Revenge is one hell of a motivator.
The Adderall burns in my nostrils and a few minutes later I can feel the buzz starting behind my eyeballs. My mouth goes dry and my sinuses open up. I get that jittery feeling of fake confidence. I can drive all night. I can outpace the cartels chasing me down. I can get to Tabitha, get to Mictlan, set the world on fire. Everything will be just fine.
I know it’s all bullshit. I have to remember that. Have to force myself. Confidence in this game is dangerous. The second I think I know what I’m doing, give in to that screaming Adderall voice and its promises, the euphoria, the confidence, I’m fucked. The Adderall focuses me, keeps me awake, but it’s a lying sonofabitch. Tomorrow I’m going to pay for it. Right now I need it.
The next five hours go by in a blur. I crank the volume on the one tape stuck in the car’s dilapidated cassette deck, a regrettable collection of Norteño music I picked up in Tijuana. I can’t get the damn thing out of the machine.
Half the tracks are narcocorridos, songs glorifying the cartels, making them sound like fucking Robin Hoods instead of mass murderers. If I weren’t tripping balls I wouldn’t be listening to this crap. So I’m rocking out while I speed down the highway to Movimiento Alterado’s “Sanguinarios del M1,” a peppy little number where some narco in Culiacán goes on about how awesome it is to kill people. The accordions really tie the song together.
I pass small towns separated by miles of nothing. Truck stops, gas stations, bars. The terrain becomes more mountainous as I get closer to Mexico City, the population denser, the world more modern.
The magic changes, too. The taste and feel of the magic shifts based on location and people. New York doesn’t taste like New Orleans. St. Paul doesn’t taste like Miami.
My entire time here, the magic has tasted old, like dirt and clay and ashes. It’s peasant magic, mostly, spells that come from the earth, magic tinged with the wrappings of faith, either for the Catholic god or some of the older ones. The magic in rural America has a similar feel, if not as wild.
And not nearly so full of death. I’ve occasionally seen a few shrines to Santa Muerte on the road and in those areas the magic tastes off. Not bad, evil, or anything stupid like that. Those aren’t things that apply to magic. That’s like calling water evil.
No, it feels resigned, stoic. Like it’s given up. Magic takes on the characteristics of the lives around it. So much violence, so much corruption, I’m not surprised. And when I pass those areas I feel a surge of power. Death is death, and whether I like it or not, that’s what my magic’s tuned to.
That’s never bothered me before. It’s just something I accepted. But lately, especially here where the body count is in the tens of thousands, where there’s this much suffering, I’m not sure how I feel about it.
As I get closer to Mexico City the magic starts to feel more modern, colder. Steel girders and old world marble. Electricity and blood. As the seat of the Aztec empire before the Spanish came along there’s a lot of blood. It wants it. Demands it. The murder rate doesn’t compare to places like Acapulco or Ciudad Juárez, but it’s got a deeper history of it. Murder here has its roots in ritual and the city feeds on it.
Pulling in to Mexico City proper and the magic competes with itself. It wants to be ancient and modern at the same time. A constant back and forth struggle as the people embrace the future and cling to the past.
Everything about Mexico City has that same sense of old and new. Cobblestone streets and modern day traffic, glass-skinned skyscrapers and five-hundred-year-old cathedrals. The whole city is built over the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the seat of Aztec power before the Spanish came, while just to the north lies Teotihuacan, a city pre-dating the Aztecs by a thousand years. No one knows who built it. No one knows where they went.
It’s a strange city, even by my standards. Hell, a strange country. It’s easy to be swept up in this idea that it’s nothing but a murder party 24/7. But it’s not. There are people pushing back. People living their lives. When all you see is the fucked up parts of a place, you start to think that maybe that’s all there is. But most people aren’t really that bad.
All that goes out the window, of course, as soon as I start crossing the city toward Tepito. I sit in gridlock for more than three hours trying to go less than twenty miles. Makes Fridays on the 405 back in Los Angeles look like an empty four lane highway. This is not a city built for cars. Or people with anger management issues.
I finally manage to park the Cadillac a few blocks from Tepito proper. Almost the entire barrio is taken up by a massive open-air market and trying to get the car in there is an exercise in futility.
I dig through the messenger bag past bullets, cans of spray paint, locks of hair from convicted murderers, grave dust and ground up bone, salt for barring doorways and drawing circles, extra Sharpies and “Hi My Name Is” stickers. You know, the usual.
For about a year all this stuff was stuck in the Caddy’s trunk where I couldn’t get it. Restocking took forever and there are some things that I just couldn’t find. One of a kind items, reagents that would take me a couple of years to get more of. I’m lucky the trunk is warded as well as it is, or most of it would be useless by now.
The dead side sucks, sure, but if you do it right it’s a great place to stash your stuff.
After a minute I find what I’m looking for. A pair of handcuff bracelets with the chain connecting them removed. I check the cuffs. One of them has a large M engraved on the side, the other an S. It won’t do to mix them up.
I bought the cuffs about eight years ago off a dominatrix who works sex magic in Brooklyn. Goes by the name of Mistress Morgana. Has the phrase “a touch of the exotic” on her cards for her normal clientele. Real name’s Eunice. She’s a peach.
I put the cuff marked M around my left wrist and close it. I can feel a small pop of magic as the spells in the cuff activate. I slip the other into a pocket.
I’ve modified these heavily over the last six months from their original purpose as a bondage toy. Each cuff has spells engraved into the surface. I blurred out a bunch of them and added new ones with a Dremel.
I just hope they work.
I secure the Benelli in the trunk, check to make sure the Browning’s loaded, and sling the messenger bag over my shoulder. I’m jittery and worn out, adrenaline replacing the Adderall.
I cross a couple of boulevards, dodge traffic and then I’m in Tepito. Here the streets are clogged with people shopping at makeshift stalls covered in blue and yellow tarps, folks selling their wares on blankets in the street. It’s a massive twenty-five block swap meet of vibrant color and noise, thick smells of food and sweat, gasoline and rancid garbage.
Clothing, bootleg DVDs, computers, luggage, TVs, boomboxes, guns, drugs, second-hand odds and ends, people. If you’re looking for it, chances are somebody in Tepito has it.
And throughout it all is Santa Muerte. There are shrines to the Bony Lady in half the stalls. You can buy small resin statues of her, candles, incense burners. Every botánica has prayers to her printed on fake parchment, rolled up and tied with a bow. Spells for love, vengeance, money, happiness. She is death and sex and magic and salvation. A dark reflection of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her only promise being that one day she will come for you. Even if there were no shrines to Santa Muerte in Tepito she’d be in the very fabric of the place.
I get stares as I wander through the streets. The out of place gringo. Some are curious, some sizing me up. To the ones who look like they might be trouble, I lower my sunglasses and give them a good, long look at my eyes. They scurry along like rats after that.
I don’t know where Tabitha might be in this chaos. I gravitate toward the shrines, the stalls with life-size statues dressed in hot pink wedding dresses, gold and black fabric, dollar bills pasted to their plaster robes.
I ask about a Korean woman and get pointed in half a dozen directions. To the locals anyone Asian is Chinese. A while back a slew of Chinese immigrants showed an
d started buying up stalls and storefronts. Now they own most of the place. None of them are Tabitha.
A couple hours of wandering and my body tells me it’s either time for food or more Adderall. I opt for the food. I hit a cart and pick up a Coke and a bowl of migas, garlic soup with pork bones and day old bolillos. I’m leaning against a light post, staying clear of the wires and cables snaking up from the stalls into the lamp to pirate power, finishing my second bowl when I see it. A small, unobtrusive carving in the post of one of the permanent stalls across from me. A tiny pentagram with two wavy lines beneath it. If you didn’t know what it was, you probably wouldn’t notice it.
The stall is a botánica selling folk remedies, prayer candles. But the carving tells me it sells other things, too. A woman, old, with skin cracked and brown like gnarled teak, sits behind the table watching me run my finger over the carving. I toss the paper bowl and plastic spoon in a trash can, or at least I hope it’s a trash can, it’s a little hard to tell out here, and walk over to her.
The magic set likes to keep things quiet, so when practitioners sell to other practitioners they use symbols based on old hobo signs. The pentagram with the wavy lines means this woman sells potions. It’s only about the width of my thumb.
Of course, she could just be manning the stall and the real mage is out. There’s a simple way to get to the bottom of that. I take a sip of the local pool of magic, taste its tang of chaos, its thickness of human sweat, the draw of money. Her eyebrows shoot up as she feels the pull on the magic. She does the same. It’s a quick and easy way to identify other mages. It’s not like we walk around wearing robes and pointy blue hats with stars and moons on them. And it’s more polite than acting like dogs and sniffing each other’s butts.
Now that we’ve established our bona fides I pull a wad of 200 peso notes out of my pocket and put them on the table. She smiles when she sees the bills, showing cracked and yellow teeth. “I’m looking for someone,” I say. And the smile goes away.
“I don’t know anybody,” she says. She looks away from me.
I ignore and press on. “I’m looking for the type of someone who might be interested in your sorts of wares.” She doesn’t have any other customers, but the stalls are so close to each other that anyone could easily overhear our conversation so I keep it cryptic. Above all else, we don’t want to scare the straights.
Her eyes lock onto mine, and I can tell she’s pissed off. I’ve crossed a line. “I don’t talk about my customers.” I pull a U.S. hundred dollar bill so that only she can see it and slip it under the peso notes. The last thing I need is somebody trying to jump me for my cash. I already stand out, I don’t need to grab more attention.
“How about a slightly different question? Have you seen anyone around recently who you think might be a potential customer? Somebody like me?” I lower my sunglasses so she can get a look at my eyes. She scowls at me. She knows I’m human. When something that isn’t draws power from the pool it feels different.
She thinks about it a second, then sweeps the bills to her side of the table making them disappear faster than you can say abracadabra. “End of the street. Girl’s got a storefront. She does fortunes. Felt a draw on some power coming from that direction a little while ago. So if it’s not her, it’s somebody close.”
“Much obliged.”
“Don’t tell her I said anything,” she says. “She frightens me.”
“Why?”
“She smells like death,” she says, crossing herself. “The same way you do.”
Yep. That’s Tabitha.
The storefront is right where the woman said it would be, in a white brick building with blacked out windows. Hand-painted in bold, red letters above the door is a sign that reads ADIVINADORA. Fortuneteller.
Well, then. Let’s go see what the future holds.
A little bell rings when I open the door and step inside. The sounds and sights of Tepito disappear behind me and it takes me a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they do I can see what look like carnival sideshow banners hanging from the walls, brightly colored paintings with words beneath each one. LA LUNA showing a smiling, crescent moon, LA MUERTE showing a skeleton, and EL CORAZÓN showing an anatomical heart with veins and everything. I’ve seen these before but I can’t quite place them.
Pedestals line the walls holding softly glowing veladoras, prayer candles inside tall, glass cylinders. Each one stamped with an image that could be mistaken for the Virgin of Guadalupe in the gloom if they weren’t all surrounding different effigies of Santa Muerte on each pedestal.
There’s one in her traditional wedding dress holding a scythe in one bony hand, a globe in the other. Another of her in a red traje de flamenca, a green cocktail dress, a long, flowing quinceañera dress. Almost a dozen Santa Muerte statues, none more than a few feet tall, stare out into the room through empty eyes.
Through an open door on the other side of the room sits a table covered with a dark tablecloth. A single light shines down from the ceiling. Two women sit at the table, one a young Latina girl in a black t-shirt and jeans, the other an Asian woman wearing a blue flannel shirt over a tank-top.
Tabitha’s black hair is longer than the last time we met and falls down to the small of her back. It looks good. I push that thought out of my head.
She places cards in front of the girl, saying something too quietly for me to hear. She glances up, sees me, gives me a slight smile and returns to her cards.
I stay quiet, not wanting to intrude. Better to wait until the girl’s gone. She’s not a part of this and I need some time alone with Tabitha.
As Tabitha puts each card down I can feel the slight tug of magic in the air. This isn’t some sideshow con game. Is she actually telling this girl’s fortune? Or is she doing something else?
Why would the avatar of Santa Muerte be telling two-bit fortunes in a shithole barrio in Mexico City? What does she want from this girl?
A few minutes go by as Tabitha lays down each card and says a few words I can’t make out. The girl begins crying and Tabitha puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. When con artists give you bad news it’s tinged with hope, a solution. It’s that hope that keeps the mark coming back. Maybe she’s just really good, but this doesn’t feel like that. I’m thinking Tabitha’s telling this girl something she doesn’t really want to hear.
I have a thought I don’t want. What if Tabitha doesn’t want anything from this girl? I push it aside as unproductive. I’m not here to analyze her motives.
After a bit the girl stands to leave and starts to hand Tabitha a wad of pesos with shaking hands. Tabitha takes the girl’s hand in her own, leans in and whispers something to her.
There it is. The catch. The girl doesn’t brighten, but the shaking stops. She tries to hand the money to Tabitha again, but she won’t take it. Finally, she nods, puts the cash back in her pocket and leaves.
I step further back into the shadows and push out a little I’m-not-here magic. It won’t keep the girl from seeing me, it’s not as powerful as the Sharpie magic, but she won’t really notice me or care that I’m here. She shuffles out of the building, drying her tears on her arm, disappearing into the chaos of Tepito.
“Eric,” Tabitha says when the girl is gone. “It’s good to see you.”
“Tabitha. Or do I call you Santa Muerte? You should try some of that half-face calavera makeup. I think it’d suit you.”
I want the words to bite, but they just come out flat. It’s weird seeing her. I’ve been hunting her down for months and now, after all this time, here she is.
I thought I’d be furious, angry. Told myself I’d have to keep control. She’s important for right now. If I kill her, and I’m going to kill her, it can’t be until I have what I need from her.
But all I feel is sad. Used up.
“That’s still a few weeks off,” she says. “You can call me Tabitha.”
She waves at the chair opposite her. “Have a seat. Want your fortune told? Find
out what your future’s like?”
“I already know it.”
“Do you now?”
“It ends badly.”
She picks up her cards, shuffles them. “Everyone’s ends badly, Eric. But let’s take a look, maybe see how you get there. Really, have a seat. I won’t bite.” She shows me a wicked grin. “Unless you want me to.”
“What’d you tell the girl? She seemed pretty upset.” I slide into the chair. I can feel the weight of the unconnected handcuff in my coat pocket. I have no idea if this plan will work, but if it’s going to, it depends on me getting close to Tabitha. She doesn’t seem to have a problem with me doing that.
“The truth, of course,” she says. “Her father’s dying. Cancer. He’ll be gone in a day or two. But I gave her hope.”
“Telling her he wouldn’t suffer? That you could save him? What’s Santa Muerte looking for from her?”
“She’s not looking for anything,” she says. “He’s got pancreatic cancer. Believe me, he’s suffering. No, I told her that his death isn’t the end. It’s just a change. You know this better than most.”
“I also know that sometimes it is the end.”
“Sure. If you arrange it that way. You’d know that better than most, too.” She shrugs, continuing to shuffle her cards. “It’s cancer, Eric. Nobody’s feeding him to ghosts. Nobody’s destroying his soul. Normal, everyday death. The kind that happens to most people. His soul will go wherever it’s supposed to go.”
It’s weird seeing Tabitha like this. She’s either played cold, cryptic death avatar, or friendly confidante and lover. Before I knew she was the avatar of Santa Muerte she acted confused. Magic was a new thing to her and she didn’t understand what it was, or how it worked. Sad, lost, little Tabitha. And I ate it the fuck up. It was all bullshit. She knew the whole time, and I bought into the act.
Hungry Ghosts Page 6