Wear Your Home Like a Scar, page 8
Rose won’t look at me but he nods okay to the bartender.
“Didn’t think I’d see you again,” Rose finally says, hands still moving, arranging cards, setting them wherever he needs to pull off his trick.
“I’ve survived a lot worse things than a two-day bus ride from Del Rio. Though I think someone killed a chupacabra around San Angelo and left it in the toilet.”
The bartender sets my drink down. “Best we got. Made by a woman in town.” He goes into the back.
Rose clears his throat. “You told me the day we met that you liked the way I talked.”
“I did.” I sip at my mescal and it’s like cielo in my boca. “But I should’ve listened to my grandmother.”
Rose finally looks at me, cocks his eyebrow.
“‘Silver tongue,’ she’d say, ‘means coal heart.’”
Rose resumes shuffling. “Sounds like a Catholic thing.”
I swallow the rest of my drink. I won’t miss Texas, but I will miss this mescal. “I could’ve loved you, you know.”
Rose doesn’t have any kind of response. I didn’t think he would, but some kind of platitude would be nice. Guess that’s his way.
“I just wanted you to know that.” I pull the revolver from my purse and set it against his head. “It’s important to me that you know.”
I pull the trigger and the bar is splattered with red, shards of white skull, gelatinous bits of gray matter.
The man in the corner falls off his chair, ducks under the table. The bartender comes racing out from the back, an axe handle in hand. I point the revolver at him. He drops the wood, holds his hands up.
“This is not meant for you,” I tell him.
He falters a moment, glancing down beneath the bar.
“Don’t be stupid, kid. Go into the back a spell.”
Hands still up, he retraces his step.
When he’s gone, I vault over the bar and snatch the sawed-off sitting on the cooler, pop out the shells and drop them in my purse, then smash the barrel against the bar until it’s too bent to use. I grab the duffel bag beneath the bar, take out the drugs and drop them in the cooler, then sling the bag over my shoulder. I pull out the card and dial the number of the big man. He answers without saying anything.
“The Painted Horse, outside Amarillo,” I say. “It’ll be here. I won’t.”
I hang up and start to leave but pause a second. I nestle the bottle of mescal into the money, then climb over the bar and give my Rose one last look before I head out into the desert.
Back to TOC
A Small Town in a Vast Hell
The parrots are screeching again, flocking high in the canopy of trees that crowd the hills ringing this valley. You don’t even know the name of the pueblo, only that El Mencho sent you and Juangui Delgado there to let things cool down. It’s pretty, though, nestled deep in the Sierra Madre Occidental range, a small river cutting across the dry land, the woods themselves teeming with different kinds of animals: rainbows of birds, iguanas and snakes, ocelots and margays, though you can never tell the difference. The house itself is simple but comfortable: mud-brick walls with a clay tile roof. Only two rooms, so you and Juangui have to share a bed, but the woman was kind enough to take you in and cook for you, offer to wash your clothes. Not like she had much of a choice—when El Mencho of the Cártel Jalisco de Nueva Generación asks you for a favor, he’s not really asking. You do it or you lose your head.
But those parrots, they could wake the dead. You have no idea how Juangui is still asleep, but that boba could sleep through the apocalypse. You, you never closed your eyes, so there was no waking up. Never closed your eyes because when you do, you see the boy’s head, hear the report of the gun and the splash of his skull as it hit the wall. You feel the slipperiness of blood on your hands as you tried to cup it, to scoop everything up and put it back together. You knew the whole thing would not end well, but when El Mencho tells you to bring him the head of Z-35, a Zeta lieutenant, you do what you’re told.
Bringing back that pinche malparido’s head wouldn’t have bothered you. His boy running across the courtyard, trying to escape, then falling down like someone turned his power off as your bullet kissed his skull: that broke something deep inside, something that will never be put back together. The fact that he was a dead-ringer for your sobrino, your sister’s boy, didn’t help.
“Close the window, güey.” Juangui moaned and curled the pillow over his face.
“Time to get up,” you say. “It’s late.”
“It’s not late.” His voice is muffled by the pillow. “And we have nothing to do anyway.”
“Still,” you say, though you don’t have anything to follow it with. Instead, you return to the window, swinging closed one of the wooden shutters as some kind of a concession.
A door slams nearby and you jump, ducking behind the window and reaching for the pistol tucked into the back of your waistband. You hear the squish of gray matter, feel sweat roll down your spine. But a few seconds later, you see the woman walking from the front door, her white linen dress flowing in the breeze, a woven basket filled with clothes cinched against her hip. The white goat she keeps in a corralito on the side of the house bleats, butting up against the rickety fence. The woman winds her way down to the river, to the large rock she’ll use to scrub your shirt, vainly trying to get out the stains she knows better than to ask about.
“Tranquílate, carnal,” Juangui says, tossing the pillow aside and sitting up in bed with a great sigh. “Come on. Let’s get a cafecito.”
The town is small, most of the buildings the same mud brick and clay construction, many of the stores called out by a hand-painted sign or brightly colored tiles inlaid in the walls. Some of them are overrun by purple and pink bougainvillea. The café is empty except for you two, a ceiling fan lazily pushing warm air around the room. Juangui leans back in the woven chair, his arm thrown over the back of the empty chair beside him, sipping at the cafecito as if it’s the most luxurious thing he’s ever tasted. All you can taste is burnt wood and smoke and ash.
“How old you think Doña Marina is?” Juangui says after what seems like hours.
“Who?”
“Marina, tonto. The woman in the house.”
“Oh.” You sip at your cup, force yourself to swallow it. Though the abuela who runs the café is grilling meat for tacos in the back and you can’t remember the last thing you ate, the smell does nothing. “No idea. Thirty? Fifty?”
“Fifty? Que barbaridad.” He shakes his head and sighs. “How long you think el Mencho will keep us here?”
You shrug. “Till Z-35 is dead. Or we’re dead. Either one.”
Juangui raises his eyebrows and lowers them, something you take as agreement. “Doesn’t bother me. I like it out here. It’s quiet.”
“Too quiet.”
“Better than DF.”
You don’t say anything.
“Yeah, I could make a nice little home out here, me and Marina. Raise some goats and kids.”
You blink a couple of times. “Seriously?”
“I’m fucking with you. You’re a damn zombie the last couple days. I know the hit didn’t go well, but damn, güey.”
You drain the rest of your cup and turn it over, leaving a brown ring behind, then leave the café.
You walk until your shadow lengthens. You find yourself tracing the edge of the river, watching the water wink in the dying sun as it licks the banks. You grew up near the water but your mother never let you play near it for fear of la Llorona, the mythical woman who drowned her children in a fury after her husband left—just to spite him—then threw herself in the water upon realizing what she’d done. She’s doomed to stalk the water for eternity, perpetually crying as she searches for her children. Legend was, if you heard the crying, she was there to take you in place of her children.
But the heat, it felt so good as it scorched your neck, somewhere between penance for taking the boy’s life and affirmation that you’re still alive, but it’s gone now, replaced by whistling birds, stirring creatures, burbling water. For a second you realize it’s been hours since the last time you heard the phantom gunshot and splash.
The realization makes you think of it, but before the sound can echo through your skull, you hear something else. It starts as a whisper, a swirling, whining whoosh, then comes into focus.
It’s crying.
Your skin turns cold, bumps spreading as a cold finger runs along your spine.
You look around but see no one. Then you see the rock where Marina scrubs the clothes. Sitting at the base is your shirt, the one with stains that will never be removed.
You sprint back toward the house, knowing if you look back even once, that will be the last time.
“Seriously?” Juangui says, his mouth somewhere between bemused and incredulous. You’re panting too hard to tell him to fuck off. “Primo, my abuela used to tell me that shit when I was annoying her. You don’t stop running in the house, I’ll lock you outside and la Llorona will get you.”
“Yeah, but I heard it. I saw my shirt. I,” you pause and glance around the room, making sure you’re alone, “I mean, the doña’s name is Marina.”
“And?”
You can’t believe he’s that stupid, or that willfully blind. “You’re American. You don’t get it.”
He doesn’t understand the full story of la Llorona. That Malinche, the Nahua woman who acted as translator for Cortés when he exterminated the natives and claimed Mexico as property of the Spanish empire, was renamed Marina by the conquistadors. He doesn’t understand that Cortés married her and fathered a child, only to leave her later for a Spanish woman, leading her to murder her children. He doesn’t understand that La Malinche is shorthand for traitor.
“Motherfucker, I was born in Texas and moved here when I was ten.” He spits on the ground. “Fuck you, Tenoch.”
“I’m serious.”
“Look, güey, I know that kid fucked you up. But this superstitious Aztec bullshit is just—it’s bullshit, man. El Mencho sent us here to let things cool down and let you get your head together.” He lays his hands on your shoulders, looks you in the eye with something approaching concern. “You know what he’ll do if you don’t.”
You hold his gaze for a long minute. Then your eyes start to drift to the side, behind him, down where the river is. You don’t see your shirt from up here, don’t hear la Llorona’s crying, but, regardless of what this güero says, you know what really happened down there.
You don’t sleep again, can’t, but it’s different this time. It’s not because you’re too haunted by the sound to close your eyes—though you are—but because you’re waiting, watching, listening. You’re as scared you’ll hear la Llorona as you are you won’t.
The nights are deafening, filled with flapping bats, chittering bugs, blowing wind. The coffee was good but you don’t know how Juangui thinks it’s so peaceful out here. You’d prefer a sidewalk in Mexico City or your head in an oven. You stand watch by the window, your eyes acclimating to the dark, your ears tuning to frequencies below the natural world, searching for other vibrations, vibraciones verdaderas.
One night, nearly a week later, as a line of pink begins to bleed through the sky, seeping up from behind the mountain range, you hear shuffling. Something large, determined, and you know it’s not something but someone. You know it’s her.
You slink out of the room and follow, creeping down the path to the river, because you have to know. The goat bleats in the pen, slamming against the side, trying to free itself. You can’t hear the crying near the water so much as you can feel it in your marrow, but for some reason you’re not scared.
You walk for what feels like hours but is probably only three minutes, pausing behind a copse of trees. Marina sets her basket down and begins pulling out clothing. You know this is suspicious because you and Juangui haven’t been here that long and you’ve been wearing the same clothes since you arrived. She isn’t coming down here to wash: she’s coming to search. To make things equal.
“Can’t you sleep?” she says, and you didn’t realize you’d stepped into the clearing. She never meets your eyes and you don’t know why. She’s wearing the same white dress, flowing and shimmering though you don’t feel any breeze. A white dahlia pinned up in her dark brown hair. “I love this time of morning. You can feel time shift. There’s something tactile in the air when the night creatures turn over to day.”
“That’s why you come down here now?”
“That,” she says, giving a pregnant pause as if she’s weighing her words, “and it’s usually peaceful here. Usually,” she says again for emphasis. She pulls out several pieces of clothing and you’re almost positive one is your shirt, the one she left by the rock.
“I prefer the day. Easier to see things.”
She shrugs. “We all live with ghosts. Some just adapt easier.”
Your skin prickles. “Why do you say that?”
“You should know as well as anyone.” She laughs but it comes out more jagged than soulful. She pauses in her scrubbing and gestures around. “You know this country is full of ghosts.”
“I don’t see ghosts,” you say as you hear the boy’s crying, feel his fingers scratching on the back of your skull.
The next day you’re walking down the main street with Juangui. Apparently, a famous potter lives in town and he wants to see her studio.
“Why do you care about pottery again?”
“Güey, I don’t. Mamá does. I just told you this five minutes ago.” He shakes his head. “You still hung up on that Llorona shit?”
You nod like you’re saying sorry, forgot, but it’s hard to concentrate on what he’s saying with that boy scratching, louder than before, down by the river. You try to think back on the scene, remember if you actually saw your shirt in her basket, but when you bring up her face in your mind all you see if black depressions where her eyes are, a void for a mouth. The crying in your skull shifts pitch, boring into ossified pockets. You squint as if the sun had collapsed and lodged itself in your skull, and you know now she wants to take you as payback for the boy.
You lean against the side of a shop, press your forehead into your shoulder to alleviate some of the pressure. Juangui stops beside you, asks what you’re doing. You can’t answer because you know if you open your mouth the only thing that will exit is a long wail that will consume everything.
Then Juangui says, “Carajo. I didn’t even see him,” and posts up next to you, sifting through the spinning postcard rack in the shop’s entrance.
In place of a response, you glance behind, see a guy abruptly walk into the café. You don’t recognize him.
Juangui peers out from behind the rack. “You see him around here before?”
You shake your head, the scratching beginning to abate.
“Me neither.” Juangui screws up his lips, spits on the ground. He hooks his chin back toward the mountain. “Let’s head back, lay low a minute.”
As soon as you turn toward the house, the scratching and wailing doubles, so strong it nearly drops you to your feet. You’re sure it will end you if you don’t end it.
“I’ll raise Mencho, see what’s up,” Juangui says. “If it’s anyone we need to worry about, we’ll get them before they get us.”
Juangui’s right, you think. You need to get her before she gets you.
You wait by the window until you hear a sharp crack, followed the shuffling. You grab the knife you stole from the kitchen and follow. The night is cloudless, the moon a shining coin in the abyss. Your eyes acclimate without any effort, as if they were created for the night. But you could make this journey in pitch-black, you’ve run through it in your head so many times. So when the light shifts and you catch your foot on a piece of wood lying across the path, you’re caught off guard. You stumble, dropping the knife but catching yourself before you tumble down the mountain. You grab the wood—a fence plank, it appears—and toss it into the scrub, then snatch up the knife and continue.
The pitch of the crying sharpens as you draw nearer to the river, coming ever closer to the source. You see her kneeling there, luminous white in the moonlight, and a sudden calm washes over you, knowing that you’ll soon rid yourself of this curse.
You creep to the edge of the clearing, watching her rend herself by the river, searching for her children, searching for you to drag to the other side and appease the spirit of the murdered boy. You grip the knife in your hand and the moon catches the blade, winking at you. Telling you to move.
You rush forward, knife at the ready, and cinch your arm beneath her chin. Her hair gets in your mouth and tastes of dirt. You yank her chin back, exposing her tender throat, and draw the blade across. A wave of wet heat rushes over you. It feels like absolution, a baptism. Her body jumps and throbs beneath you but you pin her down.
This legend, this curse, now powerless. Defeated.
When the thrashing turns to twitching, when the pulsing ebbs to a trickle, you release your grip, letting the body fall to the ground. Everything around you is so silent it’s shocking. The river, the animals, the scratching in your skull. The absence of sound is nearly tactile. Your body feels cleansed, purified.
Then you hear shuffling, tumbling behind you, from farther up the trail. You turn around, your mouth stretched into a beatific smile, and see Juangui staring at you, his mouth slack and eyes distant.
No, you think, as all feeling rushes out through your feet, not Juangui.
Juangui’s head.
The man holding out Juangui’s head tosses it toward you.
Something behind him catches your attention, something glimmering, and you blink a few times to focus before seeing her, Marina, Malinche, la Llorona, dressed in all white, standing near the doorway of her home, exchanging whispers with a man whose face is pocked by tattoos.
