The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read online

  Root suspected it might have been fatigue and the fat green joints he and Mosca had smoked hours earlier. Root’s ass had been dragging he was so tired; but that night Calabazas marched them up and down, up and down the same stretch of the arroyo, until Root suddenly realized what the old bastard was saying. “Look at it for what it is. That’s all. This big rock is like it is. Look. Now, come on. Over here. This one is about as big, but not quite. And the rock broke out a chunk like a horse head, but see, this one over here broke out a piece that’s more like a washtub.” Root had rubbed his hand over the edges of the fracture lines, and although both rocks were the same dull gray basalt, he had been able to feel differences along the fractures. One had been weathered smooth on the edges. One sat slightly higher on a gravel bench shaped by the confluences of the wash. The other rock had rested at its location long enough to collect a snarl of tall rice grass and broken twigs and tumbleweeds at its base.

  Survival had depended on differences. Not just the differences in the terrain that gave the desert traveler critical information about traces of water or grass for his animals, but the sheer varieties of plants and bugs and animals. Calabazas liked to talk about the years of drought, when so many rodents and small animals died, and the deer and larger game migrated north. “Buzzard was the king those years. You should have seen. They don’t have to drink much water. They get it from the rotting meat they eat. It swells up with gas and then it makes greenish water. Buzzards gather around and feast. It is like their beer. They drink and drink.” The old Dodge pickup was spinning and sliding around corners sometimes in the dry wash, sometimes on a faint wagon road parallel with the wash. He parked the pickup by a big mesquite tree, but Calabazas kept lecturing even after the engine stopped.

  Mosca pretended to gag on Calabazas’s lecture, then he laid his head on the dashboard and went to sleep. But Root sat leaning out the truck window, catching the cool, damp smell of the summer desert night. Being around Mexicans and Indians or black people, had not made him feel uncomfortable. Not as his own family had. Because if you weren’t born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren’t born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.

  Root always remembered the last remark Calabazas had made that night, just as they were drawing near the basalt knob where the drop was to be made. Calabazas said, “Those who can’t learn to appreciate the world’s differences won’t make it. They’ll die.”

  Mosca skids to a stop for the red light. Root knows Mosca could clear the intersection while the light was still yellow, but it has been Mosca’s custom to hit the red light at Oracle and Ft. Lowell so they can pause a minute or two at the site where Root’s journey to the world of differences had commenced. Root tolerates Mosca’s obsession because Mosca sees the accident as supernatural intrigue and the brain damage as strange power. Mosca strides into a crowded bar on a Friday night with Root, weighing 260, dragging a foot and slurring words, and Mosca is oblivious of the stares and remarks. Root is fairly certain Mosca doesn’t know any better. Mosca doesn’t understand why white people become uneasy when they see cripples or brain damage; their fear is irrational. They believe another person’s bad luck is contagious no matter how many times they are given scientific facts.

  THE HAPPY ONES

  MOSCA IS OBLIVIOUS of the bars all over Tucson where blacks, Mexicans, and Indians aren’t welcome. Mosca moves in so fast and gets so caught up in the sounds and faces that he never registers the hostile eyes. Quick, quick he is around the entire room, in and out of the men’s room, scanning the pool tables, poking quarters into the jukebox, and counting the whores and single women. Mosca could spend the night sipping at his beer and watching a man across the room, whispering to Root from time to time, as he tried to figure out whether the guy he was watching had gotten his face fixed by the feds for testifying in the federal witness protection program. Mosca knew all about cheap face-lifts and the “new” identities. Mosca knew a bookie in Phoenix who took bets on how long the protection of a federal witness would last once the feds had finished with the witness.

  At the intersection light, Mosca smiles broadly at Root and nods his head. His nose runs a little and Mosca wipes it on the back of his hand, takes a swallow of beer, and says, “I been shot twice. Once in the shoulder with a .38 and the other time a .22 in the stomach. But you know, I never passed out or anything like that. Because right away it doesn’t hurt. Later it hurts. But for me, I don’t know—it was like good dope right in the vein. I sort of could see myself, you know? Everything going on around me. I just lie back and watch. I saw everything even though both times the guys who were there said my eyes were closed and I looked like I was out. But I could tell them everything. That my aunt and her boyfriend came while the medics were working over me and they left to get my father. I could even tell them that one of the pigs that came right after it happened was a woman cop.

  “But you don’t remember anything about your accident.”

  “No,” Root says, and then Mosca starts repeating what Root has told him, which is the little that Root’s mother and the police report revealed. Mosca doesn’t care if they are zooming down Oracle Road with the graveyard and intersection far behind. He repeats Root’s story lovingly. Green Plymouth station wagon, a white woman driving, works for a real estate agency. This makes Root want to laugh, but the beer and the drugs make Mosca seem as distant as a face on a television screen. But Root likes to hear Mosca’s different versions of his accident. Somehow it feels less personal for Root then, and more like one of the old stories Calabazas is always telling about ghosts jumping into the back of a wagon.

  “Three-thirty P.M. A Thursday.”

  “Wednesday,” Root corrects him, although the day of the week hardly matters at all, but then it will seem more like conversation than Mosca and one of his litanies of disaster.

  “Oh, yeah, man, I always get it confused—”

  “With the time they shot you on Thursday.”

  “Yeah, right: got me on a Thursday afternoon. Cinco de Mayo party along the riverbank.”

  “That was the .38 in the shoulder—”

  “No, man—the fucking .22 in the gut. And I tell you something, that .22 was plenty bad. These guys all want to be carrying a bigger piece.” Mosca pats the front pocket of his white jeans. “Twenty-two magnums will kill you just as dead as .38 specials. Aim for the head.”

  Root nodded. It was the speed, the muzzle velocity, and the shock. “Yeah, like the speed of this pickup.” Root nods at the speedometer. Mosca glances down, then mugs a face full of mock surprise. The truck tires squeal around the corner of a side street. Mosca likes to use side streets to ditch the heat. Mosca likes to be able to pull over to the curb in the neighborhood and pour those toots of cocaine on the dashboard. Mosca is laughing now, and Root sees just how crazy this bastard is. But so happy. One of the happy ones, as Root’s own mother used to say, her eyes roaming the hospital halls, or the wards where microcephalic children rocked back and forth strapped in high chairs. Root’s mother thought their moans and grimaces were laughter and smiles. “Poor little things,” she’d say as she pushed Root in the wheelchair, “they are the happiest ones because they don’t know any better. They are happy like they are.” Root had not associated the retarded children with himself. There was no comparison. Then suddenly he realized his mother believed he was retarded by the brain damage. She had screamed at him before the accident; she didn’t want him with “that element.” She wanted to wash her hands of him when she saw the motorcycle. To her a motorcycle and friends with motorcycles meant Hell’s Angels.

  Root had sat up as straight as he could in the wheelchair. He had not made any sound, but his cheeks and the front of the hospital gown had been soaked by the time she had pushed him back to his room. She had made little clucking noises when she saw the tears, and Root had hated her so much at that instant it had been all he could do to keep from trying to smas
h her, smash her face with anything he could get his hands on—the bedpan, the dirty breakfast dishes and tray still lying on the table. Root identified the clucking noises with the sound he knew she would be making for her grandchildren, any day now, when his sister hatched the first grandkid. Root wanted to bash in her head because she had abandoned him, left him with the other “poor things.” She would always see him as one of them. She would always reassure herself that he was happy no matter how many times the doctors and therapists had assured her Root had not lost intelligence or cognitive power; what was gone was partial motor control affecting his balance and speech. The insurance company had paid. But the money had not gone to Root. His mother had arranged the trust while he was still in the coma. Eighteen or not, a man in a coma wasn’t a man. Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money. When he could finally ask her, she had brushed him off. It was all invested in real estate, she said, and he was never going to have to worry about a thing. He’d be taken care of. Root had seen how her eyes and attention drifted away from the covey of earnest young neurologists standing in front of her, out the hospital window to the roof of the other hospital wing where pigeons were quarreling in spiral swirls over the huge air-conditioning unit. Root’s mother did not seem to hear them when they told her the results of the latest testing they’d done. Her son might be missing a good portion of his brain, but that he still had an IQ only a few points below the genius level.

  “No, Mom, I’m not one of the happy ones. But Mosca is.” Root carries on imaginary conversations, inside his head. Mosca almost glows with excitement. He is pointing to a bus stop just beyond the dry-cleaning plant and a little way from a scrap-metal yard. Mosca turns to Root and only his hands have anything at all to do with driving, and even then, they flap on and fly off the wheel while Mosca babbles about witches. Mosca says he has just figured it all out. “What?” “How the accident happened.” Mosca knows how Root’s head got dented by that Plymouth fender. They are only ten or twelve blocks from Calabazas’s place, and Root is thinking this high-wheeled truck could literally run over the top of a sports car. How about a sports car full of secretaries? With Mosca’s luck they’d all be secretaries in downtown law firms specializing in accidents. And Mosca added there’d be no way to tell if any of them had got brain damage in the wreck. “You don’t damage what you don’t got in the first place!”

  Mosca sees that Root is with him, listening, so he turns his attention back to driving in time to whip the truck around a city bus stopped in the curb lane. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before,” Mosca says. “You see, it all adds up. Someone in your family could have arranged it. Or it might have to do with women or the bad things your great-grandfather did around here. You know, in the old days. You can never tell. Myself, I’d bet on someone in the family.” Mosca pauses. “I don’t know. I hate to say this, but from what I’ve seen”—Mosca looks over at Root to gauge his reaction so far—“I hate to say this but—your mother.”

  “My mother.” Root repeats the statement. No question mark. Not “My mother?” but “My mother.” Yeah. Root knows Mosca is right about his mother.

  Mosca finishes the beer and flings the can to the floor by Root’s feet. Mosca’s brain doesn’t need the extra spin that cocaine gives it; now the brain whirs faster than the poor asshole knows how to talk. “She was always pissed off at you, right? After your dad died. She was always on your back about your scooter, right? She always thought you were supposed to help out more.” Root nods; he knows beter than to argue with a drunk crazy man.

  Root can see the tops of the tall tamarisks in Calabazas’s yard looming down the block, and he wants to say, “Okay, okay, go on, go on,” but Root’s high is too serene and too comfortable for words. Root can only nod at Mosca, who is back on the sins of Root’s great-grandfather. Mosca was born and will die a Catholic, but he quotes the Bible like a fundamentalist. Mosca goes to the tent meetings on South Fourth Avenue. Mosca claims it can’t hurt to know what those cracker Baptist assholes are thinking.

  TUCSON WITCHES

  ROOT LETS HIMSELF slide farther down into the deep bucket seat of the big Chevy four-wheel-drive truck. All the border smugglers drive them. They are the equivalent of Lincolns or Cadillacs for pimps. Root prefers taxis. He likes Mosca’s theory of witchcraft as well as any he has heard for the accident. Middle afternoon, dry and clear, on a straight stretch of Oracle Road. The woman who hit him testifies she saw nothing. Suddenly his body was just there on the hood of her station wagon. Mosca claims witches have methods of making their victims invisible momentarily so that just this sort of accident takes place. Witches can make a two-hundred-pound man dressed in a bright yellow-and-red hunting vest appear to be a turkey gobbler with a powder-blue throat under a pine tree. An instant after a hunter pulls the trigger the body of his hunting companion falls where the turkey had been. Mosca is really hot now. He is interpreting the meaning of the spell of invisibility. Root knows he is right. That one meeting between Mosca and Root’s mother had been enough. She had not wanted Mosca to sit on the living room sofa or chairs. She was certain they both had motor oil on their clothes from riding motorcycles. But when Root carefully showed her both of them were wearing clean shirts and jeans, Root’s mother ignored him. She had been ahead of them already, telling them she had cookies and coffee in the kitchen and that they’d all be more comfortable in there. Mosca knew immediately it was his dark skin that had set off Root’s mother. He had heard all about this woman’s grandparents and the early days of Tucson. How many Indian slaves they had owned? Why they had refused to sell a young Yaqui girl to her own family after her father and the brothers had walked three hundred miles to bring her home!

  Mosca kept talking. “Yeah, your mother probably told the witch. She probably said something like, ‘I wish he would just disappear,’ or something like that, you know?” They had crossed the river and were driving down Silverbell Road; Root could feel his high level off. In a minute or two, the sensation of the ground crumbling under his feet would surge through his body, and Root would need more cocaine and more whiskey. “The witch made you disappear for a second or two, just long enough for blubber ass to turn in front of you. The witch could have been right there that day. Walking on the sidewalk by the cemetery, waiting for you to come riding along. That’s how they work. That’s how it happens.”

  Mosca has pulled the truck off the road under the tall tamarisk tree in the deep shade. He is talking while he is spooning out more cocaine. “It might look like just another old potbelly man walking his scabby dog. Or just another wino hobbling along on crutches. All it takes is a split second.” Root can’t dispute Mosca because he doesn’t remember. He can’t even remember the week before the accident. If he could only remember. Memory returns but in slow motion; the accident must have happened in slow motion, the way all his falls were in slow motion as he learned to walk again.

  Mosca is still rambling on about witches as he skids back on the road. Mosca pinches both nostrils and throws his head back violently. Root is riding his high the way he imagines desert hawks ride the updrafts over the arroyos and ravines. Root doesn’t want to spoil the feeling right now. He imagines the moment as an edge polished with fine emery cloth. In the truck, Root leans out the window and opens his mouth. He remembers as a kid he tried to drink the evening air because it smelled so good.

  “When was the first time you ever really saw a witch?” Root says as clearly as he can, but Mosca is lost in blasting the big pickup down the road, swerving around slower traffic, and Root has to repeat the question patiently, two more times. Mosca shoots a curious look at Root because it is the first time Root has brought up witches. Mosca smiles, shakes his head, relaxes the foot on the accelerator, and hands Root the sack with the peanut butter jar. Root rolls up his window and reaches for the tiny silver spoon.

  Mosca settles back in the seat, steering now with one hand. “I ended up in jail on account of a witch.”

  “What witch?”<
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  “The first witch I ever saw,” Mosca says. “You know I can see them. I can just take one look and I know.”

  “How?”

  Mosca shakes his head. His expression is serious. “I was driving down Miracle Mile. I was on my way to sentencing. My first time. I mean ‘first time’ as an adult. Anyway, I was driving and I was real nervous. I was going before the worst judge—Arne.”

  “Arne’s the federal judge,” Root interrupts, but Mosca only nods.

  “Now he is, but before that, he was a state judge. . . . I was driving down Miracle Mile and I had just made that big turn by that used-car lot across from the Motor Inn where all the whores like to stand, and I looked over at the bus stop and I saw him.”

  “A witch?”