by Joe McKinney
“Looters,” he said. He looked me over. “You're not hurt?”
“No. You?”
“No.” He glanced over the top of the stairs and quickly dropped back down. “Damn!” he said. “I wish we had our guns.” The guns were back in our car, in the trunk. Pistols don't do well in the decontamination chambers.
We heard more voices. Not just the ones behind us, but more from the back of the house, coming closer.
“Chunk?”
“We can't stay here.”
In front of us was a busted chain link fence. On the other side of that, a low line of tanglehead grass. Not high enough or thick enough to hide behind, but high enough to wrap around our feet and tie us down if we tried to run for it. Beyond that was the side of a weather-beaten house, a busted window midway down its length. In the backyard, I saw a small metal tool shed and a few trees.
The shooting stopped. Then, laughing. They cackled like witches, taunting us, calling us out. I saw movement in the backyard and a man shouted. “Over here! Over here! They're over here.”
He fired at us. The bullet hit the concrete next to my head, powdering me with dust. Chunk jumped up and cleared the chain link fence in a single stride. I was right behind him. I grabbed the top of the fence and swung my legs over. Another shot rang out. It hit something beneath my hand. The fence collapsed, and I hit the ground face first. I saw a flash of purple as my mask smashed into my nose.
When I looked up, men with rifles were running from the street into the front yard and Chunk was disappearing into the cover of the trees along the front of the house, running away from them.
I heard more shouting from behind me, and in an instant I realized I was cut off. I couldn't go forward after Chunk, and I couldn't go to the backyard. I jumped into the broken window of the house in front of me and tumbled to the floor. The wood was rotten, spongy beneath my weight. The house was dark, musty. No furniture that I could see. Dust was everywhere.
“Go that way,” the voices shouted from outside. “Get that one!”
“The other's in the house.”
“Which one?”
“That one. You get that one.”
Heavy footsteps pounded on the front porch. Men yelled at each other. They kicked debris out of the doorway, forcing their way inside. I got to my feet and ran out of the room, toward the back of the house. The men coming in from the front of the house saw me as I slipped around the corner. They fired a shot. Through a window, I saw more men in the backyard. They turned toward the shot and charged the house.
The yelling erupted again. The clapboard house felt like it was going to rattle to pieces in the stampede of so many intruders. I ran through shadows and hallways to the far side of the house, the sound of heavy boots running on the rotten floor coming from all around me.
I ducked into an empty room and spied a window on the opposite wall. I heard voices in the hallway where I'd just come from, and I knew I had to make a move then or die in that house.
Running at the window, I dove through it without bothering to look at what was on the other side. I landed hard on a wood pile, shot through and overgrown with weeds, my ribs on my left side hitting the pile before the rest of me.
My vision blurred from a piercing bright light of pain, and moaning sickly, I rolled off the wood pile, onto my uninjured right side. It took a second before I could make myself move. There was a thick stand of bushes ahead of me, and I pulled myself along on my belly towards it.
Just as I got behind cover I heard the voices behind me.
“Anything?”
“Not back here.”
I heard them trashing the house, and I used the noise to cover my movements as I crawled along the bushes to the back of the house. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought that Chunk must be around the next corner. That he'd realize we got separated and was waiting for me. But when I rounded the corner to the backyard, I didn't see him.
But what I did see stunned me.
It was the top of a U-Haul-style moving van, dented and worn-looking, but the right size and shape as what Chunk and I were looking for. A fence and some chest-high bushes separated the van from me, hiding the bottom half of it, but my hopes were up, and I ran for it.
“There!” one of the men shouted from inside. “There! In the yard.”
I jumped the fence as a shot rang out and I hit the ground. As I landed, through the panic, I saw the lower half of the van, and my heart sank. It wasn't the van we were looking for. The back axle was up on cinder blocks and the van was ringed on all sides by scraggly hackberry bushes.
A bullet whizzed past my ear.
I hit the ground and crawled for the van and squeezed under it, inching my way forward, where the hackberry was thickest. I was even with the front tires when I stopped crawling, for a new, but much older fear had gripped me. On the ground in front of me, slowly uncoiling, was a dusty, caramel-colored rattlesnake. Its head looked as big as a slice of pumpkin pie, and its body was as big around as my thigh. The muscles along its flank rippled as it glided through the dirt, its tongue licking the air, sensing a living presence, but smelling only rubber and plastic.
I was on my belly, eyes wide open, every muscle in my body frozen with fear. The snake inched closer to me. Its head rose off the ground slightly, and then we were so close we were almost touching, nose to nose. I could see every speck of color in its slitted eyes.
We were motionless, eyes locked together for what seemed like forever, though it couldn't have been more than four or five seconds at the most. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the snake broke eye contact and glided forward. It crawled right past my ear, over my shoulder and onto my back, its body impossibly long and heavy, disappearing with exaggerated and terrible slowness into the shadows at my feet.
I didn't even breathe.
“Check there,” somebody shouted. “Yeah, there! Under that van.”
A fresh wave of panic took me. I heard the men running across the yard, coming closer. I turned and looked at the back axle over my shoulder. The snake was there, moving towards the daylight.
Voices at the hackberry. Hands pushing the greenery apart.
The snake reared back, its tail alive with the fury of its rattle. A shadow fell over the snake, and a man's face and body appeared above it. The snake lunged for the man's face and he pulled back just in time.
I heard him yell, “Whoa!” and then, a moment later, “Fucking rattlesnake man!”
The others laughed.
“Shut the fuck up,” the man yelled back.
They kept teasing him, but to my amazement, their voices retreated. They were going off to hunt for me in other places.
I watched, thunderstruck, as the snake slithered out into the hackberry, out into the sunlight, leaving me alone. I closed my eyes and let my face mask drop to the ground.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter 12
I stayed as still as possible, listening for more voices. The only sound was the muffled whistling of my breath as it exited through the filters of my gas mask. The looters were gone, I was pretty sure of it. I hadn't heard anything for over a minute, and the cave-like hollow beneath the van where I was hiding was becoming more and more oppressive.
I decided to chance a run for better cover.
I crawled out from under the van, but stayed in a low crouch. As quietly as I could I made my way back to the houses where Chunk and I had been hiding when we separated. I crossed between the houses to the front, where I stayed low behind some bushes, hoping to get a view of our car. Our weapons were still in the trunk, and I figured if I could get to them I could level the playing field a little.
But my heart sank when I saw the car. It had been shot to pieces. There were huge, gaping holes all over it. All the windows were broken, glass everywhere. A thin column of steam rose up from the radiator. Worse, the trunk was wide open, jimmied open sloppily, with a crowbar from the looks of it.
Moving through the bushes once again I headed along the front of the houses in the same direction Chunk and I were going when I lost him. I made it to the end of the block before I heard more voices. Men's voices. They were shouting at each other, slapping their way through an overgrown alley behind the house I was using for cover.
I ran across the street quickly and ducked into a small white house without a front door. Immediately the world around me was thrown into darkness. There was very little furniture to clutter the wood floors, a few chairs, a ragged sofa, a cabinet. Dusty sunlight pierced through the holes in the wall and the roof and the broken windows, making bright white patches on the floor.
I was painfully aware of my own breathing. How loud it was. How much my chest hurt where I had fallen onto the wood pile. The voices were gone, lost somewhere behind me. I desperately wanted to find Chunk, but I didn't want to go back outside. I couldn't risk another encounter with those looters. Not alone, anyway.
I wandered through the entryway, the kitchen, with its piles of unwashed pots and pans and spider webs in the sink, and then into the living room.
There I stopped. In front of me, so still that at first I believed she must have been a mummified corpse, was an old Mexican woman in a rocking chair.
She beckoned to me. “Come closer. You're safe here. Those men won't bother you here.”
“Who are you?”
“You come into my home and you ask me that? Who are you?”
I crossed the room and stood before her. My space suit and face mask didn't seem to scare her at all.
She looked amused. Her thin, wasted smile had only a few yellowed teeth left in it, and though she looked so frail she seemed ready to blow away with the dust, her voice was strong and didn't shake.
“My name is Lily Harris. I'm a police detective. Do you live here?”
“I do.”
“I thought all the homes in this area were evacuated back in May.”
“I'm still here.”
“What's your name?”
“Carmenita Jaramillo.”
“Ms. Jaramillo, you—”
“Carmenita. Please.”
“Carmenita. Okay. You said those men won't come in here? How do you know they won't?”
The rocking chair moved so slightly I thought maybe it was my imagination. Great stillness surrounded her, and even the tiniest twitch rippled through her like an earthquake.
“They need to be healed sometimes, the men. I heal them when I can.”
Heal them? How?
I took a quick glance around the room and saw odd things—dried herbs hanging above the back door. Dried chicken bones were laid out deliberately on the window sill. There was a basket of brown eggs on the floor next to her chair. I looked at the items, and a thought came to me.
“You're a curandera,” I said. A Mexican faith-healer, a tradition brought to South Texas from the Indian mountains of Northern Mexico.
She smiled.
“I didn't think there were any more curanderos left,” I said.
My dad was a cop on the south side of San Antonio for 36 years, and I remembered him telling me stories of curanderos. Stories of their strange rituals and their followers so fanatically devoted to them that in some parts of South Texas and Mexico, local Catholic priests were forced to acknowledge their gifts, their don de Dios, in order to appease their congregations.
“Not many,” she said, but not sadly. Her eyes were bright, happy.
I remembered a story my Dad told me. He was driving through his district on the south side one afternoon when an old woman ran out into the street ahead of him, waving her arms wildly and speaking very fast in Spanish.
Dad realized the woman wanted him to follow her inside her house, and he did. Inside, on the couch, on her back, was the woman's very pregnant daughter-in-law, covered in sweat, deep in labor. Dad was calm, because he'd already delivered three babies during his career. He washed his hands, sat on the couch between the girl's legs, and got ready to deliver the baby. Dad's Spanish was okay, but not great. He spoke it with a slow, East Texas drawl. The women were telling the girl to wait, don't let the baby come yet, but Dad didn't understand why.
Then another woman came in through the back door, and everybody seemed relieved. The woman knelt next to the pregnant girl, took a chicken egg from a pocket of her apron, and with the flat of her palm rolled the egg across the girl's belly, all the while muttering a prayer in Spanish.
When she was finished, Dad delivered the baby. He went to the sink and washed the blood and amniotic fluid from his hands, dried them, and then as calmly as if he were ordering a cheeseburger, got on his police radio and requested a case for Assist the Public, checked on the status of the ambulance, and got a time check for the birth of the baby. Dad was a veteran street cop at that point in his career and very little rattled him.
He returned to the living room just as the woman, the curandera, he soon learned, was cracking the egg into a bowl.
She looked up at my Dad and said, “For protection against the mal de ojo. The evil eye.”
She emptied the egg into the bowl. The yolk was the burning copper yellow of the sunset, and it was streaked through with blood.
“That rattled me,” Dad said. “It's hard to explain, but looking at that egg, I knew something had happened, something strange. There was a sort of charge in the air.”
I remember him shaking his head, unable to explain further.
I asked Carmenita Jaramillo, “Do you do that thing with the egg?”
She smiled.
“The people who come to me are simple people. For them, I offer the pouches of barley and crushed sage. I roll the chicken egg over their skin and crack it open for them to see the mal puesto, the bad magic. But it is no magic that I do. It is peace of mind I give them. Nothing but that.”
Her smile shifted to one corner of her mouth and I could tell she was studying me.
When she spoke again, it was like her voice had joined her thoughts mid stream.
“But not that for you,” she said. “You I can tell, you need something else.”
I was fascinated with her, and even though I thought her folk cures were, well, silly, the woman herself still intrigued me.
She put a gnarled finger up to her nose and said, “You are looking for the shiny people.”
“The shiny people?”
“Yes. A man and a woman. Dressed like you. Their clothes shine in the sun. And their troca too, yes?”
“Troca?” I said. Unlike my dad, I was never able to pick up Spanish. At one point, I got good enough at it I could ask for somebody's driver's license and their insurance, but when I promoted to detective, I lost even that. But then I clicked. I remembered the word, and I got excited. “You mean a van? Yes. I am. Have you seen it?”
“Yes, I see them. Yesterday morning. I hear the man yelling. The woman screaming. There was a fight in the street.”
“You saw them fighting? The man and the woman?”
“I hear them fighting. Voices. Like today, when they were chasing you.”
“You mean it wasn't the man and woman fighting with each other? They were fighting someone else?”
“The man was fighting with another man, yes. There was much yelling. Four or maybe five gunshots.”
“Could you see who the other man was?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But after the shooting, I see their troca going into that garage over there.” She pointed out the window to a battered gray wooden garage across the alley from her backyard. “Inside there.”
Beyond the garage was a two story house with a rickety, unpainted wooden staircase and balcony along the length of the second floor. It looked quiet. No one else around.
“Carmenita, this is important. I have to go there. Are there any more of those men around here?”
“They wander everywhere. You must be careful. Do not let them find a pretty young woman alone. I can not protect you from what they would do.”
�
��Understood.”
“Detective, may I—”
“Call me Lily. Please.”
She smiled. “Lily. You do not believe in the curandero, do you?”
“They're not really part of the culture I grew up in,” I said, conscious of the thin evasion.
“The only magic we do is to know what the people who come to us need. We are listeners only.”
“What is it that I need?”
“You are sick.” She touched her chest. “Here.”
At first I thought she meant with H2N2, and I said, “No, I'm fine. I get check ups every other day.”
“No. In here.” She pointed to her chest again, the heart. “Susto.”
I shook my head. “I don't understand. Susto?”
“Loss of spirit.”
I could have laughed it off, I told myself. I could have smiled and said that's nice and thank you and left. But I didn't. I stayed. Like my Dad on the day he stood in that woman's living room, staring at that bloody egg yolk, I had a feeling I couldn't explain, but at the same time one that I couldn't deny.
“We live in a bad time,” she said. “This is a bad place. The living and the dead are not so different.”
I frowned at her. She couldn't see that behind my gas mask. I wondered how she could see anything at all about me behind my mask.
“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.
“Chocolate,” she said, her voice suddenly and strangely like that of a little girl, happy.
“Excuse me?” I wondered if she was teasing me. She must have known there was no chocolate to be had anywhere in San Antonio, at least none that didn't come out of the black market.
“Don't ever pass up the chance for chocolate,” she said. “It is a simple cure, but good for a woman. A woman needs chocolate to make her soul glad.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said. I wondered if she could tell I was between a smile and a frown, my mouth twitching in indecision.
“I'm going to...” I trailed off. I hooked my thumb and pointed out the back door.
She smiled. Nodded.
“Thank you,” I said, and slipped out the back.