by Steve Vernon
“Just that easy?” the unter-Kapitan said. “What about our sub?”
I shrugged.
I had a magnificent shrug and it was good to share it with others in plain daylight.
“It’s just so much beachfront property for now,” I said. “Maybe Bucky and I will move in. You definitely have to move out.”
“It’s a big old target,” Bucky added. “You folks were nothing but sitting ducks out there in this ironclad dory. They sank the Bismark, they could easily sink you.”
Now it was the unter-Kapitan’s turn to shrug.
Amateur.
“We’ve got each other,” Goldie said, hanging onto the unter-Kapitan like he was the biggest undead life preserver in the middle of a lonely ocean. “Anything else is tinsel.”
“God bless us every one,” Bucky said.
And so they drifted away, which is what things on the ocean generally do. I sat there, feeling the FBI pink squirming beneath my butt like a pimple with ambition.
“Be still and try not to breathe,” I told him. “You’re tickling my prostate something fierce.”
After a few minutes the Zomboid Nazis had fully pulled their tents. By this evening I expected they would be successfully co-mingling with the darker denizens of the Wetside Darktown underkingdom. You get far enough down into the underkingdom and nobody’s going to get you up out of there.
I stood up, and Bucky peeled the FBI pink off my butt. The pink lay there on the beach like a bit of flotsammed bubble wrap.
I didn’t think he’d be making any trouble too soon.
“Come on,” I said to Bucky. “Let’s you and me go on home and get ourselves next to some hot buttered sea bass and get down to some good old fashioned fraternising.”
I heard the mermaids singing out on the deep ocean water and I damn well that knew they were singing for me.
Potboiler, Told in a Spanish Key
This is an old story, best told slowly over guttering red coals. A story of love made badly and the hot gutting knife of vengeance. It is a story of a man and a woman and you should tell it as slowly as cooking stew, adding the proper bits and pieces, watching as the pot begins to boil.
The woman’s name was Conchita. Her heart had been broken like an overly ripe casaba melon. She had painted the floor of her room with bitter tears and dreamed a song of long and slow revenge.
Most dreams are smoke.
They touch the brick of the chimney and vanish – but some dreams are brick. They stay and they gather strength, soaking heat and flame, well seasoned, like a stew.
Conchita’s dreams were dark as the shadow that hides behind a dead man’s eyes. She dreamed of jaguar bones and the hollow drip of blood. Her tongue tasted of heart-meat torn from the pain-arced chests of angels burning in ancient swamps. Conchita came from a hard hating bloodline. She was the granddaughter of a brujo, a maker of magic and darker things. She knew some secrets and could guess at others.
A guess is a dangerous movement of the spirit, a knife swung blindly in the dark. You can never tell where it might cut.
This night Conchita made a dark secret pact, stronger than forgotten smoke.
She sat in her adobe room in Mexico City, with an empty white envelope tucked between her knees. She licked her lips and tasted the chalk of tomb dust, church bells, and steel shrieked into flesh. She whispered old names that would not lay down in books. Voices and words whispered about her ears like the buzzing of meat flies at the slaughterhouse. In the streets the beggars heard her pain, and danced sorrow jigs for the ignorant tourists who snapped their photographs and laughed.
Conchita sang a soft and croonless tune. She barked and croaked and hacked words that bent and cut at her soft wet tongue. She had to be careful, but she wasn’t.
There are doors, once opened that can never be closed. There are paths that memorize the taste of heedless footsteps. Conchita leaned back, letting the weight of her hair gallow down until it coiled upon the ancient adobe.
The adobe of Mexico City is old and tainted with the dried out memories of death and dust and sorrow. You can smell centuries of Aztec blood mixed with this adobe. Men’s sweat, women’s tears, the piss of the ancients soaked into soft white walls.
Conchita whispered to the darkness. To Huitzilopochtl, Tlalocs, Quetzalcoatl, the gods of rain and fire and the ever hungry sun god, the smaller gods of amaranth and maize and pulque, and the god of screams.
It was to this last god that she prayed the hardest. This was the lurker, the creeper, the god of rot and mold and everything diseased. This was the god of the rock and the knife and the arrow. This was the god of screams. Her people did not pray to this one. Rather they prayed that he would stay away.
But Conchita knew the words and the ways and the old tongue.
Learned men thought the Aztec dead and gone, one with the dust. These were lies scratched upon a dead man’s tongue. The blood of the Aztec lived on in the savage heart of thirty million modern Mexicans.
History is a river, and in Mexico all rivers taste of copper and blood. The copper taste of the people’s blood, soaked and slaughtered by that white bastard Cortez. Memories and rivers burn on longer than blood will flow.
According to her people the world was created five times, and destroyed only four - by flood, earthquake, hurricane, and jaguar. The fifth and final destruction would be one of fire and blood and the lonesome songs of very old gods. The fifth and final destruction belonged to the god of screams.
The end of the world is a little like death. You can hold it off, or you can run towards it.
Conchita chose to run.
She teased the old god closer.
She raised a delicately tooled serpentine knife and hacked at her long black hair. It was tough work, but she kept at it. Her face became a mask as grim as the eagle and jaguar masks of her grandfather’s people - the Mexica and the Aztecs.
By itself a strand of hair is nothing. A knife will pass through it as easily as a fish through water; but woven together hair is strong. A noose strong enough to hang a thousand betrayers could be braided from such hair.
The memory of the Aztec tongue was as strong as her hair. It would not die. The language could be heard in Mexico, even on the lips of the white man. Words like chocolate, ocelot, coyote, and avocado. Aztec words, soft and sharp sounds, like the hissing of the scythe as it passed through the tall grass.
She worked at her hair, hacking it slowly, only feeling pain when she pulled it too quickly.
Hair is like the tall grass, she thought. It is dead on top but its roots are buried deep in the blood.
Her hair has always stunk of blood.
Even her mother said so.
When she finished cutting she felt her head and giggled. Her scalp felt like a newly mown field of wheat.
Enough, she scolded herself. This was serious business. There was no time for laughter. She was the daughter of a brujo, descendant of the Aztec race. She knew maize, beans, amaranth, squash. She had never known the softness of wheat. Wheat is for the white man, not the copper skinned Aztec.
She piled the cut hair on the adobe floor, layer by layer, alternating them into a six sided thatch.
Then she struck a match to it.
It took her three matches to get it to burn. It was a tricky balance. The bunches of hair wouldn’t ignite. The single strands, stuck out loosely, would flash and die and refuse to catch. She didn’t mind. The sulfur fart of the matches was a good stink. The stink felt clean, purifying and holy.
The fire finally took and the hair burnt and there was nothing pure in that stink.
In a nearby church a 74 year old priest took off his robe and pushed his withered man-meat into a statue of Christ, crying out “Mary, padre, Mary, madre.” His parishioners stared on in horror as he made water into the sacramental wine, and wiped his buttocks with the holy bread.
Three blocks over a mother smothered her two children one by one into her chest. The smallest one was easy, but the older
one bit and tore at her nipples. She licked her blood and festered milk from his dead blue lips.
To the south of the city an old man leaped from off of a five story building and his screams were heard in the wind whistling around the adobe walls, but he never reached the pavement.
Back in her room Conchita made gestures, bending and twisting her fingers and arms into impossible angles, letting the feeling ride her, taking her, whipping her into a frenzied storm. She felt the god of screams rat-like ears delicately prickle at the sound of her voice and his greedy snout sucked hungrily at the stink of her young hot juice like a blood starved leech. She knew what the god of screams wanted.
The hair was nothing but a summoning.
The next part would be the hardest of all.
She placed the knife against the flesh of her left arm. She considered her choice briefly. It might be wiser to begin with her good arm and cut the bad first. No, she told herself. She should start with the left and cross to the right.
It was important to follow the old ways.
The knife was sharp. It cut her arm like a plough furrowing the earth. The pain was a cold cruel kiss, sliding along her arm, lacing a labyrinth of salty crimson. The first pulse splattered her and a tear of random red wept without sorrow down her left cheek bone.
She took the knife in her bleeding hand. It felt cold and wet and warm all at once. She gritted her teeth and pushed the blade into the meat of her right arm, in and down and then slowly through as resistance faded and the blade cut itself free.
She shook with pain, not terror. She continued chanting as she let the blood spill into the waiting white envelope.
A dog howled in the street, and bit into its own belly. A pack of small children ran through the tourist stands, scattering the postcards in patterns that almost made sense.
The candle flickered silently and the light seemed to dim, or perhaps it was only her failing vision. She fought desperately to hold the spell intact, pushing her forearms together in a blood prayer, letting life’s wine spill into the open white envelope held between her knees. The envelope opened like a mouth, gulping thirstily at the red liquid like a cancered-out old man gulping pulque to relieve the pain he could not escape.
Somewhere in the darkness of the room in the farthest corner behind her vision the old god chuckled. It was not a nice sound. It was the sound of rats running across husked out bones in a long dead corn field.
The frightened little girl that hid beneath her soul bit her lip in terror and whispered - I take it back, I take it back, but it was too late for second thoughts.
Dying. I am dying. So this is what it feels like. It’s not so bad. After the first bright kiss of pain there is nothing. My hands dangle, like the spiders who eat the flies that dance about the gallows tree.
Her thoughts fragmented, adobe and river stone, tears and rain, her life passing away from her as she let it all flow out. Somewhere inside the husk that had been her body a tiny spark burned, her spirit held by the curse she’d cast.
The envelope passed with a single unholy breath from the lung meat bellows of the scream god. Like a poorly folded paper airplane, it lifted and sailed down the tunnels of Conchita’s emptied veins, down and out into the streets of the darkened city, until it reached the door way of her lover, Manny.
She could see him through the darkness, a cruel hawk of a man with a hunter’s eyes and a heart of coldest ice. She had once thought to touch this heart, to melt and meld it with her supple body and tenderly offered kisses. Yet his heart and his love was an ice too bitterly cold to be melted by the flame of her desire.
Love was a fire that sprang up anywhere at any time. Its kindling was madness and want and shared pain. Conchita had paid in tears for her mad doomed obsession. Now, for the sake of both their lies Manuel would pay as well.
♥♥♥
He saw the envelope resting at his doorway. He knelt and reached for it gingerly, for fear of wrinkling his lovingly creased trousers. He rose, carelessly stuffing the envelope into his jacket pocket.
It was just another piece of junk mail. He was as casual with it as he was with any woman’s heart. To Manuel, women were envelopes. You filled them with lies and seed and spit, and when you were done you threw them away.
He stabbed his key into the lock.
He opened the door and entered.
It was dark inside.
Conchita saw all this. She breathed a word, a ward, and the door closed quietly behind him.
He never noticed.
Both the door and his fate were sealed.
His coat and shoes were dropped at the doorway. A curse was hissed as he stubbed his toe upon an unseen piece of furniture. He was seldom home these days. He didn’t care for the room he lived in. The room was of adobe and he hated its ancient tradition. He was quietly proud of the yellow linoleum he paid good cash money for in the market, but the adobe, that was too old for him.
He hated old.
He only wanted new.
It was why he never stayed too long with any woman.
Manuel was a hunter. His bait was his looks and his good young body. He made his fortune with this bait, stealing the heart and money of whatever woman he trained his gun sight eyes upon. His love was a falcon he sent from his arm to snatch the heart of any he pleased.
He found the light switch. He stood in the kitchen in front of the sink. He filled a clear glass teapot with water and placed it upon the stove. For a time the water was still. Then tiny bubbles began to scud about the bottom of the teapot as the water began to boil. He brewed himself a pot of tea, adding lumps of sugar because he liked his tea sweet.
He sat down at the folding card table that served as his dining room. Spring moisture had raised the surface of the table in one corner but he did not mind. He lit a cigarette with a butane lighter that he had taken from the dresser top of a woman too decently married to question his thieving ways.
He saw the envelope lying on the center of the table and felt confusion. He reached his hand lightly to his jacket pocket. He was certain that he had left the envelope inside his jacket pocket but here it was.
He shrugged slightly and picked the envelope up. There was an inscription on the outside of the envelope. He held the envelope up to the light and began to read - To My Dearest Manny.
His face darkened.
Manny!
He was Manuel to all save one.
“Conchita,” he whispered.
In the temporary prison her dead body had become she smiled. It was good to hear her name one final time, even if it was only a curse.
Manuel did not smile. His fingers tensed as if to crumple the envelope without opening it up. She waited in her temporary darkness, trembling with anxiety. The inscription had been a gamble on her part and perhaps a mistake. It would have been far wiser to leave the envelope unmarked, so that he might open it and allow it to begin its work of vengeance. A crucial error, perhaps, but she wanted him to know who it had come from.
More, she wanted to hear her name upon his lips, one final time.
As if to grant her wish he mouthed her name once more, without speaking it.
Conchita.
He stared at the envelope. Would he open it or throw it away? She whispered a small charm and tried to cross her stiff dead fingers. The charm or blind luck won out. His curiosity got the better of him.
He tore the envelope open with a quick and brutal movement.
She was not ready for this sudden pain. She screamed, a shriek of agony bleeding from her mouth, through the envelope, and to his ears, despite the many streets that separated the two.
For a moment she blacked out, almost losing her hold on him. The pain tore through her dead body. The old god, an impatient fisherman, yanked hard on her bartered soul. The spell weakened and her final death almost overtook her.
She steeled her will, allowing hatred to flood her empty veins. She called upon the blood of her Aztec ancestors, spilled over a thousand altars to hea
l the constant burning hunger of the sun.
She would live long enough to see him pay.
As her vision cleared she saw him drop the torn envelope as if it had scalded him. He leaped to his feet. The folding chair clattered to the floor behind him. Her scream echoed within the linoleum confines of the kitchen. It was a long painful moment before he brought himself to kneel and retrieve the fallen envelope.
He stared at it, turning it end over end. The room spun before her. He peered into the envelope, putting his eye against the jagged corner. If the corner had teeth she could have bit him blind.
As it is, she wasn’t certain how the spell would work. She closed her eyes for fear he would somehow see her through the portal of the torn envelope.
When she opened her eyes, his had widened in surprise. He had spotted the blood, a tiny drop upon the torn edge of the envelope. Already it had begun to spread, like a cancer growing in a man too close to death.
A paper cut? He examined his hands, checking each finger. There was no injury. Yet the envelope bled, dripdrip-drip, a faucet leaking in the night.
He smiled ruefully and shook his head. It was a trick. Some sort of parlor game to amuse the foolish.
Dripdripdrip.
The faucet of blood spilled a little faster. In her room, far away from the locked room of Manuel, her wounds reopened. The blackened gouges gaping along her forearms, pulsing and puckering like so many silent screaming mouths.
Manuel opened his own mouth wide in shock. A pool of blood covered the yellowed tile floor. Then, like a dying television set the picture faded as her strength faded. Conchita had only a little time left on this world.
The old god grew impatient for her soul.
Just wait, just wait a little longer. You are like a child, so greedy for it now. A little longer, and you can take both of us.
Conchita shivered.
She knew too late that both their souls would not be enough to satiate the old god’s belly greed. In the shadow of her mind she saw the memory of a fat man sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe, sucking on chicken bones and licking the greasy remainder off his plate, calling the waiter back for more.
And yet the old god relented.