Read Online A Love Like Blood by Victor Yates - Free Book Online Page A

the city of dreams for the Chicago Tribune. He arranged that I would receive one hundred dollars to photograph five up-and-coming singers from Mexico City. On the second day, I asked Father if I could shoot the cliff-side performance while he shot a jazz band from Cape Verde. He told me to wait, without screaming, and after he finished, we could hike to the cliff together. Hours earlier, I met a loudmouthed boy my age with perfect eyebrows at the café next to our hotel. He was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with a group of young men in Speedos, of all ages and all with white teeth. I sat down at the table beside theirs, and he sat in the chair in front of me. He pronounced my name “Car-Seat.” In English, he asked if I could photograph him diving. Through my limited Spanish, I said of course and asked him to pose standing in front of the coffee shop. I shot a provocative picture of him, from the shoulder up, looking into the camera with a lit cigarette in his mouth. His face was sexual and beyond sexual in front of the red-painted sign. He smoked cigarettes, not like chain smokers on the street do during winter in Chicago. He smoked slow and deliberate like he was savoring a decadent dessert. Or, maybe he was attempting to memorize the taste of the ceremony. Then, I shot him in profile highlighting the trail of peach fuzz leading into his red Speedo.
    For me, it was dream-like watching him fly off the August-colored cliff. The cliff looked sculpted with rust, tangerine, and beige clay. His muscular body turned into a tumbling rock and then turned weightless in the salty air. The seconds after he dissolved in the foaming Pacific and emerged unscratched seemed like hours.
    After he had strutted back up, we carried on a colorful conversation without words. We stood about twenty feet away from each other and used our heads, hands, and lower bodies. I hid behind Father preventing him from seeing us speak. While gesturing I could not leave, I kicked over Father’s drink at my feet. He knocked me across the face. My camera dropped to the ground. The cracking sound ripped up my insides. I stared at the broken telephoto lens and without thinking I punched Father in the face. He fell, and his head crunched on impact. He did not move. Neither did anyone else around us.
    The diver helped me move him away from the gawking crowd to a grass-covered area. “Look at his chest rising. You didn’t kill him,” he said.
    â€œHe will kill me the second he wakes up.”
    â€œWhen he opens his eyes give him more to drink. He won’t remember anything.”
    The diver waved down the shirtless vendor, selling Mezcal in an ice cream cart, and bought two. When father woke up, I told him to drink to feel better, and he guzzled down both. The pulpy mix was dark red and tasted as if it had strawberry, pineapple, coconut, cream, and sugar. Later, a balding hotel employee told me the drinks sold on the cliff were alcoholic, and I should not drink them. The alcohol in my two cups was tasteless. The drink I spilled was Father’s second as well. The diver waited with me, rubbing my back and offering me cigarettes until my brothers found us. I told them that Father fainted from the heat. Father came to, and my younger brother asked him, what happened.
    â€œI do not know,” Father said, stuttering.
    Junior laughed.
    Knowing I could start laughing, I faced the tanned men on the cliff, exposing my excitement only to them. Junior draped Father’s hairy arm around his sweaty shoulder and said he would walk him to the hotel and that I should continue photographing the performance. The moment my Father and brother’s heads vanished from the rock path, the diver pulled my hand. We sprinted down a different path with lush vegetation, through a palm tree forest, out to a beach blanketed with naked men. The diver slid down his Speedos. I peeled off my sticky t-shirt. His tongue forced its way into my mouth. His