I mentioned in the preceding excerpt I posted, “Fogg and
Thalcave,” that the story featuring these two characters from Jules Verne would
vie with another story to be completed after I wrap up Space Detective. Today’s
excerpt is from that competing story.
Two Monsters is the follow-up story to Three Witches, an
action-oriented tale featuring El Tigre Azul, a famous luchador (a masked
Mexican wrestler) who battles crime when he’s not flogging another combatant
inside the ring. El Tigre’s adventures are inspired by the many masked Mexican
wrestler films that were translated for the U.S. drive-in crowd during the 1960s and
‘70s. But I also find inspiration in the spirited creativity displayed in the
low-budget independent films from the 1970s, when non-Hollywood filmmakers --
those outside the studio system -- like Monte Hellman, Roger Corman, Ron
Howard, Dennis Hopper, and others -- made films that had an idiosyncratic stamp, like
the French New Wave. There’s a spontaneity and unexpected wackiness you
encounter when watching these films that I’ve tried to capture in these
luchadore stories.
Two Monsters starts up not long after the end of Three
Witches. Again, El Tigre Azul is the primary character. Some folks from Three
Witches will appear again, but readers also will encounter new characters and
situations.
Two Monsters
The old woman stood in a corner of the room. Her white hair
was pulled back into a bun that was contained in a straining hair net. The skin
of her face appeared papery dry, and her face was scored by wrinkles that
radiated from the point where the top of her nose met the deeper frown line
between her brows. Her eyes were hidden behind overlapping folds of skin that
formed her lids. And despite the presence of the frown line above the old
woman’s nose, a wide smile curled the wrinkles that crossed her cheeks.
Once she smiled and revealed a single tooth within her
mouth.
The smile appeared after a piece of crockery sailed over her
head and smashed to clatters against the wall at her back.
She didn’t dodge an inch. Just stood there, leaning on a
slender, tough cane she gripped tightly with both hands. The frayed cuffs of
her sweater were bunched at her wrists as she leaned forward, and only her
knuckles were visible, white against the black wood of the cane.
The sweater was pink. It hung down over the top of a black
skirt that reached the floor and hid her feet. A small cloud of white flour
marked the skirt.
The old woman showed her tooth again. She was watching four
men battle in the center of the broad room. The tooth appeared whenever one of
the men groaned or swore during the fight.
Tables were overturned and chairs lay in broken bits around
the battlers. Their suit coats were ripped and the silk linings flapped like
tattered flags in the wind when one or another of the fighters swung and
smashed against the others.
One of the men was bigger than the others. He wore a mask,
blue with black stripes: El Tigre Azul.
A zigzag of blood ran from his left nostril to his chin.
He staggered to his feet. One of his assailants had hit him
across the collar bone with a chair leg.
El Tigre snagged the shirt collar of the man with the chair
leg. He smashed his right fist four times against the man’s face, rapidfire.
The man dropped the chair leg as bright red gouted from his nose, splattered
the floor. He sat down in the red spatters, fell forward in a groaning daze
beside his forgotten weapon.
El Tigre ducked as a second attacker swung a still-unbroken
chair from behind. The wrestler grabbed the chair leg from the floor, spun with
his left leg extended and tripped the Chair Man. The latter stumbled, and El
Tigre was up, clacking his makeshift baton against the fellow’s skull and jaw.
The man tried to fend off these blows with the chair, but the stick in El
Tigre’s hand was like a striking snake, evading every effort to thwart its
thrusts.
Finally, the chair grew too heavy, the man’s arms dropped,
his hands released the chair, and it spun on the floor.
The man’s eyes were swelling shut. He stepped back twice,
then collapsed to the floor like a dropped bag of potatoes.
El Tigre looked at the third attacker. He had been out of it
a few minutes. He leaned against the counter; rather, his back was to the
counter, his elbows were hitched up onto its top, and he seemed to be suspended
there. His feet were splayed out before him, the heels of his shoes against the
floor, the toes pointing to the ceiling. A string of drool hung down from his
gaping mouth to his hairy chest, exposed by the buttons that had popped off his
shirt during the fight. His eyes were open, but didn’t appear focused.
El Tigre stood up from his crouch, breathed deeply several
times, then turned to look at the old woman grinning her one-tooth grin in the
room’s corner.
The wrestler was not grinning in response. “Satisfied?”
Despite the ancient frown lines in the old woman’s face, she
looked as if she hadn’t scolded a child in two generations. But she cackled
like a hen, then said, “I haven’t been so happy since my daughter shot that
idiot she married two days after the wedding.”
The pink sweater had more color than her flesh, as though
her skin had absorbed the flour she worked with every day during the decades she
had kneaded and baked. El Tigre couldn’t see her eyes, but he watched that
tooth in her mouth. She might be the color of death, but her voice was lively
with delight.
The wrestler heard something move behind him.
He turned, and the man who had been leaning against the
counter had collected his wits and was charging, a knife raised in one fist.
Blam!
A bloody gap appeared where the knife wielder’s jaw had
been. He dropped his weapon and fell to the floor, and he thumped around there
while he groaned.
El Tigre looked at the old woman. She held a small revolver
she must have pulled from a sweater pocket. The smoke that curled up from the
barrel mouth was not so pale as the baker’s face.
“Why didn’t you stop all this mess and show that thing
earlier?” El Tigre demanded.
The tooth answered: “I’ve been waiting a long time to see
those mierdas fritas get their asses
kicked. I didn’t intend to miss it.”
El Tigre frowned. “Abuelita,
if your customers knew their baker has such a tongue, they might think twice
about buying your bread.”
“Pish. After baking for seventy years, bread is bland. It
needs some spicing up.” She tapped the end of her cane on the floor. “I’m
calling the policias.”
“Will I have to fight them, too?”
“If you don’t threaten them.”
“Why don’t you shove that gun under their noses?”
“Pish. I’d rather see a good fight.”
She tucked the gun back in her pocket.
