The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (107 page)

“Oh, man, I was just a little baby! They had me sleeping in a banana box. It must have been cold, because they had me and the box up on a table or something in a kitchen.” Mosca claimed he could remember everything, even being born. Though he had only been an infant, had sensed something was watching him from the ceiling. The first of thousands of things Mosca would “see.”

Mosca had watched the steam rise off the Santa Cruz on mornings when cold mountain air settled over Tucson. He understood how the steam was the moisture of the river rising, so that you had a river running into the sky, in all directions of the winds—but also that these were the souls of the dead rising out of the purgatory where they’d been imprisoned hundreds and thousands of years waiting to be released so they could return to help their beloved descendants.

In the Sonoran desert foothills the winds were supernatural.
Los aires,
the air currents—tricky breezes, little updrafts, and ferocious jaws of downdrafts—that crushed small aircraft into the mountains. A sorcerer of some prowess could ensorcell a minor wind or strong breeze off a prominent mountain cliff. A sorcerer might grow rich and powerful if he could manage to secure just the right wind at just the strategic place. Naturally every sorcerer dreamed and bragged and schemed after the great winds—seldom seen except in sudden gusts that engulfed armies in desert sand or scuttled war fleets against coastal rocks.

One afternoon, the sky is overcast-gray, and damp heat is pushed ahead of big thunderclouds. Mosca is moody and strange. Root finds Mosca standing outside Calabazas’s house facing west. Thousands of waxy cottonwood leaves click together in the damp wind. Mosca does not acknowledge Root for a while, and then Mosca just starts talking about the souls of the dead. You can hear them, Mosca says, on rainy afternoons, summer or winter, because the dead souls are out on cloudy days to bring rain. “Dead souls are always near us,” Mosca continues, “watching over us.” The talk about spirits begins to excite Mosca. His dark eyes gleam as he gathers momentum. He says white people got the idea of guardian angels from the spirits who help us. Except the poor souls could not really “guard,” but they always accompanied you wherever you went. They came from the place of complete peace in which silence was the answer, and silence was truth.

“Dead souls stay near us, but they don’t break the silence,” Mosca said. Because talk was not necessary so long as you remembered everything
you knew about your ancestors. Because ancestor spirits had the answers, but you had to be able to interpret messages sent in the language of spirits.

Souls of the newly dead hover like gray and brown moths at the window screens and by doors of places they’d once lived. Newly dead, they have not yet learned the ways of the dead, so the dead souls cried piteously outside their houses. Europeans did not listen to the souls of their dead. That was the root of all trouble for Europeans. They never seemed to hear the cries of their dead swarming outside windows and doors of courthouses and office buildings whining for money they had not been able to take along with them. Mosca did not agree with what the communist priests and communist Indians from Mexico had said, but Mosca did agree the dead souls of Europeans cried out.

“We are outnumbered here!” was their message, endlessly, in the “séances” the Barefoot Hopi had conducted for them in prison. The Europeans not only did not feed the souls of their dead for four days afterward, family members took all things precious to the dead and scattered them. Thus Europeans were haunted by the dead in their dream life and were driven mad by the incessant cries of unquiet ancestors’ souls. No wonder they were such restless travellers; no wonder they wanted to go to Mars and Saturn.

Souls of the dead sometimes appeared as butterflies before a spring rain in the desert. Which dead souls brought blizzards and hailstorms and torrential rains that collapsed roofs and washed away garden seedlings? Calabazas wants to know. Mosca is more confident than Root has ever seen him. Mosca does not erupt in fury as he once had if anyone dared question one of his beloved theories. Dead souls that brought too much rain or too much of anything were suspected of working for sorcerers.

High plateaus and rugged mountain passes were hazardous. They were places to be avoided because where clouds were found, so were the souls of the dead. Wise travelers avoided mountain or high-land travel except in dry, cloudless weather because lightning, hailstorms, and sudden blizzards had trapped and frozen countless travelers before them. Mosca had heard the stories.

In a high mountain pass, stranded travelers huddled around a fire in darkness and blizzard. Then, on the edge of the light of the fire, through lacy veils of snow, the travelers made out a silhouette the shape of a horse. Bewildered, they staggered from their fire toward the white horse emerging from the blowing snow.

“Here!” Mosca said. “Here is the miracle of it: the Christ Child! The Holy Infant as a tiny baby, sitting astride a white horse!” When the infant smiled at them, the travelers saw the infant had a full set of teeth.

“ ‘Tengo los dientes,’
the Holy Infant said, and then rode away on the white horse into the snowy night.” Mosca smiled when he finished his story.

Liria had been listening from the kitchen. She shook her head. “That wasn’t the Christ Child! That was the Devil!” Liria started laughing. Mosca’s mouth tightened into a pout. Who asked her to butt in? Mosca demanded to know. Couldn’t anyone talk without someone listening in? What did she know anyway about the Infant Jesus? If He was God, He could have anything He wanted, including death on the cross and a white horse to ride as a baby.

Mosca hates Liria most at moments like that. Hates her laughing, hates her fucking her sister’s husband, hates her sister who fucks priests, hates the stiff-prick priests and their scandal of holy orders. Liria knows nothing. The Devil never rides white horses. Jesus had traveled the length and width of the continents called the Americas years before the Romans had directed the Jews to nail Him up on the cross. Jesus had been seen by the wandering tribes that walked the Great Plains. Jesus had been seen in Mexico. Liria and her sister were ruined by their mother, who had raised them to be white women. The Jesus they prayed to had blue eyes and blond hair.

Mosca had not always believed all the notions of the old tribal people, but he had seen for himself over the years the old people had told the truth.

Mosca’s body had been so full of natural electricity, he had never been able to wear a wristwatch of any kind because his body’s electricity interfered with the tiny watch mechanisms. Flocks of birds migrated thousands of miles and lizards communicated with one another using the same sort of electromagnetism. The circulation of the blood around and around a living body created electric current; moving electric currents in living bodies created a sort of magnetism. Performers and TV people were addicted to the jolts of electricity they got during performances in large stadiums with thousands and thousands of human bodies massed together to focus energy on a small stage. The barefoot Hopi had explained all this to Mosca while they’d shared a cell.

Mosca blamed his bad luck with women on what he called “too much electricity.” Women became uneasy around Mosca because he
aroused so much sexual desire in them whenever he was near. Unfortunately most women did not follow their instincts, but blamed Mosca for everything.

A few women had got so upset on first dates with Mosca they had even hallucinated what they heard Mosca say. Once Mosca had asked a date if she could see a clock; the woman had misunderstood and thought he said, “Can you suck my cock?” The woman had nearly jumped from the moving vehicle until Mosca’s denials had convinced her.

Mosca believed in the power of sunspots. Sunspots sent great waves of electromagnetism to collide with radio waves throughout the galaxy. Mosca had learned not to date women except in the “dark” of the moon. Otherwise, embarrassments and misunderstandings were certain to occur; even prostitutes had wild fantasies about someone loving and marrying them. Mosca would never get married; they’d have to shoot him first. Mosca had to remain absolutely free. He knew he had a higher calling than ordinary men.

Mosca could not make out what his special calling would be, but he could feel the revelation would arrive soon, a messenger was approaching. He wasn’t afraid to die. He knew the electricity that formed the soul merely escaped the body, and nothing was destroyed or lost. The dead remembered everything; the dead still loved us and watched over us. Mosca would never be lost to the people in their struggle; he would be with them, he would float around as spirit energy, giving jolts to the police, the military and the clergy.

A few nights later, Mosca had slept the wrong way on his neck. Next morning, to work the stiffness from his neck, Mosca was stretching his arms up over his head when suddenly he heard a strange sound. Then Mosca realized the sound was the cry of a spirit voice that had settled in his neck, near the base of his right shoulder. Before Mosca had left his house, he knew he would have to get advice from someone who knew about these voices because when he had tried to lift the coffeepot full of fresh water, there had been shooting pains and complete weakness in his right shoulder joint and forearm. He had been able to lift the coffeepot only with the greatest willpower and effort while a constellation of shooting pains shot like electrical charges up his arm and neck to the base of his brain.

Mosca went to consult an old woman who could talk to spirit voices. The old woman wanted fifty dollars to talk to the spirit in Mosca’s shoulder because the first statement the voice had made had been about
suffering and perhaps despair. Talk to dangerous voices cost more. Mosca had always been leery of “medicine people” he did not know; most of the good medicine people had already passed on. The only ones left called themselves healers, but they were mostly blackmailers and sorcerers. When Mosca told the old woman she charged too much, the old sorceress had begun to move her eyes up and down his body, slowly, like hot hands. She had lifted her skirts flirtatiously and said if she were not short of cash, she would have done it for free. He was in some danger, and she would hate to see him get hurt. The old woman had been a setback for Mosca; she had probably laid spells on him with lice larvae in his hair. The lice shampoo had turned his hair orange. Mornings came when Mosca had awakened with a great sadness he could not identify. Mosca felt a burden, not his alone—ancient losses, perhaps to war and famine long ago.

MOSCA HAD ABRUPTLY stopped snorting cocaine when the voice in his right shoulder had begun to speak. He had begun to smoke far more marijuana to “calm his nerves”; he ate a great deal of candy and ice cream, and suddenly Mosca could pinch little spare tires of fat from his belly.

Mosca had contacted his friend Floyd, in prison for life, to get the name of a reliable reader of body fat. Fat readers were virtually unknown outside the remote mountains of Chihuahua and Sonora. For too many years during the Spanish and Mexican occupations there had been no fat to read, only skin and bones of Indian corpses. Rumors and stories claimed that the remaining readers of fat had been enslaved or retained, often for life, simply to read the fat of the idle rich who were addicted to astrologists, faith healers, and mountain Indians who could “see” lucky numbers in the dimples and puckers of a client’s body fat.

Mosca had never seen a woman quite as fat or quite as majestic in his life. Immediately Mosca’s heart had begun to beat faster, and he could feel the fat reader was about to change his life. The fat reader had examined his hands first, and then she had touched his cheeks, forehead,
and chin. “You used to be skinny most of your life. Until now,” she had commented, as if to herself. “Take down your pants,” she said, and Mosca felt his face flush. When he hesitated, the fat reader had laughed; readers of fat, she said, preferred to read the belly, buttocks, or thighs of men and women both. Belly fat on a man means one thing; belly fat on a woman, however, means something quite different. Fat that has always been carried by a person tells a different tale than fat that appears suddenly. Fat that had been with a person all his life related to the past; fat that had appeared suddenly was related to events in the future.

The best readers of fat could tell a client a great deal more than winning lottery numbers. Fat readers were able to enhance and increase sexual pleasure by “talking to the fat” and massaging messages into the body. Belly fat increased the width and depth of the orgasm, pulsing showers of ecstasy reverberating in every cell; body fat was the great generator of sensual pleasure. Fat had its own timetable: first, relentless, consuming lust.

The fat reader had glanced at the television set in the corner of her consultation room, tuned without sound to the Telemundo station. She was still amazed, she said, at today’s people and their fear of body fat. The human body grew to the size necessary for its survival. Mosca was delighted the fat reader had interpreted the television news the same way she interpreted television commercials. The starvation of others had caused the killers to diet obsessively because they feared detection; they feared the starving would see how fat the rich had grown off their suffering. The rich dieted frantically lest one day they be killed for their fat by the starying people.