The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Max felt an obligation to offer Angelo something better than watch-dogging crooked racetrack managers. Family could be trusted. If Sonny did not want to work with his cousin Angelo, Max wanted to know then, not later. The first few times Max wanted Sonny to take Bingo and Angelo to see how things were done. Mr. B. had assured Max that all arrangements had been made. All Sonny and the boys had to do was to meet the plane and watch the transfer of the shipment to the truck while the plane was reloaded with Mr. B.’s cargo for next-day departure back south.

  Sonny was excited. This contract work for Mr. B. would be a piece of cake. Mr. B.’s southbound cargo was secure in Leah Blue’s warehouses. There were no cash transactions. The pilots worked for Mr. B. For the occasion, Sonny had rented a new Ferrari for twenty-four hours. The stupid Tucson police could not imagine anyone would dare drive to a million-dollar cocaine delivery in a bright red Testarossa. Sonny had rented a big Lincoln town car for Bingo. From now on they would call themselves “commercial land sales executives.” The landing strip was eighty miles from Tucson in the desert west of Casa Grande. Arrival time had been scheduled for five P.M. when Border Patrol and radar surveillance personnel changed shifts. Sonny had insisted Angelo ride with Bingo in the Lincoln, then gave them a half-hour head start.

  Bingo had been sipping gin and tonics since lunch; he had a double in a plastic glass with a lime wedge but no ice. Bingo claimed the cocaine helped clear the gin from his head, but Angelo decided to drive anyway. The Lincoln’s clock had a digital readout for elapsed travel time; Bingo seemed gloomy, so Angelo had made a bet with him about how long before the Ferrari screamed past them in a blazing red streak. Angelo and Bingo had never had much to say to each other because Sonny had done all the talking for both of them. Angelo glanced into the rearview mirror watching for the Ferrari—a red speck on the horizon. The Lincoln handled like a huge motorized sofa compared to Angelo’s Porsche. Angelo might have won if he were driving his Porsche, but Sonny always had to have the advantage.

  Bingo stared straight ahead at the highway with the gin and tonic between his legs. Angelo remembered how easy it had been to stay pleasantly drunk, removed from noise and confusion, detached from the pain of the loss. Who or what had Bingo lost? “You see him yet?” “No. He can’t open it up until he gets clear of traffic.” Angelo glanced into the rearview mirror; on a hill back in the distance he thought he saw a red speck. Bingo, his face flushed from gin, turned awkwardly to look for the Ferrari’s approach. Sonny was closing on them in the left lane. For a moment the red streak seemed to rise straight up from the earth to materialize into a Ferrari grill, the windshield filled with a maniac’s grinning face. “Bastard!” Bingo said as the Ferrari flashed past them and disappeared again into the horizon line. “Sometimes I really hate the fucker,” Bingo said, squeezing a wedge of lime into his gin and tonic. “But I can’t complain. Sonny Boy does all the work. He makes all the decisions. He even tells me which women I’m allowed to fuck.”

  Angelo set the cruise control at seventy-five. He did not want to talk about Sonny. And Angelo was not sure he could trust Bingo. Too many drunks repeated everything they heard to get free drinks or because they were desperate for attention. Angelo could not stop thinking about Marilyn with Tim. Tim was in trouble if a creep like Mr. B. was looking for him. Mr. B. had lied. Tim had never been a pilot. Mr. B. might want to locate Tim, but Angelo would bet rehiring wasn’t what Mr. B. had planned. Tim might already be dead meat, and Marilyn might come back.

  SUITCASES FOR MR. B.

  BINGO FINISHED the gin and tonic and dropped the clear plastic glass on the floor mat. He grimaced drunkenly at Angelo to acknowledge his sloppiness, then shrugged his shoulders to make clear he didn’t care about that or anything. Bingo kept talking about when they were kids in New Jersey. Angelo hoped Bingo would quit talking and sleep until they got to the landing strip. Driving on the empty highway under a wide blue sky always reminded Angelo of Marilyn and New Mexico. Bingo slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “Sonny came down there to my own place, my own house, and he threw her things into garbage bags. She was crying and calling out to me to help her.” Bingo started coughing and rolled down the window; he had leaned so far out the window to puke, Angelo feared he might fall.

  Finally Bingo had passed out, and Angelo could think about Marilyn in peace. Marilyn loved the wide-open spaces; that was all New Mexico had going for it anyway, she used to say. She had showed Angelo how people drive in the Southwest. On straight, empty stretches of highway Marilyn loved to give a whoop and holler, “Pedal to the metal!” as the Porsche had surged ahead. In the West, people were wild, she said. Mostly Angelo remembered the good times; there hadn’t really been a bad time until she left. Marilyn had read Angelo a poem once. She had taken classes at the university in Albuquerque, and the poem had been assigned in a class. The only line of the poem Angelo remembered was, “You will never know the last time we make love.” She might have been trying to let him know her feelings, but instead of talking, Angelo had wanted to make love.

  Angelo had tried to push inside Marilyn, but she was too tight, closed to him. He could not look at her face because he knew he would cry, although he did not understand the reason. With his eyes closed, Angelo had seen thick, black shapes twist and turn continually, changing and transforming themselves. Sweat ran from his armpits down his sides. Marilyn had been soaked and their bodies made smacking, sucking sounds together. He did not want to hurt her. He had rolled off her and hit the damp sheet facedown. Marilyn had not seen Angelo cry before. Her eyes filled with tears. She told Angelo how beautiful his body was, his thighs so muscular and full from riding horses, his cock thick and dark, long enough to enter her from behind. No woman had ever loved him the way Marilyn had. She played with the lock of hair at the nape of his neck, making a loose curl around her finger.

  Sonny Blue had followed orders step by step, marking off each item as he worked down the list, but Mr. Big’s people had screwed up big time. The pilot had flown the correct north-south corridor, but border surveillance radar personnel had apparently not been briefed. Angelo, Bingo, and Sonny had been standing on the dirt landing strip watching Mr. B.’s pilot and copilot move the suitcases from the plane to a delivery van when a Border Patrol pursuit plane appeared overhead. Mr. B. had guaranteed no problems, even if the worst happened and some hot-dog Border Patrol unit happened to intercept a delivery. Once a pursuit plane had been dispatched to chase suspicious aircraft, it could not be called back without arousing suspicion. Certain procedures would be taken if such interceptions did occur; after one phone call, law enforcement officers would be instructed to take down names of suspects for “further investigation,” but no one would be taken into custody. Mr. B. had acknowledged this was a lame cover story, but it had worked again and again in southern Arizona where the citizens were suspicious but stupid.

  The pilot and copilot took off just as the pursuit plane had touched down. Bingo and Angelo had started to run for the car, but Sonny Blue motioned for them to stay put. The truck driver ignored the pursuit plane and continued to slide the big blue suitcases into the van. Two men in dark blue coveralls and sunglasses sat inside the van, with shotguns across their laps.

  Bingo had been pale and sweating as if he might puke, so Sonny nudged him and whispered they had nothing to worry about. After the first phone call, other phone calls would be made. Sonny felt cold sweat on his hands and on the back of his neck. The seven hundred pounds of cocaine in the suitcases were what was most important. Mr. B. had had trouble in the past with suitcases that had been lost or had disappeared. In the event of trouble, instructions were to lock the suitcases in the van, or in the Lincoln should the van be lost. Sonny had been warned to watch local law enforcement officers closely; hundreds of kilos of cocaine disappeared each year before they ever reached police headquarters.

  The Border Patrol pursuit plane taxied past them and Sonny could see the copilot talk on the plane’s radio, to call in gro
und units while they took off again after the plane. Sonny made a call from the Ferrari to the number Max had given him for emergencies. At the sound of the beep Sonny punched in the message: “Call off the dogs.”

  Greenlee had got his start by selling old furniture and junk out on East Twenty-second Street. He went to government auctions of surplus and used military property and had bid on anything, provided it was dirt cheap. Then Greenlee had got lucky. He had bid two thousand dollars for a scrap metal lot that included spare aircraft parts; sixteen months later U.S. troops had been dispatched to Southeast Asia and the U.S. air force had paid Greenlee five hundred thousand dollars for the badly needed spare parts.

  Greenlee walked briskly down the landing strip, glancing in the direction of the highway for signs of headlights from Border Patrol ground units. He wanted to know if Sonny had dialed the emergency number. Sonny could not make out Greenlee’s mood except he did not seem particularly concerned, not even when a dozen sets of headlights could be seen bobbing and weaving at high rates of speed down the dirt road to the landing strip.

  THE THURSDAY CLUB

  JUDGE ARNE was annoyed that his clerk had scheduled lawyers on a Friday morning. After Thursday-night blowouts at the club, he did not like to come to his office until noon. He especially did not want to see the attorney on the county prosecutor’s staff who was a regular at the club, and who, the night before, had made a spectacle of himself with—of all things—a broomstick. As a life member of the Thursday Club, Judge Arne could hardly be absent from their weekly meetings this year because they were celebrating their hundred-year jubilee; one hundred years of fellowship and mutual support between the judiciary and law enforcement officers of southern Arizona. Judge Arne was one of the few remaining members who knew club history from the beginning.

  The U.S. or “gringo” takeover of Mexican territory, later called Arizona and New Mexico Territory, with the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, had been bitterly resented by the people throughout the Southwest. Circuit-riding judges and prosecutors from El Paso were forced to take rooms in the homes of local law officers, who, like the judges and the prosecutors, were non-Catholics, and white men. A year or two later the bachelors among the deputy marshals had rented a large house together on Main Street. When the circuit-riding judges and other prominent bachelors visited Tucson, the accomodations and a membership at the Thursday Club became a coveted social prize. The bachelor son of a prominent Tucson family had become police chief, and from that time on, relations between the police and the local bar had been unusually cordial; more than once, Tucson had gained national attention as an example of harmony and understanding between law enforcement and the local business community. A great deal had been made of the prohibition of women on the premises of the Thursday Club because Main Street had been notorious for its bordellos.

  “Brotherly camaraderie and socializing between law enforcement officers, judges, and lawyers, a phenomenon unheard of east of the Mississippi, is a weekly ritual at the exclusive Thursday Club,” an issue of the Tucson Territorial had reported. Young deputy marshals with blond mustaches as sparse as their experience sat on the long mansion porch at night and smoked Cuban cigars with assistant U.S. attorneys and federal magistrates. During those early years, they had been outnumbered in Tucson. The gringos had to stick together or they’d be overrun.

  Within a few years the Thursday Club had boasted a membership with every socially prominent Tucson family represented. The word on the street was the Thursday Club hired pretty Mexican boys to chop wood bare chested all winter while club members watched them from the sun-room as they sat in chaise lounges, sipping cocktails or sucking on small oranges. The clubhouse had boasted the first evaporative cooling system in Tucson. All summer, young brown boys carried water buckets to the roof to saturate cotton wadding in wooden frames. Jealousy over the cool-air system in the rooms at the top of the Thursday House had resulted in rumors about the source of the heat on the top floor. The rumors alleged it was the young Mexican boys frolicking with certain club members who had heated things up on the top floor.

  Club members ignored or casually dismissed rumors, citing comradeship, man to man, as the most precious commodity on the treacherous frontier. They had found themselves in the last corner of the United States, the desolate, troubled Southwest territories. There was only one direction to go after Tucson; that was down to Mexico, and they’d all rather have died first. “Hang together or hang one by one,” was the gringo motto.

  After World War One, club membership had become exclusive and hush-hush. The Thursday Club’s name had been changed to the Owls Club. Security had been cited, but it was evident the club’s members wished to lay to rest rumors—the stories that had circulated in the bars and brothels for years—tales of “the closet club,” “the old fags sleeping society,” and “sucky-fucky.” The old guard at the club had been adamant about discretion and total privacy. The sudden sale of the club’s mansion during the eighties real estate boom had been very carefully calculated. They made immense profits off the sale, while at the same time they had left behind the so-called “scene of the crime”—the attic rooms in the mansion where Tucson police were rumored to have posed nude for the pinup calendar called Cop Cakes.

  The club had already been in decline before the Cop Cakes pinup calendar scandal. Membership had fallen over the years as the club had become more exclusive. The young deputies and law clerks who had in past years always created such delight and excitement were no longer eligible for membersip; a mistake which Judge Arne believed had been fatal to the club. But Tucson’s so-called social elite were deeply concerned about “good breeding.” Tucson’s “gentry” seldom talked about anything else at their parties. It often required all of the judge’s abundant good breeding (himself a blue blood from a Mississippi timber dynasty) to suffer the hilarious pretensions of Tucson’s “aristocracy,” spawned by the whiskey bootleggers and whoremasters who had fattened off the five thousand U.S. troops who had chased Geronimo and fifty Apaches for ten years. Ah, Tucson high society! With their pedestrian little fortunes skimmed off government supply contracts for army rations of weevil-infested cornmeal and wagonloads of spoiled meat.

  THE YOUNG POLICE CHIEF

  JUDGE ARNE preferred the company of honest working men to the pretensions of Tucson’s social elite. The judge did not consider himself homosexual; he was an epicurean who delighted in the delicacies of both sexes. In classical times it had not been necessary to talk about contact between men. Contact was action, and action was behavior. Behavior was not identity. A gentleman had a myriad of choices open to him at appropriate places and times. The judge had always been certain of his sexual identity: he was a man with a cock tip big as a fist, and balls that hung like a bull’s. His was merely a cocks man’s taste for strange fruits.

  The judge had taken care to make friends with the young police chief. The judge had always been strongly attracted to “black Irish,” as the Tucson police chief identified himself. The deep blue eyes, the black curly hair, and traces of five-o’clock shadow on Irish cops were almost irresistible. The young police chief had grown up in Phoenix. He still made jokes about living in Tucson. He had never visited the Thursday Club, and he was married with three children. Still, the judge had learned from years at the club that cops were the ones who would surprise you because they had more personality quirks and twists to them than attorneys, who lacked imagination beyond panty-hose worn with a butt-hole cut into the panty. The judge had learned that cops were uniform freaks, and when they got drunk at the Thursday Club, their favorite attire had been nurse uniforms. Cop tastes ran to cock rings and color photographs of animal castrations.

  Around the young police chief, Judge Arne always felt very heterosexual, he wasn’t sure why. He found it exciting to ride through downtown in the police chief’s cruiser. The judge wanted to see what might develop with the police chief. The judge had always preferred watching over touching or performing with others. Under certai
n circumstances, the female genitalia greatly aroused the judge. He had studied human embryology in college. Each male prostate had almost been a uterus, while the clitoris was merely a penis shrunk by estrogen. In one textbook there had been a page that showed freak female sex organs erect and as large as a young boy’s penis; female organs that size dripped pearly juice when they climaxed. Some places in the world, the juice sold for hundreds of dollars, like rhino horn ground to powder to get old men aroused.

  Then at a border law enforcement convention in El Paso the judge and police chief had taken a taxi together. They had been drinking margaritas, and the police chief asked the taxi driver to take them to a whorehouse across the border. The judge had felt radiant as the driver took them down dusty lanes and narrow alleys; it had been as if the police chief had been able to read the judge’s mind. Nothing brought men closer than fighting side by side; then later, there was nothing like fucking women together.

  The run-down mansion was a block from a Juarez police annex; not surprisingly, many of the regular customers were police. The madam was a Mexican American in her late forties who drove across the border every night to her country club home in northwest El Paso. As she led them up the stairs, she complained loudly about business. Her hot breath stank of brandy and cigarettes. She had guessed they were from the law enforcement convention over in El Paso. She wasn’t surprised to see Americans because few Mexicans could afford her girls. Anyone could see Mexico was plunging into deep trouble when a thousand pesos didn’t buy ten tortillas. The Mexican police inspectors and detectives had got rich off the drug trade, but she did not approve of her girls servicing men who had been police interrogators because they had developed “sadistic perversions.” As the madam said this, she had looked sharply at both the judge and the police chief. “I don’t want my employees to get hurt.”