The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (83 page)

El Feo liked the woman on top so he could look over her shoulder at the faint glow of tiny human souls awaiting conception in the ceiling rafters overhead. Souls of children who died before their second year
remained nearby, hovering in cracks of the ceiling; homes of sorcerers were barren. Sorcerers captured only the souls of adults or children over two. El Feo and Angelita don’t talk. They have food and sex together twice a day, that’s all. She does the talking. El Feo had given up on talk years ago. He had thought he was through with fucking too, but sometimes El Feo was wrong in his predictions. This woman had chosen him. He had not done the choosing. All his life El Feo had been the one chosen.

The one chosen would be asked to do special favors for the whole group; late at night, at the end of the party, the ones who had been chosen would be asked to carry back gifts for others or to take special messages.

El Feo left the fund-raising and the gifts from all “the friends of the Indians” to Angelita, who did not mind the politics or politicians. Tribal leaders as far away as Nicaragua had heard of that woman who knew how to get the goods for the Indians. All sources of “direct” and “humanitarian” aid were known to Angelita; one week she would be gone, and the next week she would return, with little Korean vans to transport the village “baseball teams.” Her secret had been simple: the world over—from foreign governments to multinational corporations—they all wanted to be called “friends of the Indians.” They had just witnessed the bloody end of European control in South Africa. They had watched the tribes of Africa retake the land from Europeans; in the Americas they might have another fifty years or even one hundred, but time was running out. The Indians had risen up in Peru with the Shining Path. Everyone wanted to be “friends of the Indians”—the Japanese and Koreans as well as the Germans and Dutch. There were “friends of the Indians” all around the Persian Gulf.

Angelita had sent El Feo down into Tuxtla to get reports from Tacho. Tacho was ears and eyes for them. They kept track of General J. and the “security forces,” as well as the police chief and the others in El Grupo.

TACHO HAD WORKED A LONG TIME to gain the boss man’s trust; he had spent months pretending to be interested in Menardo’s endless dreams; Tacho had not told Menardo the truth about the dreams and had instead substituted lucky numbers. Tacho had himself dreamed on the same night. Menardo’s dreams had been full of numbers, but all of them had added up to less than zero. Tacho did not care if he had given away lucky numbers he might have sold or bet himself. Guacamaya, the Blue Macaw, who had taught humans to talk, had taught Tacho the use of luck with numbers. Oh, gamblers might rush out and bet lucky numbers from dreams, but they paid a price; there was always a trade-off. Gamblers who got lucky numbers lived short lives. Tacho had been taught by the macaw spirits to look for numbers that kept bullets from their mark or numbers that kept disease or sorcery from one’s bed.

The boss’s dreams had been the worst dreams; even the slow-witted boss had understood that his days were numbered. Tacho traced Menardo’s decline to the visit by the
norteamericano
who had given the boss the bulletproof vest. Tacho had watched the boss’s wife as she studied the
norteamericano
talking with her husband beside the pool. Tacho had seen her look at the boss with the same attention the last year the “old Señora” was alive; now that Alegría had the boss, she was already looking for another man. Tacho had to be careful because the boss’s new wife was quick to detect spies; Alegría was far more clever than the first Señora had been.

Tacho had guessed from the start the house the boss had been building was for this Alegría, not for the barren wife. Now Menardo had his mansion of white marble and his pool of water lily blossoms; on the ironed linens of his king-size bed, Menardo, the mestizo, savored the luscious fruit of a skinny white woman. Menardo had General J.
for a business partner and the former ambassador and the governor for country club pals. But Menardo’s dreams were the dreams of a man soon to die; in Menardo’s nightmare, the white lines of the highway suddenly became a giant snake that exploded into bloody flesh beneath the wheels of the speeding car. Menardo had awakened from the dream screaming, soaked in cold sweat. He had changed his pajamas, but the lining of the bulletproof vest had remained damp.

Menardo had discovered then, he could not fall asleep unless he wore the bulletproof vest. Even the strongest sleeping pills failed Menardo after a few hours, leaving him groggy and sick with anxiety until he put on the vest.

Tacho had been amused by Menardo’s pathetic attempts to interpret the nightmare as a “good luck” sign from the Blessed Virgin, sometimes shown crushing the head of Satan, the serpent. Menardo worries the dream may be the Blessed Virgin’s warning about assassins throwing bombs under the wheels of the car. For an instant Menardo catches Tacho’s eye in the rearview mirror and Tacho sees Menardo’s fear: “I still feel its flesh under the car—the tires sinking into slime.” Menardo opened the tiny liquor cabinet in the backseat, poured himself a glass of brandy, and said nothing more.

Dream of the cuckolded husband; dream of the
double-cuckolded
husband; besides Bartolomeo, the communist, Tacho knew the
norteamericano
had fucked the boss’s new wife too. Tacho had lied and made up winning numbers for Menardo at the horse races. He never gave any client the numbers to win all the races; word got out and they started to follow you, or worse, other gamblers tried to kill you. Tacho gave Menardo some winning numbers to fool him; Tacho wanted Menardo to keep dreaming nightmares and to keep telling Tacho his dreams.

Next Menardo had dreamed of sea turtles torn loose from their broken shells, bloody and dying; later the same night, Menardo had dreamed of two men who stood on a bridge and dropped a pistol into the brownish water. Tacho had been delighted with the information he obtained from Menardo’s dreams; Menardo had been talking to the
norteamericano
without General J.’s permission; Menardo feared the general would have him murdered. Menardo had seen the general’s notorious videotapes of intelligence interrogations; the turtle shells peeled bloody from live flesh were a reference to the torturers who removed fingernails and toenails.

EL FEO AND ANGELITA had organized their village defense units along the same order as the village baseball teams. Priests and other missionaries had been fooled by the devotion and enthusiasm the Indians showed for baseball; what the outsiders did not realize was each baseball team was composed of males of the same clans. Thus the priests and government authorities had failed to realize that baseball practices and baseball games were opportunities for more than mere sport and amusement. Tacho had listened to his brother and the woman relate the long, complicated stories, the alibis and excuses necessary to persuade foreign governments to send Indian villages direct aid of baseball uniforms and cases of dynamite. The dynamite, they lied, was for clearing land for new baseball diamonds. Tacho had told El Feo and the wild woman Angelita what he thought: if even the lowest police louse got wind that baseball teams were secret guerrilla units, then all of them were going to be ground into bloody pulp by the federal police and the military.

Tacho had gathered the information they had requested because he liked the tingle in his balls when he lifted the telephone receivers to hear the boss talk to the police chief or the general. He could hear them discuss the “solutions.” Universal Insurance’s clients were urged to telephone the boss at the first sign of worker unrest. With Tacho’s information, El Feo and Angelita had been able to deduce weak links and spies within the villages. Tacho had listened as the boss ordered Universal Insurance Company’s security forces to coffee plantations to sweep the surrounding hills of Indian squatters, their shanties, and their gardens. Over and over it happened; the squatters dragged together debris for shacks and scratched out small garden plots. Then armed “security guards” trampled the gardens and burned the shacks. The strategy of the squatters was simple: make a thing unprofitable and watch the white man leave. Over and over; again and again the squatters had reappeared in other locations. The land was theirs and they knew it. Tacho had listened as businessmen whined to Menardo about expenses, and costs. The Indians were worse than insects; it cost the squatters nothing to
breed and to swarm over the land, while a unit of five security specialists with weapons and one vehicle cost hundreds per day. For swarms of squatters, Indians thicker than weeds, Menardo had developed more economical methods: Universal Insurance sent a crop-dusting plane to dump insecticide and herbicide on the squatters. Luckily crop-dusting planes flew low and were easy for snipers to shoot down. Tacho wasn’t interested in being squashed like a flea with the others; Tacho was happy to leave the teams and units and chains of command to El Feo and Angelita. Himself, Tacho was at work on the boss man’s dreams. Tacho’s strategy was to let the dogs turn on one another. Tacho was learning patience; the macaws did not always speak clearly to him. The macaws said the battle would be won or lost in the realms of dreams, not with airplanes or weapons.

In the old days the Twin Brothers had answered the people’s cry for help when terrible forces or great monsters threatened the people. The people had always feared the Destroyers, humans who were attracted to and excited by death and the sight of blood and suffering. The Destroyers secretly prayed and waited for disaster or destruction. Secretly they were thrilled by the spectacle of death. The European invaders had brought their Jesus hanging bloody and dead from the cross; later they ate his flesh and blood again and again at the “miraculous eternal supper” or Mass. Typical of sorcerers or Destroyers, the Christians had denied they were cannibals and sacrificers. Tacho had watched enough television and movies to realize those who secretly loved destruction and death ranged all over the earth.

The old parrot priests used to tell stories about a time of turmoil hundreds of years before the Europeans came, a time when communities had split into factions over sacrifices and the sight and smell of fresh blood. The people who went away had fled north, and behind them dynasties of sorcerer-sacrificers had gradually taken over the towns and cities of the South. In fact, it had been these sorcerer-sacrificers who had “called down” the alien invaders, sorcerer-cannibals from Europe, magically sent to hurry the destruction and slaughter already begun by the Destroyers’ secret clan.

Tacho himself had tried to avoid the spirits. He had heard others complain the spirits demanded too much, cost too much, because nowadays people did not bother to look after the departed souls of their own family and relatives. Younger people refused, saying they didn’t want to take money or the time away from their jobs in the fields. But one day two big blue macaws had appeared in the tree by his door, and
it was too late; the macaw spirits had chosen Tacho as their servant. What did the spirits expect? What did they want from people who were working all day and part of the night and still they were starving? The duties of the macaw servant were innumerable; all requests, warnings, and orders from the macaws had to be obeyed, no matter what was asked. Tacho had to guard the macaws from parrot traders and common thieves, who might shoot them for their feathers. Fortunately, the birds had a big tree by the garage where no parrot traders or thieves could get near thanks to the latest in security forces and technology.

When the spirits called, Tacho had to go to them; their name for him was Wacah. Tacho had to sit for hours on end under the big tree, or sometimes he parked the Mercedes there while he polished it so he could listen to the birds. The macaws had come with a message for humans, but it would take a while for Tacho to understand. The macaws had been sent because this was a time of great change and danger. The macaw spirits had a great many grievances with humans, but said humans were already being punished and would be punished much more for their stupid human behavior. He no longer thought about anyone—not his parents or his twin, El Feo. He had not thought about the village. Tacho had cleared his mind and his heart of all others so he could understand what was going to happen next.