Dancing with the Tiger Page 29

  “Vete derechito a la chingada.” The Mexican’s voice cracked. He was propping up the girl. “Stay away from us.”

  The pair retreated with the gun and the urn, morphing back into a shuffling, two-headed, primordial creature. Hugo wished he could ride that animal all the way to Veracruz. He dropped to his knees, offered Montezuma’s mask to the moon. His father looked down with his scythe and empty belly. A fox blinked. A lynx peeked around a rock. He laid the mask in the hole.

  He was betraying Reyes as Pedro had betrayed Reyes. The drug lord would put a contract on his head. So be it. Only by resistance would the bloody reign of the narcos end. It would not be the United States or the Mexican army and certainly not the Mexican puppet president who set things right in the country he loved. It would be a million hearts refusing to obey orders. The gardener bowed his head. God will save a man who has done one brave thing.

  nine ANNA

  The man who had pressed a machete to her throat now looked downright pious as he hoisted the death mask to the moon. How small, yet how large. Small as man, large as man’s loneliness on a night when he speaks to God and wonders if anyone hears him. For a moment, Anna forgot that the mask was a forgery.

  The Tiger picked up his shovel. Dirt flew in graceful arcs. “Who is that?” Anna hissed. She hugged the urn against her chest. They were hiding behind a bluff, peering out. “Why’s he digging? Is that for the mask? He’s supposed to give it to Reyes.”

  “Not our problem.”

  “Why bury the thing you’ve been trying to find? It makes no sense. Maybe he’s Indian.”

  Salvador looked at her like she was nuts. “So what if he’s Indian? We’re all Indian. He’s a murderer.”

  Anna shut up. What she’d meant was, maybe he’s spiritual, or he had a purpose beyond money or drugs, a purpose higher than her own. The Tiger laid down his shovel, laid the mask in the hole. Anna pointed. Salvador made a face she couldn’t read. She didn’t know him that well, really. They were just beginning. Setting out in the evening. Travelers. Traveling together.

  The Tiger stomped the ground, made the sign of the cross, and walked off toward the ball court. Anna and Salvador waited to be sure he was gone. Anna surveyed the grounds. The South Platform. The North Platform. The tombs. If the dead were alive, they were here tonight. And she thought: Clouds fly higher during the day than at night.

  “We need to dig up that mask.”

  “No, we don’t. No vale.”

  “Sí, vale. I need two masks. One for me, one for the looter.”

  “You can’t give the fake. He will know you cheated him. He is the one who dug it up.”

  “He was crackers on meth when he dug up that mask. He didn’t even recognize me. He’s not a mask guy. He’s a drug guy.”

  “He’s a very famous twigger.” He was mocking her, quoting her to herself. “I thought you were friends. We talked all night long. You would feel bad tricking him.” Part statement, part question.

  “It’s a victimless crime.” Bogus expression. Something guilty politicians said. “He wants the mask for a shrine. For decoration. In church, people pray to figures of Jesus. You don’t need Christ’s real body. They use representations.” That sounded better. “Besides, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  The double negative lost Salvador. It reminded Anna of the cryptic Mexican expression No hay mal que por bien no venga, a grab bag of negatives that roughly translated to Nothing bad happens without creating some good.

  Salvador rested his hands on his hips, as if he needed support to stay vertical. She liked looking at him. Every single time.

  “Will you help me?” she said.

  “No tenemos una pala.”

  Anna wiggled her fingers.

  “Hijo de puta, qué mujer.”

  “Give me a boost.”

  Anna secured the urn against a tree trunk, then hoisted herself up the bluff. She saw no one, and the quiet filled her with relief and dread. The patch of broken dirt was easy to find. She knelt and dug with her hands. Salvador used his foot. The irony of the moment did not escape her: She’d come to Mexico to bury her mother and instead was robbing a grave. Her father had several burial artifacts, but it was different to dig up something yourself, like killing a chicken instead of buying it at the store. Here was the really crazy part: Even though the mask was a copy, she felt a rush of excitement. A treasure hunt. Dog after bone. She wanted to be the one to find it. So this was the high, the tantalizing elixir that had mesmerized her father all those years, that kept him plunging into the countryside to find a certain Señor Martínez Gómez Hernández Rodríguez who made Grasshopper masks. Anna crawled over the dirt to kiss Salvador. His lips were cool. His mouth, warm.

  “I dig you.”

  He looked confused. There would always be this gap. Nuances of language and culture. But you get more, dummy. You get everything he can teach you. She kissed him again. She was good at beginnings, so-so at middles, terrible at the end. We won’t end, then. Every day, we’ll walk to the train station with our suitcases and travel someplace new. Every day, we’ll leave. Start over. It is a pleasure to meet you. My name is Anna. I am good at beginnings.

  Their toil warmed them. Anna imagined the looter digging alone in a dark cave. That required real courage, real drugs. She struck something hard. A lost bit of shell saw the moon and smiled.

  —

  They drove down from Monte Albán in silence, the urn snug at her feet. She held the mask in her lap, wondering whether Salvador now thought less of her or more. As they took the third bend, Anna gasped and sank. “It’s him.” The Tiger’s sedan was parked on the road’s edge. A man bent over the open hood with a flashlight. Salvador kept driving, face rigid.

  “We need to follow him,” Anna said.

  “You have the mask.”

  “But I want to know who he is.”

  “No importa.”

  “Sí, importa. I want to see him.”

  “Forget him.”

  “Right. I want to see him so I can forget him.”

  They pulled off the road. Three minutes later, the car streamed past. The place the Tiger led them could not have surprised them more. Not a slum on the edge of the city or the gilded palace of Óscar Reyes Carrillo. No, the Tiger’s car stopped someplace utterly familiar. Salvador shook his head, incredulous. “You Americans all come to Mexico to lose your minds.”

  They parked as close as they dared, lowered their windows. The Tiger was preoccupied with the lockbox, punching in the numeric code. The wrought-iron gates swung open. He climbed back in his car, pulled in a yard or two, changed his mind, turned off the ignition, his car poised just inside the gate. Anna heard the front door open, the familiar cursing as Thomas shuffled the dogs out of the way. Footsteps. Spanish.

  “Where have you been?” It was Thomas. Their voices were faint but audible.

  “Visiting my uncle.”

  “I got a postcard from Reyes today. He says you work for him now.”

  “No, señor.”

  “All this time I hired and housed you and Soledad, you were running for Reyes. You brought him the death mask. You knew my show was coming up and you brought the mask to that—”

  Eyes wide, Anna mouthed to Salvador, Hugo.

  “Señor, it wasn’t that way. I never gave a mask to Reyes.”

  “My own gardener is working for a drug lord. Do you take me for an idiot? Were you going to kill us? Murder us in our sleep? Rob us and run away?”

  “He said he would kill me. Take pity. No me—”

  A gunshot rang out. Anna buried her head in Salvador’s chest. Every bad thing kept getting worse.

  “Thomas!” Constance yelled from the second floor. “Was that fireworks?”

  Which man had been shot? Anna didn’t know what to hope for.

  “No worries, puppet,” Thomas
called up. “I shot a squirrel that was brazenly, shamelessly, eating your basil. I’ll be right back. Let me dump it next door and we’ll have a drink.”

  Hugo’s car backed up, drove down the road, then disappeared into the abandoned lot at the end of the block. A minute later, Thomas emerged, strolled past their car, not hearing the two slumped people breathing inside.

  “Puppet, come sit with me,” Thomas called up, closing the gate behind him. “I’ve got a lead on a mask from this Canadian tribe. The Wild Woman of the Woods. Can you hear me?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I feel like a Shakespearean actor calling my lover through an open window.”

  “Talk louder. I’m doing my face. I’ve got this cream on. Ungodly mess.”

  “My new mask, it’s is called the Wild Woman of the Woods. She’s got a beard, and a mouth like a bullet hole, and goes wuu, wuu like an owl. They say she kidnaps children and eats them.”

  “Eats the children?”

  “But she’s got a good side. Every so often, Dzonoqua, that’s her name, picks a few lucky souls and makes them rich as Croesus. And she can bring back the dead.” Thomas cackled. “I’d better hope that trick doesn’t work.”

  The screen door slammed. The sounds of the night rose around them—the fizz of the mosquito zapper, the discordant stew of ranchero music, the barking of hungry dogs.

  —

  Salvador drove three blocks to a neighborhood church. Anna could not remember feeling so awake or so tired. Thomas had killed Hugo. It was hard to feel too bad, and yet in the battle between the American collector and the proud Indian—rightly, wrongly, that’s how she thought of him now—she sided with the Indian.

  “We need to check on Hugo,” she said.

  “Someone will find him in the morning.”

  “We should call the police.”

  “They are the last people to call.”

  “We can’t leave him there like roadkill.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A dead squirrel.”

  “He could shoot us.”

  “You said he’s dead.”

  Salvador tensed. “We need to go.”

  “What if he’s alive? We could call the hospital.”

  “We are going to save the man who tried to kill us?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “We are.”

  They crossed Amapolas and crept into the empty field, stepping around bombed-out appliances, knots of barbed wire, an upended bathtub. The Tiger’s car formed a vague shape in the distance. All over Mexico, there are fields like this where bodies have been dumped. Anna couldn’t fathom that the Tiger was dead, and she braced for him to leap out of the darkness, machete in hand. Salvador reached the car first. He peered through the back window, holding up a hand to stop her. She waited. She hated waiting, but she waited. He checked the driver’s seat, hand still raised.

  “You won’t believe it,” he said.

  “He’s dead?” A sudden sadness struck her. A tingle of emotion.

  “I don’t know if he’s dead,” Salvador replied. He looked uneasy. “There’s blood everywhere, but the car is empty.”

  ten THE GARDENER

  Hugo awoke to his wife’s face. Maybe he was dreaming, but this wasn’t like his Aztec nightmares. This dream felt three-dimensional, alive. Through tree branches, stars winked and the night air cooled his nostrils. Soledad opened his shirt, laid her hands over his shoulders. She shook him gently.

  “Wake up. What has that bastard done? Speak to me.”

  He could not speak, but he could smell: iron and apples, perfume and flies. His gut was torn and his arm was bleeding. He was lying in a wheelbarrow in a thicket near his house. His pain was as big as the sky, and blacker.

  Soledad untied the tiger mask roped to his belt, spat in its wooden hull, threw it in the bushes. She kissed his forehead. Hugo knew he was the only man his wife had ever loved, yet he had treated her like a dog. She had repaid his cruelty by saving his life.

  She helped him sit up. The tendons in her neck strained with the effort. Her hair was matted to her face with his blood. She wrapped her apron around his side to slow the bleeding, muttering something about a doctor.

  “I brought you this far,” she whispered. “Can you walk a little? Lean on me, my love. I will carry you home.”

  eleven THE COLLECTOR

  Daniel Ramsey walked out of jail into a new day. Tree limbs silhouetted the pale sky. The morning sun shyly asserted itself. This cab was going to cost a mint, but what did it matter? Nothing mattered except what did. February was behind him. The snow had nearly melted. The air smelled like mud, something green growing. When the taxi swerved into the lot, he opened the door and collapsed inside, his body wracked with stiffness, his knees a confusion of grousing cartilage. He was thirsty for comfort he knew only one way to find. The driver asked where he was going. Daniel told him, then urged him to hurry. “Is it Friday?” he asked the driver. “March second?” The driver confirmed it was. They pulled onto Route 1, passed big-box stores, fast food, then out to the country. He admired the landscape, the colors, distinguishing gray from beige from ecru.

  twelve THE LOOTER

  The looter sat by a fountain, waiting for Chelo to get her hair cut. Ever since his trip in Chapultepec Park, he’d been mesmerized by fountains. The way water rose and fell and rose again. The swirl of rainbows and bubbles. The spare change tossed in the basin. The currency of wishes. The sound of running water reminded him of Mari’s garden, a place that had changed him, a place he might have to revisit, now and then, for that change to stick.

  His phone rang. Force of habit, he answered it, before the long name on caller ID—Fernando Regalado Manuel—registered and he realized his mistake. He listened. Just breathing. The looter’s heart ached as he wondered if the three-letter word on the other end could deduce his location from the ambient noise.

  “Feo?”

  “Señor arqueólogo. ¿Dónde estás?”

  “Here. I am here.”

  “And where is that?”

  The looter looked around, getting his bearings. “I don’t know, but I’m starting over. Clearing house. Cleaning house.” Language poured out of him. Explanation. The miracle of it all. He wanted Feo to understand, be happy for him. “I found a nice girl. She’s religious. I’m going to find a real job.”

  Feo laughed. “Altar boy?”

  “Tell Reyes to find a new digger. Tell Gonzáles, too.”

  “Gonzáles may take a bath.”

  “Okay, well . . .”

  “I have to kill you.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m nobody. No body. No face. Forget me.”

  “Ya es demasiado tarde para olvidar.”

  “No,” the looter argued. “It’s not too late to forget. There’s lots of fucking time left.” Was he pleading? The bushes. The branches. The spaces between them.

  “You make a life and then you don’t want to live it anymore. Doesn’t work that way.”

  The looter was pacing, making circles. “This is a clean break.”

  “No, arqueólogo. We see you soon. I’m tracking your cell. Is that water I hear?”

  The looter dropped the phone, stomped on it, hurled the cracked plastic into the fountain. He jumped up, feet together, a human pogo stick. Alive. Alive. Alive. The smartphone was his last tie to Reyes and it was underwater now, a black box surrounded by pesos.

  He stared at it and made a wish. Or maybe a prayer.

  One of those ugly hairless Mexican dogs jogged toward him. Its torso was solid flank muscle, dirt-brown and gleaming. The dog made eye contact, if you could call it that, fixed its gaze on him. Its cigar tail wagged impatiently, like it had an appointment, like it was already late.

  thirteen THE PAPERSHOP GIRL

  Her mother dragged her to a Frida Kahlo show. Lola scowled the
entire way there, huddled in the backseat as Esmeralda drove. Since moving to Veracruz, her mother had become good friends with the plastic surgeon’s wife, who sparkled just like her name, all starry nails and Styrofoam hair. They liked museums. Clutching each other, the two women teetered along, uttering stupidities, like which painting would look good over the couch and which they could have done better themselves.

  Lola had no interest in Frida Kahlo. Her hideous mustache and unibrow were silkscreened on every tourist tote, as if she was the only Mexican woman who mattered, as if all the rest were peasants or underpaid undersecretaries to undersecretaries to Señor Nada. The most famous women in Mexican history were:

  The Virgin Mary

  La Malinche

  Frida Kahlo

  Selena

  Salma Hayek

  A virgin, a traitor, a freak, a murdered singer, and Salma Hayek, who was smart and sexy, but, of course, had to play Frida Kahlo in the movie. She would play the Virgin Mary someday, too. Work her way down the list.

  Lola called out: “Regina says Frida Kahlo was a drug addict.”

  Her mother said, “Nobody’s perfect.”

  Esmeralda regripped the leather steering wheel. “Who’s Regina?”

  Her mother murmured something under her breath.

  Lola tried again. “Regina says Frida Kahlo hated the United States.”

  “Who could blame her?”

  “Diego Rivera slept with Frida Kahlo’s younger sister.”

  Her mother sighed. “Men have no self-control.”

  “Frida Kahlo had an abortion.”

  Her mother crossed herself.

  “Frida Kahlo had surgery just to get Diego Rivera’s attention.”

  “If you dress better, you won’t have to do that.”

  The show was crowded. Paintings, of course, but also photographs and drawings. Quotes in calligraphy swooped across the walls. “Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in the closet when you were sure of finding shirts.”