Haunted Nights

by Ellen Datlow

  And he don’t stop dancing for nothing.

  With her.

  The woman whose eyes go green, the woman whose face turns a cobweb of stitches, a slash of crosshatch lips in the shape of a heart, an empty cutout of eyes surrounded by whorls of orange, surrounded by azure, surrounded by crimson, all curled-up squiggles, like a wind washing long hair down a pale-faced chasm, and they dance until she’s gone.

  That’s how death takes you, okay?

  And that woman, pachuco, she could be anyone, even you.

  Órale…

  —

  I KNOW YOU’D ASK, wouldn’t you? How I woke in the morning to realize I fucked up twice?

  No madre around, I know you’d ask that too, if I kiss her with this mouth, but the puta ran off when I was three, left me and Papá and my sisters for some wheto bandleader….I wonder what’ll happen when she dies; she won’t be mourned here. Where do the lonely souls go, the sad girls?

  So when I wake, it’s just me in the kitchen, and my aching head is lying on the table feeling like a punching bag that’s overstuffed, ’cause maybe I drank too much last night…maybe I passed out thinking of Santi.

  And like I said, I’m alone, but also there’s this voice speaking in my ear.

  “Hey, vato,” the voice says. “Hey, sleepyhead, wake up.”

  I crack open my eyes, and light in the kitchen burns like the sun has a grudge, and all I can do is squint. The kitchen is turned sideways too, the mezcal bottle looking knocked over, it should be pouring into my face.

  “You going to sleep the day away?” It talks fast, this voice, but it’s quiet too, like whispering some urgent secret.

  I groan and suck in the drool that’s puddled by the crack of my mouth. Inside my mouth it’s dry as sand, like all the spit worked its way out and stuck the side of my face to the tabletop, you know?

  “Pachuco, you won’t like if I have to wake you.”

  I lift my head real slow, and the kitchen turns how it should. I blink, and the light gets less bright, just a yellow bulb and some rays slipping through messy curtains. Okay, better, so I look around, but there’s no one else, maybe I’m imagining things. Besides the drool I left on the table are the skull, the bottle, the switchblade, and the book.

  “Cojeme,” I mutter. You don’t get hung over with mezcal like you do tequila, but you still feel like a couple rocks go grating in your head.

  I could blame Yoli I’m like this, since she left the mezcal open on the counter like a gift not just to Papá but to me as well. But then again, maybe it’s my own fault….Maybe I should finally grow up and shit. Yoli’s mezcal knocks your ass out like a Kid Gavilan bolo punch, and I knew it would.

  “There you are.”

  The voice again, and no one’s around. It’s stupid, but all I can say is, “Who’s talking?”

  “¡Órale!” the skull on the table answers, all excited like a dog you reward for doing a good trick.

  I startled, and you’d think I should have reacted more, but my brain just doesn’t get it. “How?”

  “Don’t you know, vato? You’re the one made me.”

  That’s true, I guess, out of sugar and water and meringue powder. Some paint, some icing…But I didn’t make it to talk. “Who are you?”

  “Read my name, pachuco.”

  Though my eyes are all bleary, I look what I’d written on its eggshell brow. The letters are carved between frosted vines, Cupid hearts, playing-card spades.

  “Santi?”

  “You need go back to school,” the sugar skull answers. “Learn your letters.”

  I rub my eyes twice, each lid feeling made of cement. Focus. The skull is life-size, I’d inked some crazy work on it: red scar stitching that pulled its rictus grin up razor-sharp cheekbones, and a classy butterfly spread-winged across the cavity that would have been a nose. Above the green swirls and flames of orange are the letters I carved last night, but something’s wrong with them: they don’t spell what they’re supposed to. My breath hisses out, “Ay wey.”

  I’d switched two letters….Instead of SANTI, I carved the name SAINT. Which is how I fucked up the second time.

  I turn my head away. “No, you ain’t real.”

  “Don’t disrespect me. You think I’m a dream, open your eyes.”

  I do. I turn back. Nothing changes.

  “Happy?” Saint asks.

  “No.”

  On my way to the faucet to dunk my head, it all comes back, revving, rushing in my mind, flashbacks of making sugar skulls with my sisters, Yoli and Li’l Chica.

  See, Yoli turned the back porch into an art studio couple years ago. She’s got all the marionettes and ceramic animals with stars for eyes and shit, the masks that laugh through one mouth and cry through another. You never seen skill like hers, weaving dried peppers into moon faces, painting pictures of Mayan gods and these warriors fighting under night-sky pyramids, and they don’t wear no protection but for bird feathers, it’s crazy.

  She got us to make our own skulls for Dia de los Muertos this year instead of buying from the old ladies in market stalls on every corner in the hood. You just mix the ingredients in a mold and let dry, and yesterday they were ready. So we decorated while listening to AM radio, where Miguel Aceves Mejía sang his heart out in “Tú, Solo Tú,” and no one could sound better, ’cept maybe that cowboy yodeler, Bill Haley, who came on next with “Rocket 88” that was chinga cranked.

  Yoli made her skull for Papá, and Chica made her skull for Abuelita, and I made mine for Santi….

  I hack and spit into the sink, rinse my mouth, run water through my hair, until my head feels a little better. I turn back, admitting, “I don’t know what I was thinking last night.”

  “Not strange for you, pachuco,” Saint says, “and that’s a problem.”

  “Yoli said maybe the spirits could visit, you call them right, being Day of the Dead, you know?”

  “Maybe they do. Maybe there are other ways to save them.”

  I grab the bottle of mezcal off the table and take a gulp straight from its lip. “Who needs saving?”

  “Besides you? You tried calling someone else, I think.”

  I did.

  It’s Yoli, who also inherited this big-ass book of black magick, Brujería Magia Negra….

  The autumn heat had cooled to ice when the sky broke yesterday, and Yoli started messin’ around with that book, reading things, lighting candles, and her novio, Dante, came over, and we opened up the mezcal that was supposed to be a gift to Papá’s altar, and Dante smoked out the room with joints of hash and ground-up peyote. Yoli spoke about calling back spirits, if you carve their name into the sugar skull and read this certain passage, and I started seeing things, I was fucked-up, but that was it.

  I didn’t read none of her book, I didn’t say none of the chants, I don’t mess around with that shit….

  Until they left, and I was alone, everyone else partying on the streets for the festival. I could have gone too, but I couldn’t, if that makes sense….I mean, me and Santi used to roll together every year since we were little, and me doing it without him just made me fuckin’ cry.

  I couldn’t do nothing but sit at the kitchen table with the skull I made for him, and something in my chest grew all heavy, and I started drinkin’ more, and I started talking to Santi, like why it had to go like that….

  And somehow Yoli’s book of black magick ended up in my hands and, like I said, I don’t mess around with that shit, but maybe I spoke a few words….Maybe I read from some pages things I don’t understand but said them anyway, out loud, like a certain passage, while I carved Santi’s name with a switchblade into the skull.

  “Hey, you with me, or you back in la-la land?” Saint asks.

  “So what now?” My question is a shrug.

  “Go say hello.”

  “To who?”

  Sudden as Chivo’s gunshot, there’s a clack-clack-clack sound coming from the sitting room. I don’t know what it is, and part of me doe
sn’t want to find out. It’s the kind of sound don’t belong in a home, a sound like tap dancers moving on American Bandstand, their shoes make that sharp clatter on the wood floor when they step hard and fast.

  “You got a visitor.”

  I eye Saint wearily and flick open my switchblade. “Someone like you, or I gotta cut a fool?”

  “Why don’t you find out.”

  Again: Clack-clack-clack.

  I push through the swinging saloon doors and would’ve screamed right there if my voice hadn’t fled for my balls.

  There’s a skeleton in the room, walking around as if no problem, smoking one of Papá’s cigarettes we left on his remembrance altar. It isn’t a corpse, not like scarecrow-ragged or anything, no blood, no dirt, no worms crawling from its eyes, but it’s clean, okay, like a cartoon skeleton, pale and scrubbed, every bone in place. It’s dressed to the nines too, better than I could do, like it’s going dancing at the Cocoanut Grove. The skull has a real thin mustache, like how Papá had, and it wears these big steel rings on its bone fingers like Papá used to wear—his thumpers, is what he called them—for street brawling.

  It’s looking at the altar, where a photo still shows Papá’s face—no smile—behind a frame of glass, decked out in brimmed tando as wide as his shoulders, and the starched white collar of his satin shirt flares over a fingertip coat no one could wear so well. The R.I.P. in lipstick is Li’l Chica’s, and the collection of votive candles is from Abuelita, one for each saint she brought from Juárez, which number more than the altar can hold. Abuelita’s own mourning altar is across the room; she followed Papá three years later to the underworld of Mictlan.

  Eight years ago, I was twelve, Papá got beat in East L.A. by sailors with baseball bats and lead pipes. Papá got beat so bad, his head looked like a piñata busted open, and all the little candies poured out.

  Those are the candies now painted over the face of this skeleton.

  It turns to me, wearing those same clothes from the picture, and it says my name: Clack-clack-clack.

  Saint’s voice comes from the kitchen. “Family reunion, ey, vato?”

  It’s Papá who lifts up his big bony arms for a big Papá hug, and I don’t want to touch him, but I ain’t got a choice either; he’s coming to me, and I have my switchblade in hand and could cut through a rib, but I’d never raise a hand to him, even if he’s just a dead thing clacking my name over and over, and so we embrace.

  And there’s a fuckin’ trickle of water coming down my eye, that’s how it makes me feel, but I’ve been all kinds of somber emotions lately too.

  “You going to leave me out?” Saint asks, like he’s lonely.

  When Papá lets go, he goes into the kitchen and brings the sugar skull back, held in the clattering crook of an elbow that looks like a yo-yo, the way it swings loose back and forth.

  “This is all kinds of nuthouse,” I tell them, shaking my head from one to the other. “I don’t even know.”

  “This ain’t nothing. You wanna see some shit? Let’s roll, paint the town, get some skull heinas.”

  Clack-clack-clack.

  They don’t glance back, Papá and Saint just fling open the front door and walk outside.

  I follow, and the door frame creaks when I grab it for support, because my legs go to soup at what I see. I almost turn away, though it’s no more crazy than talking to a skull made of sugar or of dead Papá carrying it around.

  Jet-black and electric blue: that’s the night sky, shimmering and buzzing like lights of an all-night diner, while agate-dusted shades zoom by, darting through alleys of a crowded universe. My eyes fight to adjust, to make sense, because the crescent moon is this sideways grin of teeth, clamping a cigar that blows puffs of firecracker flares, which drip shadows onto the hands I shoot up in reflex. The stars pulse too, like you’ve never seen. They’re glitter pinwheels and pink hearts and lemon snow cone twirls, and the pin-striping of a Chevy hardtop runs across it all in zigzag waves like stitchwork that if you undid, everything would fall apart….

  Your head would spin dizzy, you tried looking too long.

  All I could stutter is, “What…?” and, “How…?” and, “Where’s the daylight…?”

  “It’s midnight, vato.”

  “It’s only morning, like ten.”

  “It’s Dia de los Muertos, pachuco. It’s always midnight.”

  I nod, okay, and I know this is crazy, but I kinda felt I belonged too, as much as you can belong walking into the page of some dime-store comic.

  “¡Órale!” Saint exclaims at my lowrider. “Your bomba is slick. Shotgun!”

  I don’t even recognize my Impala, parked curbside, it’s been changed. The trunk is popped open like a casket of red silk, but instead of a corpse, it overflows with wild marigolds, bright in every hue of gold; my wheels are nothing but tribal suns, dark blue as tattoo ink, surrounded by whirling flames; and the car’s paint job is of skulls, I mean every skull you could want, funny skulls with winking eyes, vicious skulls with fangs for teeth, even mamacita skulls lookin’ sexy with emerald smoke simmering from empty sockets, and all these skulls got teeth that are clattering.

  Papá gets in back right behind the driver’s seat and places Saint so he’ll sit next to me.

  “Rev it up,” the sugar skull says.

  “Where we going?”

  “Where you think?”

  Clack-clack-clack.

  And I guess I knew all along where I’m supposed to go…

  Santi.

  So we cruise, and it reminds me of the last time I was with him….Fuckin’ everything reminds me of Santi: the touch of his long fingers that were always crazy warm; the way his voice would drop when he whispered some shit no one else should know; even the smell of his hair, he’d mix olive oil into the pomade, and it’d just glow like you’ve never seen.

  We’d grown up on the same block and would ride our bicycles together up Whittier Boulevard the way older cholos drove their rides low and slow. When I was nine, he took me out shooting the first time, and we’d capped glass bottles in the concrete channels of the L.A. River. He handled my business when I got fucked with too; others disrespected me ’cause I’m a little thinner, a little smaller than most in the varrio, maybe I talk a little shit, too, but Santi always had my back….Even when I got older, and I wanted to be hard and roll with the Eastside White Fence gang, it was Santi set me straight.

  Now he was gone, like everyone else I’d loved, like Papá, like Abuelita—

  “Wait, I just thought of something,” I say.

  “You can think?” Saint asks, like a smart-ass.

  “I made your skull, and you’re here, and Yoli made Papá’s skull, and he’s here. But Abuelita…Li’l Chica made her. How come she’s not around?”

  “It takes longer coming up here from Juárez.”

  Oh. I nod, like I should know.

  Clack-clack-clack. Papá wants to reminisce about Abuelita the way I’d been on Santi.

  Clack-clack-clack, he says again as I turn a steering wheel that’s made of peppermint through our varrio, down 4th to Lorena, past Fresno Street, past Concord.

  Clack-clack-clack, he goes on, and there’s all kinds of people out tonight, people who don’t belong, ghosts of people. I can see through them, like the stories always tell, these ghosts that are half-mist, half-solid, only their faces are all painted slick for Day of the Dead, and their eyes glow green as molten jade.

  There’s other things too, skeletons like Papá, and there’s headless conquistadors on steeds of papier-mâché, there’s a marching band of big brass instruments, like I mean, it’s the instruments themselves marching, with little key feet, just blowing crazy tunes. There’s banners that fly like Arabic carpets, there’s wolves made of agave, even dogs and cats saunter around on two legs like they own the streets, and their eyes are huge and round as shiny gold wheels.

  Clack-clack-clack, Papá says, and Saint nods along, a sort of roll back and forth on the seat, since he’s
without a neck.

  “Your abuelita don’t like the life you’re leading,” Saint adds, like he’s all concerned. “You need to make something of yourself, go to school or some shit.”

  I blow air, shrug him off. “The fuck you know?”

  Papá’s hand is quick when he slaps the back of my head. Clack-clack-clack.

  “¡Chingados!” That hurt; a skeleton whack, especially when it’s wearing thumpers, leaves a mark.

  “Abuelita and I go back,” Saint says, all nonchalant. “Maybe she came up through a different school, but I’ve been hangin’ with our people of the sun since the Mexica fled to Tenochtitlán.”

  I don’t even sweat him to explain, I don’t need to. That big-ass book of black magick Yoli inherited—Brujería Magia Negra—was Abuelita’s, and don’t ask where she got it. Abuelita sacrificed so we could have a better life, and not just in America.

  Abuelita was a witch doctor in Mexico, conjure, maybe you call hoodoo. She’d go off on these spiritual journeys to Mictlan and do some shit. Abuelita was the only person ever scared Papá.

  She died five years ago, only when Dia de los Muertos came around a few months later, she thought maybe she’d come back. The next morning they found the sailors accused of beating Papá to death. Those sailors looked like red candy apples after you take a big bite, and their heads were skulls with black holes for eyes, each plugged by a marigold that spun on pinwheel stems.

  All I know is, you don’t fuck with Abuelita.

  Meanwhile, Saint is still talking. “Abuelita says, you don’t change your ways, you’re gonna dance soon with Mictlantecuhtli, the top hat man. His dance, vato, it takes only a bullet to do. You’ll see soon, like your friend. And he was the smart one.”

  “What you know about Santi?”

  “More than you think. Like I said, I’ve been around. He’s down there in Mictlan, kingdom of the underworld. There it’s sugar skulls and marigolds forever. And not in a good way.”

  I shake my head. “What’d you come here for? To lecture me from Abuelita or cut me with Santi?”

  “I didn’t come here for your sparkling conversation, that’s for sure. I help people. Give them what they need.”