They take supper that night in the main dining room and in the company of the resident Malos, a raucous affair, as Axel will find it to be every night. Few of the men know English, and most of the Spanish in the room is of rustic dialect and erratic grammar. He sits at a table with Quino and Cacho and three others, the eldest of them Quino’s segundo, his second-in-command, a one-eared man named Sino. The other two men are Sino’s personal operatives, Vaquero and Alto, neither one much older than Cacho. They both speak English well and much better than Sino. The three of them live in Nuevo Laredo and spend most of their time there and in Piedras Negras, but they pay frequent visits to the ranch to confer with Quino and they often attend the semimonthly parties.
All the Malos have been told that Axel provided the information essential to Cacho’s escape and that he saved the kid’s life in the course of the getaway. He has thereby proven himself and is accepted as one of them without question. When Sino hears his precise diction and faultless grammar, he says, Fucking guy sounds like a professor. And so is he nicknamed by the Malos—El Maestro.
He’d been unsure if beer would still afford him pleasure after such long absence from his life, but his first sip from a cold bottle of Negra Modelo is so gratifying that he chugalugs half the bottle, then burps, eyes watering, and says, “Jeeesus!” The table grins in appreciation of his pleasure. Supper is a savory repast of roast kid and rice topped with grilled tomatoes and peppers.
The conversation throughout the meal is animated and largely concerned with women. Everyone is in high anticipation of the party the day after tomorrow and the girls it will bring, and Axel is an object of awe and much joking about not having had a woman in twenty-four years. Cacho says his own deprivation of nine months has been unbearable and he can’t conceive how Axel has been able to stand it all that time. Quino says he’s known guys who were in prison for so long that when they got out they couldn’t enjoy a woman except in the ass, and some couldn’t even work up a good boner anymore except with their own hand. Axel says he still prefers pussy and has never buggered a guy in his life. The assertion is met with skeptical hoots and grinning insinuations that maybe he was always the one to get buggered. Vaquero quips that even if the Maestro never put it to a guy, he bets his hands have calluses like cowhide from all the years of jacking off. Axel picks up a fork and fakes stabs at his palm, feigning frustration at his inability to puncture it, raising another chorus of laughter.
Near the end of the meal, it comes as a shock when he overhears Joaquín asking Sino if it was really necessary to kill one of the bribed guards. He tried to make fools of us, Sino says. Alto and Vaquero nod in affirmation. Redhead prick had it coming, Chief, Vaquero says. Thought he could fuck us out of the money. Mason, Axel thinks. Dumb bastard took a hell of a beating for the money and got killed trying to keep it. The Zanco word on him was right. Bad gambler.
After supper they all repair to the lounge at the other end of the house, where there is a room-length bar, tables along the other walls, a jukebox, a bandstand, and a dance floor that gets much use on the two nights a month the girls from Monterrey come to visit. An adjacent room contains three pool tables.
The evening is full of good cheer and drinking, Axel taking care to sip his beer and pace himself so that he won’t get drunk but simply achieve a mellow buzz. The general congeniality is only briefly interrupted by a fight between a man who begins talking about the terrible things he’s going to do to the Nuevo Laredo son of a whore who stole his woman last month and a man who calls him a fool because nobody can steal another guy’s woman unless she wants to be stolen. The antagonists are quickly separated, both of them bloody-nosed, and five minutes later each has an arm around the other’s shoulders and they are in loud agreement about the universal perfidy of women. Let a woman know you love her, they agree, and it’s like giving her a license to lie. She’ll know she can get away with just about anything. There ensues a general discussion on the eternal question of what women want. There is much postulation and bafflement and disagreement.
On the other hand, what men want is easily answered. They want to be respected by other men—to be feared is even better—and to have sex with pretty women, a desire that persists to the end of a man’s life. They all know it’s a lie that old men lose interest in sex. They all know it because they have been told so by old men. The main reason they don’t have sex anymore, the old men have said, isn’t a loss of interest but that their sexual interest remains in young and pretty women, but young and pretty women, by and large, do not want to have sex with old men, and so the only sex available to old men is, very by and large, with their wives, who are, extremely by and large, old women, and not even an old man wants to have sex with an old woman.