By Walter Agnew Moore II

Sabinas Hidalgo was the first town they stopped in, a huddle of one and two-storey square buildings painted light blue, yellow, or off-white, tucked in the fold of a river-valley after about an hour of pan-flat desert.  Lobo ran off of the big Mercedes bus with its locked bathroom, relieved himself in the echoing cinder-block restroom inside the bus station, and called Marisol again as the bus driver sat down to a plate of carne guisada at a nearby table.

The recorded voice said her phone was still out of the service area.  Damn, she must be sleeping off a night of partying at her brother's club, El Escarabajo.  No telling.

Farther on, Lobo was dozing through a children's movie about some man and his young daughter hiding an elephant in their apartment.  The movie's credits had been in something that looked like German, and the actors all looked sort of German too.  It was all dubbed into Spanish so who knows.  Lobo had wanted a good action flick, but he got this elephant thing instead.  Several children behind him were entranced by the antics of the huge beast and the child-actor's attempts to cope.

The day Marisol had come back from visiting her friends in Austin, Lobo knew what she had done.  He didn't need to hear her say, "I'm not pregnant anymore."  Lobo had been carrying a photo around in his head for the past couple of months.  It was a picture of him helping a little boy or girl balance on a pony's saddle, at some ranch out in the country.  It was more than a photo, he could smell the animal, feel the hot sky overhead.

This photograph had vanished with her words.

She had kept talking that day, he heard her mention family members' names, something about a trust fund, he didn't really listen to any of it.  He'd sipped his beer and noticed that her body was beautiful, like a statue.

No, he wasn't mad.  It was nothing.

The bus passed several people walking who waved, and then the driver stopped.  The people came hustling up to the bus, breathless, and the first man up the steps said, "Are you going to Cienega Flores?"

"Si," and the driver waved them all on, laughing, chattering.  The first man stood next to Lobo and said, "This seat is free, right?" with a smile and red-rimmed eyes.  Lobo scooted over.  The man smelled of old sweat, of hiking down a desert road for hours.

On the TV screen overhead, the elephant was crapping all over the apartment.  The desert-walking man was absorbed in the picture, looking at images from a distant rainy land.

Fifteen minutes later the driver had dropped all the new people off at various places in some little town.  Then the bus was in the outer suburbs of Monterrey, looking like a prosperous American city after the tiny villages they'd been seeing.  The bus puttered past shopping centers and blocks of newer houses.  Once Lobo looked at a street-sign when they were waiting at a stop-light and realized he was within a few blocks of Marisol's family house.  No point getting out though—this late in the day Marisol wouldn't be there, but her grandmother would—that bitch hated Lobo.

No, when Lobo saw Marisol, he wanted it to be in his hotel room.  He got horny thinking about it, and shifted in his seat, daydreaming.

Lobo saw the Hotel Delta off to the left as the bus pulled into the Monterrey station.  Rooms by the hour, he could pick up a cheap hooker in one of the nearby working-man's bars and bang her up there if Marisol wanted to play all hard to get hold of.

No.  He couldn't do that to his girl.  Besides, he didn't want to blow too much of his cash before he hooked up with her brother Juan.

Lobo sat on the bed in his room at the Hotel Nuevo Leon, a couple of blocks on the slightly better side of the bus station.  He held the phone and listened to the recorded voice, again.

He woke up on top of the bed still wearing his clothes.  The afternoon light was turning grey outside the window.  He heard faint car horns and an occasional shout.  He was hungry.

Lobo pissed into the seatless toilet.  Maybe he should have sprung for a nicer hotel up in the Zona Rosa.  He ran more water over his cut thumb and decided to go out instead of trying Marisol again on the room's phone.

He walked over to the Cuauhtemoc subway station, climbed stairs past old men and women selling nuts and dulces, and took the train over to the Padre Mier stop.  He climbed up the long stairs towards the dark metallic blue patch of sky and emerged in the middle of the downtown crowds.

The streets here always reminded him of a modern version of those old movies about New York, where every sidewalk is packed and taxis blare their horns.  In the distance, the jagged peak of the Cerro Silla, "Saddle Mountain," was black against the haze.

He turned into the Zona Rosa, a large pedestrian area of ritzy stores and boutiques, Latin techno music shaking his bones as he walked past their open fronts.  Lobo preferred the classier displays at the older stores like Casa Moreno, where he eyed a sharp suit.  Soon, yes, soon.

For now, he ate a hotdog at a stand, a sort of Polish sausage on a bun, split open with white cheese melted inside the grilled meat, green peppers and onions on the side with mustard.  He bought a large plastic bottle of Coke to wash it down, and the cook's wife didn't have change for Lobo's 200 peso note.  He stood by the stand and ate his hotdog while she fetched money from a neighboring toy store.

Marisol would complain about the taste of those onions on his breath.  Where the hell was she?  Lobo used a phone next to a hat-seller's stand while young couples glided past holding hands on both sides of him.  Still no answer.

Lobo decided he was going about this backwards.  Marisol was for fun.  Her brother Juan was for business.  And right now he needed to get his head straight and take care of business.  He counted his cash and came up with 1,400 pesos and change.  About $140 American.  He stuck a 200 peso note in his front pocket and put the rest back in his wallet.

The first taxi driver didn't know how to get to El Escarabajo.  Lobo tried a second one standing by his parked cab, who started out drawing a blank, but when Lobo said, "It's over across the big ridge called Loma Larga," the man perked up:  "It's over on Lazaro Cardenas, right?"

"Yeah, yeah.  That's right.  That's the street."

Lobo and the driver got into the cab, and drove south.