Spirit of Tabasco

by Richard Diedrichs

heard her say, “You are my little prince,” I felt my heart swell in my chest and tears well in my eyes. I felt perfect peace, as if floating in deepest, darkest space.

  “Julian, Julian!”

  I looked up as Thuy waved her hand in front of my face. “Where the hell are you? We need help with your father.”

  Gordon leaned forward in the back seat, pushing against Johnny. He was crying, tears and snot running down his chin. “Please help me. I have to get him home. Please. I have to get him home.”

  “Thuy, can you pull off the freeway?” I said.

  Thuy moved to the right lane, steered the Corolla on to the shoulder of the road, and stopped.

  I turned to my father. “What are you talking about? What is in that mirror? Just now, as I looked into it, I was transported. It was so real. I believed I was there and could stay there forever.”

  “Put the mirror away. You have no idea. Please, help me get him back home,” my father said.

  I slipped the disk back in the sack. “You keep saying ‘him.’ Who is him? Jose Maria?”

  “The mirror tells me. All this business I have been doing, all this success. With him, I know what to do, where to go, who to talk to and when. I have an extra sense, an intuition, about the deals. I know what move to make at every turn. It’s a miracle. I’ve never felt this potent and capable in my life.”

  “So, what’s the problem?” Johnny said.

  “He wants to go home.”

  “You don’t speak Spanish, dude!” Johnny shouted.

  “I know, as sure as I know anything. And I don’t want to let him go. I’ll never get this power back.”

  “Do you know how crazy you sound, Mr. Laigle?” Thuy said.

  “You keep saying ‘he’ and ‘him.’” I said. “How do you know that it’s a man, and not a woman, or that whatever it is has a gender at all?”

  “Let me out of this car so I can take him where he needs to be.”

  “And if we don’t?” Johnny said.

  “I will go down. I’m already half way there.”

  “How do you know that’s what the spirit wants?”

  “John, please! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?"

  I blurted, “Mom says the mirror belonged to her grandmother. Nana’s mother. It’s been in our family for generations. It was in our house for years. That is home for him. That’s where he wants to be.” I had no idea why, but I felt completely certain about what I said.

  “The village of Buergos, in the state of Tabasco,” Gordon said.

  “So, you were headed for Mexico.” Johnny said.

  “You were going to take a bus all the way to Tabasco?” I said. “That’s over two thousand miles, Dad, over land filled with Mexicans.”

  “I have a question, if I may,” Thuy said. “If the mirror was in your house for all that time, why didn’t it ever speak to you before, Mr. Laigle? Why now?”

  Gordon looked at her from the back seat, with a puzzled expression, as if she were speaking Vietnamese.

  “I am guessing on this one,” I said. “It is only when he exerted his will over the mirror, over ‘him,’ ‘Jose Maria,’ whatever you want to call it. He looked into the mirror and felt the connection, just as I did. That is when the adventure began. Right, Dad?”

  “You children are not hearing me. Let me out of the car. I have to get him home.”

  “We are taking him, and you, home,” I said. “Thuy, please drive on.”

  Gordon swiveled his head around. “Before we go, I need to take a pee,” he said.

  “Now, Gordon, how gullible do you think we are?” Johnny said, gripping Dad’s forearm.

  “I do not have the mirror,” Gordon said. “You do.”

  “That sign says there are services at the next exit,” I said. “I have to pee, too.”

  “Me, three,” Thuy said.

  Thuy pulled up behind a Chevron station, in front of the restroom doors.

  Standing on the asphalt, I let Gordon go in first, as Thuy went into the women’s. I took my turn after my father came out and stood beside Johnny. I could only imagine what the two of them would talk about. When I came out, no one was around.

  When I got back to the car, Johnny and Thuy stood, watching me approach.

  “Where’s Dad?” I said.

  “He escaped,” Johnny said. “We all went into the mini-mart together. He said he wanted to grab some Gatorade. The next thing I knew I was looking down all the aisles and he was gone.”

  “Did you look to see if the mirror is on the front seat?” I walked toward the front passenger side window.

  “Don’t bother,” Johnny said.

  “Why did you let him out of your sight?” I said.

  “We were not handcuffed together. He needed something in the next aisle. I can’t help it if he is a lying skunk.”

  “You didn’t think to lock the car with the mirror in there, or take it with you?”

  “Yeah. Of course I thought of it, in hindsight.”

  “He just got away, Jules,” Thuy said.

  When we drove back to the freeway, I looked for Gordon. I thought we might catch him hitchhiking at the onramp, headed south, back to Mexico He was gone, nowhere to be seen. He could have been hiding behind a bush, disk in hand, watching us.

  “What now, Sherlock?” Johnny said.

  “Head home. We have been outsmarted by Gordon, and his spirit-assisted superpowers.”

  On the way back to L.A., I thought about my reverie in the reflection of the onyx disk. I had been transported to more than a dream state. It felt as real as the dream I normally lived in, day to day, and it did not seem distorted or disconnected, like a sleeping dream. I was present in some dimension with my grandmother. It was not mere memory or projection. I felt in my body the love and peace, and her presence as strongly as I ever did when I was with her, in real-time, during her lifetime. No wonder Gordon was willing to perish rather than lose his grip on that mirror.

  At Karl’s birthday party, on a Thursday evening, I was eating German chocolate cake at our Buena Vista duplex. The phone rang and Thuy came to the table to tell me that my mother said that Ellie was calling. I had not talked to Ellie for two weeks, since we were last there at my Dad’s place, looking for Gordon and the disk.

  When we came home from San Ysidro, I told my mother what had happened, and she said, “At this point, Jules, let it be. It will all work out the way it’s supposed to. I can see that now. The mirror will find its way home, with or without your father.”

  By home I knew exactly where that was, and it had nothing to do with wherever my father was going. Let it be, she said.

  “How’s your ocular migraine?” I asked Ellie when I picked up the phone.

  “I’m feeling fine, Julian. Thank you for asking. It is probably because I am not stuck in the middle of your father’s insanity. Well, hardly stuck.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you and your brother come over to his place?”

  “You mean now? We are in the middle of a birthday party.”

  “This is important, Julian. Your father is in deep shit, as you might say.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to my mother. I have a day off from school tomorrow, so it should not be a problem. Is it okay if Johnny brings his girlfriend? She’s here at the party with us.”

  “I don’t care who you bring, just get here as soon as you can. I am tired of dealing with all this.”

  When Ellie seated us in my father’s living room and provided sodas all around, she sat on a metal folding chair across from the sofa. “Your father called me,” she said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Stranded in Mexico,” she said.

  “Tabasco?”

  “I don’t hear a word from him for weeks and he calls collect. He is in Veracruz. In a place called Coatzacoalcos, on the coast.”

  “How did he get there?”

/>   “He was staying in Emilio Carranza.”

  “In or with?”

  “Emilio Carranza is a place. I google-earthed it. It’s about two hundred and fifty miles north of where he is now,” she said.

  “Stranded? What happened to the mirror?” I said.

  “I thought he was going to some village in Tabasco, to take it home, or take him home,” Johnny said.

  “The mirror is missing. He said he was staying at a hotel in Emilio Carranza and it was just gone,” Ellie said.

  “Somebody stole it? Wow!” Johnny said. “We could not separate him from it, as hard as we tried.”

  “You are kidding, right?” I said.

  “Your father did not say someone stole it. He said it was missing. It was not there, in his room, with him. He made that distinction clear.”

  “Okay! So, what’s up with Gordon?”

  “He said he is not leaving until he knows where the mirror is. He is going on to a place called Buergos in Tabasco to see if it is there. He said he will not be able to return for a year and seven months if he does not find the mirror and take it home.”

  “A year and seven months? Why a year and seven months?” Johnny said.

  “Why didn’t he call me?” I said.

  “All of it is as crazy to me as it is to you,” Ellie said, lifting her hands in the air like two spooked birds and letting them crash smack on her thighs. “Gordon sounds on the edge. I do know that if he does not get back to his business, everything he has put together in the past few months will fold. He is on very thin ice here. It will not survive for another year and a half without him.”

  “I thought you were bailing on him,” Johnny said.

  Ellie pinned my brother with a baleful stare. “John, I have a responsibility here. Your father is still paying me a salary. And I