Hot Sur (50 page)

Neo-noir comics, originally inspired by Frank Miller’s
Sin City
, and frequently printed in black and white, is a bristling and electrifying genre, as if on amphetamines, generally misogynous and eschatological and centered on sadistic, disgusting, maniacal crimes, with decadent and vicious detectives.

It’s not my genre, of course: my suicide poet and his girl are little sisters of the blind compared with the freaks that appear in noir. I told Ming more or less what I already knew of Sleepy Joe, his habits of burning and destroying on a massive scale, the dice on the eyes of a dead ex, the ritual with a broomstick involving Corina, the ritual with a knife involving his dead brother, the bone-chilling event with the dog.

“He doesn’t sound like a big-time murderer,” Ming told me, “more or less a small-time killer, timid, unsure. At least for now, although maybe he may yet do more terrible things.

“His ceremonial executions are crude, but whatever they lack in finesse, they make up for in conviction,” Ming continued. “For now, he threatens and assaults but does not kill, or he kills animals but not humans. Although things may escalate depending on what is propelling him. There must be a touch of necrophilia. It’s possible that he nailed the corpse of the dog to the wall after it was dead.”

“Which means he tortures cadavers?” I asked.

“I don’t think he sees it as torture, more like purification or glorification. Perhaps he makes his peace with the dead through the ritual. It could be how he asks forgiveness, as in how he sliced the corpse of his brother with a knife, a brother with whom he identified. Greg, the older brother, his idol, possibly the only person who cared for him and worried about him. Sleepy Joe must have adored him.”

“Yeah, he adored him, but snatched his wife. Some love.”

“There you go. He adored him up to a point. Look closely at the details: it was a pure instance of substitution; when he took the wife, he put himself in the shoes of his brother, he became the brother, and made María Paz the ardent object of his desires. When María Paz didn’t want anything else to do with him, she stripped him of very fundamental things, castrated him when she rejected him sexually, negated the identification with the brother, and to top it off he believed she took his money. He must have felt as if he had been skinned alive, anyone would have felt as such. He beat her but did not kill her because that would be the end of his desideratum, and he’s no idiot. But he beat her almost to death, and began to destroy the beings she loves. She is left with nothing and no one. You understand. That’s the message he is sending her: ‘The only person you have in this world is me.’ You have not told me that she is with you now, but I imagine she might be. If so, be very careful. You are getting directly in the path of Sleepy Joe, a complicated individual.”

“Can you sketch me an outline of his modus operandi?” I asked.

“Fuck, Jack the Ripper had a modus operandi; this bastard barely knows where he is heading,” Ming said.

At that point, I told him about the Eagles case and that I thought Sleepy Joe was the culprit.

“It has his trademark, a ritual over a cadaver,” Ming responded as he fed mosquito larvae to the iridescent and bluish Wan-Sow, the best of his bettas. Ming meant that unexpected forces were pushing Sleepy Joe to more dangerous levels. “If Sleepy Joe is Eagles’s murderer, it would mean that the guy is getting close, Cleve.”

If he is the murderer, he is among us. Although it is highly unlikely that he’ll remain wandering around there, given that since the night of the murder the area is crawling with patrol cars. The cops come by our house at least twice a week, calling out at every door to make sure everything is okay. This has become for us a protective barrier against Sleepy Joe, and at the same time the greatest threat, because if they discover María Paz, she is history. That is, those who can do us in are also our protectors; damned spot we’re in, so dual and complex. As the Coen brothers scripted for George Clooney in
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
“Damn! We’re in a tight spot.”

For now, I have María Paz by my side in this attic refuge, and she is my only reality. She peruses my books while eating cheese, leaving them all greasy. For long periods, she does nothing, she wastes all the hot water while showering, she brushes Skunko and paints her toenails. Afterward, she lies on my bed and watches some reality shows that I think are horrible but that she won’t miss and then recounts them to me episode by episode in complete detail. First thing in the morning, she does aerobics following the instructions of a woman called Vera in a program called
In Shape with Vera
. She has a double portion of ice cream for breakfast, later she puts on my clothes, that is if she doesn’t remain in her pajamas all day, and entertains herself rummaging through my drawers and disorganizing my things. She sits by the side of the window hidden behind the curtain to spy on the deer that ravage our garden and the moose that turn over our garbage cans looking for food. She appears serene, light—I would say radiant, in any case—very beautiful. I am madly in love with her.

But I live in a state of alertness with my hairs standing on end. I spend many hours psychoanalyzing the brother-in-law, dissecting his personality. For obvious reasons, I have been interested more in his story than the story of the murdered brother. Arms trafficking seems like a very ordinary subject matter, one more chapter in the kind of corruption that is eternal. And besides, I hate cops, and any atrocities that they are accused of committing are possible and likely probable. In contrast, I have reached some interesting conclusions about Sleepy Joe. As a child, he must have always been scared to death. In general, those types of bullies have been bullied themselves, they become abusers because they have been abused, anybody who reads comic books knows that. I imagine that in his case, old childhood fears must have reemerged in adulthood, creating a sick and distorted ritualization. María Paz recounted that when Sleepy Joe was a boy, the mother forced him to recite a prayer called “A Thousand Jesuses” that was a repetition of the name a thousand times. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Of course, maybe this wasn’t the best tactic, a thousand Jesuses is an exaggerated number of Jesuses; you can go a little nuts during the few hours on your knees repeating Jesus in Slovak.

She has also told me that in the bedroom of Greg, Sleepy Joe, and the rest of the siblings, there hung a large portrait of the baby Jesus nailed to a white cross. Not the adult Jesus but the baby Jesus. Crucified. Such a thing, a child as a
crucificado
.

I would not have been able to open my eyes with that portrait in the room, that would have been the least of it, but I would not have become a master criminal because of it. Who knows what else could have happened to him, from what root the tendency toward evil had sprouted.

There must have been other things, because in the end being the son of a mother who says the rosary every day does not automatically lead you to nail a dog to a wall. It was too obvious to look automatically for Christian roots to any perversions, but perhaps the drama has less to do with Christianity than with the Carpathians, their region of origin, mountain ranges that I imagine gloomy and menacing, boulders cut by picks and vertigo-inducing cliffs, with frozen landscapes and a national history crisscrossed with everyday butcheries and cruelties. The whole Slovakia thing may be nothing, I couldn’t even pick out its exact location on a map, but that’s how I imagine it during my nights of insomnia. Then I remembered about the lands of Vlad Tepes, Dracula, the insatiable impaler who liked to eat his dinner among the dozens of Turks whom he had ordered to be strung from behind. And don’t some of Sleepy Joe’s actions seem Dracula-like: Corina and the broomstick?

Isn’t it easy to make connections?

But those are just the speculations of the sleepless, too many horror movies. The only thing that’s clear is that the more I know, the more I am disgusted with Sleepy Joe.

I am the type of person who cannot stand the suffering of animals. I must admit that sometimes I feel like Brigitte Bardot with her maniacal and exclusive obsession with the well-being of seals. I do not compromise with anyone who engages in the abuse of animals in any form, and that’s why I’m a vegetarian. But to nail a dog to a wall, you have to be a sadistic motherfucker to do something like that. And that would be enough to earn my hate, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If there’s something I can’t stand in this world it’s a man who mistreats a woman. Zero tolerance, much less if it’s the woman I love. Yet there is another side of him that caught my attention, a corner of his character, one only, that inspires a degree of envy, his knack for the ritualistic, which seems authentic. He is a nobody, illiterate and vicious, but he retains the sense of the sacred. Or least he is one inspired son of a bitch. A taut string of conviction vibrates in that bastard, and I dashed to write that phrase down before I forgot it. Writing graphic novels for so long, I have developed the habit of thinking in vignettes, which I translate into catchy expressions that fit in dialogue balloons.

Some force is pushing Sleepy Joe beyond himself. Something lifts him from his current surroundings. At nights, in the safety of my bed, I intuit what an angry María Paz had to experience on her own on the roof, tied up and terrified, naked and trembling from the cold as she watched her brother-in-law officiate that ceremony. She knows exactly what all this is about, and after so many days of silence on the matter, early this morning she uttered a phrase whose meaning I haven’t quite fully deciphered. I don’t know if it was said in defense of her brother-in-law or against me: she warned me not to underestimate Sleepy Joe.

“You may hate him, yes, despise him even, whatever you want, but never underestimate him.”

“Alright,” I said, somewhat annoyed, “I’ll be careful; I don’t like the idea of being nailed to a wall.” Not to mention a broomstick up my ass.

Two days ago I told María Paz that today we would have to separate for a few days, just a few, because my mom and Ned’s anniversary was coming up, and I had promised both of them that I would go to the celebration in Chicago. I hate the idea of leaving María Paz alone here, knowing that Sleepy Joe is near, but it is much more risky to try and take her out given the police presence. I can’t miss this fucking anniversary, my mother would kill me, she’s already very touchy since I decided to live with my father, and missing her party would be the last straw. Besides, María Paz is fine on her own. She is in a house owned by white people who are more or less rich, or at least upper middle-class, and, as such, free from suspicion. The state troopers are well aware that they are here to protect us and not make things harder, and they will not have any awareness of her presence unless she makes it known by peeking her nose out of the hiding place. I have warned her a thousand times that she cannot do it, not under any circumstances. She cannot be tempted to look out the window at the garden, as she does when I am there, or go down the stairs, or go to the front door, under mortal risk.

“Look me in the eyes, María Paz, promise me you are not going to do anything crazy while I’m gone,” I said, and tried to soothe her anxiety. “It will only be forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours of common sense on your part, that’s all I’m asking. Before you know it, I’ll ride back up to the house on my bike. Think of it like this: I will only be gone this afternoon, tomorrow, and the following morning, just the ride there, the party, and the ride back. Don’t pull any stunts during that time or engage in risky action, just do that for me. Do you understand?”

“What if something happens to you?” she asked, widening her big black eyes so that I wanted to jump into her, plunge into the deep dark water of those eyes, forget about Edith and Ned, to hell with their anniversary, there will be others, but I can’t, just can’t.

Edith would kill me, and if you ask me whom I fear more, Edith or Sleepy Joe, I’d have to say Edith by a few heads.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“Motorcycles are very dangerous . . .”

“Now you sound like my father.”

I’m going to leave her plenty of food and a ream of paper, in case she is inspired to write something new. As a temporary farewell, yesterday we made love and took a shower together, me struggling to hold her under the warm stream as she slid down my arms, wet and slippery as an otter, and I brought up her dream again, although she didn’t seem to want to talk about it this time.

“So AIX?” I asked her.

“What?”

“AIX. That’s what you said the creature in your dreams was named, the one that comes out of the cloth vagina. That was it, right, AIX?” And I wrote the letters in the foggy glass of the shower door.

“And what if your father comes up, Mr. Rose?” In spite of all the intimate acts we had shared, to her I continued to be Mr. Rose, her creative-writing teacher; she never called me Cleve.

“My father is going to be in the city. Besides, you know he never comes up here. Why? Will you get bored?”

“How can I get bored, when I am in heaven?”

Her response could not have been more lovely or full of joy. But it concerned me somewhat.

Even though María Paz may not think of it in these terms, she is as locked up and deprived of liberty here as she was in Manninpox.

“Why don’t you start writing your memories over again,” I suggested. “I’ll leave you my laptop, you know how to use it now, or there is paper if you prefer longhand.”

“Ugh, no, Mr. Rose, write everything down from the beginning again, way too long. That’s lost, and it should stay lost. Oh, one little thing before you go,” she said, handing me a small wooden box that she took out of her bag. The box contained Hero’s ashes and the medal of valor given to him in Alaska.

María Paz wanted me to bury the box and keep the medal, but the medal was attached to a blue ribbon that was all stuck to the ashes, so I suggested that we just bury the box with everything inside.

She agreed, and asked that it be buried in a clearing in the woods that was visible from the window. Today, before I leave for Chicago, I will do it in a big way. I am going to give Hero the funeral rites of a hero, a war hero, with Wagner and everything. I’ll burn his name into a small wooden placard and mark the spot of the burial with a makeshift wooden cross. Although on second thought, no name. It would be stupid to do that and then already be well on the road when the police make their daily rounds and investigate. Or what about if my father saw it and was curious about this Hero. What hero? He’d wonder. I will just bury the box, make a quick cross with two pieces of wood, and that’s it—no Wagner or any such other stuff. I’m doing terrible on time. I promised my mother I would not ride the bike at night, and I’m already cutting it close.