I was allowed to work — the term is inaccurate: to get in the way — at the local panadería, and so was my dog. I hung out and flopped flour around, and punched it, and heaved it, and cut it, and kneaded and rolled and just generally had a sexy time of it. My dog was called Dusty. I contemplated his nature as he apparently contemplated me having relations with dough. He was allowed on the premises because it was believed he was the world’s greatest ratter, but I do not think he is. At any rate, I have never seen him look for a rat or act like he wants to locate one. It seems rather more correct to regard this dog as a gentleman, albeit a tense one who does manifest a nervous eye toward my welfare. If I cough in a cloud of flour, he edges up, prancing a little, to my side, until the fit is over and he retires to a cool pool of flour on the floor. If I slip in guano as we mine lost silver, and whimper from the slick ammoniac turf, he licks my face. He is a kind of bodyguard, but through no wit or will of his own — people are generally terrified of a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua.
I get off from the panadería—where, by the way, no one fears Dusty because, as I get it, they are already dead, and where I am accepted because once covered in flour I am indistinguishable from the dead — I get off and go home and make María breakfast against her day abus. I feature the fried egg and the cigarette tortilla, buttered and salted and rolled tightly. They’ve allowed me a bag of sopaipilla from the panadería and these I adulterate with things and put in a plastic bag for her. She goes off brown and fresh and fed and coming home to me. Wow. Legs! Kisses! No crap! Me and the dog and my TV-free day! Silver mining with my dog. I am a puny Tarzan with an apple-dome Cheetah and a robust Jane. Jane is always robust, that is why she is Jane. Jane does not say, “What did you do today, honey — nothing again?” Jane says, “Estoy berry tire” and gets you in a headlock and wrestles you to bed and buries her head in your unmanly chest.
Then the Revolution came by. That is all I know to call it. It was a parade of men in Mercedeses, shouting a formulaic something that contained the three or so Mexican names known to me before this my naturalization. It sounded like ZapatBoliTrotsGuevaraWhathe-fuckwrongwiyou!? I looked timid for a minute and looked to María for support and protection, a very bad move on the game board of machismo. But I noticed there was some kind of gentler current running through things; the apparent leader got out of the T-top through which he had been throwing the crowd epithets and candy and spoke conspiratorially with María, as near as I can tell about me. At any rate, they looked at me during this consultation, he at my head and she at my feet. I had the wit to go get my dog and two sugar scoops of the pills. I could not tell whether they wanted me for a ritual sacrifice or for some nobler symbolic purpose — a red-faced white man visible in the cause.
When I got back outside, things looked better and worse. El Revolucionario looked like he wanted to kiss María rather than execute or conscript me. The gang was impatiently revving the Mercedes Revolution motorcade. The entire scene had elements of a rabid young labor union, a Klan rally, a Hells Angels mobilization, a football weekend, a fraternity rush party, a fistfight on a dance floor, fishing on a big party boat, and on the fringes a drug deal. That’s where I stepped in: without any more ado I poured the pills from the sugar scoops into the cupped palms of all the revolutionaries. This raised my stock visibly and considerably. At the precise zenith of this coup of public relations my forty-seven-pound Chihuahua peed on a Mercedes tire. I felt we had together made a perfect declination to join the cause, either as casualty or as troop. And indeed the wet tire was noted with some chuckling and some pills were thrown back amid headshaking and the Parade of the People was off in half-circle blasts of dust and diesel and death to the oppressors. María and my dog and I stood there arm-in-arm, looking happily into the sunset. Is the cup half empty or full? I aim to get into my grave squarely and neatly and meet my private batch of worms without one more moment of horseshit intervening. Leave me alone — I shall dig my own hole. I do not recall being as centered, as easy on the feet of my being, since as a boy I took solid solace in keying out a snake or tree and playing a little ball. After that, things got pointless fast. And it seemed the job of everyone to accelerate the pointlessness and deepen one’s commitment to it. This is where, if I am not mistaken, “failure” began to accrue: those who for whatever reasons did not or could not vigorously conspire in the proliferation of pointlessness began to “fail.” The specifics of what I mean by “pointlessness”—oh, supply your own. Who cares. I’ve got a unique dog and a room full of no appliances broken or working and a woman not broken and no country that claims me and its revolutionaries will not kill me. Could I have more? I am allowed to muss myself in the bakery of the dead. I am allowed to prospect in old and lost mines. I am allowed to fall down therein in prodigious bat slime. I am allowed.
Many things are not allowed. People can have as many people as they wish, whether they can afford them or not, and consume as many cars as they wish, but they may not drive them as fast as they wish. This would reduce the number of people. And so forth. María and I had tequila sopaipillas following my brush with the Revolution, and got dizzy and bloated but otherwise felt very good. I saw more than the usual number of dead folk glance in our window while my tequila-sopaipilla buzz wore off, and waved at them all. I have not had, and not missed, socks since I’ve been south of the border. María slept nobly, flat on her back and breathing smoothly, which may be what attracted inordinate dead, after our biscuit buzz. It is possible my mother is in the hospital. No Son of Sam or anything, but my dog told me this, if in fact I have been “told” this at all. Told, “told”—it is not so suspicious: when you are told nothing — no phone, no mail, no Western Union, no pigeons — you find that you are nonetheless, necessarily, told something. This neat little fact is what, I suspect, really separates man from animals. Animals can do without, man must be told something. I doubt he can think one whit better, or has an ounce of soul or mind more, but he must be told something some of the time or he goes nuts. But a dog does not care if you keep the deepest secret on earth from him forever. You have never seen a dog longing for the news, and you never will. Yet somehow my world-stopper dog told me my mother, for whom I care not much, was hospitalized. I’m almost certain. He’s forgotten it, of course.