Minotaurs on Holiday

Florentina had grown up in Buenos Aires but had come here, to the world's bottom, the southernmost city in the world, at the beckoning of a man who ran stables and owned a horse named Picasso. Don Julio took tourists and huasos for week-long treks on horseback and came back dead silent and in need of a bath.

When Florentina heard the slip and glide of someone in the bathtub, she imagined her husband had returned early, but as the door to the bathroom creaked open, she saw her son, Mauro, kneeling before the tub and attempting to hold still a wet dog that shivered inside pink suds. Mauro looked over his shoulder. His eyes, the color of syrup, told the story. He reached into the shallow depths as the dog scratched at the slippery sides.

"Mauro?"

"I found a dog."

She rolled up her sleeves and grabbed a towel. "Tell me everything. Go on." She surveyed the bathroom to see what damage had been done. A leash hung from the towel rack.

"It was on the street, just running back and forth. I brought him home. He was pink, but now—"

They both looked at the crimson water in the tub.

"Somebody dyed him?"

She laid out the towel and together they lifted the lean dog out of the tub. Water spilled onto her shoes. Mauro got on top of the toilet seat and looked down at the dog. From an early age Mauro drew maps of places he had never been, maps of Antarctica and Paraguay and Chile, always from a bird's-eye view.

"He's drawing with the eyes of a pilot," his father had said.

Yes, Florentina had grabbed him by the chin and looked into his face. "He has God's eyes."

While the dog whimpered in the bathroom, Florentina scrambled to find a newspaper—as if lost dogs would make the news— and found only reports of beaver infestation in the flag-tree woods and a drug from the city that had hit their streets, paco, a garbage drug made of cocaine, kerosene, and baking powder. She turned back to page one and read about a drag queen beaten and left to die on Quinip Street, the little road that smelled like paprika and empanada dough. The victim was described as large hipped, a man who wore high heels made of transparent plastic, with fake goldfish inside the heel. She, or he, had been suffocated. The killer remained unknown. Florentina was a woman who lived in lowercase letters. The drag queen had managed to die in all caps.

Here, in Ushuaia, the lines of longitude collected like the inner spokes of a wheel. Tierra del Fuego, they called it, the land of fire. But a gaucho tour guide hiking the hills and taking in the thousand shades of gray, like one villa miseria on top of the other, would unearth the masquerade. The fire was within them, within the drag queen who put fire on her lips and within the killer who put that flame out. Florentina turned the page to the police blotter and read about the motorcycle riders who had driven here for a biker party on the pier. As a girl growing up in Buenos Aires, Florentina had grown to be afraid of men in groups, had later striven to keep Mauro, now fourteen, off soccer teams and away from the throng of boys at the makeshift flea markets. The defunct prison had once housed the worst of these savages. The bottom of the world, by all accounts safe, would set you on fire any chance it got.

With her hand on the leash, the dog sniffing a calefate bush, Florentina started down the hill along a row of gray and blue cottages. Mauro, hands in perpetual motion, recited facts from the weather almanac. Florentina broke his reportage. "We need to take the dog back where you found it. You understand?" Near downtown, on a concrete wall painted turquoise, swirls of anti-American graffiti named presidents and generals. Florentina and Mauro weaved around cars that were dusty following the...