For the most part, Fernando liked his job at the construction site. He got to work with his hands, which was a refreshing change to him, and his work crew was his crew of friends. The only drawback to the gig was his employer.

Alfonso the jefe liked Fernando, it was true. Fernando found himself wishing—as with Juan Francisco and others whose company he’d been compelled to tolerate in the past—that the jefe liked him a little less.

Fernando kept his distance as best he could from the man,

Collecting his paycheck from the jefe was a prospect Fernando distinctly dreaded. It necessitated venturing into Alfonso’s sweltering hot trailer of a lair to be hopelessly ensnared in long-winded tales of false bravado. If not outright lies, these were at best no tales of his own. The jefe had a highly romantic opinion of himself, built entirely on delusion.

Braving the infernal trailer early one day to collect his wages, Fernando was surprised to see the jefe sitting slumped in his chair

Fernando shook his head. He turned aside.

More even than anger, Fernando felt disgust for the man. For any so-called man who conducted himself in such a fashion as this. Who’d dug himself in so deep with his gross missteps that he could no longer crawl back out on his own strength. Who instead must look to others to save him like some repugnant damsel in distress.

It was shameful and deplorable. Better suited to Alfonso than a cowboy hat and boots were a wig and a dress. As Fernando contemplated

III

Work conditions improved markedly in the days that followed. Both for Fernando personally and for the job site in general.

“Finally getting things in again,” Chico said, checking over the latest shipment of construction materials delivered. “I don’t know what lit a fire under the jefe’s ass all of a sudden, but now that he’s got his shit together, we might just get this job done after all.” His glance turned shrewd as he looked to Fernando. “Seems

Fernando had never cared much for girls, it was true. Almost without exception, he’d found girls his own age silly and uninteresting. Shallow, predictable and dull. Too lacking in worldly experience to have any savor to them. Once you got them out of their clothes, you’d seen the extent of all they had to offer.

But he did like women. He had always liked them—mature, older women with depth and complexity to them. Ones who’d been around the block a time or two. Ones who’d been bitchslapped

Fernando’s neglectful mother may have planted the seed of his attraction. But it was another from his early youth who’d shaped his proclivities.

His first erotic experience had occurred to him in hindsight, when he was still living in the barrio. He had been eight years old, the same age he’d been when his mother had died. Perhaps because of this the encounter had been branded into him all the more deeply.

He’d been playing alone in his bedroom when he’d happened to glance

The salacious image of the bathing woman from the barrio persisted, taking on a life of its own. In a sense Fernando was forever striving to recreate this experience, to recast it in some form or fashion with every woman who strayed across his path.

He sought for it with fiendish single-mindedness, all while keeping his fiendishness tightly under wraps. It hadn’t taken him long to recognize that his inclinations were aberrant. Highly conscious of his own deviancy, he maintained an iron grip

Fernando had been chasing after women all his life. Long before he’d understood what compelled him, he had chased them. Stalking them, shadowing them. Studying them from afar. He’d sensed his natural affinity for the chase, and he’d enjoyed it.

But as he’d entered into his teenage years, this passion for the chase had gone from a passive exploitation of circumstance to an active pursuit. He would feel the anticipation building within him, a familiar restlessness that titillated

* * *

Fernando and the others followed Chico back to his home on the outskirts of town. The home was little more than a hovel, built from the rusted bones of what looked to be an old farmhouse slatted up with mismatched boards and sheeting, crippled under the weight of the years and its bizarre accouterments. Fernando’s stepmother María Luisa would not have deemed it fit to house dogs.

Haphazard additions had been tacked onto the barn house from all angles. A slope-roofed garage of sorts

Fernando regarded this kindly matron as she regarded him in turn—Chico’s mother, his own mother’s cousin. Looking at Emmanuella, Fernando saw no resemblance whatsoever between her and Carmencita, except perhaps for an utter absence of pretension, which would have endeared her to him even were she no relation of his own.

Fernando curved a smile down at her. Her eyes went wide as he did so, as though she’d seen a ghost. A work-tumbled hand fluttered to her breast.

“My,” Emmanuella said