Free Blood Makes Noise by Gregory Widen

greed, who cared? No one had ever spoken to the great unwashed as an equal, held them to their breast, cooed to them like lovers, whispered hatred for those they hated: the rich; the privileged; the whole pointless, pathetic history of their nation.
    She was dead, and she lived on in the stares of servants. And all the generals’ medals, all the posturing Michael knew only underlined a fear so deep none had the courage to destroy her. Because maybe her corpse really was protected by God, or the devil, or the stares of servants.
    He was drunk.
    Nothing can sneak up on you in the pampas, and
El Amo
’s riding party was already a mute plume of dust at vision’s edge. Valets prepared cool towels and
mate
for the returning adventurers, flushed with the ride, sun, and booze. A gaucho bringing up the rear carried in one hand half a dozen strung pheasants, the day’s shotgun catch. Each horseman half dismounted, half spilled out of his saddle as the chef rang the bell announcing the meal.
    The beef, sliced from the side of the mammoth rotating carcass, was sweet and so juicily raw Michael’s mouth sang as his gut sagged. He’d held Karen’s hand under the table at dinner, felt her brush his arm in suggestion, but he’d lost her now somewhere among the greasy laughter on the patio, the piles of bones going red in the retreating day.
    He was cornered now, pinned against an adobe planter by his host, his office mate Lofton, and a nonspecific
Porteño
whose name he couldn’t keep straight over the growing gin rush in his ears.
    “Tell him the story, Mike.” It was Lofton, living up to his reputation as the drunkest man in Argentina. The veins in his nose had taken on a life of their own and were rivaled only by the pulsating red in his eyes. “Come on, Mike, tell him.” The conversation was in English, despite the two Argentines; Lofton in fifteen years here never bothering to pick up the language.
    “Please, Mr. Suslov,” his host, Senor Carenza, said, swaying. Carenza was spectacularly fat in gaucho
bombachas
and a cotton riding shirt. His face was easy and drunk and listing dangerously to one side. Lofton had heard the story a dozen times and had never shown any particular interest in it. But Lofton liked to be around people without having to deal with them, liked being at the center of a good story he didn’t have to tell.
    “Once, when I was a kid…” His tongue felt bloated and alien in his mouth, the words unwieldy blocks to scale. Michael knewthe story by heart—how his father, stuck with him for the evening, had dressed Michael up as an adult dwarf so he could take him drinking in the local tavern. It was a funny story, but Michael knew if you looked closely enough it was a sad one too.
    “Where did you grow up?” Carenza asked.
I grew up in La Boca
, Michael thought,
tasting the malevolence of your class.
    “Chicago.”
    Days died fast out here, twilight lasting just long enough to find the light switch. The gnats had risen and with them bats, blurry shapes dashing through the glow of strung party lamps. The drinks had stopped slithering and were now outright tackling his body. His face was numb, and it was getting hard to concentrate on what anyone was saying. So he stopped trying. The gaggle of husbands had grown tight enough around Karen he could barely glimpse her brunette head. It was always the same out here: endless drunken weekends on endless pampas, heat and booze and husbands flirting with his wife.
    “So. Mike.”
    He slurred his head to look. “Barbara.”
    “You’re drunk.”
    “Old news I’m afraid.”
    Barbara DeVries was a full inch taller than he. From his slouch it seemed ten. She had a frosty glass in one hand, surveying the party. “Saturday night in Argentina.”
    She was his age, with short, severe brown hair and a face so mannishly angular it could cut paper. Her British education left her talking Oxford, but she was Dutch, here as a secretary for the Dutch