Tears of the Trufflepig

by Fernando A. Flores

  Impossible they could’ve hauled that house so fast, he thought. They’d have to take it in pieces, have it hauled by a couple of flatbeds, or hundreds of burros.

  He walked through yellow ankle-length grass toward the slave quarters, saw the door was slightly open behind the ragged, dusty screen door. He knocked quietly and listened for any movement. When he sensed the approval of silence, he shoved the door open. It felt warm in there, like there was a radiator going, or something was baking in an oven.

  Bellacosa, evoking the perverted old men from when he was a boy who catcalled the women going by, said in a loud voice, “Arroz.”

  Nobody responded, nothing moved, and he walked inside the long, wide room. The place was empty except for a desk at the far end supporting a monitor with many tentacle-like cables that dug into the wooden wall. A calendar by the door from three years ago advertised a mechanic shop named Taller Armendáriz. The ground appeared recently swept, and Bellacosa could smell cheap pine cone deodorizer. He walked to the monitor and could feel that the heat was emitting from this machine. It clicked in strange sequences and slightly shook. The screen displayed a succession of six looping images in color and black-and-white, of apparently the same scene from various angles.

  The images were of a warehouse with many aboveground muddy troughs about fifty feet long, like furrows of vegetables were being filtered and grown. People in white bodysuits walked around with clipboards as if inspecting the troughs, and there were men dressed in the Tejano style holding automatic weapons, as if they were goons overlooking prisoners. The color images revealed not vegetables, but slivers of flesh emerging from the mud in some of the troughs. The black-and-white cameras registered the flesh in a strange gray hue, like giant blades. The slivers looked like people to Bellacosa, as if they’d collectively been drowned naked in those furrows of a fake swamp.

  It dawned on him that the images were not various angles of one place, but different locations. The people with clipboards and the goons were all standing and moving differently in every successive image. Bellacosa stared at the flicker of the monitor for an interminable moment, then thought about himself being in the room in the first place and got the creeps, and he pulled himself away from the images and the monitor.

  Órale, viejo, he told himself, and hurried toward the door.

  Two Border Protector trucks had rolled in and there was an officer scanning the plates and registration on the old Jeep, while another captured a three-dimensional portrait of it with a special camera. Two officers stood about twenty feet in front of Bellacosa with weapons drawn, and the light-skinned one with bad acne said, “Manos arriba. With your hands up.”

  A dozen automatic weapons then pointed at Bellacosa. He raised his arms and said, “I’m an American citizen. I have rights.”

  A muscular female officer said, “Right. Frontsquad, show this American here his rights.”

  Two officers approached Bellacosa in shuffles of alligator movements. One of them pressed what looked like an electronic vampire bat to Bellacosa’s neck; it bit into his flesh and released a shock that brought Bellacosa to the ground, unconscious and shivering. The officers shackled his hands and his feet and carried him into one of the Border Protector vehicles as he convulsed.

  An officer wearing a purple visor said into his radio, “We’re gonna need the flatbed to come out here and haul a vehicle away. Here at the new McM Properties place. There was an intruder, but the situation is under control. Better get the paperwork going. Find its address of origin and have them leave it there. We don’t want another incident with people asking questions. Barbecue tonight, to celebrate the big game. Don’t forget to inform the rest of the crew, everybody. It’s gonna be a nice one.”

  * * *

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Valley, Paco Herbert was driving around in the Centaurus he’d managed to rent again with the last of his work stipend. He chewed on a piece of terebinth jerky, unable to stop adding up the things he’d read. He obsessed over the story of the great and final leader of the Aranaña tribe, Sopo, who was the first to vanish before their civilization mysteriously disappeared for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was the only account or legend he found published in any library’s information thread.

  Sometime in the fifteenth century, Sopo was the only son of the Aranaña emperor Tritbú and empress Bexexes. He was born on the day of the Eagle’s Tooth under both sun and moon daggers. Immediately after Bexexes gave birth, strange things occurred: birdlike fruit sprouted on cacti and flew away; a crowd of people learned to whistle in unison to lift fish from a lake; a child spotted a red-feathered hare and chased it into the ground, never to return. Legend had it the Aranaña people crossed effortlessly between reality and the world of dreams. They believed both worlds to be one and the same, so the lions and reptiles Sopo slayed in dreams were real events witnessed by all. When the Vulture Age changed into the Amalpa Age and the ritualistic succession of power occurred, Tritbú and Bexexes were cast into the Crystal World, the world of dreams, at Laguna de Sil. Afterward, to fulfill his ascendance to power, Sopo had to climb their volcano god Huixtepeltinico and rescue what academics from a certain era referred to as “el cerdo reptil”—a term first coined by the Mexican historian Dr. Lazaro Carranza, somewhat crudely translated by himself as “the Trufflepig.” This Trufflepig was not considered real by history’s standards, and if it existed no skeletal remains have been discovered. The Aranaña believed that since Sopo climbed the volcano Huixtepeltinico and rescued his Trufflepig, every member of the Aranaña tribe had their own Trufflepig to rescue, too, and in dreams had to climb the volcano to retrieve it. It was also Dr. Lazaro Carranza who proposed the Trufflepigs were a sort of mascot of the Aranaña subconscious, accessible to them only in a dream state.

  Scarcely anything of the Aranaña was known—their numbers or quotidian lives—except what was translated from scrolls written by Miguel Espinaplata de Marsé, the Spaniard who documented the Aranaña during the brief time he was acquainted with the tribe. This field writer alone is the only link modern history has to the Aranaña natives. The idea that Espinaplata de Marsé, a failed playwright whose father studied with the father of Lope de Vega, fabricated the tribe and their infamous legend has not been unpopular.

  Yet in the final section of the scrolls he states that Sopo, the Aranaña leader, after predicting unrest in the arriving age, chose to go off into the Crystal World not through the Laguna de Sil, as the ritual went, but through the Ballí Desert. Dr. Lazaro Carranza theorized that a different idea of a dream world began somewhere past the Ballí Desert, thus the leader Sopo, carrying his Trufflepig, walked into its silver horizon, and every day henceforth a new member of the Aranaña tribe followed suit with their own Trufflepig, until all of the Aranañas successfully disappeared. In his scrolls, Espinaplata de Marsé has almost no description of the Trufflepig, but there was supposedly a rough sketch that was very piglike, with hooves like a goat’s and a beak like an eagle’s. Unfortunately, the original scrolls went missing only a few years after their discovery in the ruins of a monastery, and Dr. Carranza was the only scholar to have studied them. He died in a car accident in Berlin around the time the Aranaña were rumored to have returned, and before he was able to publish a monograph on his findings, though fragments of his work were saved and cited by colleagues many years after his death. His research became a touchy matter for both Mexican and American governments, when they had to face the insurgence of Aranaña immigrants, and most of Carranza’s work, Paco Herbert concluded, was suppressed.

  The explanation that was chosen and bought by the history books and the press was that the Aranaña were refugees from Tlicolco Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, which had been closed off from the rest of civilization for centuries. Two generations of Aranaña had turned over since then; many of them learned to speak Spanish or English and were successfully assimilated into Western culture. Hidden forces made sure their unstudied language and culture died off with the elder refu
gees.

  Paco Herbert felt he was on to a big story now, not quite waving his hat in the air as he rode on the wild beast of it, but almost. Somebody, some entity, had been suppressing the knowledge and culture of the Aranaña. They’d gone through elaborate, if half-assed, means to even black out the few books that referred to them. But why? And the Trufflepig—after learning more about it, Paco Herbert couldn’t believe he’d come so close to one. What the fuck was the Trufflepig? If this world and our dreams were really one and the same, then what were the dreams we experienced in sleep? What was this world we called reality?

  He tried to work out an angle for Cecilia, his editor, chewing on the jerky and listening to Liberian gangster rap. Though Paco Herbert had seen the Trufflepig at the illegal dinner, he had a hard time connecting the two—what did this creature tied to the Aranaña have to do with the filtering syndicates and these dinners? And who was setting them up, now that the kingpin Pacheco was dead? The Mexican syndicates were too busy killing each other—the initial burst of violence needed time before things settled for it to be possible to see who had gained the most ground.

  Paco Herbert’s bulky cassette recorder sat on the passenger seat like a trained pug, determined to record the conversation he was planning to have with Bellacosa. The last of the daylight was burning. He wadded up the remaining jerky in its wrapper and threw it aside. It was time now to visit Bellacosa, to discuss what they remembered of the dinner, and to maybe share details with him of the things he’d learned.

  When he got to North MacArthur it had been dark over an hour. He’d stopped at three different stores before he found the Pinot Noir he craved, Acuña Roble from the Nieves Estate. Paco Herbert didn’t want to show up empty-handed.

  When he pulled up to the big house, it seemed strange to him a widower with no children would live there. Then he noticed the big house actually shared a yard with a shed converted to a living quarters: Bellacosa’s place.

  Sitting in the Centaurus, Paco Herbert wondered if the rumors of snow could possibly be true. He thought he saw a hooded figure move between the rustling shadows under the birch trees, in the garden that the house and shack shared. Paco Herbert watched for any movement in the darkness and where the streetlights shone, feeling very aware of his caged sobriety. For a few seconds he got paranoid. Paco Herbert lowered his window slightly, and from his breast pocket pulled out a thin silver whistle about four inches long and blew on it, pointing outside. It hit a strange note and spread like a pungent cadmium-yellow smell carried by the wind. He heard a few barking dogs. But nothing moved or crept from the birch trees again. He grabbed the Pinot Noir and almost took the tape recorder, too, but changed his mind. Paco Herbert told himself he’d come back to grab it in due time, and got out of the car. The old Jeep was parked along the curb, which is why Paco Herbert knew Bellacosa was home.

  * * *

  MUMBLING TO HIMSELF and slowly walking in circles around a graveyard, Oswaldo clutched at a pain in his stomach and took notice of the headstones surrounding him. He panicked and asked himself where he was while trying to take deep breaths. The headstones turned to branches swaying with the wind, and then Oswaldo took notice of the birch trees, the rustling of the bougainvilleas and anaquas, as the pain in his stomach receded. Oswaldo was outside his brother’s home. In the moonless night he kept forgetting how he got there and what his purpose was. Then the birch trees and the plants grew still and turned to headstones surrounding Oswaldo once again.

  He mumbled to himself, slipped one hand in his coat pocket, and kept playing with the large coins he kept in there, flipping them around, then clenching them like talismans. When Oswaldo pulled the coins out and saw they were actually coyote bones he admired their shine under the smoggy MacArthur sky. He shuffled the coyote bones around in his hand and they seemed to smile. That’s when the reality of his life flashed before Oswaldo and the pain in his stomach returned. With the help of Angelo, the Border Protector who’d found him, Oswaldo had arranged a meeting with his sons by the old airport near the border. When they met he saw his sons cry for the first time as grown men. It was harder to arrange anything with his ex-wife, but one night he got to see her from afar, which proved sufficient for Oswaldo. The only thing remaining was to see his brother, Esteban, one last time.

  Oswaldo felt his larger reality lowering slowly like a metallic curtain. Then he saw the bones, really saw the coyote bones resting in the palm of his hand. They seemed alive and eager to dance like a marionette. He mumbled something incoherently to himself, dropped to his knees, and with one hand dug a small hole in the cold ground. Oswaldo heard a strange whistle in the air and looked around in alarm. He threw the coyote bones into the dirt, mumbled louder to himself, and covered up the hole as all around his brother’s neighborhood dogs began to bark. Oswaldo clutched at his stomach and tried to stand up, but slipped and fell by the bones he’d buried.

  He swung like a pendulum between consciousness and the beyond; the unmistakable sound of a shutting car door boomed over and over from a pipe-tunnel darkness, followed by footsteps, then a soft knocking on a door. Oswaldo found a pocket of gray adrenaline within himself that reminded him he was expecting his brother, and he sprung up, jumped over the short perimeter fence. In front of Bellacosa’s door, holding a bottle of wine and about to light a cigarette, was Paco Herbert. Standing absolutely still, and obviously spooked, he whispered, “Buena hora,” but the pain in Oswaldo’s stomach had returned too painfully for him to respond, so he let out a groan instead.

  * * *

  BELLACOSA KNEW something bad had happened as he regained consciousness under bright orange lights. That he’d been in a car wreck or he’d been shot. He was on a stretcher, still wearing the dark blue suit and the Franco Brunis. He could barely move his fingers, but tried to feel his body for bandages or pain. There were no people around. He could hear electronic hummingbirds beeping from the lights beside him that shrunk, getting tighter and tighter, then popped open like Dalí’s melting clocks toward the ceiling. Through a large window on the wall was a sad newsroom with nobody in it. Everything inside the newsroom was turned off and a darkness that opened like an infinite mouth emerged. Bellacosa looked into the mouth as it told him everything that had happened. In a half-conscious state, feeling not quite human, he panicked and tried to get up. He flopped around and in his weakness tried pushing himself upward. Though he wasn’t strapped down, his efforts proved useless. He moved his rubbery lips to try talking and felt like a horse chewing tar, or an inebriated fish with long whiskers, and his limbs became one fin. He swam away like a fish, but he couldn’t swim. Bellacosa was trapped. He saw a couple of empty stretchers in the same room; one appeared recently soiled, the other heavily bleached. He heard a distant sound grow into a loud echo and a door opened.

  Two young scientists wearing eggshell-white bodysuits walked in along with a chubby, short man wearing a Smithson hat in the style of old westerns and dressed like he played conjunto music. In his arms he held what looked at first like a golden goose to Bellacosa, but turned into a gold-plated AK-47. The chubby man chewed gum loudly. He kept the weapon pointed at the young scientists in bodysuits, reminding them he could end it really fast for everybody whenever he wanted.

  The chubby man waved the golden goose at the two scientists to hurry it up. One of them grabbed Bellacosa’s ankles, the other pressed down on his shoulders to make sure Bellacosa lay flat, and together both scientists wheeled him out through a long, bright hallway that led through an open room like the vestibule of an empty hospital. Bellacosa was handled like he was a washed-up dolphin needing rehabilitation, but he felt more and more conscious and aware by the second.

  The young scientist in front of the stretcher kicked a door open. In the new room, various young scientists in similar bodysuits buzzed around with loud footsteps, some wearing surgical face masks. Bellacosa tilted his head to the left and saw a group of nervous scientists monitoring equipment in a huddle, and looking through a window into
a hospital-like room. Inside the shut room, propped on a cushioned, tall chair, Bellacosa saw a Trufflepig, like the kind they had at the clandestine dinner, only this one had sensors attached like a sinister wig on its body. The sensors led to machines displaying frantically changing readings with green digital numbers.

  A few feet from the Trufflepig, harnessed to a gurney, was a very big, strong Mexican man with tattoos along his arms and face. His exposed torso and temples were also attached to sensors. The tattooed man was screaming in pain, his face red and sweaty, with bloodshot eyes like prairie dogs caught fire bulging out of their burrows. His gurney was violently shaking, while, in contrast, the Trufflepig lay absolutely calm and still. The screaming then stopped and the big, strong Mexican man wasn’t moving anymore. He had given up the ghost. All the young scientists grew disappointed and resigned, like rabid fans tired of their soccer team losing. The door to the room was quickly opened and a couple more scientists walked in.

  A young female scientist removed the sensors, first from the dead man, then from the Trufflepig’s reptilian skin. They wheeled out the man’s body as a bearded scientist read numbers off the machine that had been attached to him. “This guy just had four heart attacks. A new record,” he said.

  “What’s the reading?” yelled a scientist surrounded by short tables with stacked and scattered files. He was outside the room with the Trufflepig, standing close to Bellacosa.

  “A hundred and twenty-seven per minute until it shocked him out.”

  “God damn.”

  Two men dressed like conjunto players with AKs perched over the scientists like gargoyles on a desecrated church, looking mean. Unlike the chubby man’s golden goose, their AKs were the color of old, rusted bumpers. The scientists were scraggly and disheveled, like they hadn’t bathed in days. Some looked sleep-deprived, and others wired with energy to the point of spontaneous combustion. They didn’t make eye contact with the armed men or one another.