by Joe McKinney
Paul, not understanding, had turned his head towards her, lifted his sunglasses, and said, “Do when, tonight?”
“No. I mean, what do you want to do, you know, after school? What are your plans?”
“You mean like a job?”
“Well, yeah. I guess.”
He squinted at her, and not because of the bright sunshine. He seemed to give a lot of thought before he said, “I’d love to play pro ball. But I know that ain’t gonna happen. What I always figured I’d do is be a cop. I’ve got in pretty good with this internship to S.A.P.D. The pay’s good. Benefits are good, too.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I remember you saying that.”
“But I don’t think that’s what you mean, is it? What you mean is: who am I looking to spend my future with. Rachel, there is no doubt at all in my mind who I want to spend my future with.”
She tilted down her sunglasses and looked at him.
“Rachel, you’re my center. I have never met anyone who can focus me the way you do. It’s like, the way you know something is so completely right that all the rest of the world can fall away, but what stays here between you and me will always be whole. That part’s indestructible. That’s how certain I am that I love you.”
Rachel smiled inwardly at the memory and longed for a little of that security now. The rest of the world had certainly fallen away, but she was far from convinced that the two of them were whole. The indestructible felt like it was starting to crumble.
This is what heartache feels like.
Something caught her eye down on the lawn. She put her finger in the book to save her place, stood up and walked to the railing. She had seen a man there, she was almost sure of it. A man in a white shirt and dark slacks, an old cowboy hat in his hand. But there was no one there now. Just the junipers dancing in the breeze.
Damn it, Paul, she thought. Paul and his stories about the homicidal maniacs who were his parents. Now you’ve even got me rattled.
Chapter 11
At first, Magdalena Chavarria didn’t recognize her own living room. Her head was ringing and it was hard to concentrate. There was a film over her eyes that she couldn’t wipe away. She’d been sitting in the same position for a long time and her back and hips ached. There was blood in her mouth. She touched her fingers to her lips and winced.
In front of her was a stick lattice, only the third one she’d ever been called upon to make. The first was twelve years ago, in Mexico, right after the death of her Abuela. After that lattice, she’d buried the woman in the rocky white soil near their home and gone into town to call Martin Henninger, the young man from Texas who had stayed with them for so long while he learned the secrets of the way, and told him that it was her Abuela’s instructions that the power now pass to him.
After that she made the trek northwards, first crossing the border into Texas with six other illegals. From there she’d made it to this little house on the east side of San Antonio, where she hung the sign of the curandera above her door.
Her first year had been a lean one, but certainly no harder than her life in Mexico had been. She told fortunes for the old women in the neighborhood. Sometimes she offered herbal remedies and prayers for aching joints or helped the younger women with the cramps that came with their monthly visits. Business was never enough to make her rich, but it was steady enough to live on—and it seemed like a fortune after Mexico.
And then, on a cold, rainy morning in early September, an old woman from down the street came to her house, pounding on the door, begging for help. Magdalena went with the frantic woman to her house and was ushered into her living room, where the woman’s fourteen year old granddaughter was on the couch, naked from the waist down, screaming in agony from the depths of her labor pains. A group of woman knelt around the young girl’s head, mopping the sweat from her face with towels and trying to reassure her, though from their faces they all knew that death was coming.
“Please help her,” the old woman begged in Spanish. “She’s bleeding so much. I don’t know how to stop it.”
Magdalena looked from the old woman to the girl on the couch. She was writhing in agony, and there was blood all over her legs and running down the skirts of the couch. Magdalena felt ice forming in her belly. She felt angry, too. These women wanted too much from her. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t wield the power. Not really. She looked at the dying girl on the couch, the poisonous beads of sweat popping up all over her face, and she knew the girl was going to die. Death was already crouching on her chest, licking at her lips.
The other women stared at Magdalena. She could hear them muttering to each other. Magdalena wanted to turn around and run out the back door, anything to get away from here. She came close to losing herself to anger. She hadn’t asked for this. These women, they’d brought her here to do the impossible. If the girl died, it wouldn’t be because of some complication resulting from a child having a child, but because Magdalena had failed her. That wasn’t fair. She hadn’t asked for this.
“Please do something,” the old woman said.
She grabbed Magdalena’s hands in hers and went down on her knees.
“Please.”
Magdalena touched the wrinkles in the old woman’s skin and felt the fragile bones in her hands, and all at once her Abuela’s words came back to her. Life and death are reflections of each other. If you trust in this power that I’m teaching you, it won’t matter what side of the mirror you’re standing on.
“On the way in, I saw some chickens in your backyard,” Magdalena said. “Are any of them sitting on eggs that are about to hatch?”
“Yes. Several.”
“Go and get me one of those eggs, please.”
“Of course,” the woman said.
The woman left and Magdalena went to the girl’s side. The other women parted for her.
Magdalena touched the girl’s forehead and felt how hot she was. The girl’s breathing was ragged and her pulse was out of control. A big blue vein throbbed in her forehead.
“Can you hear me?” Magdalena said.
The girl opened her eyes. There was madness there for a moment, bloodshot crazed madness, but it faded.
The girl nodded.
“Good. I want you to breathe with me.”
Magdalena was aware of the power flowing between them, and in that moment she knew that she could help this little girl. She could feel the little one taking strength from her, the energy flowing down her arm and out her fingertips like a living thing.
“Breathe with me,” Magdalena urged.
The girl’s ragged breathing began to slow. Magdalena breathed in, breathed out. Breathed in, breathed out. Her hand was steady on the girl’s cheek. The girl’s convulsions were easing, her fear ebbing away from her like she was shucking off a heavy wet coat. The big blue vein stopped throbbing.
“Good,” Magdalena said. “Breathe with me.”
And then they were breathing together, the two of them in perfect time.
The old woman came back in with the egg and handed it to Magdalena.
“Thank you,” Magdalena said.
To the girl, she said, “I’m going to lift your shirt now. Keep breathing with me.”
The girl nodded.
Magdalena lifted the girl’s shirt and revealed the swollen belly beneath. She could see what she thought was the baby moving, low in the birth canal, fighting for daylight.
“Good,” she said, “you’re good, child. Keep breathing. In and out, in and out.”
She placed the egg on the girl’s stomach and rolled it across the downward swell of her belly with the flat of her palm. There was no more doubt in her mind now. She could feel the circuit forming between the fetus in the egg and the fetus in the girl’s belly, one life taking shape, one life going away.
Magdalena said, “Do you feel it? Do you feel it?”
The girl nodded eagerly. Her breathing broke with the sound of snot bubbling in her nose and Magdalena said, “Easy girl
. Breathe deep. Breathe with me.”
Magdalena took the egg away. She was suddenly dizzy and had to steady herself on the side of the couch. She turned and looked for the old woman who had brought her here.
“Bring me a bowl,” she said.
Someone handed her a bowl, and Magdalena put the egg inside it and stood up.
She turned to the old woman and said, “She’s ready for the baby. Help her.”
Magdalena stood on unsteady legs and stumbled away from the couch. She stood in the middle of the room, watching the egg, glancing at the girl who was now pushing her baby out of the birth canal. She saw the bloody baby emerge. She watched as the old woman cradled the still, purple-skinned child in her arms.
The old woman looked from the still baby to Magdalena, her face a ruin of grief.
Magdalena turned to the egg in the bowl. She muttered, “One life goes in, the other out. All things in balance.”
And almost as though on cue the egg burst with a sound like that of a gunshot. The old women who had gathered around the young girl’s head spread like startled birds, all of them looking at the bowl.
Inside it, a fetal chick lay dead in a flower of blackish red blood.
Magdalena was also looking at the bowl. She was aware of the sounds of the girl crying, though these were not tears of pain, but of a relief so complete it seemed almost spiritual.
And then there was the sound of a baby crying.
Magdalena let out a long sigh. The women turned from the bowl to the baby in a flood of ecstatic voices, and Magdalena stumbled out the door.
From that day forward, Magdalena’s reputation as a curandera was secure.
***
That first lattice she made all those years ago in Mexico was like a slowly burning pile of coals. She had felt its power for years, burning within her with a slow, steady heat that was as reassuring as her Abuela’s touch had been when she was just a child.
The second lattice, though, had felt very different. That one, made only four days ago, was like a bonfire in her chest. The need to make it had come upon her with all the unexpected force of a car crash, and when she was done with it, she had staggered out the back door and into the yard where she kept a small herd of goats and vomited all over the grass.
She came to with the goats pressing their noses against her mouth. Slowly, like an old woman, she rose and staggered back inside. It was then that she saw the lines of Hebrew scrawled across her walls.
There was a black magic marker on the floor in the kitchen, the cap off and probably lost during her fugue state. She picked it up and went to a bare spot on the wall and tried to copy some of the script. She couldn’t. For some reason her hand wouldn’t work, wouldn’t make the necessary movements. It felt like so much work just to keep her chin up, and soon she gave up on the pen and dropped it to the floor.
After that she stumbled into the living room and stared at the lattice in the middle of the floor. It was not very large, certainly no bigger than the one she had made in Mexico all those years ago, but this one resonated with a power that terrified her. She could feel a heat coming off it. Magdalena put out a hand to it and just as quickly pulled it away. Apparently, now that it was made, she was not to touch it.
But she did know what she was supposed to do. She went out back again and led two of her goats to her truck and tied them up in the bed. Then she drove them to the old Morgan Rollins Iron Works, said the prayers her abuela had taught her, killed one of the goats, and set the other free inside the complex.
“Come back with the priest,” she said to the goat in Spanish.
When she was done, she drove home and poured herself a glass of water. She was so thirsty. She downed her first glass in a gulp and poured another. That one went down in another gulp. As did the third and the fourth. After that she felt a little better, though she did pour yet another glass and took a few swallows from it before setting it down on the counter.
She fell asleep on the couch, still wearing all her clothes, and dreamed of the man who had come to live with them all those years ago. She hadn’t thought of him in a very long while, but she could see him clearly enough in her dreams.
Magdalena also dreamed of the dead goat, the one she’d gutted on the dirt floor of the circular chamber inside the old factory. In her dream, it began to convulse. A man’s hands emerged from inside its ribcage. She knew who the man was, even before she saw his face, and when Martin Henninger pulled himself out of the animal like a man pulling himself up through a hole in the floor, she wasn’t surprised. Terrified, but not surprised.
But then he went about ridding the old factory of the men who did their drugs there, and that was terrible to watch.
So many men died, and in her dreams, she saw every one of them.
***
Magdalena went to the sink and washed the blood off her fingers. Her muscles still ached and her head was ringing, but she knew what she had to do. It was like a line drawn on a map in her head. She dried her hands on a paper towel and took her keys from the basket near the back door and got in her truck and drove to the Mulberry Green Mental Health Rehabilitation Center.
The building was on the fringes of the Vista Verde District just north of downtown, and didn’t look like much of anything from the curb, just a crumbling white brick structure with windows of smoked glass. There was a small brick wall near the front walk that had the name of the clinic printed on it, but the floodlights at its base weren’t working and it was impossible to see what the sign said from the street. Some kids had scrawled graffiti on the left side of the building. On the opposite side, a large copse of walnut trees separated the clinic from a three story Victorian style wood-framed house. The house was painted a light egg-shell blue and had evidently been converted into a law office.
That meant it’d be deserted.
“Good,” she said. She didn’t want to see anybody else hurt. Ever since her dream of the old factory, the dead had haunted her. This was an abomination that she was doing. The power her Abuela had taught her, it was not for this. It was meant to heal. Her Abuela would not approve, though of course her Abuela was no longer here. Martin Henninger was the conduit for the power now. Magdalena had no choice but to serve.
On the other side of the big blue Victorian was a washateria and a convenience store, both evidently open all night but deserted at the moment. Two gay men were walking across the parking toward the club down the street. Magdalena waited for them to walk out of sight, then got out of her truck and walked to the vacant lot across the street from the clinic.
Once she was in position, she began to mutter the commands Martin Henninger put in her head. The swarm started as a hum in the distance, but the sound grew steadily louder, until it was like the roll of a bass drum. From within the din, Magdalena could hear the steady clicking of millions of insect wings. There was a surge of wind at her back and then the sky above her darkened, filling up with wave upon wave of cicadas, their shrill drone elevated now to a deafening roar.
They swarmed past her and descended on the clinic, pounding against the building’s backup generators. It only took a few seconds for the smell of smoke to drift across the street to her. She watched as the first tentative puffs of smoke darkened into columns and began to swirl into the night’s sky, and when the front doors to the clinic burst open and a pair of nurses emerged, coughing and spluttering, waving away the still swarming cicadas, Magdalena got ready to move.
***
David Everett’s body was in full revolt. It wanted heroin and it wanted it right now. He was shaking. He ached everywhere. His skin was wet with sweat and his teeth rattled from the waves of chills that swept through him.
They had him on suicide watch. Though his mind had been chewed to honeycomb by the drugs, he could still tell what these people thought of him. They weren’t cops, but from where he was sitting there was little difference. He was still a prisoner.
The room—not a cell, but a room—had been stripped of anyt
hing that might conceivably be used as a weapon. There was no furniture besides a bare mattress. They took the sheets so he wouldn’t hang himself with them. His clothes, too. Now he was wearing a green paper hospital johnny. It was soaked through and torn. He would have ripped it off if he’d had the energy. As it was, he could barely lift his eyes from the mattress to the door. The effort was too great.
Something was going on outside. Had been for a few minutes now. He’d heard voices and the sound of people moving fast in the hallway outside. The lights flickered but held. There was a faint smell of electrical smoke coming from the vent in the wall above him, but he wasn’t thinking fire. He wasn’t thinking about anything except heroin.
The lights flickered again—and then went out. He held his breath for a moment, listening to the dark outside his room. There was someone standing there.
He waited.
The door opened, and the figure of a woman appeared in the chalky gray outline of the open door.
David Everett managed to push himself up into a sitting position.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“A friend,” said the woman’s voice. Her Mexican accent was strong.
She came forward and knelt beside him.
“These are your clothes,” she said. “Put them on.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Away from here.”
“Where?”
“Don’t ask questions,” she said. “There isn’t time.”
The woman helped him to his feet, then kept a hand near as she let go, as if uncertain whether or not he would remain upright.
Everett wasn’t so sure about that himself.
He steadied himself and waited to see if it would last. It didn’t. A wave of nausea tore through his gut like a punch and sent him pitching forward. The girl grabbed him and held him, but wisely held off trying to make him stand up again.
