In the heat of the day a mule stumbled into the pueblo with a corpse slung across its saddle. It made its way towards the shadow of Francisco’s house and stopped there as if it were about to collapse. It stood for some time, until a woman came out of the house and seeing the mule and its burden rushed back inside. She returned with a man who approached the beast cautiously. The body, he observed, was a male, of about his own age. It was lying face-down with its head on the farther side of the animal, the boots hanging loosely in front of him, like a puppet’s. The shirt had ridden up and the skin of the midriff was sunburnt. Francisco could see a mark slightly to the right towards the base of the spine. Close-up, it looked like a tattoo. Some kind of creature. A salamander.
Three flies were buzzing about the burro’s ear, and it twitched uncertainly. Together, the man and the woman dragged the body down and into the house. The mule remained still—as if it had no further part in the story.
The corpse was not yet stiff. They rolled it over on the flagstones of the kitchen, and it opened its eyes. The woman jumped back and screamed. And then she fainted. A moment nonplussed, Francisco came to his senses and brought water to his wife. Then he turned to the man, whose eyes were again closed. He offered the pot to the man’s lips and the water dribbled down his cheek, collecting in a pool by his right ear. The woman, Ana, lay propped against the wall, her face pale as the daytime moon.
‘It is my brother,’ she said.
When she was sufficiently recovered, they got him to their bed, and moistened his lips again. By evening he was sitting up, though he said nothing. When Ana gave him to understand that she would send for a doctor or a paramedic, he shook his head and looked fearful. At this Francisco was relieved: without insurance they lived from day to day and from hand to mouth. There was a grubby bandage round the man’s head which Ana unwound tenderly, revealing a long gash on the left temple—the track of a bullet.
‘Raoul!’ she murmured, bathing his face.
For a week he said no word, but sat in the corner drinking soup and staring at the trapezium of light that fell through the doorway. Gradually he began to talk again. Grunts at first, to indicate when he needed Francisco to help him to the bathroom, then observations about the heat or the noises outside. Finally, at meal times, he began to reveal snippets of what had happened. He had been executed by the Brotherhood, somewhere up in the chaparral, and somehow he had risen from the dead. In the madness of the day he met a man on the road who put him on the back of his mule. Beyond that, he remembered nothing.
The Brotherhood believed he had betrayed them. There was an ambush across the border, and a gun-battle which Raoul escaped. Two of the comrades who were with him had been killed. He protested innocence, but the Brotherhood had lost face. Raoul’s job was to take people to the safe crossing-places, to act as a guide. The poorest were asked to carry with them the black heroin that would pay for their passage: their passport to a better life. The tattoo was an axolotl, symbol of Xolotl, god of fire and lightning, the Brotherhood’s badge. If you joined them, you joined for life.
When he was well enough, Raoul slept on a makeshift bed in the kitchen and Francisco and Ana returned to their room. In the mornings he would climb the outside ladder and sit in the sun on the parapet of the roof, shaving. Clean-shaven, he said, he would not be recognised. He was inclined to whistle whenever he moved from room to room or came in from the outside. Usually it was a bar or two of the theme from The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, and it wasn’t long before the whistling began to grate on Francisco’s nerves.
‘When will he go?’ Francisco asked one night as he and Ana lay in a cage of moonlight.
‘How can he leave?’ she replied. ‘He’s safe in the pueblo. No-one comes here. If he goes to the city the Brotherhood will track him down.’
And Raoul made himself useful about the house, helping with the meals and with the summer whitewashing. Sometimes he took Francisco’s rifle, unchained Francisco’s dog, and they went off together into the brush to shoot jack-rabbits. The dog, Fargo, appeared to enjoy the excursions and wagged his tail in the dust whenever Raoul walked by.
In the end, Francisco confided the situation to his work-mate, Alejandro. They were cleaning a swimming-pool at a big house on the edge of town.
‘What would you do?’ he asked as they hauled the cover back across the rocking surface of the pool. Alejandro ruminated, and rubbed his hand through his hair.
Finally he said: ‘I would tell him go. This is my house. A man must be master in his own house.’
When Francisco got home in the pick-up that afternoon, he found Raoul and three of the old men from the pueblo sitting round the table they’d dragged outside to a spot in the shade. They were playing poker and laughing. Raoul sat with a big stack of matches arranged on the table in front of him.
‘I raise you five!’ he grinned, sliding the matches forward as he looked up at Francisco. One of the old men had brought beers. The ancient guys were having a high old time.
In the night, Francisco would reach out for Ana. Her head lay smooth on the pillow, the dark plait curling behind it. Francisco had never consciously thought it, but he was deeply in love with her shape, her ears especially. Her ears were moulded perfectly, delicate and girlish. But Ana lay still, her head turned to the whitewashed wall. He kissed it gently and slipped his hand under her nightshirt. She pushed it away.
Francisco lay back in the almost-black. The stars in the square of the window were further than light years away.
Deliberately loudly, he said: ‘One day soon, Ana, maybe we’ll have a baby.’
Ana sat up on an elbow and whispered angrily. ‘Francisco! How can we? How can we now?’
* * *
After four months Francisco began to fray. At work he was dropping things, swearing at Alejandro. At home he was moody and silent. Raoul seemed oblivious. He carried on laughing with the old men, killing snakes, climbing up to the roof to view the sunsets. When the meal was finished one night, Francisco took the keys of the pick-up, and saying nothing drove off to the house of the prostitute Rosita.
Rosita had one small room in an apartment. For convenience, she wore nothing but a brown shift which she hauled over her head. She lay back on the bed and spread her legs. Francisco approached her like a penitent. He knelt and buried his face in the tangle of black above her vulva. Her scent was rich and feral. He felt himself rising fiercely. Rosita took him in hand, and he cried out like an animal when his seed spilt across her belly and onto the mottled sheet beneath them.
As he drove home, Francisco stopped by a scrubby tree—or what passed for a tree in those parts. He pulled out the tow-rope from the back of the pick-up and looked at the tree. Neither of the main branches would bear his weight, and besides, it was nowhere tall enough. Weakly, he clambered back behind the wheel. His shame was deep and all-pervasive. He had damaged some clean part of himself, and that part, he knew, belonged to Ana. For him, Ana was woman. He could have no other. When he crept in, guilty, like a dog that has taken chickens, she was in bed, lying as usual with her face turned to the wall.
In the morning he woke with a heavy head. Raoul was on the roof, shaving and whistling to the sunrise. Francisco went out through the kitchen, taking the meat-knife as he passed. Without sound, he climbed the wooden stair toward the parapet. Raoul was stripped to the waist, unaware of him, with his back to the steps. The mirror stood propped at an angle. He’d put on weight. There is nothing more solid than a happy man. As Francisco came close he could see the tattoo—just above the belt-line. The axolotl smiled its inscrutable smile. From its tether in the shade of the house, the mule brayed.