Country of the Bad Wolfes by James Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

Constitución, the vast central square and center of the federal government. This main plaza was more commonly called the zócalo—and the term had come to refer to any town’s main square that contained a cathedral and municipal building.
    He got money for liquor by stealing from church poor boxes, by robbing drunks on the late-night streets. He wrested bottles from weaker men. He occasionally encountered a bartender or patron who took his branded face for a badge of honor and stood him a few drinks. He fed at the alley doors of restaurants where a man might be meted leftovers when the dinner trade was done, or in whose garbage cans he might find something still edible, but on some days he ate nothing. A friendly vendor of old clothing provided him with a shirt and pants and a woolen poncho to replace his tattered uniform. He somehow obtained a sombrero. From a distance he looked like one more dispossessed peón at large on the capital’s teeming streets. He slept in the parks. When the weather was inclement he took shelter in pulquerías, the most squalid of drinking places but where a man could sleep undisturbed in a corner among a litter of other homeless drunks. He spent his days ambling about the central city. He washed at public fountains. He sat on park benches and observed without curiosity the city’s passing spectacle. He had lost all interest in the doings of the world and ignored even discarded newspapers and broadsheets except as insulation against cold nights. He one day saw a former Patricio comrade on thestreet, wearing a spanking new Mexican army uniform, and ducked into the crowd before the soldier caught sight of him.
    His was a solitary existence and by now he could conceive of no other. But the streets were especially dangerous for a man alone. The capital was rife with rateros and brutos—thieves and roving gangs of young thugs—and the city’s police force of the time was small and poorly trained. People of the better classes did not venture outside after dark except in groups and with hired bodyguards. The first time he was set upon was in the darkness of a park where he slept in the shrubbery, and he lost a front tooth and was robbed of his shoes. The episode clarified to him the severity of his handicaps and how dim-witted he was to be weaponless. From a marketplace meat stall he stole a boning knife and honed its curved seven-inch blade sharper still on the stone rim of a fountain. Two nights later when a trio of thugs swooped on him he slashed the throat of one and wounded both of the others before they scrabbled away in a cursing retreat. He stripped the sandals from the one he killed, took the few centavos in his pocket. In the months that followed he killed at least three more assailants and bloodied a number of others in driving them off. He gained a daunting reputation among the local street gangs. El Yanqui Feo, they called him, and most of them eventually let him be. But he remained a challenge to young street toughs wanting to make a name for themselves, and his clothes were rarely free of recent blood stains.
    So did his days pass. Each the same as the one before. Each tomorrow his vague and only future. Every dawn’s waking one more astonishment. He was twenty years old and felt decrepit.

    In the last days of September came a cold and chronic rain. He got sick, grew weak and dizzy, went about in a sweating chill. His body felt peculiar, as though its flesh was barely clinging to its bones. One morning he was nearly run over as he crossed a street, staggering back as the mule team clopped by. It was a municipal wagon with a load of corpses loosely covered with a tarp. He clearly saw the face of one at the bottom of the pile—eyes open and teeth bared in a grimace that might have passed for a maniacal grin. The face, Samuel Thomas was certain, winked at him.
    On a raw dank night, walking in a small plaza of bright shops and restaurants a few