The Surf Guru (9 page)

On the day of the Festival, I close the stand early so I can visit Rubén before the run. As I pack away my stock, I sense someone nearby watching me and I look up. I do not know if it is the heat or the hangover or my bad eyes, but for an instant I see Ysela standing hand in hand with her mother. But no, it is my daughter, alone.

She holds out a pair of eyeglasses. “I found them among Mamá's things,” she says. “I think they're yours.”

“Perhaps,” I say, although I know they are.

My eyesight has gotten worse, but the old lenses work well enough. The gallows in the square comes into focus. I feel my eyes shift again, and now I can see all the way to the east gate. I turn to Ysela, and I see thin, shallow wrinkles in her forehead that I have never noticed before. It makes me sad, to see my daughter look as if she worries so much. But she has chosen the path she has chosen. I cannot blame myself.

She is biting her lip again. “You know I have made a lot of money,” she says. She waits for me to nod before she continues. “I want you to visit Mamá tomorrow. There is a surprise for both of you.”

Her name
, I think. Her name, the way it should be, the way she would have wanted it. I feel like dropping this crate and running to the cemetery now. But then I think: San Humberto would frown on such a tainted monument. He would curse it.

“No,” I say.

She looks surprised. “It is a gift,” she says. “For both of you.”

“I do not want your mother's grave defiled by whore money,” I tell her.

The slap hits me before I see her arm move. My eyeglasses, bent, hang from one ear. Ysela clenches her teeth and shakes with anger. “You haven't changed,” she says. “You'll never change.” She grabs an overripe mango and heaves it into the wall behind me. Pieces of the fruit spatter on the back of my head and neck.

“I have told Lars I am finished working for him,” she says. “I am going to be the new schoolteacher.”

My voice is louder than I intend. “What can you teach children? How to shame their fathers?”

She stomps away, then stops in the middle of the road. “You think you are San Humberto Himself !” she shouts. “You are not! You are an old and drunken fruit vendor, not a saint and not a father!”

I want to go after her, but I do not know what I would say. I put on the glasses again and see that people have come out onto the road to stare. I take the glasses off. I cannot watch them watching me.

I sit on an empty crate and bite into a lime. The sour juice floods my mouth. I bite again, and again. I bite, I sit, and I stare straight ahead at nothing. I do not even blink when Lars's monkey snatches the fruit out of my hand and runs away, tittering.

 

 

I am dry-throated and dripping with sweat when I get to Rubén's tree. My pulse drums in my ears. I sit on a flat mossy rock and stare up into the branches, but I can see no shadow, hear no movement. The only sound is the shrill cry of a chachalaca defending its nest. I wait, trying to think of what to say. It is difficult. I feel it has been years since I have said the right thing to anyone—not even to the saint, in my prayers. Finally, this comes out: “Rubén, I do not speak to you as your father but as a man. I am sorry for all I have done and all I have failed to do.”

The apples fly. I close my eyes and let them find their marks. When I arrive home, I count the new bruises. Seventeen in all. One for each year of my son's life.

 

 

It is time. The last traces of sunset have disappeared and the gallows is lit only by the flickering torches on the roofs. We are all gathered in the square, packed in tightly, breathing on each other. I look through the crowd for Rubén, hoping, but I do not see him. It occurs to me that I might not recognize him if he were here. Would he have a beard? Would he be taller than I am? Would he be thin and weak from a diet of apples and insects? My heart drums. I feel feverish. I cannot find Vargas, either. I do not want to be here, alone in this crowd.

A young man climbs up the frame of the gallows and leans out over the crowd, holding on with one hand. This is Urrieta, who runs Lars's cochineal farm and likes to brawl in the bar. He pumps his free hand in a fist. “Give us the bandit!” he shouts. “Give us the bandit!” A twisted, gap-toothed grin spreads across his face as the crowd takes up the chant. I see Lars standing on the terrace of the hotel that overlooks the square, shouting along, beating the railing with his fists, while one of his youngest whores runs a comb through his yellow beard and the monkey bounces and screeches. Ysela is on the terrace with them, but she stands apart from them, scanning the crowd with her arms folded over her chest. I wonder if she is looking for me.

The door to the police station opens, but no one comes outside.

Underneath the shouts I hear Vargas's voice and his heavy breathing, coming closer. “Pardon me. Pardon me. Pardon me.” He pushes his way into the space beside me. He is covered in sweat and dirt. He wipes his forehead, leaving a streak of clean.

“Where have you been?” I ask him.

“I had to bury Ayala right away, before the hyenas are set free. I did not want—”

“Ayala is dead?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“El Gris strangled him through the bars.”

“Ah,” I say. “One last kill. The demon-bandit could not resist.”

“No,” Vargas says. “Ayala begged him.”

“Then may San Humberto have mercy on Ayala's soul,” I say. “He did not deserve to be buried.” I find myself getting angry.
Why should Ayala get away so easily when the rest of us have to stay here and hurt?

“Do you want to know what I think?” Vargas says quietly, with his head down. “I think it was an act of kindness.” When he lifts his head, I see tears in his eyes. He wipes them away with his fat, callused fingers and suddenly I feel very old and lost. Living was so much easier long ago—when husbands and wives stayed together, when children respected their parents, when blond strangers did not control our town, when we had nothing to fear but the infrequent visits of El Gris.

The crowd quiets as the white-haired monsignor walks slowly out of the police station and up the wood-plank steps that lead to the gallows. Swinging a censer, he chants San Humberto's Creed in the old sacred tongue. He leads us all in the Gestures of the Sacred Bones. The Festival has begun.

The mayor follows in the monsignor's path, and then the chief of police and his two sergeants. El Gris emerges from the station and plods ahead, flanked by two officers who guide him forward. His hands are shackled behind his back. He does not look so fearsome now that they have shaved his head; he looks tired, spent. Still, the crowd gasps and
ooohs
and
aaahs
, just as they did when they saw Madalena—my wife—walk down the aisle of the cathedral in the emerald-green wedding dress Lars bought her.

Vargas nudges me. “If I were in charge, I would not have cut off his hair,” he says. “His name no longer fits. What is he now? He is nothing.”

El Gris is surrounded by policemen on the long scaffold. One of them is young Séptimo, who played with Ysela when they were children. There have been several nights when Séptimo has woken me up in the street and walked me home. He is kind and polite, not yet corrupted by age and money and other people.

This is what I imagine: El Gris jumping down from the gallows, catching a pistol thrown to him by a comrade hidden within the crowd, then running to a ready horse, his gun blasting away and streaking the air with lead, the police awestruck and fumbling. A stray bullet ripping through both Lars and the monkey in his arms, and the two of them tumbling from the terrace and landing, twisted, in the dirt. The mare's hoofbeats resonating in my chest as she speeds El Gris to safety outside the walls of our corrupted city.

Perhaps I am the one who will throw him that gun.

But El Gris makes no move to escape. He stands still while Séptimo, on the chief 's command, tightens the noose around his neck. The mayor motions for quiet. “As San Humberto punished evil, so we punish evil in His name. Before you is the infamous outlaw El Gris. Countless people have tried to bring him to justice and have failed. But we have succeeded, we, the citizens of Ciudad San Humberto, especially our good friend Lars Jarlssen and the young and beautiful Ysela María Rivera de los Pozos.”

Ysela?
I think as the crowd roars approval.
What have I missed?

El Gris looks up at my daughter and fixes his eyes on her, as if he wants her to be the last thing he sees. It is possible that his lips move, but I cannot see clearly. As Séptimo reaches for the lever, Vargas squeezes his eyes shut. So do I. First there is silence. Then I hear the trapdoor slap and the rope jerk taut, and then the wood creaking as the bandit swings, dead, and the voices of the city rising all around me.

Years ago, when Ysela was a little girl, I explained the Festival to her like this:
First we impose justice as the Great Codex demands. After the hanging, we divide into four groups and wait at each of the gates for hyenas to be let in. At the sound of the gun, they run, and we run ahead of them. We act as their guides. We lead them to the dead man, and then we watch with joy from high above.

Why?
2

Couldn't they find the dead man themselves?
she asked.
Couldn't they smell him?

That is not the point
, I said.
Someday you will understand.

 

 

 

We are gathered together in front of the west gate, waiting for the signal. Jugs of dragonfruit wine are passed through the crowd. People drink quickly, in equal parts celebration and fear. Someone says the rabid ones are behind the south gate this year. Someone else says no, they are here behind the west gate, Zorrillo himself told him so. There is still no sign of Rubén.

I look down the road toward the square; though the sky has darkened, I believe I can make out the shape of El Gris's body, swaying slightly at the end of the rope. I can hear the hyenas in their cages outside the gate, snarling, throwing themselves against the bars that confine them. I hear teeth on metal, and I realize that I am very frightened, frightened of the hyenas, of Lars, of the people around me. I am frightened that I will never see my son again, frightened that I will never again be a father to Ysela. I am becoming an old man and I am frightened of myself. The more I have learned, the more frightened I have become. The strength leaks from my tired, bruised legs. I drink a large mouthful from a jug but it does not wash away the fear. “I want to go home,” I tell Vargas. “I am too tired to run.”

A pistol fires from behind the gate. “Too late,” Vargas shouts. He throws the jug aside, grabs my hand, and we run. The gate opens behind us, and I hear the clanks of cage doors and the hyenas' snarls turning to whoops. The muscles in my legs stretch and burn. I do not look behind me. I keep my eyes forward. My view of the city bounces crazily as my feet pound the earth.

Past the feed store, past the animal doctor's, past the bakery, a quarter of the way there. Vargas and I have fallen behind the pack, and he pulls me along with him. The air is filled with dust and with the stink of dirty, murderous fur. My breaths are shallow and I feel like vomiting. I hear the hyenas behind me, front legs long, hind legs hort—
ka-thup, ka-thup, ka-thup
. Powerful jaws snapping. I have heard these sounds every year of my life. I do not want to hear them ever again.

Past the tailor, past the barber, almost halfway. Vargas is nearly dragging me. I am holding him back—fat, panting Vargas. I am so tired. I need to stop and I do not care what is behind me. Then I wonder,
Am I no better than Ayala, on his knees and begging to have his neck wrung?
Oh, but this is different, so different. It is one thing to seek death; it is another simply to accept the inevitable, to embrace the fate that snaps at your heels. Everyone will be able to see how different it was. And even if they cannot, I know San Humberto will. He will understand.

At the moment I let go of Vargas and try to plant my feet, I feel a prickly heat surge throughout my body. Just as quickly the warmth turns to ice. I think I feel myself dying.

Vargas clamps his soft hand around my arm and pulls, hard. He turns his head, and I can see by his eyes that the hyenas are close, closer than they have ever been to him before. “Run!” he yells, his high voice sharp, commanding. Without thinking I take his hand again, but I do not know how much longer I can run.