Saint Death

by Marcus Sedgwick

  And that was that.

  * * *

  Why the three of them became such close friends, no one really knew, but it was as if the brothers who were not brothers wanted a sister, even though Eva was not their sister.

  They did everything together. For the year and a half that Arturo and Faustino were at school they learned together. Out of school they played together. They laughed and laughed and ran and cried, and they fought, like the time with the handprints and the paint on the school wall when Margarita got so mad at them. Though they were close, the three of them, there was something strange about the way they were; something they felt but were too young to know.

  There were three of them, and three points should form a triangle, but Arturo and Faustino and Eva did not. They were a line, and on one end was Arturo and on the other end was Eva, while Faustino was in the middle. He was the one who made it all work, he was the bridge between Arturo and Eva, stopped them from squabbling, made them all happy. He would appease Eva’s moods, he would cheer Arturo up from the gloom he sometimes sank into, and they grew up that way, not seeing that things were changing, that they were changing, and that the distance Faustino had to travel back and forth between Eva and Arturo was now greater than ever.

  * * *

  One day, Arturo thinks as he lies on his bunk in his shack on the Isla de Sacrificios, one day, the line that had been stretching and stretching just snapped. They’d probably stopped being friends months before, they just didn’t know it. They had all grown, and when you grow you can either grow together, or grow apart. They would bicker with each other, all three of them; they’d stopped having fun, and the time had to come eventually when one of them would realize it. That was the day that Faustino left, took Eva, and went to live with her mother, who was by then living in Chaveña.

  Arturo didn’t see them again. That was a year ago, he calculates, almost a year ago, and until they showed up in Faustino’s car, he hadn’t seen them in all that time.

  Arturo’s breathing slows.

  He feels he is barely here in the world as he admits to himself: Well, that’s not exactly true. ¿Is it?

  He might not have seen Faustino for almost a year, but he had seen Eva. Just once. And it is this once that is troubling him. With everything that has happened, he hasn’t had time to think when it was that he saw Eva. That’s what he tells himself, but he knows that’s a lie too. He thinks of Siggy. The first person a liar lies to is himself. He has had more than enough time to work out when it was that he saw Eva, he just hasn’t dared, and now that he does dare …

  It was sometime last winter, he knows that, because there had been a light fall of snow on the sierra and the cold was intense. He’d heard a scrabbling at his door so faint he wasn’t sure he’d heard anything at first; then, thinking it might be a stray animal, he’d gone to take a look.

  He’d found Eva standing there, her face filled to overflowing with barely suppressed emotion and a bottle of Tonayán in her hand.

  —I hate him—she’d said.

  Arturo didn’t need to ask who. They stood in the doorway for a moment before Eva spoke again.

  —Arturo. I’m cold.

  —Sorry. It’s not much warmer in here—he said.

  But he invited her in and he tried to coax a little more heat out of his makeshift stove. He threw on some really good scrap wood he’d been saving for the worst of the cold, and found a mug to use as a glass. He handed it to Eva, and she laughed and pulled the cork from the bottle, drinking from it directly.

  She handed the bottle to Arturo.

  —Here—she said, and he drank, while Eva told him about the fight she’d had with Faustino.

  Arturo couldn’t really follow what Eva was saying, and now, all this time later, Arturo cannot even really remember the little he did understand. But it seemed that Faustino had been with another girl. Or maybe just kissed her. Or, and Arturo wasn’t even sure about this, maybe he had only said he would like to kiss her, and then there’d been a big fight. Arturo didn’t follow the details because he wasn’t really interested. All he could think was that if two people were lucky enough to have someone to be with, then why should they ever fight about anything? Couldn’t they just be happy that they had someone? Wasn’t that enough?

  But Eva was getting drunker and Arturo was catching up fast, drinking bad mezcal and, since there hadn’t been much to eat recently, drinking it on an empty stomach. Soon, none of the things Eva was talking about seemed to matter, not to Arturo, not to Eva herself.

  They began to laugh and joke and Eva dried her tears. They talked about old days, days when they were kids, days when the boys were still going to school. Arturo mentioned the thing with the handprints and the paint.

  —I never thought you liked me again, after that—he said.

  Eva looked surprised.

  —¿No? ¿Really?

  —Not in the same way. I think you never forgot it.

  Eva laughed, but it was a strange sort of laugh.

  —No, Arturo. No, I liked you just as much.

  —It didn’t seem that way—said Arturo, shrugging, taking another swig of Tonayán.

  As he lowered the bottle, he found Eva looking at him very seriously, leaning in close.

  —No, Arturo—she said.—I liked you just as much.

  As Arturo lies on his bed, thinking about that night, thinking about how drunk they got, he cannot remember any more details of what they said. He doesn’t remember, for example, what he said next, but he supposes he must have said something because somehow Eva was moving closer to him. They looked right into each other, even through the mezcal, and then Arturo remembers slipping Eva’s jacket off, and then she pulled her T-shirt off over her head and it was cold in the shack, despite the fire in the stove. But Arturo remembers how their skin was warm, he remembers how wonderful it felt to feel their soft bare skin pressing against each other as they slid down under his blanket. He remembers sliding the rest of Eva’s clothes from her body, and there was something funny about that, though what it was has long since left him. It’s not important. And anyway, most of all he remembers that, even in the very moment, he guessed there could be no better feeling in the world than that: folding around and around and into someone else; safe, warm, naked.

  * * *

  He never saw Eva again. She left before he had even woken to a charging hangover. For the whole of the first day he expected to see her coming along the street, to be with him, to talk. She didn’t, yet in the coming days, as he realized she had just made a mistake, that she didn’t want to be with him instead of Faustino, he still expected her to show up. To come and talk things over, to explain, to say sorry, maybe. At the very least, to tell him never to whisper a word of what had happened to Faustino, should they ever run into each other. But she never came, and neither did Faustino, not until they both showed up last night, with a car, and a baby.

  A one-month-old baby.

  Arturo knows he cannot be sure. He will never be sure. There is no way of telling. But he does know that it was just after Christmas when she came; that it’s just about ten months since that night when Eva showed up, angry and drunk, and they got lost in each other, and when, for a very short time, Arturo was saved.

  * * *

  More Mexicans are leaving the US than migrating there, a study by the Pew Research Center has found.

  More than one million Mexicans and their families, including US-born children, returned to Mexico during the period 2009–2014.

  Meanwhile, around 870,000 Mexicans moved to the US over the same period, creating a net loss of 140,000 people.

  Hardliners claim that these figures do not reflect the true picture since they can only estimate the flow of illegal aliens, while others say the figures show that increased border controls have made it harder for undocumented Mexicans to enter the United States, that fences can work. There is another argument, unspoken by almost everyone, which reasons that perhaps Mexicans are simply returning home�
�and for a good reason: because they want to.

  * * *

  VISITORS

  Five o’clock comes and goes. There is no sign of Faustino.

  Damn you, damn you, damn you, thinks Arturo. Damn you, cabrón. My friend. My brother. Damn you.

  He waits on the box he uses as a bench outside his door, until he gets too cold and begins to pace up and down the street to keep warm. The sound of every engine has him craning his neck and straining his eyes, but no cars come up Isla de Sacrificios; he sees just a few passing in the distance, and none of them is Faustino’s white Ford.

  He gives up, tells himself he won’t come if he stands outside waiting like an anxious mother. There is that, and the fact that the sun is setting. Arturo does not want to see the sun set, and as the sky begins to burn orange at first, and then redder and redder, he slinks back into his shack. He sees his pack of calavera cards sitting on the table. He picks them up, silently denouncing them. He goes to the stove and tries to light the remains of the last fire he had. He just about gets it to catch, and as soon as it’s burning, he begins to flick the cards into the flames, one by one, waiting until each one has caught, then flicking another in, precisely, adding to the fire.

  He stares at the flames, remembering his dream of the night before; his dream of fire and water. He hadn’t thought of it before, but someone once told him what it means to dream of water. He tries to remember who it was. He is about to flick another card into the flames when he realizes he has one in his hand already. It’s a five.

  He stares at it, and the skin creeps on the back of his neck. He stares at the five little red hearts; the square of four outside, and one all alone, in the middle. As he stares at the heart in the middle, he hears an engine outside.

  He turns toward the door, and, still holding the five, he remembers who it was who told him what it means to dream of water, for she is right there, getting out of a gold Jeep, the only one who ever really taught him anything: Margarita.

  She’s by herself.

  She looks worried. Scared even.

  She hurries over to Arturo, throws her arms around him.

  —¡Niño!—she says.—¡You poor kid! ¡I’m sorry!

  Arturo steps away. He wonders what it is that she’s sorry for, and is about to tell her she has nothing to be sorry for, but she won’t stop talking.

  —I had no idea. He told me you were dead. ¿Why would I not believe him? He would never say more; refused to talk about it. But I told him, Arturo. I told him, after you left; I said that he had to tell me everything else, and that if I ever found another lie coming from his lips, I will leave. I will take your sister and leave.

  Arturo shakes his head.

  —¿So you know? ¿You know he works for the Azteca?

  Margarita is silenced, briefly.

  —Of course I know—she says quietly.—But do not think badly of me, Arturo. All he does is drive.

  All he does is drive, Arturo thinks. He knows that Margarita knows that the driving he does is not so innocent. He thinks about Gabriel, being bundled into Raúl’s pickup. He thinks about the bodies that dangle from the overpasses, messages of terror carved into their skin. He thinks about the charred remains of those executed by necklacing. He wonders if his father has driven those bodies, those people, to their ultimate destinations.

  —Don’t judge me—says Margarita.—¿You think I had it easy, as a teacher, here? Sure, I had a better job than some. I didn’t have to go to a maquiladora every day. But there aren’t so many choices for a woman here. I wasn’t making much as a teacher and that was before the M-33 came to the school. They told every teacher that half our salary would go to them from then on … So when I saw my chance, I got out. I wanted a better life, Arturo. I wanted a better life. ¿Is that so bad?

  Arturo finds it hard to argue with what Margarita is saying. And yet she is now well off, rich even, because his father has thrown himself in with the life, as they say. And the way they make their money is through drugs, through killing people who get in their way, through the wielding of absurd amounts of power. Power that can defy anything, defeat anyone, corrupt anyone; even the police, even politicians. It’s a drug that is too powerful to resist; once tasted, it takes hold of people, sometimes even good people. And the question of who is clean, and who is sucio, dirty, is not so simple in Juárez. It’s not so black and white. And while you might not be in the life, there are matters like who spends money in your shop, or bar, or who paid to build the church you worship in. There’s the matter of who paid you not to write something in the newspaper, there’s the business of what your son is doing every night that you try so hard to ignore.

  There’s an equation that says if you’re clean, then the gangs won’t want anything to do with you. You’ll be safe. It’s an equation that goes on to say that if you happen to get raped or killed, then it must be because the gangs did want something from you, and therefore you were dirty, all along. There’s no escaping that logic, but it’s blind logic that helps people pretend that the world isn’t going mad all around them. The truth is much harder to find, and Margarita is proof of that.

  Now that he sees her again, away from his father, Arturo can see the other dark thing in her eyes, which he could not see before. Yes, that’s it. There is shame. And Arturo finds he cannot blame her for her choice, despite everything it means, because he can still hear Carlos’s words in his head. Everything, Arturo. They’re scared of everything.

  But really, none of this matters now.

  —¿Why have you come?—Arturo asks, and, hurriedly, Margarita starts rummaging in her bag.

  —I told him, I said. I told him. You have to give Arturo the money he needs. He’s your son. That is something you cannot deny. Something you must be true to. And I told him if he wants me to stay around and stick with him, the first thing he had to do was give you the money you need. So I found out where you live from Carlos and Siggy and here it is.

  She’s smiling, she’s holding out an envelope, bulging from whatever’s inside. Money. Margarita has brought him money, from his father.

  It’s Santa Muerte.

  Arturo knows that she has saved him, after all. She has been playing with him, testing his faith, teasing him, for what he did at Doña Maria’s, but finally, she has performed a miracle. Or maybe, Arturo thinks, it’s Margarita who’s performed the miracle, because she has talked his father, his useless, unloving, wreck of a father, into giving him the five thousand dollars.

  He tears the envelope open, with good tears in his eyes, and then he freezes.

  —¿What’s this?—he asks.

  He has taken the money out and is holding it for Margarita to see.

  —It’s the money you need, of course—she’s saying, but the smile is faltering on her face.—The money you need. Roberto told me you need five hundred dollars.

  Arturo cannot speak. He’s holding five hundred dollars in one hand, and an empty envelope in the other. No, it’s not quite empty. He sees there is a slip of paper inside. It has writing on it. He twists his hand so he can see the note without taking it out of the envelope, without touching it.

  He reads.

  You are a tenth of the son you should be.

  Here is a tenth of the money you need.

  Somewhere above Arturo, somewhere out of sight, Santa Muerte is watching him, watching to see what he does next. The world starts folding in on itself again, a loud vibrating stagger, a staccato shudder, focused around a point in space that seems to lie directly between Arturo’s hands. It threatens to rip and pour into itself, sucking him and everything else with it.

  Margarita is speaking to him; he doesn’t hear her. He cannot hear over the sound of the universe shaking itself to bits inside him.

  —¿Margarita?—Arturo says, though he can only just hear himself above the noise.

  —¿Yes?

  —You once told me what it means to dream of water. ¿Didn’t you?

  Margarita is shaking her head.


  —Yes, I did … But—

  —¿What does it mean? To dream of water.

  —Nothing, Arturo. It means nothing. I cannot—

  —It’s okay—says Arturo.

  He knows anyway, he has remembered what it means. It’s okay. The meaning is coming, very soon. There is no need to question, no need to worry. There is no more danger.

  —¿Margarita?—he says, finally looking up from the money in his hands.

  —¿What is it, Arturo? ¿Do you need more money? He has the money, your father, and I don’t—

  —I want you to do something for me—Arturo says.—Right now.

  Margarita is nodding, though her face is filled with confusion.

  —Yes, of course. ¿What can I do?

  Arturo knows what he has to do, he knows what Santa Muerte wants him to do. The new thought that entered his head as a tiny seed has planted itself and grown and is already bursting through his mind, a wild forest of leaves. And it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s really okay, only something is distracting him, something on the edge of his vision and at the corner of his hearing. He shakes his head, as if trying to shoo blowflies away. There must be no distractions. Not now. He needs just a moment of clarity, a moment of calm, in which to test the beliefs of his friends, the barroom philosophers. He will try to prove Carlos right, and Siggy wrong.

  —I want you to take this money. ¿Do you know Chaveña? There’s a street called Libertad. Number 965. Go there now before it gets dark, it’s not a safe place. Go there and give this money to Faustino.

  The distraction is buzzing louder, getting closer, and Arturo gets worried now, because Margarita is shaking her head.

  —No—she says.—No, I can’t. No, you have to take it. Arturo, listen to me. Whatever trouble—

  —Take it, Margarita—says Arturo.—Take it to Faustino. Faustino needs it. ¿You understand?

  He’s speaking more firmly now, more insistently. She has to take it, she has to take the money to Faustino and she has to take it now, because Arturo cannot ignore the distraction anymore: as he looks down the length of Isla de Sacrificios, he sees a dark-red pickup swing into view. He knew it was coming, somehow, before he saw it, and now here it is, conjured into his vision.