The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (22 page)

In those days Calabazas had been handsome and wild. Calabazas had been working with their clanspeople and relatives in Sonora. His pants pocket was fat with cash. When Lecha had pointed at the wad, Calabazas laughed and pretended it was his cock. “You can get this for yourselves anytime,” he had joked, meaning the money as well as sex.

As soon as Zeta had become acquainted with the people Calabazas worked with in Mexico, she had saved up a bankroll to work a few deals of her own. Calabazas should have expected Zeta to pull a stunt like that, Lecha had confided later. Her sister was not to be trusted. Zeta had quit both Mexico Tours and Calabazas at the same time. She had taken two of the bus drivers with her, leaving Mr. Coco in his sour black suit, looking stunned as she told him she was bored with smuggling live green parrots and fake Rolex watches across the border in the bellies of tour buses.

YOEME HAD GUESSED immediately what Zeta was doing with her tour bus business and her partnership with Calabazas. When Yoeme had exclaimed “You will be a rich woman!” Zeta had only shrugged her shoulders. Zeta realized old Yoeme was leading her on, setting Zeta up for a tirade. Old Yoeme had made a big point of shaming those who would sell the last few objects of the people who had been destroyed and worlds that had been destroyed by the Europeans. Yoeme had looked Zeta right in the eye when she said it. Yoeme said that the work that faced Lecha had been made more difficult because from time to time, weakhearted keepers of the old almanac had sold off pages here and there for frivolous reasons.

“Remember all this when Lecha is struggling to make sense out of the notebooks.” “Ask Zeta how many of the missing pages got sold off to her tourists from the United States.” Of course Zeta had never seen anything like the fragments of the manuscript of glyphs. All that had ever moved through the garages of Mrs. Mares had been pottery and figurines, with a scattering of carved stone or jade axes and knives. When Zeta had informed Yoeme that they were out of the antiquities business and “working in other areas,” old Yoeme had crowed, “Sold it all away! It’s all gone and now you move to something else!” Zeta nodded. She had seen no point in arguing either with her grandmother or her sister.

Old Yoeme had been in the mood to talk that day:

I have kept the notebooks and the old book since it was passed on to me many years ago. A section of one of the notebooks had accidentally been lost right before they were given to me. The woman who had been keeping them explained what the lost section had said, although of course it was all in a code, so that the true meaning would not be immediately clear. She requested that, if possible, at some time in my life I should write down a replacement section.

I have thought about it all my life. The problem has been the meaning of the lost section and for me to find a way of replacing it. One naturally reflects upon one’s own experiences and feelings throughout one’s life. The woman warned that it should not be just any sort of words.

I am telling you this because you must understand how carefully the old manuscript and its notebooks must be kept. Nothing must be added that was not already there. Only repairs are allowed, and one might live as long as I have and not find a suitable code.

I must always return to what the white men kept hanging in all the lovely cottonwood trees along the rivers and streams throughout this land. Swaying in the light wind, rags of clothing flapping the shrunken limbs into motion. They try to walk, they try to walk—the feet keep reaching long after the neck has broken or the head has choked. In those days the Mexican soldiers were not particular about whom they killed so long as they were Indians found near the mountains. Before dawn they fired upon a camp, taking it for Indian, and the Mexican soldiers killed a young American lieutenant and an American cavalry scout. They were all hunting the Apaches running with the man they called Geronimo. That was not his name. No wonder there has been so much confusion among white people and their historians. The man encouraged the confusion. He has been called a medicine man, but that title is misleading. He was a man who was able to perform certain feats.

I have seen the photographs that are labeled “Geronimo.” I have seen the photograph of the so-called surrender at Skeleton Canyon where General Miles sits in the shade of a mesquite tree flanked by his captains as he makes false promises and lies. But the Apache man identified in the photographs is not, of course, the man the U.S. army has been chasing. He is a man who always accompanied the one who performed certain feats. He is the man who agreed to play the role for the protection of the other man. The man in the photographs had been promised safe conduct by the man he protected. The man in the photographs was a brilliant and resourceful man. He may not have known that while he would find wealth and fame in the lifelong captivity, he would not again see the mountains during his life. The man who fled had further work to do, work that could not be done in captivity.

When the mountain people came down for salt or for other necessities, they came to bring the news and maybe some herb delicacy for me. This man accompanied them. He did not remain with the others
talking on the porch or eating roast mutton inside. He walked down here, right to this place we are standing.

I had walked out on the second-story porch carrying one of the babies—it was Amalia, your mother. She was always crying and puking milk. I could see the man very clearly. The others had told me that he had certain work he must do, which was why they had brought him down with them. No one was to know who he was. It was a very dangerous time then. The soldiers were killing Indians left and right. I watched the man for a long time. Amalia fell asleep in my arms. He was watching the gulls ride the waves in and out. I began to remember my wonder at the rising of the waves when I first saw the sea. The sun was setting into the water. The tide was going out. The gulls were being carried farther and farther away into the bright gold light of the last sun across the water. I never moved my eyes from the man at the edge of the water. But in an instant he was gone. All I could see was a gull riding a wave, floating and stretching its wings in the lazy way the gulls have.

That is all. Take me back. I am tired.

They argued over what was easier. Lecha wanted to go back to the house and get the car, but Yoeme refused to ride in one. Zeta thought the deep sand made uphill with the old wheelchair impossible and said she could more easily carry Yoeme. But the old woman said her bones might poke through her skin if Zeta tried something stupid like that. So they took turns struggling up the sandy road from the beach, old Yoeme sleeping through the jerks and skids. They got too winded to talk. They never discussed the story Yoeme had told them on the beach, but Lecha had been careful to write it down in the notebook with the blank pages. After she had written it, old Yoeme had demanded to see it, and it was then they realized it was the first entry that had been written in English. Zeta waited for Yoeme to break into a fury. But she had rocked herself from side to side, sighing with pleasure. Yoeme claimed this was the sign the keepers of the notebooks had always prayed for.

It had been Yoeme in the first place who talked to snakes. She claimed to consult the big bull snake out behind the adobe woodshed. Zeta had learned it from her. What did the snake tell her? the two girls had wanted to know. Nothing the girls would be allowed to hear. Old Yoeme had never got along with churchgoers. She had her own picture of things. Snakes crawled under the ground. They heard the voices of the dead: actual conversations, and lone voices calling out to loved ones still living. Snakes heard the confessions of murderers and arsonists after
innocent people had been accused. Why did Catholic priests always kill snakes? The twins nodded their heads solemnly at their grandmother. Snakes moved through the tall weeds, and under the edges of rocks and up through the branches of trees. They saw and heard a good deal that way: where husbands crept away, where wives embraced lovers. Snakes saw what illicit couples did, in turkey pens after dark, in the arroyo by the trash pile, all the sexual excesses the two girls had been able to imagine, but were not allowed to hear. Yoeme had the girls begging.

Lecha could not bear to face the big bull snake. She closed her eyes and tried. But she could not bear to see him thick and coiled in the shady spot by the hole in the wall where he slept. Lecha could not endure to watch his slippery, black fork tongue dart in and out, in and out. “Well, you go on back to the porch,” Yoeme had told her. “Not everyone can do this. Your sister can tell you what he says.”

Zeta had waited until Yoeme called her closer. The snake was not so stupid that he did not know a stranger. Although he does know you two girls because you play out here sometimes. But you can’t just go rushing at them. Bad manners. You can’t have a conversation right away. It is no different from with humans. Let him hear your heartbeat. Let him hear your breathing.

It was something Zeta did alone with her grandmother. In the fall, as the days were cooling off, they would find the big bull snake sunning himself on the south side of the woodshed. Yoeme had picked him up carefully, supporting his long body with one hand as she cradled him against her chest. “He likes the warmth, you see,” and it had been then Zeta understood that the big snake recognized Yoeme, because he lay quietly, only his tongue moving slowly in and out at Zeta.

Zeta had never mentioned any of this to Lecha because she could not exactly explain how it had worked. Certainly the snake didn’t talk. But looking at the snake as it curled in Yoeme’s arms and thinking how beautifully the light brown spots were with the pale yellow under it, Zeta had for no reason thought of Grandpa Guzman not as her grandpa, but as the “old white man,” which was what others, outside the family, called him. She had thought of him overturned and moaning feebly for help. And her aunt Popa was ignoring him because she figured there would be something dirty to clean up. All Zeta had ever thought was that she knew how it worked, how one talked to snakes. But it had not impressed her.

So, years later, when old Yoeme had given Lecha the notebooks to decipher, Zeta had been surprised that the old woman said, “Your skills
lie elsewhere, don’t they?” Lecha had glanced at Zeta to try to figure out what old Yoeme had meant. But Zeta did not change her expression, and their grandmother drifted into one of her long naps—a long nap that finally one warm afternoon four days later had not ended.

ZETA HAD NOT NEEDED Calabazas after the first loan from him was repaid, but she had played along for a while because she was interested in what he might do next. He said that the two of them could have the run of the town when it came to “commodities” crossing the border. This proposal had come shortly after he had visited the old ranch in the mountains and had realized the possibilities. Zeta thought this had also come about the time Calabazas was beginning to realize that she was not going to be swept into his bed as other women generally were.

Calabazas had gotten amorous at sundown while Zeta was explaining what her father had told them about the big volcano that had once been there and about the giant explosion that had destroyed it. Zeta had been showing him different rocks containing bits of volcanic ash melted into them. She had been explaining that her father had wanted to spend his retirement studying these rocks and the ore deposits of these mountains when Calabazas had tried to gather her into his arms for a big kiss. But Zeta had seen the move coming, and she had twisted away expertly, dropping the rock she had been showing him on his foot. “You are not like your twin sister,” Calabazas had said, shaking his head. “No,” Zeta had replied, “I’m not.” And a week later Zeta had arranged the biggest haul of gold coins yet, and Calabazas and his people knew nothing about it. She had not trusted a deal that big to anyone. She had loaded Ferro’s diaper bag, car bed, and toys into the backseat of a big Hudson Hornet. The old widow and Ferro had ridden in front beside her. Zeta purposely wore a full, loose blouse over her plain, dark skirt that might suggest pregnancy. At the border crossing in El Paso, the U.S. guards had made only a quick check of the trunk. The mighty
frame and springs of the Hudson Hornet had not held their load without sagging, but they seemed not to notice. Or they had passed it off to the two large Indian women, the large baby, and the load of baby gear.