Mexican Ghost Tales of the Southwest (12 page)

They finally got up and found the road that would lead back to their home. Chicho didn't understand how they ended up so far from home in the short time that they were in the whirlwind. They walked all day, and at night they slept close together to keep warm in the cold desert. In the early dawn they continued their trip home again.

Chicho cried much of the time, and hunger plagued them both. Some relief came from eating the seedy prickly pear from the numerous cacti in that region. They drank the meaty juice from the succulent fruit.

Finally, they arrived at the area where Chicho remembered his adobe house had once stood. There was only rubble. Broken adobe bricks lay scattered around what remained of the walls of the house. Desert shrubs grew all over. The desert was slowly reclaiming the land. The cornfields were long gone. Everything had been abandoned many years ago.

He stood there in the quiet ruins and called out,
“Mamá! Mamá!”
But only the echoes from the distant hills answered him.

Mangas looked at him with sad eyes. Their home was gone! Gone forever into the quicksand of time. Only a carcass of their former lives remained. The years had passed so swiftly during their time in the whirlwind. Gone was their youth, too. The demons of the whirlwind had lost their prey, but they had exacted their revenge.

Chicho walked over to the edge of a crumbled adobe wall and sat down gently. His old limbs caused him pain when he moved. Mangas slowly came over and lay down beside him. Chicho had tears running down his cheeks. He was an old man with an old dog.

He lived for many more years. Even in his old age, he and his dog Mangas would attempt to chase down a whirlwind whenever one came by. Chicho would hobble after it with his dog at his side to jump into the whirlwind, but they were too slow. Only the demons knew why Chicho and Mangas were chasing whirlwinds. They were trying to enter one to recapture their youth. The swirling demons of the whirlwind would only tease them and laugh at them as the wind swiftly moved away.

The local people called Chicho and Mangas “the crazy old man and his old dog.” He was the village idiot who chased whirlwinds. He probably went insane as a punishment for the evil of his youth, people would say. But nobody would ever find out the truth—only Chicho and Mangas knew the story, and even now they can't tell you. They passed on to their fathers and are buried together at the local cemetery.

THE CHINESE WOMAN OF THE SEA

THE CHINESE WOMAN OF THE SEA

O
n the Pacific side of Baja, California, there is a beach surrounded by rocks. There are many clusters of rocks off the beach in deeper water. Pounding waves hit the rocks and explode into flying foam and water. On the far left side of the beach is a cluster of rocks known to the local people as Seal Rocks. The rocks are used as resting places by seals, sea gulls, and other sea fowl.

Many years ago a coffin washed up on the rocks. The waves kept battering it until it broke into pieces, revealing the body of a young Chinese woman with her baby tied up against her breast with strands of old rope. The waves washed the corpses into a deep crevice in the rocks. The rocky crevice protected the bodies from the violent crashing waves coming in from the sea.

The woman was from a nearby Chinese hamlet. Chinese fishermen and their families had arrived years earlier from upper California in their fishing boats. The coastal current had carried them down, and they had landed in a small cove where they built their houses. With such abundant marine life
in the area, they had decided to stay. They made their daily living fishing and diving for the abalone which were plentiful in the cove.

The young woman had drowned only a couple of kilometers away from Seal Rocks Beach. After she drowned, it had taken five days of hard work to recover her body from the deep because of the rough seas. Meanwhile, her baby had refused to eat or drink, and it soon died crying for his mother.

To retrieve her body, the Chinese fishermen had brought a big rock from the beach and tied a rope to a diver. The diver held the rock in his arms and jumped into the sea. Down, down he went into the deep blue water. When he reached the bottom, he could feel tremendous pressure against his small body. He swam over to the corpse, managed to grab her arm, and jerked his line to let the people above know to pull him in. Swiftly and steadily, he was pulled up until he broke the surface of the water gasping for air.

The fishermen had built a coffin, and they tied the woman's baby to her body with old pieces of rope. The mother and child would be together in death as they were in life. They placed the coffin on the fantail of the boat. On their way back to the hamlet, a huge wave arose from the sea and smashed into the boat and washed the coffin into the sea. A riptide carried it away beyond the reach of the small fishing boat. The Chinese fishermen could only wail and cry over their loss. It was hard for them to lose the bodies after the struggle and sacrifice to retrieve the woman's corpse. They could only cry in their misery as the coffin swirled and tossed in the turbulent sea then disappeared from their sight in the ocean waves.

Sometime later, a woman's mournful sobbing and a baby's gentle crying could be heard at Seal Rocks intermingled with the sound of the waves that crashed against the rocks and onto the beach. Only the bravest would venture past the beach at night. Unfortunately, the footpath by the beach was the only way to go to the neighboring villages.

One dark night, an old man—known to people in the villages as
Tigre Acero
or Steel Tiger—was walking along the beach path. He was feeling a little tipsy. He had shared a little
pulque
with his friends at the next village.

“What a beautiful night!” he said to himself.

Just then, he heard a baby crying softly from the distant rocks by the beach. In his drunken mind he thought he was hearing voices. The crying drifted closer and closer. Suddenly, the crying stopped. Everything went quiet, even the crickets were silent. An eerie calm settled over the area. Only the slow steady beat of the old man's sandals on the pathway could be heard. He was aware that something was wrong, but he kept on walking.

He was not scared. He had walked this footpath many times in the past. He was Tigre Acero, the Steel Tiger, the meanest man in the village. But he was much older now. Age had mellowed his temper, yet he still boasted of his fighting youth. The local villagers didn't call him Tiger anymore, only “Old Man Acero.”

He continued walking until a soft voice called to him. “Sir! Sir! Help me, please.” He was startled by the voice and turned in the direction of the sound. He calmed down quickly. It was a young lady in the shadow of an old tree with low hanging branches. He could see she was holding a bundle in her arms.

“Help me, please!” she said again.

He asked her, “What are you doing here so late at night?”

She replied, “I fell asleep with my baby. We have been walking all day, so I took a nap and just woke up.”

He looked at her with curiosity. What was a Chinese woman doing out here by the beach and so late at night? As he mulled over the question, he was interrupted by her. She sadly revealed that she had no place to go.

Acero, being kindhearted in his old age, said to her, “You and your baby can stay with me as long as you wish. I'm a lonely old man, and I need companionship and someone to cook and care for my house. If you agree to these terms, you can stay.” Then they continued on their way.

While walking in the darkness, he told her, “You are Chinese, so I won't tell people about you. They will only spread gossip and slander against me. There aren't too many Chinese people around here, except in the fishing hamlet some distance away.”

She walked softly behind him, hardly making any noise. He looked back at her. She glowed in the darkness, with the phosphorescent glow of breaking sea waves on a moonlit night. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him because he was drunk. He kept on walking, looking back every so often to see if she was still with him.

Upon reaching the village, a few dogs started howling. “Strange,” he told the Chinese woman, “they usually bark and growl at me. But tonight they stay away and howl.”

There was a saying in the village that when a dog howls at night, somebody has just died. He
thought about this and laughed out loud. “Can't be me. I'm still walking around!”

They walked into his home. He showed her the small room that had been his wife's bedroom. She had passed away years before, and he had been forced to live by himself. He missed her very much, but time heals the open wounds of sadness. Now, he was happy again. The Chinese woman would take care of the chores. He would be able to spend more time with his friends in the neighboring village.

He woke up the next morning with an aching head from his hangover. He knew he had too much to drink last night. The woman … was that a dream? But the smell of pinto beans and fresh corn tortillas in the stuffy air told him otherwise. He went out to the well, washed himself, and drank a little water. It tasted so good and sweet! He walked back into the house.

All the rooms were dark. The Chinese woman had covered the windows with thick curtains, and very little light came in. When he asked her why, she explained to him that the strong desert sunlight hurt her eyes.

“It's all right. I can live with it,” he said.

He thought maybe that's why she was so pale, that the Chinese lived this way. He told her to rest. She then left for her small room.

He called to her, “I'll be going to see my friends in the next village. I'll be back late.” She didn't answer him.

As the weeks went by, he started to lose weight. Too much drinking, he thought, and the late hours. Every night when he came down the beach path after drinking with his friends, the woman would be waiting for him. Together they walked the path
back to the house. He was usually drunk and would hum a lively country song, as the girl walked softly behind him with her baby in her arms.

She always had that strange glow and the smell of the sea. A fisherman's daughter, Tigre Acero mused to himself. He asked her what her name was one night, and she said her name was
Li Ying,
which means Pear Tree in Chinese. He laughed out loud when she mentioned her name. He laughed and laughed.

“You should have a name like María or Luisa or Rosa,” he told her.

She scowled at him. “You are very rude and have no manners.”

He felt bad when she scolded him. He knew that he had ridiculed her name and had been disrespectful to her. He apologized to her for being so impolite. She slowly smiled at him, and he knew she had forgiven him.

He grew even thinner and found it hard to get around. Even going to visit his friends was becoming difficult. He stayed home more, sitting quietly with a bottle of tequila on the table. Li Ying would scurry around the rooms dusting and cleaning. She would come over to the chair where he was sitting and stroke his hair and face very gently. He felt happy with her. But when he looked too long into her dark almond eyes, he was afraid.

Since he was not feeling well these days and was no longer able to visit his friends, they began to visit him instead. They came in the daytime because it was easier for them to walk the beach path and they were afraid of the beach at night. They would always come over with a couple of bottles of tequila. They would open the curtains wide
and let the sunlight in.

“You shouldn't live in the dark,” they told him, “That's why you are becoming so pale. Pretty soon you'll look like a gringo!”

Whenever his friends came over, Li Ying and her baby disappeared. He did not find this too strange, thinking perhaps she was bashful and fearful of his rustic friends. She would always come back at night. The dogs would howl when she arrived. She told Tigre Acero it was because they smelled a stranger; she was not of Mexican-Indian stock like the rest of the people.

His health continued to get worse. He remained in bed more and more. She had to help him get up. He hobbled around with a stick as a cane. His skin was getting paler and ghostly. His eyes were beginning to protrude from his sunken face. His friends would drop by more often, and Li Ying would disappear with her baby more often. He never told anyone about her, not even his friends.