DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (15 page)

     
"The priest is
my wife's cousin. He says you're in danger. Except what he knows he knows from
the confession. That means he can't tell it himself. You want to go back to the
airport, man, tell me now."

     
The sun rose higher
in an empty cobalt sky. We crossed a flat plain with sloughs and reeds by the
roadside and stone mountains razored against the horizon and Indian families
who seemed to have walked enormous distances from no visible site in order to
beg by the road. Then the road began to climb and the air grew cooler. We
passed an abandoned ironworks dotted with broken windows, and went through
villages where the streets were no more than crushed rock and the doors to all
the houses were painted either green or blue. The mountains above the villages
were gray and bare and the wind swept down the sheer sides and blew dust out of
the streets.

     
"It's all
Indians here. They think you paint the door a certain color, evil spirits can't
walk inside," Heriberto said.

     
Helen was awake now
and looking out the window.

     
"This is what
hell must look like," she said.

     
"I grew up here.
I tell you something, we don't got guys like Arana here. He's from Jalisco. I
tell you something else, they don't even got guys like Arana
there.
Guys
like him got to go to the United States to get like that, you understand what
I'm saying?"

     
"No," she
answered, looking at the back of his neck.

     
"My English
ain't too good. It's a big problem I got," he said.

     
We pulled into a
village that was wedged like a toothache in a steep-sided, narrow canyon strewn
with the tailings from a deserted open-pit mine on the mountain above. Some of
the houses had no outbuildings, only a piece of concrete sewer pipe inserted
vertically into the dirt yard for a community toilet. Next to the cantina was
the police station, a squat, white-washed building with green shutters that
were latched shut on the windows. A jeep carrying three
rurales
and a
civilian with a bloody ear and hair like a lion's mane came up the road in a
flume of dust from the direction of the mine and parked in front. The three
rurales
wore dirty brown uniforms and caps with lacquered brims and World War I
thumb-buster U.S. Army .45 revolvers. The civilian's clothes were in rags and
his hands were roped behind him. The
rurales
took him inside the
building and closed the door.

     
"Are these the
guys who popped Arana?" I asked.

     
"Yeah, man, but
you don't want to be asking them no questions about it, know what I'm saying?"
Heriberto said.

     
"No, I
don't."

     
He scratched his
nose, then told me a story.

     
The village had been
visited by a carnival that featured a pedal-operated Ferris wheel, a donkey
with a fifth leg that grew like a soft carrot out of its side, a concessionaire
who sold hand-corked bottles of mescal that swam with thread worms, and Arana,
the Spider, a magical man who swallowed flame and blew it like a red
handkerchief into the air, whose scarlet, webbed tattoos, Indian-length hair,
blackened mouth, and chemical green eyes could charm mountain women from their
marital beds. His sexual energies were legendary.

     
"Arana was in
the sack with the wrong man's wife?" I said.

     
"They gonna tell
you that. You go away with that, take that story back home, everything's gonna
be fine. You don't, you keep asking
questions, maybe we got a
problem. You see that guy they just took in? You don't want to go in there
today."

     
"What'd he
do?" Helen asked.

     
"Two children
went in those empty buildings up at the mines and didn't come back. See, where
all those pieces of tin are flapping in the wind. He lives in there by himself,
he don't ever take a bath, comes down at night and steals food from
people."

     
"Why'd they
shoot Arana?" I said.

  
   
"Look, man, how I'm gonna tell you?
This ain't no
marijuanista
we're talking about. This guy takes
high-powered stuff into the States sometimes. These local guys know that. It's
called
la mordita,
you got to pay the bite, man, or maybe you have a
shitload of trouble. Like the guy behind those green shutters now. He don't
want to see nobody light a cigar."

     
The infirmary had
been built by an American mining company in the oblong shape of a barracks on a
bench above the main street of the village. The lumber had warped the nails out
of the joists, and the windows were covered with ragged plastic sheets that
popped in the wind. In back, a gasoline-powered generator throbbed next to a
water well that had been dug in the middle of a chicken yard.

     
Inside, the beds were
in rows, squared away, either a slop jar or spittoon under each one, the steel
gray blankets taut with a military tuck. The woodstove was unlighted, the open
door congealed with dead ash. The bare walls and floors seemed enameled with cold.

     
But the man named
Arana needed no heat source other than his own.

     
He lay on top of the
sheet, naked except for a towel across his loins, the scarlet tattoos on his
skin emblazoned with sweat. His chest was peppered with wounds that had been
dressed with squares of gauze and tape and a yellow salve that smelled like an
engine lubricant. But that was not where the offensive odor came from. His
right thigh was twice the size it should have been, the shiny reddish black
color of an eggplant.

 
    
The priest who had called the sheriff
brought us chairs to sit by the bed. He was a thin, pale man, dressed in a
windbreaker, flannel shirt, khaki pants and work boots that were too big for
his ankles, his black hair probably scissor-cropped at home. He put his hand on
my arm
and turned me aside before I sat down. His
breath was like a feather that had been dipped in brandy.

     
"Arana has
absolution but no rest. He believes he served evil people who are going to hurt
you," he said. "But I'm not sure of anything he says now."

     
"What's he told
you?"

     
"Many things.
Few of them good."

     
"Father, I'm not
asking you to violate the seal of the confessional."

     
"He's made
himself insane with injections. He talks of his fears for young people. It's
very confusing."

     
I waited. There was a
pained glimmer in the priest's eyes. "Sir?" I said.

     
"The man some
think killed children up at the mines is his relative," the priest said.
"Or maybe he was talking about what he calls the
bugarron.
I don't
know."

     
Helen and I sat down
next to the bed. Helen took a tape recorder out of her purse and clicked it on.
The man who was named Arana let his eyes wander onto my face.

     
"You know me,
partner?" I said.

     
He tilted his chin so
he could see me better, breathed hard through his nostrils. Then he spoke in a
language I didn't recognize.

     
"It's an Indian
dialect," the priest said. "No one speaks it here, except his
relative, the crazy one who lives inside the mines."

     
"Who sent you to
New Iberia, Arana?" I said.

     
But my best attempts
at reaching inside his delirium seemed to be of no avail. I tried for a half
hour, then felt my own attention start to wander. The priest left and came
back. Helen yawned and straightened her back. "Sorry," she said. She
took one cartridge out of the recorder and put in another.

     
Then, as though Arana
had seen me for the first time, his hand cupped around my wrist and squeezed it
like a vise.

     
"The
bugarron
ride a saddle with flowers cut in it. I seen him at the ranch. You messing
everything up for them. They gonna kill you, man," he said.

     
"Who's this
guy?"

     
"He ain't got no
name. He got a red horse and a silver saddle. He like Indian boys."

     
Inadvertently, his
hand drew mine against his gangrenous thigh. I saw the pain jump in his face,
then anger replace the recognition that had been in his eyes.

     
"What's this man
look like?" I said.

     
But I had become
someone else now, perhaps an old enemy who had come aborning with the carrion
birds.

     
Helen and I walked
outside with the priest. The sunlight was cold inside the canyon. Heriberto
waited for us in the Cherokee.

     
"I have no
authority here, Father. But I'm worried about the fate of the man from the
mines, the one inside the police station," I said.

     
"Why?"

     
"Heriberto says
the
rurales
are serious men."

     
"Heriberto is
corrupt. He takes money from drug smugglers. The
rurales
are Indians.
It's against their way to deliberately injure an insane person."

     
"I see. Thank
you for your goodwill, Father."

     
That night Helen and
I boarded a four-engine plane for the connection flight back to El Paso. She
looked out the window as we taxied onto the runway. Heriberto was standing by a
hangar, one hand lifted in farewell.

     
"How do you read
all that?" she said, nodding toward the glass.

     
"What?"

     
"Everything that
happened today."

     
"It's an outdoor
mental asylum," I said.

     
Later, she fell
asleep with her head on my shoulder. I watched the clouds blowing through the
propellers, then the sky was clear again and far below I saw the lights of a
city spread through a long valley and the Rio Grande River glowing under the
moon.

M
onday morning
Karyn LaRose
walked through
the department's waiting room and paused in front of the dispatcher's office.
She didn't need to speak. Wally took one look at her and, without thinking,
rose to his feet (and later could not explain to himself or anyone else why he
did).

     
"Yes, ma'am?"
he said.

     
She wore a snug,
tailored white suit, white hose, and a wide-brim straw hat with a yellow band.

     
"Can Dave see
me?" she asked.

     
"Sure, Ms.
LaRose. You bet. I'll call him and tell him you're on your way."

     
He leaned out his
door and watched her all the way down the hall.

     
When I opened the
door for her I could feel a flush of color, like windburn, in my throat. Two
deputies passing in the hall glanced at us, then one said something to the
other and looked back over his shoulder again.

     
"You look
flustered," she said.

     
"How you doin',
Karyn?" I said.

     
She sat down in front
of my desk. Her hat and face were slatted with sunlight.

     
"Clay said I
have to do this. I mean apologize . . . here . . . in your
office. To the sheriff, too. Otherwise, he says I'll have no
serenity," she said. She smiled. Her platinum hair was tucked inside her
hat. She looked absolutely beautiful.

     
"Why are you
hanging around with Clay Mason?" I said.

     
"He was a guest
of the university. He's a brilliant man. He's a very good poet, too."

     
"I heard he blew
his wife's head off at a party in Mexico."

     
"It was an
accident," she said.

     
I let my eyes drop to
my watch.

     
"I'm sorry that
I wronged you, Dave. I don't know what else to say." She took a breath.
"Why do you have to treat me with fear and guilt? Is it because of the
moment there in the hotel room? Did you think I wanted to seduce you with my
husband sleeping a few feet away, for God's sakes?"