But even two men could not carry on their backs enough wood from forest to town to make it worth the effort. A woodcutter required a horse, or a mule, or, at very least, a burro. Which confined him largely to paved or at any rate beaten thoroughfares. There were at least twenty such on this side of the town, but the nearer they approached to town the more they combined, so that, for the practical purposes of the moment, there were only five to be considered. The San Benito road led into the main highway too far south; daylight would find them in the open. The road of the old convent led past a checkpoint. A third was too long and winding; a fourth had in recent months become identical with one of the local creeks. Carlos was not very strong on arithmetic, but he felt fairly certain that this left but one road. To his surprise, he realized that he had, presumably while calculating, reached just that one. It now remained to consider exactly, or even approximately, where on that road might be the best place for his emboscada. Too close to the woods, the criminals might escape back into them. Too near the town, they might find refuge in house or patio. An ideal situation would be a place where the road was not only sunken but surrounded by walls on either side, not too near and not too far. Such a situation was not only ideal, it was actual, and it contained, moreover, a niche in which had once reposed an image of La Guadalupana before the Republic was secularized. Carlos snickered, thinking of the astonishment of the rogues as he sprang out upon them from that niche, pistol in hand!
He was still snickering when something seized hold of his foot and sent him sprawling.
The fall jarred his back and all his other bones. It sickened him, and all his quiescent pains flared up. Voices hooted and gibbered and mocked; faces made horns and spat at him. He lay there in the road, fighting for breath and for reason, sobbing. By and by he was able to breathe. The darkness was only darkness once again. He groped about, his fingers recoiled from what they found, then groped again and found the flashlight. He gave a long, high cry of anguish and of terror at what the yellow beam disclosed lying there in the road: the body of a man lying on its back in a pool of blood. It had shirt and pants and hands and feet, all as a man should.
But where a man’s head should be, it had no head.
Slowly, slowly, the sky lightened. Mist mingled with the smoke and obscured the sun. Carlos Rodriguez N., with burning and smarting eyes, paced back and forth in the road. He had been doing so for an hour, two hours, three—who knows how long? He dared not sleep. Suppose someone were to steal the body? He had not dared return to town and report the killing, for the same reason. He had been sustained in his vigil by the certain knowledge that daylight would bring people out on the road, and that he could send one of them into town with his message—preferably one of a group of mature and respectable ciudadanos whose testimony about the body would be incontrovertible. But as it happened, the first ones along the road were a pair of boys taking four cows out to pasture.
Or one boy taking two cows. It was no longer possible for Carlos to be sure if he were seeing single or double. One boy and two cows. Two boys and four cows. One body with no head. Two bodies with no heads. The sky was gray and cold and the treacherous sun feared to show itself. Eventually he was satisfied there were two boys, for one of them agreed to run back with the message and Carlos could see him running at the same time he could see the other boy drive the cows off the road so as to get them past the body. Life or death, the cows must eat. The boys were out of sight, the cattle, too, and someone was shouting, still shouting, had been shouting forever. With a shock, he recognized his own voice, and fell silent.
Flies began to settle on the blood and on the body. Very soberly, very tiredly, Carlos observed the corpse. He did not recognize it. It looked neither familiar nor strange; it looked merely at rest, with no more problems. It didn’t even seem so odd any more—one had heard before of murderers removing the heads of their victims in order to destroy or at least delay identification… Rest. And no problems. How long would it take the boy to get back to town?—and how long for Don Juan Antonio to arrive? And then? And what then? Would he commend Carlos? Curse him? Discharge him? Arrest him? Commit him?
The man’s arms and legs began to tremble. He tried to repress the tremors, failed, seated himself on a stone, placed his back against the side of the roadside wall, placed his revolver in his lap, and without volition or premonition immediately fell asleep. His head jerked back and he jumped forward and upward with a cry of alarm, thrusting his hands forth to catch the revolver. He did not catch it, neither did he see it fall, neither could he find it. His shout and motion startled the flies and they rose from the drying blood with an ugly, thrumming buzz. Carlos pitched forward onto his hands and knees, stared stupidly at the dark pool with its blue lights. The blood was still there.
But the body was gone.
Everything whirled around and around, and Carlos whirled with it, staggering along the road with arms outstretched to keep from falling. He had slept, he had slept, after the hours of keeping awake to guard the body in the darkness, he had fallen asleep in the earliest daylight! Now he was worse off than ever, for now Don Juan Antonio knew there was a body—and how would Carlos be able to account for its loss? Weeping, sobbing, cursing, stumbling along, he knew that he could account for that no more than for the loss of his revolver. He was certainly doomed.
Unless—Unless—he provided another body, so no one would know the difference.
Below him he saw the railroad tracks. Half-sliding, he descended the slope and ran along the rails. He knew who had, who must have done this to him! Who else but the woodcutters, those thieves and sons of harlots? Why else but to take revenge upon him for his intended capture?—and to prevent his ever doing so! But he would show them, now and forever. They had incited the entire poblacion against him, but he would show them… He came to a switch and just a short distance away was the equipment shed of the maintenance crew, with its weathered inscription: This Edifice And Its Entire Contents Is The Property Of The Republic. With his shoulder skewed around he burst it open, seized up the first grass-machete he saw, and rushed out again. He had time? Would he be in time? Would Don Juan Antonio have been awake? Been elsewhere? How soon would he start out? Carlos prayed for time to stand in between Don Juan Antonio and the barbarous plot of the woodcutters.
And luck was with him. The mists parted as he came back over the slope and there down below was a man leading a burro laden with wood. Cautiously and carefully, so shrewdly that he was obliged to smile to himself and to stifle his own laughter, Carlos approached bent over and on crouching knees. The burro approached, the burro passed, Carlos rose to his feet and darted forward on his toes. The machete swung. The body fell, spouting blood. Carlos kicked the fallen head like a football, watched it drop into the underbrush. He threw the body over his shoulder and ran and ran and ran and ran.
“Carlos,” said Don Juan Antonio. “Carlos! Do you hear me? Stop that! Stop that and listen to me! Do you hear—”
“No use, jefe,” said his assistant, Raimundo Cepeda. “It’s the shock—the shock. He won’t come out of it for a while.”
Don Juan Antonio wiped his face with an impeccably ironed and cologne-scented handkerchief. “Not he alone… I am also in such a situation. Dreadful. Horrible. People do not realize—”
“Poor young man,” sighed the elderly jailor, Uncle Hector, shaking his head. “Only consider—”
Don Juan Antonio nodded vigorously. “By all means let us consider. And let us consider the whole case. Thus I reconstruct it:
“We have the precious pair, the coarsely handsome cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz. Ostensibly and even occasionally woodcutters. On the side—drunkards, when they had the money; thieves…and worse…when they had the chance. Partners against the rest of the world, fighting often between themselves. Last night they go out to cut wood, illegally. And on the way back a quarrel breaks out. Who knows why? For that matter, perhaps Eugenio merely decided on the spur of the moment to kill Onofrio. At any ra
te, he does kill him, with a blow of his axe. Then, to conceal the identity of the corpus, with the same axe he decapitates it. And returns to his hut, carrying the head. Also, the defunct’s wallet.
“Once there, the thought occurs to him that he should not have left the body. With daylight coming, it will soon be found. So he prepares a pile or pyre of wood. With all the burning of fields and thickets, one more smoke will hardly be observed. Should anyone smell anything, they will assume it to be a trapped deer. And he goes back to gain the body. But meanwhile the police have not been idle. Officer Carlos Rodriguez Nuñez is not only up and around, but he has also located the corpus and is guarding it. Eugenio conceals himself. By and by the sun begins to rise, the little brothers Santa Anna approach, and Carlos sends one of them with a message to me. But the child is, after all, only a child; he doesn’t go to the right place, wanders around, time is lost. Meanwhile Carlos, content that all will soon be well, sits down and falls asleep. Erroneously,” he added, with emphasis, “but—understandably. Understandably.
“Out from his place of concealment creeps the criminal murderer Eugenio Cruz. He steals both Carlos’s service revolver and the corpus, loads it on the horse which he had brought with him and also concealed at a distance, returns to his hut. There he decides that he has not enough wood to incinerate the victim. So he conceals the corpus inside the hut and goes out for more wood. Meanwhile the unfortunate and valiant Carlos awakens, discovers his loss. By dint of the faculty of ratiocination so highly developed in our police, he deduces who the killer must be and where he must have gone. He tracks him down, securing, along the way, a machete. He confronts the arch-criminal. He kills him. Again, I must say: erroneously. And again I must say: understandably. Doubtless the murderer Cruz would have attempted to escape.
“At any rate, this second slaying is witnessed by the much respected citizen and veteran of the Revolution, Simon-Macabeo Lopez—”
The much respected citizen and veteran of the Revolution, Simon-Macabeo Lopez, snapped his sole remaining arm into a salute, and nodded solemnly.
“—who had risen early in order to go and cultivate the piece of land granted him by the grateful Republic. Veteran Lopez immediately and properly proceeds to inform me, arriving at the same time as the little brother Santa Anna. The police at once move to investigate, and we find—that which we found. A body here, a body there, here a head, and there a head, Carlos in a state of incoherent shock. So. Thus my reconstruction. What do you think of it?”
There was a silence. At length the assistant head of the police said, “Masterful. Masterful.”
“Thank you.”
“It is such a reconstruction, so neat, so lucid, so full of clarity, as is usually to be met with only in the pages of criminal literature. But…señor jefe…it is not the truth. No, I must say, it is not the truth.”
Don Juan Antonio snapped, “Why not?”
Cepeda sighed, gestured to the unfortunate Rodriguez. “Because, señor jefe, you know and I know and almost everybody in town knows why. That bitch, that strumpet, Lupe de Rodriguez, was cuckolding poor Carlos with the cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, too. One man was not enough for her. And Carlos was blind to all.”
“Truth,” said the jailor, sighing.
“Truth,” said the veteran, nodding.
“Truth,” said the other policemen, shaking their heads, sadly.
Don Juan Antonio glared. Then his expression relaxed, and he lowered his head. “It is the truth,” he said, at last. “Ay, Carlos! ¡Woe of me! ¡Hombre! The husband is always the last to learn. For weeks, now, I have scarcely been able to look him in the face. Why, the very honor of the police was imperiled. How the railroad men were laughing at us. Mother!
“So, my poor Carlos—You finally found out, eh? Nevertheless!” Don Juan Antonio all but shouted at the others. “It is my reconstruction which must stand, do you agree? Carlos has suffered enough, and moreover, there is the honor of the police.”
“Oh, agreed, agreed, senor jefe,” the other officers exclaimed, hastily and heartily.
“We may depend upon the discretion of the Veteran Lopez, I assume?”
The old man placed his hand over his heart and bowed. “Securely,” he said. “What Carlos did may have been, in some sense, technically illegal; I am no scholar, no lawyer. But it was natural. It was male.”
“It was male, it was very male,” the others all agreed.
Don Juan Antonio bent over, took the weeping Carlos by the shoulder, and tried to reassure him. But Carlos gave no sign of having heard, much less understood. He wept, he babbled, he struck out at things invisible, now and then he gave stifled little cries of alarm and fright and scuttled backwards across the floor. The chief and the others exchanged looks and comments of dismay. “This commences to appear as more than temporary shock,” he said. “If he continues like this, he may finally be encountered in the Misericordia, may God forbid. You, Gerardo,” he directed the youngest officer, “go and solicit Dr. Olivera to appear as soon as convenient. He understands the techniques of modern science… Take no care, Carlos!” he said, encouragingly. “We shall soon have you perfectly well… Now… There was something in my mind… Ah, Cepeda.”
“Yes, Sir Chief?”
“You said, ‘…with Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, too.’ Too. Who else? Eh? What other man or men—I insist that you advise me of their names!”
Rather reluctantly, the assistant said, “Well…sir… I know of only one other. Ysidor Chache. The curandero.”
Astounded, first, then outraged, then determined, Don Juan Antonio arose to his full height. “The curandero, eh. That mountebank. That whore-monger. That charlatan.” He reached over and took up his cap. “Come. We will pay a call upon this relic of the past. Let us inform him that the police have teeth. Eh?”
The jailor, old Hector, shook his head vigorously. The even older veteran of the Revolution put out his hand. “No, no, patron,” he said, imploringly. “Do not go. He is dangerous. He is very dangerous. He knows all the spirits and the demons of the woods. He can put a fearful curse upon you. No, no, no—”
“What!” cried Don Juan Antonio, scornfully. “Do you think for a moment that I put stock in such superstition?” He stood brave and erect, not moving from his place.
Old Hector said, “Ah, patron. It is not only that. I, after all, I, too, am a civil servant. I do not—But, sir, consider. The curandero knows the power of every root and herb and leaf and grass. He is familiar with each mushroom and toadstool. Consider, consider—a single pinch in food or drink (and what man has a thousand eyes?)—Consider the result of such poison! Sterility, impotence, abortion, distortion of vision, paralysis of the throat, imaginary voices, dizziness, pain, swelling of the eyes, burning of the chest and heart, hallucinations, wasting away, insanity, and who knows what else? No, patron, no, no.”
“He traffics with the devil,” old Lopez muttered, nodding.
“Hm, well,” said Don Juan Antonio. “This commences to sound like a matter for the priest, then, would you say?”
“Securely, the priest! If not, indeed, the bishop!”
Instantly the chief of police returned his cap to its place. “Obviously, then, it would be unfitting for a servant of the secular Republic to mix in such a matter. I thank you for calling this to my attention. We shall not dignify the old fraud with our presence.”
His eye at that moment was looking out the window. He seemed startled. “Speaking of the—Heh-hem. Did I not mention the good priest? Look.” The good priest was indeed at that moment crossing the plaza, his technically illegal cassock covered by an unobjectionable overcoat for most of its length. Preceding him was his sacristan, bearing the small case in which, all knew, were carried the vessels for the administering of last sacrament.
“Hector—do me the favor, go and enquire, who has died?—and then go and see what is keeping the doctor. jAy, Carlos, hombre!”
Hector trotted out. A moment later he returned close enough to call
a name before proceeding to the physician’s office.
“What did he say?” Don Juan Antonio inquired. “Who?”
“Sir, Abuelita Ana. You know, the—”
“What?” Don Juan Antonio was surprised. “Grandmother Ana? Who would have expected it? She had been dying as long as I can remember her. Well, well, well …” His mouth still astonished, he lifted his right hand and slowly crossed himself.
THESEVENTIES
Selectra Six-Ten
INTRODUCTION BY ED FERMAN
I had the good fortune to know Avram best during the eventful years from 1962 to 1964. The events included his marriage to Grania, a move from New York to Milford, PA (I drove him and his cats down to Pennsylvania, a ride full of laughs and ripe smells), and another move to Mexico.
These were the years when he took a detour from his writing to edit F&SF. What initially impressed his young assistant (me) was his witty and scholarly story introductions. But what has stayed with me the most is the remarkable care and sensitivity with which he handled each submission, perhaps the result of the fact that he had not always been treated with courtesy as a writer.
In 1964 Avram resigned as editor to return to full-time writing. My father wrote to him that “you’ve done an extraordinarily fine job under very trying circumstances” (i.e., being mostly over one thousand miles from the office without even a phone close at hand), and Avram replied:
Thank you for your kind and complimentary letter about your satisfaction with my work as editor. I have not done as well as I wished to, but I think that I did as well as a part-time and absent person of my habits could. It was an honor and a pleasure to have this work. I appreciate the fact that you at all times treated me like a gentleman. Needless to say that I wish my successors, and The Magazine under their hands, all possible success. Meanwhile, I forge ahead on my writing and hope to have time for short stories before the end of the year …
The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 34
