by Various
Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte! A dry howl from a million throats, the noise of a sidewinder’s scales scraping across desiccated ribcages. Play them to the trail! Strings sing and foxes dance! Danza Macabra! Danza Macabra!
A shape forms in the cloud of sand. A woman with a skull’s face, hooded and robed, cigarette dangling lazily from between her teeth. Rosa sees the vision for only the briefest of moments, but it tells her all she needs to know, all she wants to know. Her throat goes as cottony as Gray Sister’s tail. She gropes reflexively for the strand of beads around her neck, rubbing at them for what courage she can muster.
“… My apologies, good lady,” she finally croaks. “I didn’t know it was… I never thought—”
Make them dance if you seek justice! PLAY!
The voice cracks against her cheek like a slap. Rosa mutters a final prayer under her breath and reaches into the saddlebags for her fiddle case, fingers fumbling clumsily with the latches.
It’s a beautiful instrument, all pyrographed flowers and gleaming red wood. She fits it under her chin and raises the bow. If I can play an air in the middle of a sandstorm, she thinks, the next time I’m invited to a corn-husking shouldn’t be any trouble at all. Her exposed skin tingles faintly. An old folk ditty her father used to play springs to mind, appropriate enough that she almost chokes on laughter. Music seeps into the air.
The fox went out on a chilly night,
He prayed for the moon to give him light,
For he’d many a mile to go that night,
Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o,
He’d many a mile to go that night,
Before he reached the town-o.
The tune capers and leaps cheerfully above the noise of the storm, ignorant as a trout in the stream. Had Captain Todd ever requested this song, back in the days when she’d sit on his knee and fiddle for kisses? She’s sure he must have, but her memories of that time are blessedly vague, a flash of freckles here, a swatch of scratchy blue uniform there. She remembers the faces of the girls better than his own. Their blood sticky on the floor and the key, their scalps swinging from his belt like obscene medals. A cavalry sword slicing through the darkness, his white sickle grin not far behind.
A funny thing happens as she plays. The voice of the wind quiets. The pall of sand begins lifting, gradual as the curtain before a revue. The first stars peek through, and then the miles of sage and sand ahead. She can see mountains, gullies, riverbeds etched in purple and orange ink. The world unfurls before her like music.
And the foxes.
They’re a riot of movement, whirling shapes ducking and dodging over backs and under bellies like eels escaping a net. A yellow coat and a gray twirl around and around together, teeth buried in each other’s tail tips, a third darting in and out of the cyclone they make. The two identical silver sisters Rosa calls the Minnows yap and stamp atop a heap of stones to her left, claws going click-click-clack on the worn surface of the boulders. Gray Sister bounds among her companions, nipping at rumps and legs and anything else that gets in the way of her fangs. The faster Rosa plays, the more frenzied they become. The earth is a mass of flashing fur and teeth.
They’re dancing, she realizes. Play them to the trail, she said.
It’s a memory she’ll keep safely tucked away in her heart’s pocket until the day she dies. The fiddle singing its wild, sweet song, the sky darkening to indigo above them, and all around her foxes, twisting like gunsmoke through the eye of a needle.
They have no trouble finding the trail the next morning.
• • •
She’s still got scabs on her knees from when she crawled to the bruja’s shrine outside of town. The parish priest had banished the old crone years before—the church didn’t look too kindly on the followers of Santa Muerte, blasphemous rum-swilling newcomer that she was—but that didn’t stop villagers from slinking out to the barrens whenever they needed a favor. Mama Margaret wasn’t picky, and neither was La Flaca. For a small offering the two of them could get you whatever you wanted. Money, or a little power, or protection for the people you cared about. Luck in love. Luck in things the authorities might’ve frowned upon.
Revenge, too. Santa Muerte was very good at revenge.
“To catch a fox,” the witch had said, “you need to be a fox.” And she had handed Rosa the bottle of patent medicine, smiling her lined, tobacco-stained smile. “I can’t promise you it’ll work, or that you’ll like what it does. Señora Blanca’s a fickle old bitch, but you’re young and pretty and you crawled here like a good penitent. You got faith in the old ways, which is more than I can say for the rest of your family. More important than any of that, you’ve been wronged. Drink what’s inside that bottle and I’d bet the whiskers on my chin the good lady will help you. Wait a little while and see.”
“But what about my brothers and the other posse?” Rosa had flinched at the memory of their faces, missing them already. “Won’t they catch up before I do?”
Another flash of teeth, brown as saddle leather. “What about them? The good townspeople didn’t give a whit about all those penniless wenches vanishing until you found their bodies, and I doubt they care too almighty much even now. You just start riding west and follow the sign as best you can, little girl. Let revenge be your compass, and don’t worry about folks who couldn’t find sand in the desert.”
• • •
Dreams begin skittering through her head each night like mice beneath tall grass, plump with omens and signs.
She’s standing in the parlor of her elderly fiddle teacher, Mrs. Wull, still dressed in her travel-stained poncho and boots. There’s a stiff horsehair sofa in the middle of the room, a piano in the corner, and several oil paintings hanging from the walls, exactly like the waking world. The heads of the stern-faced men and women in the portraits have been replaced with those of sly-eyed foxes. Rosa notices this, but the detail lands like a pebble in a dry well, quickly forgotten as her thoughts swim on to other pressing matters. How did she get here? Would it be polite to sit on the sofa when she’s covered in sweat and sand and horse lather? If she licks the wallpaper, will anyone notice?
The taste of Mrs. Wull’s wallpaper has been a long-standing question in Rosa’s mind. It’s the vibrant red of prickly pear preserves, striped with veins of minty green. When she was small, she imagined it tasting like figs crossed with raspberries, sweet and sappy and juicy-tart all at the same time. Now that she’s older and supposedly wiser, she knows that wallpaper, no matter how colorful or tempting, is just wallpaper, dust-flavored and dry as a moth’s wing rasping across your disappointed tongue. Saint Nicholas isn’t real, true love is a lie, and the only thing that won’t let you down in the world is its ability to let you down. The past few weeks have been, if nothing else, something of a learning experience in that regard.
Rosa knows all of this, but it doesn’t stop the stubborn five-year-old part of her from wanting to try. Feeling a little ridiculous, she sidles over to a corner, extends the tip of her tongue, and gives the wallpaper a tentative swipe. She braces for the bitterness of boiled glue, the chemical tang of several generations of mothballs and kerosene smoke. She prepares for life’s bad taste in her mouth, inevitable as wrinkles or scorpions in the kitchen.
It tastes like figs crossed with raspberries, sweet and sappy and juicy-tart all at the same time.
The voice comes from the empty room behind her, a dry, honeycomb-and-bone thing like sugar skulls trying to speak. “See there? Life ain’t so bad sometimes—leastways not all the time. Don’t let him make you forget that, else he’s already won and we might as well just pack it up and go home.”
Rosa whirls with her hand already fluttering for her gun. She breathes a sigh of relief that’s half curse, half greeting when she realizes it’s just Gray Sister, seated primly on the sofa.
“Where the hell did you come from?” she says. That the fox can talk now doesn’t surprise her in the slightest; this is, after all, only a dream. �
�And where’d you get that horrible accent?”
“Where’d you get your dark skin? Where’d you come by the color of your hair?” Gray Sister scoffs down her muzzle, all toothy disdain and bristling fur. “Don’t ask stupid questions, darlin’. I know you got more brains sloshing around in your head than that. Now, where did I come from, that’s a pretty good one. I could tell you,”—and here the sneer slips into a rueful, foxy grin, like a bullet sliding into a chamber—“but I don’t particularly feel like talking about that right now. Let’s hunker down and have a pow-wow about you. About the future, if you get me.”
Now it’s Rosa’s turn to bridle. She eyes the vixen suspiciously. “What about the future?” she asks. “What about me?”
“I swear, there’s more of an echo in here than inside Cap’n Todd’s empty puddin’ head. Untwist your tail and stop puffing up, I’m not here to give you grief. We’re all behind you one hundred and ten percent, more than you probably cotton. Hell, if I die a second time on this little hunt I’ll consider it time well spent and rest easier in my grave, wherever that may end up being. Not like I was getting any sleep before.” She shakes her wedge-head irritatedly, like she’s dislodging a fly from her eartip. “Didn’t I say I wasn’t gonna go into all of that? Lord a-mercy. Anyway, what I came here to tell you is this, and you remember it like it’s written across the face of your fiddle. Once the hunt’s done and the skin’s tacked up to dry, move on with your life. Don’t let that carpetbagging piece of rat-bone fool you into believing livin’ ain’t worth it, ’cause it is. Even with scalawags like him runnin’ through it it is, I tell you that true.”
“But—”
“Butts are for rifles and cigarillos, little sister. Love something. Doesn’t have to be another person. Could just be your own sweet self. But for goodness sakes, don’t let him take off with your joy between his teeth, else you might as well have died with all the rest of us in that crawlspace beneath the stairs.” The fox snaps her fangs together, snickety-snak. Rosa shudders at the noise, and the memory. “That’s all I came here to say, anyways. Some of the others are better at speeching, but I got elected to it. Hope they’re happy with the results.”
And the mystery of the vixens suddenly clicks together like the oiled machinery of a revolver inside Rosa’s head.
• • •
It all happened like the worst kind of fairy tale. Rosa can almost imagine some prairie hen of a mother telling it to her circle of wide-eyed daughters, a cautionary sermon on impropriety and the dangers that lie waiting around every corner for headstrong young girls:
Rosa’s sixteen and oh! my darlings, such beauty you’ve never seen. Curls thick as blacksnakes, eyes brown as a summer flood, and a dab hand at the fiddle that could charm a Mennonite into doing the Jarabe Tapatío. She’s the delight of her father’s eye and the worry of her mother’s heart, high-spirited, fractious, and stubborn as three mules standing end to end to end.
A rich man lives in this town. He wears a bright blue uniform with bright brass buttons, and his hair is bright, too, like a penny at the bottom of a spring. There’s money jingling in his pockets, a whistle like rubies on his lips, and a glint in his eye when he looks at Rosa that says he’ll have her on his knee before the next Fourth of July. And does Rosa mind, my dears? Does she turn up her nose at all his flattering and charming and carrying on, like she’s done with all the other farm boys who came a-courting? Good heavens, no! For this captain is an easterner, and that spells different, and different spells interesting. She follows him around like a cat expecting fish, and if his eyes are sly (so sly!) and his expression foxy-sharp (so sharp!) she pays no attention and gives it no thought. Love’s wicked sneaky that way, my darlings. Like blinders on the eyes, or having no eyes at all.
So here he is and here she is and never have you seen a better-matched pair, tight as ticks in a coyote’s armpit. They’re the talk of the town and the toast of the throng, admired by every second son and firstborn daughter in the county. The months march on, and, as often happens, talk of a wedding springs up. Rosa’s chomping at the bit to see where she’ll live—to see where they’ll live, he and she and their lives ivy-twined together but her Captain, sly and slick as a greased lizard, never takes her there. It’s away down the white road, he says, far too dusty a length to travel for a mere visit.
“How many rooms are there in your villa?” she asks. For our Rosa’s a curious girl, as curious as a cat with its paw under the door.
“As many as there are teeth in a fox’s jawbone,” says he. “You could dance on your pretty toes from one end to the other and back again, fiddling all the while, and never come across the same set of doors twice.”
“When can I see it?” she asks. For our Rosa’s an impatient girl, as impatient as first love and last rites.
“Why, when we’re married, of course,” says he. “You know as well as I do what people would say if you visited before then, don’t you?”
Rosa smiles too, but she’s not smiling inside, no no no. Propriety be damned, her heart says. I want what I want and I want it now.
All through the long weekdays of sewing and study she’s imagining her lover’s touch, until she’s near full to bursting with impatience. All through Sunday mass and Monday oration and Tuesday baking and Wednesday washing she’s thinking of his eyes, and lips, and hands, until she can barely focus on another blessed thing. The moon comes up one Thursday night big and round as a horsecrippler cactus, and Rosa’s had enough of prim and enough of proper. Out of bed she goes, dancing past creaky boards and sleeping siblings and the room where her parents lay a-snoring. Into the stables and out again like thread looping a needle, and now she’s pounding away down the white road and no one can stop her.
• • •
The wind blows fine white sand all over them and now they really are a ghost army, gritty and swift as dust devils as the sign gets fresher and the foothills loom. The vixens smell victory and begin to lope. Rosa senses it too and kicks Santiago into an out-and-out run, reins in one hand, the polished grip of her brother’s revolver warm in the other. She imagines the other girls riding beside her, bloody and vengeful. She whispers their names, lets them spring from her mouth like hunting animals.
Samantha.
Lettie.
The pretty Navajo girl with the long, long hair.
The one with the freckles nearest the door.
Essie from Buck’s Ridge, who died a free woman.
Ada, who died with her hands over her eyes.
There’s a crack, like the purple evening sky is hatching from some unfeasibly huge crow’s egg, and a little gout of sand spins upward to her right. She barely has time to register what’s going on—a gunshot a rifle someone’s shooting at us he is shooting at us—before the next bullet whines past her ear, so close the wind of it tugs at her hair. Rosa blesses the dusk, the shadows, and Lady Luck. She stands in her stirrups and screams a challenge across the plain, her voice a snarl of barbwire and rust.
“Is that the best you can do?” she howls. “Do you think I’m afraid of you, you miserable stinking lump of horse shit?” The tears are finally falling now, hot and angry. “We found you! Get out here and fight me face-to-face, coward! Either shoot straight or show your god-damned face!”
The silence unreels and stretches lariat-taut, Santiago’s hoofbeats drumming a tattoo across its surface. For long seconds no response comes. Rosa hunches closer to the horse’s neck, pressing her cheek against warm skin and lathered hair. She wants him to do it. She dares him to call her bluff, to finish what he started, to take her maidenhead with a bullet. Anger like ether fills her up and chases out what little fear is left, leaving her as hollow and light as gnawed rabbit bone. Let the lead fly. Let her skin rip like a rattlesnake’s shedding. There’s nothing inside to tear apart but air and a paper heart.
“Go on,” she whispers. “Do it. Do it and be damned.”
It comes like a knock at the door after a long illness. Gray Sister shrie
ks, tumbles into a clump of sage, and fades to smoke and twilight, still clinging desperately to her old shape.
Rosa feels the vixen go, a deep-down-in-her-bones tug that hurts worse than an entire pouch of bullets. She tries to scream, but it comes out a wordless gurgling whimper and the wind snatches it away as greedily as it did Gray Sister. Shots are peppering the earth like hail now, as fast as her unseen enemy can pull the trigger. Pirate falls by the wayside, biting at her fading flank. Sepia somersaults like a great unseen hand has grabbed hold of her scruff, already mist before she can hit the ground. Phantom and Frizzle and Patch die in rapid succession and buzzards with straight-razor beaks tussle at Rosa’s guts, each casualty another pull and twist. He’s severing parts of her she didn’t even know she possessed. Invisible connections are snapping, ragged as exposed nerve.
Captain Todd is sending her a gunpowder telegraph. I know how much this hurts, it says. There are worse things than dying, and I’m going to teach you all about them before I finally take your life.
Somehow she manages to stay a-saddle, clutching blindly at Santiago’s mane as they charge across the last of the desert and up the first foothill. The world recedes into a raw red haze of pain and noise. When she comes back to, there are only eight of the original twenty-four vixens left, a snarling half-ring beneath the pile of cliffside boulders where Captain Todd has gone to ground.
He’s scrawnier than she remembers, all gangly, boyish limbs and pale skin shrunken over bone. The pretty blue uniform he always took such pride in hangs off his shoulders in scarecrow tatters, toes peeking through ripped scraps of boot. Even his face is strange now, covered from chin to cheek in a forest of gingery hair. The Todd she knew kept his mustache trimmed and his boots glossed to a high sheen. This stinking, hairy creature clicking his empty revolvers at her foxes can’t be the same man, and yet she knows it has to be. There hangs the evidence from his belt, shriveled and grisly. There sits the memory in her mind’s eye, vivid as a vision of Hell.