The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (30 page)

ROOT’S MOTHER had been engrossed in forcing her simple husband to live up to the name of the family he’d married into. Root liked to say that his father had lasted long enough to sire eight of them, and then he had dropped dead. Driven to death just as old Gorgon was supposed to have driven a team of mules to death, explaining later that the mules were worn-out and used up, and he had a chance to close a big business deal in Nogales if he was willing to press the mule team harder. Root was always bitter when he talked about his father and mother. Root preferred to say that all his family had died in his accident. That the instant his skull had bounced off the car bumper, mother, grandmother, sisters, and brothers died. When he woke up months later, each one had to be introduced to him, and the night after meeting his
mother and the rest, Root had cried himself to sleep in the hospital room. “Because,” Root told Lecha, “I knew they weren’t really my family. All they cared about was how much I was going to cost them, and whether I was going to mean extra work for anyone.”

Lecha had noticed Root right away because he had looked at her defiantly as he kick-started his motorcycle and had then roared around Calabazas’s big yard in mad circles until the corralful of burros and mules threatened to stampede. Then, calculating just the point before Calabazas would come out of the house yelling, Root had turned off the engine and glided his motorcycle back to its place under the big cottonwood tree.

Lecha had let Root fuck her the first few times because he had a crush on her and he was wild and young. She told him he had a lot to learn. Meaning that he couldn’t get it in without its spewing all over the sheets. But after he got out of the hospital, six months after the accident, with slurred speech, a leg that dragged, Root had stayed hard no matter how long she fucked him. In those days Lecha had not thought twice about the men she was fucking. There were too many to think about. But the few times she had been in the mood, she had got his phone number from Calabazas, because Root worked full-time for him by then. Calabazas had hired him for many reasons as it turned out. One was old Gorgon had once hired Calabazas many years before. But the main reason was Root’s brain damage made a perfect front for them. Root took day and night classes at the community college. He carried gram packets of cocaine in the plastic pencil bag hooked inside his loose-leaf notebook. He used the pauses and slurs to his advantage. In the college snack bar joking with classmates after class, or with the narcotics officers who tried to shake him down. Root could deliver a punch line or an insult with mock innocence, to force strangers to realize that even with only part of a brain, he was smarter and quicker than they were. He was going to school to learn to read and write all over again, Root liked to tell undercover cops, to get them off his trail. He had enrolled in speech therapy class every semester but never attended. “I didn’t want,” he’d say, slowly forming each word, “I didn’t want to spoil a good thing like this with speech therapy.” Root would laugh, and Lecha realized he meant he had finished with the world where those things mattered.

Lecha let the blue silk kimono slip open to see what he’d do. But Root was intent on pinning down her illness. She’d called him collect from a phone booth at the airport in Miami. She had not intended to
mention the illness, but Root had sounded short, a little irritated by the collect call. So she said, “I’ve got cancer, and I’m dying.” Root had only grunted, but then at the airport he met her with roses. Until then Root had never bought her anything except taxi rides. When Lecha left Tucson, she had not thought about seeing him again. She had not thought about Root at all, except when she saw cripples or people with palsy, and then she would merely wonder what he was up to and forget him again. But when she began making stopovers and short stays in Tucson, she found she could depend on Root. He had an account with Yellow Cab, and although he only rented house trailers, they were always clean and she had always had a place to sleep and more if she wanted. Root always took the mangled motorcycle with him when he moved and parked it outside the rented trailers. He said he kept it to remind him where he’d been and where he’d come back from. A Plymouth bumper two inches into his skull had not stopped him the message ran, so the punks better think twice about pushing him around.

“You can’t stay here,” Root says slowly, peeling at the beer label with one finger.

“Because of that woman?”

Root shakes his head. “Business,” he says, reaching over to pat Lecha’s bare thigh.

That was okay because Lecha had to see Zeta and Ferro sooner or later. It might as well be sooner. At the ranch she would not be hounded by hysterical blondes who had seen her on daytime television. “I wonder what she wanted.”

“Who?”

“That woman.”

“Someone who knows Cherie.”

“Cherie?”

“Cherie is all right,” Root answers. “She’s a dancer at the Stage Coach.”

Lecha looks down at her own tit dangling out of the blue kimono. She hefts it in one hand the way she’s seen strippers display themselves. “An old potato,” Lecha says. “More like an old cantaloupe,” Root says, taking her breast in both hands, pretending he wants to make a meal of it. She slides down on the sofa and the kimono falls away; even the long, full sleeves slide off. When Root was in his twenties, and even into his early thirties, he had been her slave. He would have done anything she asked. But now Root had said “business,” and he had meant it. Lecha had always made it a practice to avoid calendars and clocks except
where business required them. Because they were not true. What was true was a moment such as this, warm sweat sliding over their bellies so smoothly that despite everything, the size of Root’s beer belly or her old full-moon ass, the connection was as hot as it had ever been, the charge bolted through like lightning. Let the years dry up the cantaloupes or potatoes as long as there’s still the electricity.

SEESE IS ANXIOUS to begin working with Lecha immediately to transcribe and type the old notebooks and papers. Certain answers lie within the ragged, stained pages. Answers to problems and questions Lecha must have before they begin the search for Monte. But once Lecha has settled into her big bed, she announces work on the old notebooks and papers must not interfere with work that “brings home the bacon.”

Seese learns to sort the mail into two categories: new business and old. Old business consisted of the successful clients still sending Lecha money orders and cashier’s checks with letters that thanked Lecha again and again. New business wasn’t so easy. Reading the letters had coiled the old sadness tight in her chest, and she had been shocked how easily she had returned to vodka and cocaine in her bedroom.

Nothing prepares Seese for the phone calls she must transcribe. A woman calls long distance from Florida. Her voice starts out clear and in control, but grief pushes to the surface, and when she gets to the color of the T-shirt, she gasps as if there is no more air in her lungs: “I know I should remember which one it was, but he was always changing clothes all day, you know. He liked to put on the Snoopy T-shirt, but then after “Sesame Street” he liked the one with the little Grover puppet on it.” The woman agonizes over the color of the T-shirt she can not remember, worn by the child she will never see again. The woman describes the sneakers over and over again—blue Keds—repeating details again and again as if to prove to herself she had been a good mother although her child is gone. They called. They sent cash and an article of the missing person’s clothing or a stuffed toy.

Even with cocaine again, Seese can’t bear transcribing the phone calls. Lecha claims she enjoys talking on the telephone. Seese grits her teeth and slashes open envelopes with Lecha’s Mexican dagger.

Seese had only read a dozen or so plea letters before she read the letter that stopped her. Without a greeting, date, or return address, a big manila envelope had come registered and certified first class. “Right there you know you got something happening,” Lecha alerted Seese.
Happening
meant a cashier’s check had also fallen out of a wad of typewritten pages. Anything over $500 American in new business had to be carefully considered. Every fragment, scrap, and dim memory the client might have must be meticulously reported. Lecha said they had to stop the telephone calls because no check or money order fell out of the phone.

The letters and messages Lecha got had been the exact opposite of nightmares or daydreams. The letters were invariably lists of facts, recitations of precise locations at hours and minutes of specific months and days: height, weight, eye and hair color, descriptions of birthmarks, jewelry, and clothes. From the facts Lecha’s task was to find the appropriate or accurate emblems or dreams. Lecha said the world had all it ever needed in the way of figures and facts anyway. Lecha admitted it was difficult to understand. A matter of faith or belief. Knowledge. Or maybe grace. Something like that. Lecha only had to slit open an envelope or listen to a recording of a long-distance phone message, and suddenly she would seize the tin ammo box full of crumpled pages and notes and sift them carefully until a single word or a short phrase revealed “the clue” to her.

Seese must remember it was only a “clue.” No one but the client would ever be able to understand fully the clue’s meaning. On occasion Lecha had reluctantly agreed to accept yet another fee to determine for the client the message or clue. More risk was involved in reading the clue. There were all kinds of reasons for this. Seese nodded. It was all right with Seese if Lecha sent clients weird or unintelligible messages. As long as everyone understood.

Any psychic worth her salt knew even before she opened an envelope the nature of the message inside. Words inscribed by terrified, haunted people in nightmare hours after midnight were useless and often misleading. It didn’t matter what the letters or messages said. Each story had many versions. Had Seese heard about Freudian theory? Seese nodded. Lecha had got herself warmed up. Freud had interpreted fragments—images from hallucinations, fantasies, and dreams—in terms
patients could understand. The images were messages from the patient to herself or himself.

Lecha continued with her crackpot theories: Freud had sensed the approach of the Jewish holocaust in the dreams and jokes of his patients. Freud had been one of the first to appreciate the Western European appetite for the sadistic eroticism and masochism of modern war. What did Seese think Jesus Christ symbolized anyway?

Nothing had prepared Seese for the work on Lecha’s notebook. Lecha insists that Seese type up each and every letter or word fragment however illegible or stained. Lecha wants her personal notebook transcribed and typed because it is necessary to understanding the old notebooks Yoeme left behind. Lecha tells Seese not to be disappointed. The old notebooks are all in broken Spanish or corrupt Latin that no one can understand without months of research in old grammars. Lecha had already done translation work, and her notebooks contained narratives in English.

Lecha’s Notebook

After days of searing heat the Earth no longer cools at night. The wind carries away the heat for a few hours, and by dawn the air is motionless, and a faint warmth emanates from luminous pale ridges of limestone and tufa. The lower skirts of leaves of jojoba and brittle bushes are parched white and shriveled from drought.

What can you tell by the color of their eyes?

Dead children were eaten by survivors during times of great famine.

Late August afternoon wind stirs a blue wash of rain clouds over the edge of the southwest horizon. Humidity increases. The paloverde’s thin, green bark glows with moisture off the ocean wind from Sonora.

Meaning lies in the figures and colors of the killer’s tattoos. Meaning lies in the particular disarray of the victim’s underclothes.

The killer’s blue eyes dilate with rage so the victim sees only the empty blackness of her own grave. The killer keeps victims long enough to wash and curl their hair, and to clean and paint the victim’s finger and toenails with pink polish sold at thousands of drugstores.