The little boy did not agree. He did not think tampering with the pages of the almanac was allowed. But the girls were brutal. They told him they didn’t care if he ate or not. Every time a page had been memorized, they could eat it. Of course they hoped to reach some of their own people in the mountains of the North. They agreed they should try not to eat any more pages. They would have to be cautious. The crippled woman only watched. The children noticed she was less cheerful, and they did not hear her singing as they had when they’d first come. The eldest said it was because the woman was afraid soon they would leave her, and then she might die. The youngest girl thought the woman was sad because the others in her village had left her behind. The little boy feared the woman had already suffered the effect of having eaten a page from the almanac.
Sometime in the late afternoon, the eldest girl studied the northern horizon, calculating the last leg of the journey. She had learned the paler the blue of the mountains, the drier and more barren the land where they lay. She must not have her willpower fade at the thought of leaving the comfort of the shady cottonwood trees and the water at the little house of river reeds.
The hunchbacked woman was again boiling a potful of roots and bulbs. The woman gestured at the pot, and the eldest girl knew the woman wanted another page from the almanac. But this time the girl was well rested and not starving. She knew what must be done with these pages. They had not yet reached the mountains the color of the sky. Her instructions had been very clear. The girl pretended not to understand what the crippled woman was asking, but the girl also realized by the expression in the woman’s eyes, the woman was not fooled. The children had not traveled all that distance without encountering “hosts” who had wanted favors in return. Even the little boy was not safe from such propositions. But their elders had warned them they must be prepared for “such hosts” because the epoch that was dawning was known by different names from tribe to tribe, but their people called the epoch Death-Eye Dog. During the epoch of Death-Eye Dog human beings, especially the alien invaders, would become obsessed with hungers and impulses commonly seen in wild dogs. The children had been warned. The children had been reminded. A human being was born into the days she or he must live with until eventually the days themselves would travel on. All anyone could do was recognize the traits, the spirits of the days, and take precautions. The epoch of Death-Eye Dog was male and therefore tended to be somewhat weak and very cruel.
The girl was careful to take each of the children aside one by one. She told them they must travel on and that she felt the crippled woman might try to stop them. So when they went to dig roots and gather larvae in the coolness after sundown, they were careful to fill all of their gourd canteens. The little boy carried the torn blanket. The hunchbacked woman watched helplessly and kept gesturing at the pot full of roots stewing over the coals. The girl who had first chewed the edges of pages she carried hesitated. She had also had her first menstruation because of the food and the rest, and she wanted to show the others, especially the eldest, she was not a child.
“Go on,” she told the others, “I will be following right behind.”
The eldest girl tried to warn her. “Don’t do this! We must stay together.” But the girl would not listen. “At least take off your dress so the pages will be safe.” But the girl refused that too because she was confident of herself. The last they ever saw of her was in front of the house of woven river reeds, accepting a bowl of stew from the crippled woman, who was smiling broadly and nodding her head enthusiastically.
The eldest girl went sneaking back the next day while the others slept. She had gone back for the pages, not for their companion. The crippled woman was asleep in the shade of the cottonwoods. The eldest could find no trace of the other girl. For a while she thought perhaps the girl had somehow been lost attempting to catch up with them, although they had been walking in the river sand, following the dry riverbed. But as the girl quietly checked inside each of the abandoned houses, she finally came to a structure that had been used by the men for ceremonial purposes. Part of the structure was set below the ground’s surface; even as she stood at the entrance she could feel cool air currents pouring out. The girl had stopped at the entrance although she knew she must hurry. She had not hesitated at any of the other houses, but the air currents she felt caused the sweat to chill on her skin; a shudder swept over her. She did not want to go inside. She did not even want to stand in the threshold and look in.
So there, in the hottest part of the day, after the sun had centered in the sky, a restless breeze kicked up the dust and rustled the cottonwood leaves. The girl was standing in front of the ceremonial house; she did not want to look inside, and yet she was certain she must. The clatter of the cottonwood leaves in the wind, and the waves of heat swelling off the packed earth of the abandoned village plaza, seemed to lull her into drowsiness and sleep. The girl realized if she did not move that instant, she would become paralyzed, and her fear startled her and caused her to lunge forward into the coolness of the dim ceremonial chamber. The heat swelling out of the parched earth had been the woman’s ally; while the woman was sleeping, her ally had been instructed to guard the abandoned village.
People did not return to the abandoned village for a long time, and even now, people from the village called the Mouth suffer for reasons that can only be traced to what the eldest girl saw inside the ceremonial house. The epoch of Death-Eye Dog is, of course, notorious for just this sort of thing. Death-Eye Dog has been seated on the throne for five hundred years. His influence has been established across this entire world.
So the girl did not hesitate at what she saw hanging from the cross-beams of the roof. What she had returned for was the ragged garment the younger girl had worn. The eldest girl could only hope the crippled woman had not begun cooking the pages, but had instead feasted upon the liver or heart, known to be the preferred delicacies. The hunchbacked woman had not yet removed the pages from the dress, so the eldest slipped the garment over her head and wore it over her own dress. The children had been told the pages held many forces within them, countless physical and spiritual properties to guide the people and make them strong.
Old Yoeme had paused and looked them both in the eye before she had continued. “You see, it had been the almanac that had saved them. The first night, if the eldest had not sacrificed a page from the book, that crippled woman would have murdered them all right then, while the children were weak from hunger and the longer journey.
“As long as all our days belong to Death-Eye Dog, we will continue to see such things. That woman had been left behind by the others. The reign of Death-Eye Dog is marked by people like her. She did not start out that way. In the days that belong to Death-Eye Dog, the possibility of becoming like her trails each one of us.”
PART TWO
MEXICO
BOOK ONE
REIGN OF DEATH-EYE DOG
MESTIZO
THE OLD MAN was that way. You could play him cards or dice, and if you beat him, he would just laugh and say you were too young to have such a bad memory. He’d claim he had won with three kings or with five threes on the dice. He would pour you more of the rotten-smelling beer he brewed out of any kind of weed or plant or cactus he could find. The old man was slow, lazy, and dangerous. He would get enough of his smelly home brew in him and then he would start bragging about his ancestors and how they had been the most illustrious and powerful. Full of beer he used to get very serious, and when I was a young child, I felt frightened. It was then he bragged the ancestors had seen “it” all coming, and one time I interrupted to ask what “it” was, and he waved his hands all around the shady spot where we were sitting and he said, “The time called Death-Eye Dog.” There was no one in the area who could talk the way the old man did.
Once the old man got rolling he would talk as if others were present and they were arguing with him, debating some point or another. So whenever he addressed the present time we live in as “Death-Eye Dog,” it seemed those invi
sible ones knew the time by other names, and the old man would quickly correct himself. Some knew it as “The Reign of Fire-Eye Macaw,” which was the same as saying “Death-Eye Dog” because the sun had begun to burn with a deadly light, and the heat of this burning eye looking down on all the wretched humans and plants and animals had caused the earth to speed up too—the way the heat makes turtles shiver in a last frenzy of futile effort to reach shade. The only true gods were all the days in the Long Count, and no single epoch or time of a world was vast enough or deep enough to call itself God alone. All the ancestors had understood nothing stayed fixed in the universe. Originally the sun and the stars had come from a deep blue darkness, spinning and whirling and scattering themselves in arcs above us, called the Big River or the Milky Way.
That old man had been interested in what the Europeans thought and the names they had for the planets and stars. He thought their stories accounting for the sun and the planets were interesting only because their stories of explosions and flying fragments were consistent with everything else he had seen: from their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born. He thought about what the ancestors had called Europeans: their God had created them but soon was furious with them, throwing them out of their birthplace, driving them away. The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them.
Menardo had loved the stories his grandfather told him about the old man who drank stinking beer and talked about and sometimes talked with the ancestors. Menardo had loved the stories right up until the sixth grade when one of the teaching Brothers had given them a long lecture about pagan people and pagan stories. At that time the boys had started looking at the girls who did not go to school, but who were required to spend mornings working around the church, either in the kitchen or in the convent area where they washed and cleaned or in season put up the fruit and vegetables. The girls with quick hands learned sewing and embroidered heavy satin vestments for the monsignors and the bishop.
Menardo had been fat all his life. But in those days the others had picked on him and made fun of him. Pansón was the name they called him, and he did not mind it because one of the older boys had found a far worse name. For the rest of his life Menardo could hardly think of it, let alone whisper it. When he looked in the mirror to shave, it always came back to him. Flat Nose. A slang name the Indians were called. “Flat noses that dogs don’t even have.” The boy who made up the name was dark skinned himself, but he was also tall and had legs and arms of a man. When he beat up the younger boys, he always picked them up and threw them up in the air, so they were injured in the fall and not by blows from the fists or feet.
Around the time the others had called him Flat Nose and Big Belly, Menardo had made a horrible discovery. His grandfather’s nose had been much shorter and wider than his was; the people the old man called “our ancestors,” “our family,” were in fact Indians. All along Menardo had been listening to the one who was responsible for the taunts of the others. Without the family nose, Menardo might have passed for one of sangre limpia. Immediately Menardo found excuses for not going down the street where the old man lived in a small ramada in a garden. Menardo was afraid the other boys might come by and hoist themselves up on the back wall of the garden and see Menardo sitting with the old man.
Menardo’s cousin had finally come to the house one evening to tell them the old man was begging to have Menardo visit him as before. Menardo had rehearsed his lies for his mother and was able to repeat them to his cousin in flawless form: he was studying now to become an altar boy and had to spend all his free time at the rectory. Menardo almost felt sorry because the old man was the only one of all the adults who did not require anything in return, except that Menardo listen. The old man talked about other times and other worlds that existed before this present one. The old man recognized evil, whatever name you called it.
Not long after his cousin had come asking why Menardo did not visit grandpa, the old man had died in his sleep. Menardo had been relieved once they got him buried because he had studied the shapes and sizes of the noses of all his uncles and aunts and cousins; the only one with a suspicious nose was Menardo, and once the evidence the flat nose was inherited had been buried, Menardo knew exactly what to do.
He had gotten the idea out of a magazine that one of the older boys had smuggled into chapel. They had wanted the magazine because it had ads in it for women’s lipstick and perfume, and one of the ads showed a woman whirling around in a dress that showed the tops of her thighs. It was an exciting picture and the boys had nearly ruined it with their sweaty hands, smudging all the black ink on the page. But later on, when the picture was ruined and the magazine was stuffed behind the cupboard of the priest’s kitchen, Menardo had taken the magazine to the outhouse, in case he might still be able to make out the image of the woman whirling in her short dress. But the wonderful page had been torn out. What he found was a picture article on boxing and the new flyweight champion of Chiapas. The new champion was talking about his success and his hopes of meeting the flyweight champion of all Mexico, who was second in the world only to the Filipino champion. The champion had hazel eyes, just like Menardo, and his hair was light brown. But more important, his nose had a wide, flat look that the champion called his only regret. “An older, heavier opponent smashed my nose into my face,” the champion said. “But the women still like me, don’t they, Evita?” the champion said to the gorgeous, shapely blonde at his side during the interview.
UNIVERSAL INSURANCE
THE BOXING ARTICLE had given Menardo the answer he needed. He would bring it up casually. As he had later when he was courting Iliana. Menardo imagined her father was staring at his nose. Menardo had to swallow hard to keep from blurting it right out like a maniac: “It got broken in a boxing match!” Such an outburst would have finished the whole courtship right there. Iliana’s family was among the oldest in Tuxtla Gutiérrez—her great-grandfather on her mother’s side had in fact been part of the original Gutiérrez family that had settled the area. Menardo had risen quickly in the insurance business because he knew exactly what people wanted to hear.
Menardo sold “insurance of all kinds” to the whole region around Chiapas. As a salesman, Menardo got better and better; he moved up in the world, establishing his own company: Universal Insurance. He made appointments only with police chiefs, mayors, and owners of grocery stores. Of course there were many businesses and lives that could not be insured, not by any company, and not even by God himself, Menardo liked to joke over a cocktail during a follow-up visit with a new client. The concept of life insurance and insurance for buildings, livestock, and crops was new to the people outside the Federal District. Part of Menardo’s work was to explain tactfully the new world that they were living in, the new age. What was necessary so a man might sleep soundly at night was insurance against all the unknowns stalking the human race out there. Fire, Menardo likened to a feral cat, stalking at night around warehouses full of hemp or freshly ginned cotton. The glow of the cat’s eyes was seen too late to save a lifetime’s struggle and labor.
They liked it when he talked to them about hurricane winds that stampeded across the bay, to trample flat warehouses full of coffee beans or tobacco drying on racks. But there were always the older businessmen—elderly merchants who had seen their life’s savings roll away in wagons driven by thieves calling themselves “revolutionaries” and “the wave of the future.” These elder businessmen did not approve of the notion of interfering with the will of God by insuring losses. They did not like Menardo, and it took many visits and a great deal of humiliation before Menardo could get them to listen to him. He was there, he told them, because the
“new world” could belong to them just as the old one had. Insurance was the new tool of the trade. What Menardo offered were special policies that insured against all losses, no matter the cause, including acts of God, mutinies, war, and revolution. The policies were extremely expensive, but guaranteed 100-percent coverage. How could they lose? How could they refuse this kind of protection?
The older businessmen inquired into the assets of Menardo’s company and found them sufficient. Still they thought he was a fool to insure against losses during revolution since anyone could see the years and the police crackdowns had not cooled off the rabble-rousers and the Bolsheviks. Menardo knew a few of them had developed a perversity due to their advancing age and to the losses they had sustained years ago. Menardo knew that a few of these bitter, strange old ladino businessmen were hoping to see Universal Insurance destroyed and Menardo wiped out. Chiapas had the misfortune of being too close to the border, which leaked rabble-rousers and thieves like a sewage pipe. Menardo’s had been the first insurance company to employ a private security force to protect clients from political unrest.
TIDAL WAVE
ILIANA’S FAMILY HAD ANNOUNCED their engagement after one of Menardo’s greatest triumphs as an insurer. A frantic telephone call had come from the owner of a shipping enterprise up the coast. An earthquake in the Pacific had sent a tidal wave in the direction of the docks and warehouses. The freighters could be taken out to sea to ride out the high water, but one warehouse was packed full with new appliances just shipped from the United States.
Menardo had had no more than two hours. He chartered a crop-dusting plane belonging to a coffee plantation he insured. He telephoned ahead for trucks, wagons, wheelbarrows—anything with wheels. He offered phenomenal wages for an hour’s work. He guaranteed anyone injured or possibly lost if the tidal wave should arrive ahead of schedule would have their family and orphans forever cared for by Seguridad Universal. When the chartered plane landed on the dirt strip behind the hospital, a doctor and a priest came running out to complain they could get no one to help with the evacuation of the hospital because everyone in the town had heard about the amazing wages being offered by Menardo. It was true. The men and big boys stood waiting anxiously glancing over their shoulders from time to time to check the ocean waves. A dump truck, a tractor pulling a flat hay trailer, a milk truck, and a number of smaller pickup trucks, taxis, and horse teams and wagons were ready and waiting. On the hill above the town, the women and children stood together, not watching the ocean but the activity at the airstrip. Menardo took command. He politely asked the doctor and the priest to step aside. Everything would be taken care of, he reassured them. While Menardo gave the orders for the crates of refrigerators and stoves to be loaded and moved to high ground, he questioned the doctor and the priest about the number of patients who were ambulatory and those who would require stretchers. Menardo could feel the power swell inside himself. He assured the doctor and the priest he would return with help.