The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read online

“Yeah, I saw this guy, and the instant I glanced at him, he looked right at me, right into my eyes. That’s how I knew. It’s all in the eyes. The lawyer had said whatever happens, don’t be late. But I couldn’t get over it, you know? I figure the witch probably sensed I have the ability to see things like him. Anyway, all the hair on my neck was chilled stiff, you know, and I could feel sweat just pouring off me. I had plenty of time. It was just twenty to ten by the bank clock, so I thought I would go around and take another pass by the bus stop. I was sort of scared but curious too. It was July and hot, but I could see this old man wore something black and long—I thought it was a long overcoat or raincoat. Then I realized he was wearing a long black skirt. The witch pointed at me and laughed.”

  “A long black skirt? Did you ever do acid, Mosca?”

  Mosca slows the truck dramatically so he can give Root the most intense gaze possible. “I was going before Arne to be sentenced! You think I’m crazy?”

  HOMELESS

  MOSCA VEERED SUDDENLY off Silverbell Road and turned onto a narrow tire track that snaked through the mesquite forest on the vacant lot behind the Safeway store. Beyond the forest was the big arroyo. The hobos and tramps rolled off Southern Pacific freight trains night and day during the cold months. Mosca was taking the sandy road so fast that mesquite branches had nearly torn off the big side-view mirrors of the truck. Mosca was high and talking a mile a minute and pointing out campsites and trees where he’d slept. He had been annoyed when Root made a joke about Mosca’s sleeping in a tree like a monkey and not under a tree. Mosca said all Root had to do was take a good look at the campsite under the big mesquite trees set back from Interstate 10. “Go ahead! Go ahead! Take a look!” Root couldn’t see what Mosca was pointing at. The cocaine had made Mosca impatient. “See the way they made a fort out of piled-up branches they tore off trees?” Root nodded. He could see what Mosca was talking about. It was the kind of fort he had built with the other kids in the summer down along the riverbanks. Make-believe forts where they pretended to live because they knew they could walk away anytime.

  The campsite Mosca had pointed out stood apart from the other lean-tos because of the similarity and orderliness of the tents and lean-tos. Root noticed a number of the tents displayed U.S. flags.

  “You want to talk about crazy,” Mosca began dramatically, “those war vets, those guys are really something! They call this their ‘firebase camp.’ ” Mosca was leaning against the hood of his truck fumbling to light up a joint. Root could only see a few men outside the shelters; one wore a green beret. Another wore a camouflage T-shirt and combat boots; otherwise to Root they looked like any other homeless men camped along the Santa Cruz River.

  “I been inside their firebase,” Mosca said, exhaling the marijuana smoke as he spoke. “They have bunkers, sandbags, everything just like the movies. One of them even calls himself Rambo.” Mosca kicked at empty plastic milk and bleach bottles scattered around an old campsite circle of soot-blackened river stones.

  Root had listened to Mosca before on the subject of homeless white men. Women and children were different, Mosca maintained, and the war veterans were different too. But the rest of the grimy white men who lived on the streets Mosca called “hobos” and “tramps”; they had no excuses except laziness and they liked to sleep under cardboard in a city park. Mosca knew they liked to sleep in the street because he himself had lived on the streets for a couple of years even when he could have gone to cousins or to other relatives anytime he wanted.

  Mosca said he used to get an incredible high off transient living. He claimed it was really a great high—street survival. “Almost as good as coke!” Root laughed out loud. He didn’t care if Mosca got upset. Mosca was crazy. Mosca was leaning against the hood of the truck, fumbling to light up a joint. He was still talking about living on the street. It was the “accomplishment,” Mosca said, the accomplishment of survival all on your own, without any help, that’s what made Mosca high.

  “Well, you don’t feel it right away,” Mosca says in response to Root’s laughter.

  Mosca stopped to spoon coke up both nostrils, then passed Root the vial. Mosca squatted by the truck, then rocked back on the heels of his cowboy boots, both eyes closed. The rush made Mosca smile. “Okay,” Mosca says dreamily. “What I mean is—you learn it’s not so bad. It’s not the end. You learn you can do it.”

  When they got back into the truck, Mosca purposely made a wide turn so they could pass close to the war veterans’ camp. Mosca was talking a mile a minute about the nut who called himself Rambo and the big black man who was his lieutenant. “You ever talk to any of those guys?” Mosca went on before Root could answer. “Those guys are scary. War taught those dudes all kinds of bad shit! I like to hear them talk. Demolitions, night attack—” They were speeding down Silverbell Road and Mosca was laughing. Mosca thought it would be really funny if they ever got hold of a little dynamite and a few rifles. Homeless war veterans attacking the country they had defended so many years before. Mosca thought it would be the funniest thing in the world.

  Mosca shook his head violently and waved both hands in front of him. Root was amazed the truck did not veer off the road. The white men on the street were genetically defective. Mosca was certain of it. Take mass murderers for example. They were always white men with educations and good jobs, even families. Symptoms of trouble never came in time to stop the slaughter. There was a lot of evidence these days, Mosca said, that the mass murder of family members might be a scientifically desirable outcome in the certain cases where the entire family was hopelessly defective. The healthiest family member killed all the others. Look at the survivors of the death camps in Germany. They had carried death with them like an incurable fever. All Germans had been infected by the Nazis—even the poor Jews. Mosca blamed all the violence in the Middle East on Israel. Each time a Palestinian child was shot by Israeli soldiers, Hitler smiled.

  Root shook his head. “I never get over what a fucking racist you are, Mosca.” Mosca does a “Who me?” routine, but goes right back to his theory. According to Mosca’s theory, the battered and murdered children are the offspring of defective parents who instinctively kill their own offspring because none in their line is genetically fit to continue.

  Root had watched Mosca a thousand times: Root watched as the rage gathered, and then Mosca erupted in a fury of words—his rage and indignation blazing like automatic rifle fire. Mosca’s foot would crunch the accelerator and his hands would twist the steering wheel savagely, and the big Chevy Blazer would go skidding around corners, fishtailing into the straightaways. It had been during these berserk rages that Root had seen how he and Mosca the Fly would die. Not in a rain of bullets from the DEA or local narcs; not even shot in the back by one of Calabazas’s nephews. They would die maybe even this next minute because Mosca had noticed cars and pickups carrying the middle-aged couples, mostly white people but with a scattering of Hispanics and blacks. They were the low-level civil servants and clerks: the meter readers and delivery-truck drivers who had risen to managerial level by obeying the rules, written and unwritten. Mosca became outraged by the suck-ass expressions on their faces. They were the puritans who believed they were the chosen, the saved, because they were so clean, because they were always so careful to obey every rule and every law. Every yellow and red light was one of their lights, and Mosca plowed through full speed, scattering vehicles at intersections, while he raved and ranted about the churches, rotted with hypocrisy.

  Root had learned the only way to stop Mosca’s outrage over the faces in the cars on the street was to get Mosca’s attention on something that delighted or amused him. Root pretended to be indifferent to the screeching of brakes. Root knew Mosca did not want any response from him. All that mattered to Mosca was getting it off his chest. A reply from Root or anyone might interrupt the flow of outrage. Mosca used to laugh and agree with Root that he did have enough hate and homicide in his heart to last all of them a long long time.

&nbs
p; The dumb faces were so full of self-righteousness after church that Mosca wanted to slit their throats. What good would that do? If they had been to Holy Communion, Mosca would be sending them straight to heaven, Root pointed out. But Mosca was pounding his fists on the steering wheel and shaking his head violently from side to side. “Look at their faces!” Mosca had shouted as the big Blazer veered head-on at the car Mosca was pointing at. Root had looked and seen puffy white faces, middle-aged female and male, frozen in stupefied horror. Mosca had whipped the truck back across the center line at the last possible moment.

  After Mosca left, Root opened a beer and sat for a long time in the dark thinking about the system and how it worked. Calabazas liked to talk about Root’s great-grandfather and the other white men in Tucson. “You can read about it if you don’t believe me. What they did. The whites came into these territories. Arizona. New Mexico. They came in, and where the Spanish-speaking people had courts and elected officials, the americanos came in and set up their own courts—all in English. They went around looking at all the best land and where the good water was. Then they filed quiet title suits. Only a few people bothered to find out what the papers in English were talking about. After all, the people had land grants and deeds from the king of Spain. The people believed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo protected their rights. They couldn’t conceive of any way they could lose land their people had always held. They couldn’t believe it. Some of them never did. Even after it was all over, and all the land and water were lost.”

  Root was still sitting in the dark when Lecha came in. “I hired a nurse,” Lecha said. The taxi was waiting in the driveway.

  Root reached over the grimy sofa arm and switched on the lamp. “Who?”

  “That blonde. The one that lost her kid. I hired her. Secretary. Nurse.” Lecha sat down on the sofa close to him and started rubbing up against him like a cat. Her eyes were glittering as if she was high on something. Whatever it was, it had aroused her. Still, she was quick to sense his mood. Lecha had not forgotten the months after the accident, and even after Root could again talk and walk. She had come into town and found him sitting in the same ratty armchair or lying on the same sofa where she had last seen him two weeks before.

  “So what’s this about? Business?” Lecha wasn’t going to let him forget that he’d told her she couldn’t stay there because of “business.”

  “I was just thinking,” Root said.

  Lecha raised her eyebrows the way Root often did, when he asked a question. “About how old you are getting. And how fat I’m getting,” Root joked.

  “Wrong,” Lecha said. “You were thinking about your great-grandfather and all the money he made off the Apache Wars. You were wondering if the sins of the great-grandfather bash in the head of the great-grandson.”

  Root looked closely at Lecha. “What are you on? I could use some.”

  Lecha laughed and laughed. “Nothing!” she said in a light, young-girl’s tone, lying and hoping he’d let her get away with it. Lecha gave him a big kiss and then threw open the door of the trailer. She called out to the taxi driver that she’d be right there.

  Root helped her wrestle the folded-up wheelchair down the trailer steps. The taxi driver couldn’t fit it in the trunk, which was already jammed full with Lecha’s suitcases and other luggage. Root knew Lecha was nervous about seeing Zeta, or maybe it was seeing her son, Ferro. Lecha had waited until she was high enough and had someone to go with her before she’d return to the ranch in the mountains. Lecha leaned out the window of the taxi. “Thanks, sweetie! Take care of that business now!” Root stood in the doorway of the trailer looking down at her. He nodded his head slowly.

  IMAGINARY LINES

  AS THE TAXI LEFT HIM at the end of the driveway, Root thought he could see a darker form against the black silhouette of the big tamarisk tree in Calabazas’s yard. Root could hear kitchen sounds and a radio playing rock and roll from the front of the L-shaped adobe, and more distantly another radio playing norteño—accordions, trumpets, and guitars that made a peculiar combination of Mexican Indian music and German polka. Root had never paid much attention to classes or teachers when he was in school, but he had never forgotten the color plate of Maximilian and Charlotte in their gold and jewel-crusted regalia as emperor and empress of Mexico. Blond and blue-eyed, they had been surrounded by legions of short, dark soldiers and honor guards. Maximilian collects insects. He has more and more sexual liaisons with servant girls; Charlotte becomes obsessed with ridding the castle of spiders and vermin. Maximilian sleeps on a billiard table.

  Root could see the red ash on Calabazas’s cigarette. Calabazas had dragged two five-gallon buckets under the tree for them to sit on. When Root got close, Calabazas had shoved a bucket to him. Maximilian and Charlotte had got as far as any Germans were going to get with Mexican Indians. Charlotte went crazy; she kept trying to get maids and servants to kill the flies and spiders crawling and flying through the royal apartments. The chastised German ladies-in-waiting had complained to Maximilian. The Indians and mestizos refused to kill insects in the palace or the garden because spirits would be offended. When Maximilian began to execute palace chambermaids for spiders and flies found in the royal bedchamber, the days of their reign had been numbered.

  Calabazas gazed toward the northwest at the quarter moon descending. They sat and smoked in silence. Finally Calabazas cleared his throat, then spit between his boots. “You two, where were you?”

  “Racetrack. Getting high.”

  “You saw—”

  “Horses.”

  “And Mosca?”

  “He moves pretty fast.”

  Calabazas nods and drops the burning butt between his legs, then grinds it flat with a bootheel. Root sees that Calabazas is drawing himself into his oratory posture. Calabazas calls it “Indian style” when he talks and talks before he turns at the last moment, to the point he wants Root to get. For a long time it drove Root crazy, and he wanted to yell at the old man to just tell him what it was, what was bothering him or what had gone wrong. But over the years Root had learned that there were certain messages in the route Calabazas took when he talked.

  Calabazas lit up another cigarette and took a long drag before he started. He blew big smoke rings that tumbled toward Root’s face before they broke. “I was born here. My great-grandmother was born here. Her grandmother was from the mountains in Sonora. Later the other Yaquis used to hide up there from the soldiers. I have to laugh at all the talk about Hitler. Hitler got all he knew from the Spanish and Portuguese invaders. De Guzman was the first to make lamp shades out of human skin. They just weren’t electric lamps, that’s all. De Guzman enjoyed sitting Indian women down on sharp-pointed sticks, then piling leather sacks of silver on their laps until the sticks poked right up their guts. In no time the Europeans wiped out millions of Indians. In 1902, the federals are lining Yaqui women, their little children, on the edge of an arroyo. The soldiers fire randomly. Laugh when a child topples backwards. Shooting for laughs until they are all dead. Walk through those dry mountains. Right now. Today. I have seen it. Where the arroyo curves sharp. Caught, washed up against big boulders with broken branches and weeds. Human bones piled high. Skulls piled and stacked like melons.

  “Did the Jews know? Did the Americans know? So many Yaquis had fled north to settle here in Tuscon. But did anyone care when these reports were told?” Calabazas stands up, takes a last drag on the cigarette, then tosses the butt, ash glowing, into the center of the yard. He leaves Root sitting then returns carrying a small red ice chest. He offers Root a beer and opens one for himself. When Calabazas gets like this, he will talk all night. Root wonders if he can last. Somehow this day has wrapped up about five days in itself.

  Root decides he will watch the tail of Scorpio. When the fourth star of the stinger drops below the horizon, he will tell Calabazas he needs to sleep. Calabazas doesn’t start talking again until he’s downed half of the first can.

  “We don’t believe
in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that. And we carry a great many things back and forth. We don’t see any border. We have been here and this has continued thousands of years. We don’t stop. No one stops us. You have a working name. That’s nothing new. I made up my name. Calabazas, ‘Pumpkins.’ That’s what you did. Invent yourself a name. See, my brothers and cousins at San Rafael grew them. Big beauties. A big river down there. Plenty of water for the pumpkins. I’d load up with altar candles in little red glasses. My wife and my sisters-in-law would spend a week making big wreaths of paper flowers. Liria, my wife’s youngest sister, could make colored paper talk. Could make it sing. She had a crush on me. She made big orange squash and pumpkin blossoms—they looked so real that other people stared at me and my brothers when we spread them over our parents’ graves—how they admired the flowers Liria made!

  “So there I’d be at the border crossing, the back of my old green Ford pickup loaded with candles and flowers and usually a goat or fat sheep for the feast. The guards on the Mexican side don’t care, hundreds of Yaquis crossed for the feast of All Souls. I never had any trouble. One time a goat tied in back got loose and ate all the paper-flower wreaths, but I’ve always had good luck. Right at sundown we’d cover the graves with flower wreaths and candles in the red glasses blinking. My sister-in-law and nieces would set out a bowl of goat stew at the head of each grave. We’d sit up at the graveyard drinking all night, listening to Uncle Casimiro’s claims that he’d talked to the souls, and they say they don’t know any more now than they did when they were alive.

  “I don’t know. We live in a different world now. Liars and feebleminded are everywhere, getting elected to public office or appointed federal judge. Spoken words can no longer be trusted. Put everything in writing.