Playing a Spanish Number — Eduardo Paz-Martinez

...It is a well-known fact that it is the land he lives on that defines a man. Put him on the beach and he is one person; put him on the Polar ice cap and he will be another. Why that tends to happen has a whole lot to do with man's inability to adjust to the environmental elements. A man from the hills of Kentucky might find the beach quite an unplesant experience, as a man from Arizona might think the North Pole a hellhole of mind-blowing proportions. And then there are those men eager to throw themselves at the worst of things, at rough and tough geography where everybody knows the snakes rule the day, where everybody lives a life so harsh that everything good's on the ground. No tall mountains here to help define highs and lows. No pretty ponds to paint. No beautiful deer or bears to admire. Snakes and lizards by the million. A murky river that serves as more than an international boundary. A river that is more a plumbing pipe than anything bringing life to vegetation, to marine life, to the population astride its banks, a population riding it as if there was nothing else to ride. This is the Rio Grande Valley in Deep South Texas, a land at once addictive and selective that it takes years of living here to feel like you belong. Patrick Alcatraz has come to the Texas-Mexico border from Santa Fe, New Mexico, a land many would describe as being among the prettiest in the world. Patrick is in his early 40s, adrift professionally, and in serious need of a reason for living. His wife has turned her back on his failures and left him for, of all things, an artist. He can live with that, except that revealing that small fact would pretty much blow his ability to make friends in a land where toughness is measured by the number of notches on your gunbelt or bedpost. Not an ugly man, Patrick closes the ledger on his past and plunges into a new life in the company of Ben Barcelo and Ray Palafox, two handsome playboys about his same age interested only in making sure man ends the 20th Century on a high sexual note. Barcelo is the freak of the trio, but only if one defines freak as someone easily excited and someone insisting that things don't always have to be done in one and one way only. Ray Palafox was Zorro in an earlier life. He won't say it, only to watch him in action with the ladies is to see an accomplished swordsman. As with handsome men in a small bordertown, women aren't hard to come by. The search for a pretty one, however, is the challenge. Ben Barcelo will bed any woman willing to be tied to his tree in the backyard. Ray Palafox sets a different course. He is of the opinion that bedding down discounted meat is to make for tremendous allowances. Palafox sees sex as a Holy calling. He is propelled forward by the possibilities of perhaps meeting the one woman he has never had. And that, he believes, could be any day now. He's ready and he's in training. Bar brawls and loud Spanish insults to help spur those fights on are his specialty. Fighting bulls keep him in great physical shape. Patrick Alcatraz, the narrator of this contempoarry tale, is the mellow one in the trio, although that hardly means he is shy and retreating. Patrick dreams of finding that vein in his emotional river that will deliver him to a place where he again finds the sort of happiness he enjoyed as young man in Santa Fe. He has been on a treadmill to nowhere for the most part, failing at various ventures and wondering why things never play out as he expects. He lives in a small apartment atop a tire shop, putting up with banging till all hours of the night while he writes a book about forgotton sea disasters in the Gulf of Mexico. It is a money-losing idea, he knows. But there is the prospect of riches coming for sure from his latest stab at traditional business, a condom vending machine enterprise that promises much. It's a shot in the dark, yet he feels good about the idea, so much so that he educates himself on the product so that he knows what the market offers and what men seek in rubber sheathing. It's a life, too. The women who come into the picture are a mix of pretty and semi-pretty sweethearts demanding different things in different ways. Ben Barcelo has cornered the market on the humble ones, like Perla, the bar maiden who has succumbed to his wily ways and lived to pay the price. Not that she didn't get anything out of it, but there are the welts on her bottom to wonder about. Ben Barcelo is in it for himself and no one else. He pleases women after pleasing himself. He invites them into his world and then pushes them out. He treats them like queens and then demotes them to maids. He takes them high into the sky and then drops them to the streetcurb. Love? What is love? Ben Barcelo accepts the proposition that he is a man and that women are for men. He is here, he will say with pride, to offer something a little different. Nothing more; nothing less. As the story begins, we find that there already is