Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

“What is it?” Agar asked, intrigued. Though he couldn’t deal with the stench anymore.

They went around the edge of the abandoned house. It had been a beautiful house, but now the West Side Boys had completely destroyed all of its windows.

They arrived at the place at last. The stench was unbearable.

“It’s a dead mare,” Henry said. “And she was about to give birth. Don’t you see the bump, Agar?”

A swarm of flies was circling around the thing in question.

“She was about to give birth.” Henry insisted. “She was tied up in Liborio’s field and got loose.”

“The captain killed her,” Kiko Palacios pointed out, placing his boot on the swollen belly. “Godinez, the sea captain. Denny saw him driving his Buick when the mare got in the way.”

“And he ran over her?”

“No. He got out of the car and shot her twice.”

“I saw it all with my own eyes,” Denny said, coming out from behind the wild rosemary. “Two shots.”

“Son of a bitch,” Agar said.

“I don’t know anything about that, dude.” Denny said. “Politics don’t interest me. What I can tell you is that it was loaded.”

Denny broke off a stick of rosemary and shoved it forcefully into the dead beast’s sex. Agar shuddered in horror when the stick entered, breaking the flesh.

Henry leaned on his shoulders. Suddenly, Agar felt a great desire to hold that stick.

“Give me that stick, dude,” he said, biting his lip. “I’m going to tear her apart.”

He took the rosemary and sunk it in forcefully, digging into the orifice, until a trickle of whitish liquid came out.

“She came, dude,” Henry whispered. “That’s it! That’s it!” And Agar felt the boy’s hand trembling on his shoulder. The sun was beating down on the rosemary bush and a halo spiraled around their heads.

Agar felt two urges. One was tugging at his body, pushing him to run away from there forever. The other directed his arm, making him sink the stick in up to the hilt.

He felt disgusted, but strangely satisfied.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said later, throwing the stick far away. “She’s dead.”

Denny Dimwit sat down on the animal’s swollen belly. He exhaled the smoke from his cigarette and said: “But that’s how women work, more or less.”

“But you have to get them there,” Kiko Palacios assured them. “You have to ‘know’ how to get them there.”

“Is it very deep?” Agar wanted to know. In his mind, he was calculating according to his own resources.

“Eight inches to the end,” Denny said. “Although that varies. Eight, nine. that’s where a woman’s weak spot is.”

Agar felt frustrated. It was too much. In the afternoons, he went into the bathroom at home where he’d hidden a geometry ruler in order to measure himself. And he wasn’t any more than five inches.

“What are you doing with a ruler behind the toilet?” a surprised Mama Pepita wanted to know.

“I brought it in by accident,” he replied.

He thought that if Mama Pepita had suspected anything, he would have had to hang himself from a lamp. Then his memories disappeared as Denny continued to explain: “Women, there are two kinds. Wide and narrow. Hot and cold. My mother, for example, is cold.” A thousand needles pricked Agar’s face.

“Why?” Agar asked.

“My old man says so every once in a while,” Denny said, indifferently. “You’re already a man, he says. I can talk to you man-to-man. Right? And then, he says to me: Do you know how long it has been since your mother and I did it? A month! Do you think that’s fair? And then he says: Find yourself a Spanish woman for home; an Englishwoman to go out; and an Indian woman for a good time. What do you think?”

“Listen, dude,” Henry said. “Your old man is really something!”

“He’s a real joker,” Denny said. He searched his nose with one finger and added, “A month ago, when I turned eleven, he talked to me in the living room like a friend. Son, he goes and tells me: you’re already a man. And as a man, I’m going to tell you something. (And during all of this, mom is signing to him to shut his mouth.) He started to laugh and said: What you have there is not just for urinating, do you understand? It’s to be used. Use it well! And at the same time, my old lady goes: Animal! But he kept on going as if nothing happened. He shrugged his shoulders and said: It’s my duty! My father did the same with me. And his father and his. And so on and so on. And thus. to infinity.”

Denny Dimwit took a stick of pine and rolled it around in his closed fist.

“In any event,” he said, returning to the matter at hand. “I’m in no rush. The thing grows until you’re twenty-one. About an inch a year.”

He let out the smoke arrogantly and added: “Mine will be legendary!”

And Agar felt himself being reborn. He turned around, touching himself between the legs. From eleven until he turned twenty-one, there were still ten long years. And Denny was calculating one inch per year. He patted his penis and felt it small beneath his clothes. He felt ashamed of how many times he’d imagined that it would never grow.

Like that day they were urinating on the park benches, and he was so nervous he had to take a good look because he couldn’t get it out, and Bones had asked: “What, dude? Did you lose it?”

He finally ended up taking it out at last. Although he remembered that then the stream hadn’t come and how nonetheless, that night, he had pissed all over himself in bed.

At Seven, the Razor’s Edge

They were lying on the grass. Smoking under the sun facing the mare. The evil rosemary bloomed, and the West Side Boys broke into their space.

“A treasure!” Tin Marbán yelled. “The dudes found a treasure.”

So they all explored the dead beast.

They spent a while jumping over her, until they fell on the grass. Pacheco’s dog had come with them and was barking furiously at the putrefied corpse. Bones called her over and spit in her mouth and she swallowed Bones’ saliva.

“Hey, speaking of, Dude, you know who died?”

“No.”

“Well, someone who was alive.”

Laughter.

Agar felt he was being mocked.

“Hand me a smoke, dude,” Kiko Ribs said. And then he lit the cigarette, cupping his hand around it wisely. As he smoked, Agar recalled Mama Pepita the day she smelled his mouth.

“This boy smokes,” she discovered, shocked. “He smells like an opium den.”

He remembered previous episodes in a row. Like the day they found cigarettes in his shirt and Mama Pepita saved the box to show it to Papa Lorenzo when he got back from work.

That time he spent the whole afternoon shaking like a leaf in his room. And he had wished that someone would arrive that night with the news that Papa Lorenzo had been in a car accident.

By nine, Papa Lorenzo still hadn’t returned, and then he thought he had killed him with his supplications. Deep down, he understood that he did not want to kill his father.

“You can leave him an invalid, okay,” he pleaded, “but let him live!”

Deep down, he didn’t really understand himself. He saw Papa Lorenzo look up at the peeling ceiling and write names in the air with his finger, and he thought he loved him.

“I was raised by the whip,” Papa Lorenzo said that time, looking at the walls stupefied. “My father went to get me on the ball field and ran after me around all the bases with a belt raised high.

“You have to work!” he would say.

Papa Lorenzo smiled faintly and continued: “I would have been a good Major League player. If it hadn’t been for how malnourished I was, God knows where I would be now! Tom Casey saw me playing once and liked me. ‘What a shame!’ Tom Casey said. ‘If he had another twenty pounds on him, I would hire him for Cincinnati.’”