The Devil's Bag Man

by Adam Mansbach

  Then he breached the surface and plunged, limbs akimbo, through open air and sky. A cassock of soft purple moss softened his landing, but did nothing to cushion his consciousness.

  What the fuck?

  He blinked away the stars, got his legs beneath him, sucked in a huge gust of humid air, and staggered to his feet.

  Sure enough, the ocean was high overhead—vast and wide, like an endless color-shifting cloud bank, suspended and self-contained, a big fat middle finger in the face of earthly physics. Whatever meniscus he’d broken to escape it and fall to the ground had repaired itself instantly.

  He tore his eyes away and looked around.

  There was only one word for this place.

  Insane.

  To start with, there were the colors. It looked like a four-year-old with a jumbo box of fluorescent crayons had run roughshod over a drawing of a magical kingdom—as conceived and penciled by her nine-year-old sister. The ground cover was a mishmash of high grasses and low mosses, in every color but green. Creeping vines of scarlet kudzu twined around blue cacti in a marriage of climatic opposites; trees bearing an array of fruit Galvan had never seen dotted the vast, gardenlike landscape—gardenlike except where giant pits of sand interrupted, or clusters of massive, steaming icicles sprouted from the ground.

  But it wasn’t the flora.

  It was the fauna.

  The ocean might have been empty, but this place teemed with life.

  Human life.

  Female human life.

  There must be hundreds of them, Galvan thought, eyes darting from one vista to the next, distant to near, the garden unending.

  No, thousands.

  They slept, strolled, and sprawled. Some wore simple clothing, fabric fashioned from plant fibers, but most were naked.

  And all of them were young.

  Innocent.

  Pure.

  The words flashed through his mind, as Galvan put it all together, remembered what Cucuy had told him.

  For every body buried in a shallow grave out there, every heartless virgin the Ancient One had sacrificed and discarded, there was a girl here. Cucuy had built a harem for the god.

  Starting with his own wife.

  A cold chill ran through Galvan.

  She was here somewhere.

  The woman in yellow. The seductress who had filled his dreams.

  Or had they been Cucuy’s dreams, and Galvan merely an interloper, an eavesdropper on her siren call to the man who had betrayed her unto hell or purgatory or limbo or whatever this place was?

  But even as he thought it, Galvan knew it was none of those. He was mapping Christian ideas on to it, but those concepts were foreign, imposed, after the fact. The Dominio Gris was the Dominio Gris. A prison turned playground, if Cucuy was to be believed. And there was no reason to doubt him. He might have been a monster, but he hadn’t lied yet.

  All that explained why homegirl napping against the closest Day-Glo palm tree looked so familiar. He’d probably laid eyes on her a few months back, when he’d made his border run and every Virgin Army conscript close enough to sense the presence of the heart had done her damnedest to stop him.

  He’d probably laid more than eyes on her, actually. Probably driven a station wagon over her or swung a machete at her neck. Maybe she was among those who’d swarmed and devoured his buddy Payaso, or ripped the strongman Gutierrez limb from limb.

  If so, she looked no worse for wear—or for the violence Cucuy had perpetrated either. No more than Galvan himself did. Apparently, the travails of the body were erased here.

  As no doubt befit the pleasures of the god whose garden this was.

  The garden, and every piece of fruit it bore.

  Galvan walked a few paces, until he stood directly before a girl with dark eyes, whose flowing raven-black tresses covered her small breasts. She looked old, he thought; not old old, barely sixteen, but old like she’d been born a few hundred years back, before the gene pool diversified. Thoroughbreds like her didn’t exist anymore.

  She peeled a large fruit with her teeth, a cross between a kiwi and a mango, green pulpy flesh beneath silky ribbon-thin skin. She took no notice of Galvan whatsoever.

  “Howdy,” he tried, with a halfhearted little wave. “I’m, uh . . . new here.”

  She blinked at him, lower half of her face invisible behind the fruit, then spun on her heel and walked away.

  Tough crowd.

  “They can’t talk to you.”

  It was Galvan’s turn to spin on his heel.

  He found himself face-to-face with a lean, handsome young man, sandy haired, with piercing green eyes. A piece of fabric, tied around his waist like a skirt, was his only nod to modesty.

  The dude smiled. “Don’t recognize me, huh?” He shifted his weight, from one foot to the other. “It’s me, Gum. I look a little different here.”

  “Gum. Jesus Christ. You clean up good.” Galvan looked him up and down, grimaced. “I could use one of those. Feels kinda wrong to be walking around with my dick swinging in the breeze.”

  Gum unwrapped the cloth from his torso, ripped it cleanly in half, and offered Galvan a strip just wide enough to do the job.

  “Thanks. So we’re . . . dead, or . . . what the fuck, man?”

  Gum shook his head. “Nah.” He jutted his chin at the garden, the girls. “They’re dead. Or—more dead. Undead. You and me, we’re different. We didn’t die. But me, I’m still out there. And you, you’re not.”

  Galvan mulled that over for a few moments. “So you’ve got a foot in each world.”

  Gum’s baleful stare confirmed it.

  “How the fuck you manage that? I mean, right now, we’re here, having this conversation. But somehow you’re also, like . . .” He trailed off, unable to find a way to balance the idea atop the teetering stack that already filled his mind.

  Gum pawed the ground with his bare foot and winced. “It feels like being torn apart,” he said quietly.

  The gears of Galvan’s mind were turning. Slowly, grimed with rust. But turning.

  “Find my daughter.” He reached out, grabbed Gum’s shoulder. “Please. I’ve gotta know if she’s alive.”

  Gum’s eyes flitted left-right-left, like he was reading type off Galvan’s forehead.

  Or deciding whether to lie.

  “She is,” he said at last. “I’m with her.”

  Galvan felt the sweat burst from his pores. All was not lost. He could still reach out to Sherry. The questions poured out of him, each one erasing the last.

  “Where is she? Who’s she with? Is she safe?”

  “For now,” Gum said, but something had shifted. His eyes, his posture. A new caginess. Or, more accurately, the old caginess.

  “Tell her to get as far away as she can,” Galvan said. “Tell her run and don’t look back. And that I love her. And that I’m sorry. And that I’m gonna—”

  Gum’s face was a brick wall, and it brought Galvan up short. “What?”

  “She’s with Izel. They’re going to find Chacanza.”

  “I don’t know who either of those people are,” Galvan said, but his stomach dropped as he said it.

  He knew. Her name, her face, her very essence had echoed, rattled, and floated through Galvan for as long as Cucuy had colonized his body. She was the ghost in the machine, the fist of regret and love, fear and hatred that clutched at the monster’s heart.

  The last vestige of his humanity.

  The final threat.

  “Why?” he breathed, bracing himself for the answer. “They got a plan?”

  It was Gum’s turn to grimace. “Not much of one.”

  Galvan clenched his fists. “You’ve gotta stop her.”

  One look at Gum’s face, and Galvan knew that wasn’t gonna happen. Sherry was too willful, too reckless, too headstrong.

  Too much his daughter.

  “I gotta get out of here.”

  “Nobody gets outta here, man. It’s—”

  “Then I
’ll be the first.”

  “Yeah?” Gum crossed his arms. “How you plan to do that, guy who just got here five minutes ago?”

  Galvan mulled that over. “I’m gonna make Tezcatlipoca an offer,” he said at last, the germ of an idea taking root. “You know where I can find him?”

  “Why you think I’m here?” Gum countered. “He sent me to come get you, boss. Only I wouldn’t be so eager, if I was you.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Ojos Negros loomed before him, huge, squat, and menacing. Finally Domingo Valentine had something to stare at besides the man sitting across from him in the limousine’s spacious rear chamber.

  Man.

  It was a term he used loosely.

  The change that had come over the former Jess Galvan was subtle but unmistakable, and for the journey’s duration Valentine had toyed deliciously with the paradox, as if it were a wiggly tooth.

  It was almost too much to hold in his mind, the way his companion both was and was not the Ancient One. Valentine remembered an interview he’d heard on the radio, decades ago. Some scientist, talking about a made-up experiment where you replaced each part of a man, one after the next, until nothing of him remained. A new heart, a new lung. Cornea transplants. Artificial legs. Finally, the brain. At what point, the scientist had asked—or maybe he had been a philosopher—was the man no longer himself, but someone else?

  This was different, of course. No surgery, and no question. Jess Galvan had been obliterated. There was a god inside the man. That was what the Great One had always been.

  It is of no more significance than a new suit of clothes, Valentine thought.

  But that wasn’t exactly true either. This body was stronger. Much stronger. Valentine thrilled at the possibilities. The power. Only now, seeing Cucuy enshrined within this new form, did he understand how enfeebled the Ancient One had been in the previous one. How limitless his reach was now.

  And yet, Valentine mused, the Timeless One might walk undetected in this new skin. The very prisoners who had slept and eaten alongside Jess Galvan a few months earlier would merely assume he had returned to Ojos, as so many did, and take him back into the fold with nary a second glance.

  But that was only because, as the Great One had taught Valentine, the human brain refused to process anything that lay outside its understanding of the world. Like any animal, man relied on filters. Blinders. Ignorance was survival, except when it was death. A frog recognized a fly when the fly flew. Surround it with live flies hanging from strings, and the creature would starve to death.

  Of course, only a cruel god, a force outside of nature, would present a frog with such a scenario.

  And under closer scrutiny, the Great One would not be able to disguise his glory—not that Valentine imagined he intended to live undetected among inmates.

  Galvan’s eyes had been brown or green or hazel; now, they were a black beyond black, and possessed of an intense magnetism, so circuit scrambling that Valentine could not be sure whether they attracted or repelled. They were Cucuy’s eyes; Valentine had watched in jubilant disbelief as Galvan’s had dulled, like spent lightbulbs. An instant later the Timeless One’s glowed, brighter than Valentine had ever seen them.

  His whole body glowed, in fact. As if his heart pumped molten lava through his veins instead of blood.

  That was new.

  “Everything is new,” Cucuy declared, reading his mind. Valentine startled and nodded. The voice was hardest to get used to; it was Galvan’s through and through, no matter how closely Valentine listened for some subsonic growl, some hint of his master’s vicious rasp.

  “The world is remade,” Cucuy continued. “And it is time to work. Are you ready to work, Domingo?”

  Valentine drew himself up, his back arching away from the leather seat. “I have never stopped.”

  Until he said it, Valentine had not known how deeply he pined for his master’s recognition, for the Timeless One to credit him with orchestrating this triumph—and now, he castigated himself for being weak, petty.

  Everything might have changed, but some things never would. To clamor for Cucuy’s praise was to invite its opposite.

  But the Great One had not noticed his petulance or else chose to ignore it. Either way, Valentine was grateful.

  “Tell me what you need,” he said.

  Cucuy stretched his legs in front of him, locked his elbows, fisted his hands, and turned his arms left and right, as if turning a pair of spigots.

  Acclimating to his new dimensions, Valentine thought.

  He unclenched his right hand, finger by finger, counting off a list.

  “Girls. My appetite for girls remains the same.” He said it slowly, as if realizing it as he spoke or surprised that it was so. Another finger unfurled from the thick, muscular palm, and a toothy grin spread across the Great One’s face. “And fruit. I have a need for fruit.”

  “Fruit?” Valentine repeated, incredulous, before he could stop himself.

  What am I, a caterer?

  Thankfully, Cucuy was half lost in reverie.

  “Yes. The fruits of my young days. I cannot remember their names.”

  “I will look into it, my lord,” Valentine assured him, growing more anxious by the moment. Had the Timeless One lost some part of himself, trapped in that incorporeal netherland? Had his lust for—

  “And now, to more important matters.”

  Ah. Okay.

  Cucuy gestured at the prison. “How many men?”

  “About eighty-five hundred.”

  “Assemble them. Now.”

  The sweat seeped from Valentine’s brow, and the air conditioner converted it into a salty residue, tight on his skin. The only place the entire population of Ojos Negros could conceivably fit was in the yard, and no more than a tenth of the inmates were permitted to congregate there at once. A quarter might overwhelm the guards; en masse, they would be fools not to look around, do the math, and realize how simply collective exodus could be achieved.

  These men might be cutthroats, but they were far from fools.

  “If I may make a suggestion, Great One . . . in the past you have controlled them from a distance. Through guards. Intermediaries. The leaders of the cartels. To bring together so many men at once might be . . . unwieldy.”

  Cucuy’s smile was icy.

  Icy, and unprecedented.

  “You doubt I can control them, Valentine?”

  The procurer gulped down the lump rising in his throat. “Of course not, master. I was only—”

  “Go, then.”

  Valentine reached for the door, threw it open, stepped into the late-afternoon heat. A shaft of sunlight fell into the car, and Cucuy slid across the seat to bathe in it, catlike.

  Valentine hesitated, just long enough to banish a thought from his mind.

  “Something else?”

  Valentine’s pulse pounded in his temples, so hard he wondered if his head was vibrating like a bass woofer. He turned, sucked in a breath of air, bent to look at Cucuy and found himself caught in those oil-well eyes.

  “It’s just . . . in your absence, I . . . I had to manage the cartels as best I could. I hope I didn’t—”

  At first, Valentine didn’t know what to make of the sound that emanated from the Ancient One, low and syncopated, dastardly, like a man falling down a flight of stairs.

  Then he realized it was laughter.

  “They are of no consequence. You have done well, Domingo Valentine. There is a place for you in the New World.”

  He crossed his legs at the knee and folded his hands, the pose oddly aristocratic, and for the hundredth time today the procurer reflected that he knew nothing, must assume nothing. The habits, the manners, the concerns of the master he had served were no more. A new master sat before him, and his own survival depended on learning how to become indispensable to him.

  Who he was, and what he wanted.

  Both questions had the same answer, Valentine thought abruptly.

  Ever
ything.

  “Thank you,” he whispered and hurried off to do his master’s bidding.

  THE GUARDS WERE nervous. Trigger happy. They’d refused to stand among the inmate population, and for the sake of expedience, Valentine had agreed to put them all on the roof and in the watchtowers, safe from the riot they seemed to think was inevitable the moment you asked Azteca and Sinaloa to share the yard.

  He had invoked Cucuy’s name—as if they didn’t know for whom he spoke—but, over the last few months, the power of that invocation had waned considerably due to overuse, invisibility. His grip on power had been far more tenuous than he had realized, Valentine reflected. But he had completed his task. Done well.

  The steward had worn the crown until the king’s return. It had not touched the ground.

  And now, he thought, as he stood by the Great One’s side and watched the men emerge from their cells and shuffle down the five stacked tiers, trickle out of the cafeteria, the laundry, the workshops—streams and rivers of humanity fusing into a vast ocean that flowed toward the open, dusty yard at the prison’s center—the kingdom would be set right.

  He hadn’t the foggiest notion what that meant.

  The only Great One Valentine had ever known had been intent on survival, stealth and shadow, manipulation and puppetry. The biding of time. The gathering of strength. He had never spoken of what came afterward, and it had never occurred to Valentine to wonder, much less ask.

  But here they were.

  That word flashed through the procurer’s mind again.

  Everything.

  At last, the cells were empty, the yard full. The smell, the energy, the sheer jittery malevolence of so many men accustomed to being treated like animals was overwhelming. The yard was a rippling ocean, yes—and at the center of it was an island, a small circumference of space upon which the water did not dare encroach.

  Alone on that island, like a single palm tree, stood the Great One, his hands clasped behind his back as his terrible eyes moved across the crowd, the subtle glow of his body brightening as the light failed.

  Valentine watched the men watch him. The silence was absolute. They didn’t know what they were looking at, but they felt its power, knew they had never seen its like before.