The Surf Guru by Doug Dorst

hand. This is Urrieta, who runs Lars’s cochineal farm and likes to brawl in the bar. He pumps his free hand in a fist. “Give us the bandit!” he shouts. “Give us the bandit!” A twisted, gap-toothed grin spreads across his face as the crowd takes up the chant. I see Lars standing on the terrace of the hotel that overlooks the square, shouting along, beating the railing with his fists, while one of his youngest whores runs a comb through his yellow beard and the monkey bounces and screeches. Ysela is on the terrace with them, but she stands apart from them, scanning the crowd with her arms folded over her chest. I wonder if she is looking for me.
    The door to the police station opens, but no one comes outside.
    Underneath the shouts I hear Vargas’s voice and his heavy breathing, coming closer. “Pardon me. Pardon me. Pardon me.” He pushes his way into the space beside me. He is covered in sweat and dirt. He wipes his forehead, leaving a streak of clean.
    â€œWhere have you been?” I ask him.
    â€œI had to bury Ayala right away, before the hyenas are set free. I did not want—”
    â€œAyala is dead?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œEl Gris strangled him through the bars.”
    â€œAh,” I say. “One last kill. The demon-bandit could not resist.”
    â€œNo,” Vargas says. “Ayala begged him.”
    â€œThen may San Humberto have mercy on Ayala’s soul,” I say. “He did not deserve to be buried.” I find myself getting angry. Why should Ayala get away so easily when the rest of us have to stay here and hurt?
    â€œDo you want to know what I think?” Vargas says quietly, with his head down. “I think it was an act of kindness.” When he lifts his head, I see tears in his eyes. He wipes them away with his fat, callused fingers and suddenly I feel very old and lost. Living was so much easier long ago—when husbands and wives stayed together, when children respected their parents, when blond strangers did not control our town, when we had nothing to fear but the infrequent visits of El Gris.
    The crowd quiets as the white-haired monsignor walks slowly out of the police station and up the wood-plank steps that lead to the gallows. Swinging a censer, he chants San Humberto’s Creed in the old sacred tongue. He leads us all in the Gestures of the Sacred Bones. The Festival has begun.
    The mayor follows in the monsignor’s path, and then the chief of police and his two sergeants. El Gris emerges from the station and plods ahead, flanked by two officers who guide him forward. His hands are shackled behind his back. He does not look so fearsome now that they have shaved his head; he looks tired, spent. Still, the crowd gasps and ooohs and aaahs , just as they did when they saw Madalena—my wife—walk down the aisle of the cathedral in the emerald-green wedding dress Lars bought her.
    Vargas nudges me. “If I were in charge, I would not have cut off his hair,” he says. “His name no longer fits. What is he now? He is nothing.”
    El Gris is surrounded by policemen on the long scaffold. One of them is young Séptimo, who played with Ysela when they were children. There have been several nights when Séptimo has woken me up in the street and walked me home. He is kind and polite, not yet corrupted by age and money and other people.
    This is what I imagine: El Gris jumping down from the gallows, catching a pistol thrown to him by a comrade hidden within the crowd, then running to a ready horse, his gun blasting away and streaking the air with lead, the police awestruck and fumbling. A stray bullet ripping through both Lars and the monkey in his arms, and the two of them tumbling from the terrace and landing, twisted, in the dirt. The mare’s hoofbeats resonating in my chest as she speeds El Gris to safety outside the walls of our corrupted city.
    Perhaps I am the one who will