Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

They were scared. They were all scared. Only Parker the judge, leaning on his crutches, dared to look him in the eye.

“Listen, Bronco. listen to the words of an old man and then do whatever you want. But. may the devil take me away if it wouldn’t be right for you to forgive!”

“Where is he?” he said.

“Pop Lorenz left here a thousand years ago. May the devil take me away if that’s not how it was. He might have gone to Yuma,” Old Parker said, looking nervously at his pistols.

“Get back!” Bronco Joe said brusquely.

“Listen to the words of an old man, son!” The judge exclaimed, feeling found out. “Forget about the past. I know you can do it!”

“Forget.,” Bronco Joe whispered. “It’s hard to forget!”

“Leave it be, Parker!” He heard behind him. It was the unmistakable voice of Pop Lorenz.

He turned around brusquely and saw him again for the first time in thirty years. Tears of indignation threatened to fall.

“Leave it be!” Old Lorenz repeated. “God knows I don’t regret a thing!”

He grabbed a fistful of dirt and threw it at Bronco Joe.

“That’s what you are!” he yelled. “Dirt!”

Bronco smiled wanly and said: “The same old Lorenz, right?” He rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. “I’m glad it’s like this,” he said then. “It resolves an old doubt I had.” And he let the words fall lightly: “Do I kill you. or not kill you?”

“So what did you decide?” Pop Lorenz yelled. “Say it once and for all, for God’s sake!”

Suddenly, Old Lorenz gestured to his pistols. Bronco let him go until he practically saw him touching his guns.

“Now!” He said, drawing his own.

Pop Lorenz’s revolvers flew through the air. With his wrists bathed in blood, he fell to the ground on his knees.

“Finish it once and for all!” Old Lorenz yelled angrily.

“No.,” Bronco Joe said. “I’ve waited thirty years for this. To forgive you. ”

He slowly left the town, down the center of Main street.

“He’s a man from the West!” Old Parker yelled, raising up his crutch. But Bronco Joe didn’t hear him. He was already riding his horse very far away en route to the sweet plains of glory.

And so it happened in Tombstone, Arizona: “The town that refused to die.”

At Eleven, Get In on the Action

All of that had happened. He remembered it now alone. He closed his eyes and it was as if he were in the Buck Rogers’ Time Warp and landing on the planet of No Return. Where he could change the past at whim. He then remembered the stories piled under his bed. “Witch Tales,” “Frontier,” “El que la hace la paga,” “Superman,” “Walt Disney’s Stories.”

He felt he was leaving Walt Disney behind. Before he had lived for him, and had dreamed of being Gladstone Gander, the lucky one who found diamonds wherever he was. Or Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck’s uncle, who was swimming in millions and ate hot dogs to save ten cents. He liked Scrooge McDuck. He would have liked to be like that.

The owner of the house where he lived was a filthy rich Spaniard who was a lot like Scrooge McDuck. He walked around Santa Fe on Sundays with a cedar walking stick just like Scrooge McDuck’s.

“I’m thorry, I’m thorry. I’m thrict about payments. Dear thir, pay me. Fine! I’ll wait until Monday.”

“Mr. Castelón is a nice guy,” Agar commented that day.

Mama Pepita shot him a hard look from the kitchen.

“He’s a no-good son-of-a-bitch,” she said.

Agar didn’t say anything else. He would have liked to have been Castelón’s nephew. Uncle Scrooge Castelón, the golden old man who swam in bills from the bank.

He left aside the Disney stories.

Mickey Mouse was still looking for diamonds on the Lost Island.

Gladstone Gander was about to find Tutankhamen’s treasure.

Elmer Fudd remained lost under an avalanche in the Himalayas.

He now preferred “Witch’s Tales,” “The Spirit,” “Macabre Stories.” Although he knew that at night he would have insomnia and that things would reach for the bottoms of his feet.

He opened the book:

It was the story of Clay Putnam. The man who was hiding a secret. The unknown man who always walked with a box on his shoulder. What was Putnam hiding? The town asked itself. At church, the people would stop praying and turn their eyes on him. Who would pray without taking the box off of his shoulder?

One winter afternoon, Clay Putnam went into Peter’s Café. He asked for a glass of gin.

“I’m sorry, Putnam,” the barman said. “I won’t serve you until you get that damned box off your shoulder.”

“Leave me alone!” Putnam yelled. “Leave me alone with my blasted box!”

The men left their drinks and surrounded him.

“What do you have in there, you devil?”

“Show us what you have in that box, you damned warlock!”

“What did you come to Finstown to do, Putnam? Did you maybe come to cast a spell on us?”

Putnam backed away to the door and started running down the street with his box.

“Go after him, get that warlock, even if he’s the devil himself!”

Putnam fell to the ground. The men reached him, panting. Old Carson MacCullers raised his wooden stake and brought it down forcefully over his heart. The heart of Clay Horace Putnam, “The Man with the Mysterious Box.”

“Open that box!” MacCullers ordered. “Let’s get to the bottom of this mystery.”

Old Edward Albee leaned over the dead man. An air of expectation surrounded the men.

“Here goes!” Albee yelled, lifting the lid.

“Holy God in heaven above. ”

And the surprised eyes of the inhabitants of Finstown contemplated Putnam’s horrible secret: there was another head on his shoulder!

That was Putnam’s mystery. “Finstown’s Bicephalous Man.”

Agar shuddered. The drawing of the other head made quite an impression on him. He was now reading “Vampires in the Belfry” when he sensed the door creaking behind him.

“What are you doing?” Mama Pepita asked roughly. “Why are you shaking? Get to the table!” She said, turning around. “I want you to finish that plate of chickpeas without a single complaint.”

At Twelve, an Old Lady Snivels

You went back to your room.

You could also play “The Colors a Blind Man Sees.” You cover your eyes and press them tight with your fingers. That’s how the pain comes, but you’ll see a kaleidoscope of lights and unknown colors. And best of all, a red dot at the center through which you can escape and see yourself from the inside.

Grandma Hazel would tell you that you’re going to go blind from so much squeezing, but deep down, the idea doesn’t bother you.

To go blind. Marching with a red-tipped walking stick and being protected by everybody. Then Papa Lorenzo wouldn’t be able to raise his hand to me and I would eat whatever I wanted and on Sundays I could go to the theater to see this movie or that and. shit! How would a blind person go to the movies?

So you preferred to stay as you were. Although you remembered the joke: “It was twelve at night and the sun was beating down on the rocks. Under a burnt-out lamp, a blind man read a newspaper without letters.”

You started to laugh.

You really were happy alone.

“Ah!” you said. And you thought. And you thought about your penis. Although you didn’t take it out because Mama Pepita could come in whenever she wanted and the very thought of such a scene made you die of shame.

Maybe she would say: You disgusting thing! Are these the filthy things you learn in school?

And the word “school” reminded you that vacation would soon be over and you’d have to see the face of Agrispina Pérez Pérez again, the fifth-grade teacher. Do you remember? That day, she was teaching a class on Descriptive Anatomy.