House Of The Scorpion

  23

  DEATH

  Matt was strapped to a bed in a room full of alarming machinery. Two guards sat outside the door, and another two waited by the window, which was covered by iron bars.

  He was utterly terrified. This was where they had kept MacGregor’s clone. This was where the bad things happened.

  If only I’d escaped when I had the chance, he thought. Everything was ready for me. Tam Lin gave me maps and food and showed me how to climb mountains. I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand.

  He was sick with dread. Every noise in the hall made him try to free himself. At one point Willum and two strange doctors appeared and proceeded to poke Matt’s stomach and take his blood. They untied him so he could pee into a bottle, and Matt took the opportunity to run. He got only about six feet before being tackled by one of the guards.

  Fool, fool, fool, Matt told himself. Why didn’t I escape when I had the chance?

  After a while Willum and the other doctors returned to discuss Matt’s health. “It has mild anemia,” said one of the doctors. “Its liver functions are a little off.”

  “Is it cleared for transplant?” inquired Willum.

  “I see nothing against it,” said the strange doctor, peering at a chart.

  They left Matt alone with his fear and his imagination.

  What was María doing now? They would have drugged her, as Fani had been drugged before she was forced to marry Benito. Perhaps Felicia had been given laudanum in the beginning, to keep her obedient. One day there would be another grand wedding for María and Tom. María would have to be propped up as she walked toward the altar.

  I can’t save her, thought Matt. But perhaps he’d done the one thing that could rescue her. María knew about her mother now. She could call for help. And Esperanza, if Matt knew anything about the woman who wrote A History of Opium, would descend on the convent like a fire-breathing dragon.

  The door opened, and a pair of bodyguards entered and proceeded to untie Matt. Now what? he thought. It couldn’t be a good sign. Nothing was good anymore, not for him.

  The bodyguards, keeping a tight hold on Matt’s arms, led him down the hall to a room unlike any he’d seen in the hospital. It was decorated with fine paintings, elegant furniture, and carpets. At the far end, next to a tall window, was a small table with a teapot, cups, and a silver plate of cookies.

  And next to it lay El Patrón in a hospital bed. He looked extremely frail, but life still sparkled in his jet-black eyes. In spite of himself, Matt felt a wave of affection.

  “Come closer, Mi Vida,” said the whispery old voice.

  Matt approached. He saw more guards standing in the shadows and Celia in a beam of light from a gap in the curtains. Matt braced himself for a stormy scene, but she was dry-eyed and grim.

  “Sit down, Mi Vida,” said El Patrón, indicating a chair by the table. “As I remember, you like cookies.”

  I did when I was six years old, thought Matt. What was going on here?

  “Cat got your tongue?” the old man said. “It’s like the first time we met, when Celia rescued you from the chicken litter.” He smiled. Matt didn’t. He had nothing to be happy about. “Ah, well,” sighed El Patrón. “It always comes to this in the end. My clones forget about the wonderful years I give them, the presents, the entertainment, the good food. I don’t have to do it, you know.”

  Matt stared ahead. He wanted to speak, but his throat had closed up.

  “If I were like MacGregor—a good Farmer, but a foul human being—I would have had your brain destroyed at birth. Instead, it pleased me to give you the childhood I never had. I had to grovel at the feet of the ranchero who owned my parents’ land for every damn sack of cornmeal.”

  Celia said nothing. She might have been carved out of stone.

  “But once a year that changed,” said El Patrón. “During Cinco de Mayo the ranchero had a celebration. I and my five brothers went to watch. Mamá brought my little sisters. She carried one, and the other held on to her skirt and followed behind.”

  Matt knew this story so well, he wanted to scream. El Patrón slipped into it effortlessly, like a donkey walking along a well-worn trail. Once he got going, nothing could stop him until he reached the end.

  The old man spoke of the dusty cornfields and purple mountains of Durango. His bright black eyes saw beyond the hospital room to the streams that roared with water two months of the year and were dry as a bone the rest of the time.

  “The mayor of our village—dressed in a fine black-and-silver suit—rode on a white horse and threw money to the crowd. How we scrambled for the coins! How we rolled in the dirt like pigs! But we needed the money. We were so poor, we didn’t have two pesos to rub together. On this day the ranchero gave a great feast. We could eat all we wanted, and it was a wonderful opportunity for people who had stomachs so shrunken that chili beans had to wait in line to get inside.

  “One year, during that feast, my little sisters caught typhoid. They died in the same hour. They were so small, they couldn’t look over the windowsill—no, not even if they stood on tiptoe.”

  The room was deathly still. Matt heard a dove calling from the roof of the hospital. No hope, it said. No hope. No hope.

  “During the following years each of my five brothers died; two drowned, one had a burst appendix, and we had no money for the doctor. The last two brothers were beaten to death by the police. There were eight of us,” said El Patrón, “and only I lived to grow up. Don’t you think I’m owed those lives?” El Patrón spoke so sharply, Matt jolted up in his chair. The story wasn’t ending the way he’d expected.

  “There were eight of us,” the old man cried. “We should all have grown up, but I was the only survivor. I am meant to have those lives! I am meant to have justice!”

  Matt tried to stand. He was shoved back down by the body-guards.

  “Justice?” said Celia. It was the first word she had spoken.

  “You know what it was like,” El Patrón whispered, his strength deserting him now after his outburst. “You came from the same village.”

  “You’ve had many lives,” Celia said. “Thousands of them are buried under the poppy fields.”

  “Oh, them!” El Patrón was dismissive. “They’re like cattle running after greener grass. They scuttle north and south across my fields. Oh, yes,” he said when Matt raised his eyebrows. “In the beginning the tide was all one way. The Aztlános ran north to find the big Hollywood lifestyle. But the United States isn’t the rich paradise it once was. Now the Americanos look at movies about Aztlán and think life is pretty sweet down there. I catch about as many going one way as the other.”

  “El Viejo was the only good man in this family,” said Celia. “He accepted what God gave him, and when God told him it was time to go, he did it.” Matt was amazed by her courage. People didn’t argue with El Patrón if they wanted to stay healthy.

  “El Viejo was a fool,” whispered El Patrón. For a few moments he stopped speaking. A doctor came in and listened to his heart. He gave him an injection.

  “The operating room is ready,” the doctor said in a low voice. Matt was swept by an icy wave of terror.

  “Not yet,” murmured the old man.

  “Ten more minutes,” said the doctor.

  El Patrón seemed to gather his strength for a last effort. “I created you, Mi Vida, as God created Adam.”

  Celia sniffed indignantly.

  “Without me, you would never have seen a beautiful sunset or smelled the rain approaching on the wind. You would never have tasted cool water on a hot summer day. Or heard music or known the wonderful pleasure of creating it. I gave you these things, Mi Vida. You … owe … me.”

  “He owes you nothing,” Celia said.

  Matt was afraid for her. El Patrón was capable of destroying a person who angered him. But the old man merely smiled. “We make a fine pair of scorpions, don’t we?”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Celia. “Matt owes you
nothing, and he’s going to pay you nothing. You can’t use him for transplants.”

  The guards stirred when they heard this. The doctor looked up from the monitor he was watching.

  “When you had your first heart attack, I poisoned Matt with foxglove from my garden,” said Celia. “I’m a curandera, you know, as well as a cook. I made Matt’s heart too unstable to transplant.”

  El Patron’s eyes bulged. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The doctor rushed to his side.

  “I couldn’t keep on giving Matt foxglove, though. It’s much too dangerous. I needed something that would make him sick, but not too sick. Then someone told me about monarch butterflies.”

  Matt sat up, only to have a bodyguard’s hands tighten on his shoulders. He knew about the monarchs. Tam Lin had talked about them in the garden, the night of Matt’s coming-of-age celebration. The air had been heavy with perfumes, some pleasant, some not, from the flowers Celia had become interested in. She’d pointed out the black-eyed Susans, larkspur, foxgloves, and milkweed, and Tam Lin was stirred when she’d mentioned milk-weed. It’s fed upon by monarch butterflies, he’d said. They’re clever little buggers. Fill themselves up with poison so nothing will eat them.

  Matt had paid no attention to this remark at the time. Tam Lin was always coming up with facts he got out of the nature books he read so slowly and carefully.

  “I needed something like the poison in monarch butterflies,” said Celia, breaking into Matt’s thoughts. “So I began feeding him arsenic.”

  “Arsenic!” the doctor cried.

  “Arsenic creeps into the whole body,” Celia went on, her eyes as cold as the eyes of a snake. “It grows into the hair, it makes little white lines on the fingernails, it settles into the heart. I didn’t give Matt enough to kill him—I wouldn’t do that!—but enough to kill anyone already weak who tried to steal his heart. You’ve had your eight lives, El Patrón. It’s time to make your peace with God.”

  “¡Bruja! Witch!” shrieked El Patrón. His eyes flamed with murderous rage. His skin flushed an angry red. He struggled to claw his way up from the bed.

  “Emergency!” yelled the doctor. “Take him to the operating room! Move! Move! Move!”

  The guards rolled the bed away. The doctor ran beside it, pushing on El Patrón’s chest. Suddenly the whole building seethed like a wasp nest. More guards appeared—an army of them. Two of them hurried Celia off in spite of Matt’s attempts to stop them. A technician snipped off a strand of Matt’s hair and retreated.

  He was alone. Alone, that is, except for four burly men who sat outside the window and an unknown number lurking outside the door. It was a beautiful room, with a carpet patterned in the colors of the oasis. Matt saw the red of canyon walls, the heavy green of creosote, and a blue that was the color of the sky trapped between high cliffs. If he half closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself there, in the quiet shadows of the Ajo Mountains.

  He waited. It had been morning when El Patrón was wheeled out. Now it was afternoon. The panic had died down outside, and the halls were nearly silent. The hospital went about its business without involving the prisoner in the elegant drawing room.

  Matt finished the tea and ate all the cookies. He felt utterly exhausted. Everything had been turned upside down, and he didn’t know whether El Patrón’s death would mean safety or exactly the opposite.

  Matt studied his arm and wondered at the arsenic that lurked inside. Would mosquitoes die if they bit him? Could he kill things by spitting on them? It was an interesting thought. Matt discovered that no matter how terrified he’d been at first, it wasn’t possible to stay terrified. It was as though his brain said, Okay. That’s enough. Let’s find something else to do.

  Matt thought about María instead. She was probably back at the convent. He didn’t know what she did there, aside from eating chocolates and sunbathing naked on the roof. What a crazy thing to do. What an interesting thing to do. Matt’s face turned warm as he thought about it. He’d seen paintings of fat, naked goddesses from Rome in his art classes. He thought they were nice, but no one ran around like that in real life. Or did they? He didn’t know how people behaved in the outside world.

  Anyhow, María had gotten into trouble for it. Matt felt feverish, but it wasn’t surprising, being full of arsenic as he was. He wondered what other stuff Celia had tried on him from her garden.

  The door swung open. Mr. Alacrán strode in with Tam Lin.

  For an instant time froze. Matt was six years old again, lying in a pool of blood with Rosa plucking fragments of glass from his foot. A fierce man had burst into the room and shouted, How dare you defile this house? Take the creature outside now!

  It was the first time Matt had realized he wasn’t human. The fierce man had been Mr. Alacrán, and he had the same expression of loathing on his face now as he looked at Matt.

  “I’m here to inform you we no longer need your services,” Mr. Alacrán said.

  Matt gasped. That meant El Patrón was dead. No matter how often he’d thought about it, the reality came as a blow.

  “I—I’m sorry.” Silent tears began to roll down Matt’s face. He could keep himself from blubbering, but there was nothing he could do about the grief that welled up inside.

  “I imagine you are,” said Mr. Alacrán. “It means we no longer have a use for you.”

  Of course you have a use for me, Matt thought. He knew as much about running Opium as Steven. He’d studied the farming techniques, the day-to-day problems of water purification and food distribution. He probably knew more than anyone about the network of spies and corrupt officials in other countries. Years of listening to El Patrón had given Matt a feel for the Alacrán empire no one else could possibly have.

  “Have it put to sleep,” Mr. Alacrán said to Tam Lin.

  “Yes, sir,” said Tam Lin.

  “What do you mean?” cried Matt. “El Patrón wouldn’t want that! He had me educated. He wanted me to help run the country.”

  Tam Lin looked at him in pity. “You poor fool. El Patrón had seven other clones exactly like you, each one educated and believing he was going to run the country.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “I have to admit, you were the first one with musical genius. But we can always turn on the radio if we want that.”

  “You can’t do this! We’re friends! You said so! You left me a note—” Matt was knocked down by a blow that made him see stars. No one had ever struck him. No one was allowed to. He crawled to his knees, holding his jaw. He was even more shocked by the person who’d done it.

  Tam Lin.

  Tam Lin was an ex-terrorist. He’d been responsible for the deaths of twenty children, and maybe it didn’t even bother him. Matt had never considered that possibility.

  “You see, lad, I’m what you call a mercenary,” said Tam Lin in the lilting voice Matt had come to love. “I worked for El Patrón for donkey’s years—thought he’d go on forever. But now I’m out of a job, and Mr. Alacrán has been kind enough to offer me another.”

  “What about Celia?” whispered Matt.

  “You don’t think she’d get away with the game she played? By now she’ll have been turned into an eejit.”

  But you told her about the monarch butterflies, thought Matt. You let her walk into the trap.

  “Can you finish up here? I’ve got work to do,” said Mr. Alacrán.

  “I’ll dispose of the clone, sir,” said Tam Lin. “I might need Daft Donald to help me tie it up.”

  He called me a clone, Matt thought. He called me an “it.”

  “Remember, I want you back for the wake tonight,” said Mr. Alacrán.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Tam Lin with a twinkle in his lying, treacherous eyes.

  24

  A FINAL GOOD-BYE

  Daft Donald held Matt firmly, and Tam Lin wrapped him in duct tape. The bodyguard slung him over a horse as he exchanged greetings with other members of El Patrón’s priva
te army, lounging by the stables. “Where are you taking it?” a man called.

  “Thought I’d dump it next to the eejit pens,” Tam Lin replied. The man’s laughter was lost in the drum of horse’s hooves striking the earth.

  This animal was different from the Safe Horses. It was faster and less predictable. It even smelled different. Matt, with his nose pressed into its hide, was in a good position to know. Safe Horses had a faint chemical odor, but this one reeked of sun and sweat.

  Matt suddenly realized what Tam Lin meant by dumping him next to the eejit pens. He was going to be thrown into the yellow ooze at the bottom of a pit. The horror of it, the unfairness and treachery of almost everyone he’d ever known, made Matts blood pound in his ears. But this time, instead of fear, he felt a surge of pure animal rage. He deserved to live! He was owed this life that had so casually been given him, and if he had to die, he would struggle until the very last minute.

  Matt tested the tape holding his arms and legs. He couldn’t move an inch. Well then, Matt thought, I’ll have to wriggle and squirm my way out of the sludge pit. He saw the earth fly under the horse’s hooves. His stomach bounced painfully against its body. This creature didn’t run as smoothly as a Safe Horse.

  Finally, it slowed and Tam Lin lifted Matt down. The boy managed to jackknife his body and drive his head into the man’s stomach. “Ach! Ye pee-brained ninny!” swore Tam Lin. “Look about you before you do a stupid trick like that!”

  Matt rolled onto his back, his feet up to deliver a kick. He saw blue sky and a shoulder of rock. He smelled not slime and corruption, but good, clean air scented by creosote. They weren’t by the eejit pens. They were on the path to the Ajo Mountains.

  “There! I hope to have a lavish apology,” grunted Tam Lin, peeling the tape, none too gently, off Matt’s skin.

  “Are you going to drown me in the oasis instead?” Matt snarled.