Dancing with the Devil and Other Stories from Beyond / Bailando con el diablo y otros cuentos del más allá

by René Saldaña, Jr.

  A dull thudding began on his right thigh that moved slowly along the rest of his leg, down to his toes. And he knew what would come next: if he didn’t elevate his leg quick, the dullness would soon turn to a hard throbbing, especially on his big toe, the one he’d got cut by a knife earlier in the week. Standing on his one good leg, he shook the other, thinking that the swelling and throbbing would go away if he did like the coach always told his players who’d gotten the wind knocked out of them. How many times had Coach said, “Okay, Louie, shake it off. You’ll be awright, just shake it off. No pain, no gain”? So there Louie was, shaking his right leg back and forth, and it seemed to work. He sat for a few moments, but not for too long. He had to get to school on time today. Couldn’t be late a third day in a row.

  Before slipping on his socks, Louie considered changing the makeshift bandage on his toe, but saw it wasn’t so messy. Why chance running late? He chuckled at his kind of pun. Right now, he couldn’t run anywhere with this bum leg. He considered telling his mom and dad about how sick he was feeling lately, but figured it’d go away. Just a funky strain of the flu, or something. Maybe I got stung by an Africanized killer bee, or worse case scenario, the cut on my toe’s infected and has spread, but even that makes no sense. An infection wouldn’t do to my stomach what it’s doing. So, without removing the bandage, he poured some peroxide over his rag-wrapped toe, then pulled on the sock and his shoe. He was set. Sitting had helped, if only a bit.

  In classes all day, Louie found places to sit where there was an empty desk beside or in front of him so he could elevate the leg. That seemed to quell the swelling and lessen the throbbing. Occasionally, he’d have to shake his leg, and he’d be set for a good half hour or so more.

  On his way home that afternoon, every time the leg turned sluggish on him, Louie stopped, found a patch of ground to sit on, and shook his leg in the air. On one of those breaks, he saw Don Armando laughing at him from his rocking chair on the porch. So Louie called up to the old man, “What you laughing at, you stinky old man?” Louie had no idea whether Don Armando really stunk, or how bad if he did, but that was the talk around town about this old widower, that he reeked like a mean dog. This afternoon, Louie was in no mood whatsoever to find out for himself what the old man smelled like.

  Even if he’d wanted to, this bad leg of his was out-of-whack enough to keep him focused on one thing: getting home. The old smelly man’s porch would be out of his way, so he simply stopped on the dirt path in front of Don Armando’s porch, asked once again what he was laughing at, and waited for his answer, all the while shaking out his leg.

  “He he he. It’s that you reminded me just then, shaking your leg like you was doing, of my old dog, Leaky, God rest his soul. Yeah, sure, every time he finished his business, he always shook that right hind leg just like you. He he he.”

  That ain’t so funny, Louie thought. I could be a legit cripple, and here’s this old-timer poking fun at me. And he’s one to be laughing at others.

  Normally, Louie would’ve said something back at Don Armando, cut him down with some insult just as nasty or worse, but he waved the man off with the palm of his right hand, and trudged on home. His stomach was beginning to feel queasy and hollow again. He hoped there was another bottle of Pepto in his parents’ medicine cabinet. Maybe something stronger.

  Walking, he felt he was dragging his leg like that ugly helper of Dr. Frankenstein’s, Igor. Louie even stopped and looked over his shoulder and saw for a fact his right tennis shoe was leaving a trail in the dirt, so he shook his leg out hard, and sure enough, he heard old Don Armando yakking it up off in the distance.

  I ain’t no dog, thought Louie. At least he didn’t have the hump on his back like Igor. Then his stomach cramped up. It was meatloaf at lunch today, he recalled. Could be that, on top of what I had before, causing all this trouble. He rubbed his stomach, but that only made him feel worse. Rudy doesn’t call it mystery meat for nothing. He giggled at what his buddy had said today about the cafeteria cuisine.

  Truth be told, though, he got this same empty feeling on the way to school this morning, not as bad, but still. So it wasn’t anything to do with bad food, because this morning, he’d had two of his mom’s potato, egg and chorizo tacos, and they should’ve been enough to fill out any holes in his gut, and they were delicious on top of that. So it couldn’t be the meatloaf, either. Besides, it was a hollowness he was experiencing, not nausea. Well a bit, but not woozy like he gets when he’s eaten a bag of Fritos all by himself, and they sit heavy at the bottom of his stomach. Today’s was more like a queasy nothingness.

  It wasn’t anything he’d eaten, then. It was something altogether different, but what? No telling.

  At dinner, there was no hiding this mammoth leg any longer. In an attempt to hide the swelling, he hadn’t changed out of his long pants into shorts like usual. Even so, the jean material on the left leg was loose fitting, and on the other it was bursting at the seams, bulging.

  His mom immediately wanted to know what was wrong. “Let me have a look,” she said.

  “It’s nothing, Mom. Just a bee sting probably.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Luis,” she said. She called him “Luis” instead of Louie, which he hated, but she was his mom, so whatever. “You’ve been stung by bees and wasps before, and you’ve never reacted like this before. Let’s have a look.” She was relentless.

  He had to pull his pants down in front of her and he was kind of embarrassed. He hadn’t been this naked in front of her since the last time he needed her help taking baths, which was a long time ago.

  She was inspecting every inch of his leg, but she found no welt from a stinger. She shook her head in disbelief, whooshed a bit of worry, then said, “So if it wasn’t a bee, then what happened? What aren’t you telling me? Did something happen at school? Talk to me, Luis Carlos.”

  Well, Louie had no clue what to say. He was at a loss. One day he’d been okay. Had a nice enough leg. Nothing to brag about, but not ugly either. Then the next day, this.

  “Mijo, are you doing drugs? I saw on the TV news about these steroids these ballplayers are using to get bigger and stronger. Are you snorting those?”

  He wanted to laugh: snorting steroids. Where did his mom get this stuff? But he shook his head. “No way, Mom. I’m not taking steroids. This thing with my leg just sort of started happening on its own a few days ago. Like three days.” He tried telling that to his mom, but she’d have none of it.

  She said, “Mijo, pull your pants back up. I’m taking you to the ER.” She practically pushed him all the way into the car, shoved him in the backseat. They hadn’t even finished supper. She headed back toward the house, said she’d be right back and that she was going for something he could rest his leg on.

  She returned with all three cushions from the sofa and made a tower out of them. “Here,” she said, “elevate your leg. Maybe it has to do with poor circulation like your aunt Yoni has.” She made sure he was comfortable, then stepped in the car and drove away.

  Just like Mom, he thought. Making something out of nothing, though he was glad for the attention.

  Lying on his back, Louie couldn’t see where they were headed. He felt her turning left, then going straight, then left again, or right. He’d kind of kept track of where they were heading, but that was a good many lefts and rights ago. All he could see out the window was sky. He had no clue where they were.

  “Can you take off your shoe?” his mother wanted to know. “Maybe that’ll help the swelling go down?”

  It took some doing, having to bend his gargantuan leg at the knee, but yeah, he was able to take off the sneaker.

  “How bad does your foot look?” his mother wanted to know next. “Ay, I hope it’s not diabetes like your Tía Lupita had. They almost had to cut off her leg. Instead, she cut out tortillas and other bad foods from her diet. So no more tortillas and refried beans for you, mijo.”

  Louie took off his sock, a bit worried. Having to g
et his leg cut off was bad enough, but that plus cutting out his mom’s tortillas was too much.

  “What’s that on your big toe?”

  “A bandage,” he said.

  She looked quickly over her shoulder. “That’s not a bandage. It’s a garra, a dirty rag at that. But tell me, what happened that you need a bandage?”

  “Mom, it’s nothing but a little cut. It’s got nothing to do with my leg. Will you stop it already!”

  But for real, it wasn’t just a little cut. He didn’t want to tell her more than just that, though, so he said, “It’s a scratch.” If he fessed up, he knew what she’d have to say. That same old superstitious, wives’ tale garbage.

  But what if it were true what she’d warned against long ago? If he’d only paid attention to his mother about not playing with knives, then Louie wouldn’t be lying in the backseat of the car on his way to the ER. It was silly, though, what she’d said all his life growing up: “If you get cut doing something foolish, like playing with knives when your mom has told you not to a million times if not a million and one, your tripas are going to spill out through the gash. Then what? The ants’ll have a feast on your intestines.” So, what’s a kid to think at something so gory but cool. So, all his life (up to a few days ago) he played with knives.

  On the weekend, Louie was playing chicken with Rudy’s new blade. You know the kind, the blade that flips open with a flick of the wrist, then locks itself open, the handle a light brown polish with an image of an eagle inlaid. The blade a good four inches long.

  Here’s how the game went: the boys stood three yards apart, facing each other. The one with the knife flung it at the feet of the other, trying to get it as close to the foot as possible without actually sticking it into the foot. If the kid tossing the knife hit the other’s foot, then the game was over. It was also over if the one being tossed at flinched. The closer the knife came to the toes without touching them, the better.

  But there was another way to win: the one with the knife would fling it at the other, this time trying for an awkward place in the ground. The second boy would have to twist, turn or stretch until he placed a hand where the blade stuck into the dirt, then take his turn throwing the knife. Kind of like that game Twister. Eventually, one of them would be so turned around or stretched out that he’d topple, and in that way lose the game. Simple, right? Well, not so easy if the flinger actually sticks the blade into the other’s foot. Which is what Rudy did on one of his throws. The blade was so sharp it went right through Louie’s canvas tennis shoe and cut into his toe. There was blood and a whole lot of pain.

  That was four days ago. It had also been about that long that he started feeling sluggish, then queasy a day later. Today it’d gotten worse. His mom had noticed, and now they were on their way to the hospital where nurses would poke and prod, ask all kinds of questions he probably didn’t have any answers to, unless he admitted to playing with knives.

  “Let me see the cut,” she said. She adjusted the rearview mirror, then craned her neck around for a better look.

  “Mom, keep your eye on the road,” he said.

  But before they hit a tree or an on-coming car, and before he was able to take off the bandage, they’d pulled into the hospital parking lot.

  After filling out some paperwork, showing her insurance card, and Louie showing his leg to a nurse, he was ushered directly into an examination room. He was told the doctor would be in shortly, and was asked to prop his leg up on several pillows, just like his mom had told him to do in the car. The swelling hadn’t gone down hardly any, but he didn’t feel the throbbing so much, and he was getting used to the empty feeling in his stomach. He wouldn’t mention that part. What if they laughed at him because he thought it was his guts exiting his body through his toe? He shook the dumb thought out of his head. I ain’t no kid to believe in such nonsense, he thought. Nothing but a silly superstition.

  In biology, even though he didn’t pay careful attention to the chapter on a person’s insides, he knew enough that the intestines were stuck in his gut, no matter what. Unless, of course, someone sliced open your stomach from hip to hip and then your guts would spill out. But through a toe? No way.

  Then the nurse came back in and said the bandage needed to come off. For the first time, Louie noticed blood on the bandage. As a matter of fact, the whole thing was covered in the brown of dried blood.

  “Let me see what we’ve got. It may be an infection.” Then, to my mom she said, “Kids today just don’t get how serious infections can get. Tsk, tsk, tsk.” She started to unwrap the crusty rag from around my toe.

  The doctor came in just then and was looking over the nurse’s shoulder. Louie was looking at them, waiting to see what they would find once the toe was uncovered. All Louie saw was both their jaws drop and their eyes widen. Then the nurse jumped to grab some gauze on a tray next to the bed.

  “Hurry, hurry,” said the doctor.

  Louie felt a sort of flushing out of his leg. He heard the nurse gasp, and then he fainted. Not from the pain, or from the sight of his own blood—he couldn’t see that—but from hearing his mother shriek when she stepped around to the end of the bed and saw what it was that got the nurse to jumping three feet up, three feet back, and the doctor to saying, “Oh God, oh God. What on earth?”

  When he came to, the first thing he thought was, This can’t be right. It’s like I’m hanging from my toes. “Hey, what’s going on? Mom, are you there?”

  But he wasn’t hanging from his toes. He’d been strapped to his bed and the whole bed had somehow been tilted what felt like 90 degrees. He was in a hospital gown, which didn’t matter because it was bunched up at his chest, and his underwear was showing. And his leg? Whoa, he thought. It’s not so swollen any more. What’s the deal? And beyond the thigh and kneecap, way up in the air, he noticed his toe wrapped in a cast. A clean, white cast. No more blood-encrusted rag, but no throbbing either.

  “Luis, mijo, ay Dios mío,” Mom said. “What a scare you gave us.”

  “Why am I hanging upside down, Mom? And can you cover me up some, please?”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s just you and me in the room. And the nurse who comes in every half hour to lower the bed an inch or two at a time. And the doctor, who’s only been in a few times since the operation, but you threw him for a loop. He comes in, looks at your toe, checks your stomach, shakes his head, then leaves, speechless.”

  “Operation? What operation?”

  “On your toe, mijo.”

  “My toe? What about it? And my stomach? He operated on my stomach?”

  “Pues, mijo, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I mean, when you were little, I only told you about your tripas coming out to scare you out of playing too rough, but boy.” She fanned herself with a hand. “Who knew?”

  “What are you saying, Mom? What about my tripas?”

  “Never mind them now, they’re okay. The doctor did say, though, your wound was a direct result of a very sharp object. Like a knife, he said. But everything’s okay now, he says. And the nurse (who herself has never seen anything quite like this, by the way) said if it hadn’t been for your bandage, you well could’ve been dragging your intestines all over town.”

  “You mean?” And Louie fainted again.

  Dancing with the Devil

  Joey’s mom pulled up to the gym where just a few students were gathered outside.

  “Are you sure tonight’s the dance?” She looked toward the entrance, but the red double doors were closed. “Hmmm,” she said. “I don’t see any light coming through the windows, either. You boys think the dance could be at another place?”

  “It’s here, Mom,” Joey said. “It’s still a bit early. That’s why the gym’s still closed. The windows are pretty high up there, and they’re probably covered up by paper, anyhow, so even with the lights on, you wouldn’t know it.” Though he was having second thoughts himself; almost hoping they had driven to school for this
dance on the wrong night. That way he wouldn’t have to face the fact that the girl he was all in love with, since he couldn’t remember when, didn’t love him back. Not according to the hallway gossip he’d heard, anyway.

  “Are you sure, mijo? I don’t want to leave you and Juan out here all alone. What if someone kidnaps you? I saw on the news how a man escaped from a prison up in Michigan yesterday. Some kind of psycho- killer in prison for going after kids. And they haven’t caught him. Armed and dangerous, they said. Maybe I should just wait here to make sure you’ll be okay.”

  Joey heard Juan stifling a laugh in the backseat. “Mom, please, we’re in Texas. There’s no way this killer of yours could’ve made it down all the way here in that time. Unless maybe he has connections to those guys on Star Trek and asked for Scottie to beam him to La Joya. Besides, it’s not like I’m a baby. I’m an eighth grader. I can take care of myself if I have to. So, you can go home now, okay? We’ll be all right. Pick us up at around ten? Okay?”

  Joey scanned the small crowd to see if he could spot Marlen. If she was there, he didn’t know if he had it in him to go through with this.

  He hadn’t even told Juan about how Marlen kind of trashed him and his silly little invitation to the dance tonight. Joey had approached her on Monday morning outside of the band hall. She played the clarinet and had just finished practicing, so right then her lips were swollen and about the prettiest shade of red. He was nervous walking beside her and making small-talk, but he eventually got around to asking whether she’d be going to the dance. He’d meant to ask her to go with him, but he’d struggled to get even this much out. It wasn’t enough, though, so he added: “Because I was thinking that maybe if you wanted, well, maybe you could go with me, like together. A date, kind of, or maybe not if that’s too serious, you know.” He took a deep breath. He had asked. It took every ounce of energy to get it done, but the question was out there, hanging. He waited.