The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Page 13

  The lawyer is already straightening his tie. He can dress rather quickly into a three-piece suit. The lawyer could tell something was up with the child because Seese was screaming, “Then where is he? Who has him?” over and over into the receiver. Seese accused David of lying, but David’s voice was strangely quiet and a little halting. He almost whispered to her, “I swear I don’t have him. Jesus, Seese! Don’t do this!” Seese screamed back, “You took him! I know it was you, David! You took him! Where is he? Where is my baby?”

  The lawyer sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to wrinkle his trousers or shirt when Seese reached out for him. He lit one cigarette after another while she cried. Finally Seese had screamed at the lawyer, “What the fuck is this? Whose side are you on? You’re supposed to help me!”

  Later Seese told the detectives David had called asking for Monte.

  Seese could feel the detectives’ contempt for her; she had got what she deserved. They weren’t interested. The file on Monte was turned over to the Missing Persons Bureau. Seese knew once a file was sent there, hope was all but gone.

  Afterward, Seese had drifted as if she were a sea-green ribbon of kelp caught in a current with a voice that accused her over and over. A less distinct voice said she had done the best she knew how. Her baby had not drowned in his bathwater. He had not been born addicted. But she could find no consolation for this loss.

  When she tried to cry, she felt no relief, only greater pain from her anguish. She recited to herself endlessly all the ways she might easily have protected him, how she might have saved Monte if she had not been high that day; if she had not worked with criminals such as Beaufrey. Her breasts had been swollen and hot. The slightest contact with the silk kimono sent stinging to her nipples. Her milk began to soak the rose silk in wide moons. She had been too high on pot and coke to know if the wetness came from the tears off her chin and cheeks or the flow of milk leaking from her breasts.

  Gradually Seese realizes she had been fooling herself for a long time. David had not been able to love the baby any better than he had loved her. It was Beaufrey, not David, who was obsessed with the baby. Beaufrey had feared David might love the child, that the child might somehow interfere. Week after week Seese had waited for a phone call or letter.

  After the bullet had shattered the bedroom window, Seese realized David would never telephone about Monte. David would never let her see her baby again. Seese had been seized with a compulsion to jump, to smash through the glass and fall thirty stories into the Pacific. Shaking and sweating, Seese filled the sunken marble tub off the master bedroom. She rolled fat marijuana cigarettes and set them on the edge of the bathtub. She slid under the hot water and imagined glittering-blue salt water filling her lungs, sucking away her breath. But a voice inside her head argued she wouldn’t die yet. Because her baby might still be alive. Her baby might need her.

  Seese awakened when the bathwater was cold. Outside, a yellowish wedge of moon hung low over the ocean horizon. She wandered from room to room dripping water, leaving faint damp footprints on the pale-gray carpet. She kept the door to the baby’s room closed. The kidnappers had stolen the white leather album filled with Monte’s baby pictures. They had also removed a framed photograph of Monte from the wall. All Seese had left were snapshots she’d kept in her purse. David had taken all the negatives with him. The police seemed to want proof that she had really had a child in the first place. But the neighbors did not recognize her or remember Monte in the stroller.

  Seese had suddenly been aware that her own words sounded thin, and the details of her story did not seem convincing even to her anymore. She could imagine how she must sound to the police detectives. Seese threw herself over the lowered side rail of the empty crib and buried her face into Monte’s blanket, to breathe the sweetness of her baby.

  The day he moved out, David had argued that Monte would be better off living with him. Seese never forgot Beaufrey standing in the background where only Seese could see his smirk. “Smirking, sucking mouth!” Seese had screamed at Beaufrey. Afterward David never came alone to see Monte. Usually Beaufrey came, but sometimes David brought Serlo. “Are you afraid?” Seese taunted. Beaufrey had answered for David. Their lawyers had suggested a witness be present at all times. Seese felt Beaufrey’s presence far more strongly than David’s. “Your fairy lawyers?” Seese had burst out laughing, spewing a mouthful of vodka on both of them. Beaufrey had tensed so rigidly Seese thought he might slap her face, but David only turned for the door. He had not even asked to see Monte. At that instant, despite the vodka and cocaine, Seese realized it was Beaufrey who was interested in her baby. “You can buy anything else, can’t you? But you can’t have babies. You can’t do that, can you?”

  Beaufrey had stopped in the doorway and stared at her as if he dared her to continue. Beaufrey had panicked after Monte was born. Later Seese remembered his clenched fists and the unblinking eyes that seemed to pierce through her and the child. Beaufrey had misread David’s interest in the baby. David was only interested in the child so long as he saw his own image reflected. Seese had been too stunned with cocaine and vodka to think clearly about Beaufrey. She had assumed Beaufrey would take David to the other side of the world to keep David away from Monte, but she had been wrong.

  BOOK FIVE

  THE BORDER

  CHILDHOOD IN MEXICO

  YOEME HAD APPEARED suddenly. Lecha and Zeta had been playing with the other children on the long wooden porch. From a distance the twins had both spotted the rapidly moving figure no taller than they were, a black shawl pulled tightly around her face so only her blazing dark eyes were visible. They all felt the eyes examining them.

  Instinctively the children had huddled over the sunflowers they had picked and were arranging in old tin cans. They had waited for the strange figure to pass. Out of the corner of her eye, Zeta had seen it was a very old woman, dressed in a long black dress and black shawl. She had whispered to Lecha the old woman was an Indian. At that instant the tiny figure in black had turned into their gateway and stopped. In a clear voice as strong as Auntie Popa’s, the old woman had said, “You are Indians!” Zeta had never forgotten the chill down her backbone. Lecha had cowered closer to her. Their cousins had jumped up screaming and fled inside.

  But the girls did not run because the old woman was laughing, and she was not very big, and they both were. “Don’t beat me up!” She laughed some more. “Dumb girls! I’m your grandmother!” Zeta and her sister had never heard anyone talk the way Yoeme did. But they had heard their uncles and aunties discuss a certain someone. Zeta had overheard them wishing the old woman had died. The discussion had been how many years had passed since the she-coyote had run off leaving the smallest ones, Ringo and Federico, sobbing and running down the road after her.

  Yoeme’s name often came up with the subject of cottonwood trees. Somehow the morning she had abandoned her children, the long drive-way from the big house to the mine shafts had been blocked by the huge cottonwood trees felled across the road.

  Auntie Popa had ordered the others to lock all the doors and windows, despite the summer heat. Yoeme sat on the porch swing and talked to Zeta and Lecha. What she did not understand was how her own children, conceived and borne in pain, could behave so shamelessly to their flesh and blood mother. Yoeme had said “flesh and blood” so everyone inside would hear it. Popa screamed, but the sound was muffled through the window glass: “Run! Run for your lives!” The girls laughed with the old woman. They would not get rid of her, so the girls should not worry. Yoeme could not be stopped. See? Already, she had the two of them on her side. If she wanted water, it was right there. She reached for a can full of sunflowers and drank the water. Both girls had squealed, and the windows of the house were crowded with suspicious, sweating faces. Yoeme was back and there was nothing any of them could do to get rid of her. Yoeme had slept on the porch glider until the winter rains came, and then she had moved into the old cook-shed behind the big house.

&n
bsp; Late at night Zeta had awakened to loud voices in the rooms below them. Popa and Cucha wanted the dirty Indian out of there. Yoeme liked to lie to them all the time, but very quickly the twins had realized that what was important came true. The morons would not be able to drive her away from the big house, Yoeme told the girls, don’t worry.

  Yoeme teased the girls, telling them she had advised their mother to get rid of one or the other of them right away. Twins were considered by some to be bad luck. If she had been around then, Yoeme said she would have taken care of the problem. She had watched both girls’ faces for reactions. Zeta had asked, “Me or her?” and Lecha had said, “You kill me when I’m a baby and they’ll hang you!” which had caused Yoeme to clap her hands together and laugh until their mother had come out to see what was the matter. Amalia had already been ailing awhile when Yoeme had reappeared. Like the others, Amalia seemed powerless against Yoeme. “I was just telling them how I urged you to get rid of one of them.” Their mother had looked away quickly. “You’ll scare them talking like that,” she said, but Yoeme had paid no attention. She had even coached the girls to ask Amalia who had given birth to her. Their mother had given one of her deep, hopeless sighs. “Yes, she is my mother, although I do not remember her well.” Amalia had clasped both hands to her stomach because the pains had come again. The twins had jumped back in awe of the pain. Yoeme had told them the pain was actually a jaguar that devoured a live human from the inside out. Pain left behind only the skin and bones and hair.

  Amalia had leaned back in the wicker rocking chair on the big porch and managed to tell them more. There had been a terrible fight. A fight involving big cottonwood trees. “She left you and all her other children and her husband because of trees?” Zeta had wondered if her mother’s pain was also confusing the facts. Amalia had not been able to do any more than shake her head at her twin daughters. And then Lecha had said, “No, it was because she is an Indian. Grandpa Guzman’s family didn’t like Indians.”

  “Who told you that?” their mother had asked them. “Yoeme, I suppose.”

  “No,” Lecha had said, “I just know. Nobody likes Indians.”

  Later, when the twins were less frightened of the old woman, Zeta had asked, “Why did you leave your children?” and Yoeme had clapped her hands together and cheered the question so loudly even Lecha had blushed. They knew their mother’s accusation that Yoeme was a bad influence on them was true. “Our mother told us it was trees, cottonwood trees,” Lecha said. They had been sitting on the ground in the garden next to the house pulling weeds. Yoeme stopped the weeding and tilted her head back slightly and squinted her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “trees. The fucker Guzman, your grandfather, sure loved trees. They were cottonwoods got as saplings from the banks of the Rio Yaqui. Slaves carried them hundreds of miles. The heat was terrible. All water went to the mules or to the saplings. The slaves were only allowed to press their lips to the wet rags around the tree roots. After they were planted at the mines and even here by this house, there were slaves who did nothing but carry water to those trees. ‘What beauties!’ Guzman used to say. By then they had no more ‘slaves.’ They simply had Indians who worked like slaves but got even less than slaves had in the old days. The trees were huge by the time your mother was born.”

  “But why did you fight over trees?”

  “Hold your horses, hold your horses,” Yoeme had said. “They had been killing Indians right and left. It was war! It was white men coming to find more silver, to steal more Indian land. It was white men coming with their pieces of paper! To make their big ranches. Guzman and my people had made an agreement. Why do you think I was married to him? For fun? For love? Hah! To watch, to make sure he kept the agreement.”

  But Guzman had been only a gutless, walking corpse, not a real man. He had been unwilling to stand up to the other white men streaming into the country. “He was always saying he only wanted to ‘get along.’ ” Yoeme slid into one of her long cackling laughs. “Killing my people, my relatives who were only traveling down here to visit me! It was time that I left. Sooner or later those long turds would have ridden up with their rifles, and Guzman would have played with his wee-wee while they dragged me away.”

  “But your children,” Zeta said.

  “Oh, I could already see. Look at your mother right now. Weak thing. It was not a good match—Guzman and me. You understand how it is with horses and dogs—sometimes children take after the father. I saw that.” And so Yoeme told the twins. It had been a simple decision. She could not remain with children from such a man. Guzman’s people had always hated her anyway. Because she was an Indian. “We know,” Lecha said. “We know that. But what about the trees?”

  Oh, yes, those trees! How terrible what they did with the trees. Because the cottonwood suckles like a baby. Suckles on the mother water running under the ground. A cottonwood will talk to the mother water and tell her what human beings are doing. But then these white men came and they began digging up the cottonwoods and moving them here and there for a terrible purpose.

  COTTONWOOD TREES

  “I STILL SEE THIS,” Yoeme said. “Very clearly, because I was your age then. Off in the distance, as we were approaching the river. The cottonwood trees were very lovely. In the breeze their leaves glittered like silver. But then we got closer, and someone shouted and pointed. I looked and looked. I saw things—dark objects. Large and small, swaying from the low, heavy branches. And do you know what they were—those objects hanging in the beautiful green leaves and branches along the river?”

  The two little girls had shaken their heads together, and when they looked at each other, they realized they knew what Yoeme was going to say.

  Bullets, she explained, cost too much. “I heard people say they were our clanspeople. But I could not recognize any faces. They had all dried up like jerky.” Lecha had closed her eyes tight and shaken her head. Zeta had nodded solemnly.

  “So you see, when I decided to leave that fucker Guzman and his weak children, your mother was the weakest, I had one last thing I had to do.” Here Yoeme clapped her hands and let out a little shout. “It was one of the best things I have ever done! Sooner or later those long turds would have ridden up with their rifles to hang me from the big cottonwood tree.”

  Lecha and Zeta had looked in the direction the old woman pointed in the yard near the house. Only a giant white stump remained. “What happened to the big tree?” Zeta had wanted to know.

  “Well, you don’t think I was going to let that tree stand next to this house as long as I was alive, do you?”

  Yoeme had waited until Guzman had gone off to buy mules in Morelos, and then she had ordered the gardeners to get to work with axes. At the mine headquarters they had only cut down six of the big trees before the foreman had called a halt. Fortunately, while the foreman was rushing to the big house to question the orders, the gardeners had been smart enough to girdle the remaining trees. Yoeme had paid them to run off with her, since in the mountains their villages and her village were nearby. She had cleaned out Guzman’s fat floor safe under the bed where she had conceived and delivered seven disappointing children. It was a fair exchange, she said, winking at the little girls, who could not imagine how much silver that might have been. Enough silver that the three gardeners had been paid off.

  Guzman had later claimed he did not mind the loss of the silver, which a week’s production could replace. But Guzman had told Amalia and the others their mother was dead to them and forever unwelcome in that house because she had butchered all the big cottonwood trees. He could never forgive that.

  The twins were solemn.

  “I did not let myself get discouraged. All these years I have waited to see if any of you grandchildren might have turned out human. I would come around every so often, take a look.” They were on the porch now, and Dennis, their pinheaded cousin, the son of Uncle Ringo, was sitting on the step, eating his own snot. Yoeme waved her hand at Dennis. “They had all been pretty much like tha
t one,” she said, “and I was almost to give up hope. But then you two came.”

  “But you wanted to get rid of one of us.” Lecha had let go of Yoeme’s hand in order to say this.

  The old woman had stopped and looked at both of them. “I wanted to have one of you for myself,” she said.

  “But you didn’t get one of us.”

  “No.” Yoeme had let out a big sigh. “I didn’t even get one of you. Your poor mother was too dumb for that. And now do you see what I have?”

  The twins had looked at each other to avoid the piercing eyes of old Yoeme.

  Yoeme laughed loudly. “I have you both!” she said in triumph, and from the bedroom inside they could hear their mother fumble for the enamel basin to vomit blood.

  THE FAILED GEOLOGIST

  WHEN ZETA WAS ASKED about her childhood or her family, she replied only that it was all vague and uninteresting to her. This was the truth. But she also realized that she had come to be where she was through a strange and long series of events that were her childhood and youth.

  They had arrived in Tucson in the early summer of their fourteenth year. From the train in Nogales they had taken a taxi to the bus depot. Their father had been waiting. They had talked in low voices, all the way from Hermosillo, about Uncle Federico’s “big finger.” They had avoided any discussion about what would happen next. Their father had not come to their mother’s funeral, but then they had been separated for over ten years. He had sent a telegram immediately, by way of the mine at Canenea, announcing that the girls were his daughters, and he was now claiming his legal right to them.