Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  With my feet, I was pushing away from all this, going nowhere really.

  “The names… names are marked out,” I said, making the motion with my hand in case my mouth wasn’t saying it right.

  “You can look at the dates,” Davidson said, like it didn’t matter anymore. Then he came back to me. “That’s why we’d have to adopt, though, yeah? I mean, shit. Can’t be having kids with tails and all that.”

  He shrugged, nodded.

  Because of dates, we were brother and sister. Or, because, at fourteen—and fifteen and sixteen and all the other years—he’d needed a sibling, a sister, some girl in El Paso two years younger than him.

  We’d both been born at the same place, maybe.

  The same mom, though?

  “But… Ramos,” I said. “She delivered—delivered vaginally.”

  “She’s our mom, Marta. Let’s just say ‘naturally,’ cool? But yeah, she did deliver that way once. In seventy-eight. When she was sixteen. I was her first, I think.”

  I dry-heaved, threw something up into the back of my throat, swallowed it back.

  Davidson narrowed his eyes as if he felt sorry for me. “I gave you too much,” he said.

  Too much ketamine.

  “No shit,” I told him, and kind of laughed.

  “You can’t know this, about us,” I said. “Mitch is running DNA…”

  “I know,” he said, but I was shaking my head no, saying, an anger rising in my voice I hadn’t ever known was there, “She’s mine, Hector. Not—not—”

  He smiled, said, “You thought she was your mom because she was Mexican. But were you the only Mexicano involved? Don’t let the name fool you, Marta…”

  I didn’t answer, couldn’t think right. Couldn’t accept this, but then wanted to live, too. Had to accept it. And more.

  “Soy tu hermana,” I said, my voice light in my mouth.

  Davidson shrugged, closed his eyes, opened them again. “You’re just like her too, I think. I mean, she, like, just left me there when I was hardly even born. Didn’t care. And then—you.” He was looking at me now. “When your boyfriend came for me that night, I knew you’d told him. About us.”

  I opened my mouth, shook my head no: he didn’t know about the tape Richard had, from the security box.

  All this because of that.

  I was breathing hard, too deep to speak.

  Davidson looked up to me, his eyes sad, then hit me hard with the back of his hand, hugged me to his chest after that then pushed me away again.

  “Soy tu hermana,” I said, again, because you don’t do this to your sister, and he brought his knee into my face. It sent me back into the wall. He followed, buried his fingers in what was left of my hair, dragged me through the boxes, into the living room. Hugged me down to the carpet.

  “Soy tu hermana,” I whispered this time, into his ear, and he changed, shaking his head no, over and over, then, slowly, calmed, stood so still I thought he was catatonic. But he looked out of it, up to me. Wasn’t crying anymore. That scared me more than anything.

  “What’s this then,” he said, holding the rubber, “eight inches of sibling rivalry?”

  In a series of movements I already couldn’t remember, then, he had my head, was tilting it back, forcing the rubber into my mouth. I wanted to scream or bite down but it was right on my throat, slick and wrong. He had one hand to my forehead, pulling it back, the other to the base of my throat, pinching, keeping it open, forcing the thing down, and the only reason I let him was so it wouldn’t break anymore than it already was.

  It went down like a large grub, and I wanted to gag, needed to, just didn’t have the muscles anymore. The reflex. It was all dulled, numb.

  Davidson held his hand over my mouth anyway. I had maybe two minutes to live now. Three. Then the rust remover would eat through the wall of the rubber. Through me.

  I started to gag, to mime gagging, to trick myself into it, but Davidson was already rubbing something across my lips, something hot—the superglue I’d bought. He was crying again, to be having to do this, saying that he didn’t know how he was going to get this off, that he fucking hated these kind of nozzles.

  “Tu eres… mi hermano,” I said, through his fingers, and it made him close his eyes to not hear me, but then he nodded, made himself keep going, keep gluing, and then I noticed my hands were free, that he couldn’t hold them and the glue.

  Instead of fighting his wrists, my numb fingers found the button of his jeans. They came apart. He was hard in his underwear, ashamed of it, backing away from me. “This for me, brother?” I said this time, in English, taking him in my hand so that he couldn’t deny that that’s what I was doing, that that’s what his sister was doing, and then, neither of us expecting it, he started cumming, gushing, tried to fold his body around it, keep it from getting on me. Like that would be the ultimate taboo, would make his world collapse even more than it already was.

  “Look what you’re doing!” he screamed, falling, unable to touch anything because of the glue, his voice thick with the ketamine he’d held in his mouth longer than he’d meant to. Both our heads burning from the vapor off the glue. On my tongue, my teeth.

  “You’re dead already,” he pleaded, trying to clean himself with his forearms. “Just lie down now. Please.”

  “You said,” I started, pushing away, “you said I was betraying you like she did. Our mom.”

  “She betrayed both of us,” he corrected, following me. “Do you just abandon a newborn baby like that, Marta? Could you?”

  I was already shaking my head no. Said—recited, really, from having told it to myself so many times—“She didn’t abandon me, Hector. She just wanted a better life for me. Because she loved me.”

  This made Davidson laugh.

  “Don’t lie to yourself,” he said. “She was fucking Juanita Appleseed. We may not even be the only two kids she dropped, ever think of that?”

  I shook my head no again. Said, because I knew it would hurt worse than anything, “She abandoned you, Hector. Not me. She abandoned you because she could see what you were going to become. That someday you were going to go out and kill all the girls who looked like her.”

  This made him stop what he was doing with the glue. Breathe through his nose. Look up to me.

  “You’re not so perfect either,” he said.

  “You’re right,” I said, licking my lips over and over, “I’m not perfect. I pick the wrong guy every time. I’m not a freak serial killer, though, who gets hard over his own sister.”

  Now Davidson was smiling. Just his mouth.

  “I thought you were going to be perfect,” he said, taking me by the jaw, angling my mouth up. “Fucking—growing up, you know how it is. You imagine you have a brother or sister out there just like you, who understands. Blood, y’know? And then one day you meet her. And then she goes all slut, tries to kiss you one day.”

  I pulled away as much as I could.

  “Who’s next, then?” I said. “Which girl isn’t going to measure up next time? Was six not enough?”

  Davidson smiled, did his eyebrows in mock-guilt, then stepped closer, said, “Six hundred won’t be enough, sis. I’m just getting going here,” then started rubbing the glue all over my mouth. When he was done he stood, looking to his index and middle fingers. They were glued together.

  I opened my mouth to say it again, that I was his sister, that this isn’t what our mother would have wanted, if she even was our mom, but the glue was setting on my lips too now, like his fingers. It panicked me, the sudden lack of air. I stood, couldn’t, fell.

  Davidson stepped back, to watch me die.

  “This is the best part,” he said.

  I buried my heels in the carpet and pushed away from him, deeper into the corner, then deeper, knocking my tall speaker over, kicking it out at him. It didn’t make it.

  “Really,” he said, “remember that… Ortiz one? I think it’s best if you don’t move so much. Who knows, I mean. Maybe su
percop will make it back in time, take care of me then take care of you too…”

  I shook my head no to him, no no no, and reached back for something to throw at him—a bookend, a glass, anything—and my hand came down on something else altogether: the old exacto I’d dropped the night my father came to see me with the scissors.

  I curled my fingers around the cold handle, my body curling forward involuntarily, my stomach muscles writhing, clamping down. It pushed my forehead into the carpet, drug it across, my head full of my own voice. I rolled over, crying, pulling my knees up to my chest to stop the pain, the dying, and then Davidson was there, kneeling down on one knee, his fingertips to my side, his face playfully kind.

  “I’m really sorry about all this,” he said, smiling, “but I think—” and that’s when I brought the blade up into his stomach, pulling it to the side as hard as I could, trying for his spine. For my brother’s spine.

  He brought both his hands down to my wrist, and the way he opened, it like he was made of tissue paper, his blood splashing down onto me, onto us; a baptism. The two of us being born again together.

  “Martina…” he said, looking at his hand, his stomach, like this couldn’t be real, then stood, staggered back, the exacto still in him, too slick to pull at, the funnel on the ground where he’d been.

  I pulled myself up along the door frame of the hall, leaning to stand. Remembered Tina Ortiz, bucking when the condom in her burst. The way she’d screamed.

  I screamed too, in my mouth, my ears, and Davidson turned, like I was a new thing to him—a girl, fighting back instead of just dying scared.

  “Mi hermana,” he said, lifting his eyebrows, stumbling across the living room, trying to hold the blue ropes of his insides in.

  When he got close enough he leaned onto me, a hug, keeping his stomach out of it, to not push the blade in any deeper.

  My mouth was to his ear again.

  My hand found the slick handle of the exacto and I reached in deep enough for the ledge before the blade, pulled it out all at once, his head dropping hard to my shoulder.

  I raised the tip to my lips, the blade barely extending past the tip of my finger.

  Before I could tell myself how much it was going to hurt, I cut through my lips, screaming again, this time outside my head.

  I had to throw the thing up. No choice. Whatever the cost.

  “…mi hermana,” Davidson was still saying.

  “No,” I said, pushing him away.

  He stood for an instant then fell back, over the couch.

  “You killed me,” I said, ragged, my chest caving in, the base of my tongue burying itself in the back of my throat.

  “Just because I love you,” Davidson said, smiling his little boy smile.

  It was too much. On legs I couldn’t feel I crossed to him, the funnel already in my hand.

  “I love you too,” I said, and jammed the spout into the open wound in his stomach.

  He fell onto his back, the funnel leading up out of him now.

  I held it there, reached over, found the rust remover. Poured it all in.

  Davidson started throwing up when it hit. Immediately. Frothy pink stuff, like Nate but more.

  I held the bottle there until it was empty then fell back, onto the couch and off again when the cramps started. Reaching for my own throat with my finger, the front door splintering in in some other world, one I wasn’t in anymore, the silver tongue of the deadbolt describing the arc an architect had drawn once with a protractor, from above, before any of us. Before this. I wasn’t alone anymore.

  Richard.

  His face was flushed behind his three-day beard, his mouth too full of words to say anything.

  I smiled, reached up for him, and he came, didn’t know where to touch me, if to. I opened my mouth to tell him everything but found it didn’t work—the glue, it had set again, in blood. I couldn’t talk.

  “What?” Richard said, and I did the only thing I could: made cutting motions over my stomach until I knew I was going to die. Finally I just put my bloody exacto in his hand.

  Beside us, Davidson, gurgling, apologizing for some reason. Trying to pull the funnel out but it was too slick. I looked away, put the exacto into Richard’s hand a second time then pulled my shirt aside, brought his eyes there. Traced an insistent line over my stomach.

  He shook his head no, he wouldn’t, but I nodded yes, screaming inside that he was a medic, he was a medic.

  He knew. Remembered.

  “You sure?” he asked, and I nodded, insisted, and his hand when it touched me to pull the skin tight, it was so steady, and I didn’t even feel the knife, not at my skin, not at my stomach lining, but the blood, the blood was everywhere.

  From it, Richard raised the rubber, the grub, and I smiled, my lips still together, started to turn away, to rest, sleep, live, but then a sound filled the room.

  A gunshot.

  It slammed down my raped ears, into my head. Left a tooth not my own on my cheek.

  I looked up to Richard and he was dead, no face, no head almost.

  He fell to the side, the rubber still in his hand, bursting as he hit, Davidson not flinching away from it.

  In the doorway to the living room, my father. Mi padre.

  He was standing behind the snub-nosed revolver I’d given him, had just set Richard’s cell phone onto the tall speaker by the door. Bringing back what I’d left with him.

  “He won’t ever hurt you again,” he said, his English so fucking perfect, his old man eyes full, and I tried hard to open my mouth, couldn’t.

  Thirty seconds later, Madrone, filling the door with his wide body.

  He looked to the gun my father had set on the speaker by the cell phone. Sirens approaching, all of this ending at last.

  “It’s his,” he said finally, Richard’s, taking the gun, studying it, spinning the cylinder with the pad of his thumb. Remembering it from some other time I knew nothing about.

  I tried to nod, maybe did, and Madrone rubbed his lip with the side of his finger then fired the gun into the ground, the GSR working its way into the skin of his hand.

  My father was looking at him.

  “You know Mexico,” Madrone said.

  My father nodded, once.

  “Go there, then,” Madrone said, still watching Richard, Davidson, me, “go there and don’t come back,” and my father did, walking south to the kitchen, stopping only for a moment, to stand over me, reach down as if to help me up, but then, instead, he just touched his finger to my forehead, then to his own, connecting us with blood.

  November.

  Liz P.’s exclusive interview of Davidson’s parents ran just after El Día de los Muertos, when everybody’s pupils were still shaped like skulls. She was nationwide. The Davidsons were two mellow old people in a room at a nursing home, shaking their heads no, the father bringing Kool after Kool to his dry lips, his eyes roving from one camera to the other. Enough that Liz P. couldn’t edit it away. It killed the interview, reminded us too much of the apparatus—that the second camera was there for reaction shots, that the story was being constructed, not captured. That none of this was natural.

  Neither of them were prepared for the questions Liz P. had: Did they know that their adopted son had tried to change his name at seventeen, to Ramos? That he had once asked Jennifer Rice to a dance, though she was two years older than him? That she’d laughed?

  I turned it off, walked through my house. Carried the black rose from Nate’s grave east to Mission De Nuestra De La Purisma Concepcion Del Pueblo De Socorro, where I’d had them bury Davidson. His plot was no different than all the rest. I set the flower down and held it there, told him it was all right now. That it was over.

  It was funny, almost: I’d always thought that there was a live me and a dead one moving through El Paso, touching everything to see if it was familiar. Now I knew that the other me had been Davidson.

  Two weeks after her interview from the nursing home, the day before Thanksg
iving, Liz P. is at my door, her giant cameraman hunched on the porch behind her, his face scarred, hidden behind the smoke of a cigarette.

  “Marta.”

  I nod, can stand on my own now but still lean on the door, unsteady. The doctors are seventy percent sure that in a year’s time, my body will have mended. Meanwhile, disability. Standing in the viewing room at CPS while the staff works with Jessica Bueno-Vasquez’s quiet son Ladio Padilla, the boy with no father anybody can find. No mom. Sometimes I sit in a corner of the treatment room with him, so he can get used to me. The staff says he said once that I looked like his mother, except for the hair. I told the staff he was wrong.

  What Liz P. has for me is a black VHS tape.

  “Of the funeral,” she says. Richard’s. I’d still been in the hospital then, undergoing emergency calcium therapy. Getting my gastric tract rebuilt. Trying to convince myself I was alive. That I still wanted to be.

  I take it, thank her, put my hand to the door to close it but she reaches in.

  Another thing she asked the Davidsons was whether they knew the circumstances of their adopted son’s birth-mother’s death.

  The father had wheeled his head around to the camera behind him, his wife putting her hand over his, keeping him in place. “We didn’t kill those girls, Ms. Proctor,” she said, and beside her Berry Davidson nodded, desperately.

  I stare at Liz P. on my porch.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say. “I’m not a story anymore.”

  She smiles, looks down the sidewalk of my street.

  “We lived,” she says, her eyes coming back to me. “Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

  “No comment,” I say, and when she tries to read my eyes I take them somewhere else. She touches her cameraman on the upper stomach and they leave.