Burnt Water Read Online Free PDF

men in T-shirts and short-sleeved shirts gathered around jukeboxes, chewing, smoking, loafing, smart-assing; building-supply trucks, armadas of Volkswagens, a collision at the exit to Fray Servando, motorcycle policemen in cinnamon-colored uniforms, putting on the bite, one-upping, horns, insults. Again I burned rubber, feeling free, the second trip identical, the same run, the water tanks, Plutarco, gas trucks, milk trucks, squealing brakes, milk cans tipping over, rolling, bursting on the asphalt, against the safety barriers, on the red Thunderbird, a sea of milk. Plutarco’s white windshield. Plutarco in the fog. Plutarco blinded by limitless whiteness, the blinding liquid invisible to him, making him invisible, milk bath, sour milk, watered milk, your mother’s milk, Plutarco.
    Sure, my name lent itself to jokes, what would you expect from a name that sounded like Prick? In school I’d heard all that—Whaaaa? Did I hear…? Say that again? Two, four, six, eight, there’s a Verga t’appreciate, Verga, Verga, rah, rah, rah! And when they called the roll, there was always some joker waiting to answer, Vergara, Plutarco, present and primed, or present but spent, or Pee-Wee Vergara here. Then there’d be blows at recess. And when I began reading novels, at fifteen, I discovered there was an Italian author named Giovanni Verga, almost like my name, but that would never make any impression on a gang of ruffians like those shits at the National Prep. I hadn’t gone to parochial school—first, because Grandfather had said never, what did we think the Revolution had been about, and then my old man, the lawyer, agreed, there were too damn many people who were fiercely anti-clerical in public but good little Catholics at home, better for the image. But I wished I could have been like my grandfather Don Vicente, when someone’d made a joke about his name he’d had the joker castrated. You’re all smoke and no fire, no lead in your pencil, no powder in your cannon, the prisoner had said, and General Vergara cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday! From that time on, they’d called him General Balls, Old Balls and Guts, when he’s around hang on to your nuts, and similar refrains had circulated all during Pancho Villa’s long campaign against the Federales, when Vicente Vergara, still a young man but already forged in the fire of battle, had fought alongside the Centaur of the North, before going over to the ranks of Obregón when he saw the cause was lost in Celaya.
    â€œI know what they say. Beat the shit out of anyone who tells you your grandfather was a turncoat.”
    â€œBut no one’s ever said that to me.”
    â€œListen to me, boy, it was one thing when Villa came out of nothing, out of the Durango mountains, when he alone banded together all the malcontents and organized the Northern Division, which polished off the dictatorship of that drunk Huerta and his Federales. But when he set himself against Carranza and decent law-abiding folk, that was another thing altogether. He wanted to keep on fighting, anything that came along, because he’d gone past the point where he could stop. After Obregón defeated him at Celaya, Villa’s army evaporated and all his men went back to their corn patches and their woods. Villa went and searched them out, one by one, to convince them they had to keep fighting, and they said no, look, General, they’d come back home, they were back with their women and kids again. Then the poor bastards would hear shots, turn around and see their houses up in flames and their families dead. ‘You don’t have any house or woman or kids now,’ Villa would say. ‘You may as well come along with me.’”
    â€œMaybe he truly loved his men, Grandfather.”
    â€œDon’t ever let anyone tell you I was a turncoat.”
    â€œNo one says that. Everyone’s forgotten all that