The Wild Boys Read Free Page A

get loose one day and turn the city into a cake.
    She looks up at Fernández and her sad brown eyes pelt him with chocolates. Tío Paco tries desperately to outflank her but she sprays him with maraschino cherries from her dugs and coats him in pink icing. Tío Paco is the little man on a wedding cake all made out of candy. She will eat him later.
    Now Tío Gordo, the blind lottery-ticket seller, rolls his immense bulk out onto the upper balcony, his wheel chair a chariot, his snarling black dog at his side. Thedog smells all the money Tío Gordo takes. A torn note brings an ominous growl, a counterfeit and it will break the man’s arm in its powerful jaws, brace its legs and hold him for the police. The dog leaps to the balcony wall and hooks its paws over barking, snarling, bristling, eyes phosphorescent. Tía María gasps and the sugar runs out of her. She is terrified of “rage dogs” as she calls them. The dog seems ready to leap down onto the lower balcony. Tío Mate plots the trajectory its body would take. He will kill it in the air.
    Tío Pepe throws back his head and howls:
    “Perro attropellado para un camión
.” (“Dog run over by a truck.”)
    The dog drags its broken hindquarters in a dusty noon street.
    The dog slinks whimpering to Tío Gordo.
    González the Agente wakes up muttering
“Chingoa
” the fumes of Mescal burning in his brain. Buttoning on his police tunic and forty-five he pushes roughly to the wall of the upper balcony.
    González is a broken dishonored man. All the
vecinos
know he has much fear of Tío Mate and crosses the street to avoid him. El Mono has acted out both parts.
    González looks down and there is Tío Mate waiting. The hairs stand up straight on González’s head.
    “CHINGOA.”
    He snatches out his forty-five and fires twice. The bullets whistle past Tío Mate’s head. Tío Mate smiles. In one smooth movement he draws aims and fires. The heavy slug catches González in his open mouth ranging up through the roof blows a large tuft of erect hairs out the back of González’s head. González folds across thebalcony wall. The hairs go limp and hang down from his head. The balcony wall begins to sway like a horse. His forty-five drops to the lower balcony and goes off.
    Shot breaks the camera. A frozen still of the two balconies tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle. González still draped over the wall sliding forward, the wheel chair halfway down the upper balcony, the dog slipping down on braced legs, the
vecinos
trying to climb up and slipping down.
    “GIVE ME THE SIXTEEN.”
    The cameraman shoots wildly … pimps scream by teeth bare eyes rolling, Esperanza sneers down at the Mexican earth, the fat lady drops straight down her pink skirts billowing up around her, Tía Dolores sails down her eyes winking sweet and evil like a doll, dog falls across a gleaming empty sky.
    The camera dips and whirls and glides tracing vultures higher and higher spiraling up.
    Last take: Against the icy blackness of space ghost faces of Tío Mate and El Mono. Dim jerky faraway stars splash the cheek bones with silver ash.
Tío Mate smiles
.

The Chief Smiles
    Marrakech 1976 … Arab house in the Medina charming old pot-smoking Fatima drinking tea with the trade in the kitchen. Here in the middle of a film to find myself one of the actors. The Chief has asked me to his house for dinner.
    “Around Eight Rogers.”
    He received me in his patio mixing a green salad thick steaks laid out by the barbecue pit.
    “Help yourself to a drink Rogers.” He gestures to the drink wagon.
    “There’s kif of course if you want it.”
    I mixed myself a short drink and declined the kif.
    “It gives me a headache.”
    I’d seen the Chief smoking with his Arab contacts butthat didn’t give me a license to smoke. Besides it does give me a headache.
    The Chief’s cover story is an eccentric old French
comte
who is translating the Koran into Provencal and sometimes he will pull cover and bore his