The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (39 page)

CALABAZAS WATCHES ROOT disappear into the shadows of the tall trees. He gets a last glimpse when Root steps through the silver disk the streetlight spreads at the curb. Each year one was alive, things got more complicated. In the beginning it had only been the border crossings and occasionally payments to a few border officials, and they had been cousins or kin. But more and more people came. More and more outsiders. They had only been slight obstacles, nothing more to Calabazas and his enterprises than a washout on a back road or a boulder slide in the center of an arroyo. There had always been alternative trails, or other maneuvers. Calabazas had always known they would never touch him unless they got inside. From the first moment Spanish ships scraped against the shore, they had depended on the native Americans. The so-called explorers and “conquistadors” had explored and conquered nothing. The “explorers” had followed Indian guides kidnapped from coastal villages to lead them as far as they knew, and then the explorers kidnapped more guides. The so-called conquerors merely aligned themselves with forces already in power or forces already gathered to strip power from rivals. The tribes in Mexico had been drifting toward political disaster for hundreds of years before the Europeans had ever appeared.

How many years had the U.S. army garrisoned five thousand troops
in Tuscon to chase one old Apache man, twenty-five or thirty teenagers, and fifty women and small children? When Geronimo had gone to Skeleton Canyon, he had gone under a white flag of truce, lured there by one of his most trusted lieutenants. Only by betrayal of the truce flag did the white men take him. Geronimo would never have been taken except with treachery.

It had taken Calabazas years to realize what the old scouts had seen fifty years before: the motives of outsiders and others were far more clear than the motives of friends and kin. They had lasted a long time together, Calabazas and Root. Sometimes Calabazas thought Root might have known more than he let on.

Calabazas had studied Root even before the accident, when Root had been smoking dope and riding motorcycles instead of going to school. White kid with Mexican and Indian second and third cousins. Root was tolerated because he had some of their blood. He was a second or third cousin but still a white boy. They never let him forget, but Root remained calm, as if those remarks only proved they had accepted him. Root liked to be the only gringo running with them. Root liked to be the only one people stared at or remembered.

Calabazas knew about Root’s mother and her mother too. The daughter of old Gorgon. How white their skin was! Nursemaids and servants had kept them all wrapped and veiled. They were not allowed to play with other children. Teachers were hired for the big house on Main Street. Root’s mother had rebelled when she was seventeen. The air force enlisted man she married had been the first man she dated. Calabazas had seen it happen many times. In time Root’s mother had come back around with the husband her mother called “trash,” much in the same way old man Gorgon had called all his daughters’ husbands “trash.”

The truth was that one could not trust a son or daughter. One could not trust a wife. Calabazas had decided to trust Root because he had a theory about this great-grandson of old Gorgon. Despite his blue eyes and light hair, Root was a throwback. Mosca was a different case. Calabazas had a good idea why Mosca had taken Root to the racetrack. Mosca was doing a little business of his own on the side. It might be nothing, but the racetrack was not a good sign.

The Italian families had been content to hide out, to “retire” to Tucson. Then the nephews and cousins had come West, and the racetracks and betting had come in. At first Calabazas and the old families
didn’t mind. They’d let the wops have the Thoroughbreds, greyhounds, and whores. Because Calabazas’s people did their best work in the desert mountains, and on the vast burning miles between Tucson and Sonora. Because it was the land itself, that protected native people. White men were terrified of the desert’s stark, chalk plains that seem to glitter with the ashes of planets and worlds yet to come. So these mafioso-pimp syndicates did not move beyond the city limits. The old people did not call the desert Mother for nothing; they did not cry in vain.

Once Liria had asked Calabazas what their protection was from outsiders, and he had pointed at the sun and then out at the creosote flats and rocky foothills of cactus and brush.

“We are safe for as long as we have all this,” Calabazas had told her, and at the time he said it, he had believed there could never be any end to it.

Now Calabazas realized he had finally lived so long that from then on, he would be seeing more endings than beginnings. He had heard the old men and old women in the village when he was a child. In the darkness after the sun had been down an hour or so, they’d begin talking about how things had once been. They’d say “before” the whites came we remember the deer were as thick as jackrabbits and the grass in the canyon bottoms was as high as their bellies, and the people had always had plenty to eat. The streams and rivers had run deep with clean, cold water. But all of that had been “before,” and Calabazas had, even as a child, grown to hate the word, the sound of that word in the mouths of the old ones, and he hated its sound in Spanish and finally in English too.

Calabazas had resented what sounded to him like whining and crying of the old folks during the long summer evenings. He did not want to know what had happened “before.” Young as he was and with as little as he knew about the killing of his people, Calabazas was part of the new generation that the old-time people had scolded for its peculiar interest in “now” and tomorrow.

Now that it was safe, Yaquis were returning for visits in the twilight of their days. They brought with them these stories of what was possible in the North, in Tucson.

Calabazas had leapt at the chance to go North. He had been fourteen or fifteen. He had been restless. The old uncle and aunt he lived with kept saying a wife would be the solution. But Calabazas had thought the solution lay in getting out of the village. The mountain village had
served as a sanctuary for a hundred years or so, but finally it was just a temporary refuge, and the people were anxious to get back to shallow, narrow rivers with the tall cottonwoods. The mountain village really mattered to only a generation or two who felt a great attachment and tenderness for sheer basalt ridges and thorny brush guarding the narrow trails to precipitous peaks. The contours and textures of the mountain had encircled the Yaquis in massive stone barricades that no white man’s army could penetrate. Calabazas knew his old uncle and aunt did not plan to leave because they felt loyalty for the ugly, barren mountain plateau. They wanted to be buried with their loved ones—beloved sisters and grandparents who had escaped the blood-drinking Beast to live out their last days in the high, rugged peaks.

Geronimo had spent the last half of his free life hiding in the high, rugged peaks of Sonora. He had made hits against the Mexican army on his way across the border to recruit unhappy kinsmen from the new reservations at San Carlos and the White Mountains. The Yaquis had been generous with their mountain sanctuaries and strongholds. Calabazas could remember himself the strange arrivals in the middle of the night, when he had been too young not to trust all that he had seen or heard. Nights when the village dogs gave only the low growls and whispering necessary to alert, and then had come low whispering, and from his bedroll in the corner he could press an eye to the little gap in the woven wall and see silhouettes of refugees from villages far away—loaded with bundles, the women weeping silently, dabbing at the corners of their eyes with the ragged edges of their shawls.

Years later after Calabazas had heard stories about the Apaches in Arizona at the same time the Yaquis were hiding in the high mountains. Yaquis liked to argue which groups had “it” the worst—the ones who stayed down with the land in the valleys or those who had gone to the mountain strongholds to fight. “We all fought,” old Mahawala liked to say after her first glass of beer. Calabazas always bought his aunt and uncle beer when he came home. And flashlight batteries.

“OF COURSE THE REAL MAN they called Geronimo, they never did catch. The real Geronimo got away,” old Mahawala said late one night when Calabazas was half-asleep. Although the small cook fire at their feet had died down to a few coals and there was no moon, he could still see the faces of these old-timers well enough in the light of the stars and the wide luminous belt of the Milky Way. High in the mountains, the old ones claimed they were that much closer to the clouds and the winds. They claimed people of the mountain peaks got special attention from the planets and moon. Calabazas had looked at each face trying to determine in an instant if this was a joke or not. Because if it was a joke and he appeared to take it seriously, they would have him. And if it wasn’t a joke, and he laughed, they would have him too. But when Calabazas realized the old ones were serious about this Geronimo story, he had given in.

Old Mahawala started out, and then the others, one by one, had contributed some detail or opinion or alternative version. The story they told did not run in a line for the horizon but circled and spiraled instead like the red-tailed hawk. “Geronimo” of course was the war cry Mexican soldiers made as they rode into battle, counting on help from St. Jerome. The U.S. soldiers had misunderstood just as they had misunderstood just about everything else they had found in this land. In time there came to be at least four Apache raiders who were called by the name Geronimo, either by the Mexican soldiers or the gringos. The tribal people here were all very aware that the whites put great store in names. But once the whites had a name for a thing, they seemed unable ever again to recognize the thing itself.

The elders used to argue that this was one of the most dangerous qualities of the Europeans: Europeans suffered a sort of blindness to the world. To them, a “rock” was just a “rock” wherever they found it, despite obvious differences in shape, density, color, or the position of the rock relative to all things around it. The Europeans, whether they spoke Spanish or English, could often be heard complaining in frightened
tones that the hills and canyons looked the same to them, and they could not remember if the dark volcanic hills in the distance were the same dark hills they’d marched past hours earlier. To whites all Apache warriors looked alike, and no one realized that for a while, there had been three different Apache warriors called Geronimo who ranged across the Sonoran desert south of Tuscon.

Strategists for both the Yaquis and the Apaches quickly learned to make use of the Europeans’ inability to perceive unique details in the landscape. Although the Indians hired as scouts by the white armies were not so easily fooled, still the confusion of the white officers and their arguments with the scouts time and again gave the Apache and Yaqui women and children opportunities to escape their pursuers. The trick was to lead the chase to rocky terrain cut by narrow, deep arroyos. The longer the soldiers rode up and down the steep terrain, the more exhausted and afraid they became.