The Dog Fighter Read Online Free PDF Page A

did not see me come down an arroyo to drink from a fresh spring that I camped near. I witnessed half wild mustangs eating rich buffalo grass in the low country of the Bajío region. I rode trains past plowmen trenching dry sandy topsoil with wooden plows like those my father had taught me the Egyptians used.
    When I was sixteen in the rock mountains of Sonora I found hard dusty work moving rock behind bulldozers and power shovels carving roads to link Mexico and the United States through the border towns of Nogales and Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. I watched great explosions take entire copper colored hillsides away momentarily coloring the sky orange. Below these explosions hundreds of shirtless men stood. Covering our ears as dust clouds settled on the sweat of our forearms like flecks of raining red gold. I watched graders scrape miles of shrubs and trees to expose dirt to use to level the roads over the desert of Chihuahua and Coahuila. We lived for weeks at a time in a land so desolate and dry we drank water warm from pouches with mold brought to us on the backs of burros. Over land so flat and barren small animals seemed great in size and where curious mirages consumed our imaginations. I worked to build roads for trucks to carry loads from the gypsum and silver mines into the United States. Gypsum and silver and copper and gold and iron and mica and marble and alabaster. These mines in Mexico but owned by American companies.
    On the plains of Texas when I was seventeen I cut my hands on barbed wire stretching fences miles without end under that cornerless blue sky. Measuring days by the number of holes I dug and posts I set. At night setting fence posts in my sleep. Nightmares about bushes that if you touch them and then rub your eyes you will go blind. Death if you eat the leaves. Waking beside campfires doused in the mornings with orange piss from men who drink little water but much whiskey and tequila. Eating canned meat. I hid beside pickup trucks from great dust storms. Woke in the middle of the night by quiet wolves. Listened to men tell stories about work in the mines of Zacatecas. Of a worker lowered by rope into the smoking crater of Popocatépetl for sulfur.
    By wide shallow sandy rivers ferried down by drowsy river men and by trains heavy with iron ore I traveled south to Ciudad México. When I was eighteen I hung from ropes tied around my waist dangling from the sides of concrete and glass buildings. Buildings built taller than those of the once great Tenochtitlán. Stories above the earth in black air braiding ropes to hold my great weight I coughed and spit black and green coins of snot near to those below. Daring men to fight me. My laugh muted in the roar of machines but my smile telling all.
    And during all this work my hands only grew more strong each day. My shoulders more perfect for throwing my fists. The desire to put myself before other men more within me as my grandfather promised it was to be.
    In 1945 during World War II in the north of California I worked in the Bracero Program as a laborer. For an entire year in the farm town of Burnridge I worked on a prune farm. In this small town I encountered the first woman I was with without having to give her money. This woman was the wife of a Mexican I worked for who also labored for the Americans but spoke English. Her name was Perla. I did not care for the husband but I believed then that I cared very much for his wife and so much that I would do anything for her. She worked as a waitress in a café for Mexicans. After work and late into the night I drank coffee instead of beer or whiskey just to watch her wipe counters with steaming white cloths. Her hands dry from washing dishes. Her fingers long and delicate. The other waitresses giggled behind the counter and smiled over their shoulders at me. Once one of the other waitresses came to take my order but Perla hissed at this girl and then came to stand before me smiling as if nothing had