Saint Death

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Right, thinks Arturo. Right. Right, right, right.

  He thinks about the shape in the back of the truck, lying on the floor between the four men, something long and bulky and wrapped in plastic, bound with black tape. He thinks about what business El Carnero could possibly have in Anapra at two in the morning, and he thinks about Gabriel, who ran the hardware store, till five o’clock this afternoon.

  No temas a donde vayas, que haz de morir donde debes.

  * * *

  They ride.

  Juárez is left behind as they climb up toward the sierra, and Anapra.

  —¿Which way, niño?—El Carnero asks, at every intersection, and Arturo can do nothing but tell the truth.

  —Right—he says, as they reach Pulpo, another of the beasts of the sea, and then they are pulling up outside Arturo’s shack, and he realizes this is his last chance to beg for his life.

  —Please, you have to understand. This is where I live. ¡Look! I don’t have four thousand dollars. Please. I’ll pay you back, somehow, but you have to understand. I don’t have any money.

  El Carnero listens, showing no emotion at all.

  —Please—Arturo begs—I don’t have any dollars, I don’t have any money at all.

  —I know you don’t—El Carnero says, and then he’s fishing around in his jacket pocket and Arturo thinks, Let it be quick, but then he sees that El Carnero has pulled out his phone.

  He holds it up.

  The flash blinds Arturo’s eyes.

  He’s still blinking, trying to see, as El Carnero says—Just in case you decide to run. You know you can’t. ¿Right? I send this to the boys in Barrio Azteca, they send it everywhere else. Everywhere in Chihuahua, everywhere in Texas, everywhere in California. Everywhere. ¿You understand? I know you do. I’ll be back tomorrow for my cash, around sunset. Now get out of here, we have work to do.

  Arturo stumbles from the cab, the afterburn of the camera flash still blinding him, so that he cracks his head on the lintel of his door as he makes his way in.

  He staggers to his bed in the dark, and lies down, and for a while he can think nothing. He is empty, he is gone. His body is no more than a shell; for breathing, for holding his pounding heart somewhere while it beats its last few beats on this earth.

  He senses something warm on his face and, feeling his skull, finds that he’s bleeding from where he cracked it on the doorway. He holds his fingers there for a while, nausea and exhaustion sweeping into him in powerful ocean waves, stronger and stronger each time, and his head is swimming, trying to swim, to climb out of the black waters, but this darkness is something he cannot fight.

  There are sounds outside, from the sierra, from the no-man’s-land between here and El Norte. Then the shooting starts. Cracks of pistol fire and the stammering of automatic weapons. Distant shouts come down from the hill, but despite it all, Arturo is utterly exhausted.

  He sleeps.

  ARTURO’S DREAM

  Arturo dreams a dream that lasts for centuries.

  He hovers above the ground—this, the center of the world—and looks down from the starry heavens upon his own form, lying still on his bed. It is a pure, clear Mexican desert night, and the sky is an indigo sheet and the diamond stars are the eyes of apocalyptic monsters who have spent millions of years waiting for this moment, when everything on this corrosive earth is ready, when everything is aligned just so; when the world is ready to burn.

  For now, all is calm. The distant hills to the north are a page of black paper set against the sky, and the glow of the conjoined and deformed twins that are Juárez and El Paso tinges a few nighttime clouds with dirty orange.

  In Anapra, the beasts of the sea sense that the time has come. They erupt from their dirt tracks and begin to swim up and down the streets that bear their names, a few feet off the ground, swimming easily through the air. A salmon here, crossing with the shark. Fish of all kinds: turbot and bream, and carp, intersecting with the conger eel, the octopus. Then Arturo realizes that they are not the fish themselves he can see, but merely their letters, their names, which are swimming. The word salmón glides past a scuttling crab. A whale lumbers beside a shoal of small, flickering sardines.

  Still all is calm, and then, something drops from the high heavens where Arturo looks down at the world. It is something burning, a rag. It is a rag dipped in gasoline; burning, incendiary. It takes minutes to fall from the sky, minute after minute, quite beautiful; tumbling, flaming, sparking, fuming black smoke in the blackness, and then it touches the ground, and Anapra erupts into a fireball.

  Everything is alight, everything burns. The houses burn and the hospital burns and the gas station burns and the firestorm is so intense that even the ground itself begins to burn. Arturo sees people running from their homes, and their clothes are on fire, and their skin and their hair, and their eyes are on fire and their hearts are on fire, and they are screaming but Arturo sees that he is still lying in his bed, peaceful, calm.

  Arturo looks away from the burning people. He wonders about the sea creatures. As he gazes down from his dizzying height, he is surprised to see that they are untouched by the fire, and they swim on through the flames as if they were water, and then he thinks, That’s to be expected; they are only words, after all, but then he sees something else.

  Distracted by the inferno, he has not noticed that the few clouds in the sky have grown, that they are even now multiplying and spreading across the sky. They’re tall and weighty clouds, towering up above the mountains, looming, and then with a sudden crack and beat, lightning skewers the world; a single bolt that splits into three as it penetrates and there is a long silence then; long, empty and full of threat, after which the thump of the thunder shakes the ground, disturbing old things that would be better left to rot.

  On that stroke, the rain comes.

  It is a storm like no other since the forging of the world, and water hammers down from the sky, and even the furnace that is Anapra burning cannot resist it. The flames are extinguished, and in their place, the water rises.

  The world drowns now, as Arturo looks on. He sees the burned bodies of his neighbors vanish under the surface of the rising water, sees their burned mouths fill with water as they disappear from sight; he sees the fish swimming in their true habitat, content at last, real animals now, no longer just words, and the rain falls, falls, falls and that word, now that it is in Arturo’s mind, can be ignored no longer as he understands that there is no way he can hover in the sky, that he is standing on nothing, that he is clinging to nothing.

  He falls, tumbling toward the water, which is swallowing the earth. Just like the burning rag, it takes him minutes to fall, and the water is rising at an ever-increasing rate, so that now only the summit of Mount Cristo Rey is visible.

  Arturo sees that he is falling toward himself, still lying motionless in the bed where he is dreaming and he breaks the surface of the sea and plunges down and into himself and then his eyes jerk open and he breathes lungful after lungful of water. Desperate for life, desperate for birth, he claws his way through the broken roof of his shack and soars up out of the water and into the sky, landing on the slopes of the hill where, above him, Christ stands with his arms outstretched, forgiving everyone.

  Arturo climbs the mountain and takes his place. He steps inside the figure of Jesus the King and, cursing everyone, he holds his arms out wide. Like a radio antenna, he begins to collect. From the twin cities beneath him, from Anapra, from Mexico, from America, he collects.

  Words, sentences, phrases, thoughts, fears, desires. He pulls them all into him, and they are conversations and essays and dreams. They are websites and they are novels. They are racist rants in cyberspace and they are biased media reports. They are messages from narco-lords scrawled in blood on bedsheets and they are bigoted tirades of presidential candidates. They are the rattled thoughts of the dying addict, the undoubting proclamations of the religious leader. They are prayers, statistics, beliefs, opinions, ideas and verdic
ts and aspirations and judgments; they are hate and hope and they come at him in Spanish and English and a bastard mixture of the two, mestizo.

  The voices tumble into Arturo, King Arturo, and every one hurts him, every single one gives him pain and he curses them all but he forgives them all too, and the voices shout and fight, they agree and disagree, but no matter what they say, no matter who they are, no matter where they come from, they are all saying the one and same thing.

  * * *

  ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost? ¿What have we lost?

  * * *

  DEATH AND THE IDEA OF MEXICO

  As Arturo wakes from his dream, he immediately knows that one person was absent from it. The bony girl, the beautiful one. Santa Muerte has abandoned him, he knows, but then, he knew that last night as the fatal cards came down. She has abandoned him, and maybe he should never have asked her for help, maybe she is too demanding. Or, just maybe, he didn’t pray hard enough, he is not devout enough, and perhaps there is still time to prove himself to her, and the world.

  He sits up and from nowhere his head throbs so badly it makes him reel. His fingers gingerly find the place on his skull where he cracked his head and he feels a scab forming and blood, still sticky. He doesn’t really remember his dream, just snatches of it. His mind is on other things, he feels lousy, as if hung over from the fear. He gets up and goes to wash his head, leaving a small plastic dish of blood-reddened water behind. He stumbles out into the cold morning.

  It is early, and he shivers, but the sun is up and begins to warm him and then he turns and sees Mount Cristo Rey and he sees Christ the King, and with that, his dream comes back to him, all of it.

  It means nothing.

  It means nothing. There are only two things that matter. The first is that he is dead. As good as. The second thing is that there was gunfire in the night, on the high sierra. Gunfire, and he doesn’t know what it means; whether it was a war between gangs, or a gang in a shootout with the police, which is more or less the same thing, or the Americans, but he prays it wasn’t a gang of pollos, and if it was, he hopes that the people Eva and the baby were crossing with were using someplace else.

  He thinks she’s probably okay. Coyotes don’t use Cristo Rey so much anymore. He’s heard some stories about tunnels to the east of Juárez, and someone told him about the cattle market a few kilometers to the west of Anapra. He forgets the name, but it’s a big place, with cattle pens on both the Mexican and American sides of the border, just feet from each other, and they have their own border crossing, a border crossing for livestock only, except during the hours of darkness, when the night guards take a share of the coyotes’ fee to turn a blind eye to some human traffic. It’s supposed to be one of the safest places to cross and will stay that way until some official or high-ranking policeman stops taking his sobre, his envelope, to forget it’s happening. And you don’t stop taking your envelope because the alternative to that is a bullet. Arturo hopes Eva went that way.

  He’s struck by thirst and hunger and goes back inside to take a long drink of water. From under his bed he pulls out a plastic tub, and snapping off the lid he eats the last of the tortillas he has been keeping. He chews them without thinking, without feeling. He will find some better food later; for now he just needs something to stop his hunger, so he can think.

  He thinks about the task before him, and he knows it is almost impossible. He thinks about running, but as tempting as that idea seems, he knows that it is foolish, and pointless. He has no money, nowhere to go, no one to hide him, no papers. The desert is wide and the cities even more hostile for someone like him. And they are everywhere. If he runs, they will kill him once they find him whether he has the money or not, because it will no longer be about the money, but about their twisted ideas of honor.

  Arturo thinks about Faustino, and wonders what he thought when he never showed up. He wonders if something has happened to him, or whether he will turn up any second, wanting to know if he’s been saved.

  Arturo knows that he has not saved his friend. Worse than that, he had the thousand in his hands, he could have walked, he should have walked, he should have run out of there and through the streets to find Faustino. He didn’t. He saw the chance to become someone better, and, greedily, he went after it, and in doing so he has doomed them both. Yet Faustino still has a day to find his thousand dollars, which is better odds than Arturo has, for he has a day to find four thousand.

  No, he thinks. I must find five. I must find four for me and one for Faustino. It’s my fault, it’s my fault. We could be laughing about it all now, but it’s my fault. We could be sitting in luxury in his place on Calle Libertad and laughing about it, but we’re not, and it’s my fault.

  Instead, he has to achieve the almost impossible, but there is one little thing that is keeping him going, and that is the word almost. Almost impossible, almost, and that word gives him the slightest chance, and the slightest hope. He knows people in Anapra; there are good people, people who try to live well, live normal lives, people who want nothing to do with the drugs, and the violence that goes with them. There are people he knows who might have some dollars stashed away. Maybe he can borrow and beg his way to survival.

  He’s about to leave when he thinks again about Faustino. ¿What if he comes while I’m out? He needs to get moving, but he must get in touch with Faustino somehow, must at least leave him a note of some kind. Quickly, he hunts around the shack for something to write with, something to write on. He does not have these things. In the end the best he can find is his pack of calavera cards and a ballpoint that does not work. He experiments a little and finds that he can just about scrawl letters by dipping the tip of the ballpoint into the water that is heavily tainted with his blood.

  He chooses the four aces since they have the most white space on which to write and then he stops, wondering what he should say.

  He thinks about what happened. He thinks about what El Carnero said about sunset. He thinks about the task ahead of him. Then he writes.

  On the first ace, he writes: F—Sorry.

  On the second: Still trying.

  On the third: Meet me here at five.

  On the fourth, on the fourth …

  On the fourth card he hesitates, for a long, long time, then he thinks, ¡Cabrón! and without thinking any more he writes, carefully and steadily, in his own blood: I love you. A.

  He shuts the door to his shack. It has a beveled edge reinforcing its flimsy surface. This surround is coming away and there’s a tiny crack into which he slips the edges of the four playing cards, one above the other, at eye height, face out. Faustino will see them. He will be able to read them, Arturo hopes, though the blood and water mix is faint and fading already as it dries in the morning sunlight.

  Faustino will read them. He will return at five, by which time Arturo will have found four, no five thousand dollars, and he will give Faustino his money, and they will both be saved.

  Arturo sets off, walking fast down Salmón and then taking Ballena and Sìluro in order to avoid the hill at the top of Cangrejo.

  He’s at the
point where Sìluro crosses the lower end of Cangrejo, when a truck comes crawling over the ridge of that hill. He sees it’s a federal police truck, a dark-blue pickup with a roll cage on the back. There are two guys in the cab, as always, and four behind, all wearing bulletproof jackets and face masks. They hold their guns slung toward the ground, and Arturo does not look at them as they edge by him. He feels their stares on the back of his neck, but he keeps his head down and he keeps walking and then, as it passes him, the truck picks up speed heading toward Rancho Anapra.

  Two minutes later he finds out why.

  He sees the truck parked behind two others on the main street, right outside Gabriel’s store. There are cops standing around and a small crowd of people. There are shouts and he sees a woman screaming and yelling at one of the policemen. Each time she shoves him away, she falls wailing to the ground behind her and crouches over something lying in the street. Arturo sees what that something is: a long heavy bundle wrapped in white plastic and bound with tape. She’s pawing at the plastic and people are pulling her away and the cop is shouting at her while others are speaking into radios. From time to time she gets up again and yells at the cop some more, pushing him away and telling him to leave, that they’re not welcome.

  As Arturo comes closer he hears what the cop is saying. He’s snapping orders at the people gathered around, snapping and ordering Gabriel’s widow to stand away, that she is tampering with evidence.

  —¡Evidence!—she shouts.—¿What evidence? ¡Evidence that you are incompetent, that you are useless! ¡Corrupt! ¡Go away! ¡Go away and leave us alone!

  Arturo knows who did this to Gabriel, and his wife. He does not stop walking. For a split second he sees himself walking up to one of the cops to tell them he knows that it was El Carnero and his gang who did it, and that he can tell them where they can be found. He knows it will do no good, almost certainly. He has no faith in the police, no one does; the chances of finding a cop who isn’t corrupt are not good enough to take the risk of putting yourself in the hands of one who’s in the pay of the gangs. At worst, he will get himself implicated in the murder; at best, it will do nothing but waste his time on a day when he has none to spare. Either way, it will not bring Gabriel back from the dead, and that is the only thing that his wife really wants, the thing she cannot have.