free! But it has not been easy, Tzoquito. We have had to develop the cleverness and strength that only forest animals possess. We are binquizacs now. The people in the valleys have never understood this.”
“Why do they hate us for being binquizacs and why do they call us enchanted dogs, Tepiltzin?”
Naturally, his brother had a ready answer. “They say that we have used the powers of devils to transform ourselves. They have forgotten that neither devils nor gods have magical powers, that the old magic lives only in the memories of the people. Their new language, their new faiths have no words for these memories. They have no idea where magic comes from anymore, so they fear it blindly.”
"But with all this magic, do we live any better than our forefathers did?" Tzoquito asked his brother trotting ahead of him, speaking in a tone that betrayed his own skepticism.
"Why should we live better than our forefathers did?" Tepiltzin called back, his voice muffled in the fur of his foreleg.
"Then do we live worse?"
He stopped and turned. "Tzoquito, curious, we do not know how they lived and they do not know how we live. So no one is better and no one is worse. Stop lagging behind and let’s go! Papa wants to talk to you."
That was enough to silence the younger brother for a few paces and they trotted on.
Their father had taught them that the others were unfree, that the others lived cooped up in the valleys, bumping around each other in their carts, shouting to each other in words they didn’t understand. But Tzoquito thought that maybe he was wrong. Perhaps it was them in the shrouded forest that didn't understand, they who lived here banished and alone.
“We say we are free but I am not so sure,” Tzoquito said with a defiance that he would never dare repeat in front of his father. “We are confused and confusion is chains. It is as though we started on a journey and have spent so much time learning the ways of the road that we can no longer remember where we were going or what we planned to do there.”
But his words apparently hit deaf ears and Tepiltzin did not respond. So Tzoquito had to content himself with watching his brother's paws hit the ground in broken rhythms as he hurried along. Until Tepiltzin’s body folded as he turned to speak.
"Bad day we let you convince us to journey to San Cristóbal!" he grumbled with unusual bitterness. "There is nothing but trouble with Papa ever since."
Now that they were home from that visit, his father was angry and each day angrier and neither he nor his brother knew exactly why. His brother Tepiltzin was moving so quickly through the bushes that Tzoquito was getting dizzy from the pace. What was the great urgency? But when they reached camp and Tzoquito saw his father’s frowning face, he knew it would be serious. He began to wonder, could his father read what he was thinking?
"We are leaving tomorrow for the high hills," his father said solemnly.
"No, papa, no," Tzoquito pleaded immediately. "Let’s stay here a few more days." He looked down through the trees at the small, peaceful town in the valley below. "I love to look at the village in the dark, when they turn the lights on..."
"Just as you love to rise when we are asleep so you can go visit those forbidden places?" his father said through anger gnarled lips.
Tzoquito didn’t answer, just let his head sink lower, hoping to hide his thoughts. Yes, he did love. He loved to gaze at this town like no other town. Because this was Cielitos, the town lived by Lupe, the girl he had spoken to in the park in San Cristóbal. He could not go away. Then with his nose, Tzoquito grazed the smooth pebbles on the ground, the tiniest stones of his ancestors. Yes, even now they whispered to him. Though he still could not decipher their words, these words had a strong effect on him anyway. They gave him courage to speak.
“No, Papa, I can’t. I want to stay here.”
“This is my decision, Tzoquito. We leave tomorrow.”
Then Tzoquito said the words, the words that he could never take back again. The words that changed destiny. “Papa, I am eighteen years old. I have my own rights now, if I choose to take them!”
His brother stared at him in amazement. Yes, of course he had those rights, but to take them... that was irrevocable and the end of their relationship.
“Yes, you have rights, Tzoquito, my son. But be prudent. Don’t speak too soon.”
“No! I won’t be prudent again! I don’t want to live like this anymore, live like a dog! I will stay here without you and I will do as I please.”
His father came close. “Tzoquito, obey your father.”
“No, I am free.”
“Tzoquito, obey your father.”
“No, I am free.”
“Tzoquito, obey your father.”
“No, I am free.”
And as soon as Tzoquito had pronounced the words three times, the play was complete. He had broken his ties completely. His father moved heavily the last few paces toward him and Tzoquito could see the moisture welling in his father’s quickly averted eyes. His father nestled his snout in the fur of Tzoquito’s neck. He spoke the final words sadly.
“Then this is goodbye, Tzoquito,” the old binquizac whispered. “You are no longer my son.”
The father drew himself away and turned his back to leave. His only remaining son, Tepiltzin, looked for a moment questioningly at Tzoquito and then followed the father away through the foliage, leaving Tzoquito there alone, alone between the high hills of his people and the unknown world below.
Suddenly everything sounded louder to Tzoquito, the birds on branches above, the worms in the soil below, even the creaking, pulsing birth of the buds and leaves on the bushes around him, all crowded in on him. He was truly alone now, for the first time in his life. It was a feeling he had felt before when his mother died. But now, there was something new about this loneliness, something greater than regrets. There was the prospect of a future.
He stepped back through the forest, the way that he had come with Tepiltzin. He went slowly, stopping many times along the way to listen to the forest around him in the ways that he wanted to hear it, to smell it as he wanted to smell it. He took so long that by the time he reached that Olmec figure he had discovered earlier in the day, it was already barely visible in the shaded moonlight. He rested his cheek down on that Olmec cheek and he cried. He cried for a loss that he could not explain and for a desire that he could not imagine. He asked the Olmec over and over what he should do, but the figure remained resolutely silent.
And then he slept right where he lay. And dreamed. He was visited there in his dream by an ancient creature, strong and embellished with the finest tattoos and most colorful paint all over his body. This creature held him steady, passing on to him the warmth that came from deep in its stone heart. This creature spoke to him with a startling clarity that quite nearly woke him.
“Tzoquito! You have taken the first step, but one step will not move you until you take the second. And you will never reach anywhere until you walk. Walk, Tzoquito. Walk!”
“But how can I? I don’t know how and I don’t know where to go.”
“Tzoquito, when you were a little child, your mother used to take you to see her brother, the great shaman Ichtaca. Do you remember, Tzoquito!”
And Tzoquito remembered, vividly. He had not thought of his uncle for so many years, since the old man had simply gone away and disappeared.
“Your uncle, the shaman Ichtaca, knew many magic things. He knew the parts of fire and the parts of sleep. But greatest of all, he knew the secrets of shifting shape. Do you remember, Tzoquito!”
And Tzoquito remembered, vividly.
“And there was one day, when you wanted the sweet fruit of an apple tree, but you could not get that fruit with your motherless paw. Ichtaca had laughed and said, ‘You need a thumb, Tzoquito! You need the mother of your hand!’ and he showed you a movement, he taught you a word and he filled your mind with an energy, a force. You concentrated that force, Tzoquito and you made your paw into a human hand, with its thumb and kept it that way long enough to reach that apple and to pluck it from that tree. Do you remember, Tzoquito?”
And suddenly Tzoquito remembered, vividly, something that had happened when he was so very young, something so momentous, how could he have forgotten? But he hadn’t really forgotten, for here it was again, alive in every detail in his mind, right down to the feel of that wondrous hand that just for a few wondrous moments had been as human as any ever born of human mother. So precisely, so vividly did he remember, that he shook with excitement and threw himself awake.
He raised his head from the Olmec figure and looked back down at its face – now frozen cold in worldly silence. He looked around in the semi-dark. He could not sleep, he had to think, to go through those memories over and over again. Now he knew what he would do. For that trick that his Uncle Ichtaca had taught him, turning his paw into a hand, had a significance far greater than the ability to pluck an apple from a tree. With that hand he could pluck the humanity right out from deep inside his soul and let it breathe. He wanted to do it immediately, but he could not do it here and now, for the magic needed sunlight and it needed open air. It could not be done in the nighttime forest but only out in the light of day.
The sun appeared as usual that day and like so many other days, Tzoquito was there, wide awake to greet it. Once again, he was at the edge of a ridge, once again he was there above that small town in the valley, Cielitos. But this time it was different. Today he was not returning from a night creeping through the town on all fours. Today he was going there in the light of dawn, he was going there forever.
The legend known by everyone, all the forest creatures, as well as all the people in the valley, was that a human could bring a binquizac back to human form by taking his hand, (or more accurately, his paw) and pulling him out. But this was not so simple: what human would ever touch a binquizac’s paw? A binquizac would more likely grow his own human hand than get a real human to touch his own. And, as Tzoquito now appreciated, this was the real value of his uncle’s lesson. All night he focused his mind on that trick his uncle had taught him and he tried it over and over again, until he had it right. Then at dawn, when a ray of sunlight glinted through the leaves, he tried it again. And this time it worked! Tzoquito had one beautiful human hand.
That cautious human hand emerged from the low foliage. And next to it, rose the gnarled paw of a binquizac. The hand grabbed hold of the paw and pulled, back and forth the two arms pulled in alternation and with each pull toward the human, the other came more human too.
He felt himself slowly being drawn along. And out. And little by little, he allowed himself to really believe it, that he was becoming human!
A head evolved. It was a young man with long unruly black hair and Native Mexican features. He looked up at the sky and he brought his perfectly lean upper body out above the foliage, naked to the sun. And now it was a chain reaction, something so smooth and natural that it could only have been the fulfillment of mother nature’s deepest desire. As each part of his body was touched by sunlight, it was transformed into the smooth and beautiful brown body of a human being.
It was magic but it was also real. He felt the warmth of the sun on his naked skin and just as quickly, the cold air of dawn on my unprotected body.
With a gleeful laugh, Tzoquito rushed down the hillside toward a group of buildings in the valley. He shouted out loud in his Mexican tongue, shouting just as he had never been able to before.
“The sun! My skin! I am free!”
He ran all the way down to the lowland, the floodplain by a small river. There was the farm and there was the old farmer at his chores in the yard. Except that now, when Tzoquito reached the fat tree and pressed his face against its lumpy trunk, he felt the dirt and grass of the ground beneath it, instead. He opened his eyes and realized he had been sleeping right there under that tree and that the sun, now lower in the sky, now milder and finally accepting, was bathing his face warmly in its evening glow. He pulled the blanket up closer around his human form as he sat up and saw the old couple standing before him, with smiles on their faces. He smiled back.
Thus, he came to live with Don José and his wife, the people whose task it would be, as their task had always been, as though appointed by the very stones of this land, to usher the young man into the valley of man.
~~~~~
All the way on the other side of the great land of Mexico, another very different destiny was moving south, heading straight for Tzoquito. Just then, as the sun set, it came to a temporary stop in a small town, a nondescript place just north of Ciudad Obregón, Estado de Sonora. The town had nothing to recommend it and just about anyone else would have driven right by without thinking twice, but El É, the driver of the big blue Chevy of destiny, had been driving in one shot all the way from Los Angeles and he couldn’t drive anymore without some sleep. So that was where the four travelers would have to stay.
They had planned to sleep in the desert but this region was heavily populated and they decided, this once, to find a hotel. They picked the sleaziest place they could find and they checked into the smallest room the guy would give them. After paying their 35 dollars American, they went upstairs to dump the bags that they didn’t want to leave in the car overnight.
“Damn, could that room be any smaller?” Brolo, one of the travelers said.
“Yeah,” his friend Jinete agreed. “Now that we got a room for our baggage, where are we going to sleep?”
“Don’t knock it,” El É said. “How far do you think a thousand dollars is going to take us on this trip?”
“It’s gonna take us to payday!” Pinto said, as though rubbing his hands greedily with his words.
“Well, in the meantime, let’s be cool. The room is pretty cheap, so let’s eat something good That’ll be our one big splurge on the way to Chiapas. We spend sixty, seventy dollars in this town, tops. Our money is too important to piss away.”
All eyes followed the newcomers as they entered the restaurant and took their seats. First came the leader, El É, the stocky guy with the bald head. He had something to do with the letter “E” judging from the gold chain around his neck with the rhinestone encrusted letter “E” hanging down. Then came his lieutenant, Jinete, a tall skinny guy with a badass limp and an odd pattern on his shaved head. Then the two footsoldiers, Pinto and Brolo. At least, that was how they all saw themselves: leader, lieutenant and footsoldiers, whereas the other patrons in the bar restaurant probably saw something vastly different, something closer to four post adolescents on spring break. There were rude snickers for each of their haircuts and then finally a little rumble of curiosity as Brolo’s back came into view. His camouflage hoodie was a size too small, so when he wore the hood up, the jacket rode up in back. That, along with his hang-down dungarees, left a sizable cream colored patch of small-of-the-back flesh and beneath it, a swatch of patterned boxer shorts.
They sat down at a round table and tried to ignore all the curiosity around them. When El É looked over at the barman, he nodded to the menu hanging on the wall, made from plastic letters of varying faded shades of red, clipped onto a board.
“We’ll have the guiso de carne. It’s a casserole for four people, right?” El É said, without consulting anybody.
“I don’t think you want that. It has beef in it,” the barman said.
“So?”
“Beef is cows, man. I thought you people couldn’t eat cows.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you come to see the Swami?”
“Swami? No, man! What Swami?”
“Swami Suchachapati. He came from Los Angeles today, too. He’s holding a meeting at the Municipal Auditorium tomorrow, all day.”
“Forget that! We’re no yogi bears, we’re gangstas!” Pinto said.
El É gave him a hard look. Pinto had a way of shouting things out, almost like he had Tourette’s and it was embarrassing at times. He was a little guy with a skinny Mohawk shock of bleached hair laying limp with fatigue on top of his head. His pronouncement would have sounded doubtful enough given the visual element, but the squeakiness of his voice made it downright ridiculous.
The barman shrugged and brought the news of an order back to the elderly lady watching television in the kitchen. She broke herself out of a TV trance and ambled over to an ancient refrigerator. Apparently they had missed regular mealtime, at this late hour. No one else was eating, though the place was full of people, nearly all men, leathery, local and drinking.
Seated at the next table was a drunken man with a week’s worth of beard. He tapped Brolo on the shoulder with a cane. “If you’re really a gangster, where’s your ink?”
“Tattoos? I don’t have any,” Brolo said regretfully.
“Not even on your knuckles? They come out of jail with all these letters on their knuckles, don’t they?” He slurred his speech so badly that Brolo had to get his friends to translate it into English. Brolo was born in L.A. and he would have to get used to speaking Spanish full time.
“Yeah, but I’ve never been in jail. I got caught shoplifting a CD once, but they just made my moms come down to the station and take me home.”
“You need a tattoo.”
“I’ve got a tattoo!” El É said, trying to draw attention away from Brolo’s dumbass answers. “A totally unique one. Look! An Aztec sun! Nobody’s got this.”
“My cousin’s got that,” another man said dryly.
“And that big girl down the street,” the barman said to the first man. “What’s her name. She’s got one, too!”
“I see a big patch of girly pink flesh that could use a tattoo, right now!” It was a somewhat unfriendly sounding voice coming from behind Brolo, a section of the restaurant with a flat-out view of Brolo’s boxer drawers and a good patch of naked backside. “Maybe a pink rose!”
There were a couple of guffaws. Another voice suggested, “How about Free Parking?”
And another: “Rear Entrance!”
Brolo whispered to El É. “Yo, dude, I’m not feelin’ the atmosphere in this place. I don’t know if we should be hangin’ out here.”
“Be cool, man. Anyway, we can’t get up and leave now. We already ordered. We’ll look like pussies. Just chill out. We’re gangstas now!”
They looked up as Jinete’s seat got pushed back noisily. Jinete was getting to his feet. He was tall and skinny and stood fairly impressively over the room. He looked around importantly and waited till he had everyone’s attention and then he started rolling up his sleeve. Without saying a word, he showed his tattoo to the entire assembly: his big-toothed Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god of the Aztecs. It was multicolored and very well made and had cost his girlfriend a small fortune at the best tattoo parlor in San Pedro. This work of art brought murmurs of admiration. Jinete sat back down, beaming, knowing that his tattoo was a success, but more importantly, that it had trumped El É’s Aztec sun, big time.
Finally, there was a sense that they were being accepted. Now, everyone began pulling at their clothes, showing their tattoos: shirt sleeves got rolled up, entire shirts flapped wide open and pant legs flew up. Practically every male in the place, except Brolo and Pinto, had a tattoo. There were some very predictable ones in the most usual places: the barman had a heart with a girl’s name in it on his chest, an old man had a blue anchor on his forearm and there were several Lady of Guadalupes of varying quality. There was nothing out of place: no monkeys with buttholes at the bellybutton, or Bart Simpsons or little stick figures with lawn mowers trimming pubes or pits, but as normal as each one was, each had to be presented for review and commentary.
The tattoo show-and-tell went on for quite awhile, too long, in fact and the arrival of their food gave the four “gangstas” from L.A. a welcome excuse to finally ignore the other patrons. They ate for awhile in peace, as everyone else busied themselves buttoning and then re-buttoning correctly between gulps of beer or bacanora mescal.
One guy had remained silent throughout the whole show, sitting quietly at the opposite wall, not showing any ink, just staring intensely at the four young men. Then, when they were finishing up their meals, he got up from his seat, gave himself an initial push from the table with one ring bedecked hand and came strutting over on sheer drunken momentum.
The wiry man stopped in front of their table and pushed back his old fashioned derby hat for effect. He announced in English, “I am Porfirio!”
“Well, you don’t say,” El É replied sarcastically. This place was beginning to annoy him. He was trying to eat.
“I am the arm wrestling champion of the Estado de Sonora!”
“Yeah, well, you get more impressive all the time.”
He whipped off his hat and they could see how the rim had creased a line all around his pomaded coal black hair. He came close to El É’s face. He had two eyes, one fiercer than the other and a bushy mustache that pointed southeast and southwest, making him look like Emiliano Zapata. “Ah, I see, you’re a big man in front of the other schoolboys. But you can’t be a real gangster if you don’t know how to arm wrestle.” He looked over at Brolo. “I pick you! With the underwear!”
“Me? I don’t do that kiddie stuff,” Brolo answered with a laugh to his friends.
“You cannot refuse a challenge! Then you are not a gangster,” then came the searing judgment. “You are no valiente!”
That got Brolo’s attention. “Hey, you don’t have to be insulting! I’m up for any challenge, man, but I haven’t done that arm wrestling stuff since I was like ten years old.”
Porfirio folded his arms forcefully. He wasn’t giving an inch. Brolo squirmed under the glare of his eyes.
“What if I lose?” Brolo protested. “I ain’t betting money.”
“Well, then if you lose, we have to go one step further: to mud wrestling.”
“That sounds messy.”
“No, it’s not. I always wear a raincoat.”
Now that was weird and quite possibly obscene, as far as El É could tell. He looked around to see if any ladies were listening to all this. Were there any women in the place? At first they had only seen two older women there, as brassy and local as the men. Now suddenly, he became aware of two pretty young women, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. They were walking over and they sat down at the next table and stared meaningfully at the four. Now that they had finished their meal, it seemed that everyone in the bar was going to start fooling with them.
“Where are you from?” one of the girls asked, the one with toasted red hair that had been worked up into a twist at the back of her head. Her name was Carolina.
“Torrance,” Jinete said.
“Never heard of it.”
“You never heard of Torrance?”
“No.”
“It’s right by the ocean, sort of like Santa Monica without all the white people,” Pinto said.
The girl looked unimpressed by the idea.
“It’s practically the Hollywood Riviera!” he insisted. The girls’ faces lit up.
“Really? Hollywood? Have you ever seen Brad Pitt around there?” said the second girl, Libertad. She looked like a cat. A calico one, perhaps, given that her hair was a patchwork of several shades of dye.
“Oh, yeah,” Pinto said. “All the time!”
“Quit bullshitting, man!” El É said. Don’t you see all these girls want is for you to spend money on them?
“Back up a bit, El É,” Jinete said. “Yeah, okay, but so what? It’s easy for you to criticize, you got a fiancée to go to. Who are we going to?”
“Go wherever you want. But I’ve been driving for eighteen hours straight. It’s eleven o’clock and I’m going to bed,” El É said. He took one last look around the room: at the old man singing hoarsely into a microphone at the karaoke, at Brolo arm wrestling with Emiliano Zapata at the opposite wall, at the barman flirting with an older woman at the counter. Then when he was satisfied that he had seen it all and had no desire to see anymore, he got out from that cramped table and went upstairs to their tiny, cramped room full of baggage.
Pinto looked after him. “I bet he’s going up now, so he can take the bed.”
“Shit,” Jinete agreed. “There will hardly be enough room for the rest of us on the floor. That’s how cheap he is with our money.”
“You’re all in the same room?” Libertad asked.
“Damn, we’re all in the same bed!” Pinto said. “Four homeys in one single bed!”
“Oh, we have to do something about that!” Carolina said coquettish. She called out to the barman. “Is the big room available?”
“You mean the bridal suite?”
“Yeah.”
“And whose going to pay for it?”
The girls nodded at the two post-adolescents at the next table. “Forget it,” the barman said with scorn. “You mean the four guys in a single room? These cheapskates aren’t going to spring for that. It’s ninety dollars a night!”
“What!” Jinete said. But the girl ignored him.
“Oh, don’t worry about that! They know Brad Pitt!”
They took the room. It served El É right, right?
Jinete, Pinto and the two girls went upstairs with a full bottle of 92 proof bacanora and playing cards with naked girls on them. Everything went as planned, with all sitting around on the floor playing Twenty One and loosening their clothes in the heat. The girls were fun but squirmy, managing to wiggle out of every move that the two woozy Romeos put on them. But that was okay, because with their pouty grins and giggles, they seemed to make it clear that an eventual rapprochement was in the cards.
That is, until the church tower across the way struck two a.m. That was when the painting of two adoring Nordic newlyweds just about to kiss, which was hanging above the TV set, suddenly caught Carolina’s attention. It touched her deeply.
“Oh, my God, that is so beautiful!” she said and then she burst into tears.
“I miss my boyfriend!” The girl wailed. Between sobs and gulps of the last of the bacanora, she proceeded to tell the maudlin tale of her boyfriend’s demise. He’d been killed in a motorcycle accident, it seemed. She was now crying and thrashing wide but safely with acrobatic grace. Whenever Jinete or Pinto tried to mumble something sympathetic, she just wailed louder and cut them off.
“I’m sorry,” Libertad said to the confused males that lay sprawled, piss drunk in front of her. “When Carolina starts talking about Tony, there’s nothing to be done.” With that the two girls got up surprisingly steady on their feet, took a pit stop look in the mirror and made a quick exit.
Jinete and Pinto gave each other a disgusted look and with a couple of curse words and a last burst of energy, they stumbled up from the floor and threw themselves onto the bed, where they promptly passed out with their clothes on, spread out across the red shag bedspread, surrounded by dozens of tiny, purse-lipped cupids shooting arrows from the pink wallpaper and doubled by the heart-shaped mirror on the ceiling.
The next morning they went down to the restaurant for breakfast. They found El É there alone.
“What happened to the Sonora playmates?”
“Carolina and Libertad? They had to leave,” Jinete said simply. But Pinto, with his big mouth, had to tell the whole embarrassing story.
“Her boyfriend on a motorcycle? Playing chicken with a souped up Grand Am?” El É asked suspiciously.
“Yeah!”
“And his hand-tooled leather boot got caught in the gears? Couldn’t get out of the way? I suppose his guts splattered right at her feet.”
“Yeah, yeah! How did you know?”
They were singing that corrido all night at the karaoke. I could hear it from that tiny room all the way up on the third floor!” El É said. “You got dumped, güey!” he laughed, pointing. “They probably get a cut of whatever you spent! It’s almost worth the price of that fool bridal suite to see you guys get scammed. How much was it, fifty bucks?”
“Well, with the bar tab, room service and pay-for-porn, a little more,” Jinete mumbled.
“Like how much more?”
“A hundred and forty five.”
“Shit!” El É shouted and put his head in his hands.
“Don’t sweat it, man!” Pinto squeaked. “We’re good for it on payday!”
Jinete thought it best to change the subject. “Hey, where’s Brolo?”
El É looked up, “I don’t know, I thought he was with you guys.”
“Really? He didn’t sleep in the room with you?”
They looked around at the empty restaurant, at the unoccupied table where they last saw Brolo deep in intense competition with the mustachioed villain. There was no sign of either of them.
“Excuse me,” El É called out to the barman, who was right back at work. “Do you know what happened to our friend last night?”
“The one with the underwear? He lost. He went mud wrestling with that weird guy Porfirio.”
They took their time at breakfast. They took long showers in the bridal suite. They sat in the narrow lobby watching people straggle by on the street. They waited till the last minute to check out at one in the afternoon. Then they brought all the bags back down to El É’s Chevy Impala and sat in the car wondering what to do.
“We could have just called him on his cell,” Jinete said darkly, “if you had let us take them along.”
“I told you,” El É replied, “we are not gonna have anybody tracking us with that electronic shit. We’re on serious business!”
“Where could he be?” Pinto said from the back seat. “How long does it take to mud wrestle?”
“Jinete gave him a scorching look. “What were you born yesterday? Maybe someday I should put on a raincoat myself and show you how long it takes.” He turned to El É. “That pendejo better get back soon, or we should just leave him here to his lucha libre!”
They waited some more and now began to wonder and to worry. Maybe this Porfirio was as weird as he looked.
“Maybe we should go to the cops!” Pinto said, but immediately regretted it when he saw the looks that he got. El É went back into the hotel to speak to the barman.
He found him snoozing at the counter. El É shook him awake.
“Hey, wake up, man! What do you work twenty four hours a day?”
“Oh, thanks. No, I’m just working a double shift today, because both Carolina and Libertad called in sick.”
El É considered getting upset but then let it drop. That wasn’t his nature, anyway, so he got back to the point.
“Where does this pervert Porfirio live? My homey’s gone and we need him back!”
“That I can’t tell you. But you may find him where you’ll find just about everybody else in town today, except me.”
“Where?”
“At the municipal auditorium. To see Swami Suchachapati!”
El É came back out, got in behind the wheel and started the car. “Jump in, we’re going!” he said.
“And leaving Brolo behind?” Jinete asked with an amused smile, as he slid in beside him.
“No. We’re going to find him, at the Swami show. Pinto, go through his bag and find his photo ID from El Camino Community College.”
They drove over to the Yaqui Valley Auditorium. Obviously, people had come from far and wide this Saturday, because there was a jumble of dented cars and pickup trucks parked everywhere on the sidewalks, the grass and in the plaza. They parked the Chevy all the way across the large plaza on a side street and hurried over.
There was a big canvas sign over the building that said in English and Spanish, “Direct from Los Angeles! Swami Suchachapati, the Hindu master of Destiny!” The front door was open and as they got closer they could hear the insistent murmur of voices inside. It was clear that the place was full of people. They walked up to the two gringo gorillas at the door.
“Invitation?”
“No.”
“Contribution?”
“No, we are just looking for our friend. We lost him and we gotta find him fast. Has anybody seen this guy around?” He showed them Brolo’s student ID. The first gorilla took a quick look and passed it to the second gorilla. The second gorilla was even quicker and passed it on to a skinny guy further inside and this one didn’t even glance at it, but just immediately disappeared with it into the hall.
“Hey, where’s he going?”
“He’ll show it to the Swami, to see if he’ll take your case.”
“What?”
“You’re not the only people with a problem, you know. People come to the Swami with all kinds of crazy stories.”
“What Swami? We’re just looking for our friend that’s all!” But by now the gorillas were uncommunicative, busying themselves with other more interesting latecomers – ones with money.
So they waited to see what would happen. A minute later, the skinny guy came rushing back through the door with an excited air.
“He’ll take you, but it’s gotta be right now!”
“Really?” The first gorilla said, eyeing the three stooges with newfound respect. “They must be important.”
“Nah, it’s because the old lady he put in a trance won’t snap out of it, so they’re waiting for the paramedics. This will be a good distraction.”
The heavyset gorilla stepped to the side, granting them entrance, even without the benefit of a banknote slipped into his palm.
“Go on, get in there. Hurry up!”
The three homeys entered the hall. The place was packed, with standees lining the walls behind all the seats, filling nearly every available space. There was organ music with a few babies crying mixed in, like at a revival meeting. Hanging down at the back of the stage was a huge “om” symbol inside a lotus flower and below that, a Hammond organ where a straw hatted lady sat with her back to the audience, working the keys vigorously, pounding ponderous chords. At the front of the stage was a platform with vases of tall flowers, and in the middle of the raised platform, an exceptionally obese Swami had been artfully placed in a gold cushioned armchair. He was too fat to sit on his crossed legs, so he had merely crossed his ankles on the floor beneath his seat. That was good enough. He wore purple pajama pants and no shirt on his hairless and many layered chest. He had little eyes set in a pasty face and no beard; his only hair being a big fluffy ball of the stuff on top of his head, enough to stuff a pillow. All together, he looked like a chapati bread puffed up with hot air and ready to burst at the first touch.
“Yo, what’s with the Swami with the afro?” Pinto asked, far too loud.
“He looks like Fat Albert,” Jinete snickered.
“Shhhh!” A congregant hissed at them with a glare. Some high pitched giggling came to them from a few rows away. Jinete and Pinto looked over to see the Sonora playmates, Carolina and Libertad waving at them double time.
Swami gave a sign to the organ player and the music went soft and full of tremolo. Although Swami Suchachapati made no sign acknowledging the appearance of these new supplicants, he was now definitely occupying himself with their case. He was holding Brolo’s photo ID at arm’s length in one hand and squinting at it, as though he needed reading glasses. With the other hand, he was pointing to his temple as though indicating to the slowest in the congregation where the work was now taking place. Then he finally looked up and acknowledged the three newcomers.
“What’s his name?” he said in English. A little man in a rumpled sharkskin suit stepped up to a microphone at the edge of the stage and repeated the question in Spanish. “¿Còmo se llama?”
“Brolo.”
“I don’t have the answers, my young friends.” There was a collective puzzled sigh from the audience. “No, I don’t. I am here to empower you. You! I don’t have the answer, but you do! You do!” Swami said. His English was peculiar, sort of like Bombay via Baton Rouge. He pointed at them, like Moses in an ancient print. “It is all inside of you! I will transmit my power to you and you will find young Frodo on your own.”
“He was just here this morning!” Jinete said.
Swami opened his eyes very wide and scanned the audience expectantly.
“Ah!” The audience murmured with appreciation.
“You see, brothers and sisters? It is working immediately!” he gushed marvelously. Then he boomed to the rafters, in a voice that could be called anything but ethereal. “Such is the power of my thoughts!” He turned back to the three. “He was here, you say? Where, specifically. Concentrate, my son! You can do it!”
“He was here in this town! At the Tres Gallos Hotel!”
The lady smacked the organ keys and “Ah!” the crowd gasped, even louder this time.
“It is amazing, the power, isn’t it, my people? Just look at this young man, with the power, he could immediately see the presence of young Frodo! Immediately!”
“What are you fucking talking about?” Pinto shouted. There was an uncomforted rustle from the crowd and silence from the organ lady. She was at a loss on that one. The Swami handed the photo ID hurriedly to an assistant and waved him away.