rich, enano,” Zopilote said.
“Who’s talking to you, pinche puto?”
“It’s a free country, no, güey?”
“So I’m free to break your face?”
Zopilote laughed. “You and what army, pendejo?”
Mosca stepped back and raised his fists. “Bring it on.”
I’d been friends with Mosca since the second grade. I’d never seen him back down from a fight. Most of the time he won, but sometimes he lost. He wasn’t a troublemaker. But for some reason, maybe because he was short or just because he was Mosca, people liked to pick on him.
“Come on.” I grabbed his arm. “I’ve wasted enough time here.”
“No, Boli.” Zopilote set his beer bottle on the ground. “Let him try, see how he likes it.”
We walked away.
“Chicken.”
We stopped. “Watch out,” I said. “I’ll let him go.”
Zopilote raised his fists. “I’m not afraid of him.”
“Just pray I don’t find you walking alone when Boli’s not there to save your ass,” Mosca said.
“I didn’t ask him for help.” Zopilote curled his fingers and waved his hand in an obscene gesture. “Mocos güey.”
Mosca tore away from me and charged. Zopilote’s face twisted. He jumped back. Mosca stopped and laughed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, cabrón.”
“Guess what?” Mosca said as we walked away. “They put up new posters for the feria announcing the wrestling.”
“For real?”
“They’re all over the wall of the old brick factory.”
“So who’s coming?”
“El Zorrillo de León, Subministro Fox, Ruddy Calderón. And guess who else?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“El Hijo del Santo!”
“Bullshit.”
Mosca crossed his thumb over his index finger and kissed it.
Last year at the fair, the wrestling matches had been a joke.
All the wrestlers were nobodies, amateurs from the provinces. But now it was not only El Zorrillo de León, but also Ruddy Calderón. And El Hijo del Santo. That was huge. He was the last of the good guys. A real luchador. A legend just like his father Santo, el enmascarado de plata, the silver-masked wrestler.
“But there’s one thing.” Mosca grabbed my arm. “The tickets are super expensive.”
“With a lineup like that, they gotta be like a million pesos, no?”
We turned the corner. A group of boys was running up the street. It was Raúl Guerrero and three other boys from the elementary school.
“What do you think’s up with them?” Mosca asked.
“They probably want to play you for the devil’s fire,” I said.
“Yeah, they wish.”
They stopped in front of the butcher shop where Raúl’s uncle worked. Two butchers came out on the sidewalk, their white aprons covered in blood. Raúl pointed to where he’d come from. One of the men nodded and gestured toward the plaza and went back into the shop. Raúl and the boys ran up the sidewalk and crossed the street to meet us.
“We found a body,” Raúl said. He was panting and out of breath.
Mosca shoved him. “Liar.”
Raúl crossed himself. “I swear to God.”
Mosca and I looked at each other. We had to be thinking the same thing: the body of el profe Quintanilla.
“We’re on our way to get Pineda,” one of the boys said.
I grabbed Raúl’s arm. “Where is it?”
He pointed east. “The Flats. In the weeds right before you get to the dump.”
Mosca and I ran as fast as we could. The dump was just outside town at the end of a long field where we played soccer and where they set up the feria and the circus whenever they came to town.
The dump was always smoldering, but there were never any flames, just a long line of whitish smoke that rose like a thin string up to the sky. Most of the time the wind blew the stink away from town. But when there was no wind or in winter when the wind swept up from the east, they could smell the rot all the way to the top of Santacruz where Mosca lived.
The field was deserted except for a few dozen vultures and crows pecking at scraps and circling the sky over the dump. By the dry weeds, a pack of stray dogs growled and barked at each other.
We made our way across the dusty field. The dogs raised their heads, waited, then scampered away, their tails between their legs.
It was not the body of Enrique Quintanilla. It was a woman. She was lying face down. And she was naked. She was missing the fingers of her right hand—just had five red stumps with white bits of bone at the end. But there was no blood. It must have been what the dogs were biting at. She had long black hair. Her skin was pale and tight against her swollen body. It had a weird shine to it like oil. Flies were crawling all over her back and ass and between her legs. It stank of rotten eggs and shit.
It was the first time either of us had ever seen a naked woman. We just stood there, hands over our nose and mouth, staring at the strange nakedness, at her ass and arms and her wide thighs.
“She’s…dead, right?”
I nodded, but I really had no idea.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We were breathing fast, sweating, staring.
“You think we should turn her over?”
“What about Pineda?”
A group of men and women were heading toward us from the row of small wood and cardboard houses that lined the field. The dogs kept watch from a short distance, waiting.
I don’t know if it was because the woman was naked or because she was dead or if it was the foul stench of rot that mixed with the burning trash that came and went with the breeze, but suddenly I realized something really ugly was happening. A fire burned in my throat. This wasn’t like when we found el profe Quintanilla’s head. This was worse.
Just as the group arrived and gathered around the body, Captain Pineda’s little Chevy turned off the road and bounced
