standing and addressed Ronnie who stood just outside the farthest beam. “So you want to know about Pancho Villa. Truth be told, I think it all started with Zapata. You know all of them rode around here. Pancho Villa probably stood on this very point of land. This part of the world was famous with Pancho Villa, Black Jack Pershing, Emiliano Zapata and their kind, all stirring up a history that still hasn’t died down.
“But I think Villa is the most famous of them. The Mexicans loved him like we love Robin Hood, although I doubt the green spandex-suited archer and his merry men would ever have conceived of a torture that included urging a plant to grow up someone’s ass.
“So it starts with a Maguey plant, although I haven’t seen any around here.”
“There’s a few back in the pauper’s section,” Enrique offered.
“Thanks,” Harry said. “That detail helps a lot.” He glared at the ground for a long moment, before he resumed. “The story says that Villa would torture those who came and did harm to his people with this plant. Now the Maguey is a perfect plant. You can build homes from it. You can make clothes from it. You can eat it. Even tequila comes from it. Maguey is a type of agave, you see. It grows wild and can reach monstrous proportions. Well, what Villa and his crew used to do is strip some poor soul down to their Birthday suit and strap them to a wooden contraption over the plant. They’d pile stones on the body and poor water on the parched plant. These plants can grow six to ten inches a night and the combination of the weight of the stones and the stimulus of the plant with the water, made it so that man would intersect plant sometime around midnight after everyone was drunk. And if they’d aimed the victim right, the Maguey would grow right up his ass.”
Ronnie’s mouth had fallen open sometime during the telling. It seemed to take a while for it to close, but when it did, there was a new cast to the young man’s jaw. He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple diving in and back out.
“Does that sound like something you’d like?” Harry asked.
Ronnie shook his head.
Although Harry looked perceptibly pleased at the answer, he was becoming frustrated with the boy’s lack of commitment. “What then? Really, Ronnie, I don’t have all day.”
“The ear.”
“What’s that?” Harry asked.
“I said the ear,” Ronnie repeated.
“What about it?” Harry asked.
“I remember somewhere that it only takes seven or eight pounds of pressure for someone to rip off an ear.”
Harry felt the Sahara enter his mouth. He licked his lips, wondering from what dark and dreary corner of the boy’s mind this idea had sprung. Still, he’d made the vow. “I heard something like that, too,” Harry heard himself saying.
“If I was to take off an ear, you could always put it back on,” Ronnie mused.
Harry blinked. “I’m sure they could at a hospital...as long as I had the ear,” he added.
“I wouldn’t do anything with it. I’d just take it off.” The young man smiled grimly. “If that’s what I decided to do.”
Harry tried to see through the reflecting squares of Ronnie’s lenses, but he might as well have been trying to peer through a mirror with the success he had.
“Now wait a minute. You have got to stick with something, Ronnie. Name it and commit to it. We could be here all night going through the catalogue of things that could be done.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you found a good one. It’s painful as hell, it’s totally disfiguring if I can’t sew it back on, and it’s something you can live with.”
Ronnie seemed to agree with the argument. He leaned against a gravestone and began to untie one of his shoes. After a minute, he rose with a black Converse high-top in his hand. He began to murmur as he pulled the lace free.
“What are you doing? What are you saying?” Harry asked. Then he glanced to the dark. “What is he saying, Enrique?”
“Math,” the Salvadoran replied.
“What?”
“He’s saying math.”
“How do you say math?” Harry shifted from one foot to the other. “What’s Enrique talking about, Ronnie? You mumbling math?”
“Physics actually,” Ronnie said. He dropped the shoe and slid his foot into it, fighting for balance. Then he held the string out in front of him with both hands. “Hooke’s general law of mechanics