The knife. I have a knife.
“Feet—your feet will be undone, and you will go down the ladder to your daughter.”
The mother bobbed her head, tried to grunt a few words, but Lupita couldn’t understand a word so reached over and tugged off her gag, holding it in place for a second to see if the woman would scream. The mother sucked air in deep, as if suffocating, but then remained silent. Lupita grabbed the X-Acto knife from her waist, felt the strong metal in her hand, undid the safety cap, and sawed away at the rope. It gave way fast, and Lupita kept the knife pointed and ready to attack in case the animal decided to flee.
Instead, the woman darted directly down the hatch, and with no hands to use, wobbled back and forth until she finally dropped partway and landed with an “umph.”
Lupita followed closely and watched as the mother waggled to the middle of the light, where the young god-child sat curled into a ball. She watched as the girl snuggled up in her mommy’s lap, the same way she was in Lupita’s lap moments ago.
The two were mushed together, and their words and cries came together, too, in a mish-mash of: “Sweetie,” “Honey-bear,” “Are you okay?” “Mommy, can we go?” “Let’s go home,” “Why are you tied up, Momma? Why are we here?” “It’s okay. It’s okay. Just wait, just wait a while.” Lupita saw tears stream from the little angel-child. Her finger’s grasping onto her mother’s skin made Lupita feel strangely warm, too.
Where was the turtle? It had wandered off. Lupita searched in the corner darkness for the turtle, found a jug of water instead, and drank until it was empty. Then she ate the half Snickers Bar that remained. She scratched her head, behind her left ear, and had to dig her fingernails deep into her scalp before she felt relief.
Lupita sat on the ground in the shadow’s edge and watched and listened. She heard the mother make promises to her daughter of somebody coming for them, how they wouldn’t be hurt. She watched the daughter clinging to her mother and her mother trying to respond in kind, but unable to move her hands.
Lupita’s own hands were exploring, feeling for rocks, but she knew she’d only find tiny pebbles. Her hands did this search automatically, without thought, always grasping at rocks, looking for sharp objects, running a finger along the edges and trying to cut herself, because if a rock was sharp enough to cut her own flesh, she could also cut Dante.
But now I have a knife. I have a knife.
Anything she did would have to complete the job. She could have no near misses again. She had planned one solid attempt. A rock big enough to crush his head was going to be hammered onto his skull while he was busy cutting a victim into fodder.
“We’re leaving,” she had told Q. “We’re leaving soon.” But it didn’t happen soon enough, not before Q told his daddy, and the daddy responded.
The flesh of her pinky finger was cut quickly, but the bone took a lot of time to saw through. Her body had to be tied up tight so she wouldn’t squirm, and the children watched and heard it all. Afterwards, he trapped her in this chamber bleeding for days.
Lupita finally noticed the dark hump of the turtle. It had crawled inside a crate, tucked itself away, and seemed done moving for now. Time passed, stares continued across the room, and thoughts were exchanged. What if it was dark in here? What if the mother and daughter were here in the dark for so long the darkness soaked into their skin, through their eyes, and crept into their hearts and souls?
They wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Fragile. They were too fragile for this. Just these tiny moments, with Lupita watching them, were making them break.
Lupita approached them from her corner of darkness, and they ceased talking. Scared perhaps. She knelt in front of them.
“See. You see, my dear—your mommy, like I said.”
The mother was trying desperately to free her hands behind her back. The girl peered up through the corner of her eye, and Lupita gave them a smile. All she wanted was to watch them together for a while, but they had stopped everything, perfectly still, like her own children get when Dante yells at them. She held out a hand to the angel-child’s face, placed the palm of her hand against the smoothness of her cheek, and felt the girl shaking inside. Then she scratched behind her ear with her thumb and sat back, thinking of how a statue of these two could keep her company.
“What do you want from us?” the mother of the child finally asked.
“Want? Don’t know. It’s hard to say for sure. You got farther than anyone, farther than anyone has in a long time.”
“We can pay. We can pay and not tell anybody. Just don’t hurt her.”
“Good. It’s good you are here.”
“My husband. Did you call him? He will pay you to let us go. Talk to him. Call him.”
“Pay? Oh, okay. Dante has taken you as a hostage? Did not know. You got people who will pay? He doesn’t do that much anymore. Doesn’t always know how. You have people who will pay?”
“Yes, I do. My husband—my husband will pay. You just need to talk to him.” She sucked in air and kissed her daughter’s forehead.
“Dante, he will try, but his brain. Brain doesn’t work anymore. Sharp—he used to be sharp. His eyes penetrated through the thick garbage that hid me. Big cash he got when people did pay. Worked hard, and we bought clothes. Rented a nice apartment for a month. But that’s gone. Gone. I can’t help it. He’s gone now, not the same. First the meth, but now the salts. Salts have burnt into him. If he gets hostage money, good for you and me. Maybe you go home, and maybe I get out of here. With money someday, you and me both go. But you are okay here. I will get water. Beef Jerky. It’s okay.”
“Please, you are a mother, right? You’re a mother with children like me. Can you help me? Please, help me. You want to leave him. I know you want to leave. We can leave here—me and you.”
Lupita scanned the drawings on the woman’s skin, wondering what they would look like on skin that was rich brown and not so sad and white. How did she do this? And why? Was she from regular people or a garbage scavenger from the slums, or a street-walking, paradita de Tijuana? The metal piercing on the mother’s brow danced with each word she spoke. The angel-child’s face was buried into her mother, as if hiding from their talk. Lupita reached over and stroked the back of the god-child’s head.
What was that? She stopped and listened. Lupita thought she heard Dante coming, or the kids. They should be here soon. Even if they had another body to feed off of, they should be here.
“Leave here? I have tried to leave, but only with my children. They would not survive without me. Dante provides sometimes, but he would stop feeding them without me here, without his brother helping us and bringing the tribe what they need. Besides, where would I go?” Lupita asked holding her hands in the air, “with two children like mine? Mine are not of the angel you carry.”
“I can help you. I can get your children to hospitals. They may just need some medical care, some doctors, and some, some… some love.”
“Love. Love? Killed. Some days I wish I had killed them, smashed their skulls together when they were just a few months and before they had a chance to harden. To make them feed off of things to live, was that for me or was that for them? Look what I did? Look what I brought into this world? From me—that’s from me, you see… my flesh is doing that. It’s mine. Something’s broken inside of me.
“You don’t know what it’s like to do anything to make your children live. Hostages and bodies and my kids. We were trapped—trapped in this very room for a long time in the dark. Then he came back and the light came back. But still, he kept us trapped, and just delivered new hostages once in a while. Well, bodies they were by then—not hostages. Nobody would pay for them, so we kept living off the bodies.”
“That must have been horrible. I am so sorry.”
Lupita looked into the mother’s eyes. She didn’t understand the tears and the cries. Statues—these were just statues talking to her, a statue of Mary like they taught her about in the orphanage. No, not
that Mary, but the other Mary, Mary Magdalene, the one who waited outside that cave when Lazarus came out.
“Sorry. The mother is sorry? Why are you sorry? You couldn’t give us food. But I did get out. One day he left the plank open; didn’t put enough weight on it. I pushed it up, and we were down the tunnel, where it meets the drain. He came back and saw me and not a word. He didn’t say a word, and we lived up there in the tunnel. Things changed, except at night he puts us back.”
“Food. Then we tried food. We tried it before, you see. Candy bars at first. Your angel, she loves candy, I’m sure. Me and you, when we were kids, we ate candy. Or doughnuts—they were always bringing us donuts when I was a Tijuanese, and I eat them with a smile. But not my two. My two children threw up the candy. They threw up black, dark, bloody stuff; they had diarrhea that burned them. It all turned to acid. Bread and beef—we tried it all when Dante steals a CalFresh card and gets free food, but that didn’t work. Their throats burned with bile, and butts ran with black diarrhea.
“And then they cut each other while we didn’t look. Q would cut T, and T would cut Q, and they would lick each other. It was hard. Tears—tears like you and your daughter have. I had those then. My children lost color, turned black as the tunnel. We tied their hands up, and I fed them that way. Then they banged heads and got the blood from each other. Day and night, I didn’t sleep to watch and stop them. Then we tried both food and bodies. Then we tried just the bodies. Now they both live happy.
“Trapped in here, you see. I was trapped in here and had to feed them things. That’s why there will be no more. No more children, I see to that. I take care of myself if I don’t have monthly blood, ’cause he’s always jumping on me, mounting me, breeding those children that will be no more.
“Maybe I leave in some years when they are stronger… maybe if he gets money from your person who will pay. But not now; he has new love. And the salts. When he gets a card from a man, he can get salts.”
Erin turned her head to the ground defeated.
“Face. That sad face. You give me that look, but I am you. Souls—we are just souls born into different bodies at random. You think I didn’t try to make a little angel like the one you have.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s Dante; it’s his fault. Don’t blame yourself, it’s him,” the woman said.
“Maybe. Maybe. Gringo with donuts—I thought he was just another gringo with donuts, but he heard me use English and said I looked part gringo and asked if he could talk to my parents, but I had none, just old people who looked out for me. They didn’t fight if I didn’t fight. ‘No prostitute,’ is all I said. ‘No prostitute.’ And he looked at me with the handsome eyes and said, ‘No prostitute.’ I believed him.”
“What did you do?”
“Do? I learned to flirt and talk. I talked with men who had wallets, day-trippers who were coming over to meet prostitutes in the Zona Norte. He would take them and sometimes get money for them. He doesn’t wait… maybe a few days.”
“Then the meth came. ‘They started a tunnel but didn’t finish,’ he told me. ‘We will use it.’ He sold meth for a while, but he would never let me through. He left and trapped me right here until after it caved in, and then he left me for good. Still won’t tell me where he was. Jail—I know it was jail a bit. He has family. He has people. They don’t like him, but they’s blood, and they’s already here in your country. The meth is gone. Don’t tell the tribe outside that, but maybe they know.”
“Who are the tribe?”
“Tribe. You’ve seen them. They camp on the trails. First they gave money for the meth, then bodies. The bodies still come; I think just because they get sick of people and send them here, or Dante’s brother makes sure it happens. Or both, but there’s always bodies.”
The child moved, and the mother curled herself around her, trying to soak her in.
“We have money, I promise. We have things we can bring you that can help. We really can. I promise, if you let us go, we will bring it. I would like to help. I have a lot to live for.”
“Live for—a lot to live for? You do, and I do not? How does that work. Why? You should be me, and I should be you. Yes, that’s it.” Lupita stood up and looked down upon the mass of limbs sitting below her. “And you have been raised with what? Why you? Why you and not me, and why yours and not mine? Huh? Let’s trade… you think you’re so tough… marking your skin with pictures and putting metal into your face and giving yourself muscles? You do a day what I do.
“Yes, that’s it. Here. You can stay here, both of you. You can stay with us, at least until you are with child. Have another child, an angel-child for me to have, or you give me the one you have already. But, honey-bear, you are staying with us.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Hey, monkey-man, you awake? You best wake up for this. You ain’t gonna wanna miss it. Open your eyes.”
The voice came to him as if under water, but Macon ignored it and kept his eyes shut. One eye was swollen shut anyway. The side of his face throbbed yet felt completely numb at the same time and much bigger than it usually was, like his lip after he got a cavity filled. His eye felt closed shut by his cheek and forehead, which were swollen and clamped together. A crack in his skull seemed to make his brain seep in and out, in and out, along with his consciousness.
Macon’s head was broken, the whole half side of it. That was it. And his shoulders ached. When he tried to move his hands, he found out why. They were pulled tight behind his back and tied together. His shirt was completely off of him. So were his shoes. He could feel the cold, wet rock below him, against his bare back. A wall seemed to be not far from his head, but the voice of his captor was across the way. Black, thick darkness hung over him like oil. Light from something nearby wasn’t enough to reach the walls of this room, but Macon could feel the walls all around.
This seemed to be no room at all. It was too dank, and with a moist, cold air that smelled of sewage. He’d been dragged into the drainage tunnel.
Snorting noises echoed in his aching skull. Where had he heard that noise before? Bathrooms… at the biker club. This was the same sound he’d heard in bathrooms where bikers would snort lines of cocaine on toilet tops as if everybody didn’t know exactly what was happening.
And Padre. Padre had turned on him. Now he was trapped, but still alive. He opened his eyes, tried to turn his head, looking for any sign of Erin. A body was next to him. Was it her?
“Silence them. Silence all of them. Not for the light, they say. Not for the light, but the dark penetrates deep—deep into my nostril to my brains.” Then he laughed. “You ever been cut, motherfucker? Yes, hell yes, and more than that. You just wait and see.” Spit. “Wait and see what we got for you… you want to see… you want to see… yeah, I know. We’ll let you see.”
The man was across from him, maybe fifteen feet away, and he had a lantern attached to his hip that was the only light, and when he moved, the light bounced with his hips.
Then there was another snort. A long, nasal inhale followed by his head jerking back. “Ah, yeah, that’s it. You need a little dark to see the stars… you need a little bit of me to see the light. You see my face? You see what you did to my face? Well, here’s what we do. Here’s what our family will do. I got kids, you see, but they ain’t right. They ain’t right and ain’t ever been right. Their mom doesn’t know this, but I know this.”
I’m dead. About to die, Macon realized, and it wasn’t going to be fast and painless. Every thought Macon had stabbed into the crack in his brain, and he wanted death to come quickly. But Erin and Lyric, where were they? He blew it. He fucked up this day just like he knew he would, like she knew he would. Failed. They were both captured in this insanity by a crazy tweaker.
“Opened eyes. Open. I knew it. I knew it!”
The man darted across the tunnel and got right up in Macon’s face. The heat of his breath was an odor so thick that Macon tried not to breathe but couldn’t help it; his nostrils had to
suck in any air he could. Lantern light illuminated only half the man’s face, and pockmarks covered his skin. An eyeball that barely seemed to stay in its socket seemed ready to fall out from the gaunt man. White foam circled his lips, and dried salt caked his nostrils. Shadows of purple and bloody, soaked bruises showed the results of Macon’s pounding. The blood was at both his temples, clotting a bit, but there was so much dirt and shadow and cave-blue light, it was hard to tell if this mask in front of him was even real. It was clear the nose was broken, twisted. If not by Macon, then it happened before, but the blood underneath it was crusting up, and the creature spoke as if the blood had clogged his nasal passage.
“Ah, you see then. You see my face? You see what you did? Wait until you see what we do to faces around here.”
“Where’s my wife?” Macon yelled, demanding to know, except it came out as a muffled, fragile cry. A rag was stuffed deep in his mouth, and when he tried to scream, no words could be heard. All that happened was the dirty rag got sucked deeper onto his tongue, and the cloth dried his mouth like sucking on a dirty cotton ball. “Where is she?” he yelled again. Just muffles.
“Noises? Those noises from you? You saying something? You got something to say? I need to hear you talk, monkey-man. Let’s hear what monkey-man has to say.”
The face of the beast came down in front of Macon, so close the flesh of the man’s swollen nose brushed against Macon’s cheek. Close up, it was hard to believe the man could talk, for his face was butchered by Macon’s onslaught of punches, but it had only took one shot from a rock to stop it and fracture the side of Macon’s skull.
The man stuck a putrid finger into Macon’s mouth, curled it around the gag, and pulled it downward to his neck.
Deep breathes of rancid air.
“Say it. Say it now, monkey-man.”
“Where’s my wife and my child? Where are they? I can pay. I can pay. Really. Walk with me to the money machine. I have money. I can pay.”
On the Lips of Children Page 12
