“I know. No responsible pet owner leaves an animal without someone around, and I can see you’re in a hurry. Very well, let me think,” Maite said and quoted the girl a higher rate than usual, which Leonora agreed to, grateful for Maite’s kindness.
Leonora handed Maite her apartment keys.
“Would you mind if I get your phone number?” the girl asked. “I…in case…the cat, you know. In case I need to communicate with you about the cat.”
So she was that kind of pet owner, the type who fussed about their little angel, calling them baby and darling and dressing them in ridiculous outfits. Maite had never particularly liked pets, except for her parakeet. Taking care of them simply gave her an extra source of income and allowed her the chance to purloin the personal items of their owners.
As she wrote down her number, Maite wondered what would be the first thing she’d steal from Leonora. She took great care in choosing her loot. It was never anything extravagant, anything people would notice, but it must always be something interesting.
The girl, still nervous about the cat, detained Maite with an explanation about the spot where she kept the cat food before departing.
Maite went back to the kitchen and grabbed her magazine. There was no doubt about it. Jorge Luis would be back; he’d wake up in an issue or two. Cheered by this thought, she walked into the spare room and looked through her records. She played Bobby Darin and let herself imagine that a dream lover was waiting for her.
That night Maite dreamed of drums in the jade-green jungle. But in the morning the view from her living room was still of a gray city, rooftops crammed with TV antennas, and there was no lover for her, no matter how much she hoped and prayed.
3
LAY LOW, THAT’Swhat El Mago said when he phoned. Elvis was utterly willing to comply, considering the big fuss people were making over the night of June tenth. Officially, nobody tied to the government was willing to admit there was such a thing as the Hawks, and some newspapers that toed the government line had pointed out the students were all commie agitators, which should have been enough to quiet the bitching. But other newspapers, and some folks—stupid protesters and their friends, and even a columnist or two who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut—were wagging their tongues, talking about brutes who had chased them down and even shot at them. It was getting messy.
To be honest, Elvis hadn’t expected this sort of attention. The Hawks regularly roughed up activists and dissolved suspicious small student meetings. The previous month a few Hawks had gone into a public high school and vandalized the library. No one really said a peep, or if they did, folks felt free to ignore the altercations.
But now it was all very delicate. People were printing names in clandestine circulars. Names like Alfonso Martínez Domínguez. Imagine that. He was the fucking regent of the city, not some low punk people could badmouth without consequence, but a fuckingregent. President Echeverría kept saying he didn’t know anything, and overall Elvis had the impression the whole damn thing had turned into a disaster. Too many people were asking too many fucking questions.
No wonder that El Mago had ordered them to stay inside the apartment as much as possible. This would have pleased El Elvis quite a bit normally, since it gave him a chance to go through his Larousse dictionary and listen to his records, but with El Gazpacho out of commission and in another location, it was El Güero and the Antelope keeping him company, which was the same as having two vultures watching over his shoulder.
They were salivating, those motherfuckers, waiting to whine and tell El Mago all the ways El Elvis had fucked up the other day. El Elvis, as a result, decided to put on his headphones and attempt to muffle his worries away with a bit of Bobby Darin; he was sticky sweet, but Elvis didn’t mind a crooner with a good set of pipes. Who didn’t fucking like “Beyond the Sea”?
Elvis wasn’t going back to Tepito. He wasn’t. Tepito was a bottomless pit, a fucking cesspool. There was no future there for him.
He’d left home at the age of fifteen. Two years before that, he had been expelled from school. For no good reason, either. Elvis liked to learn and he liked to read, but when it came to writing words down he often switched letters around, his handwriting was poor, and it took him a long time to get assignments done. It was as if the words all clogged inside his head and he had to carefully fish them out one by one.
Well, his teachers didn’t think too much of him. When Elvis vandalized a lavatory, it was deemed enough to kick him out, even though he knew that other kids did far worse and they never got expelled. It was just that his teachers were wanting to be rid of one of the “dumber” kids in the class. Real nice of them.
He didn’t enroll in another school after that. His mother had four children to look after and no patience for him, so she hit him with the mop and told him to find a job. Elvis couldn’t find a gig that was better than bagging groceries, so he fell in with one of the little gangs in the area for pocket money and for kicks. Everyone in this gang was about his age, and they didn’t do anything that was real bad, limiting themselves to harassing the maids when they did their shopping rounds. For cash, they threatened to throw rocks at the windows of shop owners in the area. Most of them paid up.
There was one exception: the owner of the Andorra Pharmacy had a son a few years older and a few centimeters taller than the kids in the gang, and he warned them he’d get his uncle—supposedly a policeman—involved if they tried anything. He also beat a couple of them when they hung out too close to his precious pharmacy.
It hadn’t been Elvis’s idea to retaliate. God knew he had better stuff to do than pick fights. But one of the kids in their gang was real pissy because the pharmacist’s son had given him a black eye, and he wanted revenge. So they banded together, waited for the kid to walk home one night, and beat him up. He was big, but against the combined power of half a dozen teenagers it was a tough fight, and tougher still when it turned out that the boy with the black eye had somehow seen fit to bring a rusty old piece of metal to the fight and stabbed the pharmacist’s son.
Fortunately, the pharmacist’s son didn’t die. Unfortunately, it turned out that his warnings about his policeman uncle were real. Within a day or two the word was out that the cops were looking for every little fucker who had participated in the attack.
Elvis wasn’t eager to go to jail or reformatory school or any fucking place with an angry policeman, so he hightailed it out of the city. He was fifteen and had little understanding of the world, but he had heard from another teen that San Miguel de Allende was full of tourists who wanted to get laid, and he thought what the hell.
He was right about the tourists, though getting laid was a bit more difficult since most of the gringitas in the town were looking for buff, big-dicked men to fuck, and Elvis was a slim teenager, not a dude cut out for pornos and horny girls’ fantasies. But if he managed to look forlorn they usually threw him a few pesos, and he scraped by.
When he met Sally things improved. She was an American lady who they said had a thing for youngsters and some sort of fetish for “authentic” Mexican culture. Elvis was in need of a place to stay and hot meals, so he traded his shoes for huaraches to tickle her brown meat fantasy. For a while it was fine. He did errands for her, took care of the plants in the house she rented, ate her pussy when she demanded it. In return, he had full access to her record collection and a room, a bathroom, and a TV, though no pocket money.
The record collection was the best part, truth be told. That’s how he’d picked the name Elvis, after listening to several records from the King. He thought there was a certain resemblance between the young Elvis and himself, so he bought a black leather jacket like the one the singer wore in one of his flicks. His real name was lousy, anyway, and he began playing a guitar Sally had hanging in the living room and never touched.
He liked Sally, which is why it came as a bit of a shock when he discovered she’d picked up some other guy—a little older than Elvis, but not much—who must have had a bigger cock or licked pussy better, then kicked Elvis out. Just like that, from one day to the next. Elvis had no problem calling it quits with the dame, but only after he sneaked back into the house, stole the money he knew she kept in a box, and also absconded with six vinyl records.
He did what any dumb kid with sudden riches would do: spend it at the pool halls around Guadalajara, which was his new home. Outside an ice cream parlor, while eating a nieve de mamey, he met Cristina, a girl about his age who ended up getting him involved with a weird little religious cult near Tlaquepaque.
Elvis was a fool for pretty women, and Cristina pulled him in like a damn vortex with her soft, soft voice and her even softer glances. By the point when she asked him if he didn’t want to go hang out with her friends in Tlaquepaque, Elvis couldn’t have cared if she went around Guadalajara suckering in and recruiting guys on the regular, which he later figured out she actually did.
Cristina led him to a shabby house with funny folks who dressed in white and talked about magic mushrooms, auras, and healing crystals. Many of them had come from Mexico City, where they met doing yoga around Parque Hundido, and they’d spent time at Real de Catorce and Huautla, like any middle-class wannabe hippie did, before they stumbled onto Jalisco. Their leader did nothing but fuck the pretty young women in the congregation, while the uglies and the men were sent to work around the farm the cult used as a base of operations.
It turned out their leader didn’t like modern music very much, insisting on playing records featuring wind chimes and gongs, which was the last straw. Elvis liked Cristina, maybe he even loved her, but not enough to stay around watching another dude plow her from behind while Elvis had to feed the chickens or shovel manure, all without the comfort of even a rock ’n’ roll song or two.
