The Game of Chicken

Men loitering, drinking beer from yellow cans, standing or sitting on the steps of the sloped concrete outside the grocery store stare at him and the contents of his purchases, seemingly unimportant: a single roll of toilet paper. The lack of effort in his broken spanish, using words as ‘like’ too often, gives his speech an endearing and yet ignorant cadence. The quiet frustration of the card reader struggling with a lagging internet connection. He feels their eyes on him but is not aware of it making him uncomfortable. He only knows of his hurry and their slowness, vast unclosable differences that remain stubbornly hostile between their world and his intruding in it so awkwardly. The men do not laugh and yet they appear entertained. Their faces dark and blurry, eyes glossy and pink and strong, a strong sweaty rosy sheen emanate from their warm brown skin like people grown tensile and firm from a diet of alcohol and uncertainty. Men who do nothing but judge and monitor one another of their clan, never fully belonging to each other yet  never to escape, one may never stop drinking or stop coming here every day to continue their activity of doing nothing, an assertion against the misuse of their bodies for cheap labour. If they will waste their bodies it will be through beer and idleness of their own choosing. But why do they judge each other for? For what use is this inescapable game? But it is just that, just a game to pass the time. It is a game like all men enjoy playing that is different from region to region, a common sort of game in the americas including the United States. It is similar to the racing game of ‘chicken.’ Two cars race towards each other, the first to turn around loses. Here is a game of who cares the least, who can detach from the sweltering repressed tangles of anger and fear and resentment that follows each man, unidentifiable and inseparable voices, a violence that accumulates like the black burned tar of the metal cooking pan, layers upon layers burned into each other like a tattoo upon a tattoo, a stronger man exerting his will over another, and yet another owning the other with a defiant clever resentment, until you don’t know who is master and who is slave. A violence that has no known beginning and seemingly no end. They test each other as men, who can care the least, how invested they are in their game of nonchalance that they may amputate every limb and organ of their body that cares to reach for something else altogether.

He would brag about $30 million to anyone who would listen in a way that almost seemed morbid. He talked fast. There was a disgusting excitement and frailty in his voice. He would tell anyone who listened. He would revel at their polarized reactions, sometimes silent, and he would make fantasies about the meaning of their silence. It meant proof of his genius, his status among men, his ability to outsmart them, signs of his intelligence. Every night he drove his old pickup around the steep and dimly lit roads through the parched jungle. He would stop at the store to stock up on Cacique, a small clear plastic bottle with a red label, a word that means ‘chief’, a name that once held solemn dignity, now merely dominated the liquor section advertising its quantity and low price over quality. He would take two or three small bottles and disappear into some time and place, until one or two in the morning, when he arrived home, driving in large sweeping motions, the loud engine of the old pickup complaining and bright lights billowing the dust clouds, coming to a silent hushed quiet suddenly.  Finally drunk enough to rest, he would stumble off the high chair of his car like a warm and happy baby. He was too drunk and happy and tired to care about the blue car parked outside his driveway. His house was the only one for hundreds of meters around. In this isolated plot of land he neglected to install basic things like internet. He was too drunk and tired to care, he only thought about the Cacique awaiting for him in the fridge of his very sparsely furnished house, the temporary house he only used twice a year when he came to visit. He always avoided the rainy seasons, but he avoided the hot, dry peak of summer as well. It didn’t suit his bloated figure. He would sweat profusely and it would send a stench all about him that was distasteful even to himself, and he could never seem to get that acidic. Rancid scent out of his clothes, a kind of chemical reaction that only happened in the heat of this country, something magnetic in the air near the equator, something about the chemicals. Maybe the judgment of the locals, silently judging him, who silently knew him in a way that his colleagues, citizens in more refined countries didn’t understand about him. Here they understood each other. There was a kind of banality, a kind of low-life language, a membership that they both belonged to. It made him nervous, more nervous than usual. Here he could be anyone and they made up stories about him and he made up stories about himself in his imagination. In his imagination, every woman he met was his lover. He collected so many. In his imagination, he was envied by many. 

Bright, white stars, a trillion miles away, decorated the sky and washed over this pitiful scene, this man whose eyes bulged a few millimeters too far out of his eyes to be trusted, this man with his paranoid thoughts seemed out of place under such a magnificent sky that someone once told me was the scattering of cigarette ashes of the Mayan gods. Perhaps this is why he dared not look up, perhaps why he only stared at the ground, dropped his keys in the sand and fumbled for them in the darkness, swearing at himself with alternating anger and laughter. He didn’t notice the man walking slowly behind him or the one standing by the screen door that was broken from him accidentally walking right into it so many times at last he gave up opening it altogether. So unaware of this man, of his surroundings, and so deeply he lived in his imagination, avoiding important things he shouldn’t, excusing himself from the duties of other men. 

He was out of control, the locals knew. They saw the death wish in him before he even realized it. They get one of these crazy foreign men every once in a while. They come with their fantastic ideas to the wild land, the land with no churches and therefore no gods. And they know prey, when they see one. The men had their eyes on him for months, tracking him. Like a deer with a fatal disease, they saw it in the color of his pelt, the limp in his stride from his drug-induced motorcycle accident, his vitals slowly fading without him realizing it. He believed his new friends. They believed in his genius and for the first time he felt understood, that is how they started to work on him. No, no, no, he had to be firm with these undisciplined men. They would not move unless he scared them a little. Something hurt in his side like an arrow, a poison dart, but he couldn’t find it. He only filled his wounds with more delusions of grandeur. In his sleep he would scratch his sides frantically where he could feel the laceration, but it seemed to move on its own and evaded his craving, searching fingers. Doctors were for weak and civilized men and he was wild like the strong wild evil men, he could dominate their weaker minds with his greater one. They were tracking his weaknesses in the stories he told, in the lies he told. They were not like the civilized men. They knew when a lie was a lie, and they knew what was broken under there. They knew what the lies covered up, and they were unrestricted by noble abstract ideals of humanity. They were unbounded from such laws. They did not stop themselves from examining in exactly what ways a man could fold or break. So much cheap alcohol in him as he sang off-key, thinking about the pretty woman he had talked to that night. She had a boyfriend, but that was no deterrent for him because he knew he impressed her with his fortune. At least, maybe it did. It was so hard to tell with these women, they were so secretive, but that did not matter. Why would anything matter at all! Singing off-key, he barely felt the blow to the back of his head or the kicks to his stomach. He was already half asleep. Like the sickly, frail deer, his organs failing. The poison reaching its final form. In grainy shadows, he only sees the shuffling of men’s black work boots as they search his trousers, as they search frantically under his mattress in every dusty, neglected cabinet in his house. He lay on the warm hard ground, confused and relieved, with no attempt to save his own life. Over the angry shouting and the men fighting one another, they did not hear nor care about the laughter from the man who lay dying on the ground, a meter from the door. His last memory, laughing at the funniest joke he’s ever told. The men’s voices in Spanish, gruff, low voices, urgent and hot and angry, searching for the cash that wasn’t there, that he had lied about all along.