The Black Witch of Mexico

by Colin Falconer

  “Like us, then.”

  Bernard smiled. “Yes. Like you and me.”

  Dolores lived in the next village, about thirty minutes drive along a dusty, pot-holed track. Bernard stopped outside a rundown adobe hut a quarter mile from a one-horse pueblo called Aguacatan.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  There were a few chickens and two bare-ribbed yellow dogs that barely raised a hackle as Bernard walked past. An old woman in a black woollen dress was working a dusty garden. He called out to her. They had a long conversation and he saw Bernard point to the jeep, then at him.

  Finally he turned and walked back.

  “Does she know where he is?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “A part of me still thinks this is a very bad idea.”

  “Please, tell me.”

  A sigh. “He’s gone to a town called Catemaco. It’s about a six-hour drive from here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know that you should thank me,” Bernard muttered and got back into the jeep.

  * * *

  Bernard said the bus for Veracruz did not leave until five the following afternoon, but he would drive him into San Cristobal in time to catch it. He could stay another night in Santa Marta, his housekeeper Maria would make them dinner, and with his permission he would try to dissuade him from wasting his time and sullying his soul by looking for the Crow.

  Adam thanked him for his hospitality but assured him there was nothing he could say to change his mind about the witch. Now he was here, he was determined to finish what he had started.

  Chapter 64

  He passed the morning helping out the new doctor in the clinica. He was an earnest young doctor from Arizona by the name of Finch. He had little experience in emergency medicine; he had taken time off from a family practice in Tucson to come down and volunteer his time, and after two weeks admitted to feeling completely overwhelmed.

  One of the patients that morning was a young man complaining that he had a frog in his stomach. Adam told Finch the remedy he had successfully employed during his tenure but he seemed reluctant to try it. He gave him some antacid tablets instead.

  Halfway through the morning there was an emergency, a mother ran into the waiting room with her three-year-old boy gagging in her arms. There was foam around the child’s lips and he was drooling. She shouted that he had a devil in him.

  Adam guessed it might actually be a one or two peso coin.

  Finch froze.

  Adam took over, had her lay the child on his side on the table, then he sedated him and intubated his airway. He was right: there was something lodged in the child’s oesophagus. He removed it with forceps and half an hour later he had the one peso coin in a jar and the little boy was sleeping it off. He had Finch give the mother some Valium.

  Now the new guy sat slumped against the wall, pale. Adam doubted that he would last six months in Santa Marta. He probably wouldn’t last six weeks.

  * * *

  Bernard said he would take Adam down to San Cristobal later that afternoon and he was sitting on the clinic veranda waiting for him to finish a baptism at the church when a red SUV, coated with dust, bumped up the dirt road, trailing a plume of dust.

  Jamie Fox Gerrido jumped out.

  He stared at her, astonished.

  “Dad said that you were going to Catemaco, and he asked me to go with you. I said let him go, make a fool of himself, but he’s worried about you. So here I am.”

  “Thanks,” was all he could think of to say.

  “Don’t thank me, I don’t give a damn. It was his stupid idea.” She stalked off towards the church to remonstrate one last time with her father.

  Chapter 65

  They ate dinner in Bernard’s little house behind the church. His housekeeper Maria served beans and tortillas, and Bernard produced a bottle of Cutty Sark and added a dribble to their coffees. They ate in funereal silence.

  Afterwards Adam went out onto the veranda to smoke a cigarette. Normally he only bummed cigarettes from the nurses in the ambulance bay after a bad call. But this time he bought a pack before he even left Boston, and already he was down to the last three or four.

  To his surprise Jamie came outside to join him. He offered her a cigarette but she shook her head. They stood a few feet apart staring at the moon.

  “What if I did it to you?” shesaid.

  “Did what to me?”

  “Say we were together and then you decided you didn’t want me in your life anymore, walked out on me. So I go to a witch doctor and ask him to do whatever he does, so I can get you back. How would you feel about that?”

  “No one could make me do something I didn’t want to do.”

  “Then why do you think she would?”

  He couldn’t answer that.

  “If you found out about it, how would you feel?”

  “Like I had been violated in the worst possible way.”

  “But you did it to her.”

  “I guess I never thought about it like that before.”

  “I guess you didn’t.”

  “Even more reason to find this guy, then.”

  “Like redemption?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. This is my penance, my pilgrimage.”

  He wondered what she wanted from him. He ground out the cigarette with his heel. The damned things left a foul taste in his mouth. He told himself he had taken them up again to soothe his nerves but he suspected the real reason was to punish himself.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” he asked her.

  “I read somewhere about tribes who live in the desert in Australia, they have medicine men and they can kill someone just by pointing a kangaroo bone at them. I guess the tribespeople believe that the guy has the power to do it and because they believe it they just give up and die. I suppose that’s how it works.”

  “But what if they don’t know about the bone? Like Elena. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “The voice of reason says if you don’t see it, it can’t hurt you.”

  “Have you ever been sitting down thinking about someone, and a couple of minutes later the phone rings and it’s them, they say, ‘hey I don’t know why I’m calling, I just had this impulse to call you.” How the hell does that work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either. I used to have an easy explanation for all that shit but now I’m not sure. I guess that’s why I came back.”

  “Try to get some sleep,” she said. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow.” She went back inside.

  He lit another cigarette, then changed his mind and ground it out with his heel. He screwed up the rest of the pack in his fist and threw them away.

  He barely slept that night. He didn’t expect to.

  Chapter 66

  Jamie manoeuvred the SUV through the crowds around the edge of the plaza in San Juan. It was market day: a riot of colour, a vast expanse of coloured shade-cloths with everything for sale; fruit, beans, pottery, embroidered shawls, ponchos, batteries, superglue, all spread on the ground on mats.

  It was then he saw him. He was standing under the colonnades of a white stucco building on the far side of the square.

  “There he is!’ Adam said. The SUV was moving at a crawl so he threw open the door and jumped out.

  “Adam, stop!’

  The Crow turned when he heard Jamie shouting and saw Adam running through the crowds toward him. He smiled then he slipped away down one of the alleys and out of sight.

  Adam was hemmed in by the crowds. Barefoot children ran in front of him holding up their beads and their hand-knotted bracelets. “Buy this,” they shouted. “It’s pretty. Buy this!’

  By the time he reached the alley the Crow had gone.

  He searched the sea of faces in the plaza, ran along the lines of stalls, the children with their bracelets and bangles trailing after him.

  The Crow was here somewhere. Or had he imagi
ned it?

  “Adam!’

  Jamie ran in front of him, arms waving, stopping him in his tracks. She bent over, out of breath, put her hands on her knees. “What are you doing?”

  “I saw him.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I’m sure it was him.”

  “He’s gone. It couldn’t be him. Now for God’s sake, get back in the jeep.”

  He prairie-dogged the square; thin men in tattered rags with vegetables spread on a mat; old women with sacks of bean and corn, crying out prices in Spanish; children gnawing on mango rinds from the garbage.

  How the hell did he expect to find a Mexican in a sea of Mexican faces, especially one who didn’t want to be found?

  The kids were still jostling him, pushing their bracelets in his face. He felt as if he was going mad, chasing phantoms through a Mexican marketplace in the middle of nowhere.

  He looked over at the church on the far side of the plaza, thought he saw a man in a black shirt and black jeans go inside. The Crow.

  “There,” he said to her and set off across the cobblestones.

  * * *

  The outside of the church, with its picturesque white facade, was like every other church he’d seen in Mexico.

  Inside, it was unlike anything he had ever seen.

  There were no pews. Instead there was a sea of burning candles on the floor, hundreds upon hundreds of them. The heat, the smell of burning wax, and the heady fragrance of the copal resin incense was overpowering.

  There were glass cabinets around the walls housing the statues of dozens of saints, and there were tables set out in front of them, with more candles burning in brass holders.

  The only sound was the murmuring and chanting of the shamans, squatted on the carpet of pine needles and melted candle wax that covered the stone flags. Whole families huddled around them with their offerings of eggs and Pepsi Cola and ‘posh.”

  A shaman had a chicken by its hind legs and was holding it upside down, passing it over the body of a sick child. He stopped to answer his cell phone, still holding the chicken with his free hand. He laughed and chatted then hung up and wrung the chicken’s neck.

  “He’s not in here,” Jamie whispered in his ear. “You must have imagined it.”

  Perhaps he had.

  Awed, he turned and followed her out of the church and back to the SUV.

  Chapter 67

  Catemaco was not much of a town, you could spit from one end to the other with a backing wind. There were charms for sale everywhere: rabbit’s feet, coyote teeth, rosaries, magic amulets, and scarlet pillows for love and good luck.

  “It was high jungle until the fifties, when they built roads up here,” Jamie said. “Until then there were no hospitals or doctors, if you got sick you went to see a shaman or a witch.”

  As they drove through the town he saw a Hotel Brujo, a Plazuela del Brujo even a chicken take-out called el Pollo Brujo - Chicken Witch. Everywhere there were signs advertising spells, magic supplies, herbal cures.

  “This place is witch central,” she said. “They have a convention up here every year in March, a whole freak show of charlatans and warlocks, they have it up on Cerro Mano Blanco, there’s thousands of them. It’s run by the thirteen brujos of Catemaco; the local royalty, they call themselves Los Hermanos.”

  “The tourists must love it.”

  “Not just tourists, even politicians go there, they get lucky amulets to help them in elections.”

  “So he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” he said.

  The first bar they went in had swing doors, as if it had been lifted from the set of a spaghetti western. There was sawdust on the floor, littered with cigarette butts, and three plastic yellow tables the colour of chicken fat.

  Two men in cowboy hats looked up as they walked in. Their eyes did not leave Jamie. He half expected to see their saliva pool on the table.

  They asked the barman about the Crow. He said he had never heard of such a person. They asked about witches. “We don’t have witches in Catemaco,” he said.

  They walked outside. Across the road he saw a sign: Maestro en ciencias ocultas: Master of the dark arts.

  “Must have lost something in translation,” he said.

  * * *

  The town had been built on the rim of a vast lake. There were shacks of scavenged tin and flimsy wood. They passed the empty lanchas, just back from taking tourists out to Monkey Island. There were mountain peaks shrouded in grey mist on the far side.

  “The legend is that the devil’s cave is over there somewhere,” she said. “They say it leads from our world to the world of the dead.”

  They walked along the boardwalk. Adam heard the bubbling of the herons in the branches overhead. Their hands brushed. In other circumstances it might have felt natural to hold her hand. He wanted to touch her very badly.

  She moved a little away from him, out of arm’s reach.

  The sun was getting low in the sky and the air grew still.

  “We should go back to the car now,” she said.

  Chapter 68

  Jamie didn’t want to stay in Catemaco so they found a hotel in the next town, Santiago Tutxlas.

  They ate dinner in the Zocalo. The rainforest hills crowded in at the gathering dusk, parrots fussed in the jacaranda trees, the colonial towers of the town hall turned rose pink. Time stood still here; the hands on the town hall clock were stuck at a quarter to three.

  They ordered enchiladas and washed them down with beer. The food was bad and the beer was warm. He pushed away his plate--he wasn’t that hungry anyway—and watched a march of ants on the table. You couldn’t get away from the jungle in this damned place.

  “This is Olmec country,” she said. “They were one of the most ancient civilizations of all the Americas.”

  “Your father showed me one of their pyramids near Santa Marta.”

  “They say this was like a Garden of Eden once, the Olmec version of it anyway. Can you feel it? There is a strange energy here. Maybe it’s just the old volcanoes rumbling under the ground.”

  Men in white cowboy hats sat on benches around the park, smoking and talking. Adam saw two of them staring at her, their thumbs in their belts. They were jealous of him, he realized. Their naked lust made them look brute and ugly. That was how I must have looked when I went to see the Crow, he thought, no surprise then that it was so easy for him to read people.

  No magic in that.

  “I appreciate you helping me,” he said. “I’ll pay your expenses.”

  “You’d better.”

  “I feel relieved having someone with me who knows their way around this country.”

  “I told you, my father asked me to do this. He was worried about you. He thinks you’ll get into trouble. He feels responsible.”

  “But you didn’t have to do it.”

  “Perhaps I think you’ll get into trouble too.”

  “Well, I’m glad we get to spend some time together.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Are you flirting with me? Or was that another one of your moments? Perhaps you thought I was El-en-a.”

  Adam sighed. What made him think she would ever forget about that?

  “Thanks anyway.”

  “I’m doing it for my father. I don’t like you that much.”

  He called for the cuenta. He thought she would say goodnight and go up to her room, but instead she said: “Let’s take a walk in the park.”

  It was a hot night and the air was thick, supercharged with heat and mist. The smell of wet earth and mangoes hung over the town, spiced with frying oil from the old woman selling tacos from a stand on the other side of the plaza.

  They stopped at a huge Olmec head that had been set down a century ago in the middle of the square. It was roofed off against the rain. A pick-up went by, the radio thumping out mariachi music so loud he half expected the statue to jerk awake. He supposed the old fellow had been resting here patiently with his eyes closed to man’s vaniti
es for a very long time. He must be used to it.

  “This is a very old land,” she said. “We know about primal things; lust and death and spirits.” She fingered the amulet at his throat. “I’m glad you decided to wear this.”

  “I just don’t get the point of it.”

  “Do you get the point of wearing latex gloves in your emergency room? You protect yourself from the bad blood you can see. This is for the bad blood you can’t see, all the things a brave, rational gringo doesn’t believe in.” She took her hand away but left her fingers resting lightly on his chest. “What will you do afterwards? When this is done?”

  “I just want to get my life back to normal.”

  “What was normal for you?”

  “I have a good life. I make a lot of money, I have an apartment in a privileged part of the city, I drive a BMW. I have good friends, I go skiing in the winter and...”

  “It sounds like a Coca Cola commercial. If it was so good, why did you go to the Crow?”

  “A moment’s madness.”

  “And now you want to chase this madness out of your life and try to forget that once you felt the blood course through your veins.”

  “I thought you said I was stupid to do what I did.”

  “It was stupid, yes, and it was wrong. But it wasn’t wrong to be crazy over someone. What kind of man do you want to be? Do you want to be a passionate man who feels his life or someone who does everything by calculation?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with calculation. If I’d thought this through I wouldn’t be chasing all over Mexico after some man who claims to be in league with the devil.”

  “It’s just that your normal life seems so bloodless to me.”

  “Is that so? Look where being passionate and reckless has got me.”