The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read online

  ROOT’S ACCIDENT

  ROOT’S MOTHER had been engrossed in forcing her simple husband to live up to the name of the family he’d married into. Root liked to say that his father had lasted long enough to sire eight of them, and then he had dropped dead. Driven to death just as old Gorgon was supposed to have driven a team of mules to death, explaining later that the mules were worn-out and used up, and he had a chance to close a big business deal in Nogales if he was willing to press the mule team harder. Root was always bitter when he talked about his father and mother. Root preferred to say that all his family had died in his accident. That the instant his skull had bounced off the car bumper, mother, grandmother, sisters, and brothers died. When he woke up months later, each one had to be introduced to him, and the night after meeting his mother and the rest, Root had cried himself to sleep in the hospital room. “Because,” Root told Lecha, “I knew they weren’t really my family. All they cared about was how much I was going to cost them, and whether I was going to mean extra work for anyone.”

  Lecha had noticed Root right away because he had looked at her defiantly as he kick-started his motorcycle and had then roared around Calabazas’s big yard in mad circles until the corralful of burros and mules threatened to stampede. Then, calculating just the point before Calabazas would come out of the house yelling, Root had turned off the engine and glided his motorcycle back to its place under the big cottonwood tree.

  Lecha had let Root fuck her the first few times because he had a crush on her and he was wild and young. She told him he had a lot to learn. Meaning that he couldn’t get it in without its spewing all over the sheets. But after he got out of the hospital, six months after the accident, with slurred speech, a leg that dragged, Root had stayed hard no matter how long she fucked him. In those days Lecha had not thought twice about the men she was fucking. There were too many to think about. But the few times she had been in the mood, she had got his phone number from Calabazas, because Root worked full-time for him by then. Calabazas had hired him for many reasons as it turned out. One was old Gorgon had once hired Calabazas many years before. But the main reason was Root’s brain damage made a perfect front for them. Root took day and night classes at the community college. He carried gram packets of cocaine in the plastic pencil bag hooked inside his loose-leaf notebook. He used the pauses and slurs to his advantage. In the college snack bar joking with classmates after class, or with the narcotics officers who tried to shake him down. Root could deliver a punch line or an insult with mock innocence, to force strangers to realize that even with only part of a brain, he was smarter and quicker than they were. He was going to school to learn to read and write all over again, Root liked to tell undercover cops, to get them off his trail. He had enrolled in speech therapy class every semester but never attended. “I didn’t want,” he’d say, slowly forming each word, “I didn’t want to spoil a good thing like this with speech therapy.” Root would laugh, and Lecha realized he meant he had finished with the world where those things mattered.

  Lecha let the blue silk kimono slip open to see what he’d do. But Root was intent on pinning down her illness. She’d called him collect from a phone booth at the airport in Miami. She had not intended to mention the illness, but Root had sounded short, a little irritated by the collect call. So she said, “I’ve got cancer, and I’m dying.” Root had only grunted, but then at the airport he met her with roses. Until then Root had never bought her anything except taxi rides. When Lecha left Tucson, she had not thought about seeing him again. She had not thought about Root at all, except when she saw cripples or people with palsy, and then she would merely wonder what he was up to and forget him again. But when she began making stopovers and short stays in Tucson, she found she could depend on Root. He had an account with Yellow Cab, and although he only rented house trailers, they were always clean and she had always had a place to sleep and more if she wanted. Root always took the mangled motorcycle with him when he moved and parked it outside the rented trailers. He said he kept it to remind him where he’d been and where he’d come back from. A Plymouth bumper two inches into his skull had not stopped him the message ran, so the punks better think twice about pushing him around.

  “You can’t stay here,” Root says slowly, peeling at the beer label with one finger.

  “Because of that woman?”

  Root shakes his head. “Business,” he says, reaching over to pat Lecha’s bare thigh.

  That was okay because Lecha had to see Zeta and Ferro sooner or later. It might as well be sooner. At the ranch she would not be hounded by hysterical blondes who had seen her on daytime television. “I wonder what she wanted.”

  “Who?”

  “That woman.”

  “Someone who knows Cherie.”

  “Cherie?”

  “Cherie is all right,” Root answers. “She’s a dancer at the Stage Coach.”

  Lecha looks down at her own tit dangling out of the blue kimono. She hefts it in one hand the way she’s seen strippers display themselves. “An old potato,” Lecha says. “More like an old cantaloupe,” Root says, taking her breast in both hands, pretending he wants to make a meal of it. She slides down on the sofa and the kimono falls away; even the long, full sleeves slide off. When Root was in his twenties, and even into his early thirties, he had been her slave. He would have done anything she asked. But now Root had said “business,” and he had meant it. Lecha had always made it a practice to avoid calendars and clocks except where business required them. Because they were not true. What was true was a moment such as this, warm sweat sliding over their bellies so smoothly that despite everything, the size of Root’s beer belly or her old full-moon ass, the connection was as hot as it had ever been, the charge bolted through like lightning. Let the years dry up the cantaloupes or potatoes as long as there’s still the electricity.

  SHALLOW GRAVES

  SEESE IS ANXIOUS to begin working with Lecha immediately to transcribe and type the old notebooks and papers. Certain answers lie within the ragged, stained pages. Answers to problems and questions Lecha must have before they begin the search for Monte. But once Lecha has settled into her big bed, she announces work on the old notebooks and papers must not interfere with work that “brings home the bacon.”

  Seese learns to sort the mail into two categories: new business and old. Old business consisted of the successful clients still sending Lecha money orders and cashier’s checks with letters that thanked Lecha again and again. New business wasn’t so easy. Reading the letters had coiled the old sadness tight in her chest, and she had been shocked how easily she had returned to vodka and cocaine in her bedroom.

  Nothing prepares Seese for the phone calls she must transcribe. A woman calls long distance from Florida. Her voice starts out clear and in control, but grief pushes to the surface, and when she gets to the color of the T-shirt, she gasps as if there is no more air in her lungs: “I know I should remember which one it was, but he was always changing clothes all day, you know. He liked to put on the Snoopy T-shirt, but then after “Sesame Street” he liked the one with the little Grover puppet on it.” The woman agonizes over the color of the T-shirt she can not remember, worn by the child she will never see again. The woman describes the sneakers over and over again—blue Keds—repeating details again and again as if to prove to herself she had been a good mother although her child is gone. They called. They sent cash and an article of the missing person’s clothing or a stuffed toy.

  Even with cocaine again, Seese can’t bear transcribing the phone calls. Lecha claims she enjoys talking on the telephone. Seese grits her teeth and slashes open envelopes with Lecha’s Mexican dagger.

  Seese had only read a dozen or so plea letters before she read the letter that stopped her. Without a greeting, date, or return address, a big manila envelope had come registered and certified first class. “Right there you know you got something happening,” Lecha alerted Seese. Happening meant a cashier’s check had also fallen out of a wad of
typewritten pages. Anything over $500 American in new business had to be carefully considered. Every fragment, scrap, and dim memory the client might have must be meticulously reported. Lecha said they had to stop the telephone calls because no check or money order fell out of the phone.

  The letters and messages Lecha got had been the exact opposite of nightmares or daydreams. The letters were invariably lists of facts, recitations of precise locations at hours and minutes of specific months and days: height, weight, eye and hair color, descriptions of birthmarks, jewelry, and clothes. From the facts Lecha’s task was to find the appropriate or accurate emblems or dreams. Lecha said the world had all it ever needed in the way of figures and facts anyway. Lecha admitted it was difficult to understand. A matter of faith or belief. Knowledge. Or maybe grace. Something like that. Lecha only had to slit open an envelope or listen to a recording of a long-distance phone message, and suddenly she would seize the tin ammo box full of crumpled pages and notes and sift them carefully until a single word or a short phrase revealed “the clue” to her.

  Seese must remember it was only a “clue.” No one but the client would ever be able to understand fully the clue’s meaning. On occasion Lecha had reluctantly agreed to accept yet another fee to determine for the client the message or clue. More risk was involved in reading the clue. There were all kinds of reasons for this. Seese nodded. It was all right with Seese if Lecha sent clients weird or unintelligible messages. As long as everyone understood.

  Any psychic worth her salt knew even before she opened an envelope the nature of the message inside. Words inscribed by terrified, haunted people in nightmare hours after midnight were useless and often misleading. It didn’t matter what the letters or messages said. Each story had many versions. Had Seese heard about Freudian theory? Seese nodded. Lecha had got herself warmed up. Freud had interpreted fragments—images from hallucinations, fantasies, and dreams—in terms patients could understand. The images were messages from the patient to herself or himself.

  Lecha continued with her crackpot theories: Freud had sensed the approach of the Jewish holocaust in the dreams and jokes of his patients. Freud had been one of the first to appreciate the Western European appetite for the sadistic eroticism and masochism of modern war. What did Seese think Jesus Christ symbolized anyway?

  Nothing had prepared Seese for the work on Lecha’s notebook. Lecha insists that Seese type up each and every letter or word fragment however illegible or stained. Lecha wants her personal notebook transcribed and typed because it is necessary to understanding the old notebooks Yoeme left behind. Lecha tells Seese not to be disappointed. The old notebooks are all in broken Spanish or corrupt Latin that no one can understand without months of research in old grammars. Lecha had already done translation work, and her notebooks contained narratives in English.

  Lecha’s Notebook

  After days of searing heat the Earth no longer cools at night. The wind carries away the heat for a few hours, and by dawn the air is motionless, and a faint warmth emanates from luminous pale ridges of limestone and tufa. The lower skirts of leaves of jojoba and brittle bushes are parched white and shriveled from drought.

  What can you tell by the color of their eyes?

  Dead children were eaten by survivors during times of great famine.

  Late August afternoon wind stirs a blue wash of rain clouds over the edge of the southwest horizon. Humidity increases. The paloverde’s thin, green bark glows with moisture off the ocean wind from Sonora.

  Meaning lies in the figures and colors of the killer’s tattoos. Meaning lies in the particular disarray of the victim’s underclothes.

  The killer’s blue eyes dilate with rage so the victim sees only the empty blackness of her own grave. The killer keeps victims long enough to wash and curl their hair, and to clean and paint the victim’s finger and toenails with pink polish sold at thousands of drugstores.

  The computer posits models of possible routes taken by the abductor and victim.

  The abductor drives the victim west and then north into the desert foothills.

  According to the computer model, the child killer acts within the first fifteen minutes after the abduction.

  The abductor can wait no longer. In his excitement he accidentally makes a long, shallow cut in his own upper thigh. He has always savored the chill of steel alongside the shaft of his own cock while he pulled and beat it off.

  A black, late-model sedan is parked at the mouth of a dry arroyo next to a dirt road.

  The purpose of the shallow grave is twofold: to hide the shameful incriminating evidence, and to prevent the loss of the beloved corpse.

  The photograph appears to be of a common grave scratched out of the Sonoran Desert gravel; scraps of cloth, bleached translucent by the sun, flutter in the wind above bits of hair and bones.

  The Santa Cruz River has been running at low, summer flood-level for weeks. The mother sends the little girl a short distance, no more than two city blocks, to mail a letter.

  The little girl rides off on her bike—and never comes back. Later, younger neighborhood children tell how a black car bumps her off her bicycle and a man lifts her into the black car. The small pink bicycle is found lying in the weeds on Root Lane near her home.

  Computers posit models of possible routes taken by the abductor. Blue-pencil grids divide the map of the area west and north of the little girl’s home. Search teams are assigned blocks within the grids. Teams on horseback and all-terrain motorcycles comb the scrubby greasewood on the gray alluvial ridges that parallel the Santa Cruz River.

  Plastic surveyor’s ribbons in white or light yellow are tied on branches of mesquite or jojoba after each of the twenty acre squares has been searched. After each square in the blue-pencil grid has been searched, a Sherriff’s Department volunteer draws a red X over the square.

  On the morning of the third day of the search, family members bring the little girl’s favorite doll, a long-tail monkey sewed and stuffed with brown cotton work socks, and a pair of the child’s pink tennis shoes for bloodhounds brought from the state penitentiary.

  Bloodhounds are not as effective in desert terrain. Damp-woods paths and lush foliage hold scents for hours, sometimes days. The dog handler estimates the dogs must be set on a trail within the first three hours or the desert’s dry, hot air obliterates the scent trail. It’s all scientific, the dog man explains. Heat expands scent molecules. Pushes molecules apart—scatters them. Desert gravel and sand for an hour, and the heat and the wind evaporate molecules into dust.

  You don’t believe they can send you all of this in one or two letters—dozens of newspaper clippings and photographs—yet week after week they do. You don’t know them. Don’t know who they are. Still they imagine you may have some sort of power to bring their little girl back to them.

  The child’s father joins the search, while her stepfather remains with her mother. They do not go to the temporary search headquarters near the bridge on the Santa Cruz River. The child’s mother waits next to the telephone with the reverend from the Church of Christ, Scientist. The call the mother waits for is from California or New Mexico. She has read about it before. Kidnappers who mean no harm to the child. Perhaps they have lost a child of their own.

  Seese watched them together. The two old women. Identical twins who no longer resembled one another except when they spoke. Zeta had only to pause an instant before her wide, dark face relaxed into a brief smile. “Oh . . . ,” Zeta had said. “You are going to copy her book. . . .” “Well,” Lecha had said, her eyes dreamy and distant, “You could say ‘her book,’ but of course the book will be mine.”

  ARMS DEALER

  WHEN ZETA THOUGHT of her father, she liked to go walking down the ridge behind the ranch house where he had walked with her and Lecha that day so long ago. She had been adamant about the security systems and fences. She did not want them to interfere with the trails she took for her walks. Because the trails were far older even than the ranching and mi
ning that had gone on in those mountains. The trails themselves extended out of another time, and Zeta had found that walking along them enabled her to reach insights and ideas that otherwise were inaccessible.

  When she walked, she always carried the 9mm in the deep pocket concealed in the fullness of her dark brown skirt. She had been surprised one day to notice that the long full skirts and dark blouses and suit coats she wore were much like a religious habit. She was able to affect the appearance of an old woman, but was also able to dress as Lecha did and give the impression of a woman barely past forty-five. Lecha did it to attract men. Zeta did it to throw the others off her trail. If Zeta wore pants, they were the English riding pants for women, and she would have had the sewing lady sew a deep pocket in them too for the 9mm. Ferro had given her a two-shot .38-caliber derringer for Christmas that year and a boot holster for it, but she preferred not to wear boots during the hot season.

  She did not have to walk far to escape the presence of the house and the guard dogs and other people. She wondered if her father had felt the distance that could be gained by walking there. The desert shrubs, cactus, mesquite, and paloverde grew lush from the steep sides of the hills and ridges, which were only the debris, the ruin, of the great volcano that had once presided over the entire valley.

  When she came to the large flat stone the size of an anvil but four times as heavy, Zeta used to wish her father had taught her about meteorites. Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two A.M. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of a moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they had watched the night skies relentlessly, translating sudden bursts and trails of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past. Yoeme claimed it had all been written down, in another form of course, in the notebooks, which she had waved in their faces almost from the beginning.