Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “Yes,” Manny breathed.

  “This La Llorona,” Jimiti said. “We meet often at places like these: beaches, rivers, small ponds in parks with ducks paddling around the middle.”

  “Who is she?” Manny stood frozen in place.

  “My spirit guide.” Jimiti nodded. “You won’t find her on any Vodou altar. And until a year ago, I never seen her. I think all the believing Latinos in Miami that make her strong. Or maybe the world changing this year. I don’t know.” Jimiti chuckled. “I once tell her she ain’t even the right mythology for me to see. And she had ask me ‘what the right mythology, Jimiti? You a two hundred-year-old blend of cultural mess! What in you vein? Kikiyu? Ashanti? Grandmammy rock you to sleep talking ’bout Ananzi, or Brer Rabbit? It don’t matter where I come from, only that I exist to you.’”

  Jimiti stepped forward again.

  “I old La Llorona. You tell me everyone here lose they culture. You right. Look this one here. Don’t self even know what a duppy is. My coming back useless. You hear?”

  The watery figure spoke. It sent shivers down Manny’s back. He had never heard a ghost speak.

  “So because they don’t know, you won’t try bringing it back to them.”

  Jimiti sucked his teeth. “They young. They don’t care. Too busy with they nice car, big building, money, technology. I don’t have nothing to share with them. The world change past me, and I don’t understand them.”

  La Llorona looked at Manny. Her eyes cleared with a ripple.

  “You are right. The world has passed you. But they still need understanding. Compassion.”

  Jimiti spat. He looked at the amazed look on Manny’s face and pursed his lips.

  “Compassion. What you know of compassion?” He looked angry, and hurt. “Let me help you understand this spirit here,” he told Manny. “La Llorana … better known as Bloody Mary.”

  “Please don’t,” La Llorona asked.

  “Haunting, crying, river spirit,” Jimiti continued. “At the youngest age she had take her two children to the river. She grabbed them by they little young neck and pushed them both under river, and hold the both of them there until their palms stop hitting the water. Then she let go and watch them still body float away.”

  La Llorona looked down at the water by her waist.

  “And after she killed herself,” she whispered, “she searched the edges of waters everywhere, hoping to find her two lost children.” Her voice hardened. “Thank you for telling him this Jimiti. You are such a kind old man.”

  Manny felt the water around him vibrate and surge against his legs.

  “Please,” La Llorona asked him. “Don’t think those things about me.” Silent tears rolled down her face. They mingled with drops of water hovering on the edge of her chin and fell down into the ocean.

  “I’m sorry,” Jimiti apologized. He had tears of his own.

  La Llorona shook her head.

  “Take care of yourself, Jimiti,” she said, putting a wet hand to his chest. “I will see you again, soon enough. You know this. Go do what you have to do.”

  A wave broke against La Llorona’s legs. She dissolved into the water with a sigh. A single strand of seaweed that had been wrapped around her small breasts floated free and grounded itself on the sand in front of Manny.

  Out past the small reef he could hear her calling for her children, a small plaintive voice lost in the rustle of coconut palms.

  Jimiti put a hand on Manny’s shoulder.

  “You know what they does call the men that could see duppy?”

  Manny shook his head.

  “Four eye,” Jimiti said. “Not hardly any four eye anymore. Just you and me.”

  They began to walk back up the beach. The mosquitos and no-see-ums returned and started biting. Manny hadn’t noticed they had stopped.

  “I will come to your house tomorrow,” Jimiti said sadly. “We take care of things then.”

  He left Manny looking out at the sea, puzzled.

  It rained the next day. Manny didn’t drive anywhere, but waited in the kitchen for the obeah man to show up.

  Jimiti came to the door well after lunch. His soaked shirt clung to his thin chest and he looked far older than he had last night. He opened a case on the table and pulled out a laptop.

  He took a bracelet of rope knots and hung it off his wrist.

  “What that?” G.D asked, watching the process from his wheelchair. “That thing on you hand?”

  “Celtic knotwork,” Jimiti said.

  “Don’t sound like no obeah I ever see.”

  “It a form of white man magic. From the English. And my spirit guide is Latino.” He looked at Manny. “What the duppy doing? Raising Cain?”

  Manny shook his head. “Just sitting there.”

  Jimiti made a note on his laptop, carefully pecking at the keys.

  “That a computer?” G.D asked. “How come you need a computer?”

  Jimiti sighed and turned to the old man.

  “I could leave, you know? I could leave you to deal with the Duppy you self. Then what? How many obeah-man you know? Where is you respect?”

  G.D wheeled backwards.

  “Sorry. I just…I just a little crazy right now.”

  Jimiti handed the old man a knotted bracelet.

  “Maybe that go ease you some ….”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “… because you a little stress out with the Duppy ….”

  “Right,” Manny said.

  “… and you go need to be calm, seen? We almost there.”

  Then Jimiti pulled a small bag out of the case and started walking around the house carefully. He stopped in front the guest room.

  “The duppy here, right?” Jimiti asked.

  Manny looked at G.D.

  “No,” they lied together.

  “Nothing in there,” Manny said. “Nothing?”

  Jimiti looked at the door and nodded. “Okay.”

  They opened the door to Manny’s room. Jimiti looked at the girl by the bed. She hadn’t moved. She still sat exactly as Manny had first found her. G.D left the room, chair whining.

  Jimiti began to poke and prod at the apparition. He sat and studied it. Then he finished and stood up.

  “I need a second,” he said. He sounded tired. “Hold this, it will calm you.”

  Manny took the piece of rope. He sat and stared at the girl’s pale skin for as long as he could. Where had G.D gone? With Jimiti? Suddenly worried he got off his bed and walked into the hallway.

  Jimiti stood there waiting for him.

  “You tried to keep me from that other room,” he said. “I ain’t stupid, you know. I could sense you had more than one duppy.”

  Manny looked at the guestroom door. It was ajar.

  “That Caroline,” he said, slowly. “My grandmother.”

  “She waiting for you grandfather.” Jimiti put a hand on Manny’s shoulder. “She there to help him die. I explain that to them.”

  “Die?” Manny shoved Jimiti aside and ran into the guestroom. “What you do? You and you stupid spirit stuff. You kill him!” He wailed.

  The last outline of a dress faded from beside the curtains as he ran inside. The only body in the room was G.D’s small frame lying peacefully on the bed.

  “What you do?” Manny cried out. “What you do!” He grabbed G.D’s hand, pushed his face into the sheets, and wept.

  Jimiti knelt by him.

  “For some, is time we pass on,” he explained. Manny leapt up and raced into the kitchen. He called an ambulance. When he put down the phone Jimiti stood in front of him.

  “I can’t make you duppy leave,” he said. “Only you can do this now. I am old, failing. I don’t have the strength. I can barely even see her.”

  “Then what you even doing here? You useless,” Manny snapped.

  “I here to offer it to you, Manny. I know it a hard time, but I have a diary and notes. They all on that machine,” Jimiti pointed at the laptop. “All my knowledge
I spoke into the laptop these last few years. I hear my guides, and my gods, and they are calling for me one last time.

  “Everything I have, everything I am, is now yours.”

  Jimiti walked out the door. He turned into Manny’s garden and headed out in the rain. He walked into the bushes past a tree.

  “You go catch a death of cold,” Manny shouted. He got no response.

  He ran out into the rain after Jimiti. But Jimiti had disappeared. His footsteps ended by a large puddle of pooling water.

  “Jimiti left, gone for good,” said a man from Manny’s side. Manny spun around. A tall thin man in tails, cigar lighted despite the rain, smiled at him.

  Manny heard the ambulance coming up the hill and ran back up his yard toward the house. Nothing today made sense. He was beginning to fall apart. It was as if he were standing at some sort of crossroads.

  After the paramedics came and left, Manny threw the laptop into his car. He left the house resolving not to ever go back. And he left the van in the driveway, telling himself he would never drive it again.

  He drove all the way to a point where the rocky edge of the island butted out against the ocean, not far from Magens Bay. Here water hurled itself against the rocks, shaking the ground with booming explosions of salt water spray that perpetually hung in the air.

  “I want nothing to do with spirits, or ghosts, or witch-doctors,” Manny muttered.

  He walked as near to the edges of the wet rocks as he dared, and flung the laptop out into the air. It arced slowly down into the foaming water and sunk.

  “Please,” a voice implored. “You must help.”

  Manny looked down at the rocks beneath him. Massive waves roiled up, swept over the boulders, and retreated. A man sat on the top of a dripping rock, the water passing right through him. He wore a suit, and glasses, and held his shoes in his right hand.

  “I think I slip down into the rocks. But my son still here. Help me find him?” The man stood up and began to look around.

  The next wave crested the boiling waters around the rocks, reached up into the crags, and the man disappeared. A spirit, Manny thought. Another duppy only he could see.

  For a moment he stood still, then he sighed and cupped his ears to see if he could hear a child calling for help.

  He heard the child crying behind him. It took only a few seconds for Manny to search through the rocks and find him. A small child, his hands cut, crying for his dad. Manny picked him up and took him back to the car.

  “Where you live?” Manny asked, leaning over the back door. The child wouldn’t say anything, and kept sobbing.

  Manny got in the front seat. He almost jumped out of his skin to see the tall man with the cigar sitting across from him. Somehow the smoke failed to fill the inside of the car.

  With a deep breath Manny started the car and turned around. He would take the child to the hospital.

  As he drove he ignored the apparition in the other seat. He would not speak to it. He would not acknowledge it. He would give it no control over him.

  But finally the man spoke.

  “The child name Timothy. He mother waiting for him and she husband. She real anxious, you know. You won’t do them no good if you take him to the hospital, because tonight all the doctor there from stateside. They won’t hardly understand her when she call, and they go treat her like she dumb. You would make an easier messenger. You like to know where they live?”

  Manny drove on, clenching the steering wheel. He bit his lip. Still not willing to speak, he nodded.

  The tall man smiled and gave him directions, and fifteen minutes of tense silence later they pulled into a sloping concrete drive lined with palms. Manny pulled the parking brake up, and Timothy in the back seat stopped crying.

  “Okay, what is it you want from me?” He asked the man next to him.

  “To do things like this for me.” The cigar was waved in a long gesture. “Some things little, some things big. Sometimes you go like it, other times you go hate it. But you always guiding people in this world.”

  A screen door banged. A thin, worried looking women peered hopefully around the edge of it at the car.

  “I can’t,” Manny said. “I ain’t right for this. What I know about helping people? Plus, I throw away that laptop already.”

  The man shook his head. The top of his hat poked through the ceiling of the Acura.

  “Look under you seat,” he said.

  Manny felt around and grabbed the edge of something plastic. He pulled the laptop out and set it on his lap.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. But only because I want help people.” He looked over the man, who was fading away. “But who you is?” he demanded.

  The thin man smiled again.

  “Most call me Eshu.”

  Then he was gone. And Timothy’s mother was walking up to the car. From the look on her face Manny could tell she suspected something was wrong.

  He took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Later that night Manny returned to the house. Inside he wandered around, laptop in his hands.

  There was no girl sitting next to his bed, or any other ghosts in his house. Outside the crickets made their song. The wind rustled the leaves, and cars passed by his house on the nearby road. Manny closed the window and turned out the light in his room.

  Tonight he would start to become more than just four eyes. Tonight he would become obeah.

  He sat at his desk and lit a single candle.

  Then he carefully cracked the laptop open and turned it on.

  The Death Collector

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  There’s a murder scheduled in one hour. Mexico City. 1960.

  Most people would pick another time and place. John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Even in Mexico there are more famous sights. The massacre of hundreds of students in the Plaza of the Three Cultures is only eight years away; tanks bulldozing through the streets and the soldiers pouring bullets into the crowds. Forty-seven years in the other direction the streets of Mexico City smell of charred human meat and the screams of the wounded.

  Those are large conflicts. Pools of blood spill through the City of Palaces. But the ones I look for are the little deaths. A true collector does not go for the easy, gaudy spectacles printed in bold letters in the history books.

  A gourmet of death sniffs for the delicious, the delicate, the more refined crimes rather than clumsy trails of corpses.

  No. Mexico City. 1960. Ramon Gay is about to die.

  Ramon Gay. He’s the true image of a movie star in striking black and white. Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema is grinding to a halt, but there are still actors like Ramon with his sculpted face that cries perfection and his smile that turns women into Jell-O.

  Debonair, he struts into the frame with a sense of place, a dignified style. His image burns into the film like a scar upon time. They don’t make faces like Ramon’s anymore. They don’t make murders like his either.

  My first vacation I went with a buddy to photograph a victim of El Chalequero. A bloodied mannequin staining the pavement. It was so ugly. It was so fake. It was expected: a prostitute in Porfirian Mexico. How passé. Might as well stay home, stare out the window and watch the narcos drill bullet holes into a car.

  There are ten journalists killed every month—you can watch it online, like a litany.

  Fifty thousand federal agents can’t stem the deaths in the narco-north.

  Corpses pile at the curb in Ciudad-Estado Juarez and San Simon sits in a corner, a sharp pin in his mouth. There is no elegance in those deaths. They are the deaths of formless, nameless masses. Ugly, stunted citizens of nowhere dying deaths without passion or meaning. Factories of destruction systematically manufacturing bleeding bodies, while the maquilas churn out their cheap clothing.

  It’s 1960 in Chilangolandia and in half an hour Ramon Gay is going to park his Dodge at Rio Rhin number 60.

  Ramon, who was in La Bruja and Muñecos Infernal
es, piercing eyes elevating a B-movie horror romp into a form of art. Sublime smile in Eugenia Grandet. The great laugh. The everything.

  No wonder Arturo de Córdova—another leading man, a leading man among leading men—saw that handsome face and fell hard and fast and inexorably.

  There’s two bombings in the subway the week before I leave. I’m not sure if it’s narcos or cops or someone else on a lark.

  Senseless decapitations in Morelos. Heads roll all through the country.

  Nothing to admire here. Butcher’s work. One hundred years from now no one will remember them; no one will care. They’ll be eroded from history while the divine ones, the movie stars, maintain their pace with modernity.

  Fifteen minutes. Evangelina Elizondo and Ramon are coming back from dinner at El Hotel del Paseo. She’s an actress and they’re both in a play. Her angry ex-husband has been drinking all night, pounding whiskeys at the Terraza Casino.

  I can hardly contain myself. I wait around the corner and flip through a newspaper, trying to keep my cool. In the entertainment section there’s an ad for an Arturo de Córdova movie playing that day: El esqueleto de la señora Morales. It’s just premiered. It’ll be considered a classic in a few years.

  It’s the story of a murder.

  The day before my trip a grenade blew up two cops around the corner from my apartment. They cordoned off the block and I worried I wouldn’t be able to go on vacation.

  My one vacation of the year. All the money stashed away and then some idiot decides to turn a couple of policemen into mush. Everyone in my building had to be questioned.

  I was lucky. Someone ratted out the guy on the fourth floor with all the cats. He probably wasn’t involved, but he looked like he’d have something to hide. The cops took him away and opened the building again.

  I was able to make my departure without further contretemps, thank God.