The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (32 page)

In the beginning Ferro had compared the two of them because he could not quite believe he had settled for Paulie when something so much finer had been available. But now he has nearly forgotten that Paulie had been his lover.

Ferro takes another snort and then pretends to toss it over to Jamey. But his throw is purposely wide and the little glass vial sinks in the water. “Ferro!” Jamey can sound almost like a girl. Ferro had never let on where the cocaine comes from. The glass vial is Jamey’s. Jamey claims the money is from his family for college expenses, though Jamey never attends class. Ferro sells him the best because Ferro knows he will be using it too. Occasionally Ferro will bring a gram or two for all-night sex, but generally he likes to see Jamey buy it from him. Jamey is shaking. His pretty face is flushed and Ferro can see tears in his eyes. “It was nearly full! That’s a whole gram. Why did you do that?” Ferro raises up and the water level in the hot tub falls so low he can almost see Jamey’s neat little navel. Jamey trails after him, asking, “Why?” Ferro glances at his wristwatch on the marble shelf by the sink, then gets into the shower. He has two hours to get to the hills for the drop. Before he leaves Jamey’s apartment he reaches into his coat pocket and tosses a full vial of pink flake on the pale blue carpet. Jamey looks at it and then at him. But before Jamey can speak, Ferro is out the door.

PAULIE IS PARKED by the exit ramp with the hood of the jeep raised. Ferro gets out of the Lincoln and pretends to be untangling battery jumper cables. Paulie lifts the hood of the Lincoln briefly, slams it shut. Ferro slams down the jeep hood and jumps in. Paulie drives. Zeta’s cardinal rule is no radios or electronic linkups of any kind. The back of the jeep is full of camera equipment and a telescope. Under it all in a telescope case there is a .223 with an infrared scope. There are two .357 magnums in the glove compartment. Paulie drives around a foothill subdivisions for a while. Ferro tries to get a good look at his
face whenever they pass under a mercury-vapor light at an intersection. Ferro detects a difference in Paulie now that Jamey is his lover. Paulie senses the scrutiny and turns to look Ferro straight in the eyes.

“I was just seeing you in thirty years. How your face will be. A hook—a beak nose,” Ferro says. Paulie guns the jeep and turns onto the pipeline road. Ferro continues to study Paulie’s profile.

The flesh sinks away and the bones rise up. That had been Ferro’s experience. In the old two-story house in Sonora with whitewash smeared over clay plaster that peels away from the adobe bricks. Whitewash everywhere—covering the wood planks and pillars of the long porch. Ferro remembers playing with chunks of white clay. Rubbing it over his hands and arms to make himself lighter. Inside the argument among the women continues for days. He thinks there is a baby in the room next to the kitchen. Cries come from behind the low wooden door, and the women arguing at the kitchen table all jump up together and rush into the room. Ferro knows that the imbecile cousins must have been around then, but does not recall seeing any of them. He had not thought of that trip to Mexico for many years and could not remember much anyway. Except that Zeta had let him order a tuna fish sandwich at the dirty café along the highway. The door of the café had been set inside a giant longhorn steer skull that rose twenty feet above the roof of the little cinder-block building. When Ferro had seen the giant steer skull, he had cried that he was hungry and that he had to go to the bathroom. Zeta had already been full of fury before they left home, and Ferro had pressed himself into the farthest corner of the big backseat of the Hudson. All he could remember about the door in the steer skull was the disappointment as he walked through. It was a dirty-white screen door and nothing of the giant steer skull could be seen. The tuna fish had been bad, and all the way from Tubac to the border he had been carsick. Or maybe it had been too hot. Zeta had not believed in air-conditioning of any kind.

Zeta had seldom taken him on any of her business trips. She had told him that children did not belong on business trips. The nuns at the school did not seem to understand how a woman could have business trips, and for a long time Ferro had not trusted her. He had decided that she simply did not want him along. But when he got older and she began to put him to work, and he started to realize what the business was, he had suddenly felt bad for not trusting her. It was dangerous business. It wasn’t any place for a little child. When she went away on her business trips, the nuns kept him with the other boarding students.
He would be one of the youngest, but they gave him a tiny room alone, not in the dorm with the others. The tiny room was between the rooms of the school principal and the old nun who cooked. Zeta had seldom left him with the nuns for more than a week, but it had always been terrifying. The others hated him even more when he slept in the little room. It had belonged to the old sister, the one who had died before Ferro came to school. The others reported that all the nuns were afraid to take that room because old Sister Maria Jose’s ghost had not gone to heaven but was occupying that room while she served out her time in purgatory. The stories had kept him paralyzed with terror all night. He had lain there thinking about his real mother then. He had lain there hating her with all his might. He had hated her more than he had feared dying with a mortal sin on his soul. Zeta had told him she did not know where her sister was. Zeta did not apologize or try to tell him that his mother loved him but was unable to take care of him. And yet Ferro had never known why Lecha had abandoned him. He only knew that his aunt did not raise him out of maternal love but out of duty. Ferro had seen how Zeta had cast off “business associates” after one mistake. So Ferro knew that something about his mother was special and that made him special. But it had never stopped him from hating her, with all his being.

•   •   •

At the old house in Sonora, Ferro had been obsessed with the stairs to the second floor, and with the second-story porch where he could drop his little metal horses and soldiers to the ground. He loved the stairs and the height because none of the houses he had ever been in had had a second floor. Most of Tucson was flat. He had so many aunts he could not keep them straight. They all looked alike to him. They were arguing over the big house and over who should have what.

Zeta had told him to stay at the house. They had crowded into the big green Hudson. The instant Ferro had seen the car go over the sandy hill he crept inside. He tiptoed to the little wooden door to the room off the kitchen. He listened for a long time. He did not know much about babies, but he also knew that mothers of his schoolmates never left babies without asking someone to look in on them. Finally he had slowly and carefully turned the cutglass knob. He did not breathe as he opened the door just a crack. What he saw were two glittering black eyes watching him from a baby crib. Just as he was trying to figure out why the eyes did not seem like the eyes of other babies he had seen, the strange baby raised up and caused the crib to shake and bump the wall.
At that instant the paralysis he suffered sleeping in the ghost nun’s bedroom afflicted his legs and hands. He watched in horror as two long-fingered, bony hands grabbed the top rail of the crib and the big head with the glittering black eyes hung over the top rail. The mouth had four huge, yellow teeth. The big bony head spoke in Spanish first, and when Ferro did not move, it brought out a few English words, but still Ferro did not move. The white hair had been cut short and stuck out around the skeleton face like dry weeds. Then Ferro had heard it call his name, softly at first and then gradually louder until it made his own name into a cry. He had pulled the door shut then and had started running for the beach although Zeta had forbidden him to go to the ocean alone. He ran and ran, imagining that the skeleton man was dragging himself over the edge of the crib and then along the brick floor to the porch.

When Zeta finally came for him, it was late afternoon. She drove the car only as far as the first sand dune and then began honking the horn. Ferro had been sitting with his back to the sea, watching the crest of the dunes for the appearance of the skeleton man. The tide was coming in, and as he moved to avoid getting wet, he had begun to feel a slow panic. Before long, the ocean would push him to the base of the high dune where the skeleton man could suddenly come rolling down to catch Ferro.

Ferro stood in front of the car and stared at Zeta. He was trying to see if she was going to whip him with the hairbrush in her purse. But she was in a hurry and gestured for him to hurry and get in. When he got in the backseat, Zeta put the car in reverse, then stopped and told him to get out and shake the sand from his cuffs and to empty his shoes. Something about having to untie his shoes made him want to cry. But he clapped his jaws together and did as he was told. Zeta told him to hurry, he could always put his shoes back on while they were driving.

Zeta had never talked much. She preferred to be left alone with her scheming and thinking, that was what Ferro had figured out later. As a child he had simply known that unlike his schoolmates and their mothers, he and Zeta did not say much to each other. They spoke only when it was absolutely necessary. Ferro had come to prefer silence just as she did. He had come to believe that talk was cheap. That it was common. That was what was best about Paulie. Nothing needed to be said.

THE KEY to this drop point is the Marana Air Park across the mountain from the gas line. The subdivisions inch out from the Santa Cruz River along Ina Road. But the people living in the area are used to the small-aircraft traffic that begin landing approaches here, and they don’t notice takeoff accelerations and airplanes climbing as they cross the foothills. Ferro learned from Zeta, and Zeta would not say, but Ferro thought she had learned from Calabazas and the other old-timers.

At sundown they spotted a small white Cessna that appeared to be gaining altitude slowly. The steel canister had landed at the edge of the gasline road four hundred yards away. The dull gray color of the metal was almost invisible in the twilight. Ferro continued setting up the tripod, and Paulie brought out the telescope. Although they appeared to be concentrating on the telescope, they were straining to pick up sounds that might indicate people in the area—horseback riders, hikers, or kids on dirt bikes. They never repeated the pattern of any drop, although it required much more planning. It was a simple matter to avoid the radar along the border by flying the plane a hundred feet above the mesquite groves. But Ferro had made it his job to continually invent new occasions and new opportunities to move the goods across the border. Lately prices had been down and Zeta had talked about trading arms and explosives instead of cocaine.

As the twilight darkened and Venus flared brighter in the lens of the telescope, Ferro told Paulie to go ahead. Ferro rested the .223 with the infrared scope across the hood of the jeep. He followed Paulie in the scope, occasionally scanning ahead and behind him, and all around the paloverde tree where the canister had bounced and rolled.

The easiest drops were also the most dangerous. Lately there had been a new kind of pressure. Not from the drug agents, but from the new kid in town, as Ferro liked to call him. Sonny Blue wasn’t new, but what he seemed to be trying was new. Content for many years to leave the drug trade with Mexico to the old families such as theirs and
Calabazas, suddenly Max Blue and his people had begun to make moves.

The canister rode in the corner of the backseat of the jeep. Paulie had already smeared motor oil on the canister. It could have passed for a five-gallon fuel can. It might have been a waterproof case for telescopic lenses. Paulie dropped Ferro at his car. When Ferro pulled onto Interstate 10, his windbreaker was zipped over his massive belly and hips. The black rubber body belt had uncoiled from the canister like a jungle snake after a heavy meal. Ferro never felt happier than when he wore the black rubber belt concealed under his clothes.

When Ferro got to the apartment, he made sure Jamey was not there. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, studying the length of zippered black rubber full of Bolivian cocaine. The over-hang of his belly hid his cock, shriveled from the breeze from the open balcony door. The black rubber belt crisscrossed his chest like Pancho Villa’s bandoliers. He had always wanted thick black hair on his chest. The fat made his breasts hang like a woman’s. With hair the fat would have been less repulsive. Jamey said he loved him more than anyone ever before. I love you as you are, he had told Ferro then scooted across the bed so that he could give Ferro head. The immensity of the belly interfered with the usual positions Jamey tried, but he had always been quick to figure out those things. It was other things Jamey had trouble with.