The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (31 page)

The computer posits models of possible routes taken by the abductor and victim.

The abductor drives the victim west and then north into the desert foothills.

According to the computer model, the child killer acts within the first fifteen minutes after the abduction.

The abductor can wait no longer. In his excitement he accidentally makes a long, shallow cut in his own upper thigh. He has always savored the chill of steel alongside the shaft of his own cock while he pulled and beat it off.

A black, late-model sedan is parked at the mouth of a dry arroyo next to a dirt road.

The purpose of the shallow grave is twofold: to hide the shameful incriminating evidence, and to prevent the loss of the beloved corpse.

The photograph appears to be of a common grave scratched out of the Sonoran Desert gravel; scraps of cloth, bleached translucent by the sun, flutter in the wind above bits of hair and bones.

The Santa Cruz River has been running at low, summer flood-level for weeks. The mother sends the little girl a short distance, no more than two city blocks, to mail a letter.

The little girl rides off on her bike—and never comes back. Later, younger neighborhood children tell how a black car bumps her off her bicycle and a man lifts her into the black car. The small pink bicycle is found lying in the weeds on Root Lane near her home.

Computers posit models of possible routes taken by the abductor. Blue-pencil grids divide the map of the area west and north of the little girl’s home. Search teams are assigned blocks within the grids. Teams on horseback and all-terrain motorcycles comb the scrubby greasewood on the gray alluvial ridges that parallel the Santa Cruz River.

Plastic surveyor’s ribbons in white or light yellow are tied on branches of mesquite or jojoba after each of the twenty acre squares has been searched. After each square in the blue-pencil grid has been searched, a Sherriff’s Department volunteer draws a red X over the square.

On the morning of the third day of the search, family members bring the little girl’s favorite doll, a long-tail monkey sewed and stuffed with brown cotton work socks, and a pair of the child’s pink tennis shoes for bloodhounds brought from the state penitentiary.

Bloodhounds are not as effective in desert terrain. Damp-woods paths and lush foliage hold scents for hours, sometimes days. The dog handler estimates the dogs must be set on a trail within the first three hours or the desert’s dry, hot air obliterates the scent trail. It’s all scientific, the dog man explains. Heat expands scent molecules. Pushes molecules apart—scatters them. Desert gravel and sand for an hour, and the heat and the wind evaporate molecules into dust.

You don’t believe they can send you all of this in one or two letters—dozens of newspaper clippings and photographs—yet week after week they do. You don’t know them. Don’t know who they are. Still they imagine you may have some sort of power to bring their little girl back to them.

The child’s father joins the search, while her stepfather remains with her mother. They do not go to the temporary search headquarters near the bridge on the Santa Cruz River. The child’s mother waits next to the telephone with the reverend from the Church of Christ, Scientist. The call the mother waits for is from California or New Mexico. She has read about it before. Kidnappers who mean no harm to the child. Perhaps they have lost a child of their own.

Seese watched them together. The two old women. Identical twins who no longer resembled one another except when they spoke. Zeta had only to pause an instant before her wide, dark face relaxed into a brief smile. “Oh . . . ,” Zeta had said. “You are going to copy her book. . . .” “Well,” Lecha had said, her eyes dreamy and distant, “You could say ‘her book,’ but of course the book will be mine.”

WHEN ZETA THOUGHT of her father, she liked to go walking down the ridge behind the ranch house where he had walked with her and Lecha that day so long ago. She had been adamant about the security systems and fences. She did not want them to interfere with the trails she took for her walks. Because the trails were far older even than the ranching and mining that had gone on in those mountains. The trails themselves extended out of another time, and Zeta had found that walking along them enabled her to reach insights and ideas that otherwise were inaccessible.

When she walked, she always carried the 9mm in the deep pocket concealed in the fullness of her dark brown skirt. She had been surprised one day to notice that the long full skirts and dark blouses and suit coats she wore were much like a religious habit. She was able to affect the appearance of an old woman, but was also able to dress as Lecha did and give the impression of a woman barely past forty-five. Lecha did it to attract men. Zeta did it to throw the others off her trail. If Zeta wore pants, they were the English riding pants for women, and she would have had the sewing lady sew a deep pocket in them too for the 9mm. Ferro had given her a two-shot .38-caliber derringer for Christmas that year and a boot holster for it, but she preferred not to wear boots during the hot season.

She did not have to walk far to escape the presence of the house and the guard dogs and other people. She wondered if her father had felt the distance that could be gained by walking there. The desert shrubs, cactus, mesquite, and paloverde grew lush from the steep sides of the
hills and ridges, which were only the debris, the ruin, of the great volcano that had once presided over the entire valley.

When she came to the large flat stone the size of an anvil but four times as heavy, Zeta used to wish her father had taught her about meteorites. Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two
A.M
. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of a moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they had watched the night skies relentlessly, translating sudden bursts and trails of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past. Yoeme claimed it had all been written down, in another form of course, in the notebooks, which she had waved in their faces almost from the beginning.

Now Lecha had returned with the notebooks and claimed she was ready to begin the work Yoeme had entrusted to her years ago.

“We must be getting old if Lecha is coming back complaining about a little thing like cancer,” Calabazas had said a few weeks before. He had been talking retirement, but Zeta knew him better than to believe it. Calabazas would never abandon what he called “the war that had never ended,” the war for the land. He wanted to call every successful shipment or journey a victory in this “war.” Zeta had not argued with him, but she had her own ideas about “the war.”

What did they say about fairness and love and war? What did they say about strange bedfellows? The older Zeta got the less she could remember the English expressions. They had smuggled truck tires during the Second World War. They had begun to get requests for ammunition and guns of any kind; there was a growing demand for explosives—Dyalite
^©
with blasting caps. Guns had always moved across the border, in a southerly direction, unless they were illegal weapons—Chinese automatic rifles or sawed-off shotguns. Zeta and Calabazas had finally parted company. Calabazas had wanted to stay strictly with dope. Because with guns there was politics, right off the bat. Zeta had argued with Calabazas for years. They had always been at war with the invaders. For five hundred years, the resistance had fought. Calabazas might avoid it for another five years, at most ten. But sooner or later politics would
come knocking at his door; because dope was good as gold; and politics always went where the gold was.

Zeta was the only Mexican or Indian who would deal with Greenlee. Zeta had never liked to look at Greenlee’s face, which was pasty white and had no chin. His pale blue eyes had always had the shine of a true believer in the white race. Arizona had been overrun by poor whites like Greenlee. So while Zeta had avoided looking at his face, she always studied the rest of him, and of course the first thing her eyes caught was the .45 automatic.

The holster he wore in the store was bulky leather and closed with a heavy police-style snap. There was nothing his .45 automatic couldn’t stop, including a Mack truck, Greenlee liked to brag when he was first introduced to people, especially women. But Zeta had always known as long as the holster was snapped, Greenlee was a lot of hot air. She also knew that Greenlee paid little or no attention to a woman unless he was fucking or hoping to fuck her. Zeta had her .44 magnum in her purse. She wasn’t afraid of Greenlee. Greenlee’s jokes were the most dangerous thing about him because sometimes they had nearly caused Zeta to lose self-control.

Zeta tried to keep the conversation on weapons. She talked about her .44 magnum. Greenlee said he’d been looking for one. If she ever decided to sell it . . . Greenlee had waved his hand vaguely in front of himself, smiling as if he might be recalling a joke.

“What do you have when you have twelve lawyers buried to their necks in dirt? Not enough dirt.” Greenlee was preparing to move into the big warehouse building he had just bought downtown. Greenlee hinted that he had become vastly rich from secret dealings. Greenlee could not resist bragging about his money to a woman, any woman. Any brains he had were hanging between his legs.

Greenlee hinted that approval for his export permits and his federal security clearance had been given priority because certain of his friends were now located in “high places” in the U.S. government.

Zeta could have spelled it out for him right then:
CIA.

Greenlee was not a man who did much thinking. If she said she wanted carbines or pistols to sell to rich Sonoran ranchers, that was that. She had always paid cash and she had never made trouble. Greenlee did not take Zeta seriously. She was a woman, a Mexican Indian at that.

FERRO SINKS BACK in the floating cushion, fingertips only on the edge of the redwood. Jamey wants to go “diving.” Jamey likes to find it floating like a sea cucumber, he says. When he gets hold, Ferro grabs both his shoulders. Jamey nibbles like a fish. Ferro reaches for the little glass vial and twists the top. He taps a hit into the glass chamber and holds one nostril while he inhales. The rush through his head then down all veins explodes in waves he imagines in shades of pale pink—the color of Bolivian flake, the color of Jamey’s tight little hole; a rose, a delicate little rose. Jamey has surfaced and is drying his face and hair. He is always grinning—those perfect rich-boy teeth beg to be smashed. He puts the towel on the shelf and searches for the glass vial. Ferro makes a fist around the vial. It takes a full minute before Jamey realizes Ferro is watching him with amusement.

“Oh!
You’ve
got it! Man! I was scared it fell in the water.” But when Jamey reaches for the fist, Ferro pulls it away, still staring at Jamey intently. “Hey! Come on, Ferro!” Jamey shifts into his pleading tone more and more all the time. Ferro holds his arm high and outside the hot tub. “Keep away!” Ferro says, remembering how much he hated the boys who took his lunch pail and threw it back and forth and around the circle while he bellowed at them and ran at them. “Pansóna! Pansóna!” they’d yell. “Miss Big Belly! Miss Big Belly!” The nun in charge of the playground would snatch the lunch pail away from the others and send them to the mother superior’s office. But when they knew the old nun had turned back to the rest of the playground, the boys used to take mincing little steps, swivel their hips, or thrust their flat bellies out in front of them, mimicking Ferro.

Jamey has a perfect body. Ferro was not content with taking measurements. He bought the expensive coffee-table book of classical sculpture. Jamey is proportioned like the discus thrower. His belly is slightly concave. His buttocks are like BBs. In Tucson, Jamey stays tan year-round. The downy blond hair on his thighs and belly bleaches
platinum. Jamey’s eyes are deep blue, not pale, washed-out like Paulie’s eyes.