The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (106 page)

Root didn’t know what it was—the combination of drugs or the strange woman—but he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to keep fucking her as if each thrust might take away the sadness.

Afterward they had smoked more marijuana, but Seese dropped the vial of cocaine in the train case and closed the lid. Root mixed a pitcher of frozen orange juice. Root stirred the orange juice with a wooden spoon and stared at the train case. “All the kilos in town right now are packed in blue Samsonite,” Root said casually, but Seese sensed some question, some suspicion.

Seese laughed. “They gave me this overnight bag. I would never buy this color of blue.”

“Someone did,” Root said, turning down the switch on the evaporative cooler. “They probably got a good deal on a thousand
powder blue
suitcases.”

Seese felt happy and high. Somehow sex had made the cocaine-craving disappear.

“I don’t know about buyers,” Root said. “Tucson is snowed under, snowbound.”

Seese started to argue, “Two years ago—”

“Two years ago the world was a different place,” Root said. His abrupt interruption hurt her feelings, but Seese blamed herself for expecting help from a man she hardly knew. Root probably had no respect for secretaries who screwed their employer’s boyfriends either. She must be crazy again; coming to Root had been a dumb mistake.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Seese said. “I didn’t want to get started with coke again. I need the money to find my little boy.”

“Don’t you work for Lecha anymore?”

“I do, but Lecha has cancer.”

“You believe that?”

Seese looked closely at Root. He was difficult to figure out. She shrugged her shoulders and got a hairbrush out of her purse. She would take a taxi to the Stage Coach and have a talk with Cherie. The two of them could go back into the business together. They could turn one kilo into two kilos with baby laxative just like old times. Seese watched out the window for the taxi; if Root wanted to talk, let him. She wasn’t saying anything he could carry back to Lecha and use against her. “I may be able to get rid of that for you—I just can’t make any promises on the prices.”

Seese saw the taxi turn into the trailer court entrance; she picked up the light-blue train case and shook her head at Root. “That’s all right, don’t bother,” Seese said. “I have other people interested.” Root stood in the door and Seese sensed how much he wanted to embrace her, but she was finished with him.

Let her find out for herself about the changes in Tucson. Root remembered downtown when it had been alive, before the malls had killed downtown. No one had thought the big malls would die out either. But then the U.S. economy had begun to falter. Prominent corporations had been avoiding or abandoning Arizona steadily over the years because corporate employees balked at living in Arizona. The quality of life was substandard. Root thought it was really funny. Guam and Puerto Rico spent more on schools and mental health programs than Arizona did. No new industry or business would ever come to Arizona again; all the tax breaks and cozy deals, all the cheap land Arizona offered to attract corporations—all was for naught. Analysts said Mexico’s civil war would be nasty and spill across to the United States. Tucson’s fate was closely tied to the fate of Mexico. Tucson’s malls had depended on wealthy Mexicans; but the rich Sonorans had fled the angry mobs of peasants and relocated to Argentina or Spain. Rumors about violence across the border had begun to scare off wealthy patrons at Tucson’s spas and health resorts.

Root had to laugh. Merchants who sold arms and munitions did a “booming” business. Tucson had always depended on some sort of war to keep cash flowing. Root’s own great-grandfather had got rich off the Apache wars. Calabazas had told Root all about it. Root’s parents never discussed the family’s social prominence or the family wealth. After Calabazas had described the bootlegging to the Apaches and the army,
the whores and the skimming off army supply contracts, Root understood why his parents and Tucson’s “social elite” had so little interest in local history.

As far as Root was concerned, he was dead to his family, he had died on the day of his accident. The only family Root had was Calabazas and maybe Mosca. He could never be sure about Mosca or Lecha either; they both loved him but they were both crazy too. Root did not know if he loved them or if he had ever loved anyone. Had he ever loved his mother? He hardly even thought about his father.

Sometimes Root even amazed himself. He should never have fucked Lecha’s assistant or nurse or whatever she was. As soon as the urge and the hunger had been hammered away, the floating ecstasy had given way to doubt. The town was full of strangers carrying suitcases packed with cocaine or U.S. dollars to trade for dynamite. Lecha had psychic powers, but she still made mistakes where her personal life was concerned; hiring the blonde might have been a mistake. Root turned on the TV, but he could not get rid of the sad feeling. No wonder Mosca only “used” prostitutes. That was money well spent because there were no regrets.

Root had started hating television while he was in the hospital. But after he got out, he had begun to hate radio too; most of all, he had hated the new state lottery, and all the stupid ads for the suckers. Local radio stations had to give away cash all day long to be assured of listeners. No one did anything for anyone anymore except for cold cash. The deliverymen and receptionists, telephone operators and line repairmen, grocery checkers and department store clerks—the stupid suckers listened hour after hour while radio deejays pimped them with trash promotional merchandise.

In the hospital, prize money and prize merchandise had been all the nurses or nurse’s aides and therapists ever talked about. At home they paid baby-sitters to watch television in case the lucky phone call came at their house. They had all been making payments on new carpet or new living room furniture. The whole question came down to what it was a person stayed alive for.

Root once sat in a neighborhood coke dealer’s kitchen one day and watched. Around three
P.M
. the first of the “clients” had got off work and stopped by for a “boost” to get them home. For a small extra charge clients were allowed to shoot up in the bathroom. They had all been white, and the dealer was sympathetic. The clients had spouses, families, and jobs to think about. Root watched the steady parade. Legal secretaries,
mechanics, postal workers, receptionists, dental hygienists, and others Root could not guess—they might have been real estate agents or high school teachers. But all had the same expression of anticipation and relief on their faces. All day they had thought about only one thing. They had shut out the tedium and humiliation of their jobs—they had endured because they knew there was a full syringe waiting. This was what they lived for; this was why they went to work.

Root understood. Anyone who could see and reason clearly and logically would have found a painless way out—handgun, any caliber, its barrel nuzzled by the ear that would never hear the blast. Everyone had made his or her choice—a personal strategy for survival. New carpets, new dinette sets, new automobiles; something to live for, reasons to go to the jobs they hated. The coke dealer was an addict himself; he complained about the fall in cocaine prices. He said less cash was circulating around town; regular customers had been laid off or had had their work hours cut back.

MOSCA HAD LEARNED not to bother with those smart, nervous women even when they were dark and beautiful like the two sisters. In a way, Calabazas had wasted his life with those two Brito sisters.

First, Sarita, his “lawful wedded wife,” had been in bed with a dead monsignor—that was a good one! Fucked him into a heart attack. Second, Liria, Calabazas’s “true love,” had gone behind his back and with Sarita had joined a Catholic radical group to help smuggle refugees from Mexico and Guatemala to the United States. Mosca had overheard most of the argument when Calabazas had found out. Mosca thought most of the neighbors had at least heard the loud voices, which had quickly dropped to angry whispers. Mosca had been the one who had found out. Mosca had told Calabazas. See how fast word got around? What was that bitch Liria trying to do? What if they came investigating Liria and her communist nuns and priests.

Mosca had heard all the arguments before—both sides. Those who said you helped when you fed them, and those who said people needed “saving.” Mosca liked to brag that he only voted what his stomach told him. Calabazas had reminded Liria that all the farmers were relatives or clanspeople of his in Mexico. Theirs was a family business; all the marijuana had been from family farms, carefully packed inside truck-loads of pumpkins.

Liria had pointed out that she was not telling him to stop his business. The Indians had been left the poorest land; it was true. In the hills only marijuana would grow; pumpkins and gourds only grew down in the small valleys. Liria had remained calm. Each person chose the work they would do. Her work was to give sanctuary to people fleeing bullets and torture. Liria did not see how her work or Sarita’s work with the refugees would interfere with his work.

Then Mosca had heard Calabazas make an inspired argument about the dangers of smuggling political refugees versus smuggling gourds full of cocaine. People were too large and too noisy to smuggle easily. Liria’s church group was too open to infiltration by government agents.

Calabazas had been walking on shaky ground; suddenly Liria had become furious with Calabazas.

“Just listen to yourself, old man! What chicken shit you men are!” Liria had stormed out, and later she had thrown two suitcases in the trunk of her Toyota and drove away. Mosca knew that Calabazas was in the dark about a lot of the subversive work the Catholic Church was doing. Mosca had never trusted nuns, priests, any of them. Mosca had brought up the subject gently because he knew Calabazas had spent years madly in love with that woman Liria.

Mosca had been able to detect wizards or sorcerers, and assassins and spies, but only as he was driving past them. Mosca’s explanation had been that sorcerers, like antelope or coyotes, did not seem to fear detection from moving vehicles.

Mosca would be minding his own business, driving down Drachman at Miracle Mile, when suddenly he would see a dark wizard disguised as a clean-cut, young Hispanic college student. Mosca did not care if Root, Calabazas, or that bitch Liria laughed at him and called him, “Loco, loco, loco!” Mosca had made careful observations. The weirdos all hit the streets at the same time—they all lurched out of their cheap apartments and trailers to walk along Ft. Lowell Road laughing and talking to themselves. How had they all known it was time to step outside? Weirdos were on the same brain wavelengths as lizards and
migrating birds and possessed the mysterious ability to converge simultaneously on the same location. Sometimes witches and wizards even hit the streets together. Mosca had never figured out why those who hated and feared one another so much would all want to stroll together on the same streets. Yet Mosca had often seen the sorcerers, witches of both sexes,
curanderos
—whatever you wanted to call them—they all circulated together no different from the whores, male and female, who also walked South Sixth Avenue.

Speeding past a witch on the street, Mosca sometimes had a split second to see a light—sometimes a flash, sometimes a glow—around the face or the feet. Compared to the old-time stories about sorcerers, his power, Mosca had to admit, was limited.

Mosca opened another beer and scooped four big snorts from the plastic bag of coke shoved in the pocket of his western shirt. Mosca didn’t care about the teasing and the jokes. Calabazas, Root, or Liria—the rest of them—could laugh until they choked. The alcohol and the dope, were only the doorways; alcohol didn’t do the talking. All the notions, the suspicions, the schemes, the reveries, the theories, and the hunches belonged to him. They were locked up inside compartments of flesh and bone deep in Mosca’s body. Mosca could feel what he knew: the surge of a great flood, the muddy, churning water of what, he couldn’t yet say. Mosca’s eyes were shining. Tribal people in South America had navigated the most treacherous rivers and had traveled icy mountain paths with the aid of Mama Coca.

MOSCA HEARS and remembers so many voices and so many places he forgets where they all came from. Two or three beers, and three or four good snorts, and if everything else is level and smooth, then all the doors and gates of memory swing open. Every time Mosca had ever been arrested, there had been an intervening circumstance—a witch, a devil, a spirit thing. Mosca went on talking about zombies, open graves, and ghost armies traveling in green fireballs because they
were and had always been a part of Mosca’s life. Root had asked Mosca how old he was when he had first seen one of the weird things.