2666 (48 page)

In
the third round Garcia left the ring and Omar Abdul stepped up. The kid was
bare chested but he hadn't taken off his warm-up pants. His movements were much
quicker than those of the Mexican fighter, and he dodged away easily when
Merolino tried to corner him, although it was clear that the fighter and his
sparring partner had no intention of hurting each other. Every so often they
would talk, while still moving, and laugh.

"You
off in
Costa Rica
?"
Omar Abdul asked him. "Come on, baby, open your eyes."

Fate
asked the reporter what the fighter was saying.

"Nothing,"
said the reporter, "all the son of a bitch knows are curse words."

After three rounds the trainer stopped the fight and disappeared
into the house, followed by Merolino.

"The
masseur is waiting for them," said the reporter.

"Who
is the masseur?" asked Fate.

"We
haven't seen him, I think he never comes out into the yard, he's a blind guy,
you know, he was born blind, and he spends all day in the kitchen eating, or in
the bathroom shitting, or lying on the floor in his room reading books for
blind people, in that blind people's language, what's it called?"

"Braille,"
said the other reporter.

Fate
imagined the masseur reading in a dark room and a shudder passed through him.
It must be something like happiness, he thought. At the watering trough, Garcia
dumped a bucket of cold water on Omar Abdul's back. The fighter from
California
winked at
Fate.

"What
did you think?" he asked.

"Not bad," said Fate, to be nice, "but I get the
feeling Pickett's in better condition."

"Pickett's
a punk," said Omar Abdul.

"Do
you know him?"

"I've
seen him fight on TV
a
couple times. Motherfucker doesn't know how to move."

"Well,
I guess I've never actually seen him," said Fate.

Omar
Abdul stared at him in astonishment.

"You've
never seen Pickett fight?" he asked.

"No,
the truth is the boxing guy at my magazine died last week and since we didn't
have anyone else, they sent me."

"Put
your money on Merolino," said Omar Abdul after a moment of silence.

"Good
luck," said Fate before he left.

The
ride back seemed shorter. For a while he followed the rear lights of the
reporters' car, until he saw them park outside a bar when they were back on the
paved streets of Santa Teresa. He pulled up next to them and asked what the
plan was. We're getting something to eat, said one of the reporters. Although
he wasn't hungry, Fate agreed to come for a beer. One of the reporters, Chucho Flores,
worked for a local paper and radio station. The other one, Angel Martinez Mesa,
who had rung
t
he bell when they were at the ranch, worked for a
Mexico City
sports paper.
Martinez Mesa was short and must have been around fifty. Chucho Flores was only
a little shorter than Fate. He was thirty-five and he was always smiling. The
relationship between Flores and Martinez Mesa, Fate sensed, was that of
grateful disciple and largely indifferent master. And yet Martinez Mesa's
indifference seemed less a matter of arrogance or any sense of superiority than
of exhaustion, an exhaustion that showed even in his disheveled clothing, a
stained suit and scuffed shoes, while his disciple wore a designer suit and
designer tie and gold cuff links and possibly saw himself as a man of style. As
the Mexicans ate grilled meat with fried potatoes, Fate thought about Garcia's
tattoo. Then he compared the loneliness of the ranch to the loneliness of his
mother's apartment. He thought about her ashes, which were still there. He
thought about the dead neighbor. He thought about Barry Seaman's neighborhood.
And everywhere his memory alighted as the Mexicans ate seemed bleak.

After they dropped Martinez Mesa off at the Sonora Resort,
Chucho Flores insisted on going out for a last drink. There were several
reporters at the bar, among them a few Americans Fate would've liked to talk
to, but Chucho Flores had other plans. They went to a bar on a narrow street in
the center of Santa Teresa, a bar with walls painted fluorescent colors and a
zigzagging bar. They ordered whiskey and orange juice. The bartender knew
Chucho Flores. The man looked more like the owner than a bartender, thought
Fate. His movements were brusque and commanding, even when he began to dry
glasses with the apron tied around his waist. And yet he wasn't very old,
twenty-five at most, and Chucho Flores, who was busy talking to Fate about
New York
and reporting in
New York
, didn't pay him much attention.

"I'd
like to go live there," confessed Chucho Flores, "and work for some
Hispanic radio station."

"There
are lots of them," said Fate.

"I
know, I know," said Chucho Flores, as if he'd already done plenty of
research, and then he mentioned names of two stations that broadcast in
Spanish, stations Fate had never heard of before.

"So
what's the name of your magazine?" asked Chucho Flores.

Fate
told him, and after thinking awhile, Chucho Flores shook his head.

"I don't know it," he said, "is it big?"

"No, it isn't big," said Fate, "it's a
Harlem
magazine, if that means anything to you."

"No,"
said Chucho Flores, "it doesn't."

"It's
a magazine where the owners are African American and the editor is African
American and almost all the reporters are African American," said Fate.

"Really?"
asked Chucho Flores. "Can you do objective reporting that way?"

It was then that Fate realized Chucho Flores was a little drunk.
He thought about what he'd just said. In fact, he didn't really have any basis
to claim that
almost
all the reporters were black. He had seen only
African Americans at the office, although of course he didn't know the
correspondents. Maybe there was some Chicano in
California
, he thought. Or maybe in
Texas
. But it also
seemed likely that there was
no one
in
Texas
,
because otherwise why send him from
Detroit
and
not give the job to the person in
Texas
or
California
?

Some
girls came up to say hello to Chucho Flores. They were dressed for a night out,
in high heels and club clothes. One of them had bleached blond hair and the
other one was very dark, quieter and shy. The blonde said hello to the
bartender and he nodded back, as if he knew her well and didn't trust her.
Chucho Flores introduced Fate as a famous sportswriter from
New York
. Fate chose that moment to tell the
Mexican that he wasn't really a sports reporter, he covered political and
social issues, which Chucho Flores found very interesting. After a while
another man showed up and was introduced by Chucho Flores as the biggest film
buff south of the
Arizona
border. His name was Charly Cruz, and with a big smile he told Fate not to
believe a word Chucho Flores had said. He owned a video store and in his line
of work he had to watch lots of movies, but that was all, I'm no expert, he
said.

"How
many stores do you have?" Chucho Flores asked him. "Go on, tell my
friend Fate."

"Three,"
said Charly Cruz.

"The
dude is loaded," said Chucho Flores.

The
girl with bleached blond hair was Rosa Mendez, and according to Chucho Flores,
she had been his girlfriend. She had also been Charly Cruz's girlfriend and now
she was dating the owner of a dance hall.

"That's
Rosita," said Charly Cruz, "that's just the way she is."

"What
way is that?" Fate asked.

In not very good English the girl answered that she liked
to have fun. Life is short, she said, and then she was quiet, looking back and
forth between Fate and Chucho Flores, as if reflecting on what she'd just said.

"Rosita
is a little bit of a philosopher, too," said Charly Cruz.

Fate
nodded his head. Two other girls came up to them. They were even younger and
they knew only Chucho Flores and the bartender. Fate calculated that neither of
them could be over eighteen. Charly Cruz asked him if he liked Spike Lee. Yes,
said Fate, although he didn't really.

"He seems Mexican," said Charly Cruz.

"Maybe,"
said Fate. "That's an interesting way to look at it."

"And what about Woody Allen?"

"I
like him," said Fate.

"He
seems Mexican too, but Mexican from
Mexico City
or
Cuernavaca
,"
said Charly Cruz.

"Mexican
from
Cancun
," said Chucho Flores.

Fate
laughed, although he had no idea what they were talking about. He guessed they
were making fun of him.

"What
about Robert Rodriguez?"

"I
like him," said Fate.

"That
shithead is one of ours," said Chucho Flores.

"I
have a movie on video by Robert Rodriguez," said Charly Cruz, "a
movie hardly anyone has ever seen."

"El Mariachi?"
asked Fate.

"No,
everybody's seen that one. An earlier one, from when Robert Rodriguez was a
nobody. When he was just a piss-poor Chicano motherfucker. A fuckup who took
any gig he could get," said Charly Cruz.

"Let's
sit down and you can tell us the story," said Chucho Flores.

"Good
idea," said Charly Cruz. "I was getting tired of standing."

The story was simple and implausible. Two years before he shot
El
Mariachi,
Robert Rodriguez took a trip to
Mexico
. He spent a few days
wandering along the Texas-Chihuahua border and then he went south, to
Mexico City
, where he
spent his time drinking and getting high. He sank so low, said Charly Cruz,
that he would go into a
pulqueria
before noon and leave only when it was
closing and they kicked him out. In the end, he was living in a bordello or a
brothel or a whorehouse, where he got to be friends with a whore and her pimp,
a guy who went by the name El Perno, which for a pimp was like being called the
Penis or the Cock. This Perno guy hit it off with Robert Rodriguez and was a
good friend to him. Sometimes he had to drag him up to the room where he
s
lept. Other times he and the whore had to
undress him and put him in the shower, because Robert Rodriguez was always
passing out. One morning, one of those rare mornings when the future movie
director was half sober, the pimp told him he had some friends who wanted to
make a movie and asked whether he could shoot it. Robert Rodriguez, as you
might imagine, said sure thing, and El Perno took care of the practical
d
etails.

The
shooting lasted three days, it seems, and Robert Rodriguez was always drunk and
high when he got behind the camera. Naturally, his name doesn't appear in the
credits. The director is listed as Johnny Swiggerson, which is obviously a
joke, but if you know Robert Rodriguez's movies, the way he frames a scene, his
takes and overhead shots, his sense of speed, there's no doubt it's his work.
The only thing missing is his personal editing style, which makes it clear the
film was edited by someone else. But he's the director, that much I'm sure of.

Fate wasn't interested in Robert Rodriguez or the story of
his first film, first or last, he couldn't care less, and also he was starting
to feel like eating some dinner or having a sandwich and then going to bed at
the motel and getting some sleep, but still he had to hear scraps of the plot,
a story of whores who gave wise advice or maybe they were just whores with
hearts of gold, especially a whore called Justina, who, for reasons that escaped
him but weren't too hard to figure out, was acquainted with some vampires in
Mexico City who roamed at night disguised as policemen. He ignored the rest of
the story. As he and the dark-haired girl who had come with Rosita Mendez were
kissing, he heard something about pyramids, Aztec vampires, a book written in
blood, the inspiration for
From Dusk Till Dawn,
the recurring nightmare
of Robert Rodriguez. The girl with dark hair didn't know how to kiss. Before he
left he gave Chucho Flores the phone number of the motel where he was staying
and then he stumbled out to where he had parked the car.

As he was opening the car door he heard someone ask if he felt all
right. He took a deep breath and turned around. Chucho Flores was ten feet away
with the knot of his tie loosened and his arm around Rosa Mendez.
Rosa
was looking at Fate as if he were some kind of
exotic specimen, what kind? he didn't know, but he didn't like the look in
h
er eye.

"I'm
fine," he said, "there's no problem."