Godchild (11 page)

Chapter 24

She is down on her knees, hands cuffed behind her back, face hanging over the edge of the pit. Over the dead bodies, the stench of the rotting flesh infiltrating her nasal passages like the gas in a gas chamber.

The night is dark and windy.

The cool air is already settling in.

A half-dozen soldiers, dressed in green fatigues and plain green baseball hats, stand all around her. Two more stand guard on the perimeter.

Behind her stands the mustached man. He is holding a pistol on her, pressing the barrel to a soft spot she never knew existed just behind her left earlobe.

“Who sent you here?” he demands. It’s the third or fourth time he’s asked. She’s not sure. She’s lost count. Just like she’s lost count of the bodies stacked three and four high in the pit.

“Jesus Christ sent me here,” she says.

He grabs a fist of hair, jerks her head back violently.

“Once more. Why are you spying?”

Her eyes are tearing. The pain of her hair ripping away from her scalp.

“I.…told.…you. I’m…a…writer.”

He lets go of her hair. With his free hand, he caresses her cheek suddenly, wipes away a tear.

He pulls the pistol away. “Perhaps,” he says, “I am being too harsh. Perhaps I am not handling this the correct way, señorita. Perhaps I’m not asking the right questions.”

She feels his rough hand on her skin. It is like an insect. A wasp she has no way of shaking off.

“Did Richard send you here? Does Richard Barnes no longer trust his partners?”

His fingertips, now brushing up against her full moist lips. The wasp about to sting.

That is, unless she can sting first.

She opens her mouth wide, catches his finger in her mouth, bites down on it with all the strength she has left.

He screams in agony, drops his pistol into the pit.

The soldiers cock their weapons, aim them at her.

“No, No, No!” screams the mustached man. “We need her alive!”

There’s blood all over her lips, on her tongue. She can taste it.

He falls back. “Oh my God. Oh my sweet Jesus.”

He holds up his right hand. The tip of his middle finger is gone. From the third joint up.

“Look what you did,” he cries. “Look what you did. Look what you fucking did.”

Real tears pour down his cheeks, soaking his mustache.

The soldiers stand around, looking at one another, like, What the hell do we do now?

“You bitch,” the mustached man says. “You horrible bitch. You’ll pay for this.”

That’s when Renata smiles, opens her mouth, just slightly, spits the tip of his middle finger onto the sand. “I’m rich, asshole,” she says. “l can afford it.”

Chapter 25

Torches lit up the open-air party, along with countless red and green lanterns that hung from the porch rafters. A roasting pig revolved on a metal skewer over a pit filled with fire. The brown baked skin on the pig glistened with the drippings the old Mexican cook had used for basting between stirs of the black-bean chili. The chili bubbled in a heavy black kettle that had been placed on a charcoal-filled, fifty-gallon drum cut down the middle and supported horizontally with sawhorses.

By seven I was standing back on the porch of the main house, a cold bottle of Corona in my hands. I soaked in the warm but breezy night in my Levi’s jeans, Tony Lama boots, and denim work shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. There was the sound of Latin music and all the nameless people who passed by me in pairs or one by one. Older, heavyset women in loose flowery dresses and long hair, some with fresh carnations pinned just above their right ear, their lively dark eyes lit up all the more by the firelight and the colorful lanterns. And men —most of them from Hudson’s little private army—who had set their automatic rifles aside but who would not give up their sidearms.  

But soon came an odd collection of men whose faces I did not recognize from my initial visit to the compound just a few short hours before. Big men, dressed in suits and wing-tipped shoes, a couple of them wearing sunglasses in the night, as if to block out the moonlight, or their identity, which was probably more the case. One of them sported a thick, Pancho Villa mustache. A thin, angry-looking man dressed in a charcoal suit. The thing that made him stand out above all the others was the thick white bandage wrapped around his right hand, the very tip of which showed traces of blood. He was drinking tequila from a quart bottle. Not to get drunk, I imagined. More likely to kill the pain in his hand.

The men stuck together in a sort of tight semicircle that shifted from one end of the front lawn to the other and back again. They passed that bottle around and they laughed at one another’s jokes and nearly fell on the sandy ground when one of them pinched the backside of an old woman as she went about placing big bowls of food on the picnic tables.

They were having one hell of a time.

All except the mustached man with the bandage. He seemed to be in a hell of a lot of pain, not all of it coming from his injured hand.

Shaw was nowhere to be found.

I knew he would show soon enough.

In the meantime, I leaned back against the porch rail and considered tracking down someone with a pack of smokes. But cigarettes were suddenly the last thing on my mind when the woman walked out onto the front porch.

She was the same woman I’d met earlier by the pool. Now she was dressed in a black, thigh-length cocktail dress and black stockings, and she was coming my way.

When she was close to me, she ran the tips of her fingers gently down the left side of my face. I stood very still and stared at the strand of white pearls that wrapped around her neck and the way they shimmered against her black dress in the soft overhead porch light. I watched the way her hair hung down over her ears, how it seemed as alive and on fire as her brown eyes.

I knew that if I gripped the bottle of Corona any tighter it might explode in my hand. I breathed and set what was left of the beer down on the rail, reached my hand out for hers. She laughed a little. She never had to say a word. She simply took my hand in hers and closed in on me. I brought my face to that special place just between her neck and shoulder and I breathed in her smell. Gently I brushed back her long black hair with my fingertips, brought my mouth to her ear, and kissed it so softly I barely touched it with my lips.

For a time we stayed close like that, our arms wrapped around each other’s waist. I smelled her sweet smell and felt her body heat and the slow, steady pace of her heart. Before I knew it, we were dancing to a slow Latin rhythm, doing these smooth turns on the porch floor, her light body in my arms.

When the music stopped, everything else seemed to stop along with it.

I kissed her.

A few seconds later, Shaw made his entrance onto the porch. He was wearing a pressed white button-down along with matching white pants and a thick black holster to support an ivory-handled six-shooter. On his feet, black snake-skin Tony Lama boots.

Judging from the smile on his narrow face, it must have pleased the hell out of him to see his guests enjoying themselves.

My new girlfriend had taken her place among the crowd. I took hold of my beer from the rail and approached Shaw.

 “Considering what’s going down tomorrow,” I said, “you throw one hell of a pig roast.”

He wrapped his left arm around my shoulder while surveying the crowd from the vantage point of the porch. “My business is my pleasure,” he said. Then he slid his arm off my shoulder and jogged down the porch steps. He was making a beeline toward the group of well-dressed Mexican men who were now calling out his name, like he was their big buddy. All except the man with the bandage wrapped around his right hand. He was drinking from the tequila bottle again. And the closer Shaw came to him, the more pain he appeared to be in.

For hours we feasted on chili and freshly sliced pork from the skewer and washed it all down with Corona beer. And for a time, I forgot all about the reasons for crossing the border in the first place. I sat at the end of a very long picnic table, beside my nameless girlfriend, a full bottle of beer set beside a few empties.

Between the girl and the stars that lit up the night sky, I almost felt content, as though I never saw a battered black Buick the Saturday before, as though I never missed my own wedding, as though I never had to be peeled off the beer-soaked floor of an Albany gin mill. None of it mattered. Not my relationship with Val or her son, Ben. Not the short happy life Fran and I had together, not the long happy life we got gypped out of. Not the Bald Man I never found nor the probability that I would never find him. Not Renata Barnes or her imprisonment, not her husband, Richard, or their dead kid. Not Tony and his reasons for giving me this job in the first place. Not my sleeplessness nor my memories nor the children I never had nor the children I never would have. Not my life.

It just didn’t matter anymore.

I’m not sure exactly when or how it happened or if there was a point to it at all, but after a time a group of seven men appeared. Boys
and
men, who sort of emerged from out of the desert. Little men —not a single man over five-feet-two or a hundred and ten pounds—dressed in white pants with little bright red bandannas wrapped around their necks.

Barefoot men with dark, rugged faces.

Like the faces of ancient Indians.

At first I thought I must be hallucinating when the smallest of the seven began to climb the flagless pole embedded into the middle of the lawn with all the ease and grace of a monkey and its favorite tree. He just scaled the vertical pole without an ounce of effort, using both his hands and bare feet to grip the smooth, narrow surface.

I thought that maybe somebody had slipped something into one of my drinks when each man followed the little boy up onto the pole, just like that. Even when I turned to my nameless girl, she had this wide-eyed look of wonder on her face, as if she was absolutely getting a kick out of the whole thing but at the same time was thoroughly perplexed.

But if drugs were available at the hacienda that night, I hadn’t seen them. Besides, the display was no hallucination. If it had been, then the entire party had to be caught up in the subliminal trance. Because by now the entire crowd had gathered around the pole, even the well-dressed men. (Except for the man with the bandage on his hand. He was up on the porch with Shaw. He seemed to be in a fit over something, waving his bandaged hand in the air as if using it to make a point. And all the time Shaw just nodding his head, as though in complete agreement).

The crowd clapped their hands to the natural rhythm the little boy made when he slipped his bare feet into the topmost strap, reached out with one hand into the night, began twirling himself around and around. Until the momentum he gathered was enough to let himself go completely from the pole, relying only on the strength of the leather strap to support his weight.

As the little boy spun in a clockwise direction, the other six men began to spin around the pole also, each one in the opposite direction of the man above and below him. Their movements seemed effortless and graceful. Like gravity never entered the picture.

It wasn’t until a few minutes had gone by before I realized I was clapping like a crazy man, pounding boot heels on the bare ground. I felt my heart beat and my lungs fill with the sweet, desert air, and there was the sweat that had built up on my brow. From across the table I spotted the girl and she spotted me.

She got up first and came around to my side of the table. And while the men in white spun away on the pole and the crowd continued to cheer them, she took my hand in hers and pulled me away from the picnic table. She led me across the front lawn, past the garage and the digging equipment, to the in-ground pool behind the main house.

Without saying anything we took our clothes off and jumped into the cool water, deep end. We kissed underwater with the lamplight sparkling and gleaming all around, and it wasn’t until we came up to the surface that I realized we weren’t alone.

Another woman had already been swimming before we jumped in. She was a beautifully built Mexican woman of about my own height with long, black hair that went all the way down to the center of her back. She had brown eyes that glistened in the lamplight and full red lips from which pool water dripped. At first I thought my girl might be embarrassed or that the Mexican woman might feel invaded by our sudden intrusion. But after only a few seconds of slightly self-conscious giggling, the two women and I discovered some strange sort of chemistry together.

As the party grew louder and the water that surrounded our bodies grew warmer (it was March, after all, even in the desert), I picked my girl up by her waist and set her down gently on the smooth wood deck that wrapped around the pool. I kissed her lips, neck, breasts, and stomach. Then I went down on her thighs and moved in slowly, until I began to kiss something else entirely. I knew she couldn’t help herself when she wrapped both hands around the back of my head, pulled me further into her as if it were possible for me to go all the way through her body.

I stayed like that for as long as she could stand it.

When finally I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and looked up at her, I could see that she was kissing the Mexican woman. The two saw me looking at them and they both giggled like schoolgirls. That’s when my girl moved me away from her angel space.

To make room for somebody new.

I watched them make love to each other and to themselves and to me for more than an hour. The three of us rock ’n’ rolled for a while more, until the Mexican woman and my girl joined hands and helped each other out of the pool. They slipped towels around their waists and torsos, took turns reaching down to me, laying one final kiss on me apiece. Then, hand in hand, they slipped into the house together by way of the back door off the kitchen for what I assumed would be a cozy desert nap.

I laughed, more out of a strange pride for the girls than myself, and hopped out of the pool. I dried myself with one of the towels from behind the open bar and put my clothes back on. Then I rejoined what was left of the fiesta.