The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (38 page)

Root reached over the grimy sofa arm and switched on the lamp. “Who?”

“That blonde. The one that lost her kid. I hired her. Secretary. Nurse.” Lecha sat down on the sofa close to him and started rubbing up against him like a cat. Her eyes were glittering as if she was high on something. Whatever it was, it had aroused her. Still, she was quick to sense his mood. Lecha had not forgotten the months after the accident, and even after Root could again talk and walk. She had come into town
and found him sitting in the same ratty armchair or lying on the same sofa where she had last seen him two weeks before.

“So what’s this about? Business?” Lecha wasn’t going to let him forget that he’d told her she couldn’t stay there because of “business.”

“I was just thinking,” Root said.

Lecha raised her eyebrows the way Root often did, when he asked a question. “About how old you are getting. And how fat I’m getting,” Root joked.

“Wrong,” Lecha said. “You were thinking about your great-grandfather and all the money he made off the Apache Wars. You were wondering if the sins of the great-grandfather bash in the head of the great-grandson.”

Root looked closely at Lecha. “What are you on? I could use some.”

Lecha laughed and laughed. “Nothing!” she said in a light, young-girl’s tone, lying and hoping he’d let her get away with it. Lecha gave him a big kiss and then threw open the door of the trailer. She called out to the taxi driver that she’d be right there.

Root helped her wrestle the folded-up wheelchair down the trailer steps. The taxi driver couldn’t fit it in the trunk, which was already jammed full with Lecha’s suitcases and other luggage. Root knew Lecha was nervous about seeing Zeta, or maybe it was seeing her son, Ferro. Lecha had waited until she was high enough and had someone to go with her before she’d return to the ranch in the mountains. Lecha leaned out the window of the taxi. “Thanks, sweetie! Take care of that business now!” Root stood in the doorway of the trailer looking down at her. He nodded his head slowly.

AS THE TAXI LEFT HIM at the end of the driveway, Root thought he could see a darker form against the black silhouette of the big tamarisk tree in Calabazas’s yard. Root could hear kitchen sounds and a radio playing rock and roll from the front of the L-shaped adobe, and more distantly another radio playing
norteño
—accordions, trumpets,
and guitars that made a peculiar combination of Mexican Indian music and German polka. Root had never paid much attention to classes or teachers when he was in school, but he had never forgotten the color plate of Maximilian and Charlotte in their gold and jewel-crusted regalia as emperor and empress of Mexico. Blond and blue-eyed, they had been surrounded by legions of short, dark soldiers and honor guards. Maximilian collects insects. He has more and more sexual liaisons with servant girls; Charlotte becomes obsessed with ridding the castle of spiders and vermin. Maximilian sleeps on a billiard table.

Root could see the red ash on Calabazas’s cigarette. Calabazas had dragged two five-gallon buckets under the tree for them to sit on. When Root got close, Calabazas had shoved a bucket to him. Maximilian and Charlotte had got as far as any Germans were going to get with Mexican Indians. Charlotte went crazy; she kept trying to get maids and servants to kill the flies and spiders crawling and flying through the royal apartments. The chastised German ladies-in-waiting had complained to Maximilian. The Indians and mestizos refused to kill insects in the palace or the garden because spirits would be offended. When Maximilian began to execute palace chambermaids for spiders and flies found in the royal bedchamber, the days of their reign had been numbered.

Calabazas gazed toward the northwest at the quarter moon descending. They sat and smoked in silence. Finally Calabazas cleared his throat, then spit between his boots. “You two, where were you?”

“Racetrack. Getting high.”

“You saw—”

“Horses.”

“And Mosca?”

“He moves pretty fast.”

Calabazas nods and drops the burning butt between his legs, then grinds it flat with a bootheel. Root sees that Calabazas is drawing himself into his oratory posture. Calabazas calls it “Indian style” when he talks and talks before he turns at the last moment, to the point he wants Root to get. For a long time it drove Root crazy, and he wanted to yell at the old man to just tell him what it was, what was bothering him or what had gone wrong. But over the years Root had learned that there were certain messages in the route Calabazas took when he talked.

Calabazas lit up another cigarette and took a long drag before he started. He blew big smoke rings that tumbled toward Root’s face before they broke. “I was born here. My great-grandmother was born here.
Her grandmother was from the mountains in Sonora. Later the other Yaquis used to hide up there from the soldiers. I have to laugh at all the talk about Hitler. Hitler got all he knew from the Spanish and Portuguese invaders. De Guzman was the first to make lamp shades out of human skin. They just weren’t electric lamps, that’s all. De Guzman enjoyed sitting Indian women down on sharp-pointed sticks, then piling leather sacks of silver on their laps until the sticks poked right up their guts. In no time the Europeans wiped out millions of Indians. In 1902, the federals are lining Yaqui women, their little children, on the edge of an arroyo. The soldiers fire randomly. Laugh when a child topples backwards. Shooting for laughs until they are all dead. Walk through those dry mountains. Right now. Today. I have seen it. Where the arroyo curves sharp. Caught, washed up against big boulders with broken branches and weeds. Human bones piled high. Skulls piled and stacked like melons.

“Did the Jews know? Did the Americans know? So many Yaquis had fled north to settle here in Tuscon. But did anyone care when these reports were told?” Calabazas stands up, takes a last drag on the cigarette, then tosses the butt, ash glowing, into the center of the yard. He leaves Root sitting then returns carrying a small red ice chest. He offers Root a beer and opens one for himself. When Calabazas gets like this, he will talk all night. Root wonders if he can last. Somehow this day has wrapped up about five days in itself.

Root decides he will watch the tail of Scorpio. When the fourth star of the stinger drops below the horizon, he will tell Calabazas he needs to sleep. Calabazas doesn’t start talking again until he’s downed half of the first can.

“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that. And we carry a great many things back and forth. We don’t see any border. We have been here and this has continued thousands of years. We don’t stop. No one stops us. You have a working name. That’s nothing new. I made up my name.
Calabazas,
‘Pumpkins.’ That’s what you did. Invent yourself a name. See, my brothers and cousins at San Rafael grew them. Big beauties. A big river down there. Plenty of water for the pumpkins. I’d load up with
altar candles in little red glasses. My wife and my sisters-in-law would spend a week making big wreaths of paper flowers. Liria, my wife’s youngest sister, could make colored paper talk. Could make it sing. She had a crush on me. She made big orange squash and pumpkin blossoms—they looked so real that other people stared at me and my brothers when we spread them over our parents’ graves—how they admired the flowers Liria made!

“So there I’d be at the border crossing, the back of my old green Ford pickup loaded with candles and flowers and usually a goat or fat sheep for the feast. The guards on the Mexican side don’t care, hundreds of Yaquis crossed for the feast of All Souls. I never had any trouble. One time a goat tied in back got loose and ate all the paper-flower wreaths, but I’ve always had good luck. Right at sundown we’d cover the graves with flower wreaths and candles in the red glasses blinking. My sister-in-law and nieces would set out a bowl of goat stew at the head of each grave. We’d sit up at the graveyard drinking all night, listening to Uncle Casimiro’s claims that he’d talked to the souls, and they say they don’t know any more now than they did when they were alive.

“I don’t know. We live in a different world now. Liars and feebleminded are everywhere, getting elected to public office or appointed federal judge. Spoken words can no longer be trusted. Put everything in writing.

“I’m not saying where or how the marijuana was grown because it grows wild and always has. My brothers kept the pumpkin harvest in an adobe shed behind the house. I’m not saying where the
mota
was. I’m not even going to say which way we cut those
calabazas,
but while we worked in the shed, my sister-in-law and little nieces were cooking pumpkin soups and puddings. Roasting all those fat, yellow seeds.

“At the border I’d wait and cross with all the other Yaquis returning from All Souls’ Day. The U.S. only has a two-man station at Sasabe. They hated to see the Indians coming because they knew that meant rat-trap cars, pickups loaded down with pigs and firewood, corn and melons. The U.S. guards were on the alert for brothers and uncles hiding under firewood. They didn’t think we were smart enough to bring across anything else.

“So the first time I tried it everyone was skeptical. Except my family in San Rafael. Because
they
knew me. But my wife and her family—well, I had to prove myself. So the first time when I drove into the yard
back in Tucson, the back of my old truck was piled high with pumpkins, big and orange-red like full moons. Liria was watering the chrysanthemums and Liria yelled, “
Calabazas! Calabazas!”
when she saw my load. And from that time on, that’s what they call me. Younger generations don’t even know I have another name. The pumpkins—well, they were something special. Even in those days, what I sold that load for was a great deal of money. My wife’s family had to take notice.

“I married the wrong sister, but at least I married the right family. At one time they owned fields up and down the Santa Cruz River valley. They only saved a few fields after the outsiders came. That’s when our families were forced to find other ways to make a living. We have always had the advantage because this country is ours—it’s our backyard. We know it in the black of night. We know it in the July heat of hell. The gringos come in and the going for us gets rough. But we just get tougher. That’s how it’s always been.

“So now I get the drift of certain rumors,” Calabazas said, finishing a third beer. The moon was gone but the glow off the city lights and the mercury-vapor light down the driveway illuminated their faces. Root could see that Calabazas was trying to gauge how much he knew. Root wasn’t family. Wasn’t one of the nephews or a husband of a niece. Calabazas had hired Root because Root’s great-grandfather had hired him once. Calabazas used to laugh about the turnabout. It gave Calabazas great pleasure, and now it was causing him some doubt. Root looked right back at Calabazas. Calabazas could trust him or not.

Finally Calabazas said, “I don’t know what will become of an old man like me.” Calabazas had settled back with his head against the tree trunk, his eyes closed. “You—the only one that’s never wanted to be boss. All the rest, Mosca included, they have a dozen deals on the side so they can be making their own profits while I ride the risks.” Root nodded. The tail of the scorpion was the only star remaining above the horizon. Root felt sorry for Calabazas. Forty or fifty in-laws, cousins, and nephews had depended on Calabazas for as long as Root had known him.

“It’s Max Blue—with friends in high places.” Calabazas was referring to a specific cocaine route, the one used by the CIA.

That was the old story. But the new story traveled inside the bright blue Samsonite suitcases.

Calabazas wanted to keep what was his—all the years he’d worked with the Guatemalan and Salvadorian connections. Except now the pressure was on. “Your country boys with their brand-new suitcases, know
where they’re from? Did you see what they were carrying in the suitcases?”

Root shook his head. Root had pretended he did not understand whom they were looking for or what the transaction might be.

“I told them I have to think. I have to think about it.”

Root nods.

“Politics. It’s never helped any of us. But then here it is.”