Cry Macho Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CRY MACHO

  N. Richard Nash (1913–2000) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Born in Philadelphia, he was one of the writers of the “golden age” of television, and the author of The Rainmaker and other plays translated into numerous languages. Often under the name John Roc he wrote radical works, of which seven have been published in N. Richard Nash Selected Plays. Along with Cry Macho, his fiction includes The Last Magic, Radiance, East Wind, Rain, and the Roc novel Winter Blood.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in the United States of America by Delacorte Press 1975

  Published in Penguin Books 2021

  Copyright © 1975 by N. Richard Nash

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Nash, N. Richard, author.

  Title: Cry macho : a novel / N. Richard Nash.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2021. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021026631 (print) | LCCN 2021026632 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137108 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525508618 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3527.A6365 C79 2021 (print) | LCC PS3527.A6365 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026631

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026632

  Designed by Sabrina Bowers, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Paul Buckley

  Cover images from Getty Images: (front) Gëzim Fazliu

  pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  He was not yet within sight of the ravine when Mike heard the first shot. Somebody had once told him—was it Howard?—that when the Mexican police shoot, the first shot is a boast, the second a bullet. But these were not Mexico City police, they were national patrolmen and the first shot was no boast. The slug cracked through the rear window of the truck and through the upholstery of the right-hand seat. If Rafo had been in it, he’d be dead. But they weren’t shooting at the kid, it was Mike they wanted. Yet, they had charges against the boy as well, and since this was their last chance at him . . .

  He let up slightly on the accelerator so he could slam it again and surge into overdrive. He was maintaining his distance from the patrol car, but it wasn’t good enough. If he made it to the ravine, he’d have to slow down and he’d lose too much of his lead.

  A second shot. Almost like the first—through the rear window, through the seat. At Rafo.

  He’s only eleven years old, you bastards, stop shooting at the boy!

  The boy who wasn’t there. What a turn the trick had taken, so perverse. Everything since his first meeting with the kid, everything perverse.

  Two shots, almost together. Closer to Mike this time. So it wasn’t the boy they were going for. Get the gringo. Plug him before he makes the border, splatter him down the ravine.

  The ravine mightn’t be there. Maybe he was remembering it all wrong—the Mexican road was unfamiliar. He knew the arroyo only on the Texas side; the terrain on this side looked different. The main difference, he knew, was in him: he felt that Mexico was a place he could too easily be caught in, found. And in Texas he could get lost . . . if that was what he wanted.

  A shot. Another. Each one, closer.

  If he could only be sure the kid would be all right. No certainty of that, especially if Mike himself didn’t get away. Whatever happened to Rafo, he’d never know. Never know whether the boy would get anywhere safely, what road he’d take, what home he would finally choose. Mexico City or Janasco? Go to Marta, Mike found himself saying, as if the boy were an arm’s length away; go to the sweet town of Janasco—it was rainbow’s end, it was paradise.

  If it was paradise, why hadn’t Mike himself chosen it? Paradise, he recalled as the shots were getting closer, was where you went after death, the exclusive abode of the departed. And he was not yet eligible.

  1

  Three months earlier . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  His arm hurt like hell and the phone was ringing. Let them ring, the impatient sons of bitches, he’d be no good to anybody until he got rid of the pain.

  He put the compress back into the tin basin of hot water, wrung it out and applied it again. The water was cooling down and he debated whether to toss it out and start over or put some liniment on the arm. He decided against the liniment—it would stink and they’d smell it and ask questions. In the earlier days he could bathe in the stuff and if he came in reeking it wouldn’t matter. But now they would take a whiff and give him sympathy and considerate glances. Then, behind his back, they’d lift their eyebrows and make bets on how soon a wild horse would break his neck.

  The phone stopped ringing and he had only the ache to make him angry. He wondered if he should take a pill. No, he didn’t dare. It would slow him down all afternoon or, worse, throw him off the rhythm of some bronc or other and, a hundred feet across the arena, he’d be on his butt. Besides, the pill didn’t do any good. He had taken one last night and, against doctor’s orders, a second one, but instead of killing the pain they had given him bad dreams.

  He’d have to find another doctor. Somebody who’d give him a powerful injection and presto, the pain would be gone. Tennis elbow—what a ridiculous label to put on an ache like this. Mike resented it. It sounded too fancy, too phony for a man like himself. It certainly gave no hint of this murderous torture, from the shoulder to the fingertips in every muscle, nerve, bone. Yes, he’d have to see another doctor, but he dreaded that the new one might call it exactly what Mike suspected it to be—arthritis—and he didn’t think he could stand that word. It meant middle age and there was no such thing as a middle-aged rodeo star.

  The pangs were getting worse, sharp seizures now, clutching the whole arm, stabbing, paralyzing it. He opened the little box and looked at the tiny triangular yellow pills—but, without taking one, shut the box again.

  That thing last night, that miserable nameless thing. He knew the pills had done it because the search persisted until they wore off. Two hours after he had gone to bed he got up again and, strangely reluctant to turn the lights on, wandered around in the dark. There was something missing, whatever it was, something he suspected he had lost. He had rooted in the darkness at first as if an absence of light had nothing to do wit
h finding anything. Then he turned the lights on, every blazing light in the apartment, and hunted everywhere—and as he became less certain what he was ferreting around for, he became more fixed on finding it. Finally, searching systematically, closet by closet and drawer by drawer, wondering who had robbed him of what, and how he might recover it, he realized he was dead tired. It was daylight when the urgency of the search diminished, and he knew he’d been doing a weird thing. He went to bed again but couldn’t sleep because the pain wouldn’t stop.

  Now the phone was ringing again. He shouted at the clanging instrument. Shut up! When did I ever miss a show? I’ll be in and riding—any wildcock horse you’ve got!—and the crowds’ll get their guns off yelling Milo, Mike Milo! Quit it—I’m coming in!

  Where else would he spend the afternoon? Not here in the apartment, certainly; the place depressed him. He had furnished it all wrong—he had been in a nightmare when he did it, he was a zombie. When it was just completed Donna had come visiting and, taking one look at the living room, had called it ruttishly masculine. From that time on he was embarrassed by the steer horns on the wall, by the horseshoe bookends, the rodeo posters, the trophies in the glass case. Yet he never changed anything—it was like a penance for a period in his life he hadn’t yet fully paid for.

  What he disliked most about the apartment was that it had never given him a quite place to read in. Not that he was a fervent reader anymore; those days were over—it was a comic inconsistency, the cowboy with his nose in a book, like wearing horn-rimmed spectacles while breaking a bronc. But sometimes he got a hunger, an emptiness . . . and the place wouldn’t let him read. It hadn’t anything to do with the fact that he didn’t have the right chair or the right light or that the bookshelves were too high on the walls. It was something hostile in the room, something that forbade him to sit in a chair and think . . . or simply to remember. The apartment barely allowed him to worry the single thought: nightmare or not, what had ever driven him to decorate his home this way? What man was in his mind when he did it?

  The pain, moving, now had centered in his forearm; all the aches had congregated there. He massaged it with his left hand, kneading it a little, but with no relief, so he struck his fist against the muscle, he pounded, pummeled it, raging. Should he take the pill? About to do so, deciding against it, unable to make up his mind, he threw the pillbox across the room and started beating on his arm again. The basin fell and the water spilled. His breath was coming too fast for him to keep up with it. The phone continued ringing and he kept trying to hurt his arm so it would stop hurting and he didn’t know whether he could cope with the two hurts at once.

  Then the phone stopped. The room was still. He could stand neither pain now, and he could barely stand the stillness.

  * * *

  • • •

  If he drove with his left hand on the wheel and allowed his right arm to hang limp, the ache was now barely perceptible. There was a worse nuisance: the noise of the car. It was a sports car, a Porsche convertible. When it was new he had admired its boasting roar, but recently the rumble had changed to a racket. Well, it had a right—it was now nearly six years old and, it seemed to Mike, an old sports car was a contradiction in terms.

  As he turned into Galveston Street and joined the heavier traffic bound for the stadium, Mike saw him. Howard Polk, also driving a convertible, a new one, a big custom-built Mercedes, specially designed and painted. It was unusually burnished, both copper and gray, like a fresh bullet. But Mike guessed it had been matched not to a bullet but to the color of the owner’s hair, the vain bastard.

  It was disturbing to see Polk. The man never came to a Sunday matinee, he was a night person. He’d have stayed away from the evening shows too, Mike realized, if he didn’t own them all; he was an Easterner as if by baptism and was caustic about cowboys, the rodeo and Texas.

  Polk’s presence today meant a nuisance. Somebody had called him—the chute boss, perhaps, or Andy the doorman—and told him Mike hadn’t appeared. The owner would be cold-angry and ready for battle. Someday, Mike thought, I’ll get him hot enough to hit me and then . . . Mike clenched the fist of his bad arm and it hurt with a spiteful pleasure.

  Howard’s car was zigzagging through traffic, outstripping him. Clearly, he had no notion Mike was behind him; he didn’t look in his rearview mirror—let the others watch him. The next minute, Howard’s car made the turn into the stadium alley as Mike was stopped by the traffic light directly outside the arena.

  The crowds were crossing from the parking lot. They always seemed happier on Sunday, and louder. The hawkers were louder too—programs, balloons, hot dogs—almost drowning out the taped music of folk-rock-country and the loudspeakers over it, telling the audience the show was about to begin.

  The huge overriding banner—Polk’s Cow Stadium, in shiny psychedelic silks—snapped in the wind. It forced the eye from the parking lot to the two entry arcades between which hung the enormous poster photograph of Mike, a full shot on a rearing bronc, with the hat aloft and the plastic grin of the witless cowboy.

  He had trained himself never to notice the picture. It had been taken before he came here, during his last year of competition. It had been a terrible year—he had won little money and no prizes. Twice he’d been hurt—a fractured leg, then a broken kneecap. Every horse was beginning to look like disaster, the drives between arena towns seemed to be taking longer, each motel room meant a little more sleeplessness than the one before, and a little more bourbon. The fear and the night sweats.

  Then he had heard from the Macmillan Brothers. They owned a stadium too large in a town too small. The major cities were drawing the major rodeos and whatever attractions the Macmillans could entice came so irregularly that they couldn’t build an audience. The arena was dying. Carly, the oldest of the brothers, had the idea to establish a resident rodeo company. Although it had been tried elsewhere without dizzying success, Carly thought he could make it work.

  Eighteen months after Mike became a salaried rider in the resident rodeo, the company collapsed and the stadium was a prey to its mortgage holder.

  The mortgage holder was Polk.

  For Howard Polk, the New York-tailored, Ivy-educated tenderfoot, to take over the management of a rodeo was worse than arrogance; it was stupidity. Everybody said so. He didn’t even know the words. He said bronco instead of bronc, rigging instead of riggin’, and he called the cattle pens paddocks. But within two years, the resident company was giving performances not only on weekends but every night except Monday.

  That Howard was able to make a success of the rodeo should have endeared him to the men, but they hated him. Only Clyde, his straw boss and toady, defended him. “Thanks to Polk, we got more horses and less horseshit.”

  That was it. He swept away the lies the cowboys told themselves, he cleaned house of illusion. They wanted to think of themselves as cowboy heroes, competing in the big time, National Finals contenders. But Howard jeered at them: if they really wanted the big time, they’d do the competitive circuit; since they were still here, securely under salary, they hadn’t the talent or the guts for the killing competition. No, they were not cowboy heroes—Howard made a needling point of it—they were actors. The men felt naked. Changing a Texas rodeo into a Broadway theater was like tearing away their spurred boots and giving them dancing shoes.

  It started with the sign-in. Hardly a month after Polk took over the stadium, he told the men that the habit of lateness had to stop. The cowpunchers, like extras in a musical, would have to sign an attendance ledger at half hour. The men fumed and cursed, they spat tobacco juice behind his back. And complied.

  But Mike Milo didn’t raise one finger of objection; he simply never signed the ledger. It surprised him that Howard didn’t call him to account for it, but he knew that sooner or later the thin-lipped man would have his retaliation.

  It came in the form of a salary cut. Everybody got it,
a twenty-five percent slash, take it or go. Nobody went. The cut bothered Mike, but the thought of going back into competition bothered him more; he too stayed. He thought Howard wanted him to leave; to the owner he was a wayward horse, unevenly broken. Neither man, however, jarred the equilibrium: Howard didn’t fire him and Mike accepted the cut. And each of them took it as a sign of the other’s weakness.

  Howard was a puzzle to Mike. Sometimes he thought of him as a dilettante, playing the rodeo like a parlor game. Then he saw him as a driven and dangerous man, fanatic to make a success where all odds foretold failure, clinging desperately to a handhold on some runaway wealth. The latter view was probably more accurate; there had been rumors of a divorced wife who had somehow swindled him out of a considerable fortune. A vindictive woman, somewhere in Mexico, violent.

  The worst part of Mike’s bafflement was that he didn’t know how he really felt about his boss. Just as he’d start respecting Polk—his imagination, his competence—he’d find himself repelled by him. He even distrusted Howard’s honesty, for the man used frankness to cut people down; his honesty was a vice.

  One of their earliest skirmishes was over nothing, over a word. Howard was a word man, insolent about his facility with language, mouth proud. But even learning the new words didn’t seem to give him a clue to the real language of the cowboys. He’d enter a conversation—they’d be talking about something simple, the weight of a catch rope—and the men would look vacantly at him as if they didn’t understand anything he said. He knew there was a secret to the cowboys’ jargon, but he was humiliatingly out of it.

  Mike could have let him in. The secret of the men’s lingo was one word. It might be spoken or it might be tacit, but it was always there: cock. Even if the cowpunchers weren’t talking about women, not even thinking about them, it was the password of their communion. A bad horse was a dirt-fucker, a good one was a sweetcock even if it was a mare; a bottle of sour mash didn’t go to a man’s head or his stomach, it went to his wangdang; and for a hangover a cup of black coffee was a jockstrap. Behind the word was an unspoken pact: they gave one another credit for prowess. It was a credit they didn’t give Howard. Without it, he had no open sesame to their language.