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Corrida de Toros

Rick Deckard

He waited in the motel, cut off from daylight by heavy, plastic-lined curtains. He kept a gun on the nightstand and watched free satellite TV with the sound turned off. When he was hungry, he crossed the gravel parking lot and two lanes of backwater farm road to a small gas station. He paid cash for junk food, beer, and cigarettes. He made no small talk with the acne-spattered teenager who worked the counter.

He got into a rhythm with the woman who cleaned the rooms: she rolled her cart up to the door, knocked twice, and he opened up long enough to swap dirty sheets and towels for clean ones. He never asked to have the bathtub or toilet scrubbed out.

There was little traffic past the motel, and he liked it that way. Whenever tires crunched in the parking lot, he tensed up. He grabbed the pistol and crept to the drapes to peek out. Despite the late-summer heat, he didn’t run the air conditioner; he didn’t want the noise to cover any other sound.

He slept lightly. He washed his clothes in the bathroom sink and hung them to dry in the tub. Every other day he shaved. His hair had once been short, but was going long from neglect. From time to time, he ran his fingers over his scalp, his expression rueful. He was, despite the closed, sweaty cell of the motel room, a neat man.

In the morning he did a hundred push-ups without stopping for rest. Before he slept, he did the same with sit-ups. He did squats every couple of days. In a way, he did these things as much to combat boredom as to remain fit. His tan faded as the weeks passed.

He was wound tightly and he was fanatically careful. Despite it all, one night while he slept, someone got in and put a six-inch stiletto through his heart.

***

Rhymer waited outside the open door of the hotel room, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot as the sun rose higher in the sky, looking like a skinny lizard on a hot rock. Haddox parked his truck, grinding gravel under the tires and kicking up dust.

“Thanks for coming so fast,” Rhymer said. He sounded shaky. Haddox saw flecks of something on his collar that looked like oatmeal. Drawing closer to the open door, Haddox smelled the stink of rotting things, of maggot death and spoilage. He wrinkled his nose. His breakfast churned. “Goddamn, Rhymer,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s something awful, Dan.”

There was shade by the door. The inside of the room was a black nothing. Haddox took off his sunglasses and peered inside. He turned back to Rhymer. “You call for a coroner?”

“Right after you.”

“And what did they say?”

“Couple of hours. Maybe more.”

Haddox considered for a moment. Jefferson Davis County was big and empty, with long roads and stretches of scrub nowhere that took time to cross. They had no coroner’s office of their own. For most cases, a local doctor was all anyone needed to produce a death certificate. Tricky situations had to have a real specialist attend, and that meant waiting for someone to come from the next county over.

The stench from inside the room thickened the air between Haddox and his deputy. No one body should reek so badly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, tried not to breathe through his nose. “Who found the body?”

“A Mexican lady that does the rooms.”

“And where is she?”

“Up in the office, I think.”

“I’m going to go talk to the lady,” Haddox said. Anything to get away from this smell. “You see to that puddle of puke you left in there, alright?”

“Sure, Dan.”

“And when the coroner gets here, make sure you call me ‘Sheriff,’” Haddox said. “I don’t want them thinking we’re a bunch of good ol’ boys down here.”

“Right, Dan.”

Haddox walked away. The hotel was small, just four rooms in a row by the roadside. They were only about a mile from town, but with the quiet they might as well be in the middle of the desert. It was a good place to kill someone.

He passed a rattling air conditioner leaking water onto the cement walk and pushed his way into the office. Like the dead man’s hotel room, it was small. The counter was overcrowded with maps and brochures for places far away from here. No one came to Jefferson Davis County for the sights.

When Haddox came in, a man emerged from the back: young and bony-thin. His eyes dropped from Haddox’s face to the Sheriff’s badge, and then to the holstered Colt. “You Sheriff Haddox?” the man asked.

“I’m him. Who are you?”

“Scott Goodloe. I’m the day manager. I got Mrs. Romulo back here if you want to talk to her.”

Haddox put his hands on the counter. He let his gaze wander the narrow space beyond: the stack of truck and gun magazines, the ceramic ashtray with a picture of the Alamo on it and a scratched-up baseball bat with tape wound around the grip. “You ever see that fella lying dead back there?”

“Not when he was dead. I checked him in, though.”

“When was that?”

“About six weeks ago. I seen him once or twice going across to the gas station, but that’s about it. Seemed like an okay guy.”

Haddox looked out the window at the parking lot. “Where’s his car?”

“Went a few days ago.”

“His car went a few days ago,” Haddox said, “and nobody checked that room between now and then?”

“He didn’t like anyone to come inside. Look, he was paid for two months, so he might have come back. I didn’t want him throwing a fit because somebody’d gone into his room.”

“He seem like the type to throw a fit about something like that?”

“You’d have to ask Mrs. Romulo.”

“I think I will.”

***

The man from the coroner’s office turned out to be a sturdy-looking Latino named Zavala. He unloaded two cases of gear from the back of his van, and looked over the hotel room. “How long has this guy been roasting?”

“A few days,” Haddox said. “Three, four maybe.”

“More like a week.”

Zavala went in. Haddox lingered on the threshold. Fresh air flowed in from outside, but not enough to make the atmosphere in the room tolerable. Zavala seemed not to notice. He took photographs of the room before turning the lens of his camera on the body. Haddox cast his gaze around, taking note of plastic bags crammed with empty food wrappers, and a collection of empty beer bottles in one corner. He took special note of the Glock semiautomatic on the dresser.

When the photographs were taken, Haddox came in. He stood over the bed. The dead man had been sleeping with his clothes on, his body a gusher of blood surging from the deep wound in his chest. At some point, the killer slashed open the man’s pants and cut off his balls. His pallid yellow penis lay in a puddle of coagulated gore.

Zavala put a gloved hand under the corpse, feeling around. He came up with a wallet and then a badge.

***

“Agent Javier Bainter,” the DEA man said. “He was working out of our office in San Miguel de Allende. Been off the reservation for a while now. Close to three months.”

“Where’s he been?”

“Besides here?” The DEA man scratched his nose. He wore a pinky ring with an enormous diamond set in it. Haddox wondered how any government employee could pull together enough money to afford something like that. “I guess now it doesn’t matter.”

“You mean you don’t care that one of your boys got knifed in my county when he was supposed to be down Mexico way?”

The DEA man shook his head. He smiled a half-smile that didn’t last. “Let us worry about the details, Sheriff. The less you know about Bainter, the better.”

***

The phone rang early on a Sunday morning. It took a few rings before Haddox was awake enough to answer. It was Rhymer. “Dan, we just got a call from that hotel again.”

Haddox sat up sluggishly. Beers from the night before still lingered in his system. He’d had one for the dead DEA man, Bainter, and then a few more on top of that. He felt headachy and out of sorts. “What’s going on?”

“Some Mexican fella came in asking for our dead man. He showed a picture at the front desk, and when they told him what happened, he went hysterical.”

“We talking Mexican Mexican?”

“Yeah, I think so. The man said ‘Mexican.’”

“This Mexican still there?”

“No, he took off.”

Haddox forced himself to rise. He wanted to brush his teeth to get the taste out of his mouth. “Listen: you get down there and you find out whatever you can. I want to know what kind of car he was in, if he was alone, everything. You understand? Everything, Rhymer.”

“Sure thing. Right, Dan.”

“I’ll be in the truck. You radio me when you know.”

Haddox brushed his teeth, washed his face, got dressed and drank coffee. By the time he was on the road, he felt almost like himself. A few minutes later, Rhymer called.

“He was driving a red Cadillac with Mexican plates on it. I got the word out to DPS and the Border Patrol. Listen, Dan, that picture he showed? He dropped it in the parking lot. I got it here. It’s our dead guy, all right. He and the Mexican are all buddy-buddy and drinking margaritas. There’s some Spanish writing on the back.”

“What’s it say?”

“Shit, you know I can’t read that.”

Haddox banged the steering wheel with the heel of his palm. “All right. Hit the road and see if you can pick up the Mexican’s trail.”

The radio went quiet. Haddox drove. Maybe this Mexican was the killer, maybe not, but he was real and was more than they had before. Javier Bainter had pictures of his kids in his wallet. Kids needed answers to things like what happened. Every cop knew that.

A half hour later, a DPS officer called over the radio to say he’d found the Mexican and his Cadillac. Haddox put the pedal down. He found the DPS cruiser flashing lights on the side of the road, the Cadillac pulled over and the Mexican in handcuffs.

***

The photograph said, Buenos tiempos hoy, mejores tiempos mañana, which meant, Good times now, better times tomorrow. It was dated five months before. Haddox put the picture on the table in front of the Mexican, and then sat down to see what he would do.

Manuel Rodríguez was a young man with a face both pretty and handsome. He had delicate lips. Whenever Haddox looked him in the eye, Rodríguez turned his toward the floor. Haddox didn’t think Rodríguez demurred much to anyone; he was packed with lean muscle, especially across the chest and in his shoulders. He resisted the DPS officer when he was pulled over, and he had a livid bruise under his left eye from a baton crack.

Rodríguez looked at the photo without touching it.

Haddox spoke: “¿Quién era él a usted?”

Rodríguez did not answer.

“¿Usted le conocía era muerto?”

Again, nothing.

“I can’t do anything for you if I don’t understand what’s going on,” Haddox said.

Rodríguez raised his eyes from the picture, and at the same time he palmed it off the table into his hand. He looked Haddox in the face: “Usted no necesita saber nada.”

Haddox opened his mouth to reply. Rhymer knocked on the door of the interview room. The moment passed.

***

The lawyer’s name was Ignacio Pérez. He drove all the way from El Paso to claim Rodríguez. He had a fax machine in his town car, so when he walked through door of the Jefferson Davis County Sheriff’s Office, he already had a draft lawsuit in hand. “Not that anything needs to be filed,” the lawyer said, “but just in case. Señor Rodríguez shouldn’t even be in custody.”

Haddox looked over the lawsuit. “No way to be sure about that. Who is Señor Rodríguez, anyway? I’ll bet the DEA would like to know.”

“If you look, you’ll see a letter from the head of the regional DEA supervisor declaring that his agency has no interest in my client. Manuel Rodríguez is not a criminal.”

The very last page was a photocopy of a letter on DEA letterhead. Haddox snorted disgustedly and dropped the stack of papers into the trash. He waved a hand toward the closed door of the interview room. “Go ahead, then. I’ll sign the paperwork.”

Rodríguez’s lawyer hustled his client into a waiting Lincoln, and came back to affix his signature to the release papers. Haddox looked out the front window, but could not see Rodríguez in the car; its glass was tinted sheet-black.

“All in a day’s work?” Haddox asked the lawyer.

“Señor Rodríguez comes from a respected family, Sheriff Haddox,” Pérez replied.

“I’m more concerned about dead cops than respected families.”

“Señor Rodríguez had no involvement with Agent Bainter’s death.”

“I guess I have a problem being so sure about that,” Haddox said.

“Well, I have no problems lending assistance to help a good man make his way back home.” Haddox frowned deeply. Pérez gathered copies of all the forms and stowed them in a slim briefcase. “Are we done, Sheriff?”

“Unless you’d like to have a cup of coffee for the road,” Haddox replied sourly.

“No, thank you, Sheriff. Good-bye.”

The lawyer left. Haddox watched him through the front windows. The Lincoln drove away, headed west. Haddox waited until the car was completely out of sight before he moved for the door.

“Rhymer, I’m going to take a drive.”

“Where you headed, Dan?”

“Just never you mind. And don’t try to call me; I’ll be off the air.”

***

It took three hours to drive to El Paso. The border was never far from sight. Texas narrowed as it closed on the city, until it was possible to see right over the Rio Grande into Mexico. Just outside the city limits, on the cheap side of the border, stood the Tony Lama boot factory. Tony Lama boots could cost upwards of $200 a pair in the US, but they were made for pennies on the dollar by Mexican hands.

Haddox kept the Lincoln in sight, though he never drew too close. The town car didn’t stop anywhere in the center of city, but at a broad enclosure on the western outskirts of town, surrounded by chain-link fence and paved flat with white concrete that lay blinding in the sun.

Haddox stopped as far back as he could. The enclosure was a truck pen, scattered with panel vans marked with the name and logo of Del Águila Trucking. Pérez parked his car near a bank of diesel pumps and got out. Not far away, a group of men emerged from a converted mobile home turned office.

A pair of binoculars out of the glove compartment gave Haddox a close-up view: Latinos in suits, two of them clearly bodyguards for a third with a mane of white hair and a sharp beard. Rodríguez got out of Pérez’s car and stood before the white-haired man, looking at the concrete between their toes. The white-haired man yelled. Rodríguez flinched at the violence of the words. Then the white-haired man slapped Rodríguez hard across the cheek.

Within minutes, the meeting was over. There was more shouting. One of the bodyguard-types gave Pérez an envelope. The white-haired man pointed toward a limousine parked in the shadow of the pre-fab office. Rodríguez went to it meekly. Pérez returned to his Lincoln and drove away. Shortly after, the limousine was on the move. Haddox followed it.

He wasn’t sure why he continued to follow, or what he thought he might do. The limousine turned south, and south meant the border and Mexico. Then Haddox’s memory flashed on the dead man in the hotel room, stabbed through the heart, his balls sliced off.

He kept going.

***

Getting into Mexico was always easier than getting out. On the Texas side, there were maybe a dozen cars waiting to pass through the checkpoint into Mexican territory, while on the far side, traffic stacked up as far as the eye could see. Haddox was two back from the limousine, and when he pulled up to the glass-and-metal booth manned by a Border Patrolman, his police truck drew few glances.

“Howdy, Sheriff,” the Border Patrolman said. He glanced down at the Jefferson Davis County seal on the door of the truck. “Kind of a ways out of your bailiwick, aren’t you?”

“Just a little,” Haddox said. He looked ahead for the limousine. It was caught in a snarl of traffic less than a mile away. They wouldn’t slip away from him. “Going across to pick up my mother’s arthritis medicine. You know, at the farmacia.”

They waved Haddox on.

More than anywhere else in Mexico, the band of country that ran along the US/Mexico border was a playground of delights, and every American city had a Mexican mirror. El Paso’s was Ciudad Juárez. Buildings were close to each other, businesses stacked one atop the other, the streets crowded with vendors, cars and people. Cheap drugs, legal and illegal, were widely available. Booze and sex, too, for those differently inclined. And for the more timid shopper: T-shirts, straw hats, wooden statues of the Virgin Mary and an endless variety of cut-rate tourist junk.

The limousine drove through this landscape of commerce, until at last it reached a large, cinderblock building painted in fading white. The building was squat and ugly. An enormous picture of a bull was plastered on the wall facing the street, along with chipped, red letters three feet tall: CORRIDA DE TOROS. The name translated literally as run of bulls, but it had another meaning: bullfighting.

***

Haddox parked the truck a block away. Mexicans scattered when they saw the star on the side, even though an Americano badge meant nothing south of the border. Haddox took a weathered leather jacket from underneath the seat and zipped it up tight over his shirt. From a distance, he hoped to look like just another gringo. He kept his gun.

The sky had begun to turn, though evening would not come for a while yet. A cool breeze filtered down to the street from the north. Haddox made his way along a broken sidewalk. The street was a pitted moonscape of potholes and layered in blown dirt. Trash collected against the ragged curb.

He stopped across the street from the bullfighting arena. The place looked about the size of a high-school gymnasium, and badly weathered. This was the kind of place where local enthusiasts could go to see novillos, young bulls for novice bullfighters hoping for a chance to head south to big cities and real arenas, or where the broken-down stars of yesteryear could earn a few pesos from nostalgia.

A few men gathered around the box office, an open window sealed up by a rusty iron grille and shuttered from the inside. A hand-printed bill for the evening was stuck with masking tape to the wall beside the box office. The men spoke animatedly among themselves. More Mexicans gathered, and the volume of their conversation increased. Haddox drew closer.

The corrida enthusiasts parted instinctively when Haddox approached the box office. He knew then that his copness was apparent even with his uniform hidden underneath a jacket. The men’s talk became muted. One even walked away. Americans were alien at a place like this, and a policeman doubly so.

Haddox examined the bill. There were six bulls, and a list of men involved in the night’s battles. Red ink at the top that caught his eye, block letters that declared, ¡Contrato especial! ¡Una noche solamente! Manuel García Rodríguez!

“¿Usted tienen gusto del corrida, señor?” asked one of the waiting men. He was older, perhaps in his late fifties. The others looked at Haddox with suspicion, but the old man didn’t seem to care. “You like the bullfight?”

Haddox nodded, though it wasn’t true. He pointed to Rodríguez’s name on the bill. “Do you know this man?”

“Si. He’s from the south. They say he could be the new Manolete. We’re lucky to see him. They added him just this morning, you know.”

“Manolete,” Haddox replied. He looked at the bill again.

At that moment, the rough wooden shutter of the box office opened. A fat woman with a broad mestizo face appeared behind the iron grille. The Mexicans, including the old man, lined up for tickets. They entered the arena through a battered steel door near the corner of the building.

“You want ticket?” the woman asked Haddox. He gave her money and went inside.

***

The interior of the building smelled like hay, beer and cow shit. Cheap, pull-out bleachers lined three sides of the bullfighting area. The bench seats were gritty with dust. Motes hung in the air, picked out by large electric lights. A pair of men used rakes to smooth out the dun-colored dirt on the killing floor.

Haddox looked around for Rodríguez, the bearded man or even one of the bodyguards. Scratchy, taped music kicked in over the arena loudspeakers. A new odor, that of cooking food, mingled with the rest. During the fight, vendors would sell sweet rolls, beer and other snacks to go with the blood on display.

The bleachers began to fill, almost exclusively with men. The noise level increased. More than once, Haddox heard the name Manolete mentioned, often in a raised voice. Almost 90 years later, the Spanish matador who died famously in the ring could still inspire passion.

Haddox explored. He wandered past a makeshift kitchen where a trio of older Mexican women steamed tamales. Haddox’s stomach rumbled. He had not eaten all day.

It took ten minutes to find a door that led away from the spectator area and into the workings of the arena. Haddox walked down a narrow hallway into an invisible barrier of bull-smell that grew stronger and stronger with every step. He turned a corner and stopped; one of the bodyguards from the limousine stood at attention outside a plain, closed door.

Haddox knew it would be easy to turn away now. The doubt that danced at the corner of his mind all day, first as he trailed Pérez and then as he followed the limousine beyond the border of Texas into Ciudad Juárez, returned. He chased it away with the same prod: Javier Bainter.

The bodyguard saw Haddox. He crossed his arms across his chest to make himself seem bigger. Haddox was six-three. As he came closer, he figured the bodyguard as an inch or two taller.

“Hola, amigo,” Haddox said. “Quiero hablar con Rodríguez.”

“Consiga perdido,” the bodyguard replied.

“I just want to talk to him.”

“¡Dije consigo perdido!”

The bodyguard put out a hand to push Haddox away. Haddox grabbed the Mexican by the wrist and turned, twisting with the movement until suddenly he was behind the bigger man with a firm armlock in place. The bodyguard pushed with his legs. Haddox rode with it. He steered the Mexican headfirst into the wall. Skull and concrete made a hollow sound together. The bodyguard crumpled.

Haddox looked up and down the hall. No one was around. The sound of feet on the wooden bleachers in the arena and the rising noise of chatter carried through the walls. He tried the door and found it unlocked.

Rodríguez was there. He turned away from a mirror ringed with bright lightbulbs, one hand still holding the brush he used to apply his dark eyeliner. His expression was surprised, but not shocked. For an instant, it almost seemed as if Rodríguez had expected him, just not at that moment.

The young man was half-dressed in his traje de luces, the “suit of lights” that was instantly recognizable anywhere in the world as the garb of the bullfighter. Rodríguez had not yet donned his jacket, and he sat naked below the waist on a folding metal chair. The pants he would wear, the teleguillas, took two men to put on. Perhaps the bodyguard was to help.

Rodríguez’s gaze passed beyond Haddox to the hallway and the sprawled form of the unconscious bodyguard. “Close the door, please.”

Haddox did as he was asked. The dressing room was tiny and cramped. There was not even a shower, only a deep sink that looked like something a janitor would use to fill buckets. “You’re speaking English now,” he said.

Rodríguez turned back to the mirror. He applied his eyeliner with an air of practice. “I speak good English.”

“Did you practice with Javier Bainter?”

Rodríguez turned his attention to his hair. He applied pomade and sculpted his dark locks into perfection with a comb. He was handsome and quietly calm, with no trace of the sorrow he showed in the Jefferson Davis County jailhouse. When he tried on his montera, the twin-pointed hat of the matador, he looked at his reflection in open appraisal. “You should not have come here.”

“I had to know. Who was he to you? What did you want with him?”

Rodríguez removed the hat. He watched Haddox in the mirror. “In the corrida de toros, the matador is all. The other fighters come and go, but the matador commands the respect of everyone who watches him. He is wanted by women and envied by men. That is me.”

“You don’t fight in places like this. You fight in the south, in real arenas.”

“I fight wherever I am told to fight. I go when I am ordered to go.”

“Who was the man who brought you here?”

“My father. He wants me to fight tonight. Any fight will do. And if I perform as he commands, then everything will be forgotten. My leaving, my disobedience… everything I have done.”

Rodríguez touched the corner of his eye. Whether it was to make a tiny adjustment to his makeup, or to dispatch a tear, Haddox didn’t know. But abruptly he knew something else: “You were Bainter’s lover.”

“I am a lover of women,” Rodríguez said without energy.

“Who killed Javier Bainter?” Haddox asked.

In the mirror, Rodríguez looked Haddox in the eyes. “I don’t know. I will never know. That is how my father insists it must be.”

“I can’t—” Haddox began.

“You can. You must. There is nothing else.”

Haddox exhaled sharply and leaned against the wall of the cramped dressing room. Rodríguez rose from his seat, and Haddox saw the man’s penis dangling between thighs of lean muscle. “This can’t be all,” Haddox said.

“The matador is a man,” Rodríguez said. “Completely a man. And it was the same for Javier. We could not be anything else, even though we wanted to.”

Rodríguez kept his back to Haddox and donned his chaquetilla, the bright and beautiful jacket of the suit of lights. Haddox tried to imagine Rodríguez and the dead man together, but it was impossible… impossible in more than one way. His head spun. He felt smothered in this undersized room.

“Have you heard that they call me the next Manolete?” Rodríguez asked without turning around.

“I heard that.”

“Manolete was gored to death, you know. And the bull was afeitado. You know what this means? He had his horns shaved to protect the matador. Manolete should have been safe. He should have walked from the plaza de toros without a drop of his blood shed.” Rodríguez looked over his shoulder. “Even the best matador can be beaten by a clever bull. It is a good way to die.”

Haddox opened the door of the dressing room. His hand shook. Rodríguez did not watch him go. Haddox retreated down the hallway, his thoughts whirling, until he emerged beneath the bleachers into the roar of a bullfight already underway. He headed for the exit, and then out into the gathering night.

He felt sick to his stomach, the smells of the arena curdling at the back of his throat. He looked down the street. A familiar figure was there: the white-bearded man. The second bodyguard moved with his master, and both paused when they saw Haddox. For a long moment, Haddox and the old man watched each other, and then the elder Rodríguez disappeared inside.

It took only a couple of minutes to return to his truck. He got behind the wheel and started the engine, but he didn’t drive away. Instead, he watched the ugly lump of the bullfighting arena, vaguely conscious of the engine’s vibration through the steering wheel, thinking only of the young matador called Manuel Rodríguez, and the dead man he loved.

An hour later, an ambulance arrived. Corrida fans spilled out into the street in turmoil. Medics beat their way through the press of bodies, handling a folded stretcher like a battering ram. When they emerged, Haddox couldn’t see who they carried, but he knew. He wondered if Rodríguez would live long enough to reach a hospital.

He waited until the ambulancia tore away with a screech of rubber, leaving behind the crowd of wailing fans. Then he waited a few minutes more, until even its siren had vanished. When enough time had passed, Haddox put the truck in gear and drove away.

He wanted to be out of Mexico, and he never wanted to come back.

Copyright(c) 2006 by Rick Deckard

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