“Will Ming be able to deal with Violeta?” she asked.
“Ming deals with himself, so he can deal with anyone.”
“Great.” María Paz gave her approval. “Then call him. Call him immediately. He must have heard the news as well, so you don’t need to go into long explanations with him either. Tell him to go to Violeta’s school today. Give him the address of the school and directions. Today is Saturday, visiting day, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Where does Ming live?”
“New York.”
“How long does it take to get from New York to Montpelier?
“About five hours.”
“It’s one now. Five hours, it’ll be about six thirty. Perfect. Tell Ming that he has to be there by six thirty. Have him ask for Violeta at the receptionist. Tell him to take her out of there right away, and wait two or three days, whatever it takes, in that motel where you and I stayed when we were in Vermont, North something . . .”
“The North Star Shine Lodge,” Rose said. Since he had befriended Pro Bono, he made sure he remembered the names of all hotels and motels where he and María Paz stayed.
“Yes, that one. Can you tell Ming where it is?”
“Right off I-89, about fifteen minutes before Montpelier. He’ll see it advertised on a large billboard, indicating the exit. From there, he just has to follow the signs.”
“Good, Rose!” María Paz hugged him. “And I did love your son, do you hear me? I loved him very much. And I love you too, when you don’t scream at me. Now, call Ming. Give him directions, and be very concise.”
“Ming is not autistic, María Paz, and neither am I.”
“We are all a little autistic. Tell your friend to speak softly to Violeta, keep his distance, don’t put any music on in the car because she is very sensitive to noise, don’t make any jokes because she won’t get them, but definitely laugh at the jokes she makes. Warn him to be careful, because the girl bites. And very important: he must introduce himself very simply. ‘I am Ming.’ Very clearly, ‘I am Ming.’ Advise him that he should not seem anxious or in a hurry, because she freezes up. Go on, call your friend.”
Rose made the call and Ming accepted the assignment without hesitation, glad to know that Ian Rose was alive. Then María Paz called the school again.
“It’s one in the afternoon, Violeta,” she told her.
“No, it’s one and ten minutes.”
“You’re right. At six-thirty today, a man named Ming will pick you up in his car.”
“A man named Ming.”
“Good. What’s the name?”
“My name is Violeta.”
“Listen, Violeta, this is not a joke. The man who’s going to pick you up. What is his name?
“His name is Ming.”
“Very good, Little Sis. Ming is a good person. You go with him. Ming will pick you up at six thirty. Ming will take care of you.”
“What a nag you are, stop repeating things. Ming will take care of Violeta, Ming will take care of Violeta, I know, I know.”
“Alright, sorry, Little Sis. Sorry to repeat. Just one last time: Ming take care of Violeta, Violeta leave with Ming.”
“Yeah, María Paz, please don’t talk like Tarzan. And if Sleepy Joe comes, I don’t go with him.”
“No! Not with Sleepy Joe, no, for God’s sake, Violeta!”
“I said that, not with Sleepy Joe.”
“Not with Sleepy Joe, no, Violeta. Sleepy Joe does bad things. Who are you going with?”
“With Sleepy Joe,” Violeta said and laughed.
“You’re playing, right? You’re teasing your sister. You go with Ming. At half past six. And don’t bite.”
“No more, Big Sis. I get it,” Violeta said, and hung up.
Toward the end of the third day of their trip, María Paz and Rose finally arrived at North Star Shine Lodge and found that despite the general chaos of things, everything was more or less under control. Ming had done his job to the letter; Sleepy Joe had not attacked, not even a sign of him; and Violeta had behaved herself, as far as things went. And now everything was on hold.
There, in that motel, the threads of this story come more or less to a dead end, or at least a neutral end, with everything quiet, perhaps falsely quiet, just like this winter of their discontent they are traversing. María Paz, Ming, and Rose entertained themselves by playing endless rounds of miniature golf, tapping the ball with the putter to make it roll on the dirty green felt. While Violeta ran after hers, picking it up and placing it in the hole. Then they ate Kentucky Fried Chicken. What else could they do? It wasn’t as if the range of possibilities was wide open. Outside the cold roared and cops were everywhere. They heard the wail of sirens; although the motel was out of the way and hidden, it was in the same area of the school, but on the opposite side of the mountain. And they didn’t know exactly what all the hullaballoo was about, or who the authorities were after. Whether it was Sleepy Joe, whom everybody was looking for, or María Paz, the fugitive, or even the girl, who had left the school without telling anyone she would be spending some nights away.
It seemed that life had pushed them to the limit, without leaving them anything other than their little golf games, old episodes of Friends, and fried chicken. Ming was worried about Wan-Sow, his prima donna finned dancer with piranha teeth, who got very agitated if it was not fed mosquito larvae every twelve hours. And yet, how could he return to his noir comics and his betta, and leave his friend’s dad in such a bind? Violeta, meanwhile, had become very obsessive-compulsive about miniature golf, breaking down every time anyone dared to suggest it would be appropriate to end the game. And the three dogs were simply happy to be dogs and to be there, or at least ignorant of the fact they could be anywhere else.
Ian Rose thought about the pipes in his house in the Catskills, which had likely frozen and burst, as had happened during other winters, and meanwhile he was stuck, far away and unable to do anything about it. But there was no abandoning these women, who in the end were the only thing he had left aside from his dogs.
María Paz seemed disoriented and perplexed to him, sandwiched between nothing and nothingness, unable to stay in the United States, unable to call for a new cyber-coyote to change her escape plan again. Because how could she just take off forever, leaving Violeta in that school she was so fond of, at the mercy of the murderer? And at the same time, what could Rose do about him, The Passion Killer, given that after the fiasco of his role as a vigilante, he no longer had any hopes of sneaking up on him commando style with Ming’s Glock?
In fact, they could describe their current situation with the same words that Pancho Villa uttered to Claro Hurtado, on that night in Parral, Chihuahua: “We’re cornered.”
María Paz got to thinking about Cleve, about how terribly she missed him, and even laughed, remembering the advice he had given as her creative-writing teacher, when she asked how to end a story she was writing, one almost as tangled as the one they were living now. “Write ‘And everyone died,’” Cleve had said. “That should solve everything.” In short, this was a sublimely dramatic moment, while stagnant; they were neck-deep in water, suspended in the eye of the hurricane, as they say, or floating in a dead calm, while all around them the murderous winds howled. It seemed as if nothing they had done had done any good, and now there was nothing else to do. So they did nothing.
They decided not to decide. Soak in a good bath, remove their watches, leave things to fate, with the brightness of North Star shining. They just were. There. Keeping each other company, trying to pass the time, this time, what was left of it, as best they could.
“The next day, I rose at dawn, still dark, to take the dogs out,” Rose tells me.
They had been trapped like sardines in the car for days. The three dogs endured the journey bravely, and it was time to give them the reward they deserved. Whatever happened, Rose was not going to depriv
e them of their walk in the woods. María Paz, Violeta, and Ming were still asleep in the North Star, and Rose figured he would return in time to have breakfast with them and make some decisions. Although who knew what kind of decisions—that was not so clear. Just then he decided it was best not to overthink the situation, and he took off toward the same uninhabited area he had gone to weeks earlier when he had emptied the Glock on the tree trunks. The temperature had risen a few degrees and the air was tolerable. Some of the snow had melted and an otherworldly blue glow surrounded the mountain. He could smell the fresh pine from the dripping stalactites on the branches, and Rose felt at home in the silence of his newly recovered solitude—that is, until he heard the faraway wail of a siren, reminding him that things were not so idyllic. Quite the contrary, there was an intense police presence all around and this time all hell would break loose if Rose were to shoot the Glock. Which reminded him, he had the gun with him in his backpack, a big mistake under these circumstances, and he thought about returning to the motel to put it away. But the dogs were already way uphill, happy and liberated, and Rose decided to follow them. In the end, all the bustle was down below and no one was going to wander up here.
They took about an hour climbing a little quiet road, their lungs heaving, their breaths steam, the four old friends, the clan, and Rose estimated that it was high time to start back when he came upon it: the Gift from God.
“Or gift from the devil, maybe,” he tells me. “I swear, all I thought was, oh, no, please, no!”
It was a yellow truck, old model, parked on the right shoulder, with no one inside. Nothing striking, and it would have gone completely unnoticed by anyone but Rose, who recently had seen a photo of an old prostitute hugging her pimp, as they leaned against the trunk of a yellow truck exactly like this one with the same sticker in iridescent letters on the windshield: Gift from God.
“It had to be the same one,” Rose tells me. “When I saw it, I accepted the fact that fate comes to meet you wherever you are.”
There were footprints in the snow, large boot prints through the barren undergrowth. It didn’t take a basset hound to track down the owner of the truck, and Otto, Dix, Skunko tore off quickly, zigzagging, noses to the ground, in a pattern tight as violin strings.
“I did not want to follow,” Rose tells me. “Didn’t want any part of it. My failure as an avenger had already been confirmed, and at that moment, my legs grew wobbly at the mere possibility of a face-to-face encounter with this man. At the same time, a spark of anger against this vermin suddenly flared again, and I followed the dogs. Revenge is like a hormone, which irritates you and emboldens you and makes you believe that you have cojones as big as a house. That’s what I discovered that day.”
The footprints went along the hillside, vanished for a bit, reappeared on the other side of a stream, meandered, deeper and deeper into a thicket of branches, reaching a peak that crowned the surrounding area, and then descended into a ravine, where the forest came to a clearing. The dogs had stopped at the top of the peak, and they remained alert beside Rose. From this vantage point, Rose had a clear view of the man below. It had to be him. The man was nearly naked amidst all that snow, wearing only underwear and a pair of yellow boots. His back was to Rose and he knelt on some rags or cloths, likely the clothing he had taken off.
“A humongous guy, actually,” Rose tells me.
A grifter, as they called them. And very white too. More so a slight shade of blue, like the snow that day. Rose immediately recognized him. He knew it was Sleepy Joe, although he could not see his face. Who else could it be, with that truck and in that trance? And it wasn’t really as if Rose knew the face. He had only seen pictures of him as a child, or hidden behind sunglasses. It seemed that Sleepy Joe had been there for some time, in the clearing, preparing his mise-en-scène. He had carved a notch high in the trunk of a large tree, and on that notch had placed a thinner trunk, binding it tightly with rope. He had painted the whole thing white, giving it a grotesque air. Rose remembered María Paz’s story about the Slovakian child and the insomniac nights because of a picture of another child, the Nazarene, who bore a white cross, sized especially for him. Shit, thought Rose, who is this animal going to crucify now? The cross was white, as if for a boy, or a girl. For Violeta? That would be the logical conclusion. He had constructed the whole set away from it all, camouflaged among the thickets, though right behind her school. But other than the fact that it was pristine white, like the cross of the child in the portrait, this cross was sturdy and big, and could easily bear the weight and height of an adult. Even Jaromil’s huge frame.
Sleepy Joe remained with his back to them, submitting himself to a rocking back and forth that slowly grew more intense, as if on the verge of a revelation. Something like the aura that precedes an epileptic fit with the spine bent backward at an impossible angle, the eyes raised to the heavens, body trembling with love for God, or perhaps from the cold. Rose tries to explain to me that it was worse, a more impressive scene than he had imagined from María Paz’s descriptions, because it was so unapologetically grotesque, more grotesque than frightening, actually, or in any case a good mix of both.
So finally, this was Sleepy Joe. Jaromil. The Passion Killer. The man who tortured and killed Cleve. And Pro Bono, and many more. A lone and naked giant, with yellow boots, blue with cold, shaken by hysterical mimicry in the middle of the forest. Rose did not know whether to laugh or weep. Cleve, my lovely son, think how much damage this clown has done to us.
Sleepy Joe prayed. Or at least he muttered things, repeated phrases, perhaps in Latin, or in an invented gibberish. To Rose’s ears it sounded like a litany of the names of demons: Canthon, Canthon, Sisyphus, Sisyphus, Scarabaeus, Scarabaeus—muttering names like that in pairs, the first time very serious and the second more shrill, all very theatrical.
Astonishing, really, but as Rose heard other names, he realized they were not the names of demons but of species of beetles.
“What followed all happened very fast,” Rose tells me. “Don’t expect some grand choreographed finale, because in fact the whole thing was very chaotic and arbitrary. Chaotic, no doubt. Although arbitrary, who knows, maybe not. Don’t think I was unmoved by this spectacle Sleepy Joe was putting on. There was a force behind it that made it almost impossible for me to bear. Remember that this makeshift priest, this motherfucker, had killed my son, in a ritual probably very similar to the one I was watching. And I was not immune. My mourning, my attachment to my own flesh, forced me to connect with that. I’m saying that I was very much aware that this dark ceremony involved me. Ultimately, it was me that man was waiting for, me who had been summoned, and perhaps I had only just beckoned his call.”
Once Rose was able to accept that, he was there of his own will and with a definite purpose. He opened his backpack and pulled out the Glock. Not before that, only then. “Sacrifice is sacrifice,” he said half aloud. “If the thing is killing you, then you have to kill it.” The gun was loaded and the target a gift, yes, there was his Gift from God, distracted, his back to him, practically naked, as if begging for a clean shot in the back of the head. But Rose’s hand began to tremble, and his conviction faltered. Not because he feared the consequences of such an act in the sense of electric chair or such.
“There are things that a man should not live through,” he tells me. “The death of a child is one of them. You might survive, but you’re no longer alive. So that day on the mountain, I couldn’t have cared less about what would happen to me. This was about something else.”
If Rose’s hand trembled, it was because it was one thing to make the decision to kill another human being and another to do it. That was the complicated thing. This wasn’t the first time that Rose’s inability to execute had prevented him from doing away with Sleepy Joe. He just could not pull the trigger. It was beyond his strength; his finger did not obey the order sent from his head. Should he just turn around, go back to where
he came from? Have forgiveness? Or pretend none of this had happened and try to forget? Maybe that’s how things would have turned out, given human limitations. But dogs are different kinds of creatures. Rose was seriously considering backing out just at the moment his dogs made a completely different decision, and raced down the hillside as a pack, encircling the kneeling man. Rose, who saw what was happening from above, referred to it as “a vicious hunting scene.” His exact words.
The three beasts fell on the unsuspecting prey and corralled him, cold and contained, in the splendor of their rage. Their teeth were peeled back to the base of their gums, their eyes fixed on the victim, as if reading his thoughts, their ears pricked, registering even the slightest gesture; more wolves than dogs, more wolves than gods, not one false move, no fussing, no barking: the single lethal threat a low growl, sustained, coming from deep inside.
“What I’m about to tell you may sound weird,” Rose warns me. “But the dogs may have saved Sleepy Joe for the moment, definitely forcing me to lower my weapon. With my shitty aim, if I had happened to shoot, I could have missed him and hit one of the dogs instead.”
Sleepy Joe’s next move was a mistake, a dreadful mistake. He tried to run. He had been terrified of animals since he was a child and, faced with this pack ready to maul him, Sleepy Joe thought it best to run. And the dogs, which until that moment simply surrounded him without touching him, fully set on him with the worst intentions. Bare as he was, the man offered all that white meat on a platter. It very soon became a massacre, especially because of Dix, the bitch. While Otto pinned him to the ground and Skunko locked his jaw on Sleepy Joe’s neck, Dix clamped on a calf and twisted his leg this way and that as if trying to yank it off. There are dog bites and then there are dog bites. Some dogs are just biters; other are butchers, merciless, and they don’t stop until the victim is carved up. Dix belonged to this second category, and within minutes the leg was reduced to shreds. Rose believed he heard crunching of bones and cartilage, and could swear he could even smell the fear that paralyzed Sleepy Joe, making him pee on himself. So this is what it comes to, Rose thought. If they could see you now, Sleepy Joe, fucked by the rules of your own game, the same mindfuck you played with your victims, making the pain of body, torn flesh, gore, nothing compared with that inward cry of utter panic.
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