Las Vegas Noir (24 page)

He finally found his way out, and merged with relief into Tropicana’s fast traffic. A few minutes later he arrived at ¡Viva!, where the noise and bustle swallowed him up. He followed the ACA signs up the wide staircase to the mezzanine and registered for the conference. A harried fellow graduate student gave him a canvas bag containing a name tag, a pen, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a horseshoe, and a book-length schedule of presentations and events. The letters of his last name stood impressively large on the name tag. It was the first time he’d ever had a name tag. He pinned it carefully on his guayabera, above his heart.

Professor Talon wasn’t listed among the presenters, but this came as no surprise; when Talon left campus, it was to penetrate little-known parts of the world and encounter their peoples, not attend academic conferences. Talon was the real thing: the utterly fearless ethnographer who knew that fieldwork was everything.

Ortiz headed to a panel on masculinities. Masculinities Studies was hot; there were six masculinities panels at that year’s conference. The one about to start was called “All About Balls” and it offered three presentations: “‘You’re Not a Eunuch, Are You?’
Pirates of the Caribbean
’s Postcolonial Masculinities;” “The Leisured Testes: White Ball-Breaking as Surplus Machismo in
Jackass
”
;
and “
Huevos
and Balls: The (Fr)agilities of Maleness in Latino/a Discourse.”

“All About Balls” was held, fittingly enough, in the Pancho Villa Salon. The audience was well-represented by what Ortiz had come to identify as the various academic types: the jovial older male professor, silver-bearded and bearlike, comfortable in his tenured professorship; the anxious junior faculty member, needing that next book to clinch tenure, building her CV by sponsoring panels at the conference while realizing that all this conferencing was cutting into her writing time; fellow graduate students dressed in solid black, ironic and cool, prepared to declare the whole scene a fraud if they found they couldn’t finish their dissertations. During the presentations, the older male professors laughed a lot, the assistant professors listened intently, and the grad students feigned jadedness. Afterwards, a few people from the audience, including Ortiz, went up to the front to introduce themselves and chat with the speakers, all professors from various institutions.

“That took some balls,” Ortiz told the
huevos
-and-balls man. He was a pint-sized Chicano in a sports jacket and tie. Trim mustache. Ortiz had to stoop to meet the humorless gaze behind the man’s rimless glasses.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said the professor, eyeing Or-tiz’s name tag.

There were certain people who took an immediate dislike to Ortiz, and this guy was evidently one of them. They didn’t care for Ortiz’s lustrous hair or his height or his colorful guayabera shirts or his authentic
huaraches
. They took him for a poser. Ortiz, in turn, pegged the guy for a former Chicano activist turned academic. Those types were always bitter and hyper-critical. They could never take a joke.

“I mean, like, all of it,” Ortiz stammered. “The panel.”

“Well, it’s all about balls, right?” the man said dryly.

There was nothing on Ortiz’s name tag to identify him as a lowly graduate student and thereby unworthy of such animosity. The name tags gave only the bearer’s name—sans title—and school. The professor hailed from a college Ortiz had never heard of. Perhaps, Ortiz thought, he felt threatened by Ortiz’s far more prestigious university.

“What’s your work on, Dr. Ortiz?
Mr
. Ortiz?” said the professor.

“Mr.,” Ortiz said. “Oh, different things.” It was flattering to be taken as having a doctorate and “working on” something.

“Ah,
different
things.”

“I work with Philippe Talon,” said Ortiz.

“Never heard of him,” said the assistant professor, turning away.

Heat rose on Ortiz’s face as his testicles rose to his body. He stalked from the room and tromped down the stairs. That was bullshit! Everyone knew of Dr. Talon.

Down in the gaming area, Ortiz bought a bucket of nickels and played an old-fashioned one-armed bandit, depositing the coins and pulling the lever fiercely, looking up occasionally to observe the dealers at the card tables absurdly done up in spangled matador’s jackets. Weren’t the players aware of the irony of being dealt to by “bullfighters”? Didn’t they know, stupid bovines, that in the end, the matador always wins? Some people just didn’t get irony. Wasn’t it incredibly ironic that a professor who had just given a talk on the follies of machismo should act so macho?

His coins soon gone, he got up and roamed the depths of the casino. Sure enough, just as pictured on the ¡Viva! web-site, the waitresses sported ridiculous Carmen Miranda headdresses made of what appeared to be real fruit. The bartenders wore billowing white shirts and wide red sashes around their waists, like the men who ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Ma-riachi trumpeters blasted away from a corner of the bar.

A display near the hotel check-in desk caught Ortiz’s eye. It was a series of life-sized dancing, grinning skeletons carved of wood, the male figures wearing wide sombreros, the females in lacey granny dresses, their bony limbs comically akimbo.

A voice came from behind him.
“Viva la muerte!”

Ortiz turned and beheld a young bellhop pushing a cart of luggage toward the elevators.

The bellhop brought his load next to Ortiz. “Pretty wild, huh?” he said. “It’s like Day of the Dead stuff.”

“Yeah. Who makes it?”

“Some kind of Mexicans. Not your regular kind of Mexicans. I mean …” The kid’s pimples disappeared in his flush, and he looked away. “Here, I think we got some information about them.”

Ortiz followed the bellhop to the brochure rack. Not your “regular kind of Mexicans,” were they? Well, he was just a kid. Learning how easy it was to fuck up when you talked to people. Ortiz could sympathize.

The bellhop produced a brochure about ¡Viva!’s collection of south-of-the-border folk art and handed it to Ortiz. “Enjoy!” he said, moving his cargo along.

Apparently the hotel-casino had a whole gallery somewhere full of colorful ceramics and squat onyx figurines and more of these dancing skeletons. The skeletons, according to a brief blurb, were carved by an indigenous people from the remote lowlands of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The Mictlanos were famous for their wood carving, which they executed entirely with machetes.

Could the odd barrio he’d stumbled across earlier that day be a community of transplanted Mictlanos? Certainly in L.A. it was possible to find neighborhoods of indigenous peoples from specific regions of Mexico or Guatemala. Why not Las Vegas?

The Mictlanos
—that wasn’t what they called themselves, but the name bestowed upon them by surrounding peoples. Mictlán, in Aztec mythology, was the ninth circle of the underworld, or something like that. Ortiz tried to remember what else Dr. Talon had said about them in his lectures. Weren’t they the group Dr. Talon had referred to as having particularly “attractive” but “dangerous” women, a remark that had brought complaints from some of the female students? Ortiz recalled Talon describing with relish some kind of ritual confrontation between two Mictlano men over a woman, something about a midnight machete battle following a stylized exchange of insults, and a grave dug ahead of time for the loser.

Ortiz whipped out his laptop and Googled
Mictlan
and
Las Vegas
and got zero hits. So: If this truly was a group of Las Vegas Mictlanos undiscovered by ethnographers, what a find. What a fucking find! Now that was something he could write about—something that might impress Talon.

Ortiz abandoned the casino to discover that night had already fallen. The darkness hung thick beyond the lights of the Boulder Strip, as if the Mictlanos (if that’s what they were) had brought the black jungle night with them. He hesitated. Maybe he’d better wait until the next morning before he ventured back into the barrio. But had Talon ever hesitated to go anywhere on the face of the earth? Of course not. The man had balls. Ortiz had balls. He had to check out his discovery one more time before going to his motel.

The odor of the putrid Chihuahua guided him to the square. His Mustang bounced along the rutted road, its headlights brushing up and down the tree the man had been sitting under earlier in the day, carving his wood. Ortiz came to a stop under the tree and shut off the engine. Silence and darkness rushed in on him.

A man’s gruff voice erupted suddenly in the quiet, followed by a slapping sound. Another slap and a woman’s cry: “Ay, ay!” A lull; and then another slap, another sharp “Ay!” It was impossible to tell where exactly the commotion was coming from. Ortiz expected to hear weeping or sobbing, but no: Only a stoic silence followed.

Ortiz waited for a moment, drowning in the blackness, before starting his engine and taking off. Whatever was going on in that shack, he told himself, it wasn’t his place to interfere. To do so would ruin his research before it even got off the ground. Anyway, there was no telling what was really happening. Rough sex? A ritual driving out of evil spirits? Whatever it was, he had to respect these people’s culture and remain neutral.

Just as he suspected, the Lucky Cuss Motel was not for truly lucky cusses, but it wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, the only room they had left smelled as if a dozen chain smokers had rented it for a week. He peeled the sheets apart and looked for hairs, but the bed seemed clean enough. He lay on it and contemplated what he’d heard: the gruff male voice, the slaps, the woman’s cries. But again, there was no need to jump to conclusions. All he knew for sure was that he was one lucky cuss to have that community of transplanted Native Mexicans to do some real fieldwork on.

But his sense of good fortune didn’t prevent him from falling into a restless sleep full of snarling dogs and dancing skeletons and screaming women, and the next morning he woke up groggy and headachy. The sun glowed with hellish intensity bright behind the heavy golden curtains. He showered quickly and threw on a fresh guayabera and khaki pants. He grabbed a large coffee at a 7-Eleven and headed once again to what he already dubbed Little Mictlán. The coffee and crystalline desert air cleared his head. By the time he got to the barrio, he felt better.

The dead dog and its stink were gone. The cluster of trailers and cinder-block shacks, bare of any adornments, were hardly cheery, but the morning light had evaporated the previous night’s sinister feel. Ortiz pinned his name tag to his shirt and strode to the first hut and knocked.

The young woman he had seen standing there the previous afternoon opened the door. She wore the same kind of white dress, embroidered at the square neckline with strangely elongated animal figures. She was small-boned and pretty, her hair woven in a single long, thick braid—hair lustrous and black as his own. She glanced at his name tag. He was glad he’d thought to put it on—it identified him as in some way official.

“
Hola
,” he said. “
Yo soy investigador? Ortiz es mi nombre?
”

His Spanish wasn’t great, he knew, but “
investigador
,” police-y as it sounded, was Spanish for “researcher,” he was sure of that.

“
Investigador?
”

“
Sí
.” No need to complicate matters, just yet, with explanations of what kind of investigator he was. He asked if he could enter.

The woman hesitated, then stepped back. Ortiz ducked inside. The room was unfurnished except for a straw-bottomed rocking chair and a long, rough-hewn—machete-hewn, no doubt—bench running along one wall. Aluminum foil covered the one window; an incandescent bulb burned nakedly in the ceiling.

The woman remained standing near the open door, keeping herself visible to the outside.

“
Ustedes son Mictlanos, no?
” he asked, giving his friendliest smile.

“
Sí
,” she said faintly.

Bingo. He had his people.

“
Qué hacen aquí?
” The question—“what are you doing here?”—came out more brusque than he wanted, but his Spanish wasn’t good enough for polite subtleties. He kept his smile, the bright smile an ex-girlfriend had once called “innocent,” and asked if he could have a seat on the bench. She nodded. He motioned for her to sit as well, and she obeyed, taking a spot at the end of the bench where she could still be seen from the street. The sunlight coiled silver along her braid.

Spanish was clearly not her first language either, but he managed to ascertain that her husband and the rest of the men in the community worked construction jobs as well as carved the comical
calacas
, as she called the skeletons, for ¡Viva! That was where they were at the moment, at their construction jobs—they’d be back later, she said, though she was unable to specify exactly when. It occurred to Ortiz that these men might make better informants, to use the anthropological term—and his was an anthropological investigation, was it not?—than this hesitant young woman.

Ortiz had a weakness for women’s legs; the sight of a well-shaped female leg made his own legs literally weak, gave them a heaviness. This woman’s brown calves were perfectly shaped, as if turned on a lathe, and her small foot arched nicely in her sandal, a sandal very similar to his
huaraches
. Her toes were small and round. She was certainly no
India patarrajada
, no “split-footed Indian,” to use the most common anti-Native epithet in Mexico, the equivalent perhaps of calling an African American “nappy-headed.” He flicked his own Native hair behind his shoulders with both hands.

Slowly, discreetly, she bunched her dress in her hand, drawing it up along her leg. He swallowed, and watched. There, beginning about mid-thigh, she revealed to him a gigantic bruise, yellow-tinged on the edges and shading into a deep, mottled purple.

“Jesus!”

She jumped to her feet and smoothed her skirt. “The men will be back later,” she repeated. She stepped out of the house. It was clearly time for him to go.

Ortiz made his way back to ¡Viva! and the conference in a kind of daze. He attended another panel presentation, but all he could think about was the young woman, and her bruise, and the way she’d inched her skirt up to reveal it to him. He fantasized tending her injury, applying Native-style poultices made of wild herbs and macerated cactus fruit they’d gather together in the flowering Mojave, and his own legs grew weak again.