Almanac of the Dead

  Root sees Calabazas still doesn’t understand him. Root used to cry in the hospital from the frustration of all that he wanted to say and all the sounds he could not form. The light-blue Samsonite suitcase each man carried is important. It reveals something, although Root is not sure exactly what. He knows that if Calabazas can only understand what he is saying, he will be able to interpret the meaning of the identical blue suitcases. “What do they want?” “To talk to you.” Calabazas remembers what Samsonite is. “What do they carry in these suitcases?” Root shrugs his shoulders, and Calabazas grunts. The men aren’t showing anything unless it’s to Calabazas. “How many?” Calabazas acts as if he can’t remember if Root has already told him or not. Root holds up four fingers. The sun is high enough to make the mule corral hot. Root feels the sweat sticking his T-shirt to his belly and his back. This talk about ghosts in wagons and strangers with blue suitcases looking for Calabazas has left Root tired and hungry. He follows Calabazas out of the corral. Calabazas walks away from him without saying any more and crosses the bare, smooth-packed adobe of the yard to the back door of the old house. Calabazas is lost in calculating all the angles, as he himself might put it, all the ways to figure these Salvadorians with new Samsonite luggage.

  Root is ready for a cold beer. Maybe Carlos wants to drive out to the Stage Coach. Calabazas calls Carlos “Mosca.” Carlos claims he has no idea why the boss calls him that. Root calls him Fly. Carlos says that doesn’t bother him because in English fly can also mean the zipper, the opening, the crotch, and this suits him perfectly, Carlos likes to say. Carlos is related to Calabazas’s wife. Mosca mostly does what Root does, except Mosca’s customers live on the South Side. They don’t talk much. Root has no curiosity about the Fly’s life. Root figures Mosca’s life is a lot like his own. Mosca talks a lot sometimes, depending on what drugs he’s on. Other times he doesn’t say anything. Root tries sometimes to figure out why he and Fly get along, but it is no use. Root knows a question like that has never crossed Fly’s mind. When they go out together, it is usually to places where there is little need to talk, only to watch and to listen. They like the Stage Coach because there is always a stripper on stage and they can watch the bikers play pool.

  Mosca comes out the back door of the old house blinking rapidly until he can get his dark glasses on. The deep, dark blue of the lenses is one of his trademarks. Maybe that’s where Calabazas got the nickname. Mosca is short and wiry. His head and the blue lenses of the sunglasses are a little too large for his body. Root can feel the cocaine ten feet away. The cocaine acts like a fuel for a system of electric turbines located deep inside the human body. Electricity from chemical reactions crackles and sizzles through the bloodstream. Root can look over the top of his head. “The horse races,” Mosca announces, patting his pockets to indicate he had some deliveries to make there. Root nods his head and realizes he is grinning. Because Mosca is so damn happy and even the buzzing of the cocaine in him is strangly in tune with the sound of the cicadas in the giant tamarisk trees in Calabazas’s yard. They will buy two six-packs on the way. Mosca estimates the distance from where they stand to the big four-wheel-drive truck Mosca is so proud of. “I’ll race you,” Mosca says. He is the only person who acknowledges Root’s disabilities. Mosca finds Root’s brain damage fascinating.

  Mosca challenges Root to physical contests he figures Root can’t win. “Because I like to win. I like to win against you. It feels just as good. Don’t ask me why.” Mosca likes to say that he doesn’t believe cripples should be given special favors. Mosca parks his big, black, four-wheel-drive Chevy in spaces painted with wheelchair symbols and marked with handicapped signs. Mosca laughs. “You are not handicapped if it is easy for you to get around. Special parking places make it too easy,” Mosca said.

  Mosca knows horses. He sneers at what he sees in the paddock where the trainers saddle for the next race. You are betting on whether the trainer has shot the horse too full of crank and it keels over dead on the backstretch. You are betting on which runt jockey fucks up the deal and bumps his nag into the number everyone is betting. “Mosca.” “The Fly.” At the track Root sees another way the nickname might have come. Mosca is getting the numbers. He never bothers to look at the horses. He flits through the crowd. Root waits, leaning against the fence by the finish-line rail. The horses seem to float when they run. Hooves barely touch the surface of the track. Their eyes shine hot. They are lighter than their bodies. Root had stopped growing after the accident. The part of the brain sending those chemical messages was gone. It was better that way. Less hulk to drag around. Root had learned how to walk again after three months. He might have blamed the accident for the size of his cock if he had not seen the size of his father’s and his brothers’. None of them would have won any prizes.

  HORSE RACES

  ENTRY NUMBERS and the odds flash across the tote board in the center of the racetrack. Root is fascinated with the foam between the horses’ hind legs. The lather on their necks. Mosca is beside him now, watching the board. “Look out for the ones that sweat too much. . . . No, no, that one isn’t sweating at all. That’s an OD. . . . No, man; these are horses, remember?” He shows Root a number so that no one standing close can see. “It’s this one. You want me to put fifty dollars on it for you?” Before Root can say anything, Mosca is gone, headed for the WIN window. A man in a white linen suit steps in line behind Mosca. All he needs is the panama hat. Root sees he’s carrying something in his left hand, hidden inside a Racing Form. He says something to Mosca as he turns away from the window with the yellow tickets. Root imagines something familiar about the face. Italian or maybe Jewish. Root asks, but Mosca keeps his eyes on the horses loading into the starting gates on the far side of the track. “He’s got a couple of horses, that’s all. Personal pleasure. Strictly amateur,” Mosca says. Root wants to see the face again, the face of a man who has nothing better to do than watch his horses run and snort what he buys from Mosca. But the man in the white linen suit is gone. Root tries to imagine the car he drives and the women he fucks. All “white linen” quality throughout his life, Root figures, then turns in time to get hit with dirt flying off the hooves as their horse finishes first.

  Mosca reappears long enough to count out the money. Odds were only five to one, but a couple of hundred is okay for standing around drinking cold beer and watching the people. Root drifts away from the fence. He likes to watch the trainers and jockeys saddle the big horses. A few of the owners are there. Root likes to try to figure out why they own racehorses. He understands how people spend money on sex, cars, and clothes; and of course, drugs. But Root wonders what it is about the horses. The owners don’t ride them. Most of the owners don’t even watch the horses run except for the big races at the big tracks. But what were these horses, and what was this track doing in Tucson? Then there was the man in the white linen suit with the two gorgeous fillies, horses with class. Those horses were only pasing through, to be graded for better tracks. The fillies were led from the paddock to join the other entries parading in front of the grandstand. Root looked for the owner’s name on the racing program, but saw the fillies were listed as the property of a private investment group. Half of the horses on the program were listed that way. Tax shelters: strings of nags running on two-bit tracks. The more horses that got hurt or just lay down and died, the more money people made.

  In the truck Mosca pulled a pint bottle of whiskey from under the seat. He handed it to Root and then began pouring neat piles of cocaine on the dashboard. Root took big swallows and passed the bottle back to Mosca, but he shook his head and nodded at the pint. Root finished the bottle, and when he had opened his eyes and wiped the sweat off his face, Mosca was offering him a segment of a red and white plastic straw. “McDonald’s,” Mosca said, showing big white teeth when he grinned. “Man, you sure surprised me! I heard all those stories they tell about you, you know, things like that, but—” The cocaine was already plumping up his brain cells. Root imagined a feather pi
llow being fluffed and smoothed into a soft, round belly of comfort and ease. He did not care what Mosca was saying.

  Mosca snorted his two piles and pointed the straw at the last two piles while holding both nostrils shut with his other hand. Root glanced around the parking lot and then took the other two. As he raised up from snorting the last pile, he saw a white Mercedes pulling out from long rows of stalls. He caught only a glimpse of the driver, but Root knew it had to be the man in the white linen suit. Root glanced over to see if Mosca had any reaction to the white car, but Mosca was fumbling with a plastic bag full of marijuana and rolling papers in his lap.

  “You shouldn’t take those things so seriously,” Mosca was saying as he roared down First Avenue doing sixty. Root didn’t mind the speed, but he was thinking about Tucson cops who instantly turned speeding tickets into illegal searches. But Root was clean. Only Mosca had been “transacting.” The sensation of the engine and the motion, tires whining and the exhilaration of the cocaine, settled Root back in the seat where he watched as the world was left behind.

  “Eat my dust,” Mosca says then, and the big Chevy veers suddenly into a convenience store lot. He leaps down from the high cab, makes two calls at the pay phone, dashes in the store for two cold six-packs, and screeches the truck into reverse. From where Root sits it is abundantly clear where Calabazas got the name Mosca; quick and busy; all over everything at once. The Fly. Mosca shoves a cold beer in Root’s hand, then lights up another joint. The dingy upholstery shops, wrecking yards, and one-stall repair shops on First Avenue fall away from them faster and faster. Root has a sensation of well-being he has not felt in years as the big four-wheel-drive truck blasts ahead.

  The last time Root had felt so good he had been a kid. Eighteen or nineteen. Right after he first met Lecha. They all took acid and went riding. He had just bought a beat-up Harley. He thought he had everything he wanted. The chopper, a woman. A real woman. The acid let him feel just how good it all really was. Later Root was uncertain he could trust his feelings then because he had been high. But the acid had not lied, not that time. When it was all over, after his accident, the first time Root smoked dope, that afternoon of riding motorcycles with his friends had flashed back to him. Vividly. The fresh smell of the desert, creosote, sage, and sand. The temperature of the air and the temperature of his own body so perfectly aligned that he was no longer sure where his body ended and the rest of the world began. They had turned down Silverbell Road to get away from the city traffic, and Root remembered the instant he saw the trees on both sides of the road. Masses of brilliant-yellow blossoms seemed to cascade off the paloverdes and lie in deep yellow pools beneath them. He had just been to see Lecha a few hours before, and it was as if for a brief instant he had poured out of himself into something larger, and the motorcycle was carrying him deep into it, and clouds of yellow flowers were billowing around him endlessly until he no longer knew how he was keeping the bike balanced upright, but he was, and he believed that he always could, and that he would always be in a world as infinite as this one. The beauty and joy of that afternoon had been a premonition, Root thought later. A last taste. Because the world was never the same after the accident. Vertical became horizontal.

  Mosca, all the cousins, looked at the accident differently from white people. Calabazas and Mosca did not think it was strange that Root kept the twisted, broken Harley frame. Root’s mother had actually called the shrink when Root refused to sell the wreckage to a junkyard. Indians and Mexicans understood, or at least the ones Root liked understood. Root had moved out to his own place after that. He did not belong; his mother and brothers were strangers.

  Root looks over at Mosca, who has broken free even from the laws of gravity; Mosca’s flying high with beer foam at both corners of his mouth, nose hairs caked white, and now one of the Fly’s famous cocaine monologues. It is as if they have been working on the same puzzle. Root’s accident. Root knows they feel the accident has significance, that it was a journey to the boundaries of the land of the dead.

  FAMILY

  MOSCA KEPT TRYING to make Root remember the accident. Root did not feel the same anger when Mosca asked. But the therapist had enraged him with her constant whining “Oh, come on now, try. Try to remember!” She had been trying to get him to remember his life before the accident. Remember. Remember your sisters and your brothers? Once he did start remembering, Root had screamed at the therapist that he wanted to forget again. His family were strangers; they were repelled by his condition, by the shaved head and the scars on his skull. Big zippers. Frankenstein zippers. “See, I can unzip it,” Root had said to his youngest sister, meaning to tease her and play as they once had. But she had shrunk away, almost knocking their mother into the IV bottle.

  Mosca wanted Root to remember, but Mosca was not interested in the past, or memories before the accident. Root had teased Mosca about acting like a shrink, always trying to get him to remember “Christmas with the family,” and Mosca had suddenly turned serious. “Man, don’t take this personal. I have no room to talk. But man, your family! If I were you—yeah! I’d forget all of them, man.” Mosca could say that because he had driven Root to his mother’s place a few times on holidays. Mosca said there was nothing worse than half-Mexicans or quarter-Mexicans who were so stunned by having light skin they never noticed the odor of their own shit again. Root agreed with Mosca. The way he had it figured, his mother and grandmother had spent their time praying he would die in the coma.

  For years, for as far back as Root could remember, Mosca had wanted Root to remember what the accident had been like. “What do you mean, what it was like?” Root would say.

  “Well, you know, old Calabazas, he said one time people who get wiped out like that—you know, almost killed—well, they get visions or they take a long journey.” Mosca would pause and wait for Root to take up where Mosca had left off; he wanted Root to talk about the soul journey and about visions. Root always got exasperated and said he remembered nothing. That as far as he knew, he had not even dreamed while he was in the coma. Mosca would look disappointed, and then hurt. “I thought we were friends,” he would say. But Mosca is a patient man, and Root can’t think of a month gone by without Mosca’s mentioning Root’s accident.

  Mosca wheels the truck down Ft. Lowell to Oracle. Mosca has done this with Root so many times, Root thinks he may not even realize he is doing it. Mosca drives Root through the intersection where the woman in the real estate company car made the illegal left turn that had sent Root on his way; flying on his motocycle to nowhere. But after a while, Root got used to Mosca’s notion the collision with the ’60 Plymouth had sent him somewhere. Try to think and remember, cast yourself back into months of coma.

  It had taken Root a few years to decide which people were worse: the ones who gawked, mouths opened so wide they slobbered on their shoes, or the ones who pretended they had seen nothing out of the ordinary when they passed him in the shopping mall, but if Root glanced back over his shoulder, he would catch them staring at him. Root soon learned the worst were those who thought his limp and dragging foot somehow gave them the right to walk up and start telling him about their daughter or son-in-law and the fall in the bathroom or the can of poison green beans that caused the paralysis.

  It had not taken Root very long to figure out that the gawkers and the queasy stomachs were invariably in the shopping malls and department stores, or were well-dressed white women passing the physical-therapy wing during hospital visiting hours. Downtown, Root had instinctively felt more comfortable. Gray-haired women loaded with shopping bags waiting for buses might look, but Root watched to see how they looked at people walking ahead or behind him. It had been a great relief to see that these old Mexican women saw nothing any more remarkable about him than the others passing by: two dark, fat Papago teenagers carrying a boxy, silver tape player shoulder-high, between them, heads cocked to the speakers; the tall, balding lawyer perspiring in his dark brown suit and vest, briefcase in hand; or th
e leftover rich hippie in black leather jeans, his long blond hair spreading down the back of a red silk tunic. Root felt he belonged there.

  Mosca had taught Root a lot, but so had Calabazas. Not intentionally, but the longer Root worked with both of them and saw the Yaqui cousins who worked on the other end, the more Root realized they did not expect what white people might call “normal” or “standard.” There had never been any such thing as “normal” for them. When Root had first begun working with them, the delivery routes had been far more difficult and remote. Hours and hours of night driving off the crude roads, careening down sandy washes for miles into the heart of the Tohano O’Dom Reservation, had taught Root not to see things as “normal.” Calabazas always did the driving, and the wonder was that all three of them had not been killed as Calabazas leaped the battered ’54 Dodge pickup over arroyos four feet wide. If Calabazas thought Mosca and Root were trying to catch some sleep, he would light up a Kool and begin a lecture on desert trails and secret border-crossing routes. Once Root had remarked that he thought one dull gray boulder looked identical to another dull gray boulder a few hundred yards back. Calabazas took his foot off the accelerator, and Mosca had tried to save Root by adding quickly, “Maybe in the dark they look alike.” But that had not prevented Calabazas from giving them one of his sarcastic lectures on blindness. Blindness caused solely by stupidity, a blindness that Root and Mosca would probably always suffer from, just as they would always suffer from the location of their brains below their belts. “I get mad when I hear the word identical,” Calabazas had continued. “There is no such thing. Nowhere. At no time. All you have to do is stop and think. Stop and take a look.” The old Dodge truck had slowed to a crawl; the engine idle sounded wheezy. They had left in plenty of time for the rendezvous with the couriers. Calabazas stopped the truck and turned off the headlights. He made them both get out. Mosca was yawning and pretended to moan and whine “uncle” at Calabazas, but it was no use. He made Root and Mosca walk ahead of him in the sandy wash. The deep, white arroyos reflected a strange luminous-silver light from the stars even without a moon. Calabazas was only worried about his merchandise, he said. Because fuckers like them were a dime a dozen, and he couldn’t care less if they got themselves lost, or ran themselves out of gas or got stuck, and then died after they’d finished the five-gallon water can.