Rafo

Rafo, also known as Rafael Polk, is Howard Polk’s son and the boy Mike is hired to bring north from Mexico. Resourceful, horse-loving, and fiercely wary of adults, he has survived parental betrayal and life on the streets by turning distrust into both a defense and a means of getting by. His journey with Mike begins as a deception he rejects; it becomes a friendship grounded in shared danger, small acts of repair, and the painful discovery that his father will not claim him.

Identity and Background

Rafo’s outward performance is itself a survival skill. Though he had spoken English very well as a young child, he learned to corrupt his speech when conning a drunk for money: sounding poor and uneducated helped conceal the background he associated with wealth. He developed a habitual jargon combining Mexican and Texan speech with gutter slang. His mother called it Tex-Mex-Sex; Rafo valued it as a way to cheat gringos and, beyond the money, to take revenge on people he hated. The adopted voice marks a split between the educated child he once was and the streetwise identity he has fashioned.

That hostility coexists with a powerful, idealized image of Howard. Rafo remembers his father as handsome, clean, and pale, from his eyes and hair to his suits and fingernails. The image has the distance of something sacred and dangerous: Rafo imagines approaching it as like climbing toward a holy fire that could consume anyone who touched it. Howard’s promises sharpen the contradiction. He said he would return by Saturday and came the following Tuesday; he promised a Texas sheriff’s badge that never arrived. Most precious was the promise to take Rafo north to a rodeo, an invitation bound up with the boy’s love of animals and horses. Howard’s failure to keep it leaves Rafo unable to reconcile the promise with the abandonment.

At home with Lexa, Rafo’s life is also marked by violence and shame. He describes a relationship in which his mother beat him, then cried over and kissed him, and beat him again. After he broke a crystal carafe and insulted her, she attacked him with its jagged neck; both were cut, and the house filled with screams. That night he left. His later reflections show how little freedom departure brought: he could hate his parents, but could not disentangle hatred from the wish to be loved by them.

Street Life and Distrust

Life in the alleys was miserable at first. Rafo slept wherever he could—in an abandoned warehouse, the basement beneath El Picador, or a bus-station toilet—and was constantly avoiding police, struggling to enter the banda, and protecting himself from men who groped him. He describes home as worse in one particular respect: there he hated himself for hating his mother and still wanting her love. His independence is therefore neither simple freedom nor proof that he needs no one; it is an adaptation to danger and to the repeated failure of adults to keep him safe.

When Mike first tries to establish who he is, Rafo calls him a liar and points to the evidence of Howard’s neglect: his father has not seen him for five years and did not spend even a dollar on a birthday present. Mike does not answer with another promise. He deliberately slows down, shows Rafo his employment card, and then hands over a photograph of Rafo himself. The card barely persuades him, but he studies the photograph closely. The exchange makes trust a matter of tangible proof, while also revealing why Mike’s account of Howard’s offer is so difficult for the boy to believe.

Mike imagines what could happen if Rafo were delivered to a father who could not ride and had little affection for the rodeo. In Mike’s fearful projection, Howard might send him to a strict private boarding school to keep him out of the way while lawyers fought over money; Rafo would run away again, more embittered than before. Mike recognizes that he is participating in a fraud if he treats delivery to Howard as a sufficient solution. The imagined future is not what happens, but it clarifies the stakes of Mike’s growing sense of responsibility: fulfilling his contract could still betray the child he has come to know.

Horses, Trust, and Reconciliation

Rafo’s love of horses precedes literacy: he learned to ride before he learned to read, and as a small boy ran onto the field at the Hipodromo in excitement after his first race. On the Janasco mesa, when the mustang finally stands still, Rafo races from the truck toward Mike, waving his arms and shouting, “Olé!” His joy gives the capture a meaning beyond possession or escape. For him, the encounter with the horse is an exhilarating arrival in a world he had once hoped to reach through Howard’s unkept rodeo promise.

His riding skill becomes unmistakable when he takes the chestnut mustang through the alameda. The horse runs, stops, rears, bucks, and runs again; Rafo stays on through three circuits without losing his seat. Mike and the others rush into the street to watch, and Mike’s astonishment is matched by the trader’s decision to buy the horse. Rafo’s competence changes how the adults see him: he is not merely the runaway boy being transported, but a capable rider whose relationship with the animal is visible in the perilous trial itself.

Rafo’s bond with Mike is tested by quarrels as well as danger. At Marta’s house, he is awake and preparing to leave, his face initially dark with resentment. Then he points to the money he has left on the table. Mike understands the gesture as Rafo’s attempt to make amends after their quarrel and silently approves. Their reconciliation needs no speech: Rafo grins, and they leave together. The quietness matters. Unlike the grand promises that have repeatedly failed him, this repair is immediate, mutual, and confirmed by what each does.

The Denial and the Return to Janasco

The official search for Rafo brings the father-son estrangement into the open. A sergeant tells him that police are looking for him in the Distrito Federal for truancy, petty theft, and resisting arrest. Lexa says she will not defend him because she does not know how, and suggests that he may need to learn that the law is the law. About Howard, the sergeant reports that he does not know anything about the matter. Rafo begins to ask whether his father sent for him, but the sergeant answers that Howard said no. The rejection punctures the idealized image Rafo had preserved without erasing the attachment that made the answer hurt.

After hearing the truth, Rafo again hates gringos as liars and promise breakers. Yet he cannot simply return to his former certainty about them: Mike has acted in a way that complicates it. When Mike asks what he wants to do, Rafo chooses to go back to Janasco by himself rather than cross the border with him. The choice is both an assertion of independence and a return to the place where he has found a measure of belonging. It does not undo the danger or resolve his family history.

At the end, Rafo hears gunshots and cannot know whether Mike has crossed into Texas or been killed. He recalls Mike calling out, “We’re going!”—not that he alone was going, but that they were—and understands the shout as an effort to draw the gunfire away from his friend. Rafo wishes they were still together and insists to himself that Mike must be alive, as alive as Santa Maria, though he may never be able to touch either. The closing image preserves the bond without promising a reunion. Rafo has been denied by his father, but Mike’s action has given him a different, earned meaning for the word we.