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  It’s in this spirit that Uli heads out into the neighborhood armed with only a Coke and a slice of gelatinous lunchmeat with which to lure the dog back. He sets off east, toward the sounds of the city, walking between boulders and burnt out cars and abandoned homes feeling like the only survivor of this place he’s never known.

  He walks five blocks toward the highway. At the end of the street, right before the turnoff to the periférico, there’s a Pemex gas station. Standing at the corner, by the pumps, a kid dressed like an angel with a Bible at his feet. He’s standing on a wooden crate protesting something.

  His face is painted with glitter and white powder. He’s draped in a white tunic that has wings attached at the back. His lips are unbelievably thin, and as Uli approaches, he can hear that the kid is praying. In front of him a cardboard sign reads: END THE LOTTERY.

  Uli looks at the boy and the boy looks back. Uli nods to acknowledge him but picks up the pace a little, walking hard toward the bridge that feeds the periférico. Minutes later, he sees another stray angel with the same sign, the same ghostly look in his eye. And then another. And then a group of them in front of a mass of people crowded around a building that looks like any other building on this strip but a little more official perhaps, which is to say it’s in the same shape but made of brick, not cement or adobe. It stands among a string of storefronts and offices. A post-office at the far corner.

  Uli guesses there are about three hundred people in all, milling about with strips of papers in their hands.

  There are families, construction workers, policemen and women dressed as house maids. From where he’s standing, Uli can see all of them move about the periphery of something in the middle of the crowd, trying hard to gain an advantage on one another. A tiny man is climbing up a ladder. His lean arms flex and pull as he reaches for a crossbeam hanging over the sidewalk where the sign of an establishment might go. Uli watches the man produce what looks to be copper screws from his pocket and carefully place them between his browning teeth. The man grinds the copper screws into the cross bar with the blunt scrape of a hammer. Sparks fly out against the angle he strikes. He does it all without so much as blinking his cataract eyes, his full concentration on the next silvery blow of steel on copper.

  Uli watches the tiny man as he works with a steady efficiency. He produces two wooden plaques from the painter’s satchel on his side.

  The first one reads: For Those Who Didn’t Believe.

  The second one reads: For Those Who Continue to Disbelieve.

  On the first plaque, ten or twelve names are branded into the wood with red paint crossed through them. Every name begins with a title: Colonel, Captain, Lieutenant, Mayor. There are only two names that don’t have titles, who could be anyone. The second plaque is full of those kinds of people. The nobodies.

  The people review the names before scrawling something furiously onto the strips of paper. And then the tiny man comes by with a bucket. Everyone pays him five pesos before putting their strip in. Old hands, young hands, baby hands with their parent’s hands wrapped around them put their strips over the lip of the bucket, one-by-one, as if they were putting their dreams at the feet of a saint. Under the noise of the crowd, the perpetual hum of the praying angels. And under the noise of the angels, the piercing bark of dogs.

  Uli cranes his neck toward the sound coming from an alley just adjacent to the crowd. At first, he thinks there’s one dog until he realizes there are many, their barks squealing to a snuff, one by one. As he leaves the crowd their sound grows louder. The scraping of paws. The panting of tongues.

  When he reaches the alley, he finds nothing. A lonesome, grey industrial door at the end. A meowing cat with pink whiskers, wet paws fishing in a bucket of blood next to the door. More barks come from inside that building. Then the sound of a plunger, a bolt entering flesh. And then the echoing sound of the drain beneath Uli’s feet.

  Uli returns home defeated, that quivering cold meat still in his hand. No dog, no father, no family. He lets the facts sink in. Why can’t he be at home with his mother? Why can’t he be back in school already? Tomorrow morning, the track team will be doing sprints. And he won’t be there to beat everyone and get to the shower first (like he always does) after the Gatorade bath that he always pours on himself if only to mock his other teammates (Look, I beat you). Why, he wonders, does he have to go further into Mexico to get back to Texas? I was right there, he thinks. And then keeps thinking, wondering about his brother before letting that thought, like the million others coursing through his brain at any given moment, fade out into the detritus of his brain.

  His mind floats between what he saw that day—the crowd, the building and then that grey industrial door with the bucket of blood. The fuck was that place? And the magazines in front of him. A thick stack of his father’s old copies of Extremo.

  Uli leaves the meat on the kitchen counter and picks up the magazines, holds them to his face. They smell like his father. The sweet reek of nicotine and cheap cologne. On the cover of one magazine, there are two men lifting a man in a grey, blood-soaked shirt from a car. The cover is vertically divided so that next to the man there’s a picture of a sexy lady in a blue swimsuit. Carrie Prejean. At the bottom left corner it says Junio 2012. Uli thinks about that man on the cover, how he’s been dead two years now.

  He thumbs the corners of the magazine, flipping the pages quickly to see the little animated drawings his father would make at the corners. A stick woman undressing. Circle boobs at the end. The very existence of the drawing is enough to make Uli blush.

  Every page drips with red ink. The most heavily marked sections are the pages that include love letters. Cuban beauties looking for love in Mexico (and beyond).

  There’s one woman who dots her i’s with hearts. She’s into fat men with or without mustaches, as long as they have steady work. There’s another woman who has children (but no scars). She says only young men need reply and Uli thinks beggars can’t be choosers. She includes a dark picture of herself printed on the next page. Her hair is sloppy, her eyes the saddest things you’ve ever seen. On the next page there are stories of ghosts, demons, shadow figures and strange things in general. Red ink is all over that page too, which includes a story with a picture of a dog, his eyes growing green like deer eyes in the headlights. The magazine says that the dog wasn’t even present when the Extremo photographer took the picture, but there he was. The dog, Extremo says, is a legend of photographers. Folk healers call the dog a psychopomp—a medium between this world and the next—that brings the souls of the dead to the afterlife. Another curandero says it’s pure evil in the guise of a dog. The story ends by saying the photographer died three months later.

  Uli puts the magazine down between his legs and remembers his father told him that story once. Now he knows where it came from, which makes it less magical somehow.

  Uli thinks of the house, of the dirt inside the house, of all of this stuff still left behind. And then he hears the silence of his own breath.

  He takes the magazines to a bedroom and puts them on the head of a busted snare drum that acts as a nightstand beside the bed. He puts the burnt out digital clock on the stack of magazines.

  In the corner of the room, by the window looking out into the street, there’s a chest of drawers flecked in gold leaf and lacquer. In the top drawer, there are stray brown and beige buttons scattered everywhere, a packet of Alka-Seltzer, a pair of brass scissors and a polaroid of his brother when he was little and riddled with chicken pox, sitting naked with pink calamine rubbed all over him. In the drawer beneath that one there are some pencils and an emptied Docker’s wallet with a single five-peso coin in it. In the drawer beneath that is a ratty Bible bulging at the spine, a fat rose pressed perfectly between the pages of Revelations.

  From the window you can hear the dogs. The cicadas too, screeching loud because their death is coming. It’ll be winter before long.

  Like the dogs, the cicadas blare from everywhere and n
owhere at once. Filtered through the glass of the window, they sound like the hum of an engine.

  When the bloody girl arrives, she brings the black dog in her arms. The dog brings the flies that ride the dog’s stench. Zizz-zazz go their wings that jolt Uli from sleep before the girl can even notice he’s in her bed.

  From the corner of her eye she sees movement. She lowers the bloodied dog to the floor, pulls a pistol from the small of her back and points it at Uli’s head.

  “Don’t move. Not even a breath,” she says, backing out into the hallway.

  Uli does exactly as she says. She watches his hands. They’re planted flat on the mattress.

  Her eyes are adjusting. In the hallway, she flips the light switch so the hall light shines behind her. She can see him clear as day, but he can only see her silhouette. She learned that squatter’s trick from her old crew who all slept with their backs to the east side of every wall. Always keep your back to the sun. The light would buy you a second or two. Enough time to slip out and run.

  She thinks about running—every squatter’s number comes up, every squatter moves on—but she looks at her dog bleeding on the ground, barely able to move. That wet look in his eye that says, Don’t leave me.

  “Get down on the floor. Hands where I can see them,” she says.

  Uli does as she says, sliding from the bed to the floor. His scars shine in the light. The bloody girl sees how gingerly he moves, how painfully slow each joint bends and flexes to get him down to where he needs to be. He lays there prostrate on the ground, pathetic. Every movement is labored, every breath is too deep. She keeps the gun on him. She knows he’s not a threat, although he’s got to be the one who cut her dog loose. He’s already done some damage, and that makes him dangerous.

  “Where do I know you from?” she asks him, only the profile of his face visible now that his eyes are on the ground. “Don’t be shy, friend. Answer me.”

  “This is my house,” says Uli.

  “First time I’ve seen you in it,” says the bloody girl.

  “My father’s house. He lived here.”

  “Past tense—lived. I don’t see him anymore. These are my things,” says the bloody girl pointing around the room with her pistol. “My bed. My sheets. My dog. Which, by the way, you cut loose.”

  “I thought he might have been my father’s.”

  “Well, you thought wrong. And now you owe me. You talk funny. Where are you from?” says the bloody girl, the pistol still aimed at his head.

  “Texas.”

  “Explains your father’s bad taste in décor. Should have gotten rid of that George Strait a long time ago,” she says, lowering the gun. A long silence between them.

  “You can go on and get up,” she says.

  But Uli just lays right there.

  A moment or two passes. Neither of them knows what the other is going to do.

  “Go on, get up. I’m not going to shoot you. I know where I’ve seen you,” she says. “That picture up in the living room. Family picture. You’re older now.”

  “No shit.”

  “Which one are you? Uli or Cuauhtémoc?”

  “Uli.”

  “I’m June,” she says “Why do you move so slow? What’s wrong with your body?”

  “What happened to the dog?” says Uli.

  “Butcher got him,” she says.

  She looks at Uli’s face, his eyebrows working like he’s trying to shake himself from a dream. She explains, “Butcher takes any animal. He doesn’t discriminate. You see any cows around here? Pigs? Chickens? Well, how many dogs do you see?”

  “I see the floor,” says Uli.

  “Well, how many do you hear then? Huh?”

  “A lot.”

  “A hell of a lot,” says June. “We’re in the desert. You let that dog go and he’s meat the next day. You cut lose all I’ve got in this world, understand? I’ve got good reason to shoot you dead tonight, but I won’t. You know why? Because I’m compassionate. And because you’re a cripple. I can tell you’re injured by the way you’re lying there. Can’t even wipe your own ass.”

  “I can wipe my own ass,” says Uli, visibly agitated, wide awake now.

  “I’d say prove it, but looks like getting up off that floor would make it a good day for you.”

  “How long are you going to stay?” asks Uli.

  “This is my home too—squatter laws.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You just need to know I’m staying here. The dog couldn’t make the trip anyway. I caught the butcher right as he made his first slice. Had to sew him up on the table right there. You believe that? Didn’t catch the artery, thank God. But fucking bastard made me pay for the meat. You believe that?”

  “I’ll pay you back,” says Uli. “I have some money. If you don’t shoot me, I can pay you what she’s worth.”

  “He is worth more than you can afford, friend. He’s a prizefighter.”

  “I thought he was a girl. What’s his name?”

  “Atómico,” says June.

  “His equipment is small but it’s there.”

  “Atómico.”

  “He’s radioactive,” she says with a straight face.

  The next morning, they lay out on the driveway with Atómico between them to let the sun cure his wounds. June stares up at the sky along with Uli, her eyes peeking out from a fleshy mask of scars.

  Her face is a patchwork of pink and white and gray. The left side of her face is like a sheet of rice paper, a shiny blister that’s never healed. She’s missing part of her nose and part of her ear too. She’s got wrinkles around her eyes. She’s about Uli’s age, maybe a little younger. An emo haircut, bangs plastered to the side of her face to cover the scars. Around her neck a chain and padlock. She wears a beige Sex Pistol’s shirt covered in dog’s blood. God Save the Queen. Skinny black jeans, red Chuck Taylors, too many bracelets on both wrists. She looks like she hasn’t eaten in days. She looks like her name isn’t really June, but that’s what she calls herself.

  Over the skies of San Miguel, an endless stream of aircraft crisscross the sky. Some of them are jets but most of them are propeller planes, their flam-blast engines cutting the air. They sound closer than they look.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” asks Uli.

  “Texas.” She leans over to shoo away the flies around Atómico’s wounds. “Army’s coming. Gonna wipe all those motherfuckers out. They’re trying to get it while they can.”

  “Get what?”

  “Their money,” says June.

  “Would you believe it if I told you I crashed in a plane, and that’s why I’m here?”

  “I wouldn’t believe anything you say,” says June. “But that would explain a lot. You’ve got enough scars to make the left side of my face jealous.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Well, what the hell didn’t happen?” she says, avoiding the question. She takes a bottle of water and pours it over Atómico’s blood red tongue. He’s got these sad eyes that look up at June, who looks back up into the sky again. All those planes moving so slowly, she wonders if she could reach out and pluck one out of thin air.

  “You were that boy in the papers, weren’t you?” June asks.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Uli.

  “Couple of brothers crashed a few weeks back. A lot of people took a lot of credit for it.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” says Uli.

  “Papers said one of the brothers was a narco.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” says Uli.

  “Are you sure that wasn’t you? You said you crashed a plane, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t fly planes,” says Uli.

  “So, your brother then. He was the pilot,” says June.

  “I don’t know where my brother is at,” says Uli, looking from the sky to June.

  “Told you so,” says June, a little smirk across her face that
makes her scar jut out a little.

  “He’s coming back,” says Uli. “This is where we’re supposed to meet.”

  “Is that a plan?” asks June.

  “That’s the only plan I know of.”

  June mulls this over in her mind a while. She can’t decide whether she hates him or feels sorry for him. She wonders how long he’ll wait. She could use the help. The gears start whirring behind her eyes.

  “I need to go into town,” she says, peeling herself up from the dusty driveway. The padlock and chain thud against her collar bone as she brushes herself off. “We need some medical supplies for the dog. Can’t let those wounds get infected.”

  “Some antibiotics?”

  “Something like that,” she says. “You said you had some money?” She bends down, steadies her back as she prepares to lift the dog back up to her chest.

  “Just enough money to not get my head blown off last night.”

  “Sounds like enough for me,” says June. “You’ll get it back.” Uli peels himself up from the ground, a pale look to his face. June grabs him by the shoulder. “I promise you you’ll get it back. Hey, look at me. Do you trust me?”

  She puts her face up in front of his, holds his gaze for a second or two. On the ground, the dog strains his neck to see what’s happening. He lets out a little growl, something low and guttural at the back of his throat. She knows she shouldn’t move him too much.

  “You have to eat, man. You have to exist while you’re waiting. And I know this city better than anyone you’re going to meet. I’ll get you your money back. You owe it to me in the first place too, remember that. You trust me?”