The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read online

  Suddenly in a rosy, clear light of sun just risen, a voice inside her had begun speaking. She was not sure how long she had. She only knew she could not go on much longer with this business of daytime television “psychic” and special assignments to police departments. She sensed the change as if the power were turning its face, and its eyes, to look toward the world that was emerging.

  The assistant producers were running back and forth with pages of dialogue for the teleprompters. The television cameras were gliding and shifting over the bare concrete floor with a dozen camera assistants dragging cables to prevent tangles. Lecha was reminded of bridal gowns, long lace and satin trains requiring many attendants to keep them from catching in doorways or around corners. Lecha curled her feet under the armchair on the talk show set. Her feet were chilled. She had learned how to dress for television—short sleeves, cool fabrics against the heat of the lights, but her feet always got cold. TV studios were all alike—underground, cold concrete floors, and snarls of black cable thicker than her arms. Television was the same everywhere she had ever appeared. No wonder daytime television viewers were interested in all the bizarre and freakish ways one might be injured or fall ill, all the terrifying, hideous ways a psychopath might torture and kill his victims, all the possible and apparently innocent actions that lead up to the disappearance and loss of a small child. The lights they used in television studios must be related somehow to napalm: the light burns the air itself, burns anything it shines on.

  Weeks on the regional daytime talk show circuit had prepared Lecha for the freezing feet and sweaty forehead, but she never quite got over the talk show hosts, who did not know what to say and had to read each word on the teleprompter. She had learned a lot since the first time she had appeared on a TV talk show. One thing was to get there an hour early to make sure the producers had her check, implying that otherwise she might not go on the air. Other than that, the work was easy. The hosts always asked her the same questions. Was she Indian and what kind? How did she learn she had this psychic power? And of course, which were the most important cases she had ever worked on? Lecha had three cases she cited, although she did not think it possible to judge “importance.” To the family or loved one the loss of the beloved was incalculable. Lecha used to talk about the cases that did not end in death, although these had always been rare cases, and in time, they had become even more scarce. But television audiences didn’t want to hear about those cases; TV viewers were mainly interested in death. Whatever had been in the news most recently was what they wanted Lecha to talk about. Today they were going to want to know all about the corpses of the fourteen young boys Lecha had located in the beach dunes of a state park north of San Diego.

  The studio audience streamed down the aisles. Lecha closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see them and tried to relax before the show. She is still feeling faint aftershocks of the headache the two San Diego detectives had induced the day before. She feels a reluctance to talk about San Diego. She feels something inside her balking, and she pictures goats from her childhood in Potam, goats that spread the toes of their cloven hooves and dug into the earth refusing to be led or even dragged against their will.

  The talk show host is an aging white man who wears heavy makeup. Lecha wants to close her eyes again. Ideally they would do the show with her eyes closed and tell the viewers and studio audience it was necessary in order for her psychic powers to function at their best. Talk show hosts are the television managements’ idea of what women want to watch. Watch doing what? is the question, Lecha thinks. She is good at imagining sex with men. Lecha has taken the time to check out some of her hunches, and although she never talks about it, her “powers” extend into the bed. She watches closely the way the host walks, stops to talk with one of the producers, and then disappears behind banks of long drapes. The keys to this guy are the carefully tweezed and shaped eyebrows. Lecha can’t get past his eyebrows to imagine herself in bed with him. So while the host with the perfect eyebrows and the rest of the crew stumble over jungle snakes of electrical cable, Lecha thinks about high voltage that causes brain tumors. She thinks about tropical lands. Giant dams in the jungles. Hydroelectric power. Guerrillas as quiet and smooth as snakes. Break open the dams and the electric motors of the machinery, machinery that belongs to the masters, stutter to a halt. She has images of these places, because she always reads her newspapers, she always has since she first took up her line of work. Tropical lands. Old tourism movies of Mexico City. The floating gardens of Xochimilco. Didn’t the priest in Potam always talk on and on about the heights of Spanish culture? And didn’t old Yoeme always say that priest was full of caca, with his lecher stories of devil-men shadowing young schoolgirls who wore even a touch of rouge?

  The smiling host joins Lecha on the talk show set, and the studio audience is hushed by the teleprompters and sweating production assistants. The show rolls right along, until the host asks about San Diego and the body count still headlining news nationwide. Lecha smiles. She is wearing a conservative black dress, carrying a black kid purse that matches her high heels. She keeps her hair shoulder length. There is no gray. Lecha smiles and prepares to confound them. Her prim appearance makes her refusal to discuss the San Diego case more shocking to the host and studio audience.

  “But the killer is dead. The case will be closed as soon as all the bodies are recovered,” the talk show host says, still smiling, not comprehending what is about to happen. This sudden twist means his teleprompter is of no use. He stalls and then takes a quick, desperate look at the teleprompter to see if the producers can get him out of this one. He asks why she won’t talk about it, and Lecha answers that she does not feel like explaining. Although she is speaking in a calm, level tone, her refusal brings scattered laughs and tittering from the studio audience. Fortunately, time is running out for this half of the show, and at last something scribbled hastily appears on the teleprompter. The host is angered now because he has been refused, and because there have been titters from the studio audience. “Well, then,” the host says in oily tones that barely smooth the sarcasm, “you can’t go leaving us empty-handed. We had our hearts set on—” He stops before he finishes that sentence. Lecha nods and smiles. She is familiar with ghoulish disappointment. They must have at least one thrill. At least one hair-raiser or spine-tingler.

  “Well, let’s have a little demonstration here. How about next week’s headlines? How about you take a look into that crystal ball—” The host held up Lecha’s purse in a vulgar gesture, as if he were trying to determine whether it contained a crystal ball. Lecha had been watching the faces and reactions of the studio audience; she was also aware of the sweat beginning to erode the makeup on the host’s face. But while Lecha was seeing all of this, she had been aware of the voice that had recently raised itself inside her; the voice also had eyes. And while her eyes had been watching the audience and the host, these other eyes had been watching the mossy water of the canals of the floating gardens. Lecha describes the gardens of Xochimilco, with the water lilies, yellow and pink blossoms, and the reeds and cattails parting gently to the prow of the small flat-bottom boat. Then up ahead she sees a bright red and yellow woven-plastic shopping bag floating in the dark green water. There are two large objects visible through the plastic netting. But here the talk show host interrupts, afraid that the Indian woman is just killing time, setting him up with a dumb story about floating gardens and floating trash. “So far I don’t see this one making next week’s headlines,” he says, and is gratified when the studio audience laughs at his cleverness. But Lecha does not hesitate. She repeats the sentence he interrupted and immediately there is silence, and Lecha has them on the canal as the little boat draws even with the brightly colored shopping bag. Inside the bag there are two human heads, their blue eyes open wide, staring at the sky.

  The studio audience gasps and breaks into applause. It is clear the Indian woman has won them from him again. He is forced to a last, desperate shot. Summoning hi
s most mocking tone, he asks Lecha, “Who are these heads?” smirking at his clever phrasing. But again Lecha does not hesitate. “They are the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and his chief aide,” she says, and this time there is a long silence before the host or anyone in the audience moves.

  SUDDEN RETIREMENT

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING while Lecha is packing in the hotel room a news break interrupts reruns of “I Love Lucy.” The U.S. ambassador to Mexico and his chief aide had been caught in an ambush by Indian guerrillas outside Mexico City. The ambassador and his aide were missing.

  A cold chill swept over Lecha. The FBI and CIA would send agents after her for debriefing. The hair on her scalp and neck tingled. Lecha reached into the pouch inside one of her long kimonos and pulled out a small leather case from a special inner pocket. Her old standby. Birth certificate, Social Security card, and Arizona driver’s license. She does not cancel the plane reservations to New York, but she makes reservations for Tucson under another name. This had happened before, and days had been wasted with stupid questions by agents who wanted to connect Lecha with the crime she’d just helped solve. But this one, this time would be far worse, especially when they found out she was an Indian, born in Mexico.

  • • •

  She was out of business much sooner than she’d thought she’d be. She’d head for Tucson and get hold of Root. He managed to keep out of the way of the law. And there were always Zeta and Ferro, the two of them obsessed with security measures, dog packs, and laser alarms. Events were moving much faster than she had expected. The yield from the green water of the floating gardens was proof of that.

  Lecha left messages for Root at three or four of the biker bars he liked. He traveled only by taxi now because of his disabilities, but he would always prefer the company of bikers.

  Lecha has forgotten how cold the rain can be. Tucson for her has always been the dry heat in June. A hundred three degrees, six percent humidity, and the cicadas breaking into song over the good weather. The wind blows the rain against the metal panels of the house trailer Root rents. The gusts make the “green beast” shudder. Lecha had taken one look at the big old-timer and had named it that. Root was uncomfortable. Lecha wonders if he is afraid the name means she is moving in for a long time. She laughs at him. He looks at her with the blue eyes that seldom blink. He tells her he does not like to hear fun made at the expense of beasts, monsters, or anything ugly and big. They both know what he means. Lecha had hoped that as Root got older he might develop more of a sense of humor. The wind and the rain are pounding the house trailer. Lecha remembers the Midwestern storms that have such appetites for house trailers. She wonders if anyone in Tucson would have the imagination to anchor a house trailer against high winds as they do in other places. Probably not. Life has always been cheap in Tucson.

  The pounding can’t be the wind. Lecha opens the narrow trailer door just a crack and gets a face full of rain from the wind. Then Lecha sees a person standing at the foot of the metal trailer steps. The woman is wearing a flimsy, clear-plastic raincoat, and under it Lecha can see a T-shirt and blue jeans. The woman has been knocking on the side of the trailer instead of coming up the steps to the door. Lecha thinks this also is typical of a town such as Tucson. People here can’t seem to do things in the ordinary fashion. The blonde is thin and probably young. Lecha can’t see much in the dark and the storm. The expression on the face seems desperate enough to belong to an old woman. Lecha assumes this is one of Root’s customers, one of those young women who swap sex for drugs.

  But when the blonde sees Lecha’s face, her desperate expression breaks into one of disbelief and then joy. “Oh, Jesus!” the blonde says, trying to wipe away the rain and strands of wet hair from her face, stumbling toward the trailer steps. “I never thought I’d find you! I need your help.” Lecha hasn’t been in Tucson for more than forty-eight hours. Only Root had known Lecha was coming. Lecha keeps her eyes on the gringa’s red and swollen eyes; it is as if the blonde is a newborn creature of some sort, not accustomed to light above ground. Lecha had never been tracked down before by a client. She took pride in her control over her private life. One of the chief occupational hazards of clairvoyants and palm readers was to live under siege by the desperately lonely, and those so crazed it was impossible ever to learn what had been lost.

  Lecha does not like the sudden appearance of someone looking for her. It might be the authorities. She might not have got out of Miami fast enough. “Anyone who tracks me down doesn’t need me. Go find it yourself!” Lecha yells this as she slams the trailer door in Seese’s face. Root comes out of the bedroom rubbing his eyes. “Who was that?” “I never saw her before.” Root pats the front pocket of his baggy jeans for his compact .380 automatic. He opens the trailer door slowly, only a crack, turning his face away from the blowing rain. Then he steps outside with bare feet and closes the door behind him. A minute later he comes back inside shaking the rain off his head; his white T-shirt is soaked and clings to the beer belly hanging over his sagging jeans. “I think she’s all right,” Root says, “one of those clients of yours looking for her kid. I told her to come back later. That you are busy.” Root limps toward the kitchen area and opens the refrigerator to get a beer. When he is tired, his right foot drags more than it usually does. The steel plate in his head had set off the airport security machine’s alarm. He had brought Lecha a dozen red roses. The airline employee pushing her wheelchair had thought Root was Lecha’s son. Lecha is proud of the age difference. The wheelchair is a prop. Lecha didn’t want to be caught walking with suitcases full of Demerol and Percodan. Root studies her. “I thought you were dying.” Lecha seldom bothers to look in mirrors anymore. Occasionally she does catch a glimpse of herself in plate glass windows or chrome trim on a car. For television she leaves the face for their makeup people to worry about. She hardly recognizes the woman she sees in the mirror, although she knows it is “herself,” whatever that means. Years ago Lecha realized she had never seen any person, animal, place, or thing look the same twice. Some mornings Lecha has awakened to find a haggard, wrinkled face with Korean eyes watching her from the mirror. Other mornings, just waking up with a man in the bed beside her gives her a face in the mirror like the one she saw in the mirror when she was nineteen.

  “It’s cancer,” Lecha lies. “But I’ll last awhile.”

  BOOK SEVEN

  WEST TUCSON

  ROOT’S GRANDPA GORGON

  ROOT FINISHES one beer and opens another. He offers Lecha one but she says cold beer is no good in this kind of weather. “What kind of weather?” Root says right back, and Lecha has to smile at the deadpan delivery. She throws an arm around his shoulder and kisses his neck. They settle on the couch together and listen to the wind pound the rain against the trailer. Root always was moody even before the accident. She had been forty and he had been nineteen when she had first seen him with some of Calabazas’s young cousins. Lecha had always preferred short men with barrel chests on the stocky side.

  They had been sleeping together only a few months when Root crashed his motorcycle. Lecha had known it would happen. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that Root with high handle bars on the low Harley chopper would not last. Before the accident, Calabazas had not paid much attention to Root. Calabazas would only grunt when Lecha brought up the subject. Calabazas had had a run-in with Root’s great-grandfather, the old Mexican Gorgon, years before. Old Gorgon had kept the whorehouses and gambling halls in Tucson. That was all Tucson had been in the 1880s, Calabazas liked to say. By the time Root was born, the family had shrewdly consolidated its holdings. Root’s grand-mother still owned all of the low-rent property south of downtown. “You know they got rich off the Indian wars,” Calabazas said. “That’s where the Irishman came in. The old man hired him to go out with a wagon and some mules to bootleg whiskey, which was illegal for the Apaches as well as U.S. troops on active duty.” The demand for Gorgon’s whiskey forever exceeded the supply. Corn, oats, or rye were too expens
ive to use for the brewing mash, so Gorgon had experimented with different recipes. Gorgon’s whiskey was distilled from a fermented mash of jojoba and mesquite beans with just a shovelful of cracked corn to suggest the bourbon flavor the U.S. troops, mostly scraggly Southerners, had come to expect. Once distilled, the liquor was given a last cut—two parts Santa Cruz water, one part formaldehyde—to prevent “spoil-age” in wooden barrels on Kirkpatrick’s wagon. Only an Irishman or a drunk would have taken that job, but Kirkpatrick was both. The job was to stay out on the desert trails, as close as possible to both the U.S. troops hunting the Apaches and the Apaches hunting the U.S. troops. Ideally, the old man told the Irishman, he should try to keep his wagonload of whiskey cut with river water and formaldehyde right in the middle of things. Stories about old Gorgon were full of clues about Root. Gorgon’s daughter married Kirkpatrick. Gorgon’s daughter had clearly married beneath herself, but she had also entertained high hopes that the children would distinguish the family name. Root’s mother had been a Tucson debutante. Root’s mother had forbidden him and his sisters and brothers to play with the children of military families sent to Tucson during the war. Root’s mother had not allowed Mexican playmates; Grandfather Gorgon, Root’s mother had explained, was of “Spanish descent,” not Mexican.