The Almanac of the Dead

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Seese saw the taxi turn into the trailer court entrance; she picked up the light-blue train case and shook her head at Root. “That’s all right, don’t bother,” Seese said. “I have other people interested.” Root stood in the door and Seese sensed how much he wanted to embrace her, but she was finished with him.

  Let her find out for herself about the changes in Tucson. Root remembered downtown when it had been alive, before the malls had killed downtown. No one had thought the big malls would die out either. But then the U.S. economy had begun to falter. Prominent corporations had been avoiding or abandoning Arizona steadily over the years because corporate employees balked at living in Arizona. The quality of life was substandard. Root thought it was really funny. Guam and Puerto Rico spent more on schools and mental health programs than Arizona did. No new industry or business would ever come to Arizona again; all the tax breaks and cozy deals, all the cheap land Arizona offered to attract corporations—all was for naught. Analysts said Mexico’s civil war would be nasty and spill across to the United States. Tucson’s fate was closely tied to the fate of Mexico. Tucson’s malls had depended on wealthy Mexicans; but the rich Sonorans had fled the angry mobs of peasants and relocated to Argentina or Spain. Rumors about violence across the border had begun to scare off wealthy patrons at Tucson’s spas and health resorts.

  Root had to laugh. Merchants who sold arms and munitions did a “booming” business. Tucson had always depended on some sort of war to keep cash flowing. Root’s own great-grandfather had got rich off the Apache wars. Calabazas had told Root all about it. Root’s parents never discussed the family’s social prominence or the family wealth. After Calabazas had described the bootlegging to the Apaches and the army, the whores and the skimming off army supply contracts, Root understood why his parents and Tucson’s “social elite” had so little interest in local history.

  As far as Root was concerned, he was dead to his family, he had died on the day of his accident. The only family Root had was Calabazas and maybe Mosca. He could never be sure about Mosca or Lecha either; they both loved him but they were both crazy too. Root did not know if he loved them or if he had ever loved anyone. Had he ever loved his mother? He hardly even thought about his father.

  Sometimes Root even amazed himself. He should never have fucked Lecha’s assistant or nurse or whatever she was. As soon as the urge and the hunger had been hammered away, the floating ecstasy had given way to doubt. The town was full of strangers carrying suitcases packed with cocaine or U.S. dollars to trade for dynamite. Lecha had psychic powers, but she still made mistakes where her personal life was concerned; hiring the blonde might have been a mistake. Root turned on the TV, but he could not get rid of the sad feeling. No wonder Mosca only “used” prostitutes. That was money well spent because there were no regrets.

  Root had started hating television while he was in the hospital. But after he got out, he had begun to hate radio too; most of all, he had hated the new state lottery, and all the stupid ads for the suckers. Local radio stations had to give away cash all day long to be assured of listeners. No one did anything for anyone anymore except for cold cash. The deliverymen and receptionists, telephone operators and line repairmen, grocery checkers and department store clerks—the stupid suckers listened hour after hour while radio deejays pimped them with trash promotional merchandise.

  In the hospital, prize money and prize merchandise had been all the nurses or nurse’s aides and therapists ever talked about. At home they paid baby-sitters to watch television in case the lucky phone call came at their house. They had all been making payments on new carpet or new living room furniture. The whole question came down to what it was a person stayed alive for.

  Root once sat in a neighborhood coke dealer’s kitchen one day and watched. Around three P.M. the first of the “clients” had got off work and stopped by for a “boost” to get them home. For a small extra charge clients were allowed to shoot up in the bathroom. They had all been white, and the dealer was sympathetic. The clients had spouses, families, and jobs to think about. Root watched the steady parade. Legal secretaries, mechanics, postal workers, receptionists, dental hygienists, and others Root could not guess—they might have been real estate agents or high school teachers. But all had the same expression of anticipation and relief on their faces. All day they had thought about only one thing. They had shut out the tedium and humiliation of their jobs—they had endured because they knew there was a full syringe waiting. This was what they lived for; this was why they went to work.

  Root understood. Anyone who could see and reason clearly and logically would have found a painless way out—handgun, any caliber, its barrel nuzzled by the ear that would never hear the blast. Everyone had made his or her choice—a personal strategy for survival. New carpets, new dinette sets, new automobiles; something to live for, reasons to go to the jobs they hated. The coke dealer was an addict himself; he complained about the fall in cocaine prices. He said less cash was circulating around town; regular customers had been laid off or had had their work hours cut back.

  COMMUNIST PRIESTS AND NUNS

  MOSCA HAD LEARNED not to bother with those smart, nervous women even when they were dark and beautiful like the two sisters. In a way, Calabazas had wasted his life with those two Brito sisters.

  First, Sarita, his “lawful wedded wife,” had been in bed with a dead monsignor—that was a good one! Fucked him into a heart attack. Second, Liria, Calabazas’s “true love,” had gone behind his back and with Sarita had joined a Catholic radical group to help smuggle refugees from Mexico and Guatemala to the United States. Mosca had overheard most of the argument when Calabazas had found out. Mosca thought most of the neighbors had at least heard the loud voices, which had quickly dropped to angry whispers. Mosca had been the one who had found out. Mosca had told Calabazas. See how fast word got around? What was that bitch Liria trying to do? What if they came investigating Liria and her communist nuns and priests.

  Mosca had heard all the arguments before—both sides. Those who said you helped when you fed them, and those who said people needed “saving.” Mosca liked to brag that he only voted what his stomach told him. Calabazas had reminded Liria that all the farmers were relatives or clanspeople of his in Mexico. Theirs was a family business; all the marijuana had been from family farms, carefully packed inside truck-loads of pumpkins.

  Liria had pointed out that she was not telling him to stop his business. The Indians had been left the poorest land; it was true. In the hills only marijuana would grow; pumpkins and gourds only grew down in the small valleys. Liria had remained calm. Each person chose the work they would do. Her work was to give sanctuary to people fleeing bullets and torture. Liria did not see how her work or Sarita’s work with the refugees would interfere with his work.

  Then Mosca had heard Calabazas make an inspired argument about the dangers of smuggling political refugees versus smuggling gourds full of cocaine. People were too large and too noisy to smuggle easily. Liria’s church group was too open to infiltration by government agents.

  Calabazas had been walking on shaky ground; suddenly Liria had become furious with Calabazas.

  “Just listen to yourself, old man! What chicken shit you men are!” Liria had stormed out, and later she had thrown two suitcases in the trunk of her Toyota and drove away. Mosca knew that Calabazas was in the dark about a lot of the subversive work the Catholic Church was doing. Mosca had never trusted nuns, priests, any of them. Mosca had brought up the subject gently because he knew Calabazas had spent years madly in love with that woman Liria.

  Mosca had been able to detect wizards or sorcerers, and assassins and spies, but only as he was driving past them. Mosca’s explanation had been that sorcerers, like antelope or coyotes, did not seem to fear detection from moving vehicles.

  Mosca would be minding his own business, driving down Drachman at Miracle Mile, when suddenly he would see a dark wizard disguised as a clean-cut, young Hispanic college student. Mosca
did not care if Root, Calabazas, or that bitch Liria laughed at him and called him, “Loco, loco, loco!” Mosca had made careful observations. The weirdos all hit the streets at the same time—they all lurched out of their cheap apartments and trailers to walk along Ft. Lowell Road laughing and talking to themselves. How had they all known it was time to step outside? Weirdos were on the same brain wavelengths as lizards and migrating birds and possessed the mysterious ability to converge simultaneously on the same location. Sometimes witches and wizards even hit the streets together. Mosca had never figured out why those who hated and feared one another so much would all want to stroll together on the same streets. Yet Mosca had often seen the sorcerers, witches of both sexes, curanderos—whatever you wanted to call them—they all circulated together no different from the whores, male and female, who also walked South Sixth Avenue.

  Speeding past a witch on the street, Mosca sometimes had a split second to see a light—sometimes a flash, sometimes a glow—around the face or the feet. Compared to the old-time stories about sorcerers, his power, Mosca had to admit, was limited.

  Mosca opened another beer and scooped four big snorts from the plastic bag of coke shoved in the pocket of his western shirt. Mosca didn’t care about the teasing and the jokes. Calabazas, Root, or Liria—the rest of them—could laugh until they choked. The alcohol and the dope, were only the doorways; alcohol didn’t do the talking. All the notions, the suspicions, the schemes, the reveries, the theories, and the hunches belonged to him. They were locked up inside compartments of flesh and bone deep in Mosca’s body. Mosca could feel what he knew: the surge of a great flood, the muddy, churning water of what, he couldn’t yet say. Mosca’s eyes were shining. Tribal people in South America had navigated the most treacherous rivers and had traveled icy mountain paths with the aid of Mama Coca.

  SOULS OF THE DEAD

  MOSCA HEARS and remembers so many voices and so many places he forgets where they all came from. Two or three beers, and three or four good snorts, and if everything else is level and smooth, then all the doors and gates of memory swing open. Every time Mosca had ever been arrested, there had been an intervening circumstance—a witch, a devil, a spirit thing. Mosca went on talking about zombies, open graves, and ghost armies traveling in green fireballs because they were and had always been a part of Mosca’s life. Root had asked Mosca how old he was when he had first seen one of the weird things.

  “Oh, man, I was just a little baby! They had me sleeping in a banana box. It must have been cold, because they had me and the box up on a table or something in a kitchen.” Mosca claimed he could remember everything, even being born. Though he had only been an infant, had sensed something was watching him from the ceiling. The first of thousands of things Mosca would “see.”

  Mosca had watched the steam rise off the Santa Cruz on mornings when cold mountain air settled over Tucson. He understood how the steam was the moisture of the river rising, so that you had a river running into the sky, in all directions of the winds—but also that these were the souls of the dead rising out of the purgatory where they’d been imprisoned hundreds and thousands of years waiting to be released so they could return to help their beloved descendants.

  In the Sonoran desert foothills the winds were supernatural. Los aires, the air currents—tricky breezes, little updrafts, and ferocious jaws of downdrafts—that crushed small aircraft into the mountains. A sorcerer of some prowess could ensorcell a minor wind or strong breeze off a prominent mountain cliff. A sorcerer might grow rich and powerful if he could manage to secure just the right wind at just the strategic place. Naturally every sorcerer dreamed and bragged and schemed after the great winds—seldom seen except in sudden gusts that engulfed armies in desert sand or scuttled war fleets against coastal rocks.

  One afternoon, the sky is overcast-gray, and damp heat is pushed ahead of big thunderclouds. Mosca is moody and strange. Root finds Mosca standing outside Calabazas’s house facing west. Thousands of waxy cottonwood leaves click together in the damp wind. Mosca does not acknowledge Root for a while, and then Mosca just starts talking about the souls of the dead. You can hear them, Mosca says, on rainy afternoons, summer or winter, because the dead souls are out on cloudy days to bring rain. “Dead souls are always near us,” Mosca continues, “watching over us.” The talk about spirits begins to excite Mosca. His dark eyes gleam as he gathers momentum. He says white people got the idea of guardian angels from the spirits who help us. Except the poor souls could not really “guard,” but they always accompanied you wherever you went. They came from the place of complete peace in which silence was the answer, and silence was truth.

  “Dead souls stay near us, but they don’t break the silence,” Mosca said. Because talk was not necessary so long as you remembered everything you knew about your ancestors. Because ancestor spirits had the answers, but you had to be able to interpret messages sent in the language of spirits.

  Souls of the newly dead hover like gray and brown moths at the window screens and by doors of places they’d once lived. Newly dead, they have not yet learned the ways of the dead, so the dead souls cried piteously outside their houses. Europeans did not listen to the souls of their dead. That was the root of all trouble for Europeans. They never seemed to hear the cries of their dead swarming outside windows and doors of courthouses and office buildings whining for money they had not been able to take along with them. Mosca did not agree with what the communist priests and communist Indians from Mexico had said, but Mosca did agree the dead souls of Europeans cried out.

  “We are outnumbered here!” was their message, endlessly, in the “séances” the Barefoot Hopi had conducted for them in prison. The Europeans not only did not feed the souls of their dead for four days afterward, family members took all things precious to the dead and scattered them. Thus Europeans were haunted by the dead in their dream life and were driven mad by the incessant cries of unquiet ancestors’ souls. No wonder they were such restless travellers; no wonder they wanted to go to Mars and Saturn.

  Souls of the dead sometimes appeared as butterflies before a spring rain in the desert. Which dead souls brought blizzards and hailstorms and torrential rains that collapsed roofs and washed away garden seedlings? Calabazas wants to know. Mosca is more confident than Root has ever seen him. Mosca does not erupt in fury as he once had if anyone dared question one of his beloved theories. Dead souls that brought too much rain or too much of anything were suspected of working for sorcerers.

  High plateaus and rugged mountain passes were hazardous. They were places to be avoided because where clouds were found, so were the souls of the dead. Wise travelers avoided mountain or high-land travel except in dry, cloudless weather because lightning, hailstorms, and sudden blizzards had trapped and frozen countless travelers before them. Mosca had heard the stories.

  In a high mountain pass, stranded travelers huddled around a fire in darkness and blizzard. Then, on the edge of the light of the fire, through lacy veils of snow, the travelers made out a silhouette the shape of a horse. Bewildered, they staggered from their fire toward the white horse emerging from the blowing snow.

  “Here!” Mosca said. “Here is the miracle of it: the Christ Child! The Holy Infant as a tiny baby, sitting astride a white horse!” When the infant smiled at them, the travelers saw the infant had a full set of teeth.

  “ ‘Tengo los dientes,’ the Holy Infant said, and then rode away on the white horse into the snowy night.” Mosca smiled when he finished his story.

  Liria had been listening from the kitchen. She shook her head. “That wasn’t the Christ Child! That was the Devil!” Liria started laughing. Mosca’s mouth tightened into a pout. Who asked her to butt in? Mosca demanded to know. Couldn’t anyone talk without someone listening in? What did she know anyway about the Infant Jesus? If He was God, He could have anything He wanted, including death on the cross and a white horse to ride as a baby.

  Mosca hates Liria most at moments like that. Hates her laughing, hates
her fucking her sister’s husband, hates her sister who fucks priests, hates the stiff-prick priests and their scandal of holy orders. Liria knows nothing. The Devil never rides white horses. Jesus had traveled the length and width of the continents called the Americas years before the Romans had directed the Jews to nail Him up on the cross. Jesus had been seen by the wandering tribes that walked the Great Plains. Jesus had been seen in Mexico. Liria and her sister were ruined by their mother, who had raised them to be white women. The Jesus they prayed to had blue eyes and blond hair.

  Mosca had not always believed all the notions of the old tribal people, but he had seen for himself over the years the old people had told the truth.

  Mosca’s body had been so full of natural electricity, he had never been able to wear a wristwatch of any kind because his body’s electricity interfered with the tiny watch mechanisms. Flocks of birds migrated thousands of miles and lizards communicated with one another using the same sort of electromagnetism. The circulation of the blood around and around a living body created electric current; moving electric currents in living bodies created a sort of magnetism. Performers and TV people were addicted to the jolts of electricity they got during performances in large stadiums with thousands and thousands of human bodies massed together to focus energy on a small stage. The barefoot Hopi had explained all this to Mosca while they’d shared a cell.

  Mosca blamed his bad luck with women on what he called “too much electricity.” Women became uneasy around Mosca because he aroused so much sexual desire in them whenever he was near. Unfortunately most women did not follow their instincts, but blamed Mosca for everything.

  A few women had got so upset on first dates with Mosca they had even hallucinated what they heard Mosca say. Once Mosca had asked a date if she could see a clock; the woman had misunderstood and thought he said, “Can you suck my cock?” The woman had nearly jumped from the moving vehicle until Mosca’s denials had convinced her.