The rooster in question is four feet tall. He’s one of those rare, proud birds that struts less with hubris or panache as much as dignity, really. Don Martin gets a little emotional when he talks about the bird’s scarlet cape and glowing iridescent epaulets. He’s not a kind bird, sure, but then a bird doesn’t win enough fights to buy his trainer a house on the edge of town by making friends. So no, the rooster is not for sale, and no, you may not kill him.

To hear Don Martin tell it this bird is a hero. Even when the Riera brothers could not be beaten and killed half the birds in Huehuetenango, his charge flapped and bit and clawed its way to stand above their bleeding foul. To hear Don Martin tell it without that rooster there in the woods they never would have learned that the Riera brothers soaked their gaffs in snake venom. Without that bird the Riera brothers might still be around, fixing fights and cheating and stealing.

Of course our story’s coward’s spanish is not so good and so he does not hear Don Martin tell it at all. It talks so much so early, our coward says, I cannot sleep at night. You know that popular wisdom gives that roosters crow at dawn, but it turns out they’re actually at it pretty much all the goddamn time.

The sun is up before six in the morning and by nine the shadows offer short, stunted refuge from an already scorching day. Our coward squints against the glare and stands dumbly, quietly, as both men have presented their positions to deaf ears and stand awkwardly while they wait for the other to relent.

Don Martin is not a tall man, but still holds his hand to his shoulder to show the height of the bird. Muy peligroso, he says, and waves behind him to the jungle before going back to his chores. No vaya al bosque.

You’ll learn not to hear it, she says, through the twisted iron fence that divides their balcony in two. Her legs drape through the railing and she blows smoke through her nose. Might take a few weeks, but you’ll learn not to hear it. Anyway, you’re going to be late.

She mashes the butt against her concrete perch and lurches to her feet to walk inside. I think that bird is actually pretty dangerous, though, and disappears through the curtain across the door.

The jukebox is broken and only plays that Lenny Kravitz version of American Woman, so more often than not it sits unplugged in the corner as a darkened sarcophagus of commercial pop from the 90s. The bar plays songs from the phone of whoever opened that day through tinny, up-too-loud computer speakers that haunt the corners of the room. They don’t do any favors for the harmon mutes and spanish vocals that are making it hard to carry on a conversation.

Not that it matters to the Peace Corps kid chatting to some Australian girl two stools down. He’s definitely a Peace Corps kid. You know the type. Always droning on about Aldo Leopold or or What’s Really The Matter Here, like he’s really going to fix something. Like a few classes at Brown or wherever has somehow uniquely suited him to fix what the American Death Machine has spent four decades ruining.

Everyone hates the Peace Corps kids.

“This song, you know, it’s really pretty sad. With the trumpets and the drums and the dance beat and everything, it sounds happy, but when you listen to the lyrics, it’s about a girl dying.” The voice comes from the boy in cargo shorts and Chacos, a fresh bag of rolling tobacco on the bar in front of him. Classic corps.

“See?” he asks. “Listen to it. Allí fueron los bomberos con sus campanas, sus sirenas. Here come the firefighters.”

The girl isn’t much younger, a gap year kid. Maybe a year or two of Uni. Her eyes flit around the room for someone, anyone, to cut in, buy her a drink, get this guy away from her, talk about literally anything else on earth. Javi is working the door.

Rumor is he was a Kaibil in the war and saw things, did things, a man doesn’t come back from. Most nights he sits on a stool by the scarred wooden doors as though someone might be told they can’t come in and pans across the room with steely blue faraway eyes. When the doors close at 11 and the ashtrays come out he peeps to the street and yells to shut the fuck up when a military patrol rumbles down the cobblestones.

“Al cuarto de Tula, le cogió candela, Se quedó dormida y no apagó la vela. She went to sleep and didn’t blow out the candle. Vela, that’s another word for candle.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?” Javi yells through the barroom murmur. The Peace Corps kid sits upright on the stool with the posture of just being caught in something. “That song’s not about any fire. That song is about fucking, man! You know?” He gesticulates with his hips across the bar.

Rumor is one year during Semana Santa he saw from his perch a girl getting raped between a couple of cars. Story goes he just went over and killed the guy there in the street, didn’t even help the girl up or anything, just killed the guy with his hands and went back to work. No one really knows if that’s true or not, but people don’t really fuck with Javi.

“You know? Fucking? Like this?”

You can’t help but feel for the kid while he squirms on the stool. The entire bar looks at him, looks at Javi, looks back at him. Only Ibrahim Ferrer cuts the silence. And then quietly, almost imperceptibly, at first, the Australian girl begins to laugh. It’s only a giggle, really, and she tries to hold it back. Her lips are taught and she bites her cheeks bloody out of some deeply ingrained tenderness toward this awful boy.

Without the rum she might have made it. Instead a short, staccato, hacking kind of laugh bubbles over and escapes before she regains control. But then another, and then from behind the bar Sofia begins to laugh as well. And then before long the whole bar is in tears. The room is consumed by a wild, frantic, hysterical kind of laughter that feeds on itself until it is a beast of its own and whatever small funny thing brought it about is not only forgotten, it is moot.

Grown men roll on the floor and point at the Peace Corps volunteer, now flushed and staring stonefaced into his rum. He stammers for a moment, and gets up, and trips, and he runs for the door but Javi, the only person in the room not laughing or crying, yells after him that he owes for the last two drinks.

He shuffles back through a straight of crying, laughing, pointing people and lays too much money on the bar and turns and runs out through the heavy double doors and into the street, and before the door is even latched behind him a different young man takes his seat and begins talking to the girl, tears still streaming down his face.

Their evenings go something like she broils hamburger patties in the oven and serves them with toast and green beans from a bag. The countertops are low so she can reach them. They eat in front of the television and he wonders to her whatever happened to Cronkite, and after they’ve eaten he washes up and hangs the plates and forks and glasses in a wire rack by the sink.

He drives them into town and parks the van by the side-door service entrance at the little bar they like and he can lower Lorraine to the sidewalk where she can just roll right in. He sits at the bar and drinks whiskey and talks to anyone and everyone who walks through the door while the video keno rings and dings from the next room. I need more money, says Lorraine. Are you winning? Why would I need more money if I was winning, and she rolls back to the redblue glow of the small town casino.

How ’bout you, he says. What do you do? You like that? What you’re doing? You know you always think you gotta keep doing what you’re doing but really you can do whatever you want. You get stuck in a rut sometimes but you can do whatever you want. Tami, let me buy these boys a beer.

I fished, you know, he says. Moved out to a boat when I was 16, did it ever since. Puget Sound, mostly, but Alaska, too. Salmon, mostly, but some dogfish. Used to catch them just to get rid of ’em. Best you could get was ten cents a pound up at Mullies by Bellingham then that place burned down and you couldn’t sell ’em at all. Tami, another, if you please.

They gave me a boat, you know. Told the company man I want a boat. He said what makes you think I’d give you a boat? I told him nothing, but now you know I want one. So one day Karl called and had a boat for me, but no crew, so I did what I could. Not one of them boys had been out of Whatcom County. Karl said Fred that’s no crew, right in front of these these boys faces, so I bet him $300 right there on the spot we’d be one of the top 10 boats on the Sound.

Now, Karl wasn’t all wrong. I never thought we’d win that bet but the boys needed at the time, you know? And we were not a great crew. We weren’t bad, sure, but great? No. Not even all that good, really. But goddamn were we lucky. I never seen such luck. The craziest things – one day the engines broke down so we couldn’t get to where the run was hot and we had to just drop our nets where we were. Pulled the biggest haul of the summer.

And wouldn’t you know it we won that bet. I said Karl you remember the bet we made right here in this room? And he said he might remember something, yeah, and so I told him that’s great, pay the boys their $300, and walked out. Luckiest crew I ever saw. And you know I’ll take lucky over good any day, but the trick is knowing that lucky ain’t the same as good. Lotta guys get that mixed up.

Tami, could I have another, he says. That’s eight now. You cutting me off, he says. Just slowing you down. You still gotta get Lorraine back home. In a minute, then.

And in a minute Lorraine says I’m out, and me too says Fred. Tami, I guess I’ll pay with plastic. Ha! Never saw that before, did you? I guess not, Fred, but get her home now. I’ll be back, he says. I know you will, and I’ll be here.