The Almanac of the Dead

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  “Touchy, touchy,” Jamey says, and laughs at Ferro’s hatred of Perry.

  Jamey did not worry himself the way Ferro did with suspicions and questions. Jamey called it second-guessing or paranoia.

  “Ferro, you can’t start thinking like that. Sure Perry might be a decoy. But he’s not. Perry is a cop who sells information because he wants the money. It’s that simple.”

  Ferro does not argue, but he does not think bad cops or spies are that simple. Blond, dumb Jamey. Ferro doesn’t bother to point out that Perry sells information at below the current market value. Let smartass Jamey Boy learn the hard way. The Perrys of the world claimed to sell the secrets for the money; but the sums they accepted betrayed their true motive, which was not greed but revenge. Traitors were driven by the strongest human impulse, the deepest human instinct—not for sex or for money but to get even. Secret crimes or hidden injuries required secret and hidden acts of vengeance. Ferro was no stranger to the pleasurable sensations revenge excited—the exquisite pulse-surges behind both eyes and the tingling in the groin while the scalp prickles and sends a chill down the spine at the instant vengeance is performed. Ferro was willing to bet the undercover cop got a hard-on every time he “leaked tips” about planned raids and stakeouts. As “cop cakes” went, Perry’s pinup photo had been forgettable; his ass was flat and he had a pencil prick. Perry had begun as “Officer January,” bare assed in department-issued SWAT gear, brandishing a riot stick. In riot helmet and gas mask, Officer January appeared anonymous and cruel. The joke had been on the Tucson Police Department. All the cop beefcake shots on last year’s calendar had included badge numbers and squad-car numbers for blow jobs. Internal memos had been sent to all precinct chiefs from department of internal affairs investigators requesting photographs of all uniformed officers under their command. The latest edition of the Cop Cakes calendar had been comedy shots—tricks of photography in which the Tucson police chief’s head appeared on the nude body of a sexually aroused male with a nightstick up his hairy ass. The comedy calendar had been a best-seller in adult bookstores in Salt Lake City and Phoenix and had made the national television news. According to Arizona’s senators, the comedy calendar was an outrage and an attack on police and law enforcement in the United States.

  The Tucson chief of police had been forced to hold a news conference televised on the national evening news to deny that the nude men on the Cop Cakes calendars were presently or had ever been law enforcement officers for the Tucson Police Department. The chief said pornographers’ actors and models had posed for the calendar, and all rumors about rampant homosexuality among police officers were untrue. The chief said he had been especially disturbed by rumors that neatly trimmed mustaches signaled gay cops. The chief had declined to discuss the photograph with the nightstick. The department was not taking the calendar lightly; when police were under attack in Arizona, then the whole American way was endangered. Law and order was threatened by these subversives—homosexual artists who printed their filth on calendars to incite disrespect for the law and contempt for the police and court system.

  OWLS CLUB

  JUDGE ARNE FOUND A BIG SCARE inside his copy of the Cop Cakes comedy calendar. Somehow, someone had got hold of a color negative from a roll of the judge’s “sensitive snapshots.” The color-film processing plant was fully automated—the judge took care to know important facts. The judge had paid the film-lab receptionists fat tips each time he had picked up one of his rolls of “fun film.” The judge would have to have a word with the lab manager—unless there was a security problem at the Owls Club. Fortunately, the yokels at the Tucson Police Department had been so stunned by their own “pinups” they had not noticed that Judge Arne’s “pinup” for the month of August was no trick-photography shot. Printed from a single negative, the color print clearly showed the federal judge merrily penetrating his own basset hound. For September, the Cop Cakes comedy pinup had been the Pima County sheriff superimposed over the figure of a man with his fly open and half-hard cock poking out, holding a stuffed owl in both hands. The judge did not like the use of the stuffed owl. The owl might be coincidence, but the judge did not think so. Whoever had found the color print of him with the dog had found it at the Owls Club. Because only members and honored guests knew that stuffed owls were one of the dominant motifs in the club’s decor.

  The judge had to smile at himself and his maturity. Twenty or even ten years ago he would have been in a cold sweat, paralyzed with fear of detection; instead he had been secretly quite pleased with the bold, exotic figure he had made on the calendar. He could easily imagine hundreds of young men locked in bedrooms nude and gazing at the calendar on the wall hypnotized or weak with pleasure. Trick photography indeed! But the “weak link” in the chain had to be located. The judge would have to go to the Owls Club on a regular basis again and familiarize himself with the regulars and the pretty homeboys off the street. He would be careful not to partake, but merely to sip cognac downstairs in front of the oversize color TV. Since he had been appointed to the federal bench, the judge had had to stay at home with his photography and basset-hound stud. The judge liked to say delicately to old friends he was now retired from all that—as if the wave of his hand swept away all the rose-bud rumps of all the brown street boys. Still the judge had regulars who were more worldly-wise than the light-fingered street boys. The blond University of Arizona boys were Midwestern hustlers who could swing both ways for a few bucks extra. The brown ones knew their place, the white ones didn’t. But wasn’t that what increased police spending was for? Alleys and vacant lots across Florida and the Southwest were littered with human refuse from the Midwest and Northeast—cast-off white men, former wage earners from mills and factories. Remnant labor-union ideas made older workers dangerous in times of national unrest. Now there was the chaos spreading across Mexico. The refugees were thick as flies in barbed-wire camps all along the U.S. border.

  The judge was scheduled for golf on important matters. The senator would be part of the foursome as would the chief of police. The senator had flown in from Washington with a top-secret briefing concerning internal American security as well as security along the international border with Mexico. Of course the judge had been privy to classified documents because of his military friends in high places at Ft. Huachuca. The Cop Cakes comedy pinup might not be such a light matter at the judge’s security-clearance renewal. But secretly the judge did not think they would bother to pursue such a trivial matter as trick photographs that libeled the police and courts. Over the years the judge had learned a great deal about lie-detector tests and the evaluators of the testing. The judge knew that the worst offenders remained serene, absolutely innocent in their own minds because the victims had always started the trouble. The judge thought the Tucson Police Department had botched the whole affair because they had been too quick to issue absolute denials that the calendar of nude cops had ever existed. Too many people in Tucson were like the judge and secretly subscribed to “art books and art calendars” for the discriminating male. The judge had breezed through all inquiries by the press concerning the comedy calendar. The judge had brushed aside the whole matter; trick photography could show anything—the public should not be misled.

  The judge was not being premature when he put the finger on one of the “regulars” at the Owls Club. He was used to inhabiting a world in which one lived in dread of the plain envelope with no return address or the series of awkward phone calls. The Cop Cakes calendar had been a subversive act, not a simple act of blackmail. A storm of lawlessness was surging at the edges of respectable life in the United States. The judge thought the golf game might be a good opportunity to raise the subject of a large donation from the senator’s foundation to help southern-Arizona law enforcement. The volatile political situation in Mexico made donations imperative, especially since Arizona State government was nearly bankrupt.

  The senator’s staff had printed briefings, which were stupid and useless on the golf cou
rse. Max had only glanced at his copy, then had stuffed it in his golf bag. Max hated the pretensions of sleazy politicians such as the senator. Max particularly enjoyed how conducting business on the golf course disrupted all the smoothly oiled routines; Max had exposed more rough edges and hidden dangers during a golf game than the best spies and informers could gather in weeks. The golf game interrupted conversations—the senator would just get puffed up to begin one of his “order and control at home, order and control abroad” speeches and whack! Max Blue had teed off, sending a lovely arcing ball hundreds of yards down the fairway to the edge of the green. The golf ball soared like a bright white bird, though occasionally the arc of the ball had reminded Max of the spring rain arching down from the clouds. The sight of the ball’s perfect flight, the ball’s absolute accuracy, silenced even the biggest assholes, such as the senator. Max could not imagine why the senator was alive at all. The senator was stupefied with greed.

  He had stared blankly as Max explained the near-hypnotic quality of golf’s graceful marriage between physics and geometry. The senator’s aides had telephoned all week, begging for a golf game with Max.

  Max had begun seriously to question what value this U.S. senator or any other U.S. senator had any longer. The U.S. Congress made laws and more laws. But laws meant nothing without enforcement. In today’s world, judges were a better buy; they gave more for the money than other politicians or the police. More and more often the senator had come for help and to ask small favors.

  PART FOUR

  THE AMERICAS

  BOOK ONE

  MOUNTAINS

  ANGELITA, AKA LA ESCAPÍA, THE MEAT HOOK

  EL FEO HAD NEVER TOLD ANYONE how he had felt the first time he had walked into the downtown hotel where the negotiations were being held. The strobe flashes and videocam lights were blinding as he entered the lobby. The other Indian leaders were more well-known and had aides along to carry their briefcases. El Feo had been lucky to borrow a pair of new shoes from the village mayor; no one in their village, not even the mayor, owned a briefcase. Later El Feo and the other Indian leaders had been driven in buses to the university campus to meet with student leaders. In those days, La Escapía had gone by her Christian name, Angelita. She had been baiting university students the first time El Feo ever saw her. Angelita had been drunk on politics; a raving orator who might someday gather together hundreds and hundreds of fighters for El Feo’s army. Then suddenly Angelita’s attention had turned to El Feo; he could feel her eyes on him. Angelita had started laughing at him—squinting in the bright lights and pointing a finger at El Feo. El Feo disliked her instantly; she knew nothing about him. He had purposely not brought a briefcase or notebook. He wanted to make it clear he was not interested in white men’s pieces of paper; El Feo had simply come for his people’s ancestral lands.

  El Feo had heard stories about Angelita. She was dangerous. She laughed and made fun of everything. She got the people laughing when the meeting or topics were serious—Angelita even made jokes about uprisings. She was dangerous. Nothing tiny or angel like about this woman, El Feo had decided, not unless you were thinking of an angel from hell. El Feo felt his throat get dry and his feet and hands tingle. He could feel beads of sweat on his scalp. Great dark angel from the thirteen nights of the old gods—here was the angel El Feo had been searching for all his life.

  Until El Feo had met Angelita, he had felt passion only for retaking stolen tribal land; big brown women with big breasts and big bellies interested him for only fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. Market days in the mountain villages found the women gossiping, whispering, and giggling behind their shawls about one so handsome his mother had to call him El Feo to protect him. His mother got him at birth from a coastal village. At one time the people had all lived closer together; at one time life had been a great deal different down in the low valleys that ran to the turquoise sea. He had come from a village close to the turquoise sea. He had been sent as an infant to the mountains so the coastal clans and the mountain clans did not forget they were one family; and because he had had a twin brother. Later as El Feo and his mother had traveled to the coastal village where he had met his other mother and father, and his twin brother, Tacho, nicknamed Wacah because he tamed big wacahs or macaws. The people on the coast had all the fish they could eat; otherwise they were poor. Tribal land the people had cleared for farming had later been claimed by the federal government; then the land had been resold to German coffeer planters.

  Angelita had questioned El Feo about certain rumors going around; they said El Feo was already married—married to the earth. They claimed El Feo had sexual intercourse four times a day with holes dug in damp river clay. El Feo had laughed and shook his head. He said he did not discuss his religion with anyone, not even with warrior angels. Later the village gossips claimed El Feo had been seduced by Angelita La Escapía, the crazy woman from the coast.

  El Feo used to watch her face and watch the faces of people in market crowds who listened to her.

  “A great ‘change’ is approaching; soon the signs of the change will appear on the horizon.” Angelita’s words filled El Feo with rapture. The earth, the earth, together they would serve Earth and her sister spirits.

  El Feo had been content to watch from a distance. Men probably watched to see her big breasts heave and jiggle. But the women listened because they had never heard a woman like her before.

  TWIN BOYS

  EL FEO AND HIS TWIN had been separated because twins often attracted dangers from envious sorcerers; later there might be accusations of sorcery made against the twins together. El Feo had been initiated by the elder men in the ancient fashion, while Tacho had only the small ceremony the coastal village people still practiced. They both had been confirmed in the Church by the same traveling bishop on the same day. The elders had remarked that the twins had been reared in different villages to prevent just such coincidences as that.

  Then one day Tacho had appeared in the mountain village. Tacho had worn his driving uniform, although he had hired an old taxi to drive him. The taxi had been full of gifts for all of them. Tacho had spent all his wages for the first month on the taxi ride, goat, and black piglets. Tacho had butchered the goat himself, but had left the task of dividing the meat to El Feo’s “mother.” Tacho’s parents had sent the goat; but Tacho himself had chosen the black pigs for his brothers. Clanspeople broke out the home brew, and the village celebrated the visit from their dear brother Tacho.

  Long into the night Tacho and El Feo drank with the other men around the glowing coals. They had talked about the black pigs and the wild-boar spirit the coastal people fed parched corn. Before dawn El Feo had looked at the piglets and at Tacho; El Feo had looked around at the figures squatting in their blankets, many of them dozing.

  “The black pigs will feed an army,” El Feo said softly.

  “Four of them?” Tacho had his eyes closed, but he was listening.

  “Of course four of them. Four is a good number. One boar, three sows. They will combine themselves over and over.”

  In the mountains the rich farmers hired armed patrols to watch for Indian squatters in the coffee plantations, and to shoot the wild pigs. Pigs rooted out the coffee seedlings and stripped off bark from mature trees.

  “On the coast, people say the black boar and his kind have helped the people’s uprisings more than once. The black boar and his troops stampede through thick undergrowth and trees. The stupid army chases the pigs deeper and deeper where the paths sink into moss. The black boar leads them into the swamp where hundreds of soldiers can easily be picked off by a few snipers,” Tacho said.

  El Feo took the pigs to his campsite in the hills above the village because pork was a great temptation even for El Feo. When the pigs were large enough to fight off wild dogs, El Feo would let the black pigs run wild. El Feo had explained to Tacho only one thing mattered: the stolen land; someday wild black pigs would help feed the people’s army as the people took back their l
and.

  MORE FRIENDS OF THE INDIANS

  TACHO WAS CAREFUL not to raise suspicion with El Feo’s visits. Tacho made a point of having El Feo help him wash and wax the black Mercedes. The boss and the new wife had been quite nervous lately; rich white people needed reassurance because of the political unrest. White people can see the tribes in Africa have retaken all their ancestral lands, blood-soaked though they were.

  Tacho entertained El Feo with stories about the “old wife” and the young mistress from Mexico City. El Feo had especially liked the old wife’s tumble down the marble stairs, but that had been everyone’s favorite story, from the housemaids to the rich society matrons. The boss would not mind if El Feo spent the night in Tacho’s space at the front of the garage. El Feo had wanted to sleep one night in the backseat of the Mercedes, but Tacho had refused. “The boss doesn’t sleep so good at night. He might surprise you.”

  El Feo liked the woman on top so he could look over her shoulder at the faint glow of tiny human souls awaiting conception in the ceiling rafters overhead. Souls of children who died before their second year remained nearby, hovering in cracks of the ceiling; homes of sorcerers were barren. Sorcerers captured only the souls of adults or children over two. El Feo and Angelita don’t talk. They have food and sex together twice a day, that’s all. She does the talking. El Feo had given up on talk years ago. He had thought he was through with fucking too, but sometimes El Feo was wrong in his predictions. This woman had chosen him. He had not done the choosing. All his life El Feo had been the one chosen.