The Dog Fighter Read Online Free PDF

passed between them. I spoke to no one but her. And then it was only.
    Café por favor.
    Nada más?
    Por favor.
    Late one night on my way to the café I stopped to comb my hair in the reflection of a front window of a hardware store. In the light of a streetlamp the windows of the other two story buildings and the redwood trees of the plaza were tall and dark in the window in front of me. The lights of the signs for the pharmacy and a clothing store dark around the plaza. A glowing white gazebo. Inside the hardware store a lamp shut off at the back. Then a young man came toward the front fixing his tie. He looked up to check himself in the reflection of the same window I was before but on the inside and there he found my eyes staring back at his. My hands making neat his blond hair. His hands at my neck. I startled him but then he smiled. We were two men preparing themselves to meet their women. At this time of my life I was working and earning money and I was taken with a woman. I thought little of Mexico and nothing of my father. If I spoke I chose not to speak in my grandfathers whisper. But still when this young blond man on his way to see his woman locked the door behind him he checked it twice. Then he nodded good night but said nothing. He did not look me in the eyes. Even as we had mistaken one for the other as the same. Both of us making ourselves handsome for the ones we wanted to impress. Later after walking Perla to her home I returned to that hardware store and threw a brick through the window. I have always enjoyed the sound of shattering glass.
    It was some time before I was able to bring myself to speak to Perla about more than coffee. But when I finally did I made up stories about my family. My life. I told her things I had heard the men I worked with say to each other. I told her so much that was not true that when I told her my mother was dead this also felt like a lie.
    At night after her work her husband did not come to walk her home to where they lived with many other Mexicans at a bend in the river to the east of the town. So I did. Perla and I walked slow and when I first kissed her we were below a railroad trestle. The light of the moon on the water and steel trusses. Some weeks later when I took her in my arms for the first time she kept her eyes closed from me. But I did not think this was important then.
    She had led me to their small building. Her husband was gone north for the apples in Washington. We went in through the back and only after she believed everyone was sleeping. In the hallway with one light Perla searched for her keys in her purse and then placed her finger to her mouth and smiled. In the bed she shared with her husband she traced her fingers along my back as I lay with my face in her pillow awake but dreaming. She made jokes about how I did not fit into the bed. Later she spoke of how he hit her. Of putting makeup on her bruises. How smart he was never to hit her in the face. Of the other women he told her he loved more.
    I do not love him. Perla said to me after we were together again that night.
    This wife who in the sweet perfume of her bed one afternoon was to beg me to kill her husband. Pictures of them framed looking down on us from the walls. My eyes closed growing angry when I imagined him hitting her. Making love.
    I want to be with no one but you. She said. Do you not believe me?
    When her husband returned a month later Perla and I met down the Russian River on the bank of a creek that let into it. She washed his clothes and mine and while they hung from limbs or spread out to dry over bushes we were together on a quilt she laid over the sandy bank beneath some willow trees. Her husband playing cards somewhere or drinking someplace she said. A large bruise on her thigh she did not want me to see. The purple of the prunes we had picked in August and September. Yellow at the edges. Perla tilted her neck so that her face was to the sky. The clouds passing in the dark