Apex Book Company

Americans are all rich, even their dead. Pobrecito knows this because he spends the hottest parts of the days in the old Cementerio Americano down by the river. The water is fat and lazy while the pipes in the colonia drip only rust brown as the eyes Santa Marguerite. Their graves are of the finest marble, carved with photographs in some manner he does not understand, or wrought with sculpted angels that put the churches up the hill to shame. Some of the American dead even have little houses, tight boxes with broken doors that must have once contained great riches.

He sits within a drooping tree which fights with life, and watches the flies make dark, wiggling rafts out on the water. There are dogs which live in the broken-backed jet out in the middle of the current, eyes glowing from behind the dozens of little shattered oval windows. At night the dogs swim across the slow current and run the river banks, hunting in the colonia and up toward the city walls.

They are why he never sleeps in the Cementerio. That some of the dogs walk on two legs only makes them worse.

When he was very young, Pobrecito found a case of magazines, old ones with bright color pictures of men and women without their clothes. Whoever had made the magazines had an astonishing imagination, because in Pobrecito’s experience most people who fucked seemed to do it either with booze or after a lot of screaming and fighting and being held down. There weren’t very many ways he’d ever seen it gone after. The people in these pictures were smiling, mostly, and arranged themselves more carefully than priests arranging a corpse. And they lived in the most astonishing places.

Pobrecito clips or tears the pictures out a few at a time and sells them on the streets of the colonia. He knows the magazines themselves would just be taken from him, before or after a beating, but a kid with a few slips of paper clutched in his hand is nothing. As long as no one looks too closely. But even if he had a pass for the gates, he dares not take them within the walls, for the priests would hang him in the square.

What he loves most about the magazines is not the nudity or the fucking or the strange combinations and arrangements these people found themselves in. No, what he loves is that these are Americans. Beautiful people in beautiful places doing beautiful things together.

“I will be an American some day,” he tells his friend Lucia. They are in the branches of the dying tree, sharing a bottle of pulque and a greasy bowl of fried plantains in the midday heat. Pobrecito has a secret place up there, a hollow in the trunk where he hides most of his treasures.

The magazines are stored elsewhere, in a place he has never even shown to Lucia.

“You are an idiot,” she declares, glancing out at the airplane in the river. The American flag can still be seen on its tall tail, small and weathered. No one has gone out to paint it over, for fear of the dogs. “All Americans are dead,” she adds with prim authority.

Lucia is smaller than Pobrecito, though older. She is one of the menoriítas, born to be little. Though she is of an age to have breasts and make her bleedings, her body is smooth and slick as any young child’s. Pobrecito knows this because they often curl together to sleep, and she likes him to touch her as if she were a baby, rubbing his hand over her sides and back and pulling her to his chest. He has tried to use his fingers to do a few of the things seen in his pictures, but she is too small down there both before and behind, and complains of the hurt.

She has never offered to touch him.

Pobrecito shakes off that thought. “What is dead can be reborn. This is what the priests are always telling us.” He grins, mottled teeth flashing even in shadow. “I shall bleach my skin and hair like they did, and have a fine house filled with swimming pools and bright furniture. My automobiles will be colorful and shiny and actually have petrol.”

She laughs then and sets her shoulder against his chest, tucking her head into his neck, sucking on the neck of the pulque bottle in a way which makes him both warm and uncomfortable. He strokes her hair and dreams of distant, lost cities such as Los Angeles and Omaha.

That evening the folk of the colonia are upset. They surge through the muddy streets, even the day workers who should already be sleeping, and there is an angry mutter like bottle wasps swarming. Pobrecito even sees some weapons, knives dangling from hands, a few pistols tucked into belts. These are offenses of the worst order, to keep or carry weapons.

Pobrecito dodges booted feet and moves with the crowd, listening. He already knows he will sell no pictures tonight. Selling no pictures, he will not eat tomorrow. But he wants to understand what is wrong.

The crowd is speaking of priests.

“Girls, indeed.”

“…a scandal. And they use God’s name!”

“They wear those black dresses. Let them lie with one another.”

“Called them up there from a list. I tell you, I won’t allow my…”

“Hush! Do you want to hang?”

“A tax. How is this a tax?”

“Their time is coming. Soon.”

Pobrecito comes to understand. Girls are being taken away by the priests. To be used, he supposes, like the Americans in his pictures use each other. Will the girls of the colonia smile beneath the lusts of the priests? Surely they will be cleaned and fed and cared for. It is the priests in their walled city that hold all wealth, all power.

But eventually the anger melts into fatigue, and word comes that the guardia are on their way down to the colonia, and so the knives and pistols vanish and people trudge home, some of them weeping more than usual.

Over the weeks, a few more girls are called every few days, always the hale ones with good curves to their breasts. The guardia comes to collect them now, as the people are no longer willing to send their sisters and daughters up the hill simply because a summons came. There are beatings and a few quiet murders in which no priest-advocate will take any interest.

None of the girls come back.

In a few months’ time, some older women are called, and younger girls as well. They do not return, either. The colonia remains restless, but the crystallizing anger of the first night never quite reappears. There is always food to worry about, and the dogs from the river, and the clouds of flies and wasps which can strip a man’s skin in minutes, and the sicknesses which prowl, just as deadly if less visible.

And the heat.

It is always a little hotter. This has been the way of things all of Pobrecito’s life.

The vanishing girls and women are good for Pobrecito’s little business. Sad men and wild-eyed boys buy from him, paying him in dented cans of dog food or little bundles of yams or onions. Even a few of the old women seek him out, clucking and tutting like senile chickens draped in funeral black, wanting pictures “of a girl alone, none of your despicable filth, just something to remember her by.”

But he is becoming too well known, too rich. He has more food than he and Lucia can eat in a day, and even a few metal tools and some old bits of gold, which he hides in his tree by the river.
Is he rich enough to be an American yet? Pobrecito wonders

One day he makes his way into the Cementerio Americano carrying two books and an old bottle of wine he has been paid for a handful of pictures of three thin, yellow-haired women kissing each other. By habit Pobrecito keeps to the shadows, the edges of fences and tumbled walls, but also by habit he has made a path in and out of this place. He steps around the edge of a rotting shed which contains a flat-tired tractor and some large metal implements to find three of the guardia.

“Ah,” says Pobrecito, and reflexively offers them the wine. Perhaps it will save him from whatever is next. He doubts that, though.

The leader, for he has more decoration on his buttoned shoulder tabs, strokes the bright leather of his pistol belt for a moment, then smiles. It is a horrid sort of smile, something a man remembering an old photo he is trying to imitate might offer up. The other two do not bother. Instead they merely cradle a machete each, staring corpse-eyed at Pobrecito. All three of them are fat, their bellies bigger than their hips, unlike anyone in the colonia, except a few who are dying of growths in their guts.

No one takes the wine.

“You are the guardian of Lucia Sandoz, is it not true?” the leader asks.

This is not what Pobrecito expected. “Ah…no. She comes here sometimes.”

The leader consults a thin notebook, ragged with handling, pages nearly black with ink. “You are Pobrecito the street merchant, no address, of the colonia.”

“Yes.”

“Then you are the guardian of Lucia Sandoz. It says so here in my book, and so this must be a true thing.” His smile asserts itself again. “We have a summons for her.” All three guardia peer around, as if expecting her to fall from the sky. Pobrecito realizes this has become an old game for them.

“She is not mine,” he says to his feet. Not Lucia. “And besides,” he adds, “she is a menoriíta. She cannot be used in the manner of a woman.” Will this help?

They laugh, his tormentors, before one of the machete-carriers says, “How would you know if you hadn’t had her?”

The leader leans close. “She is clean, boy. That is enough these days.”

Then they beat him, using the flat of the machete blades and the rough toes of their boots. Pobrecito loses most of his left ear when a blade slips, and the palm of his hand is cut to the bone, but they stop before staving in his ribs or breaking any large bones.

“Find her,” says the leader. Pobrecito can barely hear him through the pain and blood in his ear. The guardia tears the pages of the books from their bindings, unzips, and urinates on the paper. Taking the wine bottle, he turns to leave. “Before tomorrow.”

Pobrecito does not waste time on crying. He stumbles to his tree, knowing there are some extra clothes there that he can use to bind his ear and his hand. There are so many sicknesses that come in through bloody cuts and sores — black rot, green rot, the red crust — and he fears them all.

Stumbling, eyes dark and head ringing, Pobrecito can barely climb his tree because his arms and legs hurt so much. When he reaches the branch, he sees that someone has been at his cache of riches and food. Guardia, dogs, it does not matter. The hollow in the trunk has been hacked open, made wide and ragged with an ax or a machete, and everything that is not gone is smashed or torn or broken. His riches are nothing but trash now.

“I will never be an American,” Pobrecito whispers. He lays his mutilated ear against the slashed palm of his hand, pressing them together to slow the bleeding and protect the wounds from insects. Despite the pain, he lays that side of his head against the branch and stretches out to surrender to the ringing darkness.