In the opened belly of a deer, the old woman told them, was where she herself had first seen distant skies revealed in membranes of blue and purple, translucent as clouds before a snowstorm. The strands of pure white clouds were pearls of belly fat strung on thick loops of tallow the old woman saved for soap making. She told the girls there were ways the clouds might be summoned with the belly fat of deer or sheep. In the winter, steam off the body cavity summoned up snow mists and fogs around the dry mountain peaks. Old Yoeme had turned the lamb’s stomach inside out, and the bright green grass spilled out for the old dog to eat.
Old Yoeme’s gift to Lecha had been peculiar: Lecha’s gift finds only the dead, never the living. For a long time Lecha had blamed herself; she thought she had only to focus herself more intensely and quickly. By the time Lecha had returned to Potam, Yoeme had been so old and shrunken she had to lie in a child’s hospital crib. Lecha had barely been able to suppress a reflex to gag; she hated the smell of all of them crowded in the old house—cousins and in-laws in every room. It had been that day, long ago, when Lecha had begun to realize she could never be buried anywhere near the graves of other family members. Old Yoeme had seemed well cared for, although they left her alone most of the day. The old woman had recognized Lecha immediately. They had given Yoeme the room off the kitchen, and although Yoeme was as alert and cunning as she had ever been, she had got so old and shrunken up she could no longer walk. Even her bones seemed to have withered up, so all that remained were her small dark eyes still glittering with mischief.
Yoeme had claimed she had lived as long as she had because she was curious. Yoeme laughed loudly and had opened her lips and licked her tongue across yellow pegs of teeth. She still had a taste for life, what could she do for her dear grandchild?
“What if the only ones you find are dead?” Lecha had asked.
“Well, yes,” Yoeme had answered. “That is common enough. What do you want to know?” Yoeme had laughed as if Lecha’s question were a joke.
FAMILY CEMETERY
LECHA’S PLAN had been to take them by surprise. She would hire shovel hands in Hermosillo and get them started before any of the rest of the family found out what was happening. Word had come from Potam that the big house had caved in; the adobe walls had melted like fresh dung after days of torrential rain. As soon as the message had arrived, Lecha had visualized the cemetery as she had seen it as a child: the ocean below the hill was as bright blue as the sky filled with white clouds blossoming in the spring wind. Hollyhocks that had been cut before dawn were tied to weathered crosses, but hours of the breeze and the sun had left the flowers drooping like the heads of captives tied to the stake. Around Yoeme’s unoccupied grave, the shifting dunes were held back by round, smooth ocean rocks the size of fists. In Lecha’s memory, there were no traces of the other graves of uncles and aunts, not even her mother’s. The blue of the sky swelled into the blue of the Sea of Cortés.
The idea had come to her suddenly, and Lecha had to laugh out loud. She who had spent nearly all of her so-called “professional life” watching coroner’s assistants open shallow graves would now watch as shovel hands dug up a few more.
Who would calculate how fast a family graveyard might fill up? The crowding had been the fault, of course, of their cousins’ breeding like flies. Lecha had endured them for more than sixty years, but she damn sure didn’t have to lie there for eternity with them. The big house at Potam had been sinking into the hill with each rainstorm. The seaward walls were going fastest, but the summer storms drove rain hard out of the southeast. White stucco had buckled and fallen long ago. The adobe bricks exposed had lost their edges and angles. With luck the house would cave in after two rainy, gray weeks in January. Then Uncle Ringo, Cucha, Popa’s husband, and any children remaining could be buried in the ruins of the house. The adobe walls would mound into soft pink clay terraces, and from the center, spidery branches of the lively old bougainvillea would scatter scarlet petals over fallen roof beams. As the years passed, after late-summer cloudbursts, a village child might find a curious shard of china or a shell button, or the tiny bone of a fingertip. Some year a man returning from a wood-hauling trip might see something reflect the late-autumn sun. He would find not the engraved silver bowl he had imagined, but the top of Uncle Ringo’s skull.
Popa would be one of the first they would dig up. Lecha herself would scatter Popa’s bones in the mounds of broken glass, rusted tin cans and rotting dog carcasses at the town dump. Popa had insisted old Yoeme leave the big house to live in Popa’s shack. Popa had wanted the big house of course, and once old Yoeme had been moved into Popa’s shack, Popa moved herself and family into the big house. A deaf woman from the hills was hired to live in Popa’s shack with old Yoeme. Popa tore out the interior walls of the big house, remodeling, she said, but Lecha knew the old whore had been looking for the almanac notebooks. The walls were redone with pink wallpaper that matched the color of rouge the undertaker used on babies’ cheeks. Lecha knew Popa had not found the notebooks because Yoeme had given Lecha the notebooks long before she died. When Popa had confronted Lecha in a great fury, the morning after the funeral, Lecha had only laughed at her and stepped into the taxi waiting outside the big house. Popa’s feebleminded children had followed her like quail chicks as she ran after the taxi screaming, “Thief!”
The family graveyard in Potam had been nearly empty when they were children. Although Lecha had not gone back, not even when Popa was killed, she got reports. Popa’s sister, Cucha, had served her family kidney stew gone bad in the summer heat, and three of the youngest had died, while Cucha lingered paralyzed in a hammock on the long porch that ran the length of the big house. Popa herself had been killed in a train wreck, returning before Christmas from a shopping spree in Nogales on the bullet train. That had left Uncle Ringo in charge of Cucha, her three older children (her husband had gone to find work in California and never returned), and Popa’s epileptic husband and four idiot children. Uncle Ringo had not managed the big house and its inhabitants very well. Popa’s children, though quite large, still stole matches or begged them from American tourists driving past to stare at the two-story adobe mansion on the highest hill in Potam. Uncle Ringo, an albino with watery, pale eyes and poor vision, had failed to notice the four huddled over a small pyre they’d constructed from dry weeds and bits of palm fronds. When the pinheaded boy named Dennis came running, his shirt and hair were on fire. The others with halos of smoke and flame had begun running down the road toward town, afraid of the beatings Uncle Ringo had given them for playing with fire before. The family graveyard had filled up quickly.
Uncle Ringo told everyone he’d done his best, but Uncle Federico had insisted on adopting Cucha’s remaining three—all lovely little girls, the oldest being thirteen. Lecha had laughed when her spy from Potam told her about Uncle Federico’s adoption of the girls. Once Uncle Federico had taken Lecha and Zeta to the train station in Hermosillo. Both Lecha and Zeta already knew what Uncle Federico liked to do when he found them alone in the hall on the third floor of the big house or caught one of them in the pantry off the downstairs kitchen. His forefingers were as thick and ugly as the Cuban cigars he smoked. Once Lecha had seen a large dog turd in the courtyard that she mistook for a cigar her uncle had lost. He could slide the finger under the elastic of the panty leg with the same smooth motion he used to lift the little girls up into his arms. It happened so quickly he used the next motion to slip it out and smooth down the skirts of their little dresses. As they got older, he took each girl for a ride in his two-ton livestock-hauling truck and bought her a Chinese parasol out of red and gold paper, then explained that it was a delicate matter. “I studied at the seminary for the priesthood, as you know. Thus it is I who is chosen by your mother to look after you young girls. Sister Josefa has had you girls study the catechism, hasn’t she? You know the importance of your purity, your virginity, then. Yes? Well, my little dove, I am only watching out for it, a simple checkup. I am a docto
r you know, I understand the human body.”
The forty-mile ride to the train station in Guaymas had not been simple.
The girls were fourteen. They had talked to other girls, inquiring awkwardly about the other girls’ uncles. When none of the other girls volunteered any information, not even a blush or warning about secret and delicate subjects, the girls began to get the picture. They stopped for orange soda pop at San Isidro, a small town that served as a supply center for the cattle ranches and remote villages. Uncle Federico had inquired after Father Lopez from the woman behind the counter at the little store. Oh, yes, Father Lopez was there. He had a new house, one of those modern house trailers, parked next to the church. Lecha looked at Zeta and Zeta looked at Lecha. They shook their heads. They were both aware of how Uncle Federico was staring at their breasts. There was nothing in the store. The wooden shelves from floor to ceiling along the walls were empty except for a deep layer of gray dust. The soda-pop vending machine had rattled and hummed constantly but left the soda lukewarm. There were dusty harnesses hanging from nails in the wall, but the leather was brittle and cracked. No one there had the money to own horses anyway, the girls knew. Their poorest Indian relatives lived in San Isidro. Their father had sent them each a ten-dollar bill for the trip to Tucson. Zeta tried on the sunglasses, the only other merchandise in the little store. They were a man’s sunglasses, and the layer of dust on the lenses made them look like blind insect eyes. The girls laughed at each other in the glasses. They waited outside on the shady side of the store building until Uncle Federico came huffing and panting across the plaza from the direction of the church. “Surprise!” he said. “Father Lopez can hear both your confessions. You go over right now and I’ll wait for you in his beautiful house trailer. Come to me right away—just as soon as you’ve finished.”
The confessional box was low and hot and smelled of mutton fat. Lecha went first because she had nothing to confess except that she was angry their father had sent for them instead of letting them live with old Yoeme. The priest had a soft, whispery voice. He asked questions. Was she sad her mother had died? Yes, she was, but her mother had taken a great deal of time to explain that they would meet up again. Only if you get to heaven, my child. She didn’t say that, Lecha told the priest, but probably she forgot. “Five Hail Marys and go right away to the trailer. Your dear uncle is waiting for you.”
Lecha had brushed against a whitewashed wall coming out of the church. She rubbed the black cotton of her skirt against itself to remove the chalky smudge. She walked to the shiny new house trailer slowly. Everything seemed so strange now that their mother was gone. The father who sent for them had not seen them for years. Yet when her mother died, he had sent for them.
Before Lecha could knock on the yellow and white metal door of the house trailer, Uncle Federico opened it wide. “Ah, my dear! All cleansed of sin. Yes. Come inside.” All the floors in the trailer were covered with bright yellow linoleum. Lecha thought of bugs that had splattered across the windshield as they had neared the town.
“Lie down in here for a little nap,” Uncle Federico said. “Take off your dress. Don’t wrinkle it!” He closed the door and left her in a room so small that she could spread her arms and almost touch the walls on either side. She had just lain down when he came in. He felt Lecha’s forehead, then took out the stethoscope he always carried in the pocket of his sport coat. His breath smelled like sour wine and onions. He felt her stomach through her slip. He rubbed her stomach round and round and told her to close her eyes.
“Appendicitis is very common nowadays. Because children eat too many sweets. Now let me feel. Ah, there! Is that where it is? Yes, my dear, now keep your eyes closed and relax. Don’t peek, I am just going to insert my finger in here and probe around.” He was leaning on the bed and she could feel him tiptoe, and the narrow bed creaked under his weight. Lecha had started to open her eyes, but this time Uncle Federico had ordered them shut in a frightening tone. Still Lecha knew how to cheat at hide-and-seek; through slitted lids she say he held something in his hand. One of his thick, dark cigars. Strange that he would want a cigar during an examination.
ADIÓS, WHITE MAN!
SEESE DROVE the big Lincoln sixty-five and seventy all the way from Nogales to Hermosillo. Lecha was giving her directions and coaching her on driving in Mexico.
“Step on it! Don’t ever hesitate! They’ll move out of the way!” Sterling had learned to get out to piss when they stopped for gas because Lecha demanded they drive straight through. They still had to stop to hire shovel hands.
“My information comes from here,” Lecha said as they pulled up to a small whitewashed house with strings of blue morning glories trailing up the front walls. The sun was dropping low, and Seese looked tired. When she glanced at him in the rearview mirror, Sterling thought Seese looked sad. The sun was on the southwest horizon, and the crickets were noisy; a light breeze fluttered the blue morning glories. Lecha had hired teenage boys, around fifteen or sixteen; all three wore clean, mended blue jeans and white T-shirts. They were too shy to speak to Lecha, who rattled on at them in Spanish. She was apparently explaining what she wanted them to do. They answered her with nods of the head. They seemed afraid to brush against Sterling and gave him plenty of room on the back seat. They were a strange group—these teenage boys, Sterling, Seese, and Lecha.
The family graveyard was on a sandy ridge above a salt flat on the southeast side of the bay. The last twilight was fading. Seese had been driving for hours. She was still seeing white lines on pavement although they were winding down a hill on a sandy wagon road. A breeze came across the salt flat and salt crystals glittered in the last light. The sea beyond was thick, blue, and motionless. The family cemetery was surrounded by a low, crumbling wall of ocean cobblestones. Wire fencing, now rusting and sagging, enclosed the entire west and north sides where the wall had fallen and stone was scattered over the ground. The recent graves were still mounded high. The white wood crosses that marked them were entwined with red and yellow plastic roses and plastic wreathes of green ferns and pink carnations. Graves in the older sections were marked with flat wedges of dark basalt from the low volcanic peaks, cerros, they’d passed driving from San Isidro. Some of the black stones had been patterned with crude white crosses gradually weathering away. Around the stone markers the plastic roses and carnations had been planted into the white dune sand as if they had always grown there.
Lecha leaned over the wrought-iron fence and pointed at the graves of Federico, Popa, Cucha, and the others. She had turned to Seese and Sterling and glanced at the three boys. She made a disgusted sound against her teeth with her tongue and shook her head. The three boys leaned on the pick and shovels and watched the strange woman tour the graveyard.
Sterling leaned on the pick and stared off toward the west. He was sorry they had come so late. It would have been nice to see the ocean water of the California Gulf. He had seen the ocean many times from Long Beach where he liked to vacation and visit the amusement park. His favorite ride had been the giant roller coaster. He liked the part of the ride over the ocean in the early evening when the mist and fog rose up and left his jacket and hair soaking. Looking at the smooth, dark-blue surface loosened the big knot of loss in his chest. There were other places he could retire to besides Laguna.
Seese watched Lecha walking from grave to grave. Seese shivered although the air was warm. She had suddenly wanted to get away. Anywhere but Tucson or the Southwest. But Lecha had warned her certain matters take time. They would have to work on the almanac. Seese wandered to the far end of the graveyard where the stone wall was most intact. The graves were closer together here and the stones and crosses were smaller. She stopped at a white stone marker with two baby angels lifting a lamb.
“I didn’t know it would be this easy!” Lecha said triumphantly as the three boys lifted out the first coffin. The pale beach sand on the ridge made easy digging. Lecha had been too excited to notice Seese had turned pale and had
stumbled away in the dark.
In the distance, Sterling could hear the town dogs barking. He was nervous. He figured he’d probably get fired, but after all this it would be just as well. These people in Tucson were too strange for him. He’d try to find his cousin in Phoenix. High wages weren’t everything. Sterling was worried about what the Mexican police did to people who disturbed graves. He held the flashlight while Lecha directed the boys. The coffin was old and the wood was half-rotted. The boys carried it easily. They seemed unconcerned at what they were doing. Sterling had seen the roll of bills Lecha carried in her big black pouch. Maybe she would buy off the police too if they showed up. Sterling was beginning to think that what had happened back on the reservation with the Hollywood movie crew was hardly an incident as compared to the crimes committed in places like Tucson.
Lecha threw open the trunk lid. She did not seem very sick, though Sterling could see her black pouch and suitcase were full of pill bottles and syringes. Of course, Sterling reasoned, Lecha could be relying on that mysterious strength he’d read about in the Police Gazette—the strength that crazy people and killer maniacs possessed as they fought off platoons of police with tear gas and live bullets. Lecha gave orders in Spanish. The oldest boy caught the edge of the coffin lid with the toe of his cowboy boot and popped it loose. “Dump it in here,” she said in English, and pointed at the deep trunk of the Lincoln. Sterling was holding the flashlight for them, but he turned his head away, as the boys did, to avoid the fine dust that spumed up. “Well, well, Uncle Federico, here is all that remains of you and your thick, hairy fingers!”
The Almanac of the Dead Page 69