Madame hovered over Tonio, the knife behind her back, intrigued. “You adopted this boy? Do not tell me lies, Phyllis Slabbert.”
“You lied to me, when you said this had never happened, before. . .”
Madame blinked at me. Tonio whimpered and sketched. The bowstring creaked.
“Look at him, Madame: I want you to count his teeth.”
Madame whirled on me and brought the knife up to my chin so quickly I couldn’t even flinch. “What is this game?”
My muscles locked up and I just stared at her. “Actaeon’s done it before, hasn’t he? Maybe you even let it happen, part of the ‘rituals’, or a breeding experiment? And you made Greta Spivak, your old vet, dump the girl—”
“Who is this? I know no one by this name!” Madame’s wounded innocence was silent movie acting at its finest.
“Bullshit! She worked for you! I think it was because you both knew the girl was pregnant—”
“You lie!” The knife slashed at my face. I ducked away, but the edge flayed my scalp. A big flap of skin with hair on it came away in my hand as I cradled the wound.
Sobs of pain welled up in my throat, but I gagged them back. Whether or not I could go on, it had to come out. “The girl was only twelve, you remember? She couldn’t keep him, so they put him up for adoption, but nobody wanted him. He’d retreat and draw on everything, then have violent fits of rage. His hormones are all screwed up and no one’s ever tried to reach him, let alone love him, but he’s a sweet, sensitive little boy.”
Madame looked from Tonio to the bloody knife in her hand. “Look at his teeth, Madame. He’s a strange little boy, no doubt, but is he an animal? Do you want to put a saddle on him?”
Madame bent down and took Tonio’s jaw, almost tenderly, in her gloved hand. Tonio was too far gone to resist her. Still looking into his mouth as the silence dragged on, she called out, “Chandra, come here.”
In the stables, a metal pail hit the ground. The stable door groaned as it swung open. The darkness beyond yawned, absolute. Marina’s fingers grew sweaty and tired on the bowstring, and she lowered it. Blood stung my eyes, soaking my hand when I wiped it away. I needed to lie down. I had to get Tonio out of there. I wanted to show her, but I never meant for things to get so out of hand—
Madame seemed, all of a sudden, to decide. She rose and turned on Tonio with the knife out: he didn’t see it coming.
I dove after her, screaming. I grabbed her arm, but she slipped out of my blood-slick grip to stab him.
The knife scythed through Tonio’s down parka and came out amid a flurry of feathers. I’d fouled her attack, but she cocked her arm to stab him in the throat. I stepped inside her reach and shoved her as hard as I could. Tonio rolled away shrieking and threw his pad at her. Marina shouted, “Madame!” and raised her bow at me, loosed her arrow.
It never hit me. Sailing past my eyes, it hit Actaeon in the shoulder, but didn’t slow him down.
He came so fast I could only fall before him. Leaping over me, he dealt Marina a brutal kick to the chest. The girl slammed into the barn door and slumped to the ground. Almost in the same movement, he lunged after Madame who, in turn, dove after Tonio. His jaws snapped at her and she hung, howling, in mid-air, caught by his teeth in her long white hair.
Tonio crab-walked backwards into a corner between two walls of hay bales. Hanging by her hair, Madame roared commands in Greek, but Actaeon stood frozen, unable to parse the sticky situation with the stunted brute mind his mistress had given him.
Sounds of shuffling feet behind me made me turn, and I gasped. The rest of them had broken loose, and skulked out of the dark like madhouse inmates on Judgment Day, knees skinned and spurs bloodied from kicking down their stable doors. Their big black eyes rolled and they began to hoot, deep in their barrel chests, nostrils flared as they scented blood on the air.
Tonio’s blood. A trickle stood out on his green parka, studded with white down feathers, radioactive in its effect.
I knew, then, why Madame Dioskilos had always had someone else treat and put down her beasts. The smell of their own blood, the sounds of their pain, drove them mad. I thought, then, that I would die, and I laid still as death on the ground, but I did not exist for them. They stampeded over me and converged on Madame Dioskilos.
I got up, pointedly not looking at them as I crawled along the wall to Tonio. He pressed his face against the wall and chewed his lips, too scared to make a sound as I bundled him up in my arms and shuffled with my eyes closed for a thousand years to the barn door.
I raced home and packed bags in a panic. Tonio had fallen asleep in the truck. I was ready to flee again, when exhaustion set in. I had enough strength to bring Tonio into the house and lay him in his bed, before I passed out myself.
I awakened at dawn, and no sirens wailed, no police broke down the door. We would leave, but not in a hurry, not as fugitives. I couldn’t understand how the world couldn’t sense something so wrong happening, but then, how could it not have sensed how wrong things had been, all along? The sisterhood would smother it in secrecy, and that would be best. No one needed to know—
I only went back once, that morning. Of the beasts there was no sign, nor of any of the girls. Trista was gone, and there were opened pill packets and gauze bandage wrappers on the floor of the tack room. I still worry about them, but I think they will make out all right. After her fashion, Madame Dioskilos prepared them well to face the world.
I won’t detail what they did to her body, or where I found the head. The bloody paintings they made on the walls of the barn, in their stables, in the chapel of the Goddess at the barn’s heart, were what I will always remember. Though they had only one color to work in, the delicacy of the shapes of centaurs, satyrs and nymphs sporting across, filling and spilling off the cedar beam walls, spoke as no words could of what they might have been, in another life.
I burned the place down. I buried what I could find of Madame Dioskilos under the laurel tree behind the hunting lodge. I said a prayer for her, after I counted her teeth. Her extra bicuspids were filed down and the jaw surgically rebuilt, but she still had too many molars to pass for human, in her own book. I hope God sees it differently.
WHAT THE GODS EAT
Maceo Nahuat Xijun had lived in the jungle interior of the Yucatan all his life, and because nobody had ever promised him anything better, he believed that he was happy. He made no trouble for anyone. He had a pedicab bicycle with which to earn a living, and by collecting firewood and ferrying old women to the store in Valladolid, and a little souvenir carving and poaching on the side, he provided for his family better than most.
His children had grown up and now did for themselves. Though they lived on the coast, his sons were bellboys and his daughter a restroom attendant. Yet he was not ashamed of them. They were honest, and took what the world offered. Maceo was not so foolish as to deny that the old ways were dying, and soon the world must change, the Maya included. The priest in the village charged his flock to come into his hut to watch satellite television. The children all drifted to the coast to serve the legions of tourists, or to darker fates among the Spaniards in Mexico. But Maceo did not succumb to the temptations of the outside, or rail against those who pushed at the shrinking borders of their world, until the signs came to the jungle.
On a morning like any other, with the sun peering through the green canopy overhead, Maceo breakfasted with his wife and dressed, took his machete and his shotgun from where they stood beside the curtained doorway of his palapa, and went outside to greet the day.
His home stood in a small cluster with a dozen others of his father’s clan, gathered around a wellspring and a spreading ceiba tree. They lived nearly a mile from the 180, the two-lane highway that cut across the eastern jungle, and five miles from the ruins of Coba. Though it was a chore to ride his pedicab down the narrow trail that eventually blundered into the highway, he valued the quiet and the cleanliness of the woods over the omnipresent roaring and stench of
the trucks, and the rattle and horn-squawking of the tourists and taxi cabs that plied the road. So it was with particular confusion and anger that he rounded the last bend of the trail that day and found his path blocked by a towering tree of metal.
Maceo was no naïve child. In his fifty years, he had seen electric lights, flush toilets, televisions and computers; and though his soul recoiled from such wonders as witchcraft, he knew better than to infer the supernatural was at work when white men were the more likely culprits. Upon further inspection, the evil tree proved to be only a billboard. The steel trunk stood twice Maceo’s height, and held aloft a single, rectangular leaf, which beamed down on the highway with blinking electric lights around the red and white logo for one of the sugar drinks the whites liked. His own wife was addicted to Pepsi; though he forbade it in his home, she held back her earnings from weaving blankets for the tourist stand at Coba to buy the syrupy poison.
How long he stood there before the billboard, he did not know, and he only broke out of his spell when his young cousin Hilario, who took a more sanguine view of the outside world, came down the path and stood beside him.
“This wasn’t here yesterday,” Maceo told him.
Hilario studied the sign for a moment, then shrugged. “What of it?”
Now, Maceo offered his own fatalistic gesture, but there was a frustrated impulse to strike out in his movement. He didn’t know how to explain to Hilario how the billboard, which had seemingly sprouted out of the ground like an evil tree, posed a grave threat. It was a talisman, a malevolent charm beckoning the people of the forest to the illusion of a life they could not hope to grasp, though it would cost them their souls. And more, the sign itself was surely more than it appeared, if only for the uncanny speed of its erection. Whenever the whites built anything, it took weeks, while workers snoozed in their trucks and cut down trees and threw trash as far as they could into the surrounding jungle. Then it hit him, how the sign must have come about, the threads of resentment in his brain knotting together into a tapestry. But this, too, he could not hope to explain to Hilario.
As Maceo dragged his pedicab through the undergrowth around the billboard, his cousin offered him ten pesos to ride him to Coba.
“Why do you want to go there? There’s no work.”
Hilario laughed. “I stepped out onto the highway with no plans, to await what the day will bring. And now, the sign has reminded me that I am thirsty.”
By day’s end, Maceo had convinced himself of two things: the billboards were indeed a product of white sorcery, and their invasion must be repelled. Between his home and Coba, Maceo had seen no less than eighteen billboards along the highway, none within spitting distance of a village or souvenir stand, but simply standing among the trees that crowded the narrow shoulders of the road. He believed he knew now, at least, where they had come from.
The cars and trucks that passed this way threw their trash out into the forest without pause, faster than the gleaners could pick them up and find new uses for them. The waste had always struck Maceo as a disgusting mystery, but now, it made sense. The indestructible plastic bottles and wrappers that rained on the ground were not merely trash, but seeds—diabolical harbingers of the alien ecology of metal and plastic and advertising that had already swallowed the coast. It was a hostile invader that no one else seemed to want to fight. The dead-eyed souvenir-hawkers at Coba sold the products the signs foretold; beside the road to the ruins of the once-sacred ceremonial city, a looming image of golden arches promised a still-greater ritual awaiting them in Valladolid—the devouring of machine-made ghost-food.
Maceo could not read the words on the billboards, but he knew that they sought to infect their victims with the virus of desire. The lurid colors and explosive graphics tugged his eyes off the bumpy blacktop before him, and sewed hot coals inside his brain. Even he was not immune to their appeals.
Taking an alternate trail off the highway to give the infernal signs a wide berth, he resolved to stop them, to push them back as his ancestors had tried, and failed, to do. But how? To cut down one of the signs, even if that were possible, would only bring more. To stop them at the source, one must use guile or force, and Maceo had ample reserves of neither. What he had was the land itself, and the blood of the Maya in his veins—blood which his father had told him, once, descended from the Chilam Balam, the Jaguar Priests of Tulum, the last of the great cities, which he called by its old name, Zama, “the dawn.”
From the time of the Itza invasion and the fall of the cities, the Conquistadors, to 1934, the year of the last Mayan Revolt, his people had fought and lost whenever they tried to defend their land, because they were outmatched by guns and germs. The outsiders’ advantage had only grown with time, while the Maya dwindled and forgot. But he remembered; rage brought it all back, the ways which the race had of old ruled its domain absolutely. He remembered, or rediscovered, a sliver of what his people had already begun to forget before the first Spaniards landed on Yucatecan soil.
Oddly calm, now, he parked his bike in the trees, brought his wood and pork and plantains to his palapa, and took out the chisels he sometimes used to carve ashtrays, pipes and chess pieces for extra money. Silently, he stole into the jungle, trotting through the trackless green until he came to the edge of the forgotten cenote.
He scaled the sheer limestone walls of the cenote and stooped over the spring water bubbling up out of some underground river beneath his feet. Maceo knew nothing about karst topography, still less about the asteroid which had struck this very area sixty-five million years ago, lending its stark, extraterrestrial substance to an already callous terrain. He knew only what he needed, and as he attacked the rock, he sang a chant that would have sent his clan into hysterics, to hear it sung in the open. He knew that this was no blasphemy he performed, but the highest ritual act. He knew it was the right thing to do, because through his hands, the land told him so.
It took Maceo a week of nights to carve the idol. He worked in an abandoned, solitary hut in the forest under the new moon, in pitch blackness. Each night, he sat in the dark and smoked a huge green cigar until his eyes streamed and closed and his mind reeled with nauseous phantoms. His hands touched the stone, probing for the form inside it, and drove the chisel home to let it out. His fingers were shredded by mistakes and by the stone itself, which became ever more jagged and cruel as he let the true form out, but the blood made the work easier, the thirsty limestone seemed to melt and run under his tools. He never set eyes on it, never let his mind piece together the shape he liberated, until it told him he was done. Even then, his mind was clouded by fatigue and double-tongued fear—that it might not work, and that it would.
The things he carved for tourists—the Mayan calendar as an ashtray, the recumbent sacrificial god Chac Mool as a paperweight—were his deepest shame, but they bespoke the trained eye of Maceo’s ancestral mastery of the stone, of craft handed down from the Golden Age. His talent was the last guttering remnant of the brilliance that built an empire unlike any other, but until he began to carve the idol, he himself had known only half of it. For this was something sacred, a vessel of crude matter into which he hoped to call down a god.
When it was done, he laid it down before him in the dark, and lit another cigar. He blew the smoke over the deeper darkness before him, petrified that his eyes would adjust, even now, to the dark, and strip the stone of the mystery out of which the divine must be conjured. Wordlessly, he began to chant. He dared not form his desires into words, dared not call the gods by name, for he knew not what god, if any, his hands had shaped. He let the chant feed on his anger, his despair, his pustulent galls of envy. As it came out, he felt himself grow light and the ground shrugging him off, and he floated up, and grew afraid, for the dark inside the hut was much greater now, than that without.
He bowed and prayed before the idol until the dark was so deep that his eyes might have failed, but in the end, there was no answer to his prayers, no sign that his blood and sweat had y
ielded anything but another trinket to sell to the tourists.
And what did you hope for? An angry inner voice demanded of him as he snuck into his palapa and lay down beside his snoring wife. What have the old gods ever done for the sons and daughters of the Maya? This angry voice asked its question again and again in his head until a colder voice that might not have come from within his head at all demanded, And what have the sons and daughters of the Maya done for the gods?
From the moment he opened his eyes the next morning, Maceo knew this day would be different. By the cluck and chatter of his wife and neighbors, who were louder than the storm itself, he knew that it was raining. The women planned the day for their men, who would then choose to go out and work in the rain anyway, or at least hide. As his ears opened to the day, it became clear that this rain was bent on drowning out the sound of the women, so furiously did it pound the thatched roof of his hut. Such weather was far out of season, and the whole village was abuzz with news from the highway. As he dressed and ate, Maceo could not put down a curious elation, a sense that he had brought this about.
“Husband, the roof needs more thatching, and the other women say—”
“I am not afraid of the rain. I will go out and work.”
“You will stay here and protect us!” his wife’s cousin shouted over the din of watery bullets smashing mud. “There is no other work today! The rain-gods have lost their temper and the earth has swallowed the road!”
Maceo went out to see for himself, but his strange glee grew. His wife and her family burned candles to the saints and orishas, but they knew the work of the old gods when they saw it. The rain ravaged the canopy and pelted the trail he pushed his bike along, and thunder growled on all sides. This was no ordinary rain, he knew. By the ferocity of it, he believed he knew who had answered his summons, whose image his blind hands had coaxed out of the stone. Chac, the Lord of Rains, was abroad on the land.
Strategies Against Nature Page 4
