The Power Of The Dog Read Online Free

me who our distinguished poet friend is speaking to on the telephone?” “Arturo, this is a listening device. If you could perhaps insinuate it into his room …”
     
    Art did it all without blinking, and did it all well.
     
    They handed him his diploma and a ticket to Langley practically at the same time. Explaining this to Althie was an interesting exercise. “I can sort of tell you, but I can’t really,” was about the best he could manage. She wasn’t stupid; she got it.
     
    “Boxing,” she told him, “is the perfect metaphor for you.”
     
    “What do you mean?”
     
    “The art of keeping things out,” she said. “You’re so skilled at it. Nothing touches you.”
     
    That’s not true, Art thought. You touch me.
     
    They got married a few weeks before he shipped out to Vietnam. He’d write her long, passionate letters that never included anything about what he actually did. He was changed when he got home, she thought; of course he was, why wouldn’t he be? But the insularity that had always been there was intensified. He could suddenly put oceans of emotional distance between them and deny that he was doing it. Then he would revert to being that sweet, intensely affectionate man with whom she had fallen in love.
     
    She was relieved when he said he was thinking about changing jobs. He was enthused about the new DEA; he thought he could really do some good there. She encouraged him to take the job, even though it meant he was going to leave for another three months, even when he came home just long enough to get her pregnant and left again, this time for Mexico.
     
    He wrote her long, passionate letters from Mexico that never included anything about what he actually did. Because I don’t do anything, he wrote her.
     
    Not a goddamn thing except feel sorry for myself.
     
    So get off your ass and do something, she wrote back. Or quit and come home to me. I know Daddy could get you a job on a senator’s staff in no time, just say the word.
     
    Art didn’t say the word.
     
    What he did was get off his ass and go see a saint.
     
    Everyone in Sinaloa knows the legend of Santo Jesús Malverde. He was a bandito, a daring robber, a man of the poor who gave back to the poor, a Sinaloan Robin Hood. His luck ran out in 1909 and the federales hanged him on a gallows just across the street from where his shrine now stands.
     
    The shrine was spontaneous. First some flowers, then a picture, then a small building of rough-hewn planks, put up by the poor at night. Even the police were afraid to tear it down because the legend grew that the soul of Malverde lived in the shrine. That if you came here and prayed, and lit a candle and made a manda—a devotional promise—Jesús Malverde could and would grant favors.
     
    Bring you a good crop, protect you from your enemies, heal your illnesses.
     
    Notes of gratitude detailing the favors that Malverde has bestowed are stuck into the walls: a sick child cured, rent money magically appeared, an arrest evaded, a conviction overturned, a mojado returned safely from El Norte, a murder avoided, a murder avenged.
     
    Art went to the shrine. Figured it was a good place to start. He walked down from his hotel, waited patiently in line with the other pilgrims and finally got inside.
     
    He was used to saints. His mother had faithfully dragged him to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Barrio Logan, where he took catechism classes, made his First Communion, was confirmed. He had prayed to saints, lit candles at the statues of saints, sat as a child and looked at paintings of saints.
     
    Actually, Art was a pretty faithful Catholic even during college. He was a regular communicant in Vietnam at first, but his devotion waned and he stopped going to confession. It was like, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have— Oh, fuck it, what’s the point? Every day I mark men for death, every other week I kill them