Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The last thing she asked the Davidsons in her interview was if they knew where this was? Then she’d held up an x-ray. Christy Ramos’s bones, an upper torso shot.

  What Liz P. pointed to for the camera was the rust-shadow of a locket arranged on Christy Ramos’s chest, the chain reaching up to embrace her neck. The x-ray had been invented in 1895, I knew; it still couldn’t see into anything.

  In the interview Marcia Davidson sits back in her chair, her fingertips to the hollow between her own collarbones, where the air comes through, and the voice, and the interview is over.

  Because I can’t watch the footage of Richard’s funeral right then, I set the tape on the VCR, move through the house, checking all the rooms. The closets. The letter from Trevana about the DNA, the letter I still won’t open, because I don’t know if it’s better to have had a brother and killed him, or not had one at all. By late afternoon I’m back to the television set, the one Richard brought.

  I stare at the screen and fumble for the tape, pushing it back with the rest then pulling it out again, inserting it.

  It plays automatically, which means it’s write-protected.

  I sit on the edge of the coffee table and at first it’s static, but then the automatic tracking dials through it and I’ve put the wrong tape in.

  This is the one Richard brought back. The security tape his friends slipped him.

  Leaning across the table, my mouth is to Davidson’s—where Richard had stopped it, for emphasis—my hand to his upper arm, and then we part, don’t know where to look, what to say, and I drift out of the viewing area, to the water fountain in the hall, I remember now, but the camera stays in the ceiling. On Davidson.

  Seconds after I’m gone, he finally breathes, and then starts breathing too much, and then falls to the tile floor, all fours, dry-heaving, crying. Because he knew: I was his hermana, his Leigha.

  It wasn’t Richard who triggered him. It was me.

  I watch it over and over, burning each frame into my mind until I have to look away, have to leave the house or else sit there all night.

  I ease through Ysleta and cross under the bridge, going back into Socorro. The place I’ve been every day since I could drive again.

  I step out of my car, help myself along the hood, and walk out into the scrub and dry grass, tell myself the fine blades brushing my pants leg aren’t the long black hair of all the dead girls, buried standing up. It’s dusk again, the setting sun a dirty red smear on the horizon, Mexico just over the fence.

  I walk towards it until my foot hangs on a headstone, pulling me to my knees over Christy Ramos’s grave, and I collapse the rest of the way, my head hanging between my shoulders for a moment, my arms locked under me, my hair not shrouding me because it’s short again, but then my arms go too and I’m just another Mexican girl lying out in the desert, and maybe this is the way it is, maybe there’s no Juarez killer, just Juarez, El Paso. All these dark girls waiting for the night to fill them.

  But no.

  I lock my arms under me again and the locket falls forward out of my shirt, hangs. I cleaned it with what was left of the rust remover, my hands in so many gloves. In the locket is one picture. An infant. Davidson, maybe. Or me.

  For now, anyway—today, tonight—she’s mi madre. Because I need one.

  I lean forward, hugging my arms around my knees. It’s how Ladio Padilla sits in his room, before the staff knocks. Before he assembles himself into a little boy.

  Sometimes I want to tell him about his mother, make up wonderful lies, send her on adventures, tell how she could change her voice when she talked into a drive-through intercom, make everyone in the car laugh.

  But I never knew her.

  “One chalupa on a corn tortilla,” I say anyway, all Anglo, smiling around the words in my mouth, and then a pair of weak headlights wash across the scrub, get weaker still as the dust plume the truck was pulling catches up, settles into a shimmering pale nimbus around it, and I extend an arm towards it, reaching for Richard, for Nate, for mi hermano—

  And then I see it, the truck: it’s one of my uncles’, my father come up out of Mexico for me, into this part of Texas that almost was Mexico, that maybe should be still.

  He opens the driver’s side door, stands up from the rocker panel and cups his hand around his mouth, starts calling me back with his old man’s voice, mija, mija, mijita, and I stand from my mother’s grave, just outside his headlights, and in the instant before he eases the truck forward, bathing me white, I’m reaching for him too.

  A Brief History of Seven Spanish Angels

  So, yeah, Seven Spanish Angels, it’s been on Amazon for, what? Six years now? Excellent cover, jacket copy already in place, some high-caliber author photos in a drawer in New York somewhere, yet no book to buy, even used. And everybody’s always asking me what’s up with this? Well, this: Seven Spanish Angels was initially contracted as the sequel to All the Beautiful Sinners. And I wrote a draft of it like that, where Jim Doe’s childhood friend Gerry LeChapeau was the killer swooping into town, where those two Texas Rangers were showing up every few chapters—where a ragged-out Jim Doe was camped in a motel room in El Paso, trying to make this all make sense in his head, and on paper. Except it wasn’t so great, I guess; my editor rightfully suggested I maybe start over, and stop indulging myself in all the ways you can on the page. All the ways I can, anyway. So I started over, trying to be better than my ridiculous self. And then my editor said let’s not make it a sequel at all, so I did that too, and suddenly Marta Villarreal, who’d just been a somewhat-involved crime tech, she was the last girl standing, and once she had the focus it was obvious this was really her story. So I let her have it, and wrote I don’t know how-many complete drafts with her as lead. Third-person, first-person, present tense, past, mixed-and-matched tenses and angles, doing it up epistolary style, jumbling the timeline, framing it this way and that—my memory’s that I jammed down something like two-thousand pages to get these three-hundred-whatever, but, no, I’ve never page-counted all the drafts, so I could very well be remembering it as worse (and better) than it was. Anyway, it was a serious lot of writing those few months, but it was probably the sharpest learning curve I’ve ever tried to ride, too, and I’m so, so thankful for it. But, yep, then Seven Spanish Angels crashed and burned, and when it was only moments away from going under that big ARC printwheel, getting the full-on marketing push Rugged Land had been laying out for months already. Why? Because of me. Trick was, the editor—and I should note that he’d sculpted some of the big names in the field, and definitely knew what he was doing—he finally liked all of the novel except the very-very (very) end, where, if I just did this one thing, then the rest of the story would lock into place, be magic and eternal and slippery on bottom, sticky on front, as all good shelf-stock should be. And it was a fix that would take me twenty seconds of typing to accommodate, maybe, it was that easy. Except it wasn’t. I stuck there, couldn’t change Seven Spanish Angels even one word more. Because I’d lived in it so long, I suspect: these were no longer characters to me, but people, and I had obligations to them that didn’t involve anybody else, even to the point of termination papers, effectively killing the book, and all my then-prospects. I got to keep Seven Spanish Angels, though, yeah. And it probably was a spoiled move on my part, along the lines of If you’re going to make my action figure wear that cape, then I’m just going to take it home, okay? Maybe not the best career move, but you can’t always do the right thing, either, I don’t think. If I’d betrayed Marta, or Davidson—if it felt like I had—then I don’t know if any other characters would have ever trusted me enough to let me write them down. And I don’t know what I’d do without all the characters since Seven Spanish Angels, and all their stories. Or, I do know: I’d be somebody completely not-me, some stranger. Because—but you all know thisâ€�
��every main character a writer writes, that character’s the writer. We just try to disguise them up, hide who we are, pretend this is all make-believe. But it’s never make-believe. Stories are deadly real, each and every time. And if you ever sell one of your characters off, you’re selling an important part of yourself. And I guess what it comes down to for me’s that I feel like I came into the game with not much of me there in the first place, so I need to hoard every last bit there is. Especially Marta.

  I hope you liked her.

  Acknowledgements

  Marta. I think you were my first female lead in a novel. And Richard: I’m sorry. You were my secret favorite. That’s why I could never let you on the page too much. You were based on too many people I’ve known and lived for, so I couldn’t really look at you straight on. And Sean Coyne, whom I wrote this novel for over and over: it worked, I think. And, Granddad: it’s you behind those headlights, yes. It’s you sitting on that wood bench in the diner. It’s you when that garage door comes up. And Patricia Trujillo and Rose Rodriguez-Rabin and Brenda Mills: the early reads, the help, the catches, thank you. And Spot, my brother: that time you told me you thought your fingernails were melting in the sun, I think that’s maybe where this story comes from. Or where it is. But it’s also in a junkyard a big brother named Odale chased me and Asael through once. And it’s also in the way I’ve always walked through those baked pastures of Texas, sure I was about to walk up on a dead person. If I can get it down on the page, though, then maybe it won’t have to happen, right? Except of course the only way to write, it’s to live in both places at once. To send back telegrams, then pretend you made them up. And to write yourself notes so you can try to keep straight what’s from one side, what’s from another, knowing the whole time that the only way to really write’s to burn all those notes, use them to light your way back and forth. But still, some nights you get caught in between. That’s when it’s good that your study’s also your bedroom, like it was for this book. Because then, at three in the morning, at five, at daybreak, there’s somebody just a few feet away, who can extend a hand, pull you back across for a few hours and not ask any questions, even though all the questions are so obvious. Nancy: you’re my somebody. I’d never make it back if not for you. Thank you.

  Table of Contents

  Seven Spanish Angels

  Acknowledgements