Las Vegas Noir

by Jarret Keene

  Ortiz waited for a moment, drowning in the blackness, before starting his engine and taking off. Whatever was going on in that shack, he told himself, it wasn’t his place to interfere. To do so would ruin his research before it even got off the ground. Anyway, there was no telling what was really happening. Rough sex? A ritual driving out of evil spirits? Whatever it was, he had to respect these people’s culture and remain neutral.

  Just as he suspected, the Lucky Cuss Motel was not for truly lucky cusses, but it wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, the only room they had left smelled as if a dozen chain smokers had rented it for a week. He peeled the sheets apart and looked for hairs, but the bed seemed clean enough. He lay on it and contemplated what he’d heard: the gruff male voice, the slaps, the woman’s cries. But again, there was no need to jump to conclusions. All he knew for sure was that he was one lucky cuss to have that community of transplanted Native Mexicans to do some real fieldwork on.

  But his sense of good fortune didn’t prevent him from falling into a restless sleep full of snarling dogs and dancing skeletons and screaming women, and the next morning he woke up groggy and headachy. The sun glowed with hellish intensity bright behind the heavy golden curtains. He showered quickly and threw on a fresh guayabera and khaki pants. He grabbed a large coffee at a 7-Eleven and headed once again to what he already dubbed Little Mictlán. The coffee and crystalline desert air cleared his head. By the time he got to the barrio, he felt better.

  The dead dog and its stink were gone. The cluster of trailers and cinder-block shacks, bare of any adornments, were hardly cheery, but the morning light had evaporated the previous night’s sinister feel. Ortiz pinned his name tag to his shirt and strode to the first hut and knocked.

  The young woman he had seen standing there the previous afternoon opened the door. She wore the same kind of white dress, embroidered at the square neckline with strangely elongated animal figures. She was small-boned and pretty, her hair woven in a single long, thick braid—hair lustrous and black as his own. She glanced at his name tag. He was glad he’d thought to put it on—it identified him as in some way official.

  “Hola,” he said. “Yo soy investigador? Ortiz es mi nombre?”

  His Spanish wasn’t great, he knew, but “investigador,” police-y as it sounded, was Spanish for “researcher,” he was sure of that.

  “Investigador?”

  “Sí.” No need to complicate matters, just yet, with explanations of what kind of investigator he was. He asked if he could enter.

  The woman hesitated, then stepped back. Ortiz ducked inside. The room was unfurnished except for a straw-bottomed rocking chair and a long, rough-hewn—machete-hewn, no doubt—bench running along one wall. Aluminum foil covered the one window; an incandescent bulb burned nakedly in the ceiling.

  The woman remained standing near the open door, keeping herself visible to the outside.

  “Ustedes son Mictlanos, no?” he asked, giving his friendliest smile.

  “Sí,” she said faintly.

  Bingo. He had his people.

  “Qué hacen aquí?” The question—“what are you doing here?”—came out more brusque than he wanted, but his Spanish wasn’t good enough for polite subtleties. He kept his smile, the bright smile an ex-girlfriend had once called “innocent,” and asked if he could have a seat on the bench. She nodded. He motioned for her to sit as well, and she obeyed, taking a spot at the end of the bench where she could still be seen from the street. The sunlight coiled silver along her braid.

  Spanish was clearly not her first language either, but he managed to ascertain that her husband and the rest of the men in the community worked construction jobs as well as carved the comical calacas, as she called the skeletons, for ¡Viva! That was where they were at the moment, at their construction jobs—they’d be back later, she said, though she was unable to specify exactly when. It occurred to Ortiz that these men might make better informants, to use the anthropological term—and his was an anthropological investigation, was it not?—than this hesitant young woman.

  Ortiz had a weakness for women’s legs; the sight of a well-shaped female leg made his own legs literally weak, gave them a heaviness. This woman’s brown calves were perfectly shaped, as if turned on a lathe, and her small foot arched nicely in her sandal, a sandal very similar to his huaraches. Her toes were small and round. She was certainly no India patarrajada, no “split-footed Indian,” to use the most common anti-Native epithet in Mexico, the equivalent perhaps of calling an African American “nappy-headed.” He flicked his own Native hair behind his shoulders with both hands.

  Slowly, discreetly, she bunched her dress in her hand, drawing it up along her leg. He swallowed, and watched. There, beginning about mid-thigh, she revealed to him a gigantic bruise, yellow-tinged on the edges and shading into a deep, mottled purple.

  “Jesus!”

  She jumped to her feet and smoothed her skirt. “The men will be back later,” she repeated. She stepped out of the house. It was clearly time for him to go.

  Ortiz made his way back to ¡Viva! and the conference in a kind of daze. He attended another panel presentation, but all he could think about was the young woman, and her bruise, and the way she’d inched her skirt up to reveal it to him. He fantasized tending her injury, applying Native-style poultices made of wild herbs and macerated cactus fruit they’d gather together in the flowering Mojave, and his own legs grew weak again.

  He found the gallery of Mexican folk art and contemplated the Mictlano calacas there. The skeletons in this display wore formal dress, the females in furs and gowns, the males in tuxedos. One of the male calacas was a dapper little guy in glasses who reminded Ortiz of the rude professor from the day before.

  Ortiz returned to the barrio around 5, when most of the conference-goers were heading off to their wine-and-cheese receptions for this new program or that new journal. Good for them. He, Ortiz, had fieldwork to do. And the balls to do it.

  He found a group of Mictlano men under the elm tree, drinking Bud Lite. Two of them were still dressed in their work clothes—tar-stained jeans, sweaty T-shirts, cement-smeared work boots. The other three had changed into clean cotones, which was the term Talon had taught him for the loose white clothing Mexican peasants favored. One of the men dressed in white was the man he’d seen the day before; again he sat wielding his machete against a block of wood, which had taken the wide, lobed shape of a pelvic bone.

  Ortiz shook hands all around. Their faces were impassive and their handshakes surprisingly limp for men who work with their hands. They glanced mistrustfully at his name tag. The man from the day before was a full head shorter than Ortiz, but stocky. His face was broad and his eyes small and very red. A dirty cord bound the machete to his wrist. According to Professor Talon, it was customary among men in remote parts of southern Mexico to tie their machete handles to their wrists so they wouldn’t misplace them. These folks were the real thing, no doubt about it. Ortiz’s research into their ways and how these ways were affected—or not—by their living and working in Las Vegas was going to make a great, great study. Soon enough he himself was going to be tying his satchel to his wrist so as not to lose the invaluable information he gathered.

  “Usted es el investigador,” the man with the machete said.

  “Sí,” Ortiz replied. He didn’t like the continued looks of apprehension on the men’s faces. It was time to be straightforward about what kind of “investigator” he was. That was the only way to get them to be forthcoming about their lives. He certainly didn’t want them to think he was with Immigration or something.

  “Soy estudiante,” Ortiz said. And in a gesture meant to put them further at ease, he unpinned his ACA name tag and tossed it into the clutter of empty beer cans.

  “Ah,” said the stocky man. “Estudiante.”

  Ortiz didn’t care for the man’s slightly mocking tone. Still, everyone seemed to relax at the revelation that he was just a lowly student, and that was good.

&nbs
p; Ortiz then made a gesture they found very funny. He drew his thumb and forefinger along his mouth and made a twisting motion, as if locking his lips. Whether they took this to mean that the secret of their existence was safe with him or that he was asking them to be discreet about his visits, he would never know; he himself didn’t know what he meant, exactly. Both these things, he supposed. In any case, they guffawed, and popped him a beer.

  The men’s Spanish was a good deal better than the young woman’s—perhaps they weren’t indigenes, like she, but mixed-blood mestizos. Still, he understood only a fraction of what they said, and none of the jokes, though he laughed when they laughed. He made a mental note to bring a tape recorder next time he visited so he could go over everything as many times as it took to decipher it all.

  The beer and the talk relaxed him, and every now and then he cast a glance at the hut where he’d found the young woman that morning. He wished she would open the battered door, or at least peel away the tinfoil on the window and peek out, so he could know she knew he was there.

  The stocky man, who’d introduced himself as Vicente, continued hewing his wood; now he was working a longer piece, a femur perhaps, striking long slivers from it. He uttered something in a guttural language that was definitely not Spanish. He kicked the wood aside and stalked to the hut, smacking, with the side of his machete, the dog lying in front of it. The dog yelped and scurried away, tail tucked. The man entered the shack and slammed the door.

  The other men shifted their feet and sipped their beers quietly. Ortiz could feel their discomfort. He’d blown it somehow. Had Vicente caught him glancing at the shack where the woman—apparently Vicente’s woman—lived? In any case, it was time to leave. Darkness was descending, that impenetrable Mictlano darkness that was like a repudiation of the rest of Vegas’ gaudy brightness.

  He shook hands with the men. When he got to the last one, a tall, gaunt man with deep-set eyes and thin lips, the guy seized his upper arm and said, “Hay baile el sábado.”

  A dance next Saturday? Aquí?

  “Sí, aquí.” The man moved his hand down and squeezed Ortiz’s forearm firmly with his long fingers. Clearly this was an invitation. An invitation to one of their festivities!

  “Cuándo?” asked Ortiz.

  The man raised his bony finger to the growing darkness. “En la noche.”

  Ortiz skipped the rest of the ACA conference and returned that same night to L.A. He was eager to tell people, especially Dr. Talon, about his discovery, but knew he had to refrain; for now, they had to remain his secret.

  Still, he could not keep himself from visiting the professor the day before he was to return to Las Vegas and attend the Mictlano fiesta. That the professor kept his office hours on Friday afternoons was a signal that he didn’t really want students dropping in on him, since this was the time of the week when they were least likely to do so. Nevertheless, Ortiz crept down the empty hall to the professor’s office and knocked on the door.

  “Open!” Talon boomed.

  The only decorations on the professor’s walls were a spear-thrower and three arrows. He sat entombed in his piles of papers and journals, fixed Ortiz with his glittery blue gaze, and waited for him to state his business.

  “I was thinking about writing my thesis on the Mictlanos,” Ortiz said.

  “Mictlanos, ey? What do you know about the Mictlanos?”

  “Not much. That’s why—”

  “What aspect? What in particular do you want to write about?”

  Ortiz hadn’t really thought it through. But he’d been thinking about the slaps he’d heard that night in Las Vegas, the woman’s cries, the bruise she’d shown him, Vicente’s piggish face, and so he said, “Gender relations?”

  “Well, that would be fashionable,” Talon said. “Easy, too. Gender relations among the Mictlanos basically revolve around the cinchazo. Do you know what the cinchazo is?”

  Ortiz allowed that he did not.

  “The cinchazo is the blow a man gives to his woman with the flat side of his machete. It pretty much settles everything, at least from the man’s point of view. It’s very difficult to get the women to talk about it, even to other women. If you intend to do fieldwork on that, you’d best be very, very careful.”

  Talon drew from one of his piles of papers an article he’d written about the Mictlanos and gave it to Ortiz. Apparently it was a detailed account of the ritual fight between the two Mictlano males that Ortiz had already heard about in Talon’s lectures. Ortiz tucked the article in his satchel, thanked the professor, and took his leave.

  The next day, Ortiz took off for Las Vegas feeling elated. So the famous Professor Talon had a hard time getting Mictlana women to open up to him. Well, as far as Ortiz was concerned, the young Mictlana woman had already opened up to him by revealing her bruise. She wanted to talk about it. Perhaps that was because he himself was Native, or looked it. Or because he simply inspired trust. Talon was, let’s face it, a loud, aggressive European. It was surprising any Native peoples at all had ever confided in him.

  Pleased with the thought of someday surpassing Talon as an ethnographer, Ortiz hadn’t yet bothered to read the article the professor gave him, but as he drove he plucked it from his satchel and began his reading-on-the road game. As always in this game, the meaning of the text wasn’t going to sink in immediately; the fun would come later when the words, carved in his mind by the danger, came back to him verbatim, as if out of nowhere, triggered by some stress.

  Ortiz glanced up just in time up to see a deer or an antelope bounding—no, flying—across the hood of his car. Some kind of hoofed thing, anyway: The cloven hoof came down on his exterior rearview, shattering it. Holy fucking shit. Behind him, the creature continued bounding across the desert in great leaps.

  Ortiz stuffed the article in his satchel and took the wheel with both trembling hands. Enough foolishness. He kept his eyes on the road the rest of the way to Vegas.

  The sun had already set by the time he got to the city. With a frisson of professional satisfaction, he turned his car away from the lights of the Strip and headed into the dark barrio of his study. The only things he could see were what his headlights illuminated: the potholed street, and at the end of it, the elm tree.

  The tree had been hideously lopped, its stumped limbs raised in supplication to the heavens. Who would do such a thing to a tree, especially here in the desert, where shade was so needed? But again, it wasn’t his place to pass judgment on these people. They needed the wood for their carvings, after all. Or maybe they turned it into charcoal for cooking, as people did all over the Third World.

  Speaking of charcoal, the two men digging behind the huts were no doubt preparing a barbeque pit for the fiesta. That meant the food was a long ways from being ready. Maybe this was to be some sort of drawn-out, all-night fiesta; Ortiz regretted not having gotten something to eat on the road.

  Nor should he be drinking on an empty stomach, but already the man who had invited him to the baile had thrust into his hand a big plastic glass of chicha, the traditional Mict-lano fermented corn drink. So okay, cool, let the party begin.

  The man ushered him to a rickety metal table set up in one corner of the dusty courtyard. Two other men joined them. Another metal table had been set up in the corner opposite. The only illumination came from a dim kerosene lamp suspended from a wire running from the roofs of two of the huts. But it was enough to allow Ortiz to see Vicente’s squat body take a seat at that table opposite.

  A four-man band emerged from the shadows and struck up vigorous binary rhythms on an accordion and chicken-scratch strings. The men at Ortiz’s table urged more milky chicha on him. The drink was cool, if a bit acid. Probably quite nourishing. He drank and listened to the homely music and smiled at his friends. The red neon ¡Viva! sign shone bright in the distance.

  Then, as if choreographed, a group of women assembled themselves in the fourth corner of the courtyard, all dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. Among them was
the woman with the bruise. She glanced at Ortiz’s table, then at Vicente’s, then dropped her gaze to the ground.

  Men from both tables began taking women to dance, though not before first asking the woman’s husband or boyfriend for permission. Ortiz watched the dancers shuffle in the dust, and loved them. He felt deeply connected to them, to these people whose ancestors—and his, on his Native side—had crossed the Bering Strait and made that immense and brave journey down into Mesoamerica, where they had built vast empires. Now they had returned back north, to the great Nevada desert, where he was ever so fortunate to be witness to their ancient rites.

  Okay—maybe he didn’t love Vicente so much. Vicente remained at his table, sipping his chicha morosely and refusing to look in Ortiz’s direction. Ortiz supposed he should have gone to his table right off and greeted him and the other men seated there. Well, he could do that now. He would drink with them. He would win them with his smile.

  He stood, swaying slightly. The men with him pushed their chairs from the table. The band struck up a fast-tempoed tune. Ortiz made it halfway across the courtyard when someone pressed a machete into his hand.

  And that’s when, in its exact wording, Talon’s text came to him, as if written in the dark air before him:

  The disputed woman’s husband smashes the lantern withhis machete, and the baile is plunged into darkness. Themachetes of the two rivals strike each other, ringing inthe night. Cries and insults from all sides reach a joyfulcrescendo. After the clashing of the machetes is over, abrief silence ensues, until a voice shouts, “Get a light overhere!”

  A new lantern is lit. It illuminates a group of mensurrounding a dead man. The dead man’s companionscarry his body to the freshly dug grave, while others throwdirt on the pool of blood on the dance floor. Regardless of whether the dead man is the disputed woman’s husbandor his rival, she weeps copiously and goes to her house, accompanied by female friends or relatives. The victoriousman goes back to his table and shouts for more chicha allaround, and the band strikes up anew.