Free Dr. Brinkley's Tower by Robert Hough

economy, and like all residents of Corazón de la Fuente (with the possible exception of the hacendero), he couldn’t afford even Maria de los Sueños, a pudgy Chiapan girl who, it was rumoured, wore a halo of furry moles on her left buttock.
    The night came in which the cantina owner, feeling as desperate as it is possible to feel, lay in bed waiting, his eyes cast upwards at the dark ceramic ceiling. At around two in the morning he rose. He slipped out the kitchen door and made his way along a dark mud alley behind his neighbours’ houses. Creeping from shadow to shadow, he reached the southwest tip of the pueblo, at which point he more or less broke into a jog: the moon was a blaze of illuminating silver, and he worried that someone out for a late walk might see him. As he trotted, he heard crickets and wind and the soprano howl of coydogs.
    Panting, he knocked at the door of Azula Mampajo, the town’s curandera. It opened. She peered up at him, her head turned slightly to favour the less milky of her eyes.
    â€” Señora, he said. — Please, I …
    â€” I know what is wrong. I can see it on your face, you poor bastard. Come in. I will help you.
    The cantina owner left her fetid home with a paste consisting of mashed huizache leaves, dried piglet bladders, and water blessed by an epileptic seer who lived in the desert near Acuña. For the next fourteen days he mixed a few spoonfuls with simmering water and then swallowed it under the light of the desert moon. On the fifteenth night he returned to hiswife’s open arms and found that his marital life was in no way revived, their lovemaking still akin to jimmying a padlock with an oyster. And so he gave up. It was easier, in a way, to just accept his new reality. He spent more time in the cantina, and he depended on his closest male friends to satisfy the need for human companionship. In this way he settled into a life of silent, barely tolerable angst, his only consolation being that many people had similarly flavoured lives in the sad, bereaved years of the revolution.
    But
now
, every time he passed the tower, he was reminded that there was something else he could try, some new and expensive mortification he could subject himself to. Having worked so hard to accept his post-concupiscent life, he resented that he was being asked to rattle the very principles of his insufficiency. By the same token, there was also a part of him, however repressed, that still remembered what it was like to lie beside his wife with more than a tormented, paper-thin sleep to look forward to. There was a part of him that still remembered what his lips felt like when pressed against hers, and there was yet another part of him that remembered, with an almost painful clarity, how it felt to tear open the blouse of a woman whose sultry, black-eyed gaze was encouraging of a beast-like comportment.
    One evening around dusk, he stood on the stoop of his saloon and gazed at the nearly completed tower. All around him was activity: school had finished for the year, and the streets ran with children, all excited to be free of spelling primers, chalkboards, and the regular experience of having their knuckles rapped with a wooden ruler. A fury grew within the cantina owner. He couldn’t stand it that, for the rest of thetown, this phallic monstrosity symbolized good fortune and promise, while for him it mocked his most shameful of inadequacies. He seethed. He brooded. He fantasized about what he might have done had he been carrying a pistol the night those Villistas set his saloon on fire.
    It was at this moment — staring up at the tower, hands clenching at his sides, frustration welling inside him — that he suddenly turned. He stormed through his place of business and marched through the room where he slept with Margarita. A few seconds later he was in the desert, striding towards a substantial mound of scrub. On the other side of the mound was a large stand