Mendoza in Hollywood (26 page)

“Here now, girlie,” croaked a voice in my ear, and I turned in astonishment to behold a black-bearded sailor grinning evilly at me. “Ain’t you been in to see him yet?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“He’s aft there,” said the seaman, “in the deckhouse. He’s comin’ through, ye know.”

“Oh,” I said.

Then the dream faded away into something else, something less vivid, and I thought that he wasn’t coming after all, because I’d turned out to be a Crome generator. I woke crying, pitying myself.

O
UR IMMORTAL LIVES
went on. The hills went from brown to a more weathered shade of brown. The leaves of the black walnut trees turned bright yellow, and so did the few cottonwoods; they were the only ones to make any ostentatious display of color. There were also bright scarlet berries on the toyon holly bushes, and they were pretty hanging in clumps among the dark serrate leaves; but the rest of southern California was unrelievedly drab.

The days dawned gray, which burned off to a glaring white sky around noon, hazy and painful to the eyes. Smoke from the cookfire hung in the cold, still air and did not dissipate. Small wonder smog would become a local institution. There was no rain to wash it away, either, though the dewfall was heavy and our adobe rooms became chill and dank unless lit braziers were kept in them half the day, which increased the smokiness. Oscar made a few wistful remarks about how good New England food would be now that the weather was getting nippy, but there were still no takers for his Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe.

If I were home in the Santa Lucia Range, what a dark green the mountains would be, what a dark blue the sky, with cold winds that drove out the summer fog. And the redwoods and the cypresses would stand like dark gods, offering up their own aromatic blood. The broadleaf maples would blaze like flame, the stars glitter like broken
glass. I could travel my secret ridge routes all day with no company but the sea hundreds of meters below me, and the occasional white sail on the far horizon to prove I wasn’t the only living soul in the world.

And if I wanted company, or at least civilized food, I could always hike north to Monterey, or stop in at the Post’s little rancho at Soberanes Creek; though I didn’t do that often, because I unnerved the settlers, and in any case I seldom wanted company. The trees and the sea were enough. Not even
he
could find me there, my wraith, unable to summon me from my restless bed when I didn’t have one, unable to break my human heart when I’d transmuted it into green leaves and stars.

But here I was in this glaring purgatory of a cow town. Winter was decidedly not its best season. The weather wasn’t our only problem; Imarte had given Cyrus Jackson the brush-off somehow, more or less tactfully, but he hadn’t accepted it. Several times we spotted him by infrared, sitting off on the hills at night, watching our little canyon. As long as he did nothing but lurk, he was welcome to his miserable vigil; but you never know when mortals are going to decide to go out in a blaze of glory and try to take you with them, so we monitored him closely.

Imarte didn’t care. She had her fascinating theories, her invaluable first-person narratives, and her wealth of irreplaceable historical detail. When she wrang a source dry, she dropped the source. I am afraid that, although an anthropologist, she lacked a certain love for her subject, or perhaps its immediate and particular personification: the human heart.

I
should talk, eh, señors?

Anyway, we were all a little nervous, as the cold weather set in, scanning the dull hills for desperate mortals with guns. They were everywhere down here anyway, but now we had our own special desperate mortal with a gun.

One day, when the northbound stage stopped by, I went down to watch Porfirio change a shoe on the lead horse. I had seen him shoe
horses before; but Einar was the only other person around, and he and I had taken to avoiding conversation with each other since our visit to 1996.

It wasn’t a long stop; no passengers had to get on or off; they wouldn’t have stopped except for the loose shoe. During the whole time, though, one of the passengers had his attention riveted on Porfirio. He was a young kid, maybe Juan Bautista’s age, Mexican from the look of him and very well dressed, with a high shirt collar and the old-fashioned silk tie that stuck out like paddles from either side of the central knot. Leading the horse back to its place, Porfirio noticed the boy’s intense regard and glanced up at him once, curious. The boy looked away immediately.

“What was with the kid who kept staring at you?” I asked as the stage went bounding and creaking away and we closed up the smithy shed.

“Beats me,” Porfirio said. “I think I’ll make some tamales dukes tomorrow, what do you say? It’s early for Christmas, but I’ve really got a craving for something sweet.”

He made hot chocolate that night instead of coffee, and we got into quite an elevated mood, sipping it around the fire and laughing. We all sobered up, though, the instant we picked up the mortal coming over the ridge to our immediate north.

“Chief?” Einar was on his feet at once, shotgun unslung and cocked.

“I read him.” Porfirio was in the shadow of an oak tree faster than mortal eye could have followed, his Navy revolver out. Einar faded into the gloom behind the house.

“’Scuse me,” murmured Juan Bautista, grabbing up Marie Dressier, who clacked her beak at him in protest. He sprinted for his room clutching her in his arms, while Erich rode his head, balancing expertly.

I remained where I was, warming my hands on my mug and peering doubtfully up at the ridge. Yes, there he was on infrared, making his stealthy way down the hill in our direction. Carrying a gun, too.
But it wasn’t our lovelorn filibuster . . . Who the hell was this, creeping along like a thief, his heart thudding painfully? He raised the gun to sight on our circle of firelight, and I winked out on him, to continue my scan from the shadows under a spurge laurel. He lowered the gun, staring in disbelief at the deserted fire. This was a young male mortal, no intoxicants in his bloodstream but with a number of the toxins produced by fear and exhaustion. No disease signatures . . . some healed fractures, very old. Unhappiness. He didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want to be doing this. He was tired and cold. Where had the person gone, who’d been there a minute ago? he was thinking in Mexican Spanish.

I saw Porfirio and Einar working their way uphill toward him. Porfirio stopped about twenty feet below, and Einar circled around until he was just above him, only about ten feet away in the sagebrush, moving without a sound until he suddenly stood up black against the stars and said loudly:

“¿Qué pasa, amigo
?”

The kid whirled, swinging his gun around, but Porfirio nailed him from behind before he could get off a single shot. That was that. He pitched forward, and I saw Porfirio and Einar closing in on him cautiously. I remembered my hot chocolate and took a sip. No reason to come out until they’d brought the body down. He wasn’t dead yet, anyway, just unconscious and bleeding a lot.

Then what a howl of agony. Not out loud, I don’t think it would have shaken the Earth that way if he’d been using only his voice: it was Porfirio’s heart that was screaming, cutting through the subvocal ether like the sound of all possible things malfunctioning at once. My hair stood on end. I came blundering out through the bushes to see him crashing down the hillside, bearing the young mortal in his arms, and you couldn’t have told who looked more deathlike, gray-faced Porfirio or the mortal. Einar was bounding along after him.

“Chief! Chief, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Code blue!” snarled Porfirio. “Equipment! Three pints He-mosynth!”

Nobody can say we don’t move fast in an emergency. The boy was restarted and stable in no time, bleeding stopped and wounds bound, all kinds of stuff pumping through him that wouldn’t be discovered by mortals for decades. His nice clothes were ruined, of course, including the silk tie, which had come undone and was covered with blood. He was one lucky kid for all that. Porfirio’s shot had missed his heart. We stretchered him into Porfirio’s room, and Porfirio sat down beside him and told us all to get the hell out of there, which we did.

What to do after that but go to bed? Nobody was going to answer our questions; nobody was going to explain why the little creep had come sneaking back to gun for us, or why Porfirio had been so suddenly horrified, after plugging him with as neat a piece of cold-blooded shooting as I’ve ever seen, or why such pains had been taken to save his young life.

I was awakened at dawn by Porfirio coming into my room. He still hadn’t washed the blood from his hands. “He’s starting to come around,” he said hoarsely. “He can’t see me. Go to him, please.”

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the cot and groping for my boots.

Porfirio leaned against the doorway. “He’s one of my family. I didn’t recognize him. Haven’t seen him since he was seven years old.”

“So why was he shooting at you?” I stood up and pulled my shawl around my shoulders.

“I shot his father.”

“You shot his father,” I said, looking at him.

He was looking down at the dirt floor. “Yeah. You know how I recognized him? His father broke all the fingers on his hand that day. Just held his little hand down on the table and pounded it with a bottle. The fingers healed crooked. That was how I recognized him.”

“Oh,” I said.

The boy didn’t wake much. I gave him water and spoke to him soothingly in Spanish, telling him he was all right. Most of the time he was passed out, sedated while the miracle cures Porfirio had filled him
with did their work. I examined his hand and found the evidence of old multiple injuries. It must have been a very little hand when it was hurt so badly. Whether or not Paradise exists, señors, there must be a hell. People who do such things to their children belong there, and for all eternity too.

Einar came in to take my place at noon, and I went out into the ghastly white day. Porfirio was nowhere in evidence, but Imarte was standing by the cookfire with an apron tied on over her whore’s finery. Of all things, she appeared to be making lunch; she was tossing handfuls of barley into what smelled like goat stew.

“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked, squinting at it through the glare.

“It’s the only thing I know how to make,” she said defensively. “It’s a
very
old recipe.”

“Where’s Porfirio?”

“Asleep in my room, poor dear. Goddess, what a tragedy.” She sighed. The subtext here was that she knew more about it than I did, so I just sat down and refrained from asking anything else until she couldn’t stand not telling me a second longer.

“You know what happened, of course.”

I shook my head. “Only that the kid is one of that family of his. There seems to be revenge mixed up in it somehow. And child abuse.”

“If that were all! Remember when we asked Porfirio where his family is now? Remember he told us that a great-niece had married a ranchero, and her brothers had come to work on the rancho for him? Well, it seems this young man is her son, hers and the ranchero. The boy’s father appears to have been one of those unfortunates with two personalities, a fairly decent one when he was sober and entirely another kind when he drank. A lot of unresolved rage there, apparently.” She tossed in the last of the barley and looked around. She found the raisins she wanted and sprinkled them in too.

“In any case, after the child was born, the father’s dark side came more into control. He was sober less of the time. Fortunately Porfirio (who was there) and the girl’s brothers looked after the man’s business
affairs, but, as so often happens with this type of personality disorder, he was anything but grateful. More and more, his rage manifested itself in violence against his wife and, in time, no doubt as he perceived himself being displaced in her affections, against the child.”

“So he showed them all by crippling the baby’s hand.” I rubbed my eyes wearily. I hated mortals.

“Ah, but that’s not the whole story. The wife, for her part, had a classically codependent personality. She manifested her own feelings of low self-esteem by remaining with her husband in spite of their abusive relationship and, from what I understand, transferring
her
anger to her brothers and to her ‘Uncle’ Porfirio.”

“It figures.”

“Quite a standard pathology, actually,” said Imarte, stirring the pot busily and frowning as she considered the seasoning. “And of course it broke Porfirio’s heart. He seems to have loved the child and assumed the role of father in his life. He taught the boy to ride, he remembered his birthday with presents, he read to him from Cervantes. This, however, only brought about greater feelings of resentment and alienation from the actual father, and in time precipitated the final crisis. The tragedy occurred on one of their colorful fiesta days, the one with all the skeletons.”

“The Day of the Dead.”

“The family had made some attempt to celebrate, with decorations and candy for the little boy. The father, driven by his usual compulsion on festive occasions, began to drink early in the afternoon. Once again he was unable to deal with his rage, and by twilight he was fairly violent. The incident with the child’s hand was apparently provoked when the child hid from his father behind a chair.”