The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Beaufrey had taken David’s girlfriend, Seese, to the abortionist once before, but that had been when she and David had first been lovers, before Seese and Beaufrey had begun to hate one another.

  At first David had not spent much time at the apartment Beaufrey had rented for Seese and the baby. They could not live in the penthouse with a baby screaming day and night. But later, David had begun to bring the baby up to the penthouse where he spent entire afternoons photographing the infant posed on white rabbit fur. Beaufrey had been strangely intrigued by David’s obsession with the infant’s supposed resemblance to himself. David had shot dozens of rolls of color film of the baby sleeping, close-up studies of the baby’s face.

  The change in David’s attitude had been obvious. David wanted the child. He did not want that cunt to have that essence of himself, his child. Seese was nothing but an addict and a drunk; at her best, she was a whore. As David talked, he got more excited. He had a plan. David wanted to take the child and leave the United States. David had overheard Beaufrey and Luis talk about the ranch or finca in Colombia. Colombia seemed far enough away from the U.S. courts.

  David was almost delectable when he was serious and his nostrils had a slight flare. Beaufrey had to smile. Here was one of life’s little mysteries: aristocratic bloodlines seemed genetically incompatible with physical beauty. Beaufrey would be the first to admit the rich were ugly; only great fortunes had made it possible for ugly blue bloods to continue reproducing themselves. Beaufrey knew that David, Eric, and all the other “rough trade” only stayed as long as there was dope and money. Street punks looked blank if they heard the term blue blood; occasionally one might confuse the word with blue ball or scrotal congestion. Still, life’s mystery was that the loveliest, most tender pieces of beauty were “rough trade”—the boys of the street dripping their pearls in the soot.

  The idea of the game was to permit gorgeous young men such as David to misunderstand their importance in the world. The objective was to fool the young men before they could fool Beaufrey. Artists were the most fascinating to Beaufrey because they were often shattered and easily manipulated emotionally. Artists were quite exciting to destroy. Because they participated so freely. Eric had made his suicide a sort of visual event or installation, which Eric had somehow known would be irresistible to a visual artist such as David.

  Beaufrey loved the theater. Players such as Eric or David and the cunt were a dime a dozen; Beaufrey was the director and author; he was the producer. One act followed another; Eric had performed the last act of his life farce perfectly; uncanny how Eric’s blood and flesh had become a medium consumed by a single performance.

  David had been triumphant after he had snatched Monte from his playpen. Beaufrey had made all the arrangements, including the purchase of passports and papers for the infant. They had left the same afternoon for Cartagena by chartered jet. They could count on Seese to stay drunk and coked up for hours before she got desperate enough to contact the police.

  The first week in Cartagena it had seemed possible to endure David’s child’s remaining with them. The child seldom cried for its mother and slept long intervals in the afternoon when Beaufrey preferred sex. But at the beginning of the second week, the child had begun crying and rocking its crib against a wall while they were having sex. Beaufrey had been furious about the interruption, but pretended he did not mind David’s fussing with the child. Beaufrey had cut more lines of cocaine on the mirror and filled both glasses with champagne. David must have no suspicion. Later Beaufrey discussed the schedule: they could not fly out to the finca until the end of the week.

  The baby seemed to sense David’s rising frustration and had cried for hours despite the best efforts of the night nurse, a chubby, young Colombian woman with three children of her own at home. Beaufrey had rented another suite for himself and Serlo on another floor because the baby’s crying had annoyed him so much. David had pretended he did not mind being left behind in the hotel suite with a crying baby and its nurse; but David had always been jealous of Serlo. Only a few nights before, David had demanded Beaufrey tell him everything he and Serlo did in bed together.

  Beaufrey marveled at the odd chemistry. David pretended he was not jealous. But he had started fucking the chubby night nurse, who taught him to mix paregoric in the baby’s formula. Before the end of the week, David had begun leaving the baby with the nurse in the suite to join Beaufrey and Serlo upstairs in the penthouse for drinks and dinner followed by cocaine and videos of police torture, autopsies, or other new acquisitions. Beaufrey claimed he wanted David to see what others had done with “still-life studies” such as Eric, but Beaufrey had enjoyed watching the expressions on David’s face as the torture had progressed conveniently into the “autopsy” of the victim.

  David had enjoyed watching torture and killing videos before; most men did. Beaufrey divided the world into those who admitted the truth and those who lied. But that night David denied the videos gave him pleasure. David had been sullen throughout cocktails and the lovely dinner Beaufrey had ordered in their suite. That night, David had leapt up from his chair the instant he saw the surgery paraphernalia appear on the video screen. David had left the hotel without stopping to check with the nurse about the baby. Beaufrey had to smile to himself. David’s reaction was too powerful to overlook; David was afraid to feel how much he enjoyed the scalpel sinking through skin and flesh.

  Beaufrey always relied on intuition to know when a situation or a sucker was ripe. Beaufrey had been intrigued by the process of deterioration in Eric; now in David, he was beginning to detect a similar pattern. Separate David from G. and the gallery with all the ass lickers, adulation and hoopla, and David would diminish a little more each day until there was nothing. No David. He would no longer exist except when he stared into the face of a baby. But soon David had not even looked at his baby.

  David’s reaction had been typical of U.S. citizens too long insulated from foreigners and strange climates. At first, David had been exhilarated by the novelty. Cartagena had soon drained David, and he had lost a certain edge as the days passed and the hotel switchboard seemed unable to connect him with his gallery more than twice a week. Finally David had become depressed and weepy over imagined infidelities between Beaufrey and Serlo.

  David was ripe. Beaufrey could feel his excitement rising as the final moves of the game were being made and it was clear his prey could not escape. Beaufrey had purposely waited three weeks in Cartagena to make the kidnapping seem more plausible. Seese would need time for everything to sink in; that Monte had been taken, that David was responsible, that her only hope was to hire someone to find them. Seese had old connections in Tucson who could track Beaufrey; that had been another reason Beaufrey was ready to make his new headquarters on the remote Colombian plains. Or at least these were the stories Beaufrey had already fed to David, who wasn’t completely stupid. The plan required enough time so retaliation by Seese was possible.

  The flight to the finca had been scheduled for early the next morning. David had gone out with Serlo to buy darkroom equipment and supplies he would need at the ranch. Beaufrey had arranged for the four gunmen to enter David’s hotel suite and to leave the nurse unharmed, locked in a closet. The nurse had identified the gunmen as foreigners, Mexicans she thought. Beaufrey had specified Mexicans to further implicate the connections Seese had in Tucson.

  The shock of seeing police, hotel staff, even journalists, crowded around his door had left David pale and withdrawn. Beaufrey had shown David to the red leather armchair and asked Serlo to bring them some brandy. Beaufrey did all the talking because his friend did not speak Spanish fluently. As soon as the police and other authorities had grasped the possibility the child’s mother from the U.S. had taken the baby, the excitement immediately subsided. Oh! Oh! That was a different matter! Very soon the hall outside the suite had been cleared of all but a few police inspectors who were required to complete reports.

  Beaufrey had coaxed David to drink
the brandy and to snort some cocaine to settle his nerves. Beaufrey wanted David to know he was prepared to charter a return flight to the United States. Nothing was more important to Beaufrey than for David to find his infant son.

  David had snorted a line of cocaine and settled back on the sofa with his eyes closed, pinching his nostrils shut with one hand. Beaufrey especially enjoyed watching David when David was angry or upset. David’s pouting mouth aroused Beaufrey. He had the urge to cross the room and lick the traces of cocaine powder from David’s nostrils. Dull or ordinary people were so much more interesting when you and they were drunk and high on coke, just as the most ordinary street boys became special after their nipples sported diamond or gold studs. Nothing stimulated the cerebral cortex like cocaine unless it was coffee. “The deadly ‘C’ plants from South America,” he said, giggling. Beaufrey was drunk. He was high. He must not giggle again because David’s baby had been stolen only hours earlier. He snorted more coke. A great tingling rush came over Beaufrey’s entire body all at once. Bliss! Bliss! Nothing matters but bliss! Beaufrey and David stayed in the hotel suite for two days while Serlo took all telephone calls from local authorities and police, who wished to contact the United States to locate the missing child’s mother. But after numerous assurances from Serlo that the infant’s mother had kidnapped it, police authorities marked the case file “inactive.”

  Beaufrey persuaded David to fly with him and Serlo to the finca. David seemed to have forgotten he had kidnapped Monte in the first place, and that the police in San Diego might be looking for David. Or they might not be looking for him, since Monte was David’s own son and the child’s mother was an addict and a whore.

  At the finca, David had regained much of his former vigor. He wasn’t going to let Seese keep the child. The child was his. Beaufrey had nodded and pretended to agree with everything David said. The first few days at the ranch had been a replay of the last days in the hotel in Cartagena, where Serlo had been relegated to the role of receptionist while Beaufrey and David had lain naked in the king-size bed snorting gram after gram of cocaine watching torture videos or soccer games on big-screen satellite TV.

  ALTERNATIVE EARTH UNITS

  SERLO HAD REMAINED perfectly calm. Only he, of all the others, had the rare gift of perfect calm. Serlo was there to keep watch; in all directions, farther than the eye could see, the infinite blue sky enclosed the plain. Serlo was sangre pura; years before they had all the mestizos and Indians relocated to work on their ranching operations in Argentina. The finca was to become a stronghold for those of sangre pura as unrest and revolutions continued to sweep through.

  Serlo preferred that Beaufrey be dominant; danger was exciting. Their most engaging conversations together had concerned the importance of lineage. The United States had vulgarized wealth by allowing the lowest levels of humanity to worm their way into political power in a so-called democracy. Beaufrey and Serlo both agreed lineage was all that mattered. Those of highest lineage had never lost their great wealth; lesser lines of nobility had found themselves with lineages but no money.

  Serlo had dedicated himself to a cause. Really it wasn’t as quixotic as all that; other great leaders and thinkers had shared Serlo’s concern. He believed the human race would die out without a proper genetic balance. All along the droit du seigneur had been aimed at constant infusion of superior aristocratic blood into the peasant stock, just as Serlo had heard his uncles laugh about the rubber plantations years before where they had raped six or seven young Indian women, not because they had been lustful men, they were not, but because they believed it was their God-given duty to “upgrade” mestizo and Indian bloodstock.

  Serlo was the first to concede that a great deal of weak genetic material in the human population was Caucasian, the results of improper mixing of bloodlines. For example, the matings of Polish and Irish resulted in hybrid individuals worse than either of the parents. Serlo had studied at the private institutes for eugenics research, which even he had felt were questionable because researchers had refused to consider the factor of the mother. Serlo had studied a large body of psychological and psychiatric writings that clearly demonstrated that even the most perfect genetic specimen could be ruined, absolutely destroyed, by the defects of the child’s mother. Serlo believed the problems that Freud had identified need not occur if a child’s “parents” were both male. The nature of the female was to engulf what was outside her body, to never let the umbilical cord be severed; gradually the mother became a vampire.

  Serlo did not mind Beaufrey’s cheap street boys, or the gringos, not even Eric; how could Serlo have possibly felt anything at all about them? Jealousy was out of the question. Serlo had sangre pura; “blue blood” deserved “blue blood.” In the end there could be nothing better. The finca would become his research center. An institute also. They would be able to conduct research in complete seclusion. While Beaufrey was not interested in the scholarly details, still he understood simple political realities. Riches meant little if the cities were burning and anarchy reigned.

  At the finca they would have everything; the underground vaults and storage units had been built to accommodate the bales of U.S. dollars, deutsche marks, and other currency put in storage by certain of Beaufrey’s clients. Other underground units contained giant, sealed tanks of water and barrels of wine. Other units contained immense stores of dehydrated foods. But Serlo had not stopped here; he had made a generous research grant to a young scientist from Geneva, who had traveled to Colombia and lived on the finca for a year as he designed and supervised the construction of an underground chamber or “Alternative Earth” unit. Once sealed, the Alternative Earth unit contained the plants, animals, and water necessary to continue independently as long as electricity was generated by the new “peanut-size” atomic reactors.

  But Serlo’s interest in Alternative Earth module research extended far beyond mere survival or self-defense from anarchy with underground caches of supplies and weapons. In the end, the earth would be uninhabitable. The Alternative Earth modules would be loaded with the last of the earth’s uncontaminated soil, water, and oxygen and would be launched by immense rockets into high orbits around the earth where sunlight would sustain plants to supply oxygen, as well as food. Alternative Earth modules would orbit together in colonies, and the select few would continue as they always had, gliding in luxury and ease across polished decks of steel and glass islands where they looked down on earth as they had once gazed down at Rome or Mexico City from luxury penthouses, still sipping cocktails.

  The colonies in earth’s orbit would periodically be recharged with water and oxygen from earth, but the Alternative Earth modules had been designed to be self-sufficient, closed systems, capable of remaining cut off from earth for years if necessary while the upheaval and violence threatened those of superior lineage.

  DAVID’S INFANT SON

  SERLO HAD ALMOST persuaded Beaufrey to forget the one-man theater experiments with Eric in San Diego when David had appeared on the scene with the woman not far behind. Serlo had never cared for beauty or virginity since neither were as lasting as one’s lineage, which not even death could diminish. Serlo never failed to take new visitors, such as David, down the long hall to see the portraits. Those along the north wall had been his mother’s lineage; these along the south wall were his father’s lineage, which was perhaps somewhat less distinguished.

  Serlo had been interested in Beaufrey’s preoccupation with David’s girlfriend and David’s child. Serlo knew Beaufrey wanted Seese dead. He was curious to know what Beaufrey would do with the infant. If Beaufrey did not have the infant killed, Serlo wanted it raised by two men in what would be his institute’s first important experiment. The child was of common blood, but one did not waste aristocratic blood unnecessarily. Serlo did not bother with questions; whatever Beaufrey had done with the infant would undoubtedly be recorded on videotape or with photographs anyway.

  Serlo had been watching David’s attentions toward h
im; odd how David had ignored Serlo until he saw the landing strip and the ranch buildings of the finca. David was street trash; street boys were the same the world over, whether they were from the U.S. or from downtown Bogotá. Serlo liked a good dog; a good dog wagged its tail when it sniffed fresh meat. Serlo was amused at U.S. street boys who called themselves “musicians” or “painters,” but not “prostitutes.” David had misunderstood his status entirely after the success of his one-man show. Of course Beaufrey used to play along to set them up. Beaufrey loved to see their faces fall and their eyes brim with tears, these street boys who had thought they were his “equals.” Suddenly one day Beaufrey would put them in their place.

  SECRET AGENDA

  DAVID HATED SEESE so much he had failed to recognize how unlikely it would have been for Seese to stay off vodka and cocaine long enough to arrange to have them tracked to Cartagena. All David understood was his baby son, Monte, had been taken by kidnappers hired by that cunt Seese. David had even returned to San Diego once from the finca because the whore had insisted she did not have the baby. Beaufrey had stayed up all night with David, snorting cocaine and arguing about having the woman killed. If Seese were dead, they might find who was hiding the baby for her. But David had feared they might never find his baby with Seese dead.

  Serlo hoped to wean Beaufrey gradually from street boys and psychodramas because they would spend most of the year living on the remote finca. Serlo had calculated David’s departure for later in the year. Although Beaufrey would deny it, Serlo knows Beaufrey is obsessed with David. Beaufrey confided he had felt strangely excited that he had stolen David’s son but David had no inkling, no suspicion. How Beaufrey relished the deceit. Beaufrey does not want to lose his plaything; otherwise, why bother to fabricate the kidnapping at the hotel, why let the child’s mother live any longer?