Arturo turns and slowly follows the woman, putting his hand in his pocket to check that Catrina is still there. She is.
The woman holds her arm out and the lights on a white Mitsubishi all flash, twice. It’s just steps away. Arturo takes a look around and then runs.
In a moment he has her arm behind her back and the knife in front of her face, and he’s pushing her down the alley between the two office blocks.
He’s lucky. She’s too afraid, or too smart, to scream, to make trouble. Maybe something like this has even happened to her before, because she knows the routine.
—¡Okay, okay!—she’s saying.—¡Take the money, take it! ¡Leave me alone and take it!
Arturo twists her around so she faces him, but keeps the knife out toward her. He has her backed into the shadow of the side door to one of the offices. It’s Saturday, they’re closed, no lights inside, just darkness.
He doesn’t look at the young woman. He looks at her hands, holding her bag, and he waves the knife to get her to hurry. He knows it will not do to look at her, and he tries hard, but he cannot help it.
She’s scared, he can see. She might know the routine but she’s shaking so badly that she can’t open her purse to get at the money.
—I’m sorry—she stammers.—I’m sorry.
Arturo doesn’t want to look at her, but he does. She’s not much older than he is. She has nice clothes, some simple jewelry. She’s never gone hungry in her life, that’s clear, but Arturo looks at her and knows she’s not a bad person.
But he needs the money and he waves the knife and points at her bag and cannot bring himself to speak and instead he looks just behind her.
There, in the reflection made by the tinted black door to the offices, he sees himself. He sees the back of the girl, fumbling. She fumbles so badly she spills the entire contents of her bag over the ground and she doesn’t even seem to remember that she’s being held at knifepoint because she stoops and starts picking everything up.
Arturo looks at himself. He had no idea he was so thin, he had no idea he looked so rough. He sees a stupid boy holding a knife, and then he sees what’s behind him. He’s holding Catrina, but behind them is a woman much more powerful, much more deadly. Why he hadn’t seen her before, he doesn’t know, but she’s there as large as death: Santa Muerte.
She stands completely still. She waits, behind Arturo, her eyes boring into him, her arms outstretched, and in one hand she holds her scythe and in the other she holds the world. She waits, and Arturo watches himself, and now he sees the girl has stood up again and is holding out a bundle of money toward him. He has no idea how much it is. It’s not even dollars. It’s pesos. But he doesn’t care anymore.
—I’m sorry—the girl says, still holding the money, and then the look on her face starts to change.
Slowly, carefully, she puts the money back in her purse, and Arturo watches it all happening and there is Santa Muerte, right behind him. He lets his arm drop. He folds the knife and puts it back in his pocket.
He cannot look at the girl as he says—Forgive me.
He nods toward the parking lot.
—Go on.
The girl doesn’t understand why this is happening, but she sees her chance, and half walks, half runs away, looking back at Arturo every other step, checking she’s not being followed.
She isn’t.
Arturo doesn’t see her anymore. He looks at himself in the glass, and knows he has to turn around to look at Santa Muerte directly. It takes a massive effort of will. It’s hard, because tendrils have snaked out of the ground and are twining around his legs, holding him where he is, but he knows he has to face her, and so he wrenches his legs free and makes a half turn, and even as he does so and plants his feet on the ground again, the tendrils start to reattach themselves, twisting around and into him. They are the past, of past history, of lies made in the past, they are the tendrils of promises made and broken, come to seek the revenge they crave.
The White Girl, meanwhile, stares at him, Arturo. It’s impossible to read her bone face for emotion. It could be anything. It could be hate, it could be kindness. It could be empathy, it could be anger. It could be mocking laughter that pours from her silent face, her gaping mouth.
Whoever made her has done a very good job. She’s three meters high, maybe more, and covers half the side of the ground floor of the other office block. She’s mostly black and white, just a touch of color here and there, sprayed onto the brick wall with auto paint. The scythe is gold, the world in her hands is a dying green, not the green of fertile growth but the green of decay, of putrefaction.
¿What have I done? thinks Arturo. ¿What have I lost?
He stares at Santa Muerte, she stares back. As before, she wins. She always wins, and Arturo lets his gaze drop, and knows that he is done. That he has failed. That there is nothing else to do but to go back to Isla de Sacrificios, and wait. It’s over.
* * *
Something disturbs him, a noise to his right. He looks up and sees four people by a car. The car is a police car, and three of the people are policemen, and the fourth is the young woman he just tried to rob. She’s pointing at him, and the cops see that he has spotted them, and they shout.
—¡Hey!
—¡Stop!
Arturo sees them pull their guns from the holsters, and he turns away.
At the far end of the alley between the office blocks is a low wire fence. Beyond it is waste ground, beyond that, strip malls and fast food joints.
He glances at the ground, expecting to find the tendrils holding him fast, but, with surprise, sees he is free, and sprints for the fence.
He only saw the cops for a second but he spotted that at least two of them are out of shape. They cannot bring their car this way; he need only be fast enough to get away and across the waste ground.
This is the thought in his head as he throws himself at the low chain-link fence, grabbing its rusty wires with his hands and vaulting his legs up and over it. He lands in a messy sprawl, and a shot whistles past his head.
The cops are shouting and he can hear running behind him, but he doesn’t stop to think. He’s up on his feet and, ignoring the pain in one ankle, he sprints across the patch of ground, with his head back and his arms clawing for air.
Another shot, and this time he only hears the bang of the gun, and guesses he is putting distance between them. Ahead, he sees the malls. They’re full of people. They won’t shoot again, not with these people, and he even allows himself to turn and sees the first of the cops struggling over the fence, a hundred meters away now, maybe more.
Arturo ducks and weaves his way through the crowds, losing himself, losing himself, though he doesn’t really need to bother.
In truth, he is already lost.
STATELESS
Arturo slows to a walk, settles down, trying to merge into the crowd, trying to become one of them but never really settling. He is not them. As much as he tries and as much as he might like to be, he is not one of them. They are dressed better than him, they wash in fresh water every day, they have money. Arturo stands apart.
He thinks about running. Not running from these overfed cops, not running home. He thinks about running away, completely, and not for the first time. Brief but elaborate fantasies burst through his mind, fantasies in which he is lucky and finds work or steals a fortune or is taken in by kindly people and is happy. Fantasies like these, and more. He creates every one, and then destroys it. He sees El Carnero holding the phone up to his face, taking his picture. In minutes Arturo’s face can be sent to every pandilla sympathetic to the cartel and he would be walking a nightmare of a deathful expectation. He could run, yes, he could run, but where? How far would he get? What would he live on?
Arturo walks on down the strip mall, clinging to the shop windows, away from the street. He knows the cops will not follow him now. If they don’t chase you after the first block, they don’t chase you, but he’s careful, he’s safe, that’s what
has kept him alive for this long, and now he’s no less cautious. He glances at people as they slide by him, all hurrying; in fact, Arturo suddenly sees, all running. Whether they’re walking or hurrying or ambling or whatever it is, they’re all running, running, running.
He wonders what it is they’re running from. Perhaps it’s something they’re running to, but then, as he watches, they start to wind down, like a clockwork mechanism grinding to a halt, step by step, slowing to a stop. Arturo stops still, watching them wide-eyed, wondering what is happening as they all become motionless around him, frozen in time, still.
He blinks. He stares. He becomes afraid he is paralyzed too and jerks his hand to show himself he can move. Seeing that he can, he walks. Since they are stopped in time, motionless, he is able to come right up to people and stare at them, gaze at them for as long as he likes.
He approaches a couple, arm in arm. They are caught in the moment of turning to each other and smiling, and Arturo feels his heart slide as he looks at them, but then, as he looks closer, he sees something else. There is something behind the woman’s smile, and the man’s too. He sees the happiness they have in being together, in looking at each other, but underneath he sees something else, a lurking and nameless thing, a terror.
Dismayed, Arturo spins around and turns to an old man behind him. He looks into the man’s face, deeply, looking right into his eyes, more closely than anyone has done in decades. The man’s face is impassive, but Arturo sees through his eyes and feels his soul twisting.
¿With what? thinks Arturo. ¿What is it? ¿Pain, fear? ¿Loneliness?
What does Arturo see, what does he feel?
He is grasping for it, flailing, reaching as he turns and looks about him, and on all sides, with everyone he approaches, it’s the same thing.
Arturo reels backward, made dizzy by this thing he cannot name, staggering from host to host and finding only the same thing inside. The same appalling truth, the same abysmal horror and Arturo knows that this horror is only unnameable for the moment. That it will burst forth, sooner or later, erupt across the stage of the mind, the stage of the world and be known for what it is, and then people will sink to their knees and weep with understanding. They will tilt their heads back, turn their faces to the heavens, and beg and pray, and the heavens will answer with nothing but silence, for all the gods will have vanished.
Arturo stares into the soul of a young woman, a girl about his own age, transfixed by the dawning horror, on the cusp of understanding. Something distracts him. The girl has her hand lifted and is brushing her hair aside from her face. Her wrist bears an expensive watch, and Arturo is distracted by it.
Because time does not move, the hands on the watch do not move, not even the second hand, but Arturo reads the time. It is just after three. He told Faustino to meet him at five, back in Anapra. Then, the moment is broken.
There’s a shout, the second hand of the watch gives out a staggering tick and Arturo turns his head away from the girl and sees the cops at the end of the street. He was wrong, they did follow him. With that shout, everyone starts moving around him again, just as before, like normal, and Arturo looks at his legs and his feet and the ground beneath them, and sees they are free. With that, he runs.
He runs home, across the city, sprinting hard, dodging and weaving, jumping on a bus to take him back to Anapra. He has failed to find five thousand dollars, he failed to find the four he needs to save his own skin, failed to find the one that Faustino needs. He has the five hundred from Siggy and Carlos, and that is not enough to save either of them. But maybe Faustino has had better luck, maybe he has come up with something. Maybe there is still a way out, for both of them. Or maybe not for both of them, and with that, a new thought enters Arturo’s head, something remarkable, one that takes root and begins to spread rapidly through his mind. He hurries up from Rancho Anapra to his place, praying that all will be well, praying that Faustino will be there. He isn’t.
When he gets to his shack he sees three of the aces still stuck in the doorframe. The fourth is on the ground outside. Arturo pushes his way inside, and there he finds a note from Faustino, written in ballpoint on the opened-out interior of a discarded cigarette pack.
¿Where are you? You have to have the money. Meet me at mine at 12. F
Arturo stares at the note.
Faustino was here. He was here some time before twelve; they must have both been in Anapra at the same time and missed each other. And when Arturo didn’t show up in Calle Libertad at twelve, what did Faustino think then? Will he still come back at five, as Arturo told him to?
There is no way to know, no other way to find out, than to wait.
Arturo is exhausted. He lies down on his bed, and then, feeling in his pocket, discovers that Catrina is missing. The knife must have fallen from his pocket somewhere, when he was running from the cops, leaping over that fence, and he knows that he has lost the best thing he owned.
He is not aware of it yet, but he will receive three visitors this evening. The order in which they come will determine his fate. In the meantime, something he has been trying to ignore rises up in him, something he knows he can no longer avoid, someone he has to think about, finally.
So while Arturo waits for Faustino, he spends his time thinking about another person altogether: Eva.
* * *
One—Climate change is now indisputably recognized to be the result of global industrialization.
Two—The greatest single impact of climate change will be on human migration, with millions of people displaced by drought, shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption.
Three—The impact of climate change is anticipated to displace up to 250 million people worldwide by 2050.
Four—Speaking at the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris, French president Francois Hollande said: “Never have the stakes been so high, because this is about the future of the planet, the future of life.”
Five—“This is the turning point.”
* * *
EVA
Arturo knows most of Eva’s story. The rest he can guess. Hers is like so many others. He knows those lives, they all know them.
Like Arturo, Eva was born in Juárez. Not in Anapra, though, but in the Colonia Franja Sara Lugo, also right by the border, east a little way. It lies just across the river from Smeltertown, the Asarco plant, a place that is now empty, shut down after it was finally proved the company used it to illegally dispose of hazardous waste. They demolished the towering smokestacks a couple of years back, but by then decades of damage had been done.
Eva’s mother remembers those days bitterly, and will tell anyone who cares to listen as well as those who don’t. Arturo knows the stories she used to tell, stories about the wind. They hated the north wind more than anything, for it was on those days that the Asarco plant would crank up production, and the smokestack would pour sulfur dioxide and heavy metals directly into Mexico, directly into the colonias south of the border.
—They could pollute us as much as they wanted—Eva’s mother would say.—And because it was coming from another country, no one could stop them. ¿What could we do? We just breathed it all in.
And then Eva’s mother will tell anyone who’s listening and anyone who’s not about the two stillbirths she had before she had Eva, and, unspoken, dare anyone to deny that the deformed things that came out of her womb did not have anything to do with Smeltertown.
Eva was lucky. She survived nine months inside her mother. Just before the new millennium was born, Eva was born into a colonia just as poor as Anapra, where she and her mother would move later, when Eva’s father died. She was five at the time, and doesn’t really remember him. She remembers the Asarco smokestacks, though production had been stopped by then and the monstrous chimneys stood silent, monuments to foregoing greed. She remembers playing with other kids on the waste ground right by the river. There were two white shacks, built of bricks, and a smaller one, unpainted. She and
the other kids would climb on them and, when they were too tired to run and play anymore, sit on the roofs and make up stories about the sleeping giants who lived in the now silent smelting plant across the river.
When her father died, they would have been homeless, but they moved to Anapra where they lived with Eva’s mother’s brothers and their families. Eva’s two uncles had been building a house of sorts out here to the northwest of the city where land was free if you could grab it and keep it. Eva’s mother got a job in the Electrolux factory, then took a second shift, this one in the Boeing plant. She aged rapidly, she barely saw her daughter, but they had enough money to survive. Eva began going to school, and it was there, a few years later, that she met Arturo and Faustino: the brothers who were not, she eventually learned, actually brothers.
Arturo and Faustino were already friends, of course. One day, not long after they had begun going to the school, some other kid was teasing Faustino, taunting him about his foot. The kid hobbled around the yard outside the classroom, pointing at Faustino and pulling dumb faces, making some of the other kids laugh. Eva didn’t laugh. She walked right up to the kid, who wasn’t so big really, and stamped on his foot so hard they said she’d broken his toes. She got in trouble, but after that no one teased Faustino about his foot again. Faustino was embarrassed that a girl had saved him from the bully, but Arturo told him he should say thank you, so he did.
She just shrugged.
—It’s not right—she said.—To make fun of people.
Arturo and Faustino nodded, seriously.
Saint Death Page 14