“Hey,” he said, throwing an arm around Rafael’s shoulder. “You wanna cut me, or you wanna lie down on silk? You wanna watch me bleed, or you wanna hear a sugar voice sayin’, ‘Oh, Rafael! You so fine!’ C’mon, man! We’ll have a good time tonight, and then tomorrow we can get back to killin’ each other. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll catch fire inside, maybe we’ll find out we can burn together.”
Rafael’s muscles relaxed, and he giggled, getting behind Chapo’s rap. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe we cross the border, cut some gringos.”
“Shit!” said Chapo. “We gonna do more’n that, man.” He spat at the border, and for a second he believed his spit would dissolve the fire instead of merely sizzling and vanishing, revealing a fabulous unknown America, a place of golden women with jeweled eyes and occult powers. “We gonna raid the secret tower, bring back the magic dagger. Know what I’m talkin’ ’bout?”
“Yeah!” said Rafael gleefully, jittering with excitement. “Yeah!”
“We gonna dance on the moon, we gonna break the silver chains and loose the final beast.”
From behind them came a shriek, curses. An old man dressed in the cotton trousers and shirt of a campesino was lunging toward the border, trying to hurl himself into it, while an old woman clung to him, dragging him back. A crowd was gathering, hemming them in against the shimmering curtain of energy. They laughed, talked, pointed. The old woman called on God and the Virgin for help, her cries as shrill as those of a frightened bird.
“Shit!” said Rafael, and spat. “I hate that weak shit, man! People ain’t got the strength to deal, they might as well be dead, y’know.”
Chapo started to say he had come to realize that what was usually considered strength sometimes was a weakness and vice versa; but on second thought, he decided it would be better for Rafael to remain ignorant of subtleties such as this. They were not friends, after all, only partners in crime. “Yeah,” he said, pushing Rafael toward the entrance of the club. “Fuck ’em! We ain’t got to worry ’bout bein’ weak, right?”
Laughter and soft music issued from the door of La Manzanita. White light veiled the threshold. Together, Chapo and Rafael crossed over.
I
Not long after the Christlight of the world’s first morning faded, when birds still flew to heaven and back, and even the wickedest things shone like saints, so pure was their portion of evil, there was a village by the name of Hangtown that clung to the back of the dragon Griaule, a vast mile-long beast who had been struck immobile yet not lifeless by a wizard’s spell, and who ruled over the Carbonales Valley, controlling in every detail the lives of the inhabitants, making known his will by the ineffable radiations emanating from the cold tonnage of his brain. From shoulder to tail, the greater part of Griaule was covered with earth and trees and grass, from some perspectives appearing to be an element of the landscape, another hill among those that ringed the valley; except for sections cleared by the scalehunters, only a portion of his right side to the haunch, and his neck and head, remained visible, and the head had sunk to the ground, its massive jaws halfway open, itself nearly as high as the crests of the surrounding hills. Situated almost eight hundred feet above the valley floor and directly behind the frontoparietal plate, which overhung the place like a mossy cliff, the village consisted of several dozen shacks with shingled roofs and walls of weathered planking, and bordered a lake fed by a stream that ran down onto Griaule’s back from an adjoining hill; it was hemmed in against the shore by thickets of chokecherry, stands of stunted oak and hawthorns, and but for the haunted feeling that pervaded the air, a vibrant stillness similar to the atmosphere of an old ruin, to someone standing beside the lake it would seem he was looking out upon an ordinary country settlement, one a touch less neatly ordered than most, littered as it was with the bones and entrails of skizzers and flakes and other parasites that infested the dragon, but nonetheless ordinary in the lassitude that governed it, and the shabby dress and hostile attitudes of its citizenry.
Many of the inhabitants of the village were scalehunters, men and women who scavenged under Griaule’s earth-encrusted wings and elsewhere on his body, searching for scales that were cracked and broken, chipping off fragments and selling these in Port Chantay, where they were valued for their medicinal properties. They were well paid for their efforts, but were treated as pariahs by the people of the valley, who rarely ventured onto the dragon, and their lives were short and fraught with unhappy incident, a circumstance they attributed to the effects of Griaule’s displeasure at their presence. Indeed, his displeasure was a constant preoccupation, and they spent much of their earnings on charms that they believed would ward off its evil influence. Some wore bits of scale around their necks, hoping that this homage would communicate to Griaule the high regard in which they held him, and perhaps the most extreme incidence of this way of thinking was embodied by the nurture given by the widower Riall to his daughter Catherine. On the day of her birth, also the day of his wife’s death, he dug down beneath the floor of his shack until he reached Griaule’s back, laying bare a patch of golden scale some six feet long and five feet wide, and from that day forth for the next eighteen years he forced her to sleep upon the scale, hoping that the dragon’s essence would seep into her and so she would be protected against his wrath. Catherine complained at first about this isolation, but she came to enjoy the dreams that visited her, dreams of flying, of otherworldly climes (according to legend, dragons were native to another universe to which they traveled by flying into the sun); lying there sometimes, looking up through the plank-shored tunnel her father had dug, she would feel that she was not resting on a solid surface but was receding from the earth, falling into a golden distance.
Riall may or may not have achieved his desired end; but it was evident to the people of Hangtown that propinquity to the scale had left its mark on Catherine, for while Riall was short and swarthy (as his wife had also been), physically unprepossessing in every respect, his daughter had grown into a beautiful young woman, long-limbed and slim, with fine golden hair and lovely skin and a face of unsurpassed delicacy, seeming a lapidary creation with its voluptuous mouth and sharp cheekbones and large, eloquent eyes, whose irises were so dark that they could be distinguished from the pupils only under the strongest of lights.
Not alone in her beauty did she appear cut from different cloth from her parents; neither did she share their gloomy spirit and cautious approach to life. From earliest childhood she went without fear to every quarter of the dragon’s surface, even into the darkness under the wing joints where few scalehunters dared go; she believed she had been immunized against ordinary dangers by her father’s tactics, and she felt there was a bond between herself and the dragon, that her dreams and good looks were emblems of both a magical relationship and consequential destiny, and this feeling of invulnerability—along with the confidence instilled by her beauty—gave rise to a certain egocentricity and shallowness of character. She was often disdainful, careless in the handling of lovers’ hearts, and though she did not stoop to duplicity—she had no need of that—she took pleasure in stealing the men whom other women loved. And yet she considered herself a good woman. Not a saint, mind you. But she honored her father and kept the house clean and did her share of work, and though she had her faults, she had taken steps—half-steps, rather—to correct them. Like most people, she had no clear moral determinant, depending upon taboos and specific circumstances to modify her behavior, and the “good,” the principled, was to her a kind of intellectual afterlife to which she planned someday to aspire, but only after she had exhausted the potentials of pleasure and thus gained the experience necessary for the achievement of such an aspiration. She was prone to bouts of moodiness, as were all within the sphere of Griaule’s influence, but generally displayed a sunny disposition and optimistic cast of thought. This is not to say, however, that she was a Pollyanna, an innocent. Through her life in Hangtown she was familiar with treachery, grief, and murder, and at eighteen she h
ad already been with a wide variety of lovers. Her easy sexuality was typical of Hangtown’s populace, yet because of her beauty and the jealousy it had engendered, she had acquired the reputation of being exceptionally wanton. She was amused, even somewhat pleased, by her reputation, but the rumors surrounding her grew more scurrilous, more deviant from the truth, and eventually there came a day when they were brought home to her with a savagery that she could never have presupposed.
Beyond Griaule’s frontal spike, which rose from a point between his eyes, a great whorled horn curving back toward Hangtown, the slope of the skull flattened out into the top of his snout, and it was here that Catherine came one foggy morning, dressed in loose trousers and a tunic, equipped with scaling hooks and ropes and chisels, intending to chip off a sizable piece of cracked scale she had noticed near the dragon’s lip, a spot directly above one of the fangs. She worked at the piece for several hours, suspended by linkages of rope over Griaule’s lower jaw. His half-open mouth was filled with a garden of evil-looking plants, the callused surface of his forked tongue showing here and there between the leaves like nodes of red coral; his fangs were inscribed with intricate patterns of lichen, wreathed by streamers of fog and circled by raptors who now and then would plummet into the bushes to skewer some unfortunate lizard or vole. Epiphytes bloomed from splits in the ivory, depending long strings of interwoven red-and-purple blossoms. It was a compelling sight, and from time to time Catherine would stop working and lower herself in her harness until she was no more than fifty feet above the tops of the bushes and look off into the caliginous depths of Griaule’s throat, wondering at the nature of the shadowy creatures that flitted there.
The sun burned off the fog, and Catherine, sweaty, weary of chipping, hauled herself up to the top of the snout and stretched out on the scales, resting on an elbow, nibbling at a honey pear and gazing out over the valley with its spiny green hills and hammocks of thistle palms and the faraway white buildings of Teocinte, where that very night she planned to dance and make love. The air became so warm that she stripped off her tunic and lay back, bare to the waist, eyes closed, daydreaming in the clean springtime heat. She had been drifting between sleep and waking for the better part of an hour, when a scraping noise brought her alert. She reached for her tunic and started to sit up; but before she could turn to see who or what had made the sound, something fell heavily across her ribs, taking her wind, leaving her gasping and disoriented. A hand groped her breast, and she smelled winey breath.
“Go easy, now,” said a man’s voice, thickened with urgency. “I don’t want nothing half of Hangtown ain’t had already.”
Catherine twisted her head, and caught a glimpse of Key Willen’s lean, sallow face looming above her, his sardonic mouth hitched at one corner in a half-smile.
“I told you we’d have our time,” he said, fumbling with the tie of her trousers.
She began to fight desperately, clawing at his eyes, catching a handful of his long black hair and yanking. She threw herself onto her stomach, clutching at the edge of a scale, trying to worm out from beneath him; but he butted her in the temple, sending white lights shooting through her skull. Once her head had cleared, she found that he had flipped her onto her back, had pulled her trousers down past her hips, and penetrated her with his fingers; he was working them in and out, his breath coming hoarse and rapid. She felt raw inside, and she let out a sharp throat-tearing scream. She thrashed about, tearing at his shirt, his hair, screaming again and again, and when he clamped his free hand to her mouth, she bit it.
“You bitch! You…goddamn…” He slammed the back of her head against the scale, climbed atop her, straddling her chest and pinning her shoulders with his knees. He slapped her, wrapped his hand in her hair, and leaned close, spittle flying to her face as he spoke. “You listen up, pig! I don’t much care if you’re awake…One way or the other, I’m gonna have my fun.” He rammed her head into the scale again. “You hear me? Hear me?” He straightened, slapped her harder. “Hell, I’m having fun right now.”
“Please!” she said, dazed.
“‘Please?’” He laughed. “That mean you want some more?” Another slap. “You like it?”
Yet another slap.
“How ’bout that?”
Frantic, she wrenched an arm free, in reflex reaching up behind her head, searching for a weapon, anything, and as he prepared to slap her again, grinning, she caught hold of a stick—or so she thought—and swung it at him in a vicious arc. The point of the scaling hook, for such it was, sank into Key’s flesh just back of his left eye, and as he fell, toppling sideways with only the briefest of outcries, the eye filled with blood, becoming a featureless crimson sphere like a rubber ball embedded in the socket. Catherine shrieked, pushed his legs off her waist, and scrambled away, encumbered by her trousers, which had slipped down about her knees. Key’s body convulsed, his heels drumming the scale. She sat staring at him for a long seamless time, unable to catch her breath, to think. But swarms of black flies, their translucent wings shattering the sunlight into prism, began landing on the puddle of blood that spread wide as a table from beneath Key’s face, and she became queasy. She crawled to the edge of the snout and looked away across the checkerboard of fields below toward Port Chantay, toward an alp of bubbling cumulus building from the horizon. Her chest hollowed with cold, and she started to shake. The tremors passing through her echoed the tremor she had felt in Key’s body when the hook had bit into his skull. All the sickness inside her, her shock and disgust at the violation, at confronting the substance of death, welled up in her throat, and her stomach emptied. When she had finished she cinched her trousers tight, her fingers clumsy with the knot. She thought she should do something. Coil the ropes, maybe. Store the harness in her pack. But these actions, while easy to contemplate, seemed impossibly complex to carry out. She shivered and hugged herself, feeling the altitude, the distances. Her cheeks were feverish and puffy; flickers of sensation—she pictured them to be iridescent worms—tingled nerves in her chest and legs. She had the idea that everything was slowing, that time had flurried and was settling the way river mud settles after the passage of some turbulence. She stared off toward the dragon’s horn. Someone was standing there. Coming toward her, now. At first she watched the figure approach with a defiant disinterest, wanting to guard her privacy, feeling that if she had to speak she would lose control of her emotions. But as the figure resolved into one of her neighbors back in Hangtown—Brianne, a tall young woman with brittle good looks, dark brown hair, and an olive complexion—she relaxed from this attitude. She and Brianne were not friends; in fact, they had once been rivals for the same man. However, that had been a year and more in the past, and Catherine was relieved to see her. More than relieved. The presence of another woman allowed her to surrender to weakness, believing that in Brianne she would find a fund of natural sympathy because of their common sex.
“My God, what happened?” Brianne kneeled and brushed Catherine’s hair back from her eyes. The tenderness of the gesture burst the dam of Catherine’s emotions, and punctuating the story with sobs, she told of the rape.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said. “I…I’d forgotten about the hook.”
“Key was looking to get killed,” Brianne said. “But it’s a damn shame you had to be the one to help him along.” She sighed, her forehead creased by a worry line. “I suppose I should fetch someone to take care of the body. I know that’s not…”
“No, I understand…it has to be done.” Catherine felt stronger, more capable. She made as if to stand, but Brianne restrained her.
“Maybe you should wait here. You know how people will be. They’ll see your face”—she touched Catherine’s swollen cheeks—“and they’ll be prying, whispering. It might be better to let the mayor come out and make his investigation. That way he can take the edge off the gossip before it gets started.”
Catherine didn’t want to be alone with the body any longer, but she saw the wisdom
in waiting and agreed.
“Will you be all right?” Brianne asked.
“I’ll be fine…but hurry.”
“I will.” Brianne stood; the wind feathered her hair, lifted it to veil the lower half of her face. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?” There was an odd undertone in her voice, as if it were really another question she was asking, or—and this, Catherine thought, was more likely—as if she were thinking ahead to dealing with the mayor.
Catherine nodded, then caught at Brianne as she started to walk away. “Don’t tell my father. Let me tell him. If he hears it from you, he might go after the Willens.”
“I won’t say a thing, I promise.”
With a smile, a sympathetic pat on the arm, Brianne headed back toward Hangtown, vanishing into the thickets that sprang up beyond the frontal spike. For a while after she had gone, Catherine felt wrapped in her consolation; but the seething of the wind, the chill that infused the air as clouds moved in to cover the sun, these things caused the solitude of the place and the grimness of the circumstance to close down around her, and she began to wish she had returned to Hangtown. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to steady herself, but even then she kept seeing Key’s face, his bloody eye, and remembering his hands on her. Finally, thinking that Brianne had had more than enough time to accomplish her task, she walked up past the frontal spike and stood looking out along the narrow trail that wound through the thickets on Griaule’s back. Several minutes elapsed, and then she spotted three figures—two men and a woman—coming at a brisk pace. She shaded her eyes against a ray of sun that had broken through the overcast, and peered at them. Neither man had the gray hair and portly shape of Hangtown’s mayor. They were lanky, pale, with black hair falling to their shoulders, and were carrying unsheathed knives. Catherine couldn’t make out their faces, but she realized that Brianne must not have set aside their old rivalry, that in the spirit of vengeance she had informed Key’s brothers of his death.
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