Carlos Velázquez - The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories

It’d be better if you took a bath, I told her. She came out covered in powder. She looked like a giant, overactive French loaf. I’ve always wanted to fuck in my parents’ bed, she said, and then crossed the backyard completely nude, the bottle in one hand and a CD in the other. Oh, this is going to get bad, I thought when I saw the king-size bed. I turned on a porn channel, put on the CD, and undressed. We hadn’t even gotten to the second song when I realized The Western Bible was drunk out of her mind. No, not out of it, but blind drunk.

Grotesquely erotic, she spread out on the mattress and began to suck me off. My god, she was horrible. She choked. My dick was getting red. Twice I told her to leave it alone. You don’t know what you’re doing, I told her. You don’t know how to suck. But she was determined to show me otherwise and she was hurting me. Hold on, hold on, I finally said. I’m really hot and I want to stick it in you. I screamed, pretending to be on the verge and managing to get away from her teeth. But she didn’t give me a chance to do anything, quickly throwing herself on top of me. Puta madre , that fat girl weighed a ton, she completely pinned me. We began to push and pull, and I thought I would asphyxiate under her mass. It was frustrating. I immediately thought of my wife. Poor woman. She must feel the same thing when I’m on top. It must have taken so much sacrifice and devotion for her to tolerate my corpulence on her rickety little body.

The Western Bible stopped the pulling and pushing. I love that song, she said and got off the king-size bed to play it again. On her way to the stereo, she staggered, crashed against the dresser, and fell to the floor. I helped her up, and we continued with the penetration. I still had not experienced the divine loving grace of fatness when she again stopped to play the song over. Holy fuck, I shouted. Why don’t you just let it play? Concentrate.

Well, no, we’ll hear it a third time. And don’t scream at me, pendejo .

She wanted to climb on me again, but it was useless. I couldn’t take any more. My dick had deflated. We’ll stop here, I said, but she would not give up. She insisted on continuing. And to motivate me, she tried to suck me off again. Listen, puta , I agree that fellatio is an art, but it is not impossible for a mortal to do it decently, I said. Haven’t you ever eaten a popsicle? I asked her. It’s not science. It’s like sucking a Tootsie Pop. She changed tactics and got worse. Stop, stop, I shouted. I know what I’m doing, I know what I’m doing, she said in her defense, and because she was talking with her mouth full, she bit me. She refused to release me. To loosen her grip I slapped her. Then two more times, each time angrier than the other. She got up and hit me. I grabbed her and, with some effort, got her off me. I started to get dressed. She left the room, nude, with the bottle of whiskey in her hand.

When I got to the door, the fat girl came up to me. Don’t leave, cabrón . You’ve exhausted me, you fucking greaseball. You’re like all the others, you think I’m crazy. You’re like my parents.

Just what I needed, puta, the venting. I’m leaving, I said again, but I couldn’t open the door. It had a double lock. It needed a key. Give me the fucking key, I screamed. She didn’t want to give it up. Where is it?

Why don’t you understand? she began pleading. Don’t you understand? She poked my temples with her fingers and kept saying, I’m fine. This is normal, I just get depressed because I used to take drugs.

Stop, stop, I said. That’s not my fault. The key.

It’s not my fault I don’t have friends. I’m normal, normal, but everybody wants to drive me crazy. You want to drive me crazy, she barked, and then came at me. I avoided her fist, but she wouldn’t stop, so I finally punched her in the face with a closed fist.

Now in control and more eloquent, I demanded the key. The Western Bible was strewn on the floor. The key, chingada madre , or do you want another? Weak, she got up and said, You want your key? I’ll get your damn key, and she disappeared. I saw the bottle of whiskey and shoved it under my jacket. I would get drunk to forget this terrible moment. The Western Bible came back and, to make me turn towards her, she said, Here’s your key, culero . She was pointing a gun at me. I felt the blood drain out of me. It’s possible it wasn’t loaded, and she was pointing it just to get my attention, but I wasn’t interested in finding out. I didn’t dare wrestle this drunken mastodon for a gun at three in the morning. The little calf was still not awake. But with so much noise, he should have already been out of bed. If the boy could see us, The Western Bible would calm down and I could probably climb up the roof.

Nobody hits me, hijo de chingada . Nobody drives me crazy. I couldn’t do or say anything. I was shitting my pants. She could easily misfire. I thought about screaming, crying for help, but that was ridiculous. Besides, nobody was going to get out of bed to save an imbecile like me. Fortunately, the little calf began to cry and The Western Bible took off to console him. I immediately started looking for the keys. They were hanging from a wooden cross in the kitchen. I took another moment to reach into her purse on top of the refrigerator and grab as much as I had spent on the two of them at the fights, plus what I needed for my taxi home.

At the bar now, they consider me an expert on fat girls. A luminary. I have told my story to many a tourist, how a succulent fat girl rescued me from a sexual jam. They respect me. In here. But out there as well. People point at me. The devil sucked off your wife, güey. But I don’t care. My little wife and I are intimate again. And whenever we finish making love, I caress her burn scars and she purrs like a kitten under a birch tree.

The Cowgirl Bible had huge tits, a greasy face, and a mess of hair. From preadolescence, she had suffered flare-ups of rebellious hair. She learned early that letting loose those tresses was only possible for gals who could afford certain products. From the time she was just twelve or thirteen years old, as she entered the bloom of puberty, she focused blindly on the wild vertical porcupine that had begun to grow between her legs.

The punkospine, which had transmuted from the armadillo, developed in an onrush, like a flood, and could only be compared to the beards flaunted during certain musical phases by two members of ZZ Top. It could also be equated with the historic materialism of a certain identifiable and renowned pubis. The Cowgirl Bible suffered. She suffered from the folklorish dimensions of that wild bush. Her pubisexy mop could not hide under a bikini. It didn’t matter how many atonal rakes she employed to shave, or how many blades she ordered from the hair-removal industry’s complete catalog of new products, the punkospine always overwhelmed the emergent hairs like shrapnel, as is so often the case with certain honky-tonk gals.

During countless encounters with her mane, she avoided trying to control its erratic growth, until the day she was discovered by a buoyant hair talent scout. Once she found a skilled manipulator for her estimable hair of the loins, The Cowgirl Bible became the most committed participant in the national contest Shave Your Triangle . She won various awards in the ingrown hair category. At fifteen, she won the contest’s most important honors: The Golden Porcupine, the equivalent of the Hotsprings Award for the Radioactive Bud.

When a competitor is awarded the top prize, she should retire. Traditionally, Goodbye My Love plays at these affairs. And because pubic hair was her life, The Cowgirl Bible said that telenovelas and hosting would not be her path. A change of scene meant only one thing: to go under the knife, to invest in plastic surgery the way one does with horse racing. She decided it was better to follow the example of certain ex-baseball players who become minor league coaches upon retirement. She would impose herself in stylology, specializing in the pubis. She had memorized the exact manipulation of the mini mini electric shaver they used to shave her before every catwalk competition.