The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  Lupe’s body, one was always aware, was altogether independent of Lupe’s dress. It did not depend upon it for support, nor did it quarrel or struggle to escape from it, but, firm and smooth and pleasant, it announced both its presence and its autonomy and, like the dress itself, was always bright and clean and sweet. Others might doubt the fidelity of a comely wife, but not Carlos.

  Lupe was the best thing about the ranchito Rodriguez, but there were other good things about it—everything, in fact, about it was good. The large brown adobe bricks of the walls were well-made, well-cured, well-set in their places; the tiles of the roof neither cracked nor leaked nor slipped. Pajaritos hopped about from perch to perch in their wooden cages, chirping and singing, outdone in their bright colors only by the dozens of flowering plants set in little pots or cans. Carlos and Lupe never had to buy corn to make nixtamal, the dough for tortillas or tamales; they grew their own, and this supplied them as well with husks to wrap and boil the tamales in, and when the cobs had dried they made good fuel. There was an apple tree and a great tall old piñole which supplied them with blue-gray nuts whose kernels were as sweet as the apples. The goat had always fodder enough, the pig was fine and fat, and half a dozen hens relieved them of any need to depend upon the chancy eggs of the market women. Not the least of the ranchito’s many amenities was its stand of fleshy maguey cactus whose nectar gave an aguamiel from which, mixed with the older and stronger madre de pulque, came the delicious and finished milk-colored drink which made it unnecessary for either Carlos or Lupe to patronize the bare and shabby, sour-smelling, fly-ridden pulquerias.

  True, there were no children, but they had only been married two years. It was Carlos’s experienced observation that it sometimes took longer than that before children started arriving, and that once they did start, they generally continued in sufficient quantity.

  The ranchito was good; it was very, very good—but there was all the difference in the world between being a civil servant with a country place and being a peasant. Lupe’s figure, with its small but lovely curves, would become stooped and stringy and prematurely old. Carlos would wear the patched, baggy cottons of the campesino instead of his neat gabardines. That is, if he merely lost his job. What costume they wore, those unfortunates in the Misericordia, the great walled hospital for the mentally infirm, he did not know.

  This institution, long since secularized, had been originally of religious foundation, and Carlos, remembering that, considered the possibility of discussing his problem with the local priest. He did not consider it long. True, Carlos was a believer, and wore no less than two medals on a golden chain against his strong chest. He never went to church: also true. For one thing, it was not very male to go to church. That was for women. And old men. For another, it was regarded that servants of the secular state should neither persecute nor patronize religious functions. Also, the priest, that amiable and gregarious man, might accidently let slip a wrong word in a wrong ear. Of course it was not to be thought for a moment that he would betray the seal of the confessional. But this—this horror of Carlos’s days of late—this was no matter to confess. It was not a sin, it was a misfortune. He could seek the cura’s friendly counsel no more. That worthy man mingled much with the caciques, those of political importance. A single sympathetic reference to “poor Carlos,” and “poor Carlos” might find himself displaced in office by a cacique’s nephew, cousin, brother-in-law—the precise degree of relationship hardly mattered.

  Not with Don Juan Antonio’s warning words still in his ears.

  “One more mistake, young one! Just one more—!”

  Carlos blinked. He hadn’t realized he’d come so far from town. Behind and to his left was the Holy Mountain, the high hill on which had stood the pyramid in pagan times, from which now sounded the discordant bells of the little church. Behind and to his right was the concrete circle of the bullring. Ahead, the footpath he had for some reason been following broke into a fork. The one to the right led to the little house of his maternal aunt Maria Pilar, a woman of strong personality, who inclined to take advantage of his infrequent visits by asking him to mend her roof or say the rosary or perhaps both. He did not desire to see Tia Maria Pilar. Certainly not now. Why, then, was he here?

  The path to the left, where did it lead? Eventually to the tiny hamlet of San Juan Bautista. Before that? It paralleled the railroad tracks a long while. It provided access to a well. A small river frequented by washer-women and occasional gringo artists. Various tracts of woodland. Cornfields. And the isolated house of Ysidro Chache, the curandero.

  Carlos took off his cap and wiped his forehead. Cautiously, he looked from form side to side. Casually, very casually. Far, far off, a tiny figure toiled across the fields leading a laden burro. It was entirely possible that the burro carried a combustible—charcoal, made from illegally cut wood. Or, more simply, the wood itself. Those fellows were so bold! But it was too far away, and besides, that whole matter would wait for another time. What was immediately of concern was that no one, apparently, was observing him, Carlos.

  He replaced his cap. Then, still casual—bold, in fact—he turned and took the path to the left.

  Ysidro Chache was a wiry, ugly little man with one bad eye, the subject of occasional and uneasy low-toned talk. Could he see out of it, or not? Some held that he could, that, indeed, he could turn his eyes in different directions at once, like a mule. It was also remarked how popular, despite his ugliness, Ysidro Chache was among women. Not ugly ones alone, either. True, he was male. He was very male. In fact, a certain Mama Rosa, shameless, had been heard to say, “Don Ysidro is a bull, and the other men are merely oxen! And he is generous, too …”

  But the other men had a different explanation. “It is his charms, his love-potions,” was the whispered consensus. Often, after such a conversation, more than one man, himself loudly and boastfully male in his cantina conversation, would sneak off to the lone small house in the countryside where the healer lived by himself with no steady company except a parrot reputed to be older than the Conquest and to speak all languages; as well as an odd-looking dog which could speak none. Someone, once, had been absurd enough to maintain that this dog came from a breed of barkless ones—but it was known that the man’s father had been a foreigner (a Turk, or a Lutheran, or a gringo, or a Jew), and this had added to the absurdity of his contention.

  It stood to obvious reason that Ysidro Chache’s magic had deprived the dog of his bark in order to demonstrate how clearly he had no need of it to warn him. It was not even fierce! What ordinary person in the world would keep a dog for any other purposes? It was enough to make one shiver!

  The path cut into the shoulder of a sloping hill and passed, slowly, by still sturdy though much overgrown stone walls, from the sunlight into the shadow. It was cool in the woods. Perhaps it was no more silent here, perhaps only suddenly it seemed so. Almost, he could wish for the thudding sound of an illicit axe and its flat echo. But he heard none. Only the stealthy movement of something in the underbrush. Then, suddenly, he was at the house. The ancient parrot muttered something, the dog looked up, then down, indifferently. The police officer approached, slowly, announced himself without confidence. No one answered. From somewhere came the sound of a high, weak voice chanting or crooning. The parrot scowled, suddenly became two scowling parrots, but this lasted for only an eye-blink. Carlos was encouraged rather than otherwise…it did seem as though the potent influence of the curandero and his house was itself sufficient to diminish whatever was wrong with him. He announced himself again and pushed open the door.

  The house was dim (naturally, properly) and smelled (not at all dimly) of wood smoke, herbs, rum, and a number of other things, including—recognized at once although for the first time—Ysidro Chache himself.

  Who was squatting on the floor, singing his strange song, scattering his colored seeds from a painted gourd onto the floor and examining the pattern in the single thin shaft of sunlight, then scooping up the seeds t
o cast them down again. Abruptly his song ceased. “Abuelita Ana must die,” he said, matter-of-factly. His voice no longer high and weak, but deep and strong.

  Carlos tensed. Was the curandero intending—Then he remembered who Abuelita Ana was, and relaxed. “She has been dying for as long as I can remember her,” he said. Grandma Ana, with her twenty layers of garments, her tray of pills and salves and lotions and elixirs, palms and beads and holy pictures, her good luck charms and her patent medicines with the likenesses and signatures of grave and bearded Spanish doctors…and most of all, her long and thick and filthy yellow-gray and black fingernails.

  Ysidro Chache nodded. “I have been keeping her alive,” he said. “But I can’t do it any longer. Perhaps today… Perhaps tomorrow …” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “And how are you, Sir Healer?”

  “I? I am very well. The Lord and the saints love me.” He snickered.

  Remembering that he was a policeman and that the good offices of a policeman were not despised, Carlos said, “No one has been bothering you, I hope.”

  The medicine man opened his good and bad eyes very wide. “Bothering me? Who would dare?” he said, “but someone has been bothering you.”

  Carlos Rodriguez Nuñez stared. He sighed, and his sigh broke into a sob. With his voice not always under control, he told the healer of his troubles…the ugly voices heard, the ugly faces seen, the pains of body and head, dizziness, doubling of vision, unfriendliness and enmity of people, and—finally—fear that he might lose his job.

  Or worse.

  The curandero’s expression, as he listened and nodded was not totally dissimilar from that of Doctor Olivera. “Pues… I don’t think we have to deal here with the results of impiety,” he said slowly, with a reflective air. “You’re not a hunter or a woodcutter; you’d have little occasion to offend the Deer people or the Small People…even if you had, this is not the way in which they generally take revenge. I say, generally. But—for the moment—this is something we’ll leave to one side.

  “What then? The Evil Eye? One hears a lot of nonsense about it. As a matter of fact, grown men are very rarely the victims of the Evil Eye: it is the children whom one must look out for …”

  He discussed various possibilities, including malfunctioning of the stomach, or its functioning with insufficient frequency, a difficulty for which he, Ysidro Chache, had many excellent herbs. “But—” the policeman protested, “it is not that. I assure you.”

  Chache shrugged. “What do you suspect, yourself, then?”

  In a low, low voice, Carlos murmured, “Witchcraft. Or, poison.”

  Chache nodded, slowly, sadly. “Eighty percent of the infirmities of the corpus,” he admitted, “proceed from one or the other of these two causes.”

  “But who—? But why—?”

  “Don’t speak like an idiot!” the medicine man snapped. “You are a police officer, you have a hundred thousand enemies, and each one has a hundred thousand reasons. Why is a little consequence; as for who, while it would be helpful if we knew and could lay a counter-curse, it is not essential. We do not know who, we only know you, and it is with you that we must concern ourselves.”

  Humbly, Carlos muttered, “I know. I know.”

  He watched while Chache cast the seeds again, made him a guardero out of shells and stones and tufts of bright red wool, censed him with aromatic gum and fumed him with choking herbs, and performed the other rituals of the healer’s arts, concluding his instructions with a warning to be exceedingly careful of what he ate and drank.

  The officer threw up his head and hands in despair. “A man with a thousand eyes could be taken off guard for long enough—If I turn my head in the cantina for a second, someone could drop a pinch of something into my food or drink—”

  “Then eat only food of your wife’s preparing, and as for drink, I will give you a little charm which will protect you for either rum or aguardiente.”

  Vague about the amount of his honorario, Chache would say only that the cost of the first visit was twenty pesos, including the two charms. He directed that the next visit be in three days. Carlos walked away feeling partly reassured and partly re-afraid. The smell of the magic infumations was still in his nostrils, but, gradually, in the vanishing day, it was succeeded by others. A haze hung over everything. Despite official exhortations in the name of science and patriotism, the ignorant small farmers, and the people of the Indian ejidos, whose lands ringed around the municipality had begun the annual practice of burning their fields and thickets to prepare for the corn crop. It was perhaps not the best season, this one chosen by the Forestal, to have forbidden illicit wood cutting and burning; it would be difficult to distinguish one smoke from another at any distance—or, at night, one fire from another. It was a season when the land seemed to have reverted, in a way, to pagan times; there was fire all around, and always fire, and not infrequently some confused and terrified animal would find itself cut off, surrounded, and would burn to death. But these offenses against, say, the Deer People, Carlos left to the offending Indios, and to the curandero.

  Another and lighter haze hung over the town and its immediate environs. It was present twice daily, at early morning and at dusk: the haze of wood and charcoal fires which bore the faint but distinctive odor of tortillas, reminiscent of their faint but distinctive flavor, toasting on griddles. And the pat-pat-pat of the hands of the women making them.

  Carlos had come to prefer the darkness. In it he could see no hostile, no distorted faces. Seeing fewer objects, he would be disturbed by fewer objects malevolently doubling themselves. If only at such times his irregular pains and distress would diminish as well… They seemed to, a little. But a little was not enough. Perhaps the things the curandero Ysidro Chache had done would diminish them much. Hastily, furtively, in the gathering darkness, Carlos fell to his knees and said a short, quick prayer to La Guadalupana.

  It was in his mind that his wife’s full name was, after all, Maria de Guadalupe.

  “Tu cafe,” she said, pouring it as soon as he entered; hot and strong and sweet. “¿Tu quieres una torta?”

  He proceeded cautiously with his supper at first. But although his sense of taste was distorted, imparting a faintly odd flavor to the food, it seemed that tonight his throat at least would give him no difficulty. Afterwards, as she finished washing the dishes, he approached and embraced her, one arm around her waist, one hand on her breast, and thoughtfully and gently took her ear between his teeth. She said, “¿Como no?” as usual.

  But afterward she did not, as usual, say, “¡Ay, bueno!”

  And afterward, also, in the bitterness of failure and the fatigue of despair, turning his thoughts to other things, he had his idea.

  Surely, if he were to pull off a great coup—arrest someone besides a troublesome borracho for a change, for example—surely this would restore his so-greatly fallen credit with the police department, to wit, Don Juan Antonio. At least so he reasoned. He had the vague notion that the plan was not perfect, that, if he considered it carefully, he might find flaws in it. But he didn’t wish to consider it that carefully; the effort was too great; there were too many voices muttering ugly things and distracting and bothering him, and besides, if he were to decide against the plan, he would have no reason for getting up. His pains were worse, and he knew he could not get back to sleep again. Therefore he should get up, and if he got up, there was nothing to do but leave the house.

  And therefore he might as well try to carry out his plan.

  He rose and dressed, buckled on his gun-belt, reassured himself of his flashlight, and went outside.

  Dawn was yet not even a promise on the horizon. The stars were great white blazes in the black sky. He searched for Venus, hugest of all, remembering stories of how important she had been in the old religion, before the Conquest—but either she had not yet risen to be the morning star, or he was looking in the wrong place, or some tree or hill obscured her—

  He did not ne
ed his flashlight yet, knowing the way hereabouts as well as he did his own house, or his own wife. He knew the very tree stump which, suddenly, unkindly…but, somehow, not unexpectedly…began to croak, “Carlo’ el loco. Carlo’ el loco. Soon you will be encountered in the Misericordia. ¡Ja ja! ¡Loco Carlo’!”

  The officer drew his gun, then thrust it back. A bullet was undoubtedly of no use. “Wait,” he said. “As soon as it is day and I have finished with my other duty, I will return and cut you up and pour petroleo on you and burn you up. Wait.”

  The tree trunk fell silent at once and tried to hide itself in the blackness. But Carlo knew very well where it was, and passed on, giving many grim nods as he thought of it. He strained his ears but heard nothing of what he hoped he might. Doubtless the malefactors had done their original work kilometers away, back in the wooded slopes of the mountains. Deer poachers worked the same territory, usually in pairs, one to hold the bright light to attract and fascinate the animal, and one to shoot it as it stood exposed. One man could carry half a deer easily enough. Such poachers needed neither roads nor paths either coming or going; it was useless to attempt to catch them.

  Not so, however, with the woodcutters, those thieves of natural resources and national patrimony, denuding the forested hills and leaving them a prey to erosion! The more he thought of them, the more he realized the iniquity of their crimes. Moreover, look what great rogues they were even when in town—Consider how those cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz (a choice pair!) had sneered and gibbered at him only the day before, in the plaza. In fact, on reflection, not only yesterday, either. And why? For no reason. So, clearly, Carlos’s previous attitude had been wrong. Woodcutters were not mere poor devils toiling hard to earn their bread, and currently forbidden even to toil by burócratas intent on their own devious ends; merely to confront the axe-men and issue warnings was not enough. The darkness of the woods became overshot with red, scarlet and crimson. They needed to be taught one good lesson, once and for all. Ladrones. Hijos de putas.