The third message arrived in a rainstorm. “Lone Star.” Teo woke Lefty Antic out of a drunken stupor. They pored over the harness races, but the only possibility was a driver named T. North whose first name, Lefty thought, was Tex, and whose last name suggested the North Star. Then they checked the thoroughbreds at Arlington, and found a long shot named Bright Venus. “The Evening Star!” Lefty said, smiling. Track conditions would be sloppy, and Bright Venus was a mudder. Lefty had the shakes so bad he could barely get dressed, but, convinced it was the score they’d been building to, he went off to lay their bets with Sovereign. Teo bet a thousand to win.
That night he had a nightmare that he was in El Paso, where he’d begun his career as a luchador, wrestling on the Lucha Libre circuit at fiestas and rodeos. In the dream he was wrestling the famous Ernesto “La Culebra” Aguirre, the Snake, named for the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of human sacrifice. Lucha Libre wrestlers often took the names of superheroes and Aztec warriors, and Teo once really had wrestled the Snake, though not in El Paso. That match was in Amarillo, back in the days when Teo was making a name for himself as a masked luchador called the Hummingbird. He’d come upon his identity in an illustrated encyclopedia of the gods of Mexico. The Hummingbird was Huitzilopochtli, the Mayan sun god; the illustration showed a hawklike warrior bird rising from a thorny maguey plant. According to the caption, the thorns symbolized the Hummingbird’s beak, and after Spain destroyed the Mayan empire, the thorns of the Hummingbird became the crown Jesus wore. Huitzilopochtli’s sacred colors were sun white and sky blue, so those were the colors of the costume — mask, tank top, and tights — that Teo wore. When Teo put on the mask, he’d feel transformed by a surge of energy and strength. As the Hummingbird, he defied the limitations of his body and performed feats that marveled the crowds. He flew from ropes, survived punishing falls, lifted potbellied fighters twice his size high off their feet and slammed them into submission. To keep his identity secret, he would put on his mask miles from the ring, and afterward he wore it home. The nights before bouts he took to sleeping in his mask.
It was at a carnival in El Paso that he saw Alaina again, standing ringside with a group of high school friends, mostly boys. It had been three years since his uncle had thrown him out without giving him a chance to say goodbye to her. The boys must have come to see the rudo billed as El Huracán — the Hurricane — but known to fans as El Flatoso — Windy — for his flatulence in the ring. El Flatoso, with his patented move of applying a head scissors, then gassing his opponent into unconsciousness, was beloved by high school boys and drunks. Teo had been prepared to be part of the farce of fighting him until he saw Alaina in the crowd. He could feel her secretly watching him through her halflowered eyelashes with the same intensity that he knew she’d watched him when he’d spied on her through the skylight. Suddenly, the vulgar spectacle he was about to enact was intolerable. The match was supposed to last for half an hour, but when El Flatoso came clownishly propelling himself with farts across the ring, the Hummingbird whirled up and delivered a spinning kick that knocked the rudo senseless. He didn’t further humiliate El Flatoso by stripping off his mask, and the boys at ringside cursed, demanding their money back, before dejectedly dragging Alaina off with them. But he saw her look back and wave, and he bowed to her. Later that night, there was a light rap on the door of the trailer that served as his dressing room. Alaina stood holding an open bottle of mescal. “Don’t take it off,” she whispered as he began to remove his mask. Though they’d yet to touch, she stood unbuttoning her blouse. “I don’t believe this is happening,” he said, and she answered, “Unbelievable things happen to people on the edge.” She spoke like a woman, not a girl, and when she unhooked her bra, her breasts were a woman’s, full, tipped with nipples the shade of roses going brown, not the buds of the girl he’d spied on. He knelt before her and kissed her dusty feet. She raised her skirt, and he buried his face in her woman smell. He wanted the mask off so he could smear his cheeks with her. “Leave it on,” she commanded, “or I’ll have to go.” He rose, kissing up her body, until his lips suckled her breasts and their warm, sweet-sour sweat coated his tongue, and suddenly her sighs turned to a cry. “No, too sensitive,” she whispered, pushing him gently away, then she opened his shirt and kissed him back hard, fiercely biting and sucking his nipples as if he were a woman. “My guainambi,” she said, using the Indian word for hummingbird.
It was months before he saw her again, this time at a rodeo in Amarillo — a long way from El Paso — where he stood in the outdoor ring waiting for his bout with the Snake. The loose white shirt she wore didn’t conceal her pregnancy, and for a moment he wondered if the child could be his, then realized she’d already been with child when she’d knocked on his trailer door. La Culebra, in his plumed sombrero, rainbow-sequined cape, and feathered boa, was the star of the Lucha Libre circuit, and it had been agreed that the Hummingbird was to go down to his first defeat in a close match that would leave his honor intact so that a rivalry could be built. But when Teo saw Alaina there at ringside, he couldn’t accept defeat. He and the Snake slammed each other about the ring, grappling for the better part of an hour under a scorching sun with Teo refusing to be pinned, and finally in a clinch the Snake told him, “It’s time, pendejo, stop fucking around,” and locked him in his signature move, the boa constrictor. But the Hummingbird slipped it, and when the Snake slingshotted at him off the ropes, the Hummingbird spun up into a helicopter kick. The collision dropped them both on their backs in the center of the ring. “Cocksucker, this isn’t El Flatoso you’re fucking with,” the Snake told him as he rose spitting blood. The legend surrounding La Culebra was that he’d once been a heavyweight boxer. He’d become a luchador only after he’d killed another boxer in the ring, and now, when he realized they weren’t following the script, he began using his fists. The first punch broke Teo’s nose, and blood discolored his white and blue mask, swelling like a blood blister beneath the fabric. The usual theatrics disappeared, and the match became a street fight that had the fans on their feet cheering, a battle that ended with the Snake flinging the Hummingbird out of the ring. The fall fractured Teo’s kneecap, his head bounced off the pavement, and as he lay stunned, unable to move for dizziness and pain, the Snake leaped down onto his chest from the height of the ring, stomping the breath from his body, and tore off the bloodied mask of the Hummingbird as if skinning him, then spit in his flattened face. Teo, his face a mask of blood, looked up into the jeering crowd, but he never saw Alaina again.
In Teo’s nightmare, the Snake humiliated him not only by tearing off his Hummingbird mask and exposing his identity to the crowd but by derisively shouting “Las tetas!” and tearing off Teo’s tank top, exposing a woman’s breasts weeping milky tears. At dawn, when Teo groaned out of his dream, with his stomped, body-slammed chest aching and his heart a throbbing bruise, there was no envelope of winnings waiting. That morning Teo knocked repeatedly on Lefty Antic’s door without an answer. The thought occurred to him that the saxophone player had taken off with their money, not out of crookedness but on a drunken binge. It was only in the afternoon, when Teo bought a newspaper and checked the racing scores at Arlington, that he learned Bright Venus had finished dead last. He checked the harness results at Sportsman’s, and there was a story about a buggy overturning in the third race and its driver, Toby North, being critically injured when a trotting horse crushed his chest.