The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (110 page)

Mosca kept talking as they were driving to Calabazas’s house. The Hopi had begun writing letters while he was in prison and kept writing letters once he got out. The Hopi had written thousands of letters to prisoners all over the United States, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The Hopi had sent cigarettes and food boxes to hundreds and hundreds of men;

otherwise the Hopi would have been rich because he had found a deep freeze full of hundred-dollar bills buried in the desert. In a dream, a giant snake had showed him where to dig, or that was the Hopi’s story. There had also been rumors the Hopi had befriended an armed robber or an investment banker dying of AIDS in the prison hospital. The disclosure of the hidden cash had been made on the death bed.

Mosca had not actually seen one of the Hopi’s letters, but he knew the Hopi wrote to the prisoners about their dreams. The Hopi worked only in the realm of dreams; the Hopi’s letters made no mention of strikes or uprisings; instead the letters had consisted of the Hopi’s stories about the Corn Mother, Old Spider Woman, and the big snake. The black convicts and the Hopi talked about African spirits. Even redneck bikers ate up the Hopi’s stories, but that was because the Hopi had already infiltrated their dreams with the help of the spirit world.

ROOT HAD NOTICED Mosca kept glancing into the rearview mirror, so Root looked over his shoulder and saw a Border Patrol car on their tail. Mosca had pretended to ignore the Border Patrol car and kept talking, but Root saw Mosca was tense. Root watched Mosca’s hand on the .357 magnum between them on the seat. Root had not prayed so much as he had focused all his mental energy at Mosca’s brain with a message. Don’t reach for the gun, they’ll go away; or they’ll run names and they’ll let us go; please, Mosca, please, Root had concentrated. Don’t get mad, Mosca, don’t blow their heads off while I’m with you. The last time the Border Patrol had stopped Mosca, he had sworn he would never again give any
migra
pig ID or answer any questions except with his .357. By some miracle the Border Patrol unit had turned off the street without stopping them. Root wiped sweat from his forehead.

Mosca glanced in the rearview mirror as he spoke. His dark eyes glistened with feeling. “Well, you are right. I almost killed me some pigs
then.” Mosca watched Root’s face for a reaction. “Only one thing stopped me—”

“You didn’t want me to go to the gas chamber with you,” Root joked.

Mosca shook his head. “Because pigs are low on my list.” Then Mosca slammed his fist into the padded dash. Root thought he heard bones crack. Mosca crushed the accelerator to the floor. The big four-wheel-drive truck leaped forward, and Root thanked the god or spirit who had given Mosca empty lanes ahead. When Mosca was upset, his truck became a lethal weapon. Big tears rolled down Mosca’s face. “I wanted to blast the pig’s face off! I wanted to smash his teeth down his throat so much! Fucking
gringo
pigs! Where’s my green card? I’m a fucking U.S. citizen! I don’t fucking need no kind of card! My people lived here in palaces while Englishmen still lived in caves!”

Root was relieved when he saw the side street to Calabazas’s place; Mosca turned off Oracle so fast he drove over the curb and the tires squealed. Root felt the seat belt harness tighten around him; this wouldn’t be the first vehicle Mosca had rolled over. Root didn’t blame Mosca for his fury; there were Border Patrol agents all over Tucson stopping anyone who looked dark complected or “foreign.” Root himself had been stopped at Pima College where the agents waited outside classrooms where students learned English as a second language.

“Yeah, it’s really fucked,” Root said, “and all the white people in Tucson love it because it makes them feel safer.” Root had listened to his family for years. They had Mexican relatives, it was true, through Root’s grandfather. But Root’s mother and the others had been careful not to socialize with the Mexican cousins and kinfolk. Root’s father liked to joke the Irish weren’t choosy. But his father had lied; his father had not wanted a son who limped or sounded like a retard when he tried to talk. Root had learned a lot about his family and about white people when he was eighteen. They were afraid when they looked at him. They didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened to him. They would have been happier if they had buried him. What was Caucasian was perfect, and Root’s skull and brain were no longer perfect. His mother was not surprised. Root listened to her tell her friends who had come to visit him in the hospital; one of her five was bound to be a “wild one.” His mother never said “crazy Mexican,” but they all knew what she meant.

“But that’s okay,” Mosca said through clenched teeth as he turned
onto the gravel of Calabazas’s driveway. “We’ll take care of the pigs when the big day comes!” Mosca slowed the truck and looked intently at Root. Root shook his head. The Hopi must be crazy. White inmates hated black inmates and Hispanic inmates, and vice versa. Snitches were everywhere. Even if rioting started, what was the purpose? Mosca had been driving down Calabazas’s driveway and braked sharply. “The purpose? What’s the purpose?” Mosca started laughing, then stamped the accelerator so hard the big four-wheel-drive fishtailed and splashed gravel all the way to the big cottonwood tree in the yard. “Making big trouble is the purpose,” Mosca said. “Those fucking pigs won’t know which way to run!”

ROOT SAW CARS he did not recognize parked next to Calabazas’s pickup; Mosca shrugged his shoulders. “Church people,” he said. Mosca did not care, but the strange cars made Root nervous. Liria and Sarita knew better than to hide refugees there, but sometimes they held meetings at the house.

Calabazas had been sitting outside under the cottonwood tree in the remains of an old recliner chair, drinking a beer. There was a beat-up Styrofoam ice chest next to the chair. The sun had already dropped behind the trees along the river. Calabazas grinned at them. His hair was white at the temples and his mustache was silver. As they dragged lawn chairs to the tree, Calabazas popped open two more cans of beer. Calabazas looked a little drunk.

“You still trying to figure out the meaning of life, old man?” Mosca said.

“That’s right,” Calabazas said, “I thought I better get started on it while I’m still alive.” A cool wind rose from the river and stirred the cottonwood leaves. The three men drank silently and watched the sunset
blaze red-orange across the sky. Actually Calabazas had been thinking about time.

In the darkness Mosca could make out figures, but the voices were whispers. Cars started and turned down the driveway. The meeting was over. Mosca was already drunk. Mosca said he didn’t trust
anything
connected with the Catholic Church, and he didn’t trust
anyone
connected with the Catholic Church either. Mosca was always ready to bicker with Liria or Sarita over the Church. Mosca had been restless for weeks. He wanted action, he wasn’t happy with the things he had bought. The new clothes, new truck, and better whores had been exciting to dream about, but once he had them, he had realized how worthless they were. The clothes and the truck had changed nothing. The whores had worked like vacuum cleaners sucking him off, and for the money, Mosca understood why men invested in plastic inflatable women or Japanese battery-operated vaginas.

What did the Church want? Was it different from what the generals wanted, or from what the rich wanted from the poor and the Indians? All the Church had ever done was snatch food from the mouths of the hungry in the name of Jesus Christ. The nuns and priests who called themselves the Liberation Church were puppets used by the Church to give poor people the illusion the Church was on their side. Anytime they wanted, the Church could have stopped their clergy from smuggling political refugees out of the South. But over the centuries the Church had learned to keep potential troublemakers, priests and nuns and “penitents” such as Sarita and Liria, safely occupied.

The Church demanded the Indians pray only to Jesus. The Church didn’t want the people to listen to the spirits of ancestors or animals or rocks. The Church wanted Indians to feel and think like whites. Mosca wasn’t fooled; it was like the routine the pigs had: bad cop, good cop. The Church played the good cop. Smuggling out a few political refugees gave the Church good publicity.

Mosca had got himself worked up. From the Catholic Church he had leaped to the Italians and the Mafia; the pope was part of the Mafia. Mosca knew his catechism. Mosca had been swatted with a flyswatter by the nuns if he did not repeat his catechism. The pope could stop Church sacraments to anyone for any reason; yet the pope had not stopped the sacraments to the army officers who hunted down and shot Yaqui women and children. The Church had two faces it wore in Mexico; both were mask faces. The truth was the Devil had taken over the Catholic Church sometime after Saint Peter died. After the takeover, the
Devil had declared himself pope; a series of devils had been pope, and often the popes had had numerous wives and illegitimate children. The popes had been poisoners and sexual inverts because the devils lived in them and in their priests and nuns, whom Martin Luther had finally caught at their devil Masses and lewd celebrations. The Devil, the Church, and the Mafia were a world conspiracy as Mosca saw it.

Root had been baptized a Catholic, but had refused to have a priest visit him in the hospital. Root had stopped believing a couple of years before the accident. He didn’t care what Mosca said about the Mafia and the Church; but he had been surprised when Mosca started talking about Max and Sonny Blue. Root had not heard Mosca talk about the Italians for a while; the Tucson families had had the pie split up before the Italians ever got to Tucson. The Mafia had been warned by the other white men; leave the border to the Indians unless you have wings. The Indians were allied with the desert inferno; all others died there. Mafia nephews and son-in-laws bought “legitimate” small businesses—sausage shops in shopping malls, or pinball and vending-machine concessions or private garbage collection. Max Blue’s wife kept buying real estate.

Mosca had always enjoyed imaginary plots in which he surprised everyone and betrayed them all. Mosca loved to imagine the expression on Calabazas’s face when he discovered his wife had fucked to death a Church monsignor. Even with the old monsignor dead, Calabazas had lost his wife to the Church. Having the other sister was no consolation that Mosca could see; both women were under the control of priests. Sarita had taken up the refugee work only because the priests had threatened her with eternal hell for killing the old monsignor with sex. Churches had always made clever use of the money and manpower of sinners. Penitent sinners would do anything the Church told them to do.

ROOT WANTED to get Mosca off the subject of the Church so he could find out more about the Barefoot Hopi. Root asked Calabazas if he had ever met the Hopi. Mosca had, of course, answered before Calabazas himself could speak; no, only Mosca knew the Hopi, but soon people all over the world would hear about the Hopi. The Hopi was the organizer. The Hopi had dedicated his life to one day of mutual cooperation among all incarcerated persons in North America and in Mexico. Mosca was high and drunk. After his release, the Barefoot Hopi had traveled to prisons all over the United States where he had petitioned federal courts to obtain special permission as a clergyman to perform religious rites for imprisoned Native Americans.