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

by René Saldaña, Jr.

  “She gave it to you? Herself?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just like that? No strings?”

  “Well, she said I could pay her later.”

  “Did she say how much?” he asks.

  “Nope, just said good luck, basically. She’ll send Fito to collect later. So I might have to borrow a few bucks from you.”

  “From what I hear, if she’s who I think she is, you’ll owe her more than a few bucks.” Miguelón is shaking his head.

  “Stop it already,” I say. “She’s scary enough without you trying to spook me anymore.”

  “No, man, really. You’ve got to watch out for her. I told my grandpa about this boy last night. Said he was hanging out at the store, but that none of us knew him from the neighborhood or from school. I told him that he was offering guys magic marbles. Grandpa ordered me to stay clear of him. This boy, poor kid. She’s trapped him, so she’s half way home.”

  “You mean that woman’s kidnapped him?”

  “Worse, dude. She’s La Llorona. You know the story: she travels from town to town looking for children to replace her own, who she drowned. God’s condemned her to wander the earth looking for two boys. Well, what’s his name? Fito? One down, one to go. With them in tow, as proof she never killed her kids, she’ll be able to get into heaven. You’re her baby boy number two, man. I think you need to lose this marble, then go home right after and lock yourself in. Don’t come out for the rest of the summer. Hide, man.” And Miguelón turns and runs away without looking back.

  Goldie is on fire. I dispense with one mibster after another until I’m facing Toño. When I hold my shooter up to the light, he stares at it hard, and I notice his chin begins to quiver. He says, “Man, Felipe, you don’t know what you’re messing with, and I don’t want any part of it. I’m out.” He pockets his shooter, nothing fancy, just a mesh of creamy purples, and he walks away, fast.

  A stunned silence falls on the crowd. I’m dumbstruck for a few moments too, but then it hits me: I’m the marble champion of Peñitas. I’ve taken back the title and so I throw my arms up in the air. “Yeah!” I holler. “I’m the man. Toño just faced that truth and turned tail, ran like a little girl, scared to lose to a real champ.”

  I collect my winnings, take in as many of the compliments being thrown my way, but can only stand so much. Besides, I want to get back home so as to count my marbles and eat lunch. All this playing’s made me one hungry marblista. I want to sit back and take great pleasure in this moment.

  All of a sudden I feel a tap at my shoulder. It’s Fito, and he wants me to go with him back to the motel. “Mother wants to collect her payment. Come on, man. A deal’s a deal.”

  “Can’t she wait? A week at most? Tell me how much she wants for it and I’ll go home now, crack open my sister’s piggy bank and borrow what else I need,” I say, smiling.

  But Fito’s not smiling. He’s on the verge of tears, and he grips me by the wrist so I drop a few marbles.

  “Hey, dude,” I say, “What’s with the rough stuff? Nobody manhandles the marble champ. I said I’ll pay when I pay. Tell your momma that, why don’t you!” I drop to my knees to pick up the mibs at my feet, and when I stand, I say to Fito, “You still here? Listen, kid, go back to Mommy and tell her for me that if she wants a piece of this to come get it herself; otherwise, pack your bags like you were planning and buzz off. Go!” I spin around and leave. A few seconds later I hear the wind blowing, like I had the night before. It’s a wind full of sorrow, but of anger, too. So I hurry home, not once looking back to see if Fito’s still there.

  That Miguelón and his silly little stories, I think. La Llorona. And that Toño’s sure got an overactive imagination. But I can’t fall asleep. I’m thinking that anytime now Fito’s gonna knock at my window and, standing behind him staring at me over his shoulder, is his mother, demanding payment, which I still don’t have. The racket she’s making will wake up Mom and Dad. That’s another hassle I don’t need.

  Towards midnight I’m finally able to close my eyes and catch a few Zs, too exhausted to think of Fito and his mom. Man, I’d won the championship. That’s the last thing I’m thinking as I fall into a deep sleep.

  Suddenly, I sit up in bed, startled and sweating. My heart’s beating hard against the wall of my chest. I squint into the room’s darkness and scan every corner of the room until I can make out shapes that had scared me at first. That hangman’s noose becomes my mini-basketball rim, the man sitting in a chair watching me is my Pittsburg Steelers jersey draped over the back of my favorite chair.

  I can’t figure out what woke me, but I begin to feel more comfortable once I’ve made out what every shadow is, so I throw myself back on my pillow.

  Then I hear a scratch at the window, but I don’t turn my head to the window to look. Instead, I turn only my eyeballs, and only through half open slits at that. But I don’t see anything.

  When I hear the noise again, I jump out of bed and head for the light switch. The noise is rapping now, louder and more regular. I flip on the switch and the light crowds out the darkness. Once the light is on, I think, I’ll be safe.

  The room now flooded in light, I turn slowly to the window. My knees buckle at what I see there, and I fall to the floor. At the window is Fito’s mom, her hair wild like snakes. She’s fuming. Literally, smoke’s coming out of her nose, and from my place on the floor I see fire in her eyes. And all I can think as to why I can’t move a muscle, is that she’s hypnotized me.

  Now she places her hands flat on the windowpanes, her breath steaming up the glass in front of her mouth. I can’t hear what she’s saying, though I can read her lips: “Come to me, my son. Come to me now. I’ve come to collect.”

  I try to scream, to get up and run, but I can’t. My legs are useless stumps.

  As if out of thin air, she makes a marble appear. It’s black with the tiniest of speckles, like stars, and it sparkles on the tips of her fingers. “It’ll be all yours,” she says, “but you have to come with me. Won’t you come with me?”

  I can’t take my eyes off this mib. Imagine the damage I can cause with it if I make it to Nationals. I seem to be disappearing into the darkness of it, and I’ve already forgotten Goldie and the couple thousand others I’d won only a few hours ago. I want this marble so bad that I drag myself to the window as though in a trance, undo the latch, push it open and reach out for the marble.

  Fito’s mom jerks it just out of my reach, smiles, and says, “Is this what you want?”

  I nod. I just know I’m drooling.

  “What are you willing to give to make it yours?” she asks.

  I don’t even have to think about it. “Whatever you want,” I say. And I mean it.

  She presses it into my palm. “Then it’s yours,” she says.

  I hold it up close to my face. How beautiful, I think. I can’t take my eyes off it. I don’t even notice when Fito’s mom grabs my wrists with cold, hard hands, her fingers like steel. She’s not letting go. “I’ve now found my two boys,” she says. Fito appears at the window, but I’m still checking out the black marble, and I hardly notice him half smiling. “Now it’s time to go.”

  She yanks me out of my room so quickly that I drop the marble. I hear it bouncing on the floor, then rolling under my bed. I try to pull away to retrieve the mib, but I can’t free myself. The wind sounds like cackling laughter. Fito’s mom has wrapped one arm around me, the other around Fito, and we seem to be flying upward. I look down and all I can see are dark rooftops getting farther and farther away. I struggle, but her clutch is solid. I scream, but the screeching laughter drowns me out. We’re reaching the clouds now, and Peñitas is nothing but a flea-bit nick on the earth, and it’s too late for me. We’re beyond the clouds now and the air is getting harder to breathe. I’m about to faint. I look up to Fito’s mom, she looks down at me, and she’s got the softest smile on her face, tears of joy streaming down her face.

  “It’s okay, mijo. Where we’re going, y
ou’ll never want for marbles again. I’ll make sure of that.” She pulls me closer to her chest where it’s warm. I close my eyes and fall asleep dreaming of all the marbles in the world, more than I could ever count.

  All Choked Up

  The thing of it is this: in the middle of the week at three in the morning, the ones who don’t need to be in the emergency room, aren’t. They’re home asleep in their own comfy beds instead of trying to make the best of sitting on the cold and squeaky metal chairs, which are more like torture devices than chairs.

  Me? I was in the ER, though I didn’t really and truly need to be here. Except that my baby sister, Lucy, had been super sick this last week from a fever she just couldn’t kick, and the doc at the clinic couldn’t figure it out, much less fix it. Earlier at home, Mom had Lucy in a warm bath trying to bring her temp of 103 degrees down to something not so scary. But it didn’t work. So, we’d been here at the ER for four hours now, two of which we spent in the waiting room along with a crusty old guy who kept hacking up some nasty yellow-green muck from deep down in his lungs, and a guy bleeding gallons from a small cut on his forehead after running face-first into a tree with his motorcycle. It was obvious to me, from my chair, the tree had won. Otherwise, there was nobody here but us folks.

  All that time I was holding my little furnace of a sister whose cheeks were rose-red, while Mom signed us in and kept checking with the woman behind the reception desk about when a doctor could take a look at her baby. “Soon,” was the woman’s usual and annoying response.

  They finally called for Lucy, and she and Mom disappeared behind a swinging door, leaving me to my own devices out in the waiting area. As the door swung shut, I saw a sign on it that read in big red capital letters, “NO ENTRY: HOSPITAL PERSONAL ONLY.” I was surprised how a place full of educated people, doctors no less, would let a misspelling like that go. PERSONAL, hmmm. That was one of the mind-numbing things I did to keep myself from slipping into oblivion for the second two-hour stretch. I’d read everything available to me, every magazine, every pamphlet, every poster and every exit sign. In short, every word in that most uninteresting of places. Worse than school even, if you can imagine that.

  I was getting started on Women’s Health for the second time when the sliding doors squealed open, and so I was glad for the company, whoever it was, super happy for the distraction. It was a lady followed by a kid about my age, 14. I took the lady for his mom. She was hovering all over him like a mom would, anyways. She sat him on a chair across from me and set, of all things, an ice chest at the kid’s feet, slightly to his left. She pushed a mat of his hair off his forehead and planted a kiss on him. How embarrassing. But he didn’t seem to mind it.

  He was wearing a dark denim jacket, about five sizes too big for him. His arms were crossed at the chest. I caught his eye and he kind of smiled, so I smiled back. His mom said, “I’ll be right back, Ronnie. Will you be okay here?”

  The kid, Ronnie, nodded.

  “Just scream if you need me. I’ll be right over here.” She pointed at the receptionist’s desk, which was absent a receptionist at the moment. She stood there a few moments before she started calling out for somebody to please come help. Eventually, the woman who’d “helped” my mom and Lucy came out eating a Butterfingers candy bar. Some of the chocolate was smudged on the corners of her lips. She had no clue how funny she looked, either.

  Under normal circumstances, an ice chest wouldn’t look out of place. By ordinary circumstances, I meant not the ER at three o’clock in the morning. But this was the ER at this precise time of day, so I couldn’t figure out what the chest was for. It bugged me that I didn’t know what was in it.

  I decided if I couldn’t start up a convo with this kid, at the very least I could pass the time trying to figure out its contents. My first guess was snacks and drinks. It was the ER after all. My family had been here close to 4½ hours now, and no telling how much longer we’d be here, so it wasn’t out of the question that this kid and his mom would be here as long, if not longer. What I thought next was that the ER experience had to be a recurring thing for this kid; otherwise, he wouldn’t know to bring munchies. We hadn’t. But then again, we weren’t regulars, either.

  If he was a frequent visitor, he didn’t look it. Naturally, I wondered what was wrong with him that would bring him out at this hour. He looked all right sitting there. He was calm, his face was what my English teacher would describe as ruddy. She’d actually used that word last week when we were reading some poem and the word “flushed” came up describing some pretty girl’s face, and somebody laughed because, “how could that word be romantic?” he wondered out loud. “Isn’t that what you do to number two when you’re done? Flush it?” The teacher responded all teacherly: “When one’s face is flushed, it means one’s face is rosy, glowing, ruddy.” So there you go.

  That reminded me of Lucy because her cheeks were flushed, or ruddy. And with her that meant she had a high fever. Could that be what’s up with this kid? He’s got a fever like Lucy? It could be something going around?

  “It’s my hand,” the kid said, as if reading my thoughts.

  For a moment I thought he meant it was his hand in the ice chest, because that’s what was bothering me more than anything else. How crazy was that! Why would his hand be in the chest with his snacks and drinks? Stupid, right?

  And he’d said it all cool and collected. He must’ve just busted a finger or something small like that. His hand in the chest? Whatever. It must’ve been me getting all silly being up so long past my usual bedtime. I was getting loopy in the head. So instead of letting all my brains go really mushy, I asked him, “What about your hand?”

  He then pulled it out from under his armpit. All I could see was a towel. Most of it was bright red, though some of it was spotted white. Suddenly it started dripping red onto his lap, so he leaned forward and the blood splattered on the floor in front of him. Before it puddled up, he squeezed tight on the towel with his good hand, and then jammed it under his arm again, crossing his other arm over his chest again. And the blood seemed to have stopped.

  He must’ve seen how freaked out I looked, so he said, “Farming accident,” as if that explained it through and through.

  That didn’t unfreak me out, though. Actually I got more confused as a result. I mean, had he meant he’d gotten the hand cut clean off in the blades of a combine or other piece of farm equipment? But again, that didn’t compute with me because what would he have been doing running farming equipment at this time of the day? I knew farmers and ranchers were early-birders, but this was ridiculous. Besides, he was a kid like me. He’d be asleep still waiting for school the next day.

  “Farming accident?” I asked.

  He nodded, but didn’t elaborate.

  I was left to chew on the skin on the soft insides of my mouth while I chewed on that non-image image: farm accident.

  “You’re telling me it’s not snacks or drinks in that chest?” I said.

  He lowered his head only slightly and lifted his eyes at me from that angle. It looked kind of creepy, like he was up to something sneaky. “That’s right,” he said in a whisper.

  “You’re saying it’s your . . . your, uh, hand . . . in there, then?”

  He toed the chest in my direction a couple of inches. “Look for yourself,” he challenged me.

  I didn’t dare.

  “Go ahead. Open it up and check.”

  I was curious, sure, but I was more queasy just thinking it might be his severed hand in there.

  He nudged the chest a couple more inches. It was now halfway to me. All I had to do was reach down, flip the lid and know beyond a shadow of a doubt one way or the other. I’d be able to fall asleep without wondering if it was or wasn’t his hand in there. If it was, yeah, my sleep would be uneasy, but it’d be the sleep of the knowing. If it wasn’t, then I’d have been made a fool of, but I’d still be able to get some rest. The other way, not looking that is, I’d stay awake nights for weeks
unsure.

  “C’mon,” Ronnie said. “You know you wanna.”

  And, man, I did, but I didn’t, too. My breathing was coming in heavy now. I could feel my chest heaving, the acids in my stomach burning. I wished I’d eaten more than a half bowl of Cheerios for supper to calm that. I leaned forward, eyeing the ice chest. I wouldn’t even have to pop it open wide wide, just enough to see what was what in there. Then shut it quick if it was his hand. If not, if it was snacks, I’d laugh a bit at falling for it but take the snack from him and satisfy my hunger. I leaned some more. I stretched out my arms, unfurled my fingers and inched closer and closer to the lid. I was going to do it. I sure was. And just when I was about to open it up, a nurse came to the door for PERSONAL ONLY and called out the kid’s name: Ronald Neely. He got up all nonchalant, bent and took up the ice chest with his good hand and turned toward the nurse. “It’s in my genes,” Ronnie said over his shoulder. “This particular accident, I mean. Goes way back to my family’s time in south Texas.”

  I was thrown off at first. It’s in his jeans? I wondered. Does he mean his hand’s in his jeans? Which pocket?

  “It’s genetic, is what I’m saying. My great grandpa was a law man back in the day, a Texas Ranger, and he’s supposed to have . . . ” But then he was gone behind the closing door, down the hallway. All that was left of Ronnie was the back of him walking away. And a trail of blood on the floor.

  Freakiest thing, what I’d thought was a dark denim jacket was actually an acid-washed jean jacket. It was mostly white on the back, except for where his hand/stub was hidden. That part of his jacket was drenched in blood like the front of it, and the back of his pants, too, was sopping wet with the stuff. And he also left a small pool of blood on the seat of the chair he’d been sitting on. I couldn’t believe he’d been so calm. I would’ve most likely fainted at the first sight of my blood, or at the very least been screaming like a little girl.