by Joe McKinney
His mind was a mess. He felt detached, like he was groping blindly at the tattered fragments of the past while his fingers bent the exposed corner of the photograph back and forth, toying with it, teasing it until the paper slid free from the folder.
He tasted his dry, cracked lips with the tip of his tongue and could still feel the grit there. When he looked down, the photograph was on his right thigh, the folder and its contents spilled on the hardwood floor near his feet. He studied the photograph. What he saw was a family, and at first glance it could have been anybody’s family, a husband, young, strong, serious, his pretty wife at his side with a baby boy on her hip.
That was his mother holding him. He looked to be around two, maybe a little younger, which would have put his mother at about twenty. She was skinny, but not to the point of emaciation, as he remembered her. Her dark, deeply tanned skin was stretched tight over a pronounced facial bone structure, and yet she didn’t look fragile. His memories of her were of a woman very different from the one in this picture. In his memory, she was a wraith who haunted the front room of their house. He remembered standing by the bed she kept there, staring at the black eyed woman under the yellowed sheets who almost always responded to anything he said with a drugged-sounding, “Let me rest, baby. Momma’s not feeling up to doin’ much right now.”
And yet, when he looked into the photo on his thigh, what he saw was a very different woman. She was pretty—pretty because all the mental hardships she was destined to endure were still in her future. This was his mother before she lost her mind, before the depression made her a mental crank case. The woman pictured here was eight years away from the woman who would run screaming into his room with a knife in her hands and murder in her eyes.
Paul didn’t want to think about that. He let his gaze drift from his mother to his father. He put his finger on the photograph and touched the face of the man who had loomed over his life like the shadow of a mountain. The man was young here, maybe thirty years old, with a small waist and strong arms and an unsmiling mouth that was thin as a razor cut. His head seemed to Paul to be shaped almost exactly like a shoebox. As always, he wore his black slacks, his black Red Wing boots, his white shirt buttoned at the neck and the sleeves, starched to the point it could probably stand up on its own. And of course there was his black Stetson hat crowning that shoebox-shaped head.
There wasn’t an ounce of mirth in the man’s soul, a fact that was obvious from even the small glimpse of him stored here in this photograph. And yet, as Paul ran his finger over the image of the man, he could sense a window into the past opening up around him. It was a feeling like standing in a peach orchard in the middle of the summer, with the South Texas sun beating down on your arms and scorching the back of your neck and from out of nowhere you feel a breeze, a hot, sluggish breeze that plucks at the cream-colored dirt on the ground and lifts little clouds of dust a few feet into the air so that it falls onto the toes of your boots like gossamer curtains falling from a window and you realize that you are a part of this land and it is a part of you and though you make your living from it, the land is at the same time taking your living from you, drawing it out of you one drop of sweat at a time. Looking at his father’s picture was like that, the feeling of having something pulled out of him that he was powerless to hold on to.
He could sense something stirring around him. The air felt gritty and waxy against his skin, and gradually he became aware that the world around him was changing. He could see the apartment, but superimposed over top of that he could also see a ghostly world that was both strangely new and at the same time vaguely familiar.
Paul sensed he could step into this new world if he wanted to. All he had to do was let it come.
***
Confused, but not frightened, not really, Paul stood and turned to take a long, slow look at this new world. It was a small, cheap motel room. There was a metal frame bed against the far wall, a yellowed mattress on top of that with the bed sheet pushed down to the foot rails. The mattress was puckered in the middle, burned here and there by the cherries that had fallen off long ago cigarettes. A small, two-drawer dresser rested against the wall at the head of the bed. The only light in the room came from the guttering candle atop that dresser and it cast an orange glow on the yellowed, floral print wallpaper behind it, giving the stains on the wall an ochre cast that might have been rust bleeding through the paper from the nails in the wall, but might also have been blood or possibly spilled rye. Any and all was possible. The room smelled of old sweat and stale smoke and over it all, pushing everything down, was a heat so oppressive that it settled in your nostrils and made each breath a matter of forced will.
Paul crossed to an open window and looked through the curtains. Below him was an empty town with narrow, crumbling streets bathed in moonlight. The architecture was old Mexico, but even if he hadn’t known that by the shape of the slovenly cinderblock buildings with the red tile roofs and the glass shards embedded in the concrete on the tops of the walls he would have known it by the sounds of a dance coming from somewhere off to his left.
This was his father’s room. He was certain of that. He glanced down at the dresser and saw whiskey and a pack of crumpled Mexican cigarettes and was surprised because his father had never smoked around him. And then, next to the cigarettes, he saw a small mound of fibrous, bone-white mushrooms streaked through with thick blue veins and he recognized the product from his training at the Academy as hallucinogens. Suddenly he thought back to the night six years ago, the night he killed his father, and how, at dinner, his father said he once went to Mexico looking for something, what he didn’t know, but something that wasn’t his father, Paul’s grandfather, and Paul thought: Huh, imagine that. My dad used to get freaked out on ’shrooms.
A man whined in pain behind him.
He turned and, for the first time, saw his father through the open door to the bathroom. His father was naked, save for his socks, his back to Paul. He was standing over the commode, his body drenched in sweat, bruises all over his back, but darkest over his kidneys. He had one hand on the corner of the sink to support his weight. He held his cock with the other. He was trying to pee and couldn’t. He stamped one foot, threw his head back and howled in pain. Then he hung his head forward and sobbed, his whole body trembling in pain.
Paul studied the man. He looked emaciated. The powerful shoulders that Paul remembered were stooped and his spine seemed to be made of rubber. The pride that had made his backbone straight as a cane pole for all the time Paul had known him was missing. This was the man who would someday work in the peach orchards from before sun up to after sun down without ceasing, the man who could lift a two hundred pound goat carcass into the air with one hand, the man whose grip was hard enough to make other men frown when they shook his hand. This was the man who would come back from the dead and tell Paul he had a charge to keep; and yet here he was, a shell, a spiritual pauper, a man with all the self-respect of one who has just been prison raped.
Embarrassed, Paul turned away. He had never known, never even suspected, that this side of the man existed. Looking back over the span of the few years of his life, he saw absolutely no indication that the man had ever been anything but cold and hard and insane. But this, this squalor, this ugliness, it humanized the man, made him seem whole somehow, or at least filled him out in some way that made the man he was to become make more sense to the boy, the son, who was to inherit the legacy of that coldness and hardness and insanity.
Paul walked to the window and stared out at the little Mexican village and listened to a dog bark and then the sound of a truck changing gears and accelerating out on a roadway far away.
There was a knock at the door, three quick, soft raps.
Martin Henninger stepped out of the bathroom, walked right by Paul, and fell face down on the bed.
The knock again.
“Go away,” Martin Henninger said.
A pause. Another knock.
“I said, fuc
k off!”
Another pause.
The doorknob turned slowly, but when the door opened, it was with authority.
A young Indio girl stood there. She looked like she could pass for seventeen, as long as you didn’t look at her too closely. She wore a simple cotton dress of faded red that stopped an inch or two above her knees. Her breasts were small and her shoulders were broad. Her black hair was long and curly, damp against her round, dark face. Her feet were small and almost round. She wasn’t wearing shoes.
“You can stand?” she said.
Martin Henninger groaned. “Go away,” he said.
“You must stand up, señor. The men who beat you, there is talk in the village that they are not done with you.”
“Ha!” Martin said, and to Paul it sounded like the sound of a man who would welcome being put out of his misery.
“Señor, please. Stand up.”
Martin rolled over in bed then and looked at her. His face was sallow in the glow of the candlelight, his expression ironic as his eyes walked over her body.
“How old are you?” he said.
“I am eighteen.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “Fifteen I’d believe.”
“Señor, please. Do as I ask you. Stand up.”
He rolled his eyes. “What the fuck,” he said, and laughed. “Not like it matters, right? I mean, what the hell, far as the law down here cares, you could be thirteen and it wouldn’t make a cold witch’s titty of a difference, would it?”
She frowned and he smiled. Then he stood up. It was a slow, painful motion, and it reminded Paul of the morning after the day they’d played Rice in Houston back when he was in college. He’d gotten hit in the lower back, right above the butt pad, and for a blinding moment he’d seen nothing but purple and felt a screaming pain down both his legs and wondered, as he struggled to his hands and knees, if his football career was over. His father moved like that, like the morning after that hit when Paul had tried to climb out of bed and thought for a second that he wasn’t going to be able to do it.
And then Martin was standing, naked as naked gets, before the girl, and his dick looked red and ulcerous, like he’d tried to pass broken glass through his urethra.
He waved his hand at the obscenity of his disease and said, “Is it worth twenty pesos to put this in your mouth, little one?” He shifted his weight to the other leg. “You see this, right? One of the other fucking hookers around here got to me first.”
“You talk too fast,” she said. “I don’t understand all you say. But I can see what you have wrong with your pendajo. I know who can help you with that. But you must come with me, señor. It is very bad for you here.”
Martin waved her off.
“Go home, girl. Let me die here.”
She cocked her head at him.
“You wish to die?” she said.
He laughed, a self-deprecating laugh that was as new to Paul as the idea of a father who had lived life at the bottom, where life was cheap and short and weighted down by disease.
“There is talk in the village that you came here looking for something that will make you happy. Is that not so?”
Scratching his diseased groin, he said, “Happy. Yeah, sure,” and shook his head. “I didn’t come here to live it up with whores and drugs, if that’s what you mean. I came here to learn how to feed my soul.” He stopped there and looked at her. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Magdalena Chavarria,” the girl said.
“Magdalena, eh? You mind if I call you Maggie?”
“My name is Magdalena,” the girl said.
“Magdalena. All right.”
Martin staggered slightly, then sat down on the side of the bed. He looked right past Paul, not seeing him at all, to Magdalena, who was still standing just inside the door.
He said, “You know what it means to feed the soul?”
She started to speak but he cut her off.
“No, of course you don’t. Let me tell you. It’s like trying to drink from a mirage. It’s like that song, you know the one, how do you hold a moonbeam in your hand, how do you keep a wave upon the sand? It’s like that. It’s a vain hope. It’s a joke the mystics played on us. It can’t be done. The human soul can’t be fed. And you know what? I’m beginning to think it doesn’t even exist. I think it’s all just darkness and trouble.” He said, “What do you think of that, Magdalena? Do you think the soul exists?”
She stared at him for a long time, seeming to consider what to make of him. Was he merely a bug under glass, something to be gawked at, or was he a broken, diseased man, one of the untouchable Americans who come down here south of the border to become human shipwrecks on a sea of whiskey? Or was he none of those things? Her dark eyes were bottomless, and what she thought she thought alone.
“I can help you find the answers you seek, señor. But it is not easy. It is not something I can tell you. Or show you. It is only something you can come to know after a long time of not knowing. It is like watching a season change. The knowledge can only come on you like that.”
Martin ran trembling hands through his hair, then mopped the sweat from the back of his neck with his palm.
“How do I know you’re not taking me somewhere to roll me?”
“To roll you? I do not know those words. But I think I understand. You ask me if I’m taking you to those men who did this to you, no?”
“Yes.”
“I am not,” she said. “But if you stay here, you will die, and you will not know what you came here to find. If you come with me, you may die, but you may also learn to live again.”
He gave her a waxy, unenthusiastic grin. “You mind if I get dressed first?”
She sailed right on through, or was oblivious to, the sarcasm. “Yes, put on your pants. But leave your other belongings and come and follow me.”
***
Martin Henninger left his room, dressed now in jeans and a dirty blue t-shirt and old sneakers and followed the young Indio girl in the faded red cotton dress down to the street. She walked ahead of him, her bare feet slapping quietly on the pavement. Paul’s father stumbled along behind, his body stiff, his gait like that of a wounded soldier marching to the rear, and as they moved through the streets Paul had the strangest feeling. He knew already that he was not a part of the events playing out here, that he was, perhaps, experiencing a memory. As the thought took form in his head he felt his physical form fading to the consistency of a shadow and merging with the diseased American man trailing behind the solid, but still pretty, Indio girl in the faded red cotton dress—if indeed merging was what he could call this feeling of losing himself within his father, of being pulled down and made to be still, for he felt very much like he had as a young boy, when his father had clamped a hard hand down on the back of his neck and squeezed to keep him from running off.
They walked until they left the town behind. Here the road was blond dirt bordered by shallow ditches where weeds grew, and out beyond the ditches was emptiness that disappeared into the night. Ahead of them, far into the distance, Paul could see a jagged row of black mountains against the faintly luminescent blue glow of the sky.
They came to a shack of crumbling white adobe with rattlesnake hides nailed to the front door and Angora goats in the yard and chickens pecking at the dirt.
A woman was inside.
She was tall and lithesome and beautifully shaped, her figure more classically feminine than the young girl who had brought him here and now stood next to him. And though this older woman lacked the heavy features of the Indio girl, there was an obvious familial similarity to their faces.
Paul guessed she was the Indio girl’s mother.
“You rest now,” the woman said to Martin in Spanish, gesturing towards a dirty mattress on the bare dirt floor.
“But...” Martin said, and turned toward the younger girl in appeal.
“There’s plenty of time,” the girl said. “Do as she asks. Rest now.”
And then
Martin, and Paul too, for he was inside Martin, looking out as from inside a glass jar, sat on the mattress and let the women strip him of his shoes and his shirt and finally of his pants, until he was naked on his back.
“You are in pain now,” the dark-haired woman said, “but it will pass soon. We will help you.”
“Your daughter told me you could teach me,” he said.
“In time,” she answered. “But not now. First you heal, then you learn.”
And with that she took a small, white piece of waxed paper from the younger girl and used her fingernail to scrape up a reddish-brown paste that was the consistency of peanut butter from the paper.
She put her finger on Martin’s tongue and his lips closed around her finger and there was something sensual about the act that even his battered body could respond to. Her eyes smiled back at his, sensing his arousal.
“Put your head back,” she said. “You will feel very dizzy shortly.”
He did as she instructed and closed his eyes.
Paul felt suddenly warm inside as the paste dissolved on his father’s tongue—which, for the moment at least, was also his tongue.
He felt the woman’s hand on his cock and his eyes sprang open. He looked down his body and saw the woman spreading dollops of black, tar-like goo onto his groin. It didn’t burn like tar, though. It was actually cool feeling, like damp morning grass against the skin.
“What are you doing?” he said, and just then the dizziness hit him. His head rolled on his neck, his muscles seemingly unable to support the weight.
“Put your head down and sleep,” she said, not looking at him, her hands working with the clinical disinterest of a nurse dressing a wound.
But Paul’s vision had clouded over. The woman’s face twisted and melted, and her voice became garbled. The corners of his vision pulled apart like taffy into streamers of light.