“What’s the time?” His own voice surprised him with its scratchiness. He guessed he had slept for a few minutes, maybe as much as half an hour, but he didn’t feel the least refreshed. Earlier, after a lot of entreaty through the locked door, the woman had brought a shallow pan of water and his hand now marinated soothingly in it. From outside somewhere, they could hear competing strains of tootling and clangy music.
“It’s just after midnight.”
There was an intermittent clatter and bang out there that had invaded his hectic dream-state in odd ways. He only had to roll onto his side on the smelly mattress to look out through an oblong gap between a sheet of corrugated iron and a big square of stained plywood. A flat patch of land across the road was now bathed in light from several bulbs that dangled from the sickly-looking trees, and a dozen men were dismantling two very new cars. They had no power tools, but they scurried over the cars—a silver Toyota Camry and a red Trans-Am with California plates—like soldier ants, unscrewing and tugging at parts. The hoods and trunks were propped open in silhouette like arms thrown up in despair, and the strippers were sorting and stacking body panels and drive-train parts into piles. This is where his VW, parked in another border colonia, would end up in a few days, he thought.
He could imagine the parts being transported across town, and then mixed and matched to be reassembled into new hybrid vehicles: pickups with Cadillac fins, minivans with long sports-car hoods. But, in fact, he guessed the choice components would go into the inventories of auto-parts stores all over northern Mexico and the western United States.
Fariborz knelt to peer out his own aperture, a hole poked through a stiff cardboard poster for Bimbo Bread. “I’ve never seen a chop shop,” the boy said, after watching awhile. “It’s like a nature film with piranhas swarming over an animal carcass.”
One of the radios offered a pounding banda polka in weird counterpoint to a wailing North American girl singer on the other, but the outside world had lost its interest for him and he turned away. Beside his bed, there was a splayed-out stack of decomposing newspapers, all with the bold masthead ¡Alarma! The photos he could see were of gore and crushed cars and gunshot victims and the newspapers smelled heavily of mildew, which mixed with dust and piss smells heavy on the air. There was also a single orange plastic wheel that he recognized from a Big-Wheels tractor.
“Have you always been so confident?” Jack Liffey asked. The boy’s cool had impressed him at several points, though he had found it fairly typical of rich kids. He lifted his hand experimentally, but it stung and he plunged it back into the pan of water.
Fariborz had settled into a crouch, and he clasped his knees with his arms. He was lit faintly in stripes, and he pursed his lips, emoting deep thought. “That’s hard to answer without sounding like one big fat ego. I had a happy childhood, and I had loving parents who paid attention to me. When I look at my classmates, I think that’s mainly what gives you a feeling of confidence as you grow up. But maybe I’m just not imaginative enough to picture things going wrong.”
Somebody outside hollered at the top of his lungs, as if he’d just struck his thumb with a hammer, and the boy made a face. “Whatever I look like to you, I feel like a total outsider. Not just as a Persian. I don’t want to feel at home in all the sinfulness I see. Sometimes it seems that the main purpose of education is to get you to accept all that as what’s normal. I don’t quite mean sinfulness as the word to use. I mean something like selfishness and greediness and just looking the other way when bad things happen.”
All that is more or less normal, Jack Liffey thought, but he didn’t say anything.
“When I peeked at that big fat Mexican, I could see he was really evil.” The boy’s face was overworking itself to suggest difficult, or just painful thought. “It’s funny. For some reason, he didn’t scare me. I don’t know. Maybe I just trust Allah to protect me.”
“I don’t want to mess with your religion,” Jack Liffey said softly, “but I think it’s a good idea to get over that sense of invulnerability. That’s youth. Sooner or later, it’s going to hit you that it’s entirely random whether things take a wrong turn.”
“I think I learned that—I mean, things did go wrong for us. But it didn’t really change me. I mean, it changed my life, for sure, but it didn’t change how I am. I guess it’s like those girls who grow up with a fat self-image—no matter how thin they get, they still feel fat.”
The boy went on for a while talking about his moral struggles at Kennedy. Jack Liffey could see he had been self-absorbed with this for a long time, spoiling away inside, bouncing around in a fragile ethical wrangle of his own construction while dealing like a trooper with the outside world. His own thoughts subsided toward the much simpler relentless pain in his hand. The burn made anything else an effort.
“Didn’t you have a happy childhood?” the boy asked.
Jack Liffey tried to drag himself back toward the boy, who probably needed him more than he knew. “I grew up white and suburban in the fifties. That was probably the most fortunate daydream in world history, but it was a freak. We had so much fun playing with our model airplanes, we never looked around at things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Racism is the obvious one. The Dulles brothers destroying Central America because their family owned United Fruit. Vietnam was under way; then somebody went and shot King and the Kennedys. And Malcolm. Suddenly every single stone got turned up, and there was something deeply nasty under every one.”
It was the pain in his hand talking. He decided not to say any more. Fariborz was still young, and it seemed vaguely disgraceful to interfere with the idealism of the young. Maybe it was still possible in the boy’s worldview for Shane to ride into town and fix everything. And Jack Liffey knew perfectly well that every once in a while, unpredictably, he could not refrain from trying to act out some Shane drama of his own.
“I don’t think moral blindness is my problem,” the young man said.
“No, you were born way too late for that. Think of the change. My TV sitcoms all had perfect moms and slightly goofy dads who wore cardigans and did their earnest best to help their kids stay out of trouble. Yours are full of dysfunctional parents screaming insults at each other.”
“I don’t watch TV.”
“It’s kind of a metaphor. We’ve left you a world stripped raw of illusions. You don’t have to be a Moslem, you know, to recoil from the pain that shows through.”
“I know. If I thought that, I’d have to leave America. No matter what anoyone’s religion is, they have the capacity to add to the good side of the balance.”
“Well, just now, you get to save my life. That’s not a bad goal, on any moral level. I have a hunch you’re planning something to help your friends, too.”
Fariborz shook his head quickly, as if refusing any conversation about the other boys. He started to say something more when a gunshot slammed into the night, quite close, rattling and buzzing the flimsier panels of the shack. They went to their peer-holes to look out into the dark busy world. The car breakers were still at work, oblivious to the shot, and the light from their workshop poured across a gang of teens and preteens in the middle of the street. What must have been the gang leader had a slightly older teen down on his knees at gunpoint. All the gang members wore white T-shirts with a big 18 drawn on the front with Magic Marker, in that angular, vaguely Aztec lettering of Latino grafitti. “Eighteenth Street” was the Latino supergang of Los Angeles, but in L.A. they didn’t wear it on their shirts. These were wannabes or copycats.
The boy on his knees wore a too-big trench coat and was whimpering as the others shouted at him and the tiny mean-looking gang leader held a cheap automatic pistol to his neck. Strangely enough, the car mechanics just went on working. In the background the Trans-Am had been stripped of all its body panels, which were set aside now like big red flower petals.
“They want him to do something I can’t figure out,” Fariborz whispered.
The boy in the trench coat pleaded and whined and finally acceded to something, as several of the gang boys danced from foot to foot. One skinny boy at the side breathed fumes out of a paper bag and then bellowed up into the sky.
Poverty doesn’t necessarily ennoble, Jack Liffey thought, keeping it to himself and realizing that it was not a particularly profound observation after a century of various genocides by one group of the desperately poor against another. Yet these were just boys. Groups of boys, thrown together, seemed to get in touch all too easily with a warrior ethos, eternally re-creating bands of Visigoth raiders.
Two of the kids were dispatched on errands by the tiny leader with his Saturday-night special. The boy on his knees chose a different gang member as the object of his pleas, but the other boy just made rude gestures at him, clutching his own crotch like a rap singer, and laughing. Not laughing, really—the sound was a ghastly bray, like a distress signal from whatever soul remained within, the boy throwing his head back and opening a wound to the sky to dispatch that horrible sound.
Then one of them trotted back, holding at arm’s length a big mangy cat that was kicking and boxing against the air. The boy with the paper bag generously offered the cat a whiff, and the cat yowled and kicked harder. Two boys decided to push the trench-coated victim back and forth on his knees in a demented shove-o’-war. Inevitably it got too rough, and he went over onto his side.
One of the strains of competing music stopped suddenly, and it was like a toothache abating. What remained was ordinary North American rock, dark and angry lyrics over a wailing guitar, somehow fitting for this horrible scene. Across the dirt road, two men rolled a hoist toward the Trans-Am and prepared to winch the engine out of the remains.
A second errand boy came back with what looked like a small dog, a Mexican hairless. It, too, objected to captivity, yipping and writhing, and the trench-coated boy called out to the dog plaintively from where he lay.
“It’s his pet,” Fariborz explained unnecessarily.
Jack Liffey had no idea what was about to happen, but he had a feeling that it was going to be something he didn’t really want to see. Yet it had the morbid fascination of a train wreck, and he didn’t look away. The boys produced a thin rope—maybe ten feet long—and tied the animals’ tails to each end of the rope. The boy in the trench coat launched an appeal on deaf ears.
Two of the gang members swung the animals back and forth on the rope like pendulums, the animals objecting with increasing wails. The leader counted off, and the boys hurled their living bolo into the air. Jack Liffey noticed now that a power line—probably an unofficial one—dangled slackly over the dirt street, just low enough so a big truck coming up the road might snag it; but no big trucks would ever come up this road. Neither animal passed over the power line, though that seemed to be the intent. The boys scrambled to catch the rope in midair, halting the free fall of the animals so suddenly that after a moment of shocked silence there was a renewed clamor of yelping and cries. The tiny dog seemed angrier and more feisty than the cat. The gang boys leapt in the air and hurled up their fists and cheered in celebration of something.
The second toss put the heavier cat over the power line, and it jerked to a stop with a screech five feet above the dog, which swung and kicked at shoulder height, a living pendulum. One boy cupped his hands under the dog and boosted it upward, the rope slacking to let the cat descend a few feet. A taller boy leapt to boost the dog again until both animals were just about at equal height, up at the level of a basketball rim, and the original errand boy took a running leap and batted at the animals to set them swaying. The gang members hollered encouragement to this sport as the taller boy jumped again and again to redirect the animal trajectories until the cat and the Mexican hairless finally met upside down in a clash of tiny gladiators. The boy in the trench coat covered his eyes and sobbed.
“Aw, shit!” Jack Liffey said.
On its next pass, the cat wriggled around and slashed with all its legs, and the dog squealed shrilly in pain. The boys set the little gladiators swinging again, and at the next pass, the dog got in a good neck bite to set off a screech from the cat. The cat then doubled itself up at the top of its swing and, judging its aim well, struck home with all four paws on the dog’s nose. The dog went into that rapid battle gargle that dogs give.
It was eerie that the car-breakers continued their work only a few yards away, as if they and the street gang existed in parallel universes unaware of one another.
Jack Liffey finally wrenched his eyes away from the tiny oblong window. It was a nastier sight than he could tolerate. The boys’ voices went on shouting and rooting, punctuated by abrupt animal noises, while he studied a large print of the Virgin of Guadalupe tacked to the inner wall, imprisoned in her full-body spiky golden aura. It was posted on what was formerly the exterior adobe wall of the house, spiked in place with huge bent nails as if crucified. After another burst of yowling, Fariborz pulled back from his window, too. The young man’s face seemed to have gone white, but it was hard to tell in the striped dimness.
Jack Liffey watched in surprise as the boy crawled over and hugged him, resting a forehead against Jack Liffey’s chest. He felt the young man tremble. People are so damn complex, he thought. He had just been thinking the boy tough and brave, and though he might yet be, he was certainly not stonyhearted. Outside, the wailing and yipping went on and on. It was hard to tell which animal was getting the worst of it.
“How can boys do that?” Fariborz complained.
“We don’t know what was done to them as children.”
“I knew a boy at Kennedy who was beaten by his father every single day, and he’s sworn never to harm a living creature.”
The contest outside seemed to quiet down. One could always hope the boys had grown tired of tormenting the animals.
“In the religion I supposedly grew up in, they talk about turning the other cheek, but that seems to be a pipe dream,” Jack Liffey said. “We used to have Gandhi and King and a lot of men like that. I think the world’s just run out of saints.”
Then there was a sustained outpouring of yaps and screams, followed by a police whistle that cut through all other sounds. Then more whistles, coming from all over the compass, as if the colonia were being invaded by soccer referees. The music cut off ominously. They went quickly to their peepholes. Jack Liffey saw that the car dismantlers were gone, just vanished into the night, the gang boys as well. The animal combat had displaced the rope so that the lighter dog hung about a foot above the cat, just out of reach, and both ropes swung gently together, enforcing a truce. The animals still wriggled now and then as the ropes swayed, but they seemed exhausted and resigned.
A khaki-colored open truck roared past up the hill packed with soldiers carrying automatic rifles at all angles. The soldiers looked little older than the gang members. One soldier craned his neck curiously at the dangling animals passing just at eye level. The truck skidded to a stop nearby, and an amplified voice from the truck barked orders to the community, then went on up the hill and repeated its commands farther up.
“A gringo is wanted for violating a little girl,” Fariborz translated softly for him. “He raped her viciously and then killed her. There is a reward. It’s you they describe.”
“Oh, wonderful!”
Fariborz went immediately to the locked door and spoke through it, then slid an American twenty halfway under the door. He talked some more, waggling the currency, and after a moment, the money disappeared. He came back and sat with his back against the pile of ¡Alarmas!
“Don’t worry. Nobody ever believes what the soldiers say. I told her you humiliated the lieutenant by kissing his wife in a cantina.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s something she can believe. I told her there was no reward from the army, but there was plenty more from us. She’s seen the color of our money, and she knows if she turns us in I’ll tell the soldiers she has it.”
Jack Liffey stared at the boy in wonder. “You don’t quite live in a pristine universe after all.”
He made a grim face. “Fear is always understandable, in everyone.”
“You’re way past recognizing an old woman’s fear. You used it. Bribery and blackmail.”
“I still see it as bad. But would you rather I hadn’t?”
“My daughter calls that portable ethics.” Jack Liffey grinned, but the boy was not amused by his own compromises.
They heard another commotion outside and went to their portholes. An army platoon was working its way slowly downhill, dropping soldiers off to each side to pound on doors and push inside. Several of them looked terribly earnest and intense—schoolboys doing their best at dress-up—but others carried their automatic rifles haphazardly, as if they hadn’t had the lessons yet. One soldier took note of the animals overhead, still swaying head-down and exhausted. The soldier rapped a companion’s shoulder with the back of his hand.
There was laughter, then exhortations and pointing. A few of the gravest round-faced, dark-eyed soldiers looked away, but most gathered at the spectacle. Jack Liffey heard the word piñata on the air and then an eruption of laughter. Two soldiers grabbed the arms of the shortest and darkest squaddie who carried only a short carbine and had a big old-fashioned radio strapped to his back. They dragged him toward the animals and somebody produced a bandanna and tied it over his eyes. Soon he had been relieved of the radio, and an NCO snatched away the carbine and reversed it to hand him the barrel end to use as a club.
The tallest soldier, a real beanpole recruit who would have been playing basketball anywhere else in the world, stepped on the locked hands of a comrade and boosted himself upward briefly to grab hold of the rope just above the dog. The renewed activity set both animals protesting as the tall soldier leapt to the ground, holding the dog out away from himself and then sawed the rope up and down to set the hapless cat bobbing up and down above the blindfolded soldier’s head. The cat quickly regained enough energy to complain shrilly and slash at the air.
Two troopers spun the blindfolded soldier around and turned him loose to flail at the space over his head with clumsy roundhouse swings of the rifle butt. The calls and cheering intensified and more soldiers descended the hill to watch. The world was not of a single moral opinion though, Jack Liffey noticed. About a third of the soldiers seemed embarrassed and disapproving and moved away with their backs turned.
“This is inexcusable,” Fariborz said softly.
Jack Liffey desperately wanted to turn away, too, but he felt he had to keep watch on the soldiers. He became aware of the pain in his hand—amazed he had forgot it for a few moments—and readjusted his position to get his hand back into the pan of water.
The blindfolded soldier seemed to be taking cues from the shouted directions of his comrades as his big swings with the rifle never strayed far from the cat. The cat itself seemed to sense that something dire was up and it began to loose mewls of terror, one burst after another. One swing clipped the cat’s paw and set the animal twirling with a shriek like a steam whistle. The dog was yipping now, too, and it tried to curl itself up to nip at the tall soldier who clung to the rope only a foot above the dog’s tail. The dog’s assault must have unnerved the soldier because he stopped yanking all at once, which left the cat in easy reach, and one off-balance lunge of the rifle caught the cat square on the head. There was a horrible thwop on the hot air like a hardball coming off a bat, and several soldiers ducked away from gouts of cat blood.
Jack Liffey’s stomach sank. For a moment the platoon seemed chastened by what they had done. The cat’s carcass hung limp, swinging in long pendulum sweeps to spatter blood in arcs across the road, but then they braved themselves up with new cries: “El perro! Ahorra el perro!”
A far whistle sounded and they looked uphill, warning one another, “Prisa!”
“El teniente!”
“Allah, please, not the dog, too,” Fariborz objected softly. “Leave the dog alone”
The beanpole grabbed the other end of the rope and began yanking the dog up and down. They spun the blindfolded man again and set him to flailing at the poor dog, which seemed to know what was happening and let out a terrified yip-yap-yip as it wriggled in desperation.
Miss him, miss him, miss him, Jack Liffey begged, but he could not look away. He had seen unpleasantness before, and usually the ugly images dimmed out with time, but he figured this one would probably stick.
The blindfolded soldier swung so hard he stumbled and fell to his knees, and they had to lift him to his feet. Anxious to get it over with, the beanpole lowered the dog into the regulation strike zone and they steadied the blindfolded man into a baseball stance. The dog noticed the ground so much closer and clawed toward it with its forepaws.
“Beisbol, beisbol,” they chanted. “Strike! Strike! Dodg-airs!”
The blindfolded soldier wound back and fidgeted the rifle over his shoulder for a moment like an old hand at the plate. When he brought the bat around and connected, it was only a glancing blow and so much more terrible for it. A soggy thud marked a swipe to the tiny dog’s hindquarters that slung it hard around the butt of the rifle to tangle in its rope. After a stunned instant, the dog emitted one howl that was much too loud for such a small animal. Then the officer came storming down the road, berating and cursing, waving his arms in the air. He was much older and had a bushy mustache and an air of great contempt. The troopers looked sheepish suddenly and backed away, and the tall soldier let go of the rope to leave the bewildered and blindfolded batter standing there alone with the tiny yelping dog strapped to the butt end of his rifle.
The officer drew a .45 automatic from a woven leather holster at his waist and put it against the dog’s head. Even as an act of mercy, the gunshot was intolerable in the night, a sacrilege. Much of the dog just disintegrated in a wet rain, and the blast echoed back and forth several times among the shacks. The officer shouted angrily and pointed around the compass to send the soldiers off on their duties. He stared sadly at the slack remains of the hind half of the little dog for a moment as if the officer might have been an animal lover in another life, and then he holstered the pistol and turned to stare straight at the house where they hid.
Jack Liffey felt an electric jolt go through him. Not only was the officer staring directly at their shed but the stocky soldier, the piñata breaker, was now unblindfolded and heading for their shack with a sense of purpose, as if he had a lot to make up for.
“Here,” Fariborz whispered. At his direction, they tugged the filthy mattress eight inches away from the wall and Jack Liffey wedged himself into the gap. His hand immediately began to throb, but there was no way now to keep it in the water. The young man tugged the reeking bedspread over him and lay on the bed himself to block any view of what lay in the gap.
They heard a hammering at the front door that was followed immediately by shouts. The old woman must have opened because they heard her and the soldier blustering back and forth. The building shook as heavy boots came inside. Jack Liffey felt a chill course through his limbs. He knew it was only the woman’s expectation of more American currency that stood between him and another experience of torture.
He heard the bolt on their inner door clatter, and the door squawked open, and then the soldier shouted into the room. Fariborz said two words very softly. The door slammed and after a while, the young man whispered, “It’s okay. The soldier was an idiot. I mean literally.”
“I’m petrified. Literally.”
“We’re all right now. The woman was good to us,” the young man said. “I’ll give her more money.”
Fariborz lifted the smelly bedspread off him, and Jack Liffey emerged slowly from his niche and thrust his hand into the pan of water. “Ooooh. I’ll pay you back when I can.”
“If you can sleep, we’ve got a couple more hours to kill.”
“Sleep?” His chest shuddered in an attempt at a laugh. “I doubt it. Even my karma is quaking in its boots.”
“How is your hand?”
“That, too.”