The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (35 page)

In the truck Mosca pulled a pint bottle of whiskey from under the seat. He handed it to Root and then began pouring neat piles of cocaine on the dashboard. Root took big swallows and passed the bottle back to Mosca, but he shook his head and nodded at the pint. Root finished the bottle, and when he had opened his eyes and wiped the sweat off his face, Mosca was offering him a segment of a red and white plastic straw. “McDonald’s,” Mosca said, showing big white teeth when he grinned. “Man, you sure surprised me! I heard all those stories they tell about you, you know, things like that, but—” The cocaine was already plumping up his brain cells. Root imagined a feather pillow being fluffed and smoothed into a soft, round belly of comfort and ease. He did not care what Mosca was saying.

Mosca snorted his two piles and pointed the straw at the last two piles while holding both nostrils shut with his other hand. Root glanced around the parking lot and then took the other two. As he raised up from snorting the last pile, he saw a white Mercedes pulling out from long rows of stalls. He caught only a glimpse of the driver, but Root knew it had to be the man in the white linen suit. Root glanced over to see if Mosca had any reaction to the white car, but Mosca was fumbling with a plastic bag full of marijuana and rolling papers in his lap.

“You shouldn’t take those things so seriously,” Mosca was saying as he roared down First Avenue doing sixty. Root didn’t mind the speed,
but he was thinking about Tucson cops who instantly turned speeding tickets into illegal searches. But Root was clean. Only Mosca had been “transacting.” The sensation of the engine and the motion, tires whining and the exhilaration of the cocaine, settled Root back in the seat where he watched as the world was left behind.

“Eat my dust,” Mosca says then, and the big Chevy veers suddenly into a convenience store lot. He leaps down from the high cab, makes two calls at the pay phone, dashes in the store for two cold six-packs, and screeches the truck into reverse. From where Root sits it is abundantly clear where Calabazas got the name Mosca; quick and busy; all over everything at once. The Fly. Mosca shoves a cold beer in Root’s hand, then lights up another joint. The dingy upholstery shops, wrecking yards, and one-stall repair shops on First Avenue fall away from them faster and faster. Root has a sensation of well-being he has not felt in years as the big four-wheel-drive truck blasts ahead.

The last time Root had felt so good he had been a kid. Eighteen or nineteen. Right after he first met Lecha. They all took acid and went riding. He had just bought a beat-up Harley. He thought he had everything he wanted. The chopper, a woman. A real woman. The acid let him feel just how good it all really was. Later Root was uncertain he could trust his feelings then because he had been high. But the acid had not lied, not that time. When it was all over, after his accident, the first time Root smoked dope, that afternoon of riding motorcycles with his friends had flashed back to him. Vividly. The fresh smell of the desert, creosote, sage, and sand. The temperature of the air and the temperature of his own body so perfectly aligned that he was no longer sure where his body ended and the rest of the world began. They had turned down Silverbell Road to get away from the city traffic, and Root remembered the instant he saw the trees on both sides of the road. Masses of brilliant-yellow blossoms seemed to cascade off the paloverdes and lie in deep yellow pools beneath them. He had just been to see Lecha a few hours before, and it was as if for a brief instant he had poured out of himself into something larger, and the motorcycle was carrying him deep into it, and clouds of yellow flowers were billowing around him endlessly until he no longer knew how he was keeping the bike balanced upright, but he was, and he believed that he always could, and that he would always be in a world as infinite as this one. The beauty and joy of that afternoon had been a premonition, Root thought later. A last taste. Because the world was never the same after the accident. Vertical became horizontal.

Mosca, all the cousins, looked at the accident differently from white people. Calabazas and Mosca did not think it was strange that Root kept the twisted, broken Harley frame. Root’s mother had actually called the shrink when Root refused to sell the wreckage to a junkyard. Indians and Mexicans understood, or at least the ones Root liked understood. Root had moved out to his own place after that. He did not belong; his mother and brothers were strangers.

Root looks over at Mosca, who has broken free even from the laws of gravity; Mosca’s flying high with beer foam at both corners of his mouth, nose hairs caked white, and now one of the Fly’s famous cocaine monologues. It is as if they have been working on the same puzzle. Root’s accident. Root knows they feel the accident has significance, that it was a journey to the boundaries of the land of the dead.

MOSCA KEPT TRYING to make Root remember the accident. Root did not feel the same anger when Mosca asked. But the therapist had enraged him with her constant whining “Oh, come on now, try. Try to remember!” She had been trying to get him to remember his life before the accident. Remember. Remember your sisters and your brothers? Once he did start remembering, Root had screamed at the therapist that he wanted to forget again. His family were strangers; they were repelled by his condition, by the shaved head and the scars on his skull. Big zippers. Frankenstein zippers. “See, I can unzip it,” Root had said to his youngest sister, meaning to tease her and play as they once had. But she had shrunk away, almost knocking their mother into the IV bottle.

Mosca wanted Root to remember, but Mosca was not interested in the past, or memories
before
the accident. Root had teased Mosca about acting like a shrink, always trying to get him to remember “Christmas with the family,” and Mosca had suddenly turned serious. “Man, don’t take this personal. I have no room to talk. But man,
your family!
If I were you—yeah! I’d forget
all
of them, man.” Mosca could say that because he had driven Root to his mother’s place a few times on holidays.
Mosca said there was nothing worse than half-Mexicans or quarter-Mexicans who were so stunned by having light skin they never noticed the odor of their own shit again. Root agreed with Mosca. The way he had it figured, his mother and grandmother had spent their time praying he would die in the coma.

For years, for as far back as Root could remember, Mosca had wanted Root to remember what the accident had been like. “What do you mean, what it was like?” Root would say.

“Well, you know, old Calabazas, he said one time people who get wiped out like that—you know,
almost
killed—well, they get visions or they take a long journey.” Mosca would pause and wait for Root to take up where Mosca had left off; he wanted Root to talk about the soul journey and about visions. Root always got exasperated and said he remembered nothing. That as far as he knew, he had not even dreamed while he was in the coma. Mosca would look disappointed, and then hurt. “I thought we were friends,” he would say. But Mosca is a patient man, and Root can’t think of a month gone by without Mosca’s mentioning Root’s accident.

Mosca wheels the truck down Ft. Lowell to Oracle. Mosca has done this with Root so many times, Root thinks he may not even realize he is doing it. Mosca drives Root through the intersection where the woman in the real estate company car made the illegal left turn that had sent Root on his way; flying on his motocycle to nowhere. But after a while, Root got used to Mosca’s notion the collision with the ’60 Plymouth had sent him
somewhere.
Try to think and remember, cast yourself back into months of coma.

It had taken Root a few years to decide which people were worse: the ones who gawked, mouths opened so wide they slobbered on their shoes, or the ones who pretended they had seen nothing out of the ordinary when they passed him in the shopping mall, but if Root glanced back over his shoulder, he would catch them staring at him. Root soon learned the worst were those who thought his limp and dragging foot somehow gave them the right to walk up and start telling him about their daughter or son-in-law and the fall in the bathroom or the can of poison green beans that caused the paralysis.

It had not taken Root very long to figure out that the gawkers and the queasy stomachs were invariably in the shopping malls and department stores, or were well-dressed white women passing the physical-therapy wing during hospital visiting hours. Downtown, Root had instinctively felt more comfortable. Gray-haired women loaded with
shopping bags waiting for buses might look, but Root watched to see how they looked at people walking ahead or behind him. It had been a great relief to see that these old Mexican women saw nothing any more remarkable about him than the others passing by: two dark, fat Papago teenagers carrying a boxy, silver tape player shoulder-high, between them, heads cocked to the speakers; the tall, balding lawyer perspiring in his dark brown suit and vest, briefcase in hand; or the leftover rich hippie in black leather jeans, his long blond hair spreading down the back of a red silk tunic. Root felt he belonged there.

Mosca had taught Root a lot, but so had Calabazas. Not intentionally, but the longer Root worked with both of them and saw the Yaqui cousins who worked on the other end, the more Root realized they did not expect what white people might call “normal” or “standard.” There had never been any such thing as “normal” for them. When Root had first begun working with them, the delivery routes had been far more difficult and remote. Hours and hours of night driving off the crude roads, careening down sandy washes for miles into the heart of the Tohano O’Dom Reservation, had taught Root not to see things as “normal.” Calabazas always did the driving, and the wonder was that all three of them had not been killed as Calabazas leaped the battered ’54 Dodge pickup over arroyos four feet wide. If Calabazas thought Mosca and Root were trying to catch some sleep, he would light up a Kool and begin a lecture on desert trails and secret border-crossing routes. Once Root had remarked that he thought one dull gray boulder looked identical to another dull gray boulder a few hundred yards back. Calabazas took his foot off the accelerator, and Mosca had tried to save Root by adding quickly, “Maybe in the dark they look alike.” But that had not prevented Calabazas from giving them one of his sarcastic lectures on blindness. Blindness caused solely by stupidity, a blindness that Root and Mosca would probably always suffer from, just as they would always suffer from the location of their brains below their belts. “I get mad when I hear the word
identical,”
Calabazas had continued. “There is no such thing. Nowhere. At no time. All you have to do is stop and think. Stop and take a look.” The old Dodge truck had slowed to a crawl; the engine idle sounded wheezy. They had left in plenty of time for the rendezvous with the couriers. Calabazas stopped the truck and turned off the headlights. He made them both get out. Mosca was yawning and pretended to moan and whine “uncle” at Calabazas, but it was no use. He made Root and Mosca walk ahead of him in the sandy wash. The deep, white arroyos reflected a strange
luminous-silver light from the stars even without a moon. Calabazas was only worried about his merchandise, he said. Because fuckers like them were a dime a dozen, and he couldn’t care less if they got themselves lost, or ran themselves out of gas or got stuck, and then died after they’d finished the five-gallon water can.

Root suspected it might have been fatigue and the fat green joints he and Mosca had smoked hours earlier. Root’s ass had been dragging he was so tired; but that night Calabazas marched them up and down, up and down the same stretch of the arroyo, until Root suddenly realized what the old bastard was saying. “Look at it for what it is. That’s all. This big rock is like it is. Look. Now, come on. Over here. This one is about as big, but not quite. And the rock broke out a chunk like a horse head, but see, this one over here broke out a piece that’s more like a washtub.” Root had rubbed his hand over the edges of the fracture lines, and although both rocks were the same dull gray basalt, he had been able to feel differences along the fractures. One had been weathered smooth on the edges. One sat slightly higher on a gravel bench shaped by the confluences of the wash. The other rock had rested at its location long enough to collect a snarl of tall rice grass and broken twigs and tumbleweeds at its base.

Survival had depended on differences. Not just the differences in the terrain that gave the desert traveler critical information about traces of water or grass for his animals, but the sheer varieties of plants and bugs and animals. Calabazas liked to talk about the years of drought, when so many rodents and small animals died, and the deer and larger game migrated north. “Buzzard was the king those years. You should have seen. They don’t have to drink much water. They get it from the rotting meat they eat. It swells up with gas and then it makes greenish water. Buzzards gather around and feast. It is like their beer. They drink and drink.” The old Dodge pickup was spinning and sliding around corners sometimes in the dry wash, sometimes on a faint wagon road parallel with the wash. He parked the pickup by a big mesquite tree, but Calabazas kept lecturing even after the engine stopped.