Descending Son

by Scott Shepherd

  Darkness was falling by the time they hit the ground and Jess resisted the urge to get down on his knees and kiss it. As they took a cab into the downtown area, Maria asked if Cisco had run down a hotel that Tracy James had checked into.

  Jess shook his head. “The last charge was the plane flight. I don’t think she was coming down here to lounge around the pool. She probably headed straight for Santa Alvarado.”

  Maria stared out the taxi window at the ocean’s horizon. Wispy pink and purple tendrils were all that remained of the setting sun as the stars started to emerge.

  “The road, if you can call it that, is horrible. You can barely navigate it during the day. I’m not even sure we would make it in the middle of the night.”

  Jess wasn’t all that anxious to spend a bunch of time in Santa Alvarado after sundown. He liked the idea of getting there in the bright Mexican daylight and suggested they find a hotel, get a good night’s sleep, and start out early the next morning. Maria’s quick agreement led Jess to think she wasn’t all that keen on an overnight stay in her mother’s hometown either.

  But sleep was a long time coming for Jess. As he lay in one of the double beds in a Puerto Vallarta tourist trap (he had suggested separate rooms, but Maria said it was silly to spend the extra money), Jess marveled at how quickly she had fallen asleep. Normally, the big distraction would have been Maria lying six feet away—a blind eunuch would have been tempted by the way the simple T-shirt she wore to sleep clung to her every pore.

  But that wasn’t what kept Jess tossing and turning.

  Even though Santa Alvarado was over fifty miles away, Jess couldn’t stop thinking about what had emerged from the darkness there. He couldn’t shake the nagging feeling it knew they were coming. He half-expected the Civatateo to burst uninvited into the hotel room and make sure neither Maria nor Jess were ever heard from again.

  Nightmarish thoughts stayed with him for a long time. It wasn’t until the first cracks of dawn slipped through the flimsy curtains that he could let himself drift off to sleep and remain there.

  They had breakfast in the hotel’s café overlooking the Pacific. Jess barely picked at his pancakes, making semicircles in the syrup that threatened to solidify into a foreign substance. Maria looked out over the railing at early morning beach joggers and the bright turquoise water.

  “How many times this morning have you thought about just renting a cabana and never leaving?”

  “At least a hundred,” Jess answered.

  He was happy to see she had the same trepidation about the journey ahead. But it didn’t stop them from checking out a half hour later.

  While Maria went off to rent a car, Jess found a local place to access the Internet. For a few pesos he was able to go online and find pictures of Tracy James, which were simple enough to locate—she was the daughter of a film star and had accompanied Clark to numerous Hollywood premieres and parties. Jess noticed there had been fewer and fewer over the past few years, which was easy to understand as James had retired and Tinseltown was all about “out of sight, out of mind.” He found photographs of Tracy and her father arriving at the Palm Springs Film Festival six months earlier. Clark was all smiles, looking like a billion bucks and ready for a comeback. His daughter’s expressions alternated between a put-upon smile and “I-have-nothing-better-to-do-on-Saturday-night?” as she clung to her father’s arm. Jess blew up two shots so Tracy was prominently featured, printed up a few copies, and stuffed them in his jacket pocket beside the photo of Clark James at the church in Santa Alvarado.

  He met Maria at a designated corner. She swung by in an army-green colored jeep. Jess climbed inside and she navigated the twisted maze of downtown Puerto Vallarta. Twenty minutes later they put modern civilization in the rearview mirror and headed into the Mexican jungle.

  Once the trees started to overhang the road, the asphalt quickly turned to dirt. Jess had picked up a map at the Internet café and was wrestling with folds and tiny towns whose names he couldn’t pronounce.

  “Don’t bother with that,” Maria finally told him. “You won’t find where we’re going on a map.”

  “Town’s that small, huh?”

  “It’s not big. But the truth is most people won’t admit it even exists.”

  “That sounds absolutely crazy…”

  “But you know better,” she said.

  “Unfortunately, I do.”

  Maria swerved suddenly. A wild hog had appeared in the middle of the road. Both of them yelled. They really were out in the middle of fucking nowhere.

  Still, Jess was continually impressed by Maria’s calmness and determination. He was long past kicking himself for letting her accompany him. As every hour went by he couldn’t imagine being in Mexico without her.

  “When was the last time you were in Santa Alvarado?”

  “We came back a few times when I was a little girl. Believe it or not, Mom has an aunt who still lives there. But after the movie disaster, we stopped coming.”

  “You certainly know your way around.”

  “Some things you never forget.”

  Maria suggested using her great-aunt’s house as a base. Jess expressed concern that if the woman let Lena know where they were, there could soon be more visitors in Santa Alvarado. Maria told him not to worry—her great-aunt didn’t have a phone, along with most of the town. Jess, not for the first time, wondered exactly what were they getting themselves into.

  The trees and flora became so dense that for half the journey, the jeep was plunged into virtual darkness.

  “Why do you think Tracy came back here?” asked Maria as she slowed to ease the increasingly bumpy ride.

  “I’m not sure. I know she spent time down here when Clark was making The Seventh Day. But it must have something to do with all the hell breaking loose up north.” Jess shrugged, considering it all. “Maybe someone she met? Something she saw?”

  “Guess that’s what we have to find out, huh?”

  Somehow the road got even tighter—there was barely enough room for the jeep to stay atop the dirt. Jess considered them lucky they didn’t run into a vehicle coming from the opposite direction; someone would have ended up in a ditch or river trying to let the other person pass. He couldn’t imagine a film crew hauling gear into such a remote place and figured a bunch of it was brought in by helicopter. Probably the same airlift service that transported the near-death Clark James back to civilization when the movie shut down for good.

  Every once in a while they would glimpse something indicating that a real live human being had passed down the road. A tossed beer bottle. A sign with a Spanish word on it. (“Bridge,” Maria translated for him, but Jess never did see anything resembling one.) A couple of stripped cars. The first house, or to be more specific, shack, appeared two hours after they had last seen the Pacific Ocean. Santa Alvarado may have been only fifty miles due east of Puerto Vallarta, but getting there felt like plowing through a field with a machete for a solid year.

  Jess expected Santa Alvarado to be like one of those towns in the States one finds two miles past the Resume Speed sign, like the shanty villages depicted in an old D. W. Griffith movie. But when the road widened ever so slightly and the jungle began to recede, he understood why Clark James moved heaven and earth to bring a film crew to the depths of Mexico.

  Santa Alvarado was indeed small. If there had been more than one hundred structures, Jess would have been shocked. But each was an architectural wonder, built by laborers who approached their work with the passion and talent of true artisans. Red adobe roofs were in abundance and splashes of vibrant color made Jess catch his breath like Dorothy when she walked out of her house after the tornado plopped it down into a place that definitely wasn’t Kansas.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Jess said, taking it all in.

  “Sort of stuck in time is what I always say.”

  Maria slowed down as they entered the main part of the town. Most houses had simple vegetable gardens in front; some even
had corrals out back. There were two buildings that could be described as places of business—a market of some sort and what must have been a café as there were two tables set up out front.

  “Welcome to downtown Santa Alvarado. My great-aunt lives just around the corner…”

  Maria broke off as they both noticed a dozen people congregated on a tiny street. “That’s odd,” she said, throwing the jeep into park.

  “What?”

  “If you see three people together in Santa Alvarado, it’s a town meeting. Something’s going on. Maybe I ought to go check it out?” she suggested.

  “Good a place to start as any.” Jess said he would wait by the jeep and Maria headed toward the small crowd. He opened the back door and picked up a paper bag with snacks from the convenience store they had stopped at before leaving Puerto Vallarta. He grabbed a pack of M&M’s and threw the shopping bag back on the seat. As he watched Maria approach the crowd and start a conversation, Jess felt a tug at his leg. A child no older than six with big yearning eyes was looking up at him and the bag of M&M’s. Jess didn’t hesitate a beat. He offered the candy to the child, who smiled and took it from his hand. He turned his attention back to Maria, who was speaking very animatedly with the townsfolk. Knowing he wouldn’t understand one word even if he could hear it, Jess looked in the backseat to see what other snack he could scrounge up.

  The shopping bag was gone. Jess’s eyes darted in the opposite direction to see the kid race around a corner, giggling with the bag tucked under his arm.

  “Wonderful,” he muttered.

  Jess turned as Maria was making her way back toward him. She wasn’t happy. Concerned didn’t even cover it. If Jess had to label her expression, he would have said freaked.

  “What happened?”

  “A local farmer just outside of town heard a big commotion in the middle of the night. All the animals were screeching and out of their pens, running around like crazy. Then, he heard a high-pitched squealing that turned out to be a pig lying outside the barn with its throat slashed.”

  “Sounds like a coyote or something got loose,” said Jess. He only half-believed it.

  “That’s what the farmer thought. But when he was bending over the pig, he was suddenly attacked.”

  “Presumably not by a coyote.”

  Maria shook her head. “He said it was definitely human. But it was so dark he couldn’t see.”

  “Then what?”

  “He screamed and it took off into the night.”

  “I guess that’s good,” said Jess.

  Maria hesitated before adding the last part.

  “But not before it bit him.”

  15

  They located the injured man at a roadside market where his wife had brought him to pick up bandages for his wounds. The farmer was in his mid-fifties and spoke no English, but the language barrier couldn’t hide that he was completely flipped out. Luckily the bite had barely scratched the surface; his wife was applying some sort of plant salve to the wound. Maria said it was a local remedy for animal attacks and though Jess doubted the man’s assailant was of the four-legged variety, the balm seemed to ease the farmer’s pain. Jess knew they had to wait for the long-lasting effects, and more specifically what the man would feel like when the sun went down.

  At first, the farmer was reluctant to talk, but he was a (for the moment) warm-blooded male who couldn’t help but succumb to Maria’s charm. Within moments she had him eating out of the palm of her hand. Unfortunately, he couldn’t shed much light on the attack, as it had occurred so quickly. The farmer’s screams and the animal’s screeches had awoken his wife, and her emergence from the house made the attacker beat a hasty retreat. A short conversation with the wife added nothing. She had rushed to the barn and her fallen husband, concerned only with his plight. Jess and Maria thanked them both, wished the farmer a speedy recovery (Good luck with that, thought Jess), and headed back toward the jeep.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Maria.

  “That Tracy might not be the only one down here from Palm Springs.”

  “The Civatateo followed her?”

  “She came here looking for something. Maybe it didn’t want her to find it.”

  Maria pulled up in front of her great-aunt’s house. A pair of yucca trees in pebbled planters framed the structure; it was the only home that didn’t have a garden out front. But there was a large one in back and that was where they found Sophia Cordero, Maria’s great-aunt, weeding a flowerbed.

  Eighty if she was a day, Sophia attacked the green interlopers with the tenacity of a woman half her age. The garden was incredible, a botanical paradise borne from someone blessed with a green thumb. Jess could tell this was Sophia’s labor of love, her life’s work. The centerpiece was an exquisite white trellis with intertwining pink and white roses that climbed up and over the top. Wind chimes hung off branches dotted with dozens of ancient ribbons that had faded to off-white from the vibrant colors they had been years before.

  The moment Sophia saw Maria, she dropped her garden shears and rushed into her great-niece’s arms. There was plenty of joyful crying and laughter as Jess waited to be introduced. He was surprised when Sophia approached, immediately hugged him tightly, and a melodious “Welcome, Jessie” escaped her lips in perfect English.

  He was worried she had been forewarned of their arrival by someone to the north and the consequences that would bring. But Sophia quickly appeased those fears, saying Lena had written numerous letters over the decades with plenty of pictures chronicling her life in the Coachella Desert. Sophia recognized Jess the moment he stepped foot in the enchanted garden.

  She also told them she knew exactly why they had come.

  “The Civatateo. It is back, yes?”

  Jess and Maria exchanged a quick look. Maria’s almost imperceptible nod confirmed what Jess sensed immediately about Sophia—there was no fooling this woman.

  “Yes,” said Jess. “We think so.”

  Sophia surprised him further by taking it completely in stride, as if they had been chatting about a slight turn in the weather. “Then we should talk. But not on an empty stomach. You must be starving. I’m sure you haven’t eaten since leaving Puerto Vallarta, unless you caught or shot something.”

  Jess laughed. Maria took hold of his arm and urged him toward the house. “You’re in for a treat.”

  Maria wasn’t kidding. The small kitchen didn’t have an appliance built since Kennedy took office, but the ceramic wood-burning oven and vintage stove were so steeped in aromas, herbs, oils, and spices from decades of delicacies, anything prepared on them had a head start any three-star chef would salivate over. Sophia made paella from rice she had smoked the night before and Jess and Maria were given specific tasks to help. Caught up in the meal preparation and Sophia’s boundless enthusiasm, Jess was grateful to concentrate on something else and he relaxed for the first time since they had crossed the border.

  While waiting for water to boil and rice to cook, Sophia brought out photos from Lena and Maria’s annual visits many years before. Jess made fun of Maria’s attention-getting poses captured on Kodak snapshots—tongue sticking out, silly dances, way too much makeup for a six-year-old—but there was no denying Maria had always been a beautiful girl. With great pride and love, a younger Lena and Sophia watched her parade around the small house that hadn’t changed one iota. Next came pictures sent by Lena of a young Jess in similarly embarrassing situations. Maria got a particularly big kick out of him in a ridiculous cowboy outfit. He was touched and a bit envious of this chronicled Palm Springs life Lena had carved out for herself, showing off the family Lena was much more a part of than Jess.

  They sat outside at a hand-carved wooden table drinking sun tea and eating paella that Jess would have been content to drown in. As the meal wound down, he could feel a gloom sink in as the conversation took its inevitable turn.

  “How did you know what we came back here for?” he asked.

  “I heard what hap
pened to Juan Carlos last night.” She turned toward Maria. “Now you come for the first time since the madness five years ago. There could be no other reason. I always knew the Civatateo would return.”

  “And yet you stay,” said Jess.

  “I can’t leave.”

  “Why not?”

  For the first time since they had arrived, the brightness in Sophia’s eyes dimmed. A mistiness filmed over them. “Because of Luis.”

  Maria nodded. “Luis Mendoza.”

  “The love of my life,” explained Sophia.

  Maria had obviously heard the story many times, but urged Sophia to tell it to Jess. Even before she started, he could tell it simultaneously brought joy and sadness to the old woman—joy because she loved remembering anything about this man and sadness because there must have been a tragic ending.

  “You could say we knew each other since the day we were both born.”

  Indeed, their mothers had given birth within hours of each other, two villages apart. Though they hadn’t actually met on that blessed day, the midwife who delivered them both told Sophia’s mother about the beautiful baby boy she had just brought into the world. When their mutual birthday rolled around the following year, the midwife arranged a party and the two infants crawled around together in the very same yard they now sat in. On the next birthday, the celebration was at Luis’s home and Sophia’s parents rode alongside as she sat on a brand-new pony to attend the party in the next village. They continued to alternate homes each year until they reached their teens. By then, Luis and Sophia were seeing a whole lot more of each other than once a year; they were inseparable, wearing out the path between their two villages, just waiting for the day they came of age and their parents would bless their inevitable marriage.

  On their sixteenth birthday, both villages turned out to celebrate the nuptials of their favorite son and daughter—the love story having become a local fable—and the preparations went on for a joyous week.

  Sophia pointed at the white wooden trellis. “Luis and I built that from the ground up. We carved the wind chimes and hung them from the top. Everything was perfectly planned.” She hesitated, her eyes drifting up and down the trellis. “Except my wedding bouquet. Pink and white wild roses. Somehow it had been misplaced in all the preparations.”