by Ana Simo
I let Mrs. Crandall get dressed, pretending not to notice when she hid the double plug strap at the bottom of her bag. I followed her up the stairs until she reached the main door of the library. When she turned around to say goodbye, I shoved her on the ground and mounted her. She was bigger and heavier than I was, but I caught her off-balance. Weeks on the wheelchair had built up my upper body. She giggled first, then struggled, not daring to make a noise so close to the street. She put up a fight, twisting, kicking, biting, spitting, punching. She broke my lip, which bled all over her face. I strangled her with my left hand. When she was about to pass out, I released my grip so she could breathe, and shoved my right fist into her cunt. I slapped her until her lips and her nose bled. She tried to slide away but ended half-sitting against the door, which allowed me to push her legs wide open over my shoulders and push my fist into her ass. She screamed, but no sound came out of her mouth. When I shoved my fist back into her cunt, she came in a flood of cum, piss, and blood, over and over and over. Exhaustion stopped us a long time later. We lay side by side, listening to the sound of snow falling outside. She was the first one to move. When she returned from the bathroom, she was wearing her blue knitted ensemble. Her face was almost normal, except for a slight swelling on the upper lip. It would look much worse tomorrow. She shoved her soiled, torn dress into her bag. I did not know what to say or do. I was ashamed of myself. I still am. This is the most shameful thing I have ever done in my life. I have confessed it to you in vivid detail at the risk of appealing to your basest instincts, as a way to mortify myself and perhaps, in time, gain absolution, not from you or some improbable god, but from my best self, which watched me in horror and repulsion. I did not know what to say to Mrs. Crandall that night. I stood before her majestic blue-clad figure silhouetted against the library’s storm door, a ragged, stinky pygmy before a towering Athena. “Make sure you lock up behind me,” she said, not unkindly. Then she was gone.
23
Ashes to Ashes
The next morning, there was a small brown parcel in my breakfast basket addressed to “Miss Mirtila” and bearing no stamps or sender. Inside was Mrs. Crandall’s Shangri-La logbook, wrapped in a silk scarf so old that its crisscrossing threads hung in the air like a cobweb. The scarf smelled like overripe blackberries and wet soil, Mrs. Crandall’s smell at the beginning of our daily sessions, before the more potent animal odors set in. Was I forgiven, or was this a set up? Had she lied to me some, a lot, or not at all? I sniffed her scent on the scarf with the indecent voracity of a dog. Then I folded it carefully and put it inside a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, the kind used for frozen leftovers and forensic exhibits. Mrs. Crandall’s scent would be preserved for future use. I was her dog. She was my mistress. Mrs. Crandall whistles; I stand on my hind legs and shove my hairy dog dick up her ass. The Archangel Raphael sweeps down from above, burning sword in hand, and slashes the whore and her dog down the middle. I took a freezing shower, grinding my teeth, until my gnarled toes began to turn blue. I had to flush Mrs. Crandall away, purge her from my body in order to regain my human form. I could not allow her back until I had found and killed McCabe. For that I needed to be human. McCabe was my true quest, my only enigma. Everything else, even Mrs. Crandall’s cunt, would have to wait.
Hardened by the icy shower, I examined Mrs. Crandall’s logbook with the necessary sang-froid. It was, like her, an imbrication of order and debauchery. The entries were surgically precise and systematic. The handwriting was in black ink, with an architect’s small, perfectly even capitals. The map was impressively accurate and detailed. Mrs. Crandall had been modest when she had called it a sketchy line drawing. The book itself told a different, more hedonistic story. It was made of heavy Canson paper with a Belgian watermark, hand-stitched and bound in luxurious black leather. A red silk string page marker was attached to it. An entry on the final Sunday showed that Mrs. Crandall knocked on the third house on the south side of my old street, but that no one answered. Did Mrs. Crandall know that the National Security Advisor, Rafael Cohen, had been born in that cinderblock shack? If so, had she told McCabe? Had McCabe asked?
Rafael’s official bio listed Elmira as his birthplace, and then jumped to Harvard, Oxford, and Rhodes Scholarship glory, with only a discreet wink to the spic vote (“the son of hard-working Hispanic immigrants”). Not a word about Shangri-La. Rafael despised that name, but was infatuated with his own, believing himself named after the archangel—a felicitous name, he once remarked, embraced by all three great monotheistic religions. “I can pass as anything anywhere,” he boasted to Glorita, who promptly informed me with tomboyish glee. I knew better, but did not want to torment him. Didn’t I cling to my own conceits to survive in the belly of the beast Glorita had named Aracnida, the Beautiful? Rafael Cohen had not been baptized after the Prince of Light, but after El Chino Rafael, the fat, ageless Chinese who for half a century pushed his bountiful fruit and vegetable cart through La Esperanza’s pig-stained streets, my grandmother confided, after swearing me to silence. El Chino doted on little girls, particularly Rafael’s mother, who was pretty as a picture and adored him, my grandmother added, willfully blind to the unsavory implications, as the custom had been in La Esperanza. There, Chinese men were highly prized and thought to come in only two flavors: the industrious eunuchs, like the ostensibly celibate El Chino Rafael, and the good fathers and providers, those openly shacked up with the black or mulatto women who always swarmed around them in the hope of catching themselves a Chinaman.
One place they hadn’t looked was Shangri-La’s cemetery, not to be found on Mrs. Crandall’s map. It was hard to find. An impassable field of hawthorns and thistles hid it from the barrio. The only access was through a narrow, muddy path that began near the river. The sun was high and bright, melting the snow on the Judge’s rosebushes. I decided to go visit the dead.
The cab left me at the end of the paved street. I went up the slippery path on foot, keeping my balance with the Judge’s walking sticks. I found my grandmother’s grave first, overrun by thorny weeds. I’d paid seventy-five dollars to lease the plot in perpetuity, and three times that for a fancy pink granite marker with her name and vital dates. My father went in next, then my mother. There was space for one more. “I want my ashes to live with a woman who loves me.” The phrase popped into my mind accompanied by the humiliating blare of mariachi horns. If only I could express with dignity and simplicity the horror of being abandoned underground, or encased in a marble wall, or describe the longing to be remembered, loved, and kept forever at home. Turgenev would have pulled it off even if he had been born a spic. Torn between ridicule and fear of death, I stood before my grandmother’s tomb and did all my limited talent afforded me: I sang for her the maudlin, pitiful phrase in my uncertain Spanish, so she could understand. “Yo quiero que mis cenizas vivan con la mujer que me quiera.” I cut my right index finger trying to remove a big weed. A drop of blood fell on the snow, perfectly round for a few seconds. This was my red flower for my mulish grandmother, my belligerent mother, and my puzzled father. “Talk to me,” I asked my grandmother. “What should I do now?” She tickled the soles of my feet but did not say a word. The sun began dropping behind the cemetery hill.
Rafael’s parents were buried across from mine. Weeds also lurked there under the icy surface. A small Christian cross was etched on the gray stone marker, as tradition and superstition, rather than piety, dictated in La Esperanza. Genoveva had demanded it and Ezequiel had acquiesced, “with some repugnance,” he confessed to me at my grandmother’s wake. A day after I purchased our plot, they had gotten their own on an installment plan, and ordered a marker. I had to battle with the stonemason to keep the wretched cross off our own pink marker. My mother was too shrewd not to have noticed its absence, and too beholden to La Esperanza not to lament it. After a lifetime in Elmira, her arbiter in all matters of custom, morality, and aesthetics remained La Esperanza, somewhat softened by distance and changing times, but still clad in its imp
erious certainty.
I searched the cemetery looking for Glorita’s grave. I wanted to find her there. Dead at nineteen, the last age I saw her, or not long thereafter. Forever young and wicked, my enchanting Glorita, font of all yumminess, begetter of Bebe and all other scrumptious, crazymaking girls. Glorita, whose subterranean genealogical links with Mrs. Crandall and McCabe I sensed but did not yet understand. I wanted to find Glorita’s grave to immortalize her divine girlishness, protect her honeyed pussy, coddle her tiny velvet ears, keep her alive forever, even give her new life: bring her back from that valley of death where vultures pick at the bones of the young grown old. A skinny black dog with red, mangy patches on its back watched me from behind a tree, then followed me at a distance, as I moved from one row to the next.
Dusk washed out the inscriptions on the tombstones. I had to get close to read them, often aided by my fingers. Each smelled different from the other, even when they were the same type of stone and from the same year. Polished granite, impermeable, had the faintest smell, but its deeply etched inscriptions released unique scents produced by the particular mix of animal, vegetable and mineral debris caught in them. In gray stone I detected the earthy, smoky, or mineral aromas of mushroom, iron, and, unexpectedly, red wine aged in oak barrels, none of which were physically present. I also caught a whiff of late menstrual blood, dark red and richly clotted.
On my last station of the Glorita cross, when I had almost given up hope, I found the grave of her godmother, Altagracia. Hers was the only name on the tombstone and on the gaily-colored plastic wreath. Oh, how I wished my Glorita had been there. I would have kissed the soil, I would have talked to her, I would have sung to her. Disappearance without physical death is the worst torment. In time, like Glorita’s. Or in space, like McCabe’s. Sitting by Altagracia’s grave, I understood that killing McCabe would be the reverse of death. Had I known back then what I knew now, I would have killed Glorita thirty years ago. But we thought we were eternal and eternally young. I did not any longer wish for Glorita to be in Altagracia’s grave. As much as her loss without death anguished me, I did not want her here. “Forgive me, sweet Glori, for I failed to kill you,” I said.
I had never given a thought to what would happen to McCabe’s body after I killed her. My mission began and ended with the act itself, followed by my ecstatic liberation. I had envisioned Firecop harassment—and was prepared for it—but not McCabe’s funeral, burial, or memorial. I stood up holding on to Altagracia’s monument, embarrassed by my egotistical blindness, shaken like someone who had taken one step into the abyss and then retreated. I thanked Glorita for setting me straight. I thanked Altagracia, my parents, my grandmother, Ezequiel Cohen and Genoveva, and all the lonely and forgotten dead in this cemetery. The thicket of brambles and thistles that hid them from Shangri-La showed how much they were wanted. They were not tricked by any Day of the Dead tomfoolery. I swore with the dead as my witnesses, and my shining Glorita as my patroness, that I would not allow McCabe to be treated like a piece of dead meat. I would place McCabe on an altar, honorably preserved in full blood, gore, piss, shit, and saliva, before rigor mortis set in and secretions were congealed. I would burn her with my own hands, and spread her ashes over the Little Ohio.
McCabe came back to me at that moment. Vividly. Helped by the dead, I had finally emptied my body of Mrs. Crandall. I heard McCabe’s voice describing the Biloxi marshes and the migrating birds. I saw her listening to the third movement of Franck’s Symphony with her eyes closed; crouching by the rosebush holding the Judge’s secateurs in her right hand, and in her left, a diseased stem which she was about to prune; silhouetted against the noon sky, standing at the edge of the ravine.
Once while she was removing the bandages from my feet, I asked her why she stood there. My head was turned toward the window as she had instructed, so that I would not see the soiled underside of the bandages and the oozing lumps of raw meat that my feet had become. She was surprised that I even asked. Wasn’t that view the reason the Judge’s house had been built here? I agreed that it was a fine view, though far from spectacular. I myself used to stand there before the accident (to cover my tracks, I had begun using her tactful word for what had happened to my feet), but never as long, or as often, as she did. It was as natural for her to look at the ravine as it had been for me, she said, even if, unlike me, she had no memories attached to it. Perhaps that is why she lingered there, she said. A stone was a stone for her, and a tree was a tree. Nature was the same everywhere.
“You can look now,” she said. The fresh, white bandages gleamed in the sunlight streaming through the window. McCabe drew the gauze curtains and was gone before I realized it. Moments later I saw her splitting logs by the garden shed. Next to her was a woodpile on a pallet, half covered with the usual blue tarp. She split wood for the rest of the week, until the woodpile was gone, along with the pallet and the offensive blue tarp. I grew up with those blue tarps. They were my playpen, poncho, camping tent, and picnic blanket. Our emergency roof weighted with bricks over leaky spots by my poor, inept, beleaguered father, who bared his teeth in an obsequious grin before pushing open the service door of the “whites only” hardware store.
At the cemetery, McCabe first came back to me in snapshots seen through a gauzy curtain. Then with sound, volume, depth, motion, and emotion. She moved me, McCabe—she tore my guts out and I still did not know why. She came back as a perfect hologram, more real than real. Smell, touch, and taste were missing, but not missed. That was Mrs. Crandall’s fiefdom. I had never touched or tasted McCabe. Her smell must have been too subtle to penetrate the ample space that always separated us. The closest we had been was when she had cleaned my feet, her face about sixty inches away from mine.
McCabe also came back to me through my mouth. I inhaled her until my chest hurt. She had to return because I was holding her soul. I had not stolen it: she had given it to me. She could not live long without it. She would be like a zombie. Wherever she was, she must now be feeling the pull of my lungs. I had her essence in my possession. I did not want to keep it, or deprive her of it. I wanted to exhale it and return it to her, thankfully, lovingly, for her to have and cherish one last time before her apotheosis. I swore to protect her after the killing, to never betray her. The word “desecration” fluttered in my mind. I quashed it.
Half an hour later I caught a ride to Elmira in a pickup wreck driven by a handsome young Mexican dyke in a black heavy metal en español tee shirt. Her voice soon betrayed her as a girly, long-black-haired, smooth-faced Mexindian boy whom I thought hermaphroditical and not older than sixteen, until he told me in broken English that his wife was expecting their first. I was shocked. A baby girl-boy with a wife and kid! I thought I had misunderstood, so I made him repeat it, which he did, verbatim. He had been most alluring in his second permutation, as a hermaphroditical boy. I regretted to hear that this was not who he was, at least at present. The boy was a demon driver, careening around curves on two wheels, passing colossal live-poultry trucks within seconds of incoming traffic, and flashing his road lights at the ancient and lethargic Chevys and Buicks most white Elmirans had been reduced to driving. My head was in a whiplash with so many adjustments of real and libidinal perspective. “Where you of?” he asked me sweetly. When I answered that I was from there, he didn’t believe me. I insisted. He giggled nervously and shook his head, unsure if the joke was on him. When I persisted, with a gentle but heartfelt “Yo soy de aquí,” he got so pissed that he swerved and almost landed us in a ditch. He dumped me right there on the road, a quarter of a mile from Elmira, giving me the finger as he sped away.
