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"I
can't say I do," said Fate. "But you can count on me to go with you to
interview him."

"All right, then," said Guadalupe Roncal. "I'll be
waiting for you the day after tomorrow, at the entrance to the hotel, at ten.
Does that sound good?"

"Ten in the morning. I'll be there," said Fate.

"Ten
a.m. Okay," said Guadalupe Roncal. Then she shook his hand and walked off.
Her gait was unsteady Fate noticed.

He spent the rest of the day drinking with
Campbell
in the bar at the Sonora Resort.
They complained about sportswriting, a dead-end profession that never got
anyone a Pulitzer and that most people thought involved little more than
showing up at games. Then they began to reminisce about their college years,
Fate's at
New York
University
,
Campbell
's
at a college in
Sioux City
.

"In those days all I cared about was baseball and ethics,"
said
Campbell
.

For a second Fate imagined
Campbell
on his knees in the corner of a dark room, clutching a Bible and weeping. But
then
Campbell
started to talk about women, about
a bar in a place called Smithland, a kind of country inn near the
Little Sioux River
. First you got to Smithland and then
you went a few miles east and there, under some trees, was the bar
a
nd the bar girls, whose clients were
mostly farmers and a few students who came by car from Sioux City.

"We
always did the same thing," said
Campbell
,
"first we fucked the girls, then we went outside and played baseball until
we were exhausted, and then, when it started to get dark, we would get drunk
and sing cowboy songs on the porch."

When
Fate was a student at NYU, he never got drunk or slept with prostitutes (in
fact, he had never in his life been with a woman he had to pay). His free time
was spent working and reading. Once a week, on Saturdays, he went to a creative
writing workshop and for a while, not long, just a few months, he imagined that
maybe he could make a living writing fiction, until the writer who led the
workshop told him he'd do better to focus on journalism.

But
that wasn't what he told
Campbell
.

When
it began to get dark, Chucho Flores came in to find him. Fate noticed that
Chucho Flores didn't invite
Campbell
along. He didn't know why, but this made him happy, though it made him unhappy
too. For a while they drove aimlessly around Santa Teresa, at least that was
how it seemed to Fate, as if Chucho Flores had something to tell him and
couldn't find the right moment. The city lights at night changed the Mexican's
face. The muscles under his skin grew tense. An ugly profile, thought Fate.
Only then did he realize that at some point he would have to go back to the
Sonora Resort, because that was where he'd parked his car.

"Let's
not go too far," he said.

"Are
you hungry?" the Mexican asked him. Fate said he was. The Mexican laughed
and put on music. Fate heard an accordion and some far-off shouts, not of
sorrow or joy but of pure energy, self-sufficient and self-consuming. Chucho
Flores smiled and his smile remained stamped on his face as he kept driving,
not looking at Fate, facing forward, as if he'd been fitted with a steel neck
brace, as the wails came closer and closer to the microphones and the voices of
people who Fate imagined as savage beasts began to sing or kept howling, less
than at first, and shouting
viva
for no clear reason.

"What
is this?" asked Fate.

"Sonoran
jazz," said Chucho Flores.

When
he got back to the motel it was four in the morning. Over the course of the
night he had gotten drunk and then sobered up and then gotten drunk again, and
now, outside his room, he was sober again, as if instead of drinking real
alcohol Mexicans drank water with short-term hypnotic effects. For a while,
sitting on the trunk of his car, he watched the trucks going by on the highway.
The night was cool and full of stars. He thought about his mother and what she
must have thought about at night in Harlem, not looking out the window to see
the few stars shining in the sky, sitting in front of the TV or washing dishes
in the kitchen with laughter coming from the TV, black people and white people
laughing, telling jokes that she might have thought were funny, although
probably she didn't even pay much attention to what was being said, busy
washing the dishes she had just used and the pot she had just used and the fork
and spoon she had just used, peaceful in a way that seemed to go beyond simple
peacefulness, thought Fate, or maybe not, maybe her peacefulness was just
peacefulness and a hint of weariness, peacefulness and banked embers,
peacefulness and tranquillity and sleepiness, which is ultimately (sleepiness,
that is) the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness. But then
peacefulness isn't just peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as
peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really
no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending.

The next day he got up at two in the afternoon. The first
thing he remembered was that before he went to bed he'd felt sick and thrown
up. He checked on both sides of the bed and then he went into the bathroom but
he couldn't find a single trace of vomit. Still, while he was sleeping he had
woken up twice and both times he had smelled vomit: a foul odor that emanated
from every corner of the room. He had been too tired to get up and had opened
the windows and gone back to sleep.

Now the smell was gone and there was no sign that he had
vomited the night before. He showered and then he got dressed, thinking that
after the fight that night he would head straight back to
Tucson
,
where he would try to catch a red-eye to
New
York
. He wouldn't keep his appointment with Guadalupe
Roncal. Why interview a suspected serial killer if he couldn't write about it?
He thought about calling and making a reservation from the motel, but at the
last minute he decided to do it later,
f
rom one of the phones at the Arena del Norte or the Sonora
Resort. Then he packed his suitcase and went to the desk to check out. You
don't have to leave now, the clerk told him, I'll charge you the same price to
keep the room until midnight. Fate thanked him and put the key back in his
pocket, but he didn't take his suitcase out of the car.

"Who
do you think will win?" the clerk asked him.

"I don't know. Anything could happen in a fight like
this," said Fate, as if he'd been a sportswriter all his life.

The sky was a deep blue, broken only by a few cylindrical clouds
floating in the east and moving toward the city.

"They look like tubes," said Fate from the open door of
the lobby.

"They're
cirrus clouds," said the clerk. "By the time they reach the heights
of Santa Teresa they'll have disappeared."

"It's
funny," said Fate, still standing in the doorway,
"cirrus
means
hard, it comes from the Greek
skirrhos,
which means hard, and it refers
to tumors, hard tumors, but those clouds don't look hard at all."

"No,"
said the clerk, "they're clouds in the top layer of the atmosphere, and if
they drop or rise a little, just a tiny bit, they disappear."

There was no one at the Arena del Norte. The main door was
closed. On the walls were some posters, already faded, advertising the
Fernandez-Pickett fight. Some had been torn down and others had been covered by
new posters pasted up by unknown hands, posters advertising concerts, folk
dances, and even a circus calling itself Circo Internacional.

Fate
walked around the building. He ran into a woman who was pushing a juice cart.
The woman had long black hair and was wearing an ankle-length skirt. Among the
jugs of water and buckets of ice the heads of two children bobbed. When she got
to the corner the woman stopped and began to set up a kind of parasol with
metal tubes. The children got off the cart and sat on the pavement, against the
wall. For a while Fate stood watching them and the utterly deserted street.
When he walked on, another cart appeared from around the opposite corner and
Fate stopped again. The man who was pushing the new cart waved to the woman.
She barely nodded in recognition and began to take huge glass jars out of the
side of her cart, setting them on a makeshift counter. The man who had just
arrived was selling corn, and steam rose from his cart. Fate discovered a back
door and looked for a bell, but there was no bell
o
f any kind so he had to
knock. The children had gone up to the corn vendor, who got two cobs, spread
them with thick cream, sprinkled them with cheese and then chile powder, and
handed them to the children. As he waited, Fate imagined that the man with the
corn was the children's father and that he was on bad terms with the mother,
the juice woman, in fact maybe they were divorced and they saw each other only
when they ran into each other on the job. But that couldn't possibly be the
case, he thought. Then he knocked again and no one came to let him in.

•

At the bar at the Sonora Resort he found almost all of the
reporters who were covering the fight. He saw
Campbell
talking to a man who looked Mexican and walked toward them, but before he
reached them he realized that
Campbell
was working and decided not to interrupt. He saw Chucho Flores by the bar and
waved from across the room. Chucho Flores was with three men who looked like
ex-fighters and his wave back seemed halfhearted. Fate found an empty table
outside and sat down. For a while he watched people get up from their tables
and greet each other with long hugs or shout back and forth, and he watched the
bustle of photographers shooting pictures, arranging and rearranging groups to
their liking, and the procession of Santa Teresa notables, faces that weren't
familiar to him at all, well-dressed young women, tall men in cowboy boots and
Armani suits, young men with bright eyes and stiff jaws who didn't talk and just
shook their heads yes or no, until he got tired of waiting for the waiter to
bring him a drink and he elbowed his way out without looking back, not caring
that two or three rude remarks were dropped behind him, remarks in Spanish that
he didn't understand and that wouldn't have given him reason to stay even if he
had understood them.

He ate at a restaurant in the eastern part of the city, on
a cool patio under a vine-covered arbor. At the back of the patio, on the dirt
floor next to a chain-link fence, there were three foosball tables. For a few
minutes he looked at the menu, not understanding anything. Then he tried to
explain what he wanted with gestures, but the woman who was waiting on him just
smiled and shrugged her shoulders. After a while a man came over, but the
English he spoke was even more unintelligible. The only word Fate understood
was bread. And beer.

Then the man vanished and he was left alone. He got up and went
over to the edge of the arbor, next to the foosball tables. One team was dressed
in white T-shirts and green shorts and had black hair and very light-colored
skin. The other team was in red, with black shorts, and all the players had
full beards. The strangest thing, though, was that the players on the red team
had tiny horns on their foreheads. The other two tables were exactly the same.

He
could see hills on the horizon. The hills were dark yellow and black. Past the
hills, he guessed, was the dessert. He felt the urge to leave and drive into
the hills, but when he got back to his table the woman had brought him a beer
and a very thick kind of sandwich. He took a bite and it was good. The taste
was strange, spicy. Out of curiosity, he lifted the piece of bread on top: the
sandwich was full of all kinds of things. He took a long drink of beer and
stretched in his chair. Through the vine leaves he saw a bee, perched
motionless. Two slender rays of sun fell vertically on the dirt floor. When the
man came back he asked how to get to the hills. The man laughed. He spoke a few
words Fate didn't understand and then he said not pretty, several times.

"Not pretty?"

"Not
pretty," said the man, and he laughed again.

Then
he took Fate by the arm and dragged him into a room that served as kitchen and
that looked very tidy to Fate, each thing in its place, not a spot of grease on
the white-tiled wall, and he pointed to the garbage can.

"Hills
not pretty?" asked Fate.

The
man laughed again.

"Hills are garbage?"

The
man couldn't stop laughing. He had a bird tattoed on his left forearm. Not a
bird in flight, like most tattoos of birds, but a bird perched on a branch, a
little bird, possibly a swallow.

"Hills a garbage dump?"

The
man laughed even more and nodded his head.

At seven that night Fate showed his press pass and went
into the Arena del Norte. There were crowds outside and vendors selling food,
soft drinks, and boxing souvenirs. Inside, the second-tier fights had already
started. A bantamweight Mexican was fighting another bantamweight Mexican with
only a few people watching. Others were buying sodas,
t
alking, greeting each
other. Ringside, he saw two television cameras. One of them seemed to be
recording what was happening in the main aisle. The other cameraman was sitting
on a bench, trying to get a snack cake out of its plastic wrapping. He headed
down one of the covered side passageways. He saw people placing bets, two short
men each with an arm around a tall woman in a tight dress, men smoking or
drinking beer, men with loosened ties making signs with their fingers, as if
they were playing a children's game. Above the awning that covered the
passageway were the cheap seats and there the noise was even louder. He decided
to go check out the dressing rooms and the pressroom. The only people in the
pressroom were two Mexican reporters who stared at him like dying men. Both
were seated and their shirts were damp with sweat. At the entrance to Merolino
Fernandez's dressing room he saw Omar Abdul. He said hello but the fighter
pretended not to recognize him and kept talking to some Mexicans. The people
outside the door were talking about blood, or so Fate thought he understood.