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Authors: Leslie Marmon Silko

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She had not heard the shot. The gunman might have been four hundred yards away. Broken glass had streamed across the unmade bed
like water. For an instant she had confused this with the blinding afterimages on her retinas. She had been too drunk and too high to be afraid. The lawyer came and searched but could find no bullet. For an instant he was about to accuse her of breaking the windows herself until she pointed out that the glass had collapsed
into
the room. A fury she had never known swept over her at that moment, and she turned on the lawyer. “Even as drunk as I am, I’m not that stupid,” Seese said. The lawyer had never suspected she was capable of such anger. He moved under the blow like a boxer trained to keep moving mechanically no matter how hard he was hit. Later Seese decided he’d come for a last fuck, that little gesture of comfort for a hysterical woman.

“It might not be Beaufrey and David,” he warned her, still recovering his balance. If he could have frightened her, he might have regained the advantage. “It could be the others,” he continued.

“We are even,” she said. Her voice was loud. She wanted
them
to hear that, so if it was
them
who had kidnapped her baby, Monte,
them
who were shooting, they would stop.

The lawyer began to say that he had it from reliable sources that X, Y, and Z had still not been paid for Beaufrey’s last big delivery from Mexico City. Seese stared at him while he made his pronouncements. He worked for all of the big players. She wanted to shove her .380 automatic into his mouth and pull the trigger until the clip was empty. “You know better than that!” she had screamed at him. “I’m out of it! I left before I had my baby!”

The lawyer was picking up slivers of glass from the pale lavender sheets. “I’ll stay with you tonight.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed still searching for bits of glass.

“No.”

“Come on, Seese, you aren’t being quite fair with me. I love you, and I want to help you.”

Seese knows what the Cuban maid is thinking. The Cuban maid had worked for the lawyer’s father for years. The old judge is connected with powerful people. The maid resents being there. She knows they kill hired help when they come to get the big cheese. The maid does not think much of this skinny blond woman. Small cheese. She does not think anyone will get killed except Seese. But the maid hates missing her evening television shows.

“What’s that?”

“One of those shows—they get people—people doing things—you
know—swallow pennies, hold spiders.” The maid speaks English without an accent. Elena knows that if she were blond and that skinny, she would be living here. So the hatred, Seese reasons, is not of me. Elena hates all skinny, blond women. Seese rolls another joint and pours more whiskey. “What’s she doing?”

“Oh, some old Mexican Indian they claim—
she
claims she can see the past and tell the future.” Elena is from Cuba where they don’t have any Indians. Anyone can see Elena is descended only from white ancestors.

Seese is drunk. She can see women lining up to speak into a microphone. The television studio audience. “What? What?” Seese is too high and too drunk to hear what the woman from the studio audience has said to the microphone. The face of the talk show host fills the screen.

Elena’s tone is impatient. “She asked her things!”

“What things?”

Elena is not afraid to show this bitch the truth. She is spending the night with the white trash only as a favor to the boss. The boss already has another one. This one is on her way out. Elena is tired. She has no patience for this silly blond bitch who is so stupid she lost her own baby, then cries about it when she gets drunk.

“Just watch!” The maid enjoys snapping at her. She enjoys commanding: “Watch! And you’ll see.
People
who have lost things—that man there had a winning lottery ticket, then he
lost
it.”

“How?”

The maid grits her teeth. She hates people who want to talk while the television is on. Elena is almost yelling now. “I don’t know! It blew out the window of his car! Watch! Just watch!”

The marijuana and whiskey feel like lazy updrafts of warm ocean air the gulls ride. Seese lets herself be carried far from the angry Cuban woman and from the scattered glass slivers. Seese begins watching the television screen intently. The Mexican Indian woman seems to be speaking only to her. The woman’s hair is coal-black, but the skin of her face is brown and meshed with fine wrinkles. Seese giggles. The Mexican Indian woman dyes her hair.

According to the show’s host, the woman finds missing persons. The TV camera comes in for a close-up of a newspaper clipping: “Mass Murder Site Located.” The old woman’s face fills the screen. She is smiling but her eyes are not friendly. Her eyes know many things never meant to be seen. The contents of shallow graves. The thrust of a knife.
Things not meant to be heard; the gurgling cough the victim makes choking on his own blood while a calm voice on a tape recording narrates exactly how the execution must be performed. Her eyes said, plenty of women have lost babies and small children. They die of dysentery and infections all the time. They starve, get shot, bombed, and gassed.

Seese could feel the weight rising up in her chest, but the old woman’s eyes continued: In villages in Mexico and Guatemala they lay out little children and babies every day. Their little white dresses and gowns are trimmed in blue satin ribbon. Seese was crying, but like the television, she seemed to make no sound. The maid ignored her, intent on the television show.

Now the old woman’s eyes were closed and her head had fallen back as if she were dozing, but Seese could see her lips were moving. Seese could not stand it. She reached for the volume knob. When Elena started to protest, Seese pointed at the door. “Get out! I’m better off alone.”

Seese did not bother to watch Elena storm out the door. She was watching the old Mexican woman. The old woman was some sort of clairvoyant. She was rattling off what she was seeing: trash cans are stuffed with newborns. Garbagemen in Mexico City find four hundred fetuses and dead newborns each day, not counting the ones found floating facedown among the water lilies in fountains outside the presidential palace.

At this point Seese had lost track of what was happening on the screen. The talk show moderator was trying to calm a woman standing at the studio audience microphone. The psychic had opened her eyes and was wiping her brow with a large white handkerchief. A woman’s voice from the television says, “The dead rest just fine—it’s only your mind that keeps them alive and lost,” but Seese can’t see who is saying this—unless the talk show host has suddenly got a woman’s voice. Seese gets up quickly and turns the television off. She does not like the idea of hallucinatory voices talking about the dead. She has had too much to drink. She has to get to bed. She is going to track down that old Mexican Indian woman and get her to help.

That night Seese dreams she finds Monte’s corpse in a fountain at a shopping mall. He is tiny, reduced to the size of a fetus. But all his features are those of the six-month-old child he was when he disappeared. She cannot reach him and wades into the pool. Crowds of shoppers gather to stare at her. Their faces are blank although she hears angry men’s voices telling her to get out. She yells back she must get
her baby. Her own voice wakes her just as the sky is beginning to lighten in the east. The air pushing in the shattered glass is cold and wet and smells like kelp. She pulls the sheet and blanket closer. The psychiatrist believes she must give up hope of finding him alive, that all she needs is to know what had happened. But watching the talk show psychic the night before has made Seese realize the doctor is wrong. She refused to give up. She had to get out of there. Before more bullets came flying.

The local TV station could only give her the phone number of the cable network in Atlanta. Seese could feel her strength begin to drain away, and her feeling of purpose dissolve into need for a drink and a sniff of coke. But when she reached the Atlanta number, a woman with a soft drawl knew all about the clairvoyant Mexican woman. “Because she helped me out with a problem,” was all the cable TV station woman would say, but she did tell Seese the woman’s name: Lecha Cazador. The woman in Atlanta was not sure, but she thought that from Atlanta, the old woman was flying to Tucson. “That was over a week ago, you know. We do all our program tapings at least seven days in advance. This phone just won’t stop ringing. On account of her.” The woman in Atlanta belonged on a talk show herself, Seese kept thinking. Daytime rates, long distance. Seese kept trying to break in to thank her for the information. Finally Seese just hung up. She didn’t want to hear any more about the long-distance calls that had come in about missing persons.

Seese was certain the TV psychic could help her. It was the strongest feeling about getting help she’d ever had. She didn’t know if it was the heat of the sun on all the glass or the four fat lines of cocaine she had just snorted, but sweat was running down her jawbones. After all these months she was ready to move, ready to get something done. She went through all the desk drawers for birth certificates, passports, and safety-deposit keys. She packed the extra box of cartridge shells for her gun. Sweat was breaking across the bridge of her nose. She was feeling good—she was going toward something. She felt sure of it. She had not felt anything like this for a long time. The phone started ringing, but she would not touch it. No one and nothing would stop her this time.

MEMORIES AND DREAMS

MUCH LATER Seese had realized not only had David lied about having sex with Beaufrey, but Eric had been lying too. Seese had not figured that one out until after she had been crushed with Monte’s loss, and she had consumed grams of cocaine, then quarts of vodka and capsules of doxepin until her vision finally blurred and her eyes felt dried up in mummy sockets. One afternoon Seese woke up in the empty sunken bathtub. She had lain shivering, dreaming she had gone skiing with her father. In the dream he wore his dress uniform, but Seese had somehow lost sight of him in the crowd at the chair lift. She had wanted to find him because he had her jacket and gloves. In her dream, she pushed her way past the skiers, who did not seem to notice that she was naked.

She got out of the tub and sat on the toilet to pee. Out the smoky glass she could see the blaze of the sun on the sand. She checked the thermostat and found at some point she—or someone—had reprogrammed the thermostat for all the rooms. “Refrigerate, sixty degrees.” Seese found a half joint in the ashtray by the sink. She took a glass of orange juice out to the roof garden. The warm ocean air folded around her on the chaise lounge. She closed her eyes, but she wasn’t sleepy. She had been thinking that turning down the thermostat to sixty and lying on the cold porcelain nude could kill you. She and Cherie had known a girl from Phoenix who’d died like that. Not an OD, just asleep in the cold so long her body could never get warm enough again, not even in the hospital. Sometimes coke made her feel feverish. She had been alone in the apartment, so only she could have turned down the thermostat. Maybe her unconscious had remembered the girl from Phoenix, dead from the cold tub, because something inside Seese did not want to live anymore.

Beaufrey had gone days, and sometimes
weeks,
without speaking or in any way acknowledging Seese’s existence. Eric could see when she was beginning to crack, and they would make a game of her invisibility around Beaufrey. Seese would dip into the silver sugar bowl with a teaspoon, taking Beaufrey’s cocaine right under his nose, they’d laugh
later, and still Beaufrey had never glanced down or made eye contact with Seese. Beaufrey’s only comment had been about Eric’s being a coke whore. Cocaine was a matter of indifference to Beaufrey. He kept cocaine because the young boys always liked it.

The group Beaufrey worked with had stockpiles of cocaine in warehouses packed floor to ceiling, in sealed drums. Eric said Beaufrey never stopped anyone from pigging out on the cocaine in the silver sugar bowl because Beaufrey got aroused when someone overdosed on the drug. “Beaufrey would love to watch you and me both OD,” Eric had said, laughing. “He gets it for nothing. An OD was a lot less expensive than a bullet.” Eric had been right on that point. When Beaufrey got rid of Seese, he had paid her off with a kilo of coke, assuming she would dispose of herself automatically. And Seese might have done that except she had never forgotten how Beaufrey had talked relentlessly about suicide. Most assholes in this world would obligingly kill themselves for you. No need for hired assassins. You might have to supply a woman, drugs, or a fast car and a gun. Beaufrey was watching Eric’s face as he spoke. Eric had smiled: “Oh, yes, the power of suggestion. Let’s all have a cup of poison Kool-Aid. Someone push the launch button of the big bomb.”

Eric had driven Seese to the doctor’s office, but waited in the car where he could smoke dope and play loud music. Eric had guessed it the minute he saw her face. “Test positive. And you want to keep it.” Seese felt a sinking in her chest because Eric had said “it.” Her throat was tight, but she tried to sound bouncy. “Him or her—it’s him or her, not
it.”

BOOK: The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel
3.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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