The House of the Scorpion (18 page)

The gardens were cooled with fine sprays of water, and the rooms, for the most part, depended on shaded verandas to tame the hot desert air. But during the annual birthday party modern conveniences came out. The famous celebrities would have been miserable without their air-conditioning and entertainment centers.

Not that El Patrón cared whether they were miserable. He merely wanted to impress people.

Matt listened for the purr of El Patrón's limousine. The old man preferred to travel by road. If it had been possible, he would have gone by horse, but his bones were far too brittle to attempt such a thing. He would sit in the back with Tam Lin for company. Daft Donald would drive. They would whisk along the long, shimmering highway to El Patrón's other house in the Chiricahua Mountains.

Matt stared up at the ceiling. He was too depressed to eat or watch TV. All he could do was play out the events of the past few days in his mind. He went over them again and again. If only he hadn't put Tom at the baby table. If only he hadn't made María kiss him in front of the others. If only he hadn't gone to the hospital.

The regrets piled thickly on one another until Matt's thoughts were running around in his head like a hamster on a wheel.

Everyone thought he'd poisoned Furball. His fingerprints were on the bottle, and he'd left a note, a signed note!—how dumb can you get?—in María's room. Matt had to admit the evidence against him was pretty good.

Tom must have seen him come out of the pump house and decided to finish the job he'd started when he dumped Furball into the toilet. But how did Tom use the laudanum without leaving
his
fingerprints on the bottle?

Round and round went Matt's thoughts.
Squeak
went the wheel in his mind. He heard the limousine start up, the distant slam of a door, the fading roar of the engine.

So El Patrón was gone now. And Tam Lin. Matt grieved for him.
Any rat in a sewer can lie
, Tam Lin had said.
It's how rats are . . . . But a human doesn't run and hide in dark places, because he's something more.
Matt thought he could make María understand if he ever got to see her. She'd forgive him because he was a dumb animal and didn't know any better. But Tam Lin had called Matt a human and expected much more from him. Humans, Matt realized, were a lot harder to forgive.

For the first time he saw a huge difference between the way the bodyguard treated him and how everyone else did. Tam Lin talked about courage and loyalty. He let Matt do dangerous things on their expeditions and go off by himself to explore.
He treated Matt as an equal.

Tam Lin often talked to him about his childhood in Scotland as though Matt were another adult. It wasn't like El Patrón's memories, which tended to fall into a rut. Matt had those stories memorized right down to the last word. Tam Lin's stories were about the difficult decisions you made to become a man.
I was a proper fool
, the bodyguard had said.
Turned my back on my family, ran with a rough crowd, and did the thing that brought me here.
What that thing was Tam Lin never revealed.

At the memory of those picnics, tears came to Matt's eyes and rolled down his cheeks. He made no sound. He had learned that safety lay in silence. But he couldn't stop the tears.

Yet in the midst of his sorrow, Matt found a glimmer of hope. Someone, out of all the people who thought he was no better than a dog, believed he could be something more.

And I will be
, Matt promised as he stared up at the blurry ceiling.

•   •   •

Not everything was depressing. Tom was banished from the house. María, when she was hunting for her dog, had innocently asked her father to look in the hospital. Senator Mendoza wanted to know how she knew about the place. The whole story came out about MacGregor's clone and Tom's part in luring María to see it. El Patrón banished Tom to a year-round boardingschool with no holidays.

“Why doesn't Mr. MacGregor take him, if Tom's his son?” Matt asked.

“You don't understand,” Celia said as she cut cheesecake with fresh raspberries for dessert. Ordinarily, Matt would have demanded two slices. Now he didn't think he could choke down one. “Once El Patrón decides something belongs to him, he never lets it go.”

“Never?” said Matt.

“Never.”

“What about the presents he gets for his birthday?” Matt thought of all the gold watches, jewels, statues, and moon rocks people had given El Patrón for over one hundred years.

“He keeps it all.”

“Where?”

Celia dished up the cheesecake and licked her fingers. “There's a secret storeroom under the ground. El Patrón wants to be buried in it—may the Virgin keep that day away forever.” Celia crossed herself.

“Like”—Matt had to think—“Like an Egyptian pharaoh.”

“Exactly. Eat your cheesecake,
mi vida.
You need to keep your strength up.”

Matt ate mechanically as he imagined the storeroom. He'd seen pictures of King Tutankhamun's tomb. El Patrón would lie in a golden box with all the watches, jewels, statues, and moon rocks around him. Then, because Matt didn't want to think of El Patrón dying, he said, “What does that have to do with Tom?”

Celia settled back in her easy chair. She was much more relaxed now that everyone had left. “El Patrón thinks a person belongs to him the same way a house or car or statue does,” she said. “He wouldn't let that person go any more than he'd throw away money. It's why he wouldn't allow Felicia to escape. It's why he keeps everyone under his control so he can call them back in an instant. He'll never let MacGregor have Tom, even though he can't stand the boy.”

“Do you and Tam Lin belong to El Patrón?” Matt asked.

Celia flinched. “
¡Caramba!
The questions you ask!”

Matt waited.

“Maybe you wouldn't get into so much trouble if people explained things to you,” she said with a sigh.

“I didn't poison Furball.”

“You didn't
mean
to, darling. I know your heart is good.” Matt badly wanted to argue his case, but he knew Celia wouldn't believe him. His fingerprints were on the laudanum bottle.

“I grew up in Aztlán,” she began, “in the same village where El Patrón was born. It was poor then and it's worse now. Nothing grew there except weeds, and they were so bitter that they made the donkeys throw up. Even roaches hitchhiked to the next town. That's how bad it was.

“As a girl, I went to work in a
maquiladora
—a factory—on the border. All day I sat on an assembly line and put tiny squares into tiny holes with a pair of tweezers. I thought I'd go blind! We lived in a big gray building with windows so small, you couldn't put your head outside. That was to keep the girls from running away. At night we climbed to the roof and looked north across the border.”

“Our border?” asked Matt.

“Yes. The Farms lie between Aztlán and the United States. You couldn't see much because the Farms are dark at night. But
beyond
, where the United States lay, was a great glow in the sky. We knew that under that glow was the most wonderful place. Everyone had his own house and garden. Everyone wore beautiful clothes and ate only the best food. And no one worked more than four hours a day. The rest of the time people flew around in hovercrafts and went to parties.”

“Is that true?” asked Matt, who knew almost nothing about the countries bordering the Farms.

“I don't know.” Celia sighed. “I guess it's too good to be true.”

Matt helped Celia clear the dishes, and together they washed and dried. It reminded him of those days, long ago, when they lived in the little house in the poppy fields.

Matt waited patiently for Celia to pick up the story again. He knew if he pushed her too hard, she'd stop talking about her past.

“I lived in that gray building forever, getting older and older. No parties, no boyfriends, no nothing,” she said at last after the dishes were put away. “I hadn't heard from my family in years. Maybe they were all dead. I didn't know. The only change in my life happened after I learned to cook. I was taught
by an old
curandera
, a healing woman who took care of the girls. She taught me all kinds of things.

“I was the best student she ever had, and soon I got off the assembly line and started cooking for the whole building. I had more freedom; I went to the markets to buy herbs and food. And one day I met a coyote.”

“An animal?” Matt was confused.

“No, darling. A man who takes people over the border. You pay him and he helps you go to the United States. Only first you have to cross the Farms.” Celia shivered. “What an idiot I was! Those people don't help you go anywhere. They lead you straight to the Farm Patrol.

“I packed everything I owned, including the Virgin I had brought from my village. About twenty of us crossed into the Ajo Mountains, and that's where the coyote abandoned us. We panicked like a bunch of scared rabbits. We tried to climb down a cliff, and a woman fell into a gorge and died. We abandoned most of our belongings so we could move faster, but it didn't do us any good. The Farm Patrol was waiting at the foot of the mountains.

“I was taken to a room, and my backpack was dumped out. ‘Be careful!' I cried. ‘Don't hurt the Virgin!' That's how She got the chip on Her robe—when the Patrol dumped Her on the floor.

“They laughed, and one of them was going to crush Her with his foot when someone shouted ‘Stop!' from the doorway. Everyone snapped to attention then, you better believe it. It was El Patrón in his wheelchair. He was stronger in those days, and he liked to check up on things personally.

“ ‘Your accent is familiar. Where are you from?' he asked. I told him the name of my village, and he was very surprised.
‘That's my hometown,' he said. ‘Don't tell me the old rat's nest is still there.'

“ ‘It is,' I said, ‘only the rats have moved on to a better slum.'

“He laughed and asked if I had any skills. From that moment on, I belonged to El Patrón. I'll always belong to him. He'll never let me go.”

Matt felt cold. It was good that Celia had crossed over the border. Otherwise, she wouldn't have been around to care for him. But there was something so bleak about her last words:
He'll never let me go.
“I love you, Celia,” Matt said impulsively, putting his arms around her.

“And I love you,” she said softly, hugging him back.

It felt so safe then. Matt wished he could hide in her apartment forever and forget about the Alacráns, the scornful servants, and MacGregor's clone.

“What happened to the other people who crossed the border?” he asked.

“Them?” Celia's voice was flat and expressionless. “They were all turned into eejits.” And she refused to say any more about it.

T
he days passed with unvarying sameness. Now Matt could no longer look forward to María's visits. Both she and Emilia had been sent to a convent to turn them into proper young ladies. “María's the one they're trying to tame,” Celia said. “Emilia's about as wild as a bowl of oatmeal.” Matt asked Celia to send María a letter, but she refused. “The nuns would only hand it over to Senator Mendoza,” she said.

Matt tried to imagine what she was doing, but he knew nothing about convents. Did she miss him? Had she forgiven him? Was she visiting Tom instead?

With María and Emilia gone, Benito and Steven went elsewhere for their vacations. Mr. Alacrán was away on frequent business trips, and Felicia and El Viejo stayed in their rooms. The halls and gardens were deserted. The servants still went about their duties, but their voices were muted. The house was like a stage with all the actors missing.