Mean Streets

by Jim Butcher

  “Yup! Busy-ness. Busy, busy! Gotta find a grave.”

  He frowned at me. “Grave?” he asked, as if I surely didn’t know what I’d just said.

  “Yup. I have a mission to do something with a grave and I don’t know where it is.”

  “Today?”

  “No. On Sunday, November first.”

  “Oh.” Was that disappointment? “Día de los Muertos. Yeah.”

  “Is today special or something?” I asked as he started to turn away.

  “Yeah. There’s, like, a whole series of Days of the Dead. Todos Santos—November first—is just the big one the tourists are all crazy for. Today’s, like, the day for the spirits that died by violence. Tía Mercedes doesn’t celebrate that in the house—we have to go outside so the mad ghosts don’t come in and mess stuff up.” He shrugged and started to turn away, having lost all interest in me, now that I was no more interesting than the average tourist.

  I grabbed his arm. “Hey, where y’going, Miguel?”

  He huffed his hair out of his face and glared at me. “Call me Mickey.”

  “Not Mike?”

  “No.” Like, duuuuh, I thought facetiously. Was I this snotty as a teenager?

  “Mickey Mouse fan, then? Mickey Mantle?”

  He snorted, and pulled his arm out of my grasp. “Tía Mercedes has breakfast downstairs in twenty minutes. Then we can go look for your grave. OK?”

  I didn’t miss the implication of whose grave, but I did ignore it. “OK. Be right down. Thank your aunt for me.”

  He skulked away as I retreated into my room. I took a very fast shower and threw on clean clothes.

  I’d been given a room with its own bath, which I suspected was an unusual luxury in an antique house. And there was no denying the building—some wealthy man’s town home originally, I’d have bet—was exactly as old as its style indicated. It didn’t mimic Spanish colonial, it was Spanish colonial.

  Downstairs the food was endless and lush: eggs scrambled with corn tortillas, green salsa, and cheese; fried plantains; grilled tomatoes; bread and sweet pastries only distantly related to the greasy churros found in American malls. Coffee, chocolate, and milk were all available as well as horchata and fruit juice. My hosts, the Villaflores family, felt that their guests during the holiday should be well fed before they faced a day of hiking up and down the mountainous elevations of Oaxaca City and its environs. Midday meal would be on our own, but dinner with the family was open to all, Mercedes informed me—she was the proprietress I’d met the previous night. I thought I’d have to find an excuse to dodge it or I stood a good chance of gaining five pounds before November second, hiking or no.

  Miguel-call-me-Mickey was not so enthusiastic, picking at his food and jumping up the moment I was finished, telling his aunt we had to leave and get to the “palacio de gobierno” that morning or we’d never get in before they closed. He sloped off to wait for me outside while I thanked Mercedes for breakfast.

  She smiled. “Gracias. I hope you won’t mind Miguelito too much—he is bored here. I don’t know why he came at all—such an odd boy—but at least he can be some help to you. If he doesn’t make you scream and leave him in a ditch by the road.”

  “Oh . . . I think we’ll be OK,” I replied, thinking there would be ample opportunities to knock a hole in Mickey’s attitude if I wanted to. Angsty teens aren’t much of a challenge after vampires and vengeful ghosts and monsters in the sewer.

  Stepping through the door, the sound of the Grey really hit me. Where Mexico City had been a strong, steady song of steel and silk, Oaxaca was a wild roar. It sounded like the Battle of the Bands in which someone had forgotten to tell the musicians not to play all at once. Layers of contrasting melody and meter, song and noise flooded the mist-world and made the lines of energy around me spark and throb. Strata of time and memory seemed to juggle and flow, like Einstein’s river. It was tiring just to stand in it.

  Mickey lounged against the wall outside, smoking a noxious-smelling cigarillo and shifting his fake-sleepy gaze around the street like a hoodlum looking for a chump in a black-and-white film. I stood on the doorstep for a minute while he ignored me. Then I tapped his foot with mine to get his attention—OK, maybe a little more insistent than a tap, but not a full-on kick. He jerked upright and muttered a phrase under his breath even I knew was an insult.

  “Hey, I thought you were in a hurry,” I said.

  He grunted and threw down his smoke, grinding it out under his toe with more malice than the horrid thing deserved. “Yeah, right.” A sentence that seemed to mean nothing when he said it.

  He gathered himself after a final glance around and turned his back to me, heading out into the street. “This way.”

  I wondered if his shoulders got tired carrying the weight of that chip.

  I was there because of the holiday, yet I hadn’t thought of some of the implications of its presence beyond the possibility of office closures and an increased presence of the dead. Once out on the street with Mickey, it became obvious that el Día de los Muertos was a much bigger thing than Halloween and there was more to contend with, both living and dead, than bureaucrats on holiday. We walked down the wide, gray-bricked road, hemmed in by a mix of adobe and buildings of pale green stone, none newer than the late 1920s, many painted, like the Villaflores house, in rich shades of red, yellow, orange, or the native pale green. The bricked street boiled with ghostly traffic on foot, in cars, on horse-and donkey-back, even a group of ancient Spanish soldiers marching with pikes pointing at the sky.

  I was startled to note that unlike the ghosts of Seattle, most of these looked like skeletons in clothing and not like the remembered shapes of live people. Skulls grinned and empty eye sockets gleamed with only the memory of eyes. They were completely aware of us, too, watching us as we went and seeming amused. It was unsettling to be observed through eyeless, unblinking sockets, and so much more closely than I was used to.

  We scuffed through the legions of phantoms without talking for a while, to a huge central plaza. Miguel paused and pointed into it, saying in a bored voice, “That’s our famous zocalo. Where the Federales shot all those teachers a couple of years ago. That was in front of the old palacio de gobierno, but it’s a museum now. We’ll have to go through the market to get to the new one—I hope you don’t want to stop and go shopping,” he added with a sneer. He didn’t know me very well. . . .

  I rolled my eyes and ignored the jab—for now. “I’m not much of a shopper. I just need to find this guy’s grave by November first.”

  “You know which cemetery?”

  “Nope, just have a name and a date of death.”

  “Yeah, right. We’ll go to the Registrar of Deaths.” He said it with such relish I had to stifle a giggle. “We have to move it, though, ’cause they’ll close early. Día de los Muertos is a major holiday. It’s like your Christmas, only with dead guys. The market’s crazy full with old ladies like Tía Mercedes and all their kids doing the shopping for the ofrendas and all that. And tourists. And you want to get inside before the ghosts of the violently dead return.” He gave me a sly glance from the corner of his eye to see if I’d bite, but I didn’t.

  “Then we’d better get going,” was all I said.

  We continued down the street to the market with the ghost dog tagging at our heels and the gold threads that dragged from Mickey’s fingertips spinning out through the crowds of spirits that thronged the streets already crowded with the living. He seemed unaware of the vibrant threads spooling from his hands. I wished I knew what that shiny energy strand was all about, but I’d have to wait and see.

  We threaded our way through the periphery of the market crowd and cut across the corner of the zócalo—partially “opened” by the ruthless removal of towering trees, the memories of which still threw phantom shade over the raised, central “kiosk” where the state band played on Tuesdays, according to a notice nearby.

  I could see the memory of the original plaza like a projec
tion over the new design, with huge, thick-trunked trees and Victorian iron benches set along the narrower, shadier paths, and the not-so-long-ago stench of tear gas floating on the warm breeze and an echo of screams. Shadows of the dead protesters glimmered over the memory of blood on the stones in front of the old government building. I could hear the shouts and the shots mingled with the scent of flowers and fresh, spiced bread from the market nearby. The combination made me queasy. No one in their right mind would want to linger there that night.

  We turned from the market, the shops, and the cafes that lined the sun-baked zocalo and headed down to the government offices a few blocks away. We entered the usual bureaucratic maze of once-grand rooms chopped into offices and cubicles with flimsy, movable walls, repulsively out of place in the building that pre-dated World War I.

  The man behind the registrar’s desk, however, fit in perfectly. He had a small mustache with waxed points and wore his shirt collar buttoned up tight under his conservative tie.

  “Hi,” I started, hoping I could manage to make myself understood in English. “I need to locate a grave. . . .”

  The clerk’s nostrils pinched in annoyance and he shook his head. “No habla inglés, Señora.”

  I cast a glance at Mickey, who was leaning against a wall again. He shot me back a snotty look. This was going to be fun. . . .

  “Mickey, would you translate for me?” I asked.

  With a sigh, the teenager heaved himself upright and ambled to the desk.

  He made a gesture at the clerk, who gave him a look nearly as disdainful as the one Mickey had given me.

  “La gringa busca un sepulcro,” he said.

  “La gringa” . . . well, at least I wasn’t “puta” this time.

  The clerk heaved a shrug and spat back something that I imagined was, “Yeah, aren’t they all?”

  There was a bit more wiseass chitchat before I put a restraining hand on Mickey’s arm.

  “Mickey. Just translate. Commentary isn’t required.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.” Then he gave me a blank look.

  “What?” I asked, feeling the ghost dog brush past me to lie down on the floor near the door. I didn’t look down, just stared at Mickey.

  “So . . . ? What am I supposed to translate?”

  Maybe I should have kicked him harder. . . .

  “Ask him if there’s a form I need to fill out and what it will cost for him to find the information right now.”

  Mickey made with the rolling eyes again and looked back to the clerk, who was glaring at us, even though there was no one else waiting in his cubbyhole. Mickey seemed to be repeating my request, but this time in a slightly singsong, high-pitched voice.

  The man frowned at him. “Forma? Para qué?”

  “He says, ‘A form for what?’”

  “Yeah . . . I figured that part out, Mickey. I need to know if there is a form I am required to fill out in order to find out where a certain person is buried here in Oaxaca. If so, I need that form and I wish to know what fee I have to pay to get that information immediately—while I stand here and wait. Now, you think you can be that specific with him, Mickey?”

  He huffed and turned back to the clerk, parroting my request in his mocking voice.

  The clerk was annoyed by it, too, but he grunted an affirmative and handed over a form and said something about pesos.

  “He says it’ll cost a hundred dollars to do it right now.”

  “No, he didn’t, Mickey. He said ‘cinco cientos pesos.’ That’s about fifty bucks. My Spanish sucks, not my math.”

  “Yeah, right.” And the eye roll. I was getting too familiar with the routine already.

  I filled in the form as best I could with Mickey’s non-help and fished a thousand pesos from my wallet. I put it down with the form, saying, “Apesadumbrado,” and jerking my head toward Mickey. Even as bad as it is, I can manage a few important words in Spanish: please, thank you, beer, toilet, keys, and sorry.

  A smile almost cracked the man’s wooden face as he accepted the form and the overpayment, with an amused snort. “Momentito,” he said, taking the form away behind a screen.

  I sat down on one of his two cracked green vinyl-covered chairs to wait.

  “He only goes back to the computer,” Mickey groused. “He just wants to make it look important.”

  I shot him a quelling glance, but said nothing.

  The phantom dog got up to chase a phantom cat around the room. I ignored their antics and so did almost everyone else, except a skeletal clerk, who tried to give the dog one of his finger bones to dissuade it from barking. The dog wasn’t having anything to do with the clerk’s finger and backed away, bristling, leaving the ghost cat free to dash out of the room to the relative safety of the hall.

  The flesh-and-blood clerk, who looked nothing like his bony predecessor, returned with a sheet of paper. “Hmph,” he coughed, then launched into a rattling discourse aimed somewhere in between me and Mickey, as if he couldn’t decide which of us he was supposed to talk to—Mickey the brat or the illiterate gringa.

  Finally the clerk let out an impressively heavy sigh, shrugged, and shoved the paper forward for one of us to take. “Buenos días,” he added, turning his back and stomping off to his sanctum in the back.

  Mickey grabbed the sheet and held it out to me after a second’s perusal. “You’re fucked. There are three graves for your guy.”

  “Three? Not for the same date.”

  “Yeah. Look.”

  I took the page and looked it over. And there were three grave sites given for Hector Purecete, all with the same death date in 1996. “That’s gotta be wrong—it’s not a common name, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “I guess I’ll have to go look at all of them and see what shakes loose.”

  I stood up and walked out of the government offices with Mickey and the dog trailing me.

  We’d started back across the zocalo, passing closer to the site of the teachers’ fatal protest than I liked, when Mickey finally decided to talk again.

  “What do you want to find this guy’s grave for anyway?” Mickey asked. “Some kind of creepy ritual or something?”

  My turn to sigh. “No. I told you before, I just need to find it and leave something on it. On November first.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  I stopped, burning in the high-altitude sun and the hot Grey energy of the massacre. “Mickey, is it just for me, or do you always have a bad attitude?”

  He turned his head and muttered under his breath, starting to walk on. I snatched his arm and dragged him back to me, through a red blotch of remembered blood and pain. He flinched a little and tried to wrench himself out of my grip, spitting nasty Spanish words.

  “Damn, that’s a lot of endearing little nicknames you have for me. How ’bout we make this easier on both of us. You can just call me the GP—”

  “Huh? The what?”

  “The gringa puta. And I’ll just call you brat-boy. It’ll be so much easier, don’t you think?”

  He glowered at me and pulled against my hold. I let him go and sighed.

  “Mickey, look: I appreciate the offer of help, but your attitude is just not flying with me. You can straighten up and stop acting like a punk, or I can do without you. What’s it going to be?” My ghostly dog companion circled around us, growling as if to keep something unpleasant at bay.

  Mickey seemed to consider my statement seriously, sidling into the sun and away from the crying red energy of the teachers’ deaths. “OK . . . GP. We’ll have to get to the panteones soon. It’ll be a lot busier tomorrow. And you really don’t want to be out tonight.”

  “You’re serious about that ghosts of the violent dead thing?”

  He nodded. “You norteamericanos think el Día de los Muertos is just a funny tradition—not real—but we don’t. Not up here. This is the ghost country. We’re not afraid of death—not like you. We live with it.”

  “
You might be surprised. . . .”

  He ignored me. “But we don’t do foolish things like stand where people were murdered on their day to return from Mictlan. That’s just fucking stupid.”

  I nodded. “All right. Let’s get someplace better then. Like the panteon—a panteon is a cemetery, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s actually pretty safe right now. But we should get the car. Those three aren’t close to each other.”

  I was surprised at his change of attitude. He was still kind of surly, but at least he seemed to be helping me instead of making more work. We walked back to the house and Mickey borrowed his aunt’s car—a dusty silver Chevy, which amused me.

  I took the passenger seat and held the door open for a moment. The ghost dog stopped at the car’s doorsill and sat on the ground, looking pathetic and thumping its stumpy tail, but wouldn’t step up into the car.

  Mickey looked at me. “Something wrong?”

  “No . . . no, I’m fine.” I closed the door and the dog vanished from view. We drove away without any sign of the phantom canine until we got out at the first panteon on the list.

  The first stop was the municipal cemetery of San Miguel. We drove around a small carnival that was setting up in a courtyard in front and walked across drifts of flowers and greenery that had escaped from the bundles carried by a stream of people entering the panteon ahead of us. The dog trotted up, materializing out of the road dust and Grey mist to rub against my legs and bump its head against me impatiently until we walked through the cemetery gates. The dog ran ahead, into the crowd of animate skeletons and live humans who filled the graveyard.

  Everyone was busy, the living and the dead, and I paused to stare. “There are . . . a lot of people here . . . ,” I said.

  “Yeah. The graves have to be cleaned and decorated, the family ofrendas made, and the cooking has to be done before Todos Santos on November first. It’s a Sunday this year, so they gotta be done today and tomorrow—or the Church might be offended. Most of these guys won’t bring their feasts until after sundown on Sunday.”