Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “A mourner,” I said, seeing it in my head.

  “Except it’d have to be a sister or daughter or something, really,” he said, rubbing his chin now, disagreeing with himself, it seemed. I nodded, didn’t want anymore from him, just started across, the backhoe firing up when I was almost there. I looked back, just to establish some reality before stepping in with the dead girl. The groundskeeper had the backhoe smoking. It made the hollow places in the ground shake. I waved to him like he could see me, realized I was doing it to feel safe, tell whoever was watching that I wasn’t alone, then stepped in.

  The first thing was the smell. It was sweet, touched the back of my throat, coated my eyes. Not enough that I couldn’t see her, though, Jessica Bueno-Vasquez. She didn’t look like the girl on the side of the refrigerator anymore, but it was her. She had been posed into a sitting position by a headstone. As if visiting, careful not to sit on a grave. The inside of her forearms glued to the fabric of her skirt, probably. Hands glued together. Lips. I didn’t know what else.

  “Your eyes are open,” I said to her.

  It was because the eyelids had been cut off, post-mortem. Pulled out by the eyelashes probably, and snipped off, the cut curving around to follow the ball of the eye. It gave her a sense of child-like wonder. I blinked once for me, once for her, then followed where she was looking. The sister or daughter the groundskeeper had been talking about was a Christy Ramos. She’d died in 1990, had been born in ’62. I was ten in 1990. The other math I did without meaning to, then did again, to be sure: twenty-eight. Christy Ramos had been twenty-eight. Like all these girls from now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her, then stood faster than I had balance for, sure I was about to panic but not sure why. I parted the tent flap, flooding my pupils with light, and looked back to say I was sorry one more time, to make promises I knew I couldn’t keep, about her son, the tractor I was going to give him, then stepped out into the sunlight.

  Across the plots the groundskeeper saw me, made a production of killing his backhoe, getting down, starting to limp over, but then he stopped, leaning forward to see something back at the mission. I looked too.

  A man was walking up out of the haze, taking form with each step, assembling himself into Richard. I started to nod to the groundskeeper not to worry, but then another man stood from the halfwall, taller than Richard, his head overbalanced, too long. Black.

  He turned it to Richard and I understood it wasn’t a head, but a news camera. Liz P.’s cameraman. I shook my head no to him, that he shouldn’t be here. He saw, nodded, then set the large camera down, placing himself between Richard and me in a way that made my eyes hot. At the last instant before Richard got there the cameraman turned to me like run.

  I couldn’t, though. This was where I belonged.

  When the cameraman reached out to plant a giant hand in Richard’s chest, to keep him from me, Richard kind of smiled—I could see it all the way from where I was—and then, because he was Richard, he did something with his thumb in the hollow of the cameraman’s wrist. It brought the cameraman hard to his knees, Richard’s own knee already crashing forward, the cameraman’s head popping back fast, his blood spraying up into the heat.

  Richard reached through it with his hands, proceeded to take that cameraman apart like he was made of plaster, and I knew better than to try to stop him. Or to watch anymore.

  “He’s going to burn like that,” I said to Richard maybe ninety second later, shading my eyes from the sun.

  Richard was propping the cameraman up against a headstone from 1928.

  “She’ll collect him,” he said back, lifting his chin to the fence. Liz P.

  As I watched—as if released by me seeing her—she broke cover, ran across the graves to her cameraman, one of her shoes coming off. She didn’t go back for it.

  I looked away, to the mission. The groundskeeper, still standing in the same spot.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” Richard said, and I looked to the cameraman.

  “You didn’t have to do that to him,” I said back.

  Richard smiled, shrugged, spit. His saliva was bubbly and white, no red. It slung end over end onto somebody’s wife or husband or child.

  “What do you mean I shouldn’t have come here?” I said then, just hearing it.

  “That you shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

  “But—” I started, turning to face the green tent, the plastic little cathedral. On the fence on the other side of it, in the ditch across from the barn where the guy had a sign that said he could do state inspections, was the coroner’s van. Trevana unfolding himself from behind the wheel. Stopping for a moment when he saw Richard, then coming over.

  Richard met him halfway, kicking his foot sideways out of the iridescent video tape from the news camera. The cassette case was black splinters, would be here for years.

  “Another one, Godder?” Trevana said, looking to the cameraman.

  “Why shouldn’t I have been here?” I said again, because, when the patrol cars started filtering in from whatever wreck or fire they had to all be at, Richard was going to fade away again, not answer me. Too, though, this was Socorro; the police were in no hurry. There were still colonías out here. Irrigation ditches, horses, places without running water or electricity or English. On Sunday morning, the roads full of people walking to church, walking back. Free range chickens.

  Richard just stared at the tent, not answering.

  “You’re like Madrone,” I said. “You just want this to keep going on and on, don’t you? Not ever find out how this… Ramos-one is related to the killer.”

  “That’s her name?” he said, pulling his top lip in with his teeth.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, looked at the Channel 7 van. “Because I never found it.”

  “You never…?” I said, lost, not even knowing where to start, having to cycle through all the names he had been looking for, for whatever reason, and then I opened my mouth, shook my head no. Took a step back.

  He nodded, lowered his eyes.

  “Ramos is Mexican, right?” he said. “And if the killer—this guy, if he’s targeting Mexican women, he’s probably white. Double the power, all that.”

  Meaning Christy Ramos wasn’t related to the killer.

  I looked to the tent, back to him. Started breathing hard, deep. What he was saying was that I was related to her. That the reason he’d been looking for her name was that I’d asked him to.

  “How did you know?” I said.

  “You saw,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My files. In the hall.”

  I narrowed my eyes, tried to see them again. The papers from his box. The ones with my birth weight, the blood tests, doctor’s notes, all of it.

  “They’re from here?”

  “When you said Socorro, I knew,” he said, looking at the mission. I tried to see it as it was twenty-three years ago, without all the scaffolding. It had already been a century old then. Older.

  “But there was no name on those papers,” I said. “It had been blacked out or something.”

  “That’s why I didn’t know her name.”

  “You’re the only one who knows about them, though,” I said. “About… her.”

  “Yeah,” Richard said, looking off again, “kind of what I thought.”

  I laughed without smiling: Jessica Bueno-Vasquez’s body had been dumped—placed—here for me. To tell me about myself. I started walking to the green tent alone, and Richard let me. Inside, Jessica Bueno-Vasquez was still guarding, mourning, waiting. Being me because I wasn’t doing a good enough job.

  Christy Ramos, 1962 – 1990. Eighteen when she had me. If she had had me.

  Some amount of time later—it couldn’t have been more than minutes—Richard was in the tent with me. Trevana too.

  “So it’s her?” I said to him.

  Richard’s eyes seemed to catch Trevana’s for a moment, confirming something. About me. “No
way to tell,” he said. “Our guy thinks she is, anyway. Or wants you to.”

  “We can’t tell anybody,” Trevana said, and I nodded, didn’t want people to handle me with care because the mother I’d been counting on for years had been dead for longer than I’d known she even existed.

  I was crying maybe, not wanting to. Richard touched me but I pushed him away, hard, the side of the tent billowing out when his back touched it.

  Trevana watched, looked away politely, came back.

  “Radio cars,” he announced. A moment later we heard them.

  Richard parted the makeshift door, said it: “Shit.”

  I didn’t care about him and the cops anymore, though. Just her.

  “I need to know,” I said, to Trevana.

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “She’s not—” he started, looking for Richard to save him, it seemed.

  But Richard didn’t, wasn’t: “She is evidence. Part of the scene. If she had dust on her, we’d brush it off.” He shrugged, added, “Like this, she just has a few feet of dust.”

  Trevana was still shaking his head no, though, saying, “Do you two know how hard it’s going to be to get the church or historical society or whoever to sign an exhumation order for us? I mean, look at her, she was indigent, probably, doesn’t have any—”

  And then he remembered I was there, stopped. Looked away.

  “She can sign it,” Richard said, after the proper amount of time.

  “It’s begging the question in the eyes of the law, Detective Godder. Exhuming her so we can run DNA to see if Marta can sign the form?”

  “We can know before DNA,” I said. “Maybe.”

  They both looked at me.

  “I was delivered c-section, right?”

  I was talking to Richard, about the paperwork he’d found. He nodded, slow at first then with more certainty.

  “Just because—” Trevana started, but Richard stopped him, said, “It won’t be a lock, I know. But you’ve got to admit. It’d be one coincidence too many if she has that line, wouldn’t it? That scar?”

  Trevana looked at me, said, “It horizontal or vertical, you know?”

  I closed my eyes, traded my soul to remember that line in the report, recited it: “…low transverse cesarean incision.”

  “Horizontal,” Trevana said. “She probably won’t even have any—we won’t be able to tell.” Any skin, he barely didn’t say. “And anyway, it’s still the horse before the cart.”

  “Not if I sign an affidavit,” Richard said. “That I, as a homicide detective of eleven years, have seen paperwork establishing maternity.”

  “And you’re lead detective on this investigation?” Trevana said, then just looked off, into the green plastic wall of the tent. “So this paperwork,” he said finally, giving in, “you’ve really seen it?”

  Richard stared at Trevana for a breath, then said, “It’s at her house now.”

  Trevana shook his head, exhaled through his nose, defeated. He had the proper forms in his truck.

  Digging her up was all sound and diesel exhaust. Richard we got out by me pulling my car in front of Trevana’s van, then coming back from the van with a Coroner> windbreaker. It was 108°. Christy Ramos had been dead for thirteen years. Instead of opening the rotted casket in the cemetery, the groundskeeper hooked two chains under it as a sling, set the lip of it on the floor of Trevana’s van, his shovel two inches from the top of Trevana’s open back door. We pushed her the rest of the way in. She was light, like Jennifer Rice had been. An angel. I sat up front and then Trevana looped me around to my car. It was part of the plan.

  “Why are you doing this for him?” I asked, getting out.

  “I’m doing it for you,” Trevana said, both hands on the wheel.

  “Same question, then.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I shut his door, opened mine, then left it a block down, got back into the van. Only realized as I was walking into the station that the bowl of phones was still in my car, with Richard. Since he was off the case, too, had never been on, was a suspect, even, there was no chain of evidence now. Because of me. Again.

  In the bathroom by the bank of recessed coke machines I washed my face, washed it again, then leaned close to the mirror, tracing my eyes black until my hand stopped shaking. Until I was sure my voice wasn’t going to crack the first time I opened my mouth.

  “You’re ready,” I said to my reflection.

  It was the same voice I used for the dead girls.

  I looked away, tried not to let myself wonder if I looked like her, Christy Ramos. If I would see myself in her, on the table. If I was putting my eyes on for her, so she would think I was pretty. Since seeing Reyna Cruz, I had decided my mother must have been beautiful too, would expect me to be, would thread my bangs behind my ear and say I have my grandmother’s eyes.

  I followed the wooden banister down to the morgue, made myself push one of the double doors open.

  When Trevana raised his face, I was just standing there.

  He held his hand up, the one with the scalpel, told me no with his eyes. That I wasn’t supposed to be here. He was standing between me and whoever was on the table.

  I walked over anyway, blinking once with each step, my middle finger touching my palm like a button was there, to slow my heart down. It didn’t work. My mother was on the table. What was left. Bones, mostly. Fiber. A specimen tray of rusted jewelry. I swallowed, couldn’t look away from her, had to talk without facing Trevana: “Is it her?”

  “Christy Ramos?”

  Yes.

  “As far I know, this is Christy Ramos, yes,” he said.

  I closed my eyes, tried a smile.

  “My mother, I mean?”

  In answer, he lifted the dress off her lower abdomen, the fabric crumbling down onto her. Into her.

  There was nothing you could touch with a probe and not have it fall apart.

  “Sometimes scar tissue lasts longer,” Trevana said. “It’s denser, more layered. Like a callous. Doesn’t lose its color as fast, because it doesn’t have as much.”

  “Then it’s not her.”

  Instead of answering, Trevana pulled the rest of the dress off her hips, to where her caesarean scar would have been, if she still had skin. If she were my mother.

  “Look deeper,” he said, opening his hand to her pelvic bones.

  “Mitch,” I said, “I’m no—just tell me. Please.”

  “There’s pitting on the dorsal surface of the subpubic—the pubic bones.” He looked at me until I looked back. “What does that tell you? What does that tell us?”

  “I don’t—we’re not in class here.”

  “It means she gave birth vaginally,” Trevana said, letting the dress go.

  “We dug up the wrong one, then.”

  “Maybe,” Trevana said, “maybe not. DNA’ll take a week, at least.” He looked at me then. Evaluating, appraising. “You going to stand here until the lab gets back?”

  I shrugged.

  “And what if it is her?” he said.

  Maybe she’d watched me on the playground once, her fingers hooked in the chain-link.

  Trevana: “—and if it’s not her, if you’re not related, then what? Just throw her away, discard the bones, because that’s all they are?” He had his mask lowered now. “You don’t understand,” he was saying, “it’s who you choose to care for, who cares back for you.” He waited for the next part: “Are you related to God, then, Marta, to love him, to get loved in return?”

  “I’ve laid down with him,” I said, my voice toneless, “with Godder, anyway.”

  “Marta, Jesus.”

  “Preacher, please,” I said, facing him full-on now, then saw it, why he was arguing: “You’re—you’re adopted too, aren’t you?”

  It was so obvious. Trevana just stared at me though, shook his head no.

  “Then how can you know?” I said, pushing some of his precious antique tools off his tray, onto the tile floo
r.

  Because they were sharp, he couldn’t catch them, had to watch them fall, scatter under the table Christy Ramos was on.

  “You don’t come to the police functions,” he said, evenly.

  “People might call me Reyna,” I snapped back.

  Trevana nodded, giving me that, and said, “Then you haven’t seen my kids.” To show me, he removed his left glove, opened his wallet. His kids were Mexican, Aztec practically. Behind them, their blonde mother. Blonde, adoptive mother.

  Trevana didn’t say anything, just put his wallet back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t… shouldn’t have—”

  “You asked why I was doing this,” Trevana said then, in flawless Spanish, “Todos necesitamos una familia.”

  Everyone needs a family.

  I shrugged, tried to follow him down to his dissection tools but he raised his hand, shook his head no, so I just stood there with Christy Ramos, not asking her anything, and when I walked away a minute later, it was with her cheap, rusted jewelry.

  Chorizo’s wasn’t empty, but my father wasn’t there either. I stood at the glass and watched Davidson’s Brat shudder as it pulled away, the rear squatting down to the road like a scared dog. His orders from Trevana were to take me home, but then, once we got there, it was too close to Jessica Bueno-Vasquez’s. And now my father wasn’t even here.

  I got a lemonade and sat in my place on the bench.

  Three hours later Liz P. sat down beside me, with her own lemonade.

  I looked over to her, back to my glass.

  “You have his blood on your shirt,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Hector sold you my location,” I told her, then shrugged like it was all right.

  She just stared at me.

  “So you got us on tape, right?” I said. “Some backup camera or something? Me, my fugitive boyfriend-slash-suspect?”

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t you—why didn’t you run it, then?”

  “I’m not here to put your face on at ten,” she said.

  “It’s already ten.”

  “For me, this week, they’ll set the clocks back.”