Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (7 page)

The woman, whose name is Jill, is also excited. Demetrio’s flight from Bogotá will be landing in less than an hour. Cancun airport is just an hour’s drive north by armor-plated Mercedes.

We Don’ Need No Stinkin’ Baggezz

Univision Studios.

Mexico City.

Hola
.

I wink at the studio audience. Then come to rest on the chair next to Raymondo. He slips a lit menthol cigarette between my lips. Leans back and crosses his legs.

It’s great to be on your show, Raymondo. Thanks for having me.

A cup of coffee would be great. Black. Two sugars.

My earliest memory?

The click, click of the loom, as our mother, Margarita, worked through the long, cold winter of our gestation. Day after day sitting on the hard-packed earth, her hands moved back and forth, in and out, weaving wool blankets one homespun line at a time. Beautiful blankets, the gray of a rain-heavy sky. Geometric lines of red and yellow at either end, in the Toltec manner.

Our father, Juan, carried them seven kilometers into Valle de Bravo and sold them on the street.

What was it like in there?

Crowded. With five of us floating around in that salty inland sea that grew as we grew. Five identical males. Needless to say, there was a certain amount of jockeying for position. An elbow here, a kick there. I took the high ground at the top of my mother’s womb. Strangely, during those months I came to see the world first through her eyes.

What did my father do for a living?

Whatever he could find.

Which wasn’t much. It was a hard nine months. The eggs laid by our few feckless chickens froze in the bitter nights and turned black. Unusual rains rotted the corn harvest. One day my father appeared in the doorway.

“What is it?” asked Margarita.

“Another goat is dead.”

My mother rose from her loom and we went outside. The goat lay like a ruptured and treadless tire in the dusty yard. A line of blood oozed from one nostril. A six-inch white worm wriggled from its anus.

“How will we ever have enough milk when the baby comes?” moaned Margarita.

“Something will turn up,” said Juan. “I’m going into town to look for work.”

“God go with you.”

He spat into the earth.

Of course, he found none.

He came home one morning just in time to see the last of us burp from between Margarita’s loins. That was a sight: five bloody, howling grubs writhing on the floor, kicking our feet, our tiny penises like wasp stingers.

The next morning my mother found Juan hanging from the thorn tree at the edge of the yard. His tongue as black as a crow.

Raymondo’s buxom assistant sits next to me and begins spooning sweet black coffee between my lips. The cigarette butt falls to the floor, where it burns a hole in the mint green industrial carpet before going out.

No, Raymondo, that wasn’t the end of tragedy for us. You could say it was only the beginning.

How did we survive?

In the beginning, barely. Margarita set fire to her loom and our house of sticks, intending to throw herself and us on the pyre. But her nerve failed.

Somehow we trekked into Valle de Bravo where we joined a traveling carnival. We were an oddity. A freak show. Identical male quintuplets. We were right up there with the bearded lady, the sheep with two heads and the gargoyle man.

Four years later, in desperation Margarita fell in love with a drifter named Leon, who helped set up and dismantle the tents and rides. A sly opportunist, he told her they couldn’t run off to Acapulco without money.

Then he told her about Don Silvester, a two-bit
jefe mafioso
. Childless and haunted by his desire for immortality.

She dressed us up in our Sunday best and took us to meet him.

“These are my five boys,” she said. “They’re fearless. And very loyal. They’ll do whatever you ask them to do. They’ll even kill for you.”

Don Silvester fell in love with us. And we with him. We were to be his children that he couldn’t otherwise have.

He paid Margarita a thousand
pesos
apiece.

She kissed each of us on the forehead and tweaked our little dicks. That was the last time we saw her. Unless you count the black-and-white photo of her in
La Independencia
a week later. Lying in a nameless
cul-de-sac
with her throat cut.

Our first hit?

I assume this is off the record, Raymondo. Ha, ha.

When the five of us turned eighteen, Don Silvester threw a huge party at his
hacienda
. He invited all his friends and most of his enemies. It was the wedding in
The Godfather
, only for real. Wine from Don Silvester’s own vineyards in the Baja. Costa Rican
anejo
rum. Barbecued
cabrito
. Sexy girls and strolling
mariachis
.

Don Silvester introduced us to the crowd. Quinto, the youngest, Ernesto, Jorge, Justinian and me, Pepe. Almost everyone there had watched us grow up, but they hooted and applauded as though we were movie stars.

Then Don Silvester took me by the shoulder and we wandered amid the revelers. Through an opening in the throng, with a flick of an eye, he marked a man of medium height, in a medium-gray suit, white shirt and unmemorable tie with a medium knot.

“Javier intends to kill me,” he said.

At dusk the celebrants disbanded. An ambitious whore enticed Javier to a lonely lane at the edge of the
hacienda
grounds. We leaped upon him, each thrusting a knife into his mortal flesh before he could cry out or draw his revolver. He lay bleeding to death in the dusty byway. I thought of the dead goat lying in our yard that other time just before we were born.

That was the first.

Thank you, Raymondo. I just tried to recapture the moment.

How many?

Between the five of us, I’d say three hundred fifty,
mas o menos
.

Remorse?

For what!?

They were all enemies of our stepfather. Every one of them wished him harm. To snuff out his life, steal his wealth, cut off his manhood and cram it down his throat, bask in the adoration of the common man.

Payback? Yes. I guess in the end that’s what it was.

My lips are dry. Raymondo’s assistant holds a glass of water to them. I take several sips, counting the moles on her largely exposed breasts.

What happened was this:

After kidnapping us from the beach in Acapulco where we were frolicking in the waves with our girlfriends, a rival crime cartel held us prisoner for three days. They kept us in a windowless latrine. We stank to Hell and back.

When Don Silvester refused to negotiate, they did it quickly. I don’t blame him for that. If you negotiate with scum, you’re finished.

Inside the bag I could still hear everything. But I couldn’t see. The ride from Acapulco to
Ciudad de Mexico
was long and stifling.

The kidnappers burst into the private top-floor lounge of Don Silvester’s nightclub in the
Zona Rosa
.

“You’ve no right to enter here,” Don Silvester’s voice boomed with menace. “If you’re police, show me your badges.”

To which the killers replied:

“We don’ need no stinkin’ baggezz.”

Then they threw open the two burlap sacks. And out rolled our five severed heads. My four dead brothers and me.

Very funny, Raymondo. But there’s no voodoo involved.

I wink at the studio audience.

I’m here today because of a miracle of modern science.

Truly I’ve enjoyed being on your show, Raymondo. I hope you’ll have me back, God willing.

Adios
.

The audience breaks into a fierce round of applause. The studio band slides into Raymondo’s theme song. Two lab-coated attendants set my head back on the life-support machine and push me behind the curtain.

Ideas of Murder in Southern Vermont

May 20th is a good day to begin cutting the grass.

—
Old Farmers Almanac

May 20. Ray, decked out in a faded Batman T-shirt, stands in comic book chiaroscuro, half in and half out of the dusky tool shed. The air is redolent with wood rot and grass cuttings. A robin struts across the greensward, a bushwhacked earthworm dangling like a miniature intestine from its beak. The sky is as blue as the eyes of a madman.

From the corner of his eye, Ray catches movement in the kitchen window twenty-odd yards away. A hand pulling aside the lace curtain. Baby blues peering forth. It’s Gillian.

Too late to fade into his lair, Ray stiffens. The screen door swings wide and Gillian emerges onto the back porch. An apron disguises the skimpy details of her sundress, ordered from the Victoria’s Secret catalog. Her reddish hair hangs in curlicues to her bare shoulders. A tropical fruit color taints her lips.
Harlot
, thinks Ray.

“Your lunch is on the table,” she calls.

He waves at her, pretending he can’t hear, his ears sealed with wax. His lips twist in the rictus of a smile. She smiles back at him. Fake as false teeth.

“I’ve got to go to the supermarket and the hairdresser’s,” she announces.

When Ray doesn’t respond, she turns back into the house. Behind her receding derriere, the screen door smacks shut.

Stepping into the dim interior of the shed, Ray reaches down and gropes for the fifth of Old Crow hidden behind the gas can. Gasoline fumes slither up his nose like a flesh-eating amoeba, bringing a wave of nausea. He takes a long pull from the bottle. He knows that Gillian knows what he’s up to.

After a second drink, Ray hoists up the waist of his belt-less khakis, reties the leather thongs of his deck shoes and strides across the lawn to the abandoned mower. It sits on the embankment above the drainage ditch that fronts the road. As he bends over to grip the starter rope, the screen door slams again. He turns his head to look. Everything is upside down.

Gillian descends the steps from the porch and walks to the Camry, parked at an angle parallel to where Ray crouches, futzing with the mower. Without the apron, the décolletage of the sundress is revealed in all its wantonness. The hem comes barely halfway to her knees. As she lowers herself into the driver’s seat, the bleached-flour whiteness of her thighs momentarily flashes into view.

His groin tightening with desire, Ray looks away. He knows she’s meeting someone in town.

In his mind he sees a dingy room, a shadow-cloaked divan. On it, caught in the glow of a cigarette tip, an unknown pair of lips nibble the crook of her neck, while a predatory hand plays with virtuosic aplomb up the keyboard of her thighs.

It’s not clear to Ray how he and Gillian end up in the drainage ditch. She’s beneath him. His knees dig inexorably into her bare arms, crushing them into the water and muck at the bottom of the ditch. Her head splashes from side to side trying to escape the pressure of his hands over her mouth and nose. Fear has turned her eyes into iridescent saucers. Mud and deep-green plants stain the paleness of her skin and the jaunty yellow design of the sundress.

Ray shifts his position, abruptly easing the pressure on Gillian’s 112 pounds. She starts to sit up. But it’s a trick from his high school wrestling team days. In the next instant he flips her over onto her stomach. His hands press downward again, mashing her face into two inches of runoff. She makes gurgling sounds, her body heaving and quivering. After a while she becomes as still as stagnant water. A sprig of watercress is entwined in her scum-streaked hair.

Ray’s hands absorb the vibration of the mower, as it trundles moronically across the lawn. He squeezes his eyes shut to relieve the sting of oozing sweat. Opening them, he squints at the sun.
2 p.m.
When he glances down, he makes the disturbing discovery that his pants and shoes are neither wet nor mud-stained. Instead, he finds himself thinking that Gillian should be getting home soon. He kills the mower and walks over to the tool shed for some additional distilled refreshment.

Ray’s Ford F-150 is parked in front of the Paul Revere statue at the lower end of the Southbury commons. The red brick buildings of the college clutter the hillside. A summer school student in a lime green see-through camisole meanders by. Ray smokes a cigarette and watches her with psychosexual interest. He has no recollection of how he or the truck got into town.

Twombley’s Tap Room is located in the Millard Fillmore Hotel—parking in rear. Ray turns down the alley. Behind and below the Fillmore East, as it’s called by a few diehard hippies, is an open parking area covered in crushed stone. Wooden stairs of dubious pedigree wobble up to the ground floor of the hotel.

Ray sees the Camry in the third slot from the end. He wants to pretend it belongs to someone else. There’s an open space right next to it, so he pulls in.

Rex, the afternoon bartender at the Tap Room, nods. Ray nods back, walks to the bar and shakes loose a cigarette. Rex lights it. This is not a pickup move. Anything between them happened when they were on the wrestling team together back in high school. As Rex pours a jigger of Old Crow, his eyes travel in an arc toward the back of the room. Ray squints in that direction. He’s forgotten to put in his contacts.

But there’s no mistaking Gillian’s cascading tresses and shapely arms. A guy flaunting a straw Stetson sits on the reverse side of the same booth. Ray edges his drink down the bar until he can make out the cowboy’s walrus mustache. When the cowpoke gets up to go to the john, he appears tall and lanky and dangerous.

Ray waits until the ranch hand disappears through the swing door to the
pissoir
. Then crosses from the end of the bar to Gillian’s booth in a single bound. A Colt pistol with a pearl handle appears from somewhere. At the distance of twelve inches, it’s hard to miss, especially when you pull the trigger five times. Blood spatters everywhere.

Dropping the gun, Ray turns and walks out of the bar. Rex nods again as he passes. No one moves to stop Ray’s exit.