by Jadie Jang
“Because,” she said after a moment, “it’s been really hard at the magazine the past six months and you haven’t been helping. I know you don’t have time and you have your own jobs to do, but I see you getting involved in Ayo’s shit, whatever it is—”
“Ayo’s ‘shit,’ Baby? Are you kidding me? That’s my job! ‘Ayo’s shit.’ Blow me.”
She lost her temper again. “No, bitch, blow me. I wasn’t gonna say anything, but I know your girl is selling fake superstitious shit. What did you call it? ‘Merman’s penis’? She’s selling that shit and I know it. Do you?”
I did know that, in general, Ayo sometimes dealt in some sketchy shit, but none of it was fake and all of it was ethically sourced, as far as she could tell. And all of it was beyond Baby to understand. “What are you even talking about, Baby?” I practically screeched.
She stood up, practically yelling herself now. “I had a meeting with Salli! And she was talking to somebody on the phone, really angry! And she told me you were asking her about the Hung For Tong! And that she heard that they were offering to sell two aswang wings after you talked to her!! Did you set that up, Maya? Did you??”
I didn’t respond. I was in shock. Aswang wings? Oh. My. God.
Baby went on without looking at me, pacing back and forth in front of the bench. “I can’t believe you would play on people’s ignorance and superstition that way!! What is wrong with you?!?” She finally stopped, and looked up, and must’ve seen the shocked look on my face … and completely misunderstood it.
“Oh, it wasn’t you,” she said, suddenly calm again. “Oh, Maya, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed—”
I still couldn’t respond. I had suspected that the Hung For people might have Dalisay’s body, but … I didn’t realize how much I’d been hoping she was alive. If they were offering her wings, there was no way Dalisay was still breathing. Salli must’ve taken the opportunity to pass along a message to me … instead of calling me? Because … because … oh my god, she hadn’t mentioned Dalisay to Baby, just the aswang wings. She knew. That’s why she didn’t want to tell me directly. She was telling me that she knew.
We were both silent for a while, but when Baby spoke again, it was more hard than apologetic. “Okay,” she said, “I can see I was hasty in assuming … things. But seriously, Maya, you can’t exactly blame me for not wanting to see you getting involved in Chinese gangs again. And I see you getting involved in this other gang thing with Tez that’s taking up so much of your time, but is most definitely not your responsibility, and spending all your extra time here” she gestured at the encampment, “and you have no time or patience for your own magazine, which is your responsibility. I mean, we’re in deep shit, financially, and it’s like you don’t even care.”
We sat on opposite sides of the bench, not speaking or looking at each other. Some perverse wind brought the smell of her unscented beeswax lip balm to my nose, a smell I always associated with her, but it gave me nothing today. I hoped she would take herself off before somebody said the wrong thing and we fell back into fighting again.
But she just looked at me.
I tried to remember my conflict resolution training, but my mind was in too much chaos.
“Okay, Baby, I heard you.”
She waited another moment, then stood up. “I hope you did. I think we’ll skip drinks tonight. See you later.” And she walked off, if not in a huff, then definitely in somewhat of a raspberry.
Fortunately, Ayo called soon after and gave me something to focus my distress on. She was just checking in, worried about me after my reaction to Aahil’s death today. Truth be told, I’d forgotten about Aahil as soon as Baby showed up. Maybe I just didn’t have the wherewithal to explain two deaths to her … no, make that three … four … though with Justin, that was five …
I told Ayo about Hung For and the rumor that they had aswang’s wings for sale. Ayo’s voice got hard—a reaction that I rarely heard, and never messed with when I heard it.
“Okay, that’s it. I’m gonna handle this now,” she said.
“What are you gonna do?”
“I’ll arrange a sit-down—no, I’ll make a sit-down happen. And I’ll make them tell us what happened. Best stay out of this and drop the Dalisay issue now, Maya. Focus on trying to find that shadow creature.”
I agreed to do what she said and, for once, I meant it. Maybe by playing hardball she’d pry some real answers out of those idiots, but as for me: I was done up and done in. All of my specific questions had been answered, but I was still no closer to knowing, for certain, what had happened to Dalisay. And I had no new ideas.
Maybe it was the “new ideas” thought that got me going, because sometime that night—probably closer to morning, since I’d spent several hours between the general assembly and going to bed in another fruitless search for the shadow—I sat up in bed, going fully awake from complete sleep, but remembering no internal dream or external noise that had awakened me. I awoke with a fully developed thought: the stick.
The thought broke down like this:
First, I realized that I’d been assuming the stick was passive—I mean, just being handed around—but was it, really? I’d had a feeling of distant power from the stick, plus a flare of magic from it, which I’d assumed meant “transformation,” … but it also could have meant “deceit.” And Chucha said the stick talked to her. Did it? Was the stick … making things happen?
Second, Tez and Chucha were affected strongly by the stick; I wasn’t; humans were affected but couldn’t handle it; and I had no idea how a werewolf or a bajang were affected, if at all. Somehow, I’d been assuming that I was the only one unaffected by it, but really, I had no idea how it affected other supernats. Could it be that only Tez and Chucha were that strongly affected by it?
Which led me to: if only Tez and Chucha were made weird and giddy by the stick, was that a family issue? A nagual issue? Something else?
Then I remembered the stick’s name: Huexotl. Ayo had said it was a Nahuatl word, and that maybe it affected Chucha and Tez more strongly because it was from the same cultural realm. What if it wasn’t just from the same cultural realm but … but what? What if its magic matched theirs somehow? But how? I wasn’t sure what question to ask, but there was something there.
I needed to know: to know what role the stick really played in all this.
I shook my head, trying to move my thinking forward. That was how I noticed that I was still sleep-groggy, after all. I lay back down and went almost immediately back to sleep. “Almost,” because one more thought went through my head before blackness descended: time to start looking into the Varelas directly. Maybe I could find their “family friends” tomorrow … And maybe I could find Tez before the pile-up of villains started piling up on him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Friday, October 21, 2011
Tez’s House, San Francisco
According to his car registration, Tez lived in one of a row of grand old three-story, wedding-cake Victorians, of which there was a surfeit in the Mission. The houses on either end of the row were fully restored and painted in faintingly precise, six-color detail, their driveways newly re-cemented in a fashionable grey and fresh asphalt. The one on the right was framed by new, young Japanese maples; the one on the left had created a public “parklet” in the parking space in front of their house, complete with a cement mini-maze of benches and a bamboo-boxed succulent and cactus garden.
Tez’s house was one of three in the middle that were each painted one cheap color with monochromatic trim: terra cotta, olive green, steel blue. Like the sisters who married for love in a Jane Austen novel, their resemblance to their wealthy sisters made the difference in their condition all the more poignant: their fine details rotted or torn away, and their driveway cement, devoid of greenery, cracked and pitted. And like those poorer sisters, they were overrun with offspring.
Although the lovely parklet was clean and empty, the garage in the blue house to the left o
f Tez’s was spilling over with boxes and half-glimpsed men working on an engine. One of the terra cotta doors to the right of his house opened, and a young woman came out with a baby bound to her chest, hidden entirely behind a trailing blanket. And the central staircase leading to Tez’s olive green doorway seemed packed with what were really only three men: middle-aged, work-clothed, eating. As I parked and got out, they watched, silently, six eyes that turned the whole street into a panopticon.
“Hey,” one of them said, as I walked up. “Whatchu doing with Tez’s car?”
I had bet myself that I could find someone hanging around on his block who could point me in the direction of old family friends, and this was about as promising as you could get. I looked more closely at him: wide face, dramatic nose … wait a minute! He was Ayo’s client, the guy I’d seen in her car, who had come to see her at Sanc-Ahh the other day. The guy who wanted—probably, Ayo wouldn’t confirm—the instructions to the stick. Okay. And he apparently knew Tez. Maybe was even … probably was one of his neighborhood … what did he call them? Padrinos? A few things clicked vaguely in my mind.
He obviously recognized me, but wasn’t saying anything about it in front of his buddies—another mind-click—so I decided to follow suit.
“Trying to return it to him. Is he home?”
The client merely raised his goateed chin, but the other two exchanged a glance.
“Why’d he give you his car?” the client asked again.
“He didn’t. He freaked out and left it behind.”
The client frowned and the other two looked at each other again.
“When was this?” one of the others, wearing a Kangol duckbilled cap, asked.
“Tuesday,” I said. They looked meaningfully at each other. “Yes, the night Chucha died.” All three looked at me. “I was there.” They just stared. “He was freaking out. I kept the car because I was afraid he was gonna go back to Fruitvale and pick a fight …” I noticed I was babbling a lot of info without confirming these were the guys I was looking for. “Are you friends of the family? … Or maybe you’re family? No, he said he didn’t have any family left in the city.”
The client seemed to have an entire conversation with his buddies without speaking. But they seemed to decide in my favor.
“Well, the closest thing they’ve got right now. It’s true they don’t have any family left nearby, so we look out for them.” Tez’s Padrinos, check. Maybe they were hanging out on his steps waiting for him as well. Ayo’s client got up, came the rest of the way down the steps, and held out his hand. “I’m Amoxtli.”
I took his hand and held it as a lifeline. Incomprehensible names made me nervous. “Amosh … ti?”
“Aahh-Mosh-Tuh-Lee, but you say the last part all together, like ’tlee’.”
“Amoxtli.”
“Perfect.”
I shook his hand finally and let go. “Maya.”
“You his new girlfriend?” Kangol hat asked. Amoxtli shot a look of annoyance at him. “New” girlfriend? Did he actually have a new girlfriend that they knew about and hadn’t met yet, or were they just guessing at me? … Focus, Maya.
“Nope. I went to Cal with Tez.”
“That’s Jaime,” Amoxtli said, Jaime touched his hat, “and that’s Mike,” the third man waved and I waved back. “Tez isn’t home yet,” Amoxtli said. “He hasn’t been back to work this week, but he hasn’t been home much, either.” He paused. “He asked to borrow my car, wouldn’t tell me what happened to his, but I made an excuse. He … did seem to be looking for a fight.” He paused again.
“What’s your interest in Tez?” Jaime asked, and Amoxtli shot him another annoyed look. Jaime was unrepentant.
I sighed and leaned against the cracked plinth supporting the base of the staircase’s hand rail. Amoxtli sat down again. I told them the sanitized version of the story: that I worked for a sort of spiritual leader in Oakland whom Tez knew and I had gone through similar trouble in my youth, and that was why I was asked to talk to Chucha. They seemed aware that Tez was … er, “interested in alternative spiritualities.”
“Yeah,” Amoxtli told his friends casually, “Ayo’s that Iyalawo I’ve been talking to. I was trying to get that book from her.” This was news to me.
“What book?” Mike asked. Yeah, dude, what book?
“You know how Tez was all interested in nagualism?” Amoxtli said, still very casual. Wait, what?
Mike rolled his eyes and Jaime grinned.
“I can’t believe you’re encouraging him with that New Age shit,” Mike said.
“Better than some trouble he could get up to,” reasoned Jaime, with amusement.
Well that cleared up where Mike and Jaime were on the belief scale.
“Whatever,” Amoxtli said, slightly huffily. “You know he’s into that stuff. And true nagualism is syncretic anyway, a product of colonization.” Oh, really?
Jaime grinned wider. “You sound like Tez now.”
“Well, he’s onto something. Anyway, I was trying to get ahold of a first edition of this book this white dude in the 19th century wrote about it, you know, for his birthday, and Ayo was gonna help me with that.” He turned to me suddenly. “You know if she’s gotten ahold of it yet?”
It took a moment for me to pierce my own confusion enough to notice that my eyes had been flaring throughout this whole interaction. He was lying about the book, although I knew exactly which book he meant; I’d read it this week on Project Gutenberg. I looked at him more closely and he was giving me what I thought might be his meaningful look. Oh. Oh. He meant the instructions!
“I think you’re out of luck, dude,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “She sold that book a while ago.”
Amoxtli looked deflated. Hadn’t Ayo told him that? Of course she had. He didn’t want to believe her and was hoping I’d tell him otherwise. Well, two could play that game.
“Ayo told me you were a bit of an expert on nagualism yourself,” I said, making it up as I went along.
I was rewarded by a shocked looked from all three, although I think Amoxtli was more shocked that Ayo had betrayed him. She hadn’t, but he didn’t need to know that.
“I’ve read a couple of books …” he said, confusedly.
“Are there any shadow monsters in Meso American mythology?”
He looked relieved. “Ayo asked me the same thing. Not really. I mean, the god Tezcatlipoca, whom Tez is named after, is a god of darkness, but not specifically of shadow. There are darkness gods and darkness creatures—”
I interrupted. “How about magic sticks?”
Amoxtli went dead silent. Jaime and Mike looked at each other; Mike with disdain, and Jaime with continuing amusement. But Amoxtli’s eyes were narrowing at me in a menacing way, and I realized that this dude might be a little more formidable than I had anticipated. He probably thought Ayo had looked at the instructions before she’d sold them … if she’d sold them at all.
“The Aztecs didn’t put magic into objects,” he said, shortly. That was … weirdly specific. My mind clicked again. I needed to get this guy alone.
He took a deep breath. “Now … can you … tell me what happened? To Chucha?”
Oh, yeah, I should probably let him change the subject. I told them the sanitized version of Tuesday night, rearranging some facts to let them know that Chucha had been guarding something (I didn’t know what, but hinted that it was some sort of commodity) that belonged to the San Antonios and I suspected that Tez now had it and was being stubborn and vengeful and not wanting to give it back.
“So you don’t know if the 70s actually killed her?” Amoxtli asked.
“Nobody does. There wasn’t a mark on her but, like I said, they saw the guys running away from where she fell. So nobody’s gonna know until the autopsy is done. … They are doing an autopsy, right?”
Amoxtli shrugged. “Tez isn’t really saying much about anything.”
“Is this how he gets when there’s trouble?” I asked. Amoxtli lo
oked askance at me. “We’re acquaintances, not friends. I don’t know him well enough to know how he deals with things like this.” I hesitated. Time to start drawing them out. “I know there’s been a lot of tragedy in his family …”
Amoxtli sighed and the other two men shook their heads in sympathy. “Nothing but bad luck since they moved up here,” he said.
I asked how long he’d known them, and that seemed the key to unlocking Amoxtli’s tongue. Boy, was the guy a hot, fluent raconteur, once you got him going, and he spent the next hour filling me in on the Varela family back story through dramatic epics and funny anecdotes.
Turns out, Amoxtli was an old family friend. He had gone to elementary school in Mexico with Tez’s dad, Ome, and their families had emigrated together when the boys were twelve. Amoxtli’s parents brought him along, but Ome’s parents left him behind with a half-uncle, planning to settle in and find permanent jobs before bringing their son up. Unfortunately Ome’s parents died in an accident less than a year after they arrived, so they never brought Ome to the States.
My eyes started to flare up now and again, but it seemed it was at small, unimportant details in the story. I just chalked it up to Amoxtli’s artfulness as a storyteller: adding in not-strictly-factual details to spice up the narrative.
“I didn’t see him again until we were 20. I’d gotten big, from all that American food, and he’d gotten handsome, I guess from good genes. I’m not sure which of us was luckier.” Ome came to the US after marrying Tez’s mother, Pilar, and they did seasonal work back and forth between the Central Coast and San Francisco before they found permanent jobs in the city and started their family. Things seemed to be going well for them for several years. Ome was a sort of leader in the community: mature before his time, wise and able to resolve conflicts; men twice his age would come to him for help and advice. Each of these hints caused a bit of a flare in my eyes and I revised my notion of Amoxtli’s lies as pure artistry. Perhaps he did know about the whole nagual thing. I was gonna have to get Amoxtli alone, sooner rather than later.
