handle of the knife into the waiting palm.
"Police are coming," the manager warned. "You should go home, Ramon."
"You saw what happened," Ramon said.
"No, I wasn't here when it happened," Mikel said. "And neither were you, eh? Now go home. And keep your mouth shut."
Ramon spat on the ground and stalked into the night. It wasn't until he began to walk that he understood how drunk he was. At the canal by the plaza, he squatted down, leaned back against a tree, and waited until he was sure he could walk without listing. Around him, Diegotown spent its week's wages on alcohol and kaafa kyit and sex. Music tumbled in from the rough gypsy houseboats on the canal; fast, festive accordion mixing with trumpets and steel drums and the shouts of the dancers.
Somewhere in the darkness, a tenfin was calling mournfully, a "bird" that was really a flying lizard, and sounded uncannily like a woman sobbing in misery and despair, something that had led the superstitious Mexican peasants who made up a large percentage of the colony's population to say that La Llorona, the Crying Woman, had crossed the stars with them from Mexico and now wandered the night of this new planet, crying not only for all the children who'd been lost and left behind on Earth, but for all the ones who would die on this hard new world.
He, of course, didn't believe in such crap. But as the ghostly crying accelerated to a heartbreaking crescendo, he couldn't help but shiver.
Alone, Ramon could regret stabbing the European; surely it would have been enough just to punch him around, humiliate him, slap him like a bitch? But when Ramon was drunk and angry, he always went too far. Ramon knew that he shouldn't have drunk so much, and that whenever he got around people, it always seemed to end like this. He'd begun his evening with the sick knot in his belly, which being in the city seemed to bring, and then by the time he'd drunk enough to untie that knot, as usual someone had said or done something to enrage him. It didn't always end with a knife, but it rarely ended well. Ramon didn't like it, but he wasn't ashamed of it either. He was a man - an independent prospector on a tough frontier colony world less than a generation removed from its founding. By God, he was a man! He drank hard, he fought hard, and anyone who had a problem with that would be wise to keep their pinche opinions to themselves!
A family of tapanos - small, raccoonlike amphibians with scales like a hedgehog's spikes - lumbered up from the water, considered Ramon with dark, shining eyes, and made their way toward the plaza, where they would scavenge for the dropped food and trash of the day. Ramon watched them pass, slick dark paths of canal water trailing behind them, then sighed and hauled himself to his feet.
Elena's apartment was in the maze of streets around the Palace of the Governors. It perched above a butcher's shop, and the air that came in the back window was often fetid with old gore. He considered sleeping in his van, but he felt sticky and exhausted. He wanted a shower and a beer and a plate of something warm to keep his belly from growling. He climbed the stairs slowly, trying to be quiet, but the lights were burning in her windows. A shuttle was lifting from the spaceport far to the north, tracking lights glowing blue and red as the vessel rose toward the stars. Ramon tried to cover the click and hiss of the door with the throbbing rumble of the shuttle's lift drive. But it was no use.
"Where the fuck have you been?" Elena yelled as he stepped inside. She wore a thin cotton dress with a stain on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back into a knot of black darker than the sky. Her teeth were bared in rage, her mouth almost square with it. Ramon closed the door behind him, and heard her gasp. In an instant, the anger had left her. He followed her gaze to where the European's blood had soaked the side of his shirt, the leg of his pants. He shrugged.
"We'll have to burn these," he said.
"Are you okay, mi hijo? What happened?"
He hated it when she called him that. He was no one's little boy. But it was better than fighting, so he smiled, pulling