I don’t have any.
That’s because you put it in the pinché bank. Banks are full of robbers. Put rubber bands around that shit and bury it.
Why is it okay to say shit but not fuck?
. . .
I need to think about this.
• • •
but Gonzo has a voice like wildflower honey pouring winter-slow from a jar, and eyes like Paul Newman.
Everybody likes Gonzo.
The people of Cayuga County are still a little on the xenophobic side, and the Mexican invasion is only just beginning to lap at the ankles of upstate New York, so bearish, tattooed Chancho doesn’t want his brown face to be the first one they see at North Star.
He doesn’t need their love.
Just their business.
When it comes to love, he gets all he needs from his wife and Jésus Christ. Consuela got fat, but Jésus stayed skinny; he would have preferred the reverse, since he only has to chingar Consuela, but her face is still pretty and he remembers how her body was in Mexico and Texas. Maybe she does the same for him—he’s got a bigger belly now, too, and fair is fair.
“No, seriously, brujo, get this cabrón away from me. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
Salvador stands with two bottles of mineral water balanced on a tray, his hips barely moving in the echo of a wagging tail. Salvador remembers the big man with his smell of motor oil and cumin from his four-legged days. Chancho used to throw the Frisbee for him, and praise him for how high he jumped, and scratch his ears. His master explained to him that Chancho is afraid of him now, but that he shouldn’t take that personally.
Salvador really wants Chancho to like him again.
He moves a little closer with the tray.
Chancho squints, takes his mineral water, crosses himself.
16
Minutes later.
Chancho holds the striking pads for Andrew and begins to call off punches.
“Jab. Jab. Right cross. Jab. Jab. Double jab. Left hook.”
Chancho calls these words at the outer limit of audibility, as gently as if he were inventorying flowers at a funeral parlor.
“Now move forward with me,” he says, lets Andrew push him across the yard. He no longer calls punches, just holds the pads up and lets his friend improvise.
“Now punch while backing up. This is very important. You can knock a guy out who thinks he has you.”
Chancho moves forward slowly but insistently, alternating pads, nodding when Andrew lands an especially crisp one.
The taped-up gloves tattoo the taped-up pads in the backyard, the staccato mixing pleasantly with birdsong and a tractor straddling asphalt and dirt on the road out front.
“Don’t puss out on me,” Chancho says, now gently boxing out at Andrew’s ears with the mitts to show him he’s letting his guard droop.
“Switch,” he says, and Andrew takes the mitts, preparing himself for the barely padded brickstorm he will now be fielding. He’s glad for the rest all the same; his drills have left him wheezing.
The staccato comes faster and harder now, the bigger man pushing the lanky one back, bobbing his head and shoulders like something between an angry chimp and a piston. Chancho had been a formidable boxer fifteen years ago, and might have gone professional had he not been so fond of beer—he had never etched a boxer’s six-pack into his belly. The obvious way to beat Chancho was to wear him out, and enough of them did to keep him from quitting his day job.
But many did not; to wear Chancho out, you had to be able to duck his bear-swat punches, which was hard, or absorb them, which was damn near impossible.
And you had to not smoke a pack a day.
“Okay, enough punching.”
“Thank the gods.”
“Now elbows,” Chancho all but whispers, smiling his big smile under the uneven, dated mustache, just going gray. Only the soul patch under his chin keeps him from looking like he stepped out of a Starsky and Hutch episode.
Chancho throws elbows first, so the magus can rest his lungs a bit more. The tattooed arms lash out and bite the pads deep, the left elbow flashing the star tattoo of Texas, where the burly man lived until he found Jésus and got out of moving drugs. Or, rather, protecting people who moved drugs.
Chancho would always be the first guy you’d want to meet in the ring and the last guy you’d want to meet in the parking lot. Or see coming up to your sliding glass door with a lucha libre mask on.
Andrew is feeling dizzy with exhaustion, but Chancho wants him to push through it, so he does, the sweat drenching his long hair even in its ponytail, making his bare chest glisten and soaking the waistband of his jeans.
“Now you. Twist at the hips so I feel it. You’re little, so it’s even more important for you to get your hips in it. I want twenty on each side.”
When the drenched and reeking pads are lying on the table and the panting men sit down on their benches, Salvador walks from the back door carrying Mexican Coca-Cola bottles on a tray.
“Good boy,” Andrew says. “Thank you.”
Six years now since he used his secret books to bring the dog back. Chancho watches Salvador with a fixed eye; looking away from the clockwork figure is difficult, especially when he swivels his Dalí head around to meet your gaze. The thing moves so . . . fluidly.
Chancho likes Mexican Coke because it’s in glass bottles and has sugar, not that corn syrup crap they drench everything in now.
He likes it so much he doesn’t cross himself when he takes the bottle from the stick-man.
Instead he turns his gaze on Andrew.
“You’ve got to quit smoking.”
Andrew, who knows how green he looks, just nods, sipping his cola.
“I know. But isn’t that pretty pot-kettle? You smoke.”
The sweat on the green bottles looks heavenly to Chancho and he studies his, pressing it now to the side of his temple.
“I know.”
“You smoke my cigarettes, for fuck’s sake.”
“Your cigarettes are good.”
“So buy some. They’ll sell ’em to you.”
“Got to go to the hippie shop for that.”
“I’m just saying a smoker ought not tell a man to quit.”
“I don’t wheeze like a busted vacuum. I ought to quit. You got to quit.”
“Maybe.”
“Ain’t there a pinché spell for that?”
“Yeah. It’s right next to the one for quitting drinking.”
Chancho smiles.
“Maybe we could get you a hip’motist.”
“Ever seen one?”
“Heard about ’em.”
“Well, they scare me fuckless,” Andrew says. “I saw one make a guy think he came all over himself right at a café table, so that when the waitress came the guy pulled the tablecloth half off trying to cover up his lap.”
Chancho laughs, broadly enough to show the gap where the tooth behind the canine should have been.
“Funny. A man scaring you. Just a man, I mean. When you play with dead girls and dead dogs and stuff. That fishy girl, you said she kilt herself, right?”
“Her sister stole her man and she threw herself off the bluffs.”
“McIntyre Bluffs?” Chancho asked.
Andrew nodded.
“’Cause I know a guy took his lady there and they both fell off f’ing. Only nobody died. But he got his back broke, but could still walk. I think she landed on him.”
“Nadia died. Broke that pretty neck back in 1926.”
Chancho squints at him and tilts his head up, assessing.
“You need to get right with Jésus.”
“I’m fine with Jésus.”
Silence.
“Can I drive the Mustang?”
“If you shut up about Jésu
s.”
Chancho smiles.
17
Years ago.
Night.
Another Mustang, the ’65.
Upside down, wheels spinning, engine running. Andrew uncomfortable, scratched, confused. Can’t reach the keys to shut the motor off because there’s a branch in the way. Led Zeppelin is singing about California but it sounds wrong because only one speaker works.
He climbs out into cool spring air, smelling radiator fluid and oil.
Nearly falls; something is wrong with his leg.
The peasants! The peasants cut my leg off!
He looks down, but his leg is there.
Mostly.
His jeans are ripped and lots of little somethings hurt, far away.
His heart is pounding.
Just breathe.
Just walk.
Andrew walks, his back to the lamplit greenery and spinning wheels of the wrecked Mustang.
Ford.
First on Race Day!
(F)ucked (OR) (D)ying.
Andrew in his snakeskin boots and tight black jeans, walking down 104A, tempted to stop at a house but senses he’s done something wrong; he needs to get back to his own house and Sarah. He’ll be safe there; he’ll sleep and he’ll know what to do in the morning.
The left leg hurts; he sits on a guardrail and pulls his boot off, pours blood out of it, it won’t go back on.
He holds it and keeps limping, waving off several cars that stop, actually yells at one big, Swedish-looking fellow who insists that he should get in his pickup truck, but he won’t go away. Looks like he means to wrestle him into the truck. Until Andrew points at the big man’s face and gives him a cramp in the cheek muscles
How Prospero of you oh that wasn’t nice he just wants to help but I have to have to just please God get home
and the big man drives off, scared because he knows the wild, injured little man did it to him. Andrew doesn’t understand how mud got on him, but mud is drying in his hair and on his face and he pulls at this, spits on his hand and wipes his cheek.
The boot swinging in the other hand, the magus limping.
Only ten miles to Dog Neck Harbor, should be there by morning.
He waves off two more cars, but the third one pulls in front of him, its roof exploding in sharp but beautiful flashes of blue light.
Andrew says some words in medieval Russian.
Andrew disappears.
Knows the spell won’t last, hobbles into a soy field.
Invisible.
I don’t drive so well but I’m not too drunk to fucking DISAPPEAR!
He curls up in the soy plants, feels something like a beetle crawl on his hand but doesn’t slap at it.
Says “I pardon you” in a German accent like Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List and laughs until he passes out.
Dreams his car is radioactive, luminous with it, enough to poison Cayuga County, that he has to shovel enough dirt over it to protect everybody, but he can’t. He just can’t. And he holds his shovel and cries. Because he really, really fucked up.
In the morning, a trio of dogs sniffing him, a man’s good, lined face, a giant looking down on him.
Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.
“Ambulance is on its way. You want some water?”
He does.
O God I fucked up I did.
He did.
More than he knows.
He sits up.
He reaches into his pocket, thinking something in there will help him.
A napkin with a note on it, a semicircle of cabernet from where the glass rested on it, a crescent moon of vice and folly.
I want you in the library tonight.
I want you to fuck me in that leather chair.
—S.
When did she slip that into his pocket?
Is it even from today?
Sarah.
“Sit up slow. No hurry.”
The farmer again.
He shows the farmer the napkin note.
“Do you know when this was written?”
The farmer shakes his head.
“A pretty girl wrote it. She writes grant applications. And they say she plays guitar. And laughs and sings.”
The man smiles, points at the ambulance, walks off to talk to them, leaves a jug with a thumbprint of red paint on it.
Andrew notices the bright red silo.
Nice work, mister.
The water tastes like plastic.
And dirt.
Dirt in my mouth.
La la la la.
18
“Whatcha thinking about, brujo?”
“My personal bottom.”
“Bang!” Chancho says, swerving the wheel just a little, grinning.
The Mustang is doing seventy on a two-lane country highway.
Andrew jerks, grabs the door.
“Whoever told you you were funny was a pendejo.”
Chancho corrects his pronunciation.
19
Andrew wears his hair in a ponytail to do yard work at the Zautke house because he feels too effeminate in his samurai bun. He walks behind the power mower trying to look like he knows what he’s doing, working his way from the curb to the nondescript blue house, circumnavigating the stone birdbath, jogging it past the flagpole, but Salvador has been mowing Andrew’s yard for the last few years, and Andrew’s feet aren’t practiced at taking the turns. He leaves hand-sized patches of taller grass and then has to double back for them; he looks at the shorn front half of the yard and it strikes him funny because it looks just a bit like Karl’s squared-off old-man crew cut.
Karl watches him from the porch for a second.
Wants to shout “Need anything?” at his daughter’s strange AA friend, but knows he’s on the wagon like Anneke and all Karl has that isn’t beer is cheap Pick & Save orange juice just this side of brown or tap water just this side of clear, water that tastes like . . . what the hell does the water here taste like?
Not water.
Goddamn Niagara Mohawk anyway.
Karl Zautke hasn’t been feeling well lately, his lymph glands swollen up like acorns, his breath short. Not bad enough to go to the hospital, but bad enough that Anneke is coming every other day now instead of twice a week.
She does his dishes, cooks two days’ worth of food for him, does his sour laundry.
But does he even try to take care of his flagging health?
Karl drinks his Pabst Blue Ribbon, enjoying the yeasty, cold, carbonated bite on his tongue. It’s a good, simple beer for when you’re thirsty, not one of these perfumey, pumpernickel microbrews queered up by guys with sideburns.
Anneke has her big suede work gloves on, balanced on an aluminum ladder that has seen better days, shearing branches from the maple tree that had started flirting with the shingles on the west side of the house. She totters just a little, rights herself. Karl sees this, puts down his beer, comes over, and holds the ladder.
“Daddy,” she shouts, just loud enough to get over the mower’s chop. She points her gloved finger at the front door, meaning he should retake his place on his sagging chair, but Karl holds the ladder stubbornly, breathing hard through his nose and smiling at her. She doesn’t like how red his face is.
It does feel steadier.
If Karl Ernest Zautke is anything, it’s solid.
• • •
They sit on the porch, the three of them, Karl mopping his head from time to time with a kitchen towel. Karl Zautke is just a little too big for the wicker chair beneath him; Andrew has been watching it collapse in slow motion for a year and a half. Anneke would get him a new one except that she knows Karl finds half-collapsed things comfortable.
Dad.
My same Dad but old now.<
br />
Sick.
Doesn’t drink like he’s sick.
Dad’s on his third beer, and Anneke has told herself she’ll just pluck from his hand the next one he dares to open in front of her.
Karl senses he’s on the last beer he can get away with and knows better than to test her. Settles into his buckling throne.
Andrew feels mismatched sitting on his folding chair, sharing the porch with the two outsized Teutons, like a visitor from a fine-boned, nut-brown little tribe that mows the conqueror’s lawns and fetches them PBR against their doctors’ orders.
Anneke and he can’t share their vulgar wiseasseries in front of Karl, so Andrew confines himself to the practical.
Karl doesn’t feel comfortable talking about his illness or the day-to-day problems it creates in front of Andrew. Anneke enjoys having her favorite men together, and if they don’t know how to connect, that’s their problem.
“Car running okay?” Andrew asks.
Karl drives a Jeep Cherokee Andrew has bewitched to keep from breaking down, and has further bewitched so it will come to a safe stop if the driver passes out. Andrew has a real gift for cars, knows how to improvise automotive magic, massage it into their axles and chassis, synthesize it into their gears and skins. He knows very well the Jeep is running smoothly, but he never knows what to say to the big ex-sailor.
“Yeah, great,” Karl says. “Thanks again for changing her oil.”
“My pleasure.”
Two heartbeats go by.
“Mustang running all right?” Karl says, nodding at Andrew’s car.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure is a nice one.”
“Thanks.”
“Turquoise was an interesting choice.”
“That’s how she came.”
“Paint jobs are pricey.”
“They can be.”
Two more heartbeats.
“You need any juice or maybe a glass of water? Must be thirsty. Hot as heck out here.”
It really isn’t all that hot.
“Water would be great.”
Both men start to get up, but Anneke gently puts her hand on her dad’s shoulder so he keeps his seat.
The Necromancer's House Page 5
