The Almanac of the Dead

BOOK ONE. THE FOES FROM THE ANCIENT ALMANAC

LECHA COULD READ the old notebooks and scraps of newspaper clippings for hours and forget all about the pain. The first time Lecha opened the notebooks, she had recognized here was the real thing. Despite all of Yoeme’s lying and boasting, the “almanac” was truly a great legacy. Yoeme and others believed the almanac had living power within it, a power that would bring all the tribal people of the Americas together to retake the land.

For hundreds of years, guardians of the almanac notebooks had made clumsy attempts to repair torn pages. Some sections had been splashed with wine, others with water or blood. Only fragments of the original pages remained, carefully placed between blank pages; those of ancient paper had yellowed, but the red and black painted glyphs had still been clear. The outline of the giant plumed serpent could be made out in pale blue on the largest fragment. The pages of ancient paper had been found between the pages of horse-gut parchment carried by the fugitive Indian slaves who had fled north to escape European slavery.

Lecha speculated that some keepers of the old almanac had been illiterate, but had not bothered to hire someone to read the pages for them. If they had any curiosity about the writing, then their fear, which was greater, had prevailed. What they had feared were the spirits described in the writing and the glyphs on the pages. There was evidence that substantial portions of the original manuscript had been lost or condensed into odd narratives which operated like codes.

The great deal of what had accumulated with the almanac fragments had been debris gathered here and there by aged keepers of the almanac after they had gone crazy. A few of the keepers had fallen victim to delusions of various sorts. Here and there were scribbles and scratches. Lecha found pages where old Yoeme had scribbled arguments in margins with the remarks and vulgar humor Lecha and Zeta had enjoyed so many times with their grandmother.

Whole sections had been stolen from other books and from the proliferation of “farmer’s almanacs” published by patent-drug companies and medicine shows that gave away the almanacs as advertisements. Not even the parchment pages or fragments of ancient paper could be trusted; they might have been clever forgeries, recopied, drawn, and colored painstakingly.

Europeans called it coincidence, but the almanacs had prophesied the appearance of Cortés to the day. All Native American tribes had similar prophecies about the appearance, conflict with, and eventual disappearance of things European. The almanacs had warned the people hundreds of years before the Europeans arrived. The people living in large towns were told to scatter, to disperse to make the murderous work of the invaders more difficult. Without the almanacs, the people would not be able to recognize the days and months yet to come, days and months that would see the people retake the land.

Yoeme alleged the Aztecs ignored the prophecies and warnings about the approach of the Europeans because Montezuma and his allies had been sorcerers who had called or even invented the European invaders with their sorcery. Those who worshiped destruction and blood secretly knew one another. Hundreds of years earlier, the people who hated sorcery and bloodshed had fled north to escape the cataclysm prophecied when the “blood worshipers” of Europe met the “blood worshipers” of the Americas. Montezuma and Cortés had been meant for one another. Yoeme always said sorcery had been the undoing of people here, and everywhere in the world.

Fragments from the Ancient Notebooks

The Month was created first, before the World. Then the Month began to walk himself, and his grandmothers and aunt and his sister-in-law said, “What do we say when we see a man in the road?” There were no humans yet so they discussed what they would say as they walked along. They found footprints when they arrived in the East. “Who passed by here? Look at these footprints. Measure them with your foot.” The Mother Creator said this to the Month, who measured the footprint. The footprint belonged to Lord God. That was the beginning for Month because he had to measure the whole World by walking it off day by day. Month made sure his feet were even before he began the count. Month spoke Day’s name when Day had no name. So the Month was created, then the Day, as it was called, was created, and the rain’s stairway to Earth — the rocks and the trees — all creatures of the sea and land were created.

Death Dog traveled to the land of the dead where the God of death gave him the bone the human race was created with.

Scorpion uses his tail as a noose to lasso deer. Scorpion is a good hunter. He has a net bag in which he carries his fire-driller and fire-sticks.

The sign of the human hand = 2. The hand that holds the hilt of the dagger is plunged into the lower body of the deer.

Those cursed with the anguish, and the despairers, all were born during the five “nameless” days.

On the five nameless days, people stay in bed and fast and confess sins.

Black Zip whistles a warning. He is the deer god.

In the year Ten Sky, the principal ruler is Venus.

Big Star is a drunkard, a deformed dog with the head of a jaguar and the hind end of a dog with a purple dick. He staggers like Rabbit, who also is a drunkard. Nasty, arrogant liar! Troublemaker and experimenter in mutual hate and torture!

Venus. Color: red. Direction: east. Herald of the dawn and measurer of night.

Envious Ribald;

Sin in his face and in his talk; he had no virtue in him.

He is without understanding.

He had no virtue in him. Mighty carnivorous teeth and a body withered like a rabbit.

Deities return. Better get to know them.

Venus of the Celestial Dragon with eight heads; each head hurls shafts of affliction down on mankind. Europeans call Venus “Lucifer, the Bright One,” who fell from grace long ago. Venus resides in darkness until he rises as Morning Star. Dogface partially blackened, a fish in his headdress, he swims up from the dark underworld.

Error in translation of the Chumayel manuscript: 11 AHU was the year of the return of fair Quetzalcoatl. But the mention of the artificial white circle in the sky could only have meant the return of Death Dog and his eight brothers: plague, earthquake, drought, famine, incest, insanity, war, and betrayal.

Xolotol, the Death Dog, is playing his drum. He wears bird and snake earrings, which is a rebus for Quetzalcoatl. Xolotol, ribs and skull with a knife in the teeth.

Jade water = rain.

Dead souls travel branches and roots of the ceiba trees to reach the land of the dead. The outline of the tree’s roots and branches has the appearance of the outline of the lizard, Imix, earth monster, crocodile. The land of the dead is a land of flowers and abundant food.

Ik is three. Ik is wind on the edge of the rain storm; deity of the rain carries pollen; Lord of the night of the hollow drum, God of caves and conch shells. Earthquake is a scale off the back of earth monster Crocodile.

Kan is four. Kan is the lizard from whose belly sprang all the seeds for grain and fruit.

Chichan is five. Chichan is a giant snake half human and half feathered. The four chichans are the rain deities who live in the four directions.

Cimi is six and is called death, owl’s day. Lord of the underworld and Lord of death. Nonetheless day six, day of the skull, is a good-luck day.

Manik, the deer, is number seven.

Eight is the day called the Dog. Bloody pus pours from the ears of the dog. Persons born on the day of the dog will be habitual fornicators and will be obsessed by dirty thoughts.

[Numbers nine and ten are illegible.]

Eleven is the day of the monkey, whose head appears like the sun high in the trees. Jealous elder brothers sent the youngest brothers climbing high trees after monkeys so they’d fall to their deaths. The Big Dipper is the monkey constellation where the youngest brothers remain in the sky.

[Manuscript incomplete.]

Eb is the blackish mildew caused by too much rain or mist or dews and damps that ruin crops. A good day for obtaining advice concerning misfortunes. A good day for prayers for prosperity. The souls of the dead return as little gnats and bees. The souls of women who died in childbirth descend every fifty-two days to harm mankind, especially small children and babies.

Obsidian butterfly.

Seventeen is the number of Earthquake.

Nineteen is the day of flint knife.

[Manuscript illegible.]

the deer die: drought

maize in bud: women of sexual maturity

sprouting maize: marriage

Rain god sits on coiled snake enclosing a pool of water; the number nine is attached. Nine means fresh, uncontaminated water.

The snake god with the green symbol on the forehead means “first time,” “new growth,” “fresh.”

Dog = rainless storms. The dog carries a lighted torch: drought, great heat, heaped-up death.

Fine paper of bark cloth finished with lime sizing; a single, continuous piece of paper twenty-two feet long, folded like a Chinese screen, to be read from left to right. Ink of black and red; blue background, green, dark and light yellow. Short glyphic passages give the “luck” of the day planets and stars, ceremonial and sacrificial anniversaries, and prophecy.

A day began at sunset. “Reality” was variously defined or described.

Narrative as analogue for the actual experience, which no longer exists; a mosaic of memory and imagination.

An experience termed past may actually return if the influences have the same balances or proportions as before. Details may vary, but the essence does not change. The day would have the same feeling, the same character, as that day has been described having had before. The image of a memory exists in the present moment.

1. Bring the sun. Bear it on the palm of your hand. Bring the green jaguar seated over the sun to drink the sun’s blood. A lance is planted in the center of the sun’s heart. [The sun is a fried egg; the lance in its center is a green chili pepper.]

2. Bring me the brains of the sky so I may see how large they are. [The thick gray clouds of smoke from the copal incense suggest the gray mass of the brain.]

3. Son, go bring me the girl with the watery teeth. Her hair is twisted into a tuft; she is a very beautiful maiden. Fragrant shall be her odor when I remove her skirt and other garments. It will give me great pleasure to see her. Fragrant is her odor and her hair is twisted in a tuft. [A green ear of corn]

The unrestrained, upstart epoch is the offspring of the harlot, and a son of evil. The face of the Katun is covered with mud, trampled into the ground as he is dragged along.

The face of the Lord of the Katunsi is covered; he is dead. There is mourning for water, there is mourning for bread.

Bloody vomit of yellow fever.

Four piles of skulls: Spaniards, mestizos, Indian slaves, Africans.

The rope shall descend.

The poison of the serpent shall descend.

Pestilence and four piles of skulls; living men lie useless.

A dry wind blows. Locust years.

Bread is unattainable.

The sun shall be eclipsed.

Eleven Ahau is the Katun when the aliens arrived.

A beginning of vexation, a beginning of robbery with violence. This was the origin of service to the Spaniards and priests, of service to the local chiefs, of service to the teachers, of service to the public prosecutor by the boys, the youth of the town, while the poor people were harassed. There were the very poor people who did not escape when the oppressors appeared, when the anti-Christ had come to earth, the kinkajous of the towns, the coyotes of the towns, the blood-sucking insects of the town, those who drained the poverty of the working people. But it shall come to pass that tears will fill the eyes of God. Justice shall descend from God to every part of the world, straight from God, justice shall smash the greedy hagglers of the world.

Twenty-year drought: the hooves of the deer crack in the heat; the ocean burned so high the face of the sun was devoured; the face of the sun darkened with blood, then disappeared.

A time of dissolution.

Priests were called from distant towns.

Acolytes were seen carrying baskets full of small mummified creatures — lizards, toads, wrens, desert mice. Four years had seen grasshoppers devour bean and corn seedlings. Torrential rains that came too late had caved in roofs of empty granaries and storerooms.

Priests sprinkle corn pollen and meal and bits of coral and turquoise on the stone snake’s forehead. They whisper to the stone snake leaning close so no one may see their lips.

Inside the cloudy opal, four years of grasshoppers devour bean and corn seedlings. Torrential rains arrived too late and caved in roofs of empty granaries and storerooms. Any children still alive were sent away with great sorrow.

Quetzalcoatl gathered the bones of the dead, sprinkled them with his own blood, and recreated humanity.

Marsha-true’ee, the Giant Plumed Serpent, messenger spirit of the underworld, came to live in the beautiful lake that was near Kha-waik. But there was jealousy and envy. They came one night and broke open the lake so all the water was lost. The giant snake went away after that. He has never been seen since. That was a great misfortune for the Kha-waik-meh.

1560

The year of the plague — intense cold and fever — bleeding from nose and coughing, twisted necks and large sores erupt. Plague ravages the countryside for more than three years. Smallpox too had followed in the wake of the plague. Deaths number in the thousands.

May 18, 1562—sickness and death still rampant at the end of the sixty-third year after the Katun was completed.

May 1566—between one and two in the afternoon an earthquake caused great destruction. Severe earthquakes lasted nine days.

1590

In the sixty-seventh year after the alien invasion, on January 3, 1590, the epidemic began: cough, chills, and fever from which people died.

In the sixty-eighth year after the alien invasion, the face of the moon was covered with darkness soon after the sunset. It was really a great darkness and the moon could not be seen. The surface of the earth could not be seen at all.

1594

Today, September 23, a land dispute between the Xevacal Tuanli is decided according to law.

1595

The mayor was struck by lightning. Ten days later lightning struck the church and main altar. In December, the great bell of Tzolola was begun. A thousand tostones were collected from community funds in order to pay for the bell.

1597

Thus, September 3, three days before the feast of the Nativity of Mary, there was an eclipse of the sun and the day became as dark as the night.

1600

Nine Ymox, Saturday, June 16, Mary, grandmother of the sun and all creatures.

1617-24

Smallpox.

1621

Five Ah, the plague began to spread. Great was the stench of the dead. People fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. Your grandparents died, we all became orphans. We were children and we were alone; none of our parents had been spared. The younger brothers were oppressed and baby boys were flayed alive. His face was that of the war capitán, of the son of God.

This shall be the end of its prophecy: there is a great war. A parching whirlwind storm. Katun 1 Ahau. There is a sudden end of planting. Lawsuits descend, taxes and tribute descend.

One day a story will arrive in your town. There will always be disagreement over direction — whether the story came from the southwest or the southeast. The story may arrive with a stranger, a traveler thrown out of his home country months ago. Or the story may be brought by an old friend, perhaps the parrot trader. But after you hear the story, you and the others prepare by the new moon to rise up against the slave masters.

THE GREAT INFLUENZA OF 1918

OLD YOEME HERSELF had added a number of pages to the almanac; Lecha easily recognized the handwriting:

Late in the summer, the pigs chew green corncobs, and I wait for execution in the Alamos Jail. I have been convicted of sedition and high treason against the federal government. They hate me because I am an Indian woman who kicked dirt in the faces of the police and army.

They stand outside my cell and gloat over my death. Soon I “must” die because I had “already lived too long,” I have blemished their “honor.” Me, “the short, square-shouldered woman with deadly aim,” that’s my title.

In twos and threes they come to stare at me. They relish the words they repeat again and again — their daydreams of my hanging and dismemberment.

My execution is delayed by their needs for pageantry. Elected officials from other jurisdictions arrive. I am on display, an example to all who dare defy authority. Postponement is due to the governor’s busy schedule. They don’t miss a day outside my cell.

The police chief carries a paper with days crossed off in charcoal. “Count them,” he tells me in low tones. He is outraged because an Indian can read and write, while he, a white man, can not. I laugh and call him “barbarian” in my language.

“You will die! That is certain!” All the others of my kind have already been sent to hell, he says. My death is certain. I am not afraid to die. I am sorry to leave the people I love when the struggle is only beginning. I pray to God for justice. For myself and all our people I pray for the success of the revolution.

The day before my execution the news reaches town. At first the officials refuse to believe the reports of so many sick and dead. Influenza travels with the moist, warm winds off the coast. Influenza infects the governor and all the others. The police chief burns to death from fever. The jailer leaves a bucket of water and a bowl of parched corn.

“The authorities want to keep you alive,” he says, “until they recover enough to hang you.” The jailer has bloodshot eyes. He says entire households have the dead lying next to the living, who are too ill to drag corpses outside.

I laugh out loud but the jailer reacts slowly.

“Someone will come to hang you,” he reassures me, but when I ask who, the jailer shakes his head. He is tired this morning or he would kill me himself. The town is silent. Church bells no longer ring the Angelus, and I listen with all my strength for the footsteps of my executioners.

I could hear the big buzzards and smell what they ate with such relish. I was still locked up. Human scavengers followed, and I heard the sounds of looting. I did not think anyone would come. But then they came to loot the jail’s guns and ammunition. The scavengers were afraid to open my cell because they saw my legs and wrists were shackled. But I told them the Blessed Virgin of the Indians had just worked me a miracle; I had been saved by the hand of God and they must set me free.

OLD YOEME’S ADVICE

THAT OLD WOMAN! Years after her death, Lecha still could not top her. The story of Yoeme’s deliverance had been carefully inserted among the pages of the old almanac manuscript. Why had Yoeme called the story “Day of Deliverance”? What good was the story of one woman’s unlikely escape from the hangman? Had old Yoeme known or cared that 20 to 40 million perished around the world while she had been saved? Probably not. Lecha could hear the old woman’s voice even now.

“You may as well die fighting the white man,” Yoeme had told them when they were girls. “Because the rain clouds will disappear first; and with them the plants and the animals. When the spirits are angry or hurt, they turn their backs on all of us.”

Of course the white man did not want to believe that. The white man always had to be saved; the white man always got the last available water and food. The white man hated to hear anything about spirits because spirits were already dead and could not be tortured and butchered or shot, the only way the white man knew how to deal with the world. Spirits were immune to the white man’s threats and to his bribes of money and food. The white man only knew one way to control himself or others and that was with brute force.

Against the spirits, the white man was impotent. “You girls will see someday. Look what happened to your grandfather. Those mine shafts into the earth turned against him, and his bones broke to mush.”

How fitting that Yoeme had required the single worst natural disaster in world history to save her. Nothing could change Yoeme’s view of her “deliverance.” She had had “a vision” that told her the influenza had saved many others as well as revolutionists such as herself sentenced to die.

Yoeme had made margin notes after the pages describing her deliverance. Yoeme had believed power resides within certain stories; this power ensures the story to be retold, and with each retelling a slight but permanent shift took place. Yoeme’s story of her deliverance changed forever the odds against all captives; each time a revolutionist escaped death in one century, two revolutionists escaped certain death in the following century even if they had never heard such an escape story. Where such miraculous escape stories are greatly prized and rapidly circulated, miraculous escapes from death gradually increase.

It had been with Yoeme that Lecha had first seen rain clouds in the fat of sheep intestines. As children in Potam, Lecha and Zeta and their cousins had played with the lamb and pretended he was one of their make-believe herd. They stirred mud in tin cans and served it to him on plates of cottonwood leaves. He followed them when they ran. His long, woolly tail wagged while he nursed the black rubber nipple on a pop bottle. Later in the summer his tail was thick with fat and wool; burrs had tangled in his tail wool. Then one Saturday afternoon in August, old Yoeme had brought out her sharpening stone and long, curved butcher knife. She had also brought out the enamel dishpan. Uncle Ringo tied the big lamb’s legs together with rope, but the lamb did not struggle and lay on its side calmly as old Yoeme held a small tin pail under the lamb’s throat. Uncle Ringo pulled the lamb’s head back by the muzzle slit its throat. As its blood pulsed into the pail, the lamb made a weak struggle against the rope on its legs.

In the opened belly of a deer, the old woman told them, was where she herself had first seen distant skies revealed in membranes of blue and purple, translucent as clouds before a snowstorm. The strands of pure white clouds were pearls of belly fat strung on thick loops of tallow the old woman saved for soap making. She told the girls there were ways the clouds might be summoned with the belly fat of deer or sheep. In the winter, steam off the body cavity summoned up snow mists and fogs around the dry mountain peaks. Old Yoeme had turned the lamb’s stomach inside out, and the bright green grass spilled out for the old dog to eat.

Old Yoeme’s gift to Lecha had been peculiar: Lecha’s gift finds only the dead, never the living. For a long time Lecha had blamed herself; she thought she had only to focus herself more intensely and quickly. By the time Lecha had returned to Potam, Yoeme had been so old and shrunken she had to lie in a child’s hospital crib. Lecha had barely been able to suppress a reflex to gag; she hated the smell of all of them crowded in the old house — cousins and in-laws in every room. It had been that day, long ago, when Lecha had begun to realize she could never be buried anywhere near the graves of other family members. Old Yoeme had seemed well cared for, although they left her alone most of the day. The old woman had recognized Lecha immediately. They had given Yoeme the room off the kitchen, and although Yoeme was as alert and cunning as she had ever been, she had got so old and shrunken up she could no longer walk. Even her bones seemed to have withered up, so all that remained were her small dark eyes still glittering with mischief.

Yoeme had claimed she had lived as long as she had because she was curious. Yoeme laughed loudly and had opened her lips and licked her tongue across yellow pegs of teeth. She still had a taste for life, what could she do for her dear grandchild?

“What if the only ones you find are dead?” Lecha had asked.

“Well, yes,” Yoeme had answered. “That is common enough. What do you want to know?” Yoeme had laughed as if Lecha’s question were a joke.

FAMILY CEMETERY

LECHA’S PLAN had been to take them by surprise. She would hire shovel hands in Hermosillo and get them started before any of the rest of the family found out what was happening. Word had come from Potam that the big house had caved in; the adobe walls had melted like fresh dung after days of torrential rain. As soon as the message had arrived, Lecha had visualized the cemetery as she had seen it as a child: the ocean below the hill was as bright blue as the sky filled with white clouds blossoming in the spring wind. Hollyhocks that had been cut before dawn were tied to weathered crosses, but hours of the breeze and the sun had left the flowers drooping like the heads of captives tied to the stake. Around Yoeme’s unoccupied grave, the shifting dunes were held back by round, smooth ocean rocks the size of fists. In Lecha’s memory, there were no traces of the other graves of uncles and aunts, not even her mother’s. The blue of the sky swelled into the blue of the Sea of Cortés.

The idea had come to her suddenly, and Lecha had to laugh out loud. She who had spent nearly all of her so-called “professional life” watching coroner’s assistants open shallow graves would now watch as shovel hands dug up a few more.

Who would calculate how fast a family graveyard might fill up? The crowding had been the fault, of course, of their cousins’ breeding like flies. Lecha had endured them for more than sixty years, but she damn sure didn’t have to lie there for eternity with them. The big house at Potam had been sinking into the hill with each rainstorm. The seaward walls were going fastest, but the summer storms drove rain hard out of the southeast. White stucco had buckled and fallen long ago. The adobe bricks exposed had lost their edges and angles. With luck the house would cave in after two rainy, gray weeks in January. Then Uncle Ringo, Cucha, Popa’s husband, and any children remaining could be buried in the ruins of the house. The adobe walls would mound into soft pink clay terraces, and from the center, spidery branches of the lively old bougainvillea would scatter scarlet petals over fallen roof beams. As the years passed, after late-summer cloudbursts, a village child might find a curious shard of china or a shell button, or the tiny bone of a fingertip. Some year a man returning from a wood-hauling trip might see something reflect the late-autumn sun. He would find not the engraved silver bowl he had imagined, but the top of Uncle Ringo’s skull.

Popa would be one of the first they would dig up. Lecha herself would scatter Popa’s bones in the mounds of broken glass, rusted tin cans and rotting dog carcasses at the town dump. Popa had insisted old Yoeme leave the big house to live in Popa’s shack. Popa had wanted the big house of course, and once old Yoeme had been moved into Popa’s shack, Popa moved herself and family into the big house. A deaf woman from the hills was hired to live in Popa’s shack with old Yoeme. Popa tore out the interior walls of the big house, remodeling, she said, but Lecha knew the old whore had been looking for the almanac notebooks. The walls were redone with pink wallpaper that matched the color of rouge the undertaker used on babies’ cheeks. Lecha knew Popa had not found the notebooks because Yoeme had given Lecha the notebooks long before she died. When Popa had confronted Lecha in a great fury, the morning after the funeral, Lecha had only laughed at her and stepped into the taxi waiting outside the big house. Popa’s feebleminded children had followed her like quail chicks as she ran after the taxi screaming, “Thief!”

The family graveyard in Potam had been nearly empty when they were children. Although Lecha had not gone back, not even when Popa was killed, she got reports. Popa’s sister, Cucha, had served her family kidney stew gone bad in the summer heat, and three of the youngest had died, while Cucha lingered paralyzed in a hammock on the long porch that ran the length of the big house. Popa herself had been killed in a train wreck, returning before Christmas from a shopping spree in Nogales on the bullet train. That had left Uncle Ringo in charge of Cucha, her three older children (her husband had gone to find work in California and never returned), and Popa’s epileptic husband and four idiot children. Uncle Ringo had not managed the big house and its inhabitants very well. Popa’s children, though quite large, still stole matches or begged them from American tourists driving past to stare at the two-story adobe mansion on the highest hill in Potam. Uncle Ringo, an albino with watery, pale eyes and poor vision, had failed to notice the four huddled over a small pyre they’d constructed from dry weeds and bits of palm fronds. When the pinheaded boy named Dennis came running, his shirt and hair were on fire. The others with halos of smoke and flame had begun running down the road toward town, afraid of the beatings Uncle Ringo had given them for playing with fire before. The family graveyard had filled up quickly.

Uncle Ringo told everyone he’d done his best, but Uncle Federico had insisted on adopting Cucha’s remaining three — all lovely little girls, the oldest being thirteen. Lecha had laughed when her spy from Potam told her about Uncle Federico’s adoption of the girls. Once Uncle Federico had taken Lecha and Zeta to the train station in Hermosillo. Both Lecha and Zeta already knew what Uncle Federico liked to do when he found them alone in the hall on the third floor of the big house or caught one of them in the pantry off the downstairs kitchen. His forefingers were as thick and ugly as the Cuban cigars he smoked. Once Lecha had seen a large dog turd in the courtyard that she mistook for a cigar her uncle had lost. He could slide the finger under the elastic of the panty leg with the same smooth motion he used to lift the little girls up into his arms. It happened so quickly he used the next motion to slip it out and smooth down the skirts of their little dresses. As they got older, he took each girl for a ride in his two-ton livestock-hauling truck and bought her a Chinese parasol out of red and gold paper, then explained that it was a delicate matter. “I studied at the seminary for the priesthood, as you know. Thus it is I who is chosen by your mother to look after you young girls. Sister Josefa has had you girls study the catechism, hasn’t she? You know the importance of your purity, your virginity, then. Yes? Well, my little dove, I am only watching out for it, a simple checkup. I am a doctor you know, I understand the human body.”

The forty-mile ride to the train station in Guaymas had not been simple.

The girls were fourteen. They had talked to other girls, inquiring awkwardly about the other girls’ uncles. When none of the other girls volunteered any information, not even a blush or warning about secret and delicate subjects, the girls began to get the picture. They stopped for orange soda pop at San Isidro, a small town that served as a supply center for the cattle ranches and remote villages. Uncle Federico had inquired after Father Lopez from the woman behind the counter at the little store. Oh, yes, Father Lopez was there. He had a new house, one of those modern house trailers, parked next to the church. Lecha looked at Zeta and Zeta looked at Lecha. They shook their heads. They were both aware of how Uncle Federico was staring at their breasts. There was nothing in the store. The wooden shelves from floor to ceiling along the walls were empty except for a deep layer of gray dust. The soda-pop vending machine had rattled and hummed constantly but left the soda lukewarm. There were dusty harnesses hanging from nails in the wall, but the leather was brittle and cracked. No one there had the money to own horses anyway, the girls knew. Their poorest Indian relatives lived in San Isidro. Their father had sent them each a ten-dollar bill for the trip to Tucson. Zeta tried on the sunglasses, the only other merchandise in the little store. They were a man’s sunglasses, and the layer of dust on the lenses made them look like blind insect eyes. The girls laughed at each other in the glasses. They waited outside on the shady side of the store building until Uncle Federico came huffing and panting across the plaza from the direction of the church. “Surprise!” he said. “Father Lopez can hear both your confessions. You go over right now and I’ll wait for you in his beautiful house trailer. Come to me right away — just as soon as you’ve finished.”

The confessional box was low and hot and smelled of mutton fat. Lecha went first because she had nothing to confess except that she was angry their father had sent for them instead of letting them live with old Yoeme. The priest had a soft, whispery voice. He asked questions. Was she sad her mother had died? Yes, she was, but her mother had taken a great deal of time to explain that they would meet up again. Only if you get to heaven, my child. She didn’t say that, Lecha told the priest, but probably she forgot. “Five Hail Marys and go right away to the trailer. Your dear uncle is waiting for you.”

Lecha had brushed against a whitewashed wall coming out of the church. She rubbed the black cotton of her skirt against itself to remove the chalky smudge. She walked to the shiny new house trailer slowly. Everything seemed so strange now that their mother was gone. The father who sent for them had not seen them for years. Yet when her mother died, he had sent for them.

Before Lecha could knock on the yellow and white metal door of the house trailer, Uncle Federico opened it wide. “Ah, my dear! All cleansed of sin. Yes. Come inside.” All the floors in the trailer were covered with bright yellow linoleum. Lecha thought of bugs that had splattered across the windshield as they had neared the town.

“Lie down in here for a little nap,” Uncle Federico said. “Take off your dress. Don’t wrinkle it!” He closed the door and left her in a room so small that she could spread her arms and almost touch the walls on either side. She had just lain down when he came in. He felt Lecha’s forehead, then took out the stethoscope he always carried in the pocket of his sport coat. His breath smelled like sour wine and onions. He felt her stomach through her slip. He rubbed her stomach round and round and told her to close her eyes.

“Appendicitis is very common nowadays. Because children eat too many sweets. Now let me feel. Ah, there! Is that where it is? Yes, my dear, now keep your eyes closed and relax. Don’t peek, I am just going to insert my finger in here and probe around.” He was leaning on the bed and she could feel him tiptoe, and the narrow bed creaked under his weight. Lecha had started to open her eyes, but this time Uncle Federico had ordered them shut in a frightening tone. Still Lecha knew how to cheat at hide-and-seek; through slitted lids she say he held something in his hand. One of his thick, dark cigars. Strange that he would want a cigar during an examination.

ADIÓS, WHITE MAN!

SEESE DROVE the big Lincoln sixty-five and seventy all the way from Nogales to Hermosillo. Lecha was giving her directions and coaching her on driving in Mexico.

“Step on it! Don’t ever hesitate! They’ll move out of the way!” Sterling had learned to get out to piss when they stopped for gas because Lecha demanded they drive straight through. They still had to stop to hire shovel hands.

“My information comes from here,” Lecha said as they pulled up to a small whitewashed house with strings of blue morning glories trailing up the front walls. The sun was dropping low, and Seese looked tired. When she glanced at him in the rearview mirror, Sterling thought Seese looked sad. The sun was on the southwest horizon, and the crickets were noisy; a light breeze fluttered the blue morning glories. Lecha had hired teenage boys, around fifteen or sixteen; all three wore clean, mended blue jeans and white T-shirts. They were too shy to speak to Lecha, who rattled on at them in Spanish. She was apparently explaining what she wanted them to do. They answered her with nods of the head. They seemed afraid to brush against Sterling and gave him plenty of room on the back seat. They were a strange group — these teenage boys, Sterling, Seese, and Lecha.

The family graveyard was on a sandy ridge above a salt flat on the southeast side of the bay. The last twilight was fading. Seese had been driving for hours. She was still seeing white lines on pavement although they were winding down a hill on a sandy wagon road. A breeze came across the salt flat and salt crystals glittered in the last light. The sea beyond was thick, blue, and motionless. The family cemetery was surrounded by a low, crumbling wall of ocean cobblestones. Wire fencing, now rusting and sagging, enclosed the entire west and north sides where the wall had fallen and stone was scattered over the ground. The recent graves were still mounded high. The white wood crosses that marked them were entwined with red and yellow plastic roses and plastic wreathes of green ferns and pink carnations. Graves in the older sections were marked with flat wedges of dark basalt from the low volcanic peaks, cerros, they’d passed driving from San Isidro. Some of the black stones had been patterned with crude white crosses gradually weathering away. Around the stone markers the plastic roses and carnations had been planted into the white dune sand as if they had always grown there.

Lecha leaned over the wrought-iron fence and pointed at the graves of Federico, Popa, Cucha, and the others. She had turned to Seese and Sterling and glanced at the three boys. She made a disgusted sound against her teeth with her tongue and shook her head. The three boys leaned on the pick and shovels and watched the strange woman tour the graveyard.

Sterling leaned on the pick and stared off toward the west. He was sorry they had come so late. It would have been nice to see the ocean water of the California Gulf. He had seen the ocean many times from Long Beach where he liked to vacation and visit the amusement park. His favorite ride had been the giant roller coaster. He liked the part of the ride over the ocean in the early evening when the mist and fog rose up and left his jacket and hair soaking. Looking at the smooth, dark-blue surface loosened the big knot of loss in his chest. There were other places he could retire to besides Laguna.

Seese watched Lecha walking from grave to grave. Seese shivered although the air was warm. She had suddenly wanted to get away. Anywhere but Tucson or the Southwest. But Lecha had warned her certain matters take time. They would have to work on the almanac. Seese wandered to the far end of the graveyard where the stone wall was most intact. The graves were closer together here and the stones and crosses were smaller. She stopped at a white stone marker with two baby angels lifting a lamb.

“I didn’t know it would be this easy!” Lecha said triumphantly as the three boys lifted out the first coffin. The pale beach sand on the ridge made easy digging. Lecha had been too excited to notice Seese had turned pale and had stumbled away in the dark.

In the distance, Sterling could hear the town dogs barking. He was nervous. He figured he’d probably get fired, but after all this it would be just as well. These people in Tucson were too strange for him. He’d try to find his cousin in Phoenix. High wages weren’t everything. Sterling was worried about what the Mexican police did to people who disturbed graves. He held the flashlight while Lecha directed the boys. The coffin was old and the wood was half-rotted. The boys carried it easily. They seemed unconcerned at what they were doing. Sterling had seen the roll of bills Lecha carried in her big black pouch. Maybe she would buy off the police too if they showed up. Sterling was beginning to think that what had happened back on the reservation with the Hollywood movie crew was hardly an incident as compared to the crimes committed in places like Tucson.

Lecha threw open the trunk lid. She did not seem very sick, though Sterling could see her black pouch and suitcase were full of pill bottles and syringes. Of course, Sterling reasoned, Lecha could be relying on that mysterious strength he’d read about in the Police Gazette—the strength that crazy people and killer maniacs possessed as they fought off platoons of police with tear gas and live bullets. Lecha gave orders in Spanish. The oldest boy caught the edge of the coffin lid with the toe of his cowboy boot and popped it loose. “Dump it in here,” she said in English, and pointed at the deep trunk of the Lincoln. Sterling was holding the flashlight for them, but he turned his head away, as the boys did, to avoid the fine dust that spumed up. “Well, well, Uncle Federico, here is all that remains of you and your thick, hairy fingers!”

Next came Popa. “We’ll see how you like your new home, Auntie.” Lecha directed the boys to enlarge one hole and dump in all the remains of the coffins. When an end of a coffin protruded, she had grabbed the pick from Sterling’s hands and smashed it into kindling. “That’s what we brought tools for,” she said, giving it back to Sterling. He could tell how badly his hands were shaking by watching the beam of light on the beach sand pouring from the boys’ shovels over the remains of the coffins. At the town dump they scattered the bones and remains. Lecha had paid the teenage boys very generously to keep this night confidential. People would accuse her as they had accused old Yoeme of sorcery.

Lecha had got all the news about the war in the South from the teenage gravediggers. The young men had been excited about the rumors and television reports about two brothers from a small mountain village near the Guatemalan border. Spirits talked to one of the twins and told him what the poor people must do, what the poor Indians must do. Spirits talked to him and scolded the people for being lazy and weak, for selling out to the Europeans. The spirits spoke through two big macaws. The macaws had flown out of the jungle to perch on the shoulder of one of the brothers.

Before they left Hermosillo for Tucson, Lecha had directed Seese to the street with the newsstand where she bought all the Mexico City newspapers. Before the blue and yellow spirit macaws had alighted on the brother’s shoulder, theirs had been just another pitiful group of rural squatters hounded to death by the Mexican army and police.

The big excitement each day was the thousands of Indians and mestizos as well as hundreds of whites who gathered to learn what spiritual messages had been received. The spirit macaws promised spiritual strength and satisfaction to all who marched north. North was the direction of Death, but they must not be afraid. The number of the landless and the homeless and those who joined them had grown steadily, but now the authorities were dealing with a religious cult that seemed not to fear death much because they already talked to spirits of the dead anyway.

Nearly as remarkable as the spirit macaws was the Indian woman leading an all-tribal army that traveled with the spirit macaws to protect the twin brothers who served the macaws and the other faithful followers. The woman had lived with the other twin brother. The woman had been trained by a Cuban Marxist unit, but other reports circulated that other Cubans, only posing as Marxists, had trained La Escapía or the Meat Hook as she called herself.

The all-tribal people’s army had sent a shocking video to local government television stations. La Escapía’s big Indian face had filled the whole video screen. Her big Indian teeth flashed in the close-up. She said she chose the name La Escapía for battle because she thought it was hilarious. Hilarious how terrified the whites were of Indian wars. To further terrorize army and police officers, La Escapía promised if she captured high-ranking officers in battle, she would feed them the steel of her namesake and cook their testicles for lunch. The enlisted men had nothing to fear, she promised. They were welcome to quit the government forces and join the people’s army at any time.

Newspapers reported that the latest messages from the macaw spirits had warned that soon unrest would spread like wildfire across Mexico and U.S. military forces would invade. To save money, La Escapía has videotaped another message for later broadcast, after the U.S. invasion of Mexico. She wants to terrify the young U.S. troops; on the screen flash color photographs of the severed heads of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and his aide floating faceup in a canal at Xochimilco Garden.

“Adiós, white man,” La Escapía’s voice accompanies the video images of severed heads floating among flowering water lilies. La Escapía wants U.S. troops to understand they are fighting an Indian war. Commander La Escapía’s brown, smiling face fills the TV screen. The people of the all-tribal army understood that U.S. troops had no choice but to follow orders; still, Commander La Escapía invited U.S. military personnel to become conscientious objectors to this Indian war, and she promised deserters safe conduct to Oslo or Stockholm.

The interior of the white Lincoln had been uncomfortably warm despite the air conditioner, which was on full fan. But Lecha had felt a chill spread over her body as she read about the videotape of floating heads and the offer to relocate U.S. military deserters in Europe. Suddenly Lecha felt awake and refreshed; her body felt cooler. As soon as she got back to Tucson, Lecha would learn more about the two brothers, the spirit macaws, and the woman commander of the pan-American tribal army. Money, money, money. All armies needed money. Lecha wondered what Zeta had done with all the cash she and Ferro had made smuggling; Lecha wondered what Calabazas had done with his money or if those two Brito sisters had pissed his money away pampering Catholic priests.

GREAT LORD IGUANA

SEESE HAD NOT FELT well since the trip to Mexico. The evening at the graveyard had been difficult; and then reentry at the border had been a nightmare because U.S. border agents had refused to believe Lecha and Sterling were American citizens. A jeepload of GIs slouched in the shade outside Border Patrol headquarters. Border Patrol agents had looked at Seese closely and asked her to repeat her name twice before they slammed down the trunk lid and allowed her to take the Lincoln through. She waited in the car, and finally Lecha and Sterling had come out a sliding glass door. Sterling clutched the back of Lecha’s wheelchair grimly. “They almost forced me to live in Mexico,” Sterling said in a shaky voice. “They didn’t want to believe my driver’s license or voter’s registration card because they’d expired. But I told them to look at the picture — look, that’s me, see. It is still my face and my name even if the license has expired.”

Lecha laughed. “Well, I guess this is war,” she said. “I’ve been hearing rumors all about it. U.S. army tanks lined up in rows all along the border. Jeeploads of GIs to patrol all roads and highways along the border.”

Lecha had talked to the gravediggers and to the gas station attendant in Hermosillo. Seese didn’t have to understand Spanish or Yaqui to realize they had given Lecha serious news. The summer before, angry crowds had set fire to the courthouse in Hermosillo after the outgoing mayor and his council had refused to turn over the courthouse to the newly elected mayor, who was a grandson of a former Nazi who had fled to Mexico. Lecha pointed out that the Indians had nothing to do with elections. Whatever happened among the political candidates and parties did not matter to the millions and millions who were starving.

The confrontation with the Border Patrol had invigorated Lecha. She had sat up talking bright-eyed in the front seat with Seese, while Sterling napped in the backseat. Lecha said the white man had always been trying to “control” the border when no such thing existed to control except in the white man’s mind. The white man in North America had always dreaded a great Indian army moving up from the South. The gringos had also feared that one day there would be a spontaneous mass migration — millions of Indians coming out of the South.

Even with Lecha talking and laughing and the car windows open, Seese had to fight off sleep. She hoped Sterling could drive if she couldn’t. The excitement of travel and the hours at the graveyard had taken a toll.

Lecha was ready to take on the old notebooks and Yoeme’s bundles of notes and clippings. She wanted Seese to plan to work at the word processor full-time. Lecha said she was full of ideas; the news of the spirit macaws had inspired her. It had been years since she had felt so many thoughts swarming.

Back in Tucson, Lecha had begun to make notes and sift through the piles of paper and old notebooks. Seese had been surprised when Lecha had skipped the late-afternoon and midnight shots of Demerol; Lecha no longer took Percodan at noon because she wanted to stay alert to decipher the old notebooks. Old Yoeme had had her own peculiar ways to spell Spanish, and she had made up spellings for Yaqui words.

The trip to Mexico had had the opposite effect on Seese. The morning after their return Seese awoke exhausted, although she had slept ten hours. Later in the day at the word processor she had dozed off. She had been working on a strange passage in Lecha’s transcriptions of the notebooks, which had an almost narcotic effect on her.

Transcriptions From the Old Notebooks

The old priest’s hair is matted with dried blood.

The hair forms a long, stiff cape. The beads of

dry blood crust rattle softly as the old priest leans over the boy-sacrifice

a lovely young prince. The young sacrifices eat their last meal together.

Barbarians may sacrifice prisoners of war or slaves;

but the truth is, the spirits only listen when

the bloodshed is royal from the rich.

Lord Iguana carries all the seeds of the World in his tail.

In the dark around the altar

the sound of their soft breathing sends aches of desire down

the old priest’s legs.

The lizard’s head is full of fruit and flowers.

Each day has its own name and spirit.

Days form like buds.

The dawn is their flower.

The old priest wanted the boy so they did not take the boy with the others.

The stone lizard shines with blood.

By morning, the lizard has lost

the iridescence of fresh blood.

Clots darken to brown then black.

A dark skin forms on the blood,

the rind of a fragrant fruit

which he inhales deeply.

At night he whispers to the sleeping child

there are other gods they must serve now.

The flesh starves, the flesh craves until

flesh devours itself.

The long afternoon

raindrops tick against the roof.

One dancer stumbles and ruins the luck of the new year.

The room is narrow.

Light the color of granite sways

behind a paper shade.

The lamp had been hung in the window

still shaking dust

golden swarms of luminous ants.

The sun is in the North corner of Time

and no longer moves. This is a dream of another day

or this day.

He cannot remember if they have come

or if they are still approaching.

The old woman sits alone and thinks.

The liquid in the basin is the color of garnets.

The heat bruises the datura, the blossom closes.

The cotton sheet laps up his fever like a village dog.

The edge of the curtain floats, then soars in the wind.

Is it yesterday now? Fragrant odor of flowers

jewel-colored the size of a boy’s thumbnail.

All afternoon the wings of heat

shiver with voices

their moisture like yellow fruit

overripe now

decay trickles over the stone floor.

They talk to the open sky above the altar.

The most casual prayers:

the seeds were cut loose,

dripped down, scattering.

The moon is a woman tonight.

Throat to groin down the center.

He only struggled a little.

All that week Seese had taken naps and gone to bed early; but during the day she was aware of the weight of her body and felt as if she were drowning in air and light. Seese thought “bacteria” and “amoeba”; she thought about the flu. She thought about the suitcase pushed to the back of her closet, and the cocaine she had not wanted for months.

Seese blamed the old notebooks for the dream. She had awakened from the dream in tears, and hours later the effect of the dream had not subsided. Seese had sat at the keyboard and let the tears stream down her face. Instead of Lecha’s transcriptions, Seese had typed a description of the dream:

In the photographs you are smiling

taller than I have ever seen you

older than you were when I lost you.

The colors of the lawn and house behind are indistinct

milked to faded greens and browns.

I know I will never hold you again.

It had been as if Seese had not felt the enormity of Monte’s loss until the dream. She shoved the chair back from the keyboard. She lay facedown on the unmade bed. The pain in her chest took her breath away and she hoped she would die. All her life she had done everything wrong — she had ruined or lost any love she had ever had. Seese wept until her eyes and throat were dry. She had no one left, nothing to live for with Monte gone. Lecha must have known from the beginning; Seese was furious. Why hadn’t Lecha told her? Lecha could find the dead. Why didn’t she find Monte?

All at once she was sliding the suitcase out from the back of the closet. She put the newspaper-wrapped bundle on the bed. She had remembered to stash a quart of vodka just in case she ever started snorting cocaine again. She poured a glass of vodka and took large burning gulps to steady herself. She had not wanted to start with cocaine again, but now it hardly mattered if Lecha found out or Zeta kicked her out. Monte was dead, and Seese wanted to die too. Seese scooped a vial full of cocaine from the kilo. She had snorted line after line as if she were starving. She needed to get to town, to find Root or maybe even Tiny, to see if she could sell the kilo.

COCAINE GLUT

ROOT WAS NOT surprised to see the blonde on his doorstep again. The first time she had come looking for Lecha, but this time she was looking for him. She was holding an overnight bag. Root looked around for a vehicle. “I took a taxi,” Seese said, and Root motioned her inside the trailer. “I want to ask you not to tell Lecha I came here.” Root looked at the blonde’s face intently. He had always thought she might come back, and he sensed they would have sex that afternoon. Seese had been sipping vodka from a purse flask; she was nervous and talking too fast. Root was not surprised when she opened the train case and unwrapped a kilo of cocaine. Root shook his head slowly.

“Everybody has some,” Root said, putting a pinch under his tongue, “but this is pretty good. Ether, not acetone.” Root went to the refrigerator for a beer and turned off the TV.

“Can you sell it for me?” Seese had switched from vodka to beer; she got out the little mirror and vial and cut lines for Root and herself. If Root wasn’t interested, there was always Tiny; but she wouldn’t go to Tiny until she was desperate.

Root snorted a line in each nostril, then closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the couch. He got a big smile on his face. “The market here is flooded. You won’t get more than ten or twelve.”

“For a kilo?” Seese was not sure she had understood Root. Root lit a marijuana cigarette and passed it to Seese. She inhaled but started coughing — she coughed until tears filled her eyes.

“Strong?”

Seese nodded and wiped her eyes; she felt like crying. All he had said was ten or twelve. That was better than nothing. That was better than snorting or shooting coke until she was dead, wasn’t it?

Seese had cut more lines of cocaine, but after they finished the marijuana, Root locked the trailer doors and led her to the bedroom by the hand. He didn’t remove her clothes right away but embraced her on the unmade bed.

She was so skinny and white compared to Lecha. Root could feel her sharp bones while he fucked her. He went on and on with her because the cocaine and marijuana had that effect. Root tried not to get gouged by her pubic bone or pelvis. Lecha had spoiled sex for him with skinny women. Lecha made fun of men who secretly desired young boys instead of real women. Lecha said the white men kept their women small and weak so the women could not fight back when the men beat them or pushed them around.

Seese was seldom aroused by her lovers the first time. She had whispered the information to Root after he had pumped for half an hour; going on and on was no problem for him, he told her, a beneficial effect of brain damage, the tireless erection. Seese had kept her eyes closed so she did not have to see the peeling panel on the ceiling of the trailer’s tiny bedroom. If she let Root keep humping, he might come, and if he came, he might help her.

Root didn’t know what it was — the combination of drugs or the strange woman — but he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to keep fucking her as if each thrust might take away the sadness.

Afterward they had smoked more marijuana, but Seese dropped the vial of cocaine in the train case and closed the lid. Root mixed a pitcher of frozen orange juice. Root stirred the orange juice with a wooden spoon and stared at the train case. “All the kilos in town right now are packed in blue Samsonite,” Root said casually, but Seese sensed some question, some suspicion.

Seese laughed. “They gave me this overnight bag. I would never buy this color of blue.”

“Someone did,” Root said, turning down the switch on the evaporative cooler. “They probably got a good deal on a thousand powder blue suitcases.”

Seese felt happy and high. Somehow sex had made the cocaine-craving disappear.

“I don’t know about buyers,” Root said. “Tucson is snowed under, snowbound.”

Seese started to argue, “Two years ago—”

“Two years ago the world was a different place,” Root said. His abrupt interruption hurt her feelings, but Seese blamed herself for expecting help from a man she hardly knew. Root probably had no respect for secretaries who screwed their employer’s boyfriends either. She must be crazy again; coming to Root had been a dumb mistake.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Seese said. “I didn’t want to get started with coke again. I need the money to find my little boy.”

“Don’t you work for Lecha anymore?”

“I do, but Lecha has cancer.”

“You believe that?”

Seese looked closely at Root. He was difficult to figure out. She shrugged her shoulders and got a hairbrush out of her purse. She would take a taxi to the Stage Coach and have a talk with Cherie. The two of them could go back into the business together. They could turn one kilo into two kilos with baby laxative just like old times. Seese watched out the window for the taxi; if Root wanted to talk, let him. She wasn’t saying anything he could carry back to Lecha and use against her. “I may be able to get rid of that for you — I just can’t make any promises on the prices.”

Seese saw the taxi turn into the trailer court entrance; she picked up the light-blue train case and shook her head at Root. “That’s all right, don’t bother,” Seese said. “I have other people interested.” Root stood in the door and Seese sensed how much he wanted to embrace her, but she was finished with him.

Let her find out for herself about the changes in Tucson. Root remembered downtown when it had been alive, before the malls had killed downtown. No one had thought the big malls would die out either. But then the U.S. economy had begun to falter. Prominent corporations had been avoiding or abandoning Arizona steadily over the years because corporate employees balked at living in Arizona. The quality of life was substandard. Root thought it was really funny. Guam and Puerto Rico spent more on schools and mental health programs than Arizona did. No new industry or business would ever come to Arizona again; all the tax breaks and cozy deals, all the cheap land Arizona offered to attract corporations — all was for naught. Analysts said Mexico’s civil war would be nasty and spill across to the United States. Tucson’s fate was closely tied to the fate of Mexico. Tucson’s malls had depended on wealthy Mexicans; but the rich Sonorans had fled the angry mobs of peasants and relocated to Argentina or Spain. Rumors about violence across the border had begun to scare off wealthy patrons at Tucson’s spas and health resorts.

Root had to laugh. Merchants who sold arms and munitions did a “booming” business. Tucson had always depended on some sort of war to keep cash flowing. Root’s own great-grandfather had got rich off the Apache wars. Calabazas had told Root all about it. Root’s parents never discussed the family’s social prominence or the family wealth. After Calabazas had described the bootlegging to the Apaches and the army, the whores and the skimming off army supply contracts, Root understood why his parents and Tucson’s “social elite” had so little interest in local history.

As far as Root was concerned, he was dead to his family, he had died on the day of his accident. The only family Root had was Calabazas and maybe Mosca. He could never be sure about Mosca or Lecha either; they both loved him but they were both crazy too. Root did not know if he loved them or if he had ever loved anyone. Had he ever loved his mother? He hardly even thought about his father.

Sometimes Root even amazed himself. He should never have fucked Lecha’s assistant or nurse or whatever she was. As soon as the urge and the hunger had been hammered away, the floating ecstasy had given way to doubt. The town was full of strangers carrying suitcases packed with cocaine or U.S. dollars to trade for dynamite. Lecha had psychic powers, but she still made mistakes where her personal life was concerned; hiring the blonde might have been a mistake. Root turned on the TV, but he could not get rid of the sad feeling. No wonder Mosca only “used” prostitutes. That was money well spent because there were no regrets.

Root had started hating television while he was in the hospital. But after he got out, he had begun to hate radio too; most of all, he had hated the new state lottery, and all the stupid ads for the suckers. Local radio stations had to give away cash all day long to be assured of listeners. No one did anything for anyone anymore except for cold cash. The deliverymen and receptionists, telephone operators and line repairmen, grocery checkers and department store clerks — the stupid suckers listened hour after hour while radio deejays pimped them with trash promotional merchandise.

In the hospital, prize money and prize merchandise had been all the nurses or nurse’s aides and therapists ever talked about. At home they paid baby-sitters to watch television in case the lucky phone call came at their house. They had all been making payments on new carpet or new living room furniture. The whole question came down to what it was a person stayed alive for.

Root once sat in a neighborhood coke dealer’s kitchen one day and watched. Around three P.M. the first of the “clients” had got off work and stopped by for a “boost” to get them home. For a small extra charge clients were allowed to shoot up in the bathroom. They had all been white, and the dealer was sympathetic. The clients had spouses, families, and jobs to think about. Root watched the steady parade. Legal secretaries, mechanics, postal workers, receptionists, dental hygienists, and others Root could not guess — they might have been real estate agents or high school teachers. But all had the same expression of anticipation and relief on their faces. All day they had thought about only one thing. They had shut out the tedium and humiliation of their jobs — they had endured because they knew there was a full syringe waiting. This was what they lived for; this was why they went to work.

Root understood. Anyone who could see and reason clearly and logically would have found a painless way out — handgun, any caliber, its barrel nuzzled by the ear that would never hear the blast. Everyone had made his or her choice — a personal strategy for survival. New carpets, new dinette sets, new automobiles; something to live for, reasons to go to the jobs they hated. The coke dealer was an addict himself; he complained about the fall in cocaine prices. He said less cash was circulating around town; regular customers had been laid off or had had their work hours cut back.

COMMUNIST PRIESTS AND NUNS

MOSCA HAD LEARNED not to bother with those smart, nervous women even when they were dark and beautiful like the two sisters. In a way, Calabazas had wasted his life with those two Brito sisters.

First, Sarita, his “lawful wedded wife,” had been in bed with a dead monsignor — that was a good one! Fucked him into a heart attack. Second, Liria, Calabazas’s “true love,” had gone behind his back and with Sarita had joined a Catholic radical group to help smuggle refugees from Mexico and Guatemala to the United States. Mosca had overheard most of the argument when Calabazas had found out. Mosca thought most of the neighbors had at least heard the loud voices, which had quickly dropped to angry whispers. Mosca had been the one who had found out. Mosca had told Calabazas. See how fast word got around? What was that bitch Liria trying to do? What if they came investigating Liria and her communist nuns and priests.

Mosca had heard all the arguments before — both sides. Those who said you helped when you fed them, and those who said people needed “saving.” Mosca liked to brag that he only voted what his stomach told him. Calabazas had reminded Liria that all the farmers were relatives or clanspeople of his in Mexico. Theirs was a family business; all the marijuana had been from family farms, carefully packed inside truck-loads of pumpkins.

Liria had pointed out that she was not telling him to stop his business. The Indians had been left the poorest land; it was true. In the hills only marijuana would grow; pumpkins and gourds only grew down in the small valleys. Liria had remained calm. Each person chose the work they would do. Her work was to give sanctuary to people fleeing bullets and torture. Liria did not see how her work or Sarita’s work with the refugees would interfere with his work.

Then Mosca had heard Calabazas make an inspired argument about the dangers of smuggling political refugees versus smuggling gourds full of cocaine. People were too large and too noisy to smuggle easily. Liria’s church group was too open to infiltration by government agents.

Calabazas had been walking on shaky ground; suddenly Liria had become furious with Calabazas.

“Just listen to yourself, old man! What chicken shit you men are!” Liria had stormed out, and later she had thrown two suitcases in the trunk of her Toyota and drove away. Mosca knew that Calabazas was in the dark about a lot of the subversive work the Catholic Church was doing. Mosca had never trusted nuns, priests, any of them. Mosca had brought up the subject gently because he knew Calabazas had spent years madly in love with that woman Liria.

Mosca had been able to detect wizards or sorcerers, and assassins and spies, but only as he was driving past them. Mosca’s explanation had been that sorcerers, like antelope or coyotes, did not seem to fear detection from moving vehicles.

Mosca would be minding his own business, driving down Drachman at Miracle Mile, when suddenly he would see a dark wizard disguised as a clean-cut, young Hispanic college student. Mosca did not care if Root, Calabazas, or that bitch Liria laughed at him and called him, “Loco, loco, loco!” Mosca had made careful observations. The weirdos all hit the streets at the same time — they all lurched out of their cheap apartments and trailers to walk along Ft. Lowell Road laughing and talking to themselves. How had they all known it was time to step outside? Weirdos were on the same brain wavelengths as lizards and migrating birds and possessed the mysterious ability to converge simultaneously on the same location. Sometimes witches and wizards even hit the streets together. Mosca had never figured out why those who hated and feared one another so much would all want to stroll together on the same streets. Yet Mosca had often seen the sorcerers, witches of both sexes, curanderos—whatever you wanted to call them — they all circulated together no different from the whores, male and female, who also walked South Sixth Avenue.

Speeding past a witch on the street, Mosca sometimes had a split second to see a light — sometimes a flash, sometimes a glow — around the face or the feet. Compared to the old-time stories about sorcerers, his power, Mosca had to admit, was limited.

Mosca opened another beer and scooped four big snorts from the plastic bag of coke shoved in the pocket of his western shirt. Mosca didn’t care about the teasing and the jokes. Calabazas, Root, or Liria — the rest of them — could laugh until they choked. The alcohol and the dope, were only the doorways; alcohol didn’t do the talking. All the notions, the suspicions, the schemes, the reveries, the theories, and the hunches belonged to him. They were locked up inside compartments of flesh and bone deep in Mosca’s body. Mosca could feel what he knew: the surge of a great flood, the muddy, churning water of what, he couldn’t yet say. Mosca’s eyes were shining. Tribal people in South America had navigated the most treacherous rivers and had traveled icy mountain paths with the aid of Mama Coca.

SOULS OF THE DEAD

MOSCA HEARS and remembers so many voices and so many places he forgets where they all came from. Two or three beers, and three or four good snorts, and if everything else is level and smooth, then all the doors and gates of memory swing open. Every time Mosca had ever been arrested, there had been an intervening circumstance — a witch, a devil, a spirit thing. Mosca went on talking about zombies, open graves, and ghost armies traveling in green fireballs because they were and had always been a part of Mosca’s life. Root had asked Mosca how old he was when he had first seen one of the weird things.

“Oh, man, I was just a little baby! They had me sleeping in a banana box. It must have been cold, because they had me and the box up on a table or something in a kitchen.” Mosca claimed he could remember everything, even being born. Though he had only been an infant, had sensed something was watching him from the ceiling. The first of thousands of things Mosca would “see.”

Mosca had watched the steam rise off the Santa Cruz on mornings when cold mountain air settled over Tucson. He understood how the steam was the moisture of the river rising, so that you had a river running into the sky, in all directions of the winds — but also that these were the souls of the dead rising out of the purgatory where they’d been imprisoned hundreds and thousands of years waiting to be released so they could return to help their beloved descendants.

In the Sonoran desert foothills the winds were supernatural. Los aires, the air currents — tricky breezes, little updrafts, and ferocious jaws of downdrafts — that crushed small aircraft into the mountains. A sorcerer of some prowess could ensorcell a minor wind or strong breeze off a prominent mountain cliff. A sorcerer might grow rich and powerful if he could manage to secure just the right wind at just the strategic place. Naturally every sorcerer dreamed and bragged and schemed after the great winds — seldom seen except in sudden gusts that engulfed armies in desert sand or scuttled war fleets against coastal rocks.

One afternoon, the sky is overcast-gray, and damp heat is pushed ahead of big thunderclouds. Mosca is moody and strange. Root finds Mosca standing outside Calabazas’s house facing west. Thousands of waxy cottonwood leaves click together in the damp wind. Mosca does not acknowledge Root for a while, and then Mosca just starts talking about the souls of the dead. You can hear them, Mosca says, on rainy afternoons, summer or winter, because the dead souls are out on cloudy days to bring rain. “Dead souls are always near us,” Mosca continues, “watching over us.” The talk about spirits begins to excite Mosca. His dark eyes gleam as he gathers momentum. He says white people got the idea of guardian angels from the spirits who help us. Except the poor souls could not really “guard,” but they always accompanied you wherever you went. They came from the place of complete peace in which silence was the answer, and silence was truth.

“Dead souls stay near us, but they don’t break the silence,” Mosca said. Because talk was not necessary so long as you remembered everything you knew about your ancestors. Because ancestor spirits had the answers, but you had to be able to interpret messages sent in the language of spirits.

Souls of the newly dead hover like gray and brown moths at the window screens and by doors of places they’d once lived. Newly dead, they have not yet learned the ways of the dead, so the dead souls cried piteously outside their houses. Europeans did not listen to the souls of their dead. That was the root of all trouble for Europeans. They never seemed to hear the cries of their dead swarming outside windows and doors of courthouses and office buildings whining for money they had not been able to take along with them. Mosca did not agree with what the communist priests and communist Indians from Mexico had said, but Mosca did agree the dead souls of Europeans cried out.

“We are outnumbered here!” was their message, endlessly, in the “séances” the Barefoot Hopi had conducted for them in prison. The Europeans not only did not feed the souls of their dead for four days afterward, family members took all things precious to the dead and scattered them. Thus Europeans were haunted by the dead in their dream life and were driven mad by the incessant cries of unquiet ancestors’ souls. No wonder they were such restless travellers; no wonder they wanted to go to Mars and Saturn.

Souls of the dead sometimes appeared as butterflies before a spring rain in the desert. Which dead souls brought blizzards and hailstorms and torrential rains that collapsed roofs and washed away garden seedlings? Calabazas wants to know. Mosca is more confident than Root has ever seen him. Mosca does not erupt in fury as he once had if anyone dared question one of his beloved theories. Dead souls that brought too much rain or too much of anything were suspected of working for sorcerers.

High plateaus and rugged mountain passes were hazardous. They were places to be avoided because where clouds were found, so were the souls of the dead. Wise travelers avoided mountain or high-land travel except in dry, cloudless weather because lightning, hailstorms, and sudden blizzards had trapped and frozen countless travelers before them. Mosca had heard the stories.

In a high mountain pass, stranded travelers huddled around a fire in darkness and blizzard. Then, on the edge of the light of the fire, through lacy veils of snow, the travelers made out a silhouette the shape of a horse. Bewildered, they staggered from their fire toward the white horse emerging from the blowing snow.

“Here!” Mosca said. “Here is the miracle of it: the Christ Child! The Holy Infant as a tiny baby, sitting astride a white horse!” When the infant smiled at them, the travelers saw the infant had a full set of teeth.

“ ‘Tengo los dientes,’ the Holy Infant said, and then rode away on the white horse into the snowy night.” Mosca smiled when he finished his story.

Liria had been listening from the kitchen. She shook her head. “That wasn’t the Christ Child! That was the Devil!” Liria started laughing. Mosca’s mouth tightened into a pout. Who asked her to butt in? Mosca demanded to know. Couldn’t anyone talk without someone listening in? What did she know anyway about the Infant Jesus? If He was God, He could have anything He wanted, including death on the cross and a white horse to ride as a baby.

Mosca hates Liria most at moments like that. Hates her laughing, hates her fucking her sister’s husband, hates her sister who fucks priests, hates the stiff-prick priests and their scandal of holy orders. Liria knows nothing. The Devil never rides white horses. Jesus had traveled the length and width of the continents called the Americas years before the Romans had directed the Jews to nail Him up on the cross. Jesus had been seen by the wandering tribes that walked the Great Plains. Jesus had been seen in Mexico. Liria and her sister were ruined by their mother, who had raised them to be white women. The Jesus they prayed to had blue eyes and blond hair.

Mosca had not always believed all the notions of the old tribal people, but he had seen for himself over the years the old people had told the truth.

Mosca’s body had been so full of natural electricity, he had never been able to wear a wristwatch of any kind because his body’s electricity interfered with the tiny watch mechanisms. Flocks of birds migrated thousands of miles and lizards communicated with one another using the same sort of electromagnetism. The circulation of the blood around and around a living body created electric current; moving electric currents in living bodies created a sort of magnetism. Performers and TV people were addicted to the jolts of electricity they got during performances in large stadiums with thousands and thousands of human bodies massed together to focus energy on a small stage. The barefoot Hopi had explained all this to Mosca while they’d shared a cell.

Mosca blamed his bad luck with women on what he called “too much electricity.” Women became uneasy around Mosca because he aroused so much sexual desire in them whenever he was near. Unfortunately most women did not follow their instincts, but blamed Mosca for everything.

A few women had got so upset on first dates with Mosca they had even hallucinated what they heard Mosca say. Once Mosca had asked a date if she could see a clock; the woman had misunderstood and thought he said, “Can you suck my cock?” The woman had nearly jumped from the moving vehicle until Mosca’s denials had convinced her.

Mosca believed in the power of sunspots. Sunspots sent great waves of electromagnetism to collide with radio waves throughout the galaxy. Mosca had learned not to date women except in the “dark” of the moon. Otherwise, embarrassments and misunderstandings were certain to occur; even prostitutes had wild fantasies about someone loving and marrying them. Mosca would never get married; they’d have to shoot him first. Mosca had to remain absolutely free. He knew he had a higher calling than ordinary men.

Mosca could not make out what his special calling would be, but he could feel the revelation would arrive soon, a messenger was approaching. He wasn’t afraid to die. He knew the electricity that formed the soul merely escaped the body, and nothing was destroyed or lost. The dead remembered everything; the dead still loved us and watched over us. Mosca would never be lost to the people in their struggle; he would be with them, he would float around as spirit energy, giving jolts to the police, the military and the clergy.

A few nights later, Mosca had slept the wrong way on his neck. Next morning, to work the stiffness from his neck, Mosca was stretching his arms up over his head when suddenly he heard a strange sound. Then Mosca realized the sound was the cry of a spirit voice that had settled in his neck, near the base of his right shoulder. Before Mosca had left his house, he knew he would have to get advice from someone who knew about these voices because when he had tried to lift the coffeepot full of fresh water, there had been shooting pains and complete weakness in his right shoulder joint and forearm. He had been able to lift the coffeepot only with the greatest willpower and effort while a constellation of shooting pains shot like electrical charges up his arm and neck to the base of his brain.

Mosca went to consult an old woman who could talk to spirit voices. The old woman wanted fifty dollars to talk to the spirit in Mosca’s shoulder because the first statement the voice had made had been about suffering and perhaps despair. Talk to dangerous voices cost more. Mosca had always been leery of “medicine people” he did not know; most of the good medicine people had already passed on. The only ones left called themselves healers, but they were mostly blackmailers and sorcerers. When Mosca told the old woman she charged too much, the old sorceress had begun to move her eyes up and down his body, slowly, like hot hands. She had lifted her skirts flirtatiously and said if she were not short of cash, she would have done it for free. He was in some danger, and she would hate to see him get hurt. The old woman had been a setback for Mosca; she had probably laid spells on him with lice larvae in his hair. The lice shampoo had turned his hair orange. Mornings came when Mosca had awakened with a great sadness he could not identify. Mosca felt a burden, not his alone — ancient losses, perhaps to war and famine long ago.

ONE WHO “READS” BODY FAT

MOSCA HAD ABRUPTLY stopped snorting cocaine when the voice in his right shoulder had begun to speak. He had begun to smoke far more marijuana to “calm his nerves”; he ate a great deal of candy and ice cream, and suddenly Mosca could pinch little spare tires of fat from his belly.

Mosca had contacted his friend Floyd, in prison for life, to get the name of a reliable reader of body fat. Fat readers were virtually unknown outside the remote mountains of Chihuahua and Sonora. For too many years during the Spanish and Mexican occupations there had been no fat to read, only skin and bones of Indian corpses. Rumors and stories claimed that the remaining readers of fat had been enslaved or retained, often for life, simply to read the fat of the idle rich who were addicted to astrologists, faith healers, and mountain Indians who could “see” lucky numbers in the dimples and puckers of a client’s body fat.

Mosca had never seen a woman quite as fat or quite as majestic in his life. Immediately Mosca’s heart had begun to beat faster, and he could feel the fat reader was about to change his life. The fat reader had examined his hands first, and then she had touched his cheeks, forehead, and chin. “You used to be skinny most of your life. Until now,” she had commented, as if to herself. “Take down your pants,” she said, and Mosca felt his face flush. When he hesitated, the fat reader had laughed; readers of fat, she said, preferred to read the belly, buttocks, or thighs of men and women both. Belly fat on a man means one thing; belly fat on a woman, however, means something quite different. Fat that has always been carried by a person tells a different tale than fat that appears suddenly. Fat that had been with a person all his life related to the past; fat that had appeared suddenly was related to events in the future.

The best readers of fat could tell a client a great deal more than winning lottery numbers. Fat readers were able to enhance and increase sexual pleasure by “talking to the fat” and massaging messages into the body. Belly fat increased the width and depth of the orgasm, pulsing showers of ecstasy reverberating in every cell; body fat was the great generator of sensual pleasure. Fat had its own timetable: first, relentless, consuming lust.

The fat reader had glanced at the television set in the corner of her consultation room, tuned without sound to the Telemundo station. She was still amazed, she said, at today’s people and their fear of body fat. The human body grew to the size necessary for its survival. Mosca was delighted the fat reader had interpreted the television news the same way she interpreted television commercials. The starvation of others had caused the killers to diet obsessively because they feared detection; they feared the starving would see how fat the rich had grown off their suffering. The rich dieted frantically lest one day they be killed for their fat by the starying people.

The fat reader had poked and prodded Mosca’s little folds of skin and fat with her eyes closed. From time to time she would make a deep sigh, as if she were sad or tired. “You might go one direction or you might go the other,” she said. “You tend to be thin, so you are at risk.” Thin ones tended to be not well attached to life. Without capacity for pleasure, thin ones preferred the sensation of denial and pain. Injury and illness could easily carry off a thin woman or man. Skinny ones burned up in fires and blew away in big winds. “One more thing,” the fat reader had said as Mosca was leaving. “The voice in your shoulder says, Fatten up! There’s a great storm brewing in the South. In the big flood that’s coming, only the fat will float.”

Mosca had not told anyone about his visit to the fat reader. Liria and even Calabazas would make fun of him the way they had when Mosca told them his ideas about death. The old people used to request that their remains be left out in the hills for the scavengers to eat. That way they started “living” again within a matter of hours, surging through the blood veins of a big coyote as she raced across the desert to suckle her pups. Calabazas had wisecracked about becoming coyote shit. Mosca had only nodded; he didn’t mind being coyote shit because the rain carried the shit to the desert roots and seeds, and all kinds of beings and life. Fed back to the earth, Mosca believed he would bound and leap in the legs of the mule deer and soar in the wings of the hawk.

What had depressed Mosca was the way Calabazas, Root, and Liria had been so quick to laugh and make jokes whenever Mosca tried to discuss the ideas and theories that filled Mosca’s head more and more each day, like gifts from God. Mosca did not know what was wrong with Calabazas and Root; they both should have known better — Calabazas because he had been reared by old-time people, and Root because he had almost died in that scooter wreck. Mosca did not expect anything worthwhile from Liria because she wanted to be a white woman.

Liria stood up to excuse herself. Conversations about turning to shit after death did not interest her. Liria’s air of superiority had infuriated Mosca.

“You think the mortuary does any good?” he shouted. “Morticians take a last fuck on top of you while the machine replaces your blood with embalming fluid!” Liria had been laughing by then, and she shook her head as if she could not care less what Mosca was saying.

“Embalming fluid turns your bones to jelly,” Mosca said, but Liria had slammed the door, laughing wildly; then she had abruptly opened the door a crack to taunt Mosca. “And what was your plan for the bones, eh, Mosca?” Liria had taunted.

“I’d jump your bones!” Mosca said, startled by the answer he had given. Liria had snapped the door shut and laughed down the hall. Mosca’s face was hot, and he glanced quickly out the corner of his eye to see if Calabazas was pissed off. But the old man had been laughing. So had Root. To them, Mosca knew he was a joke; for a long time he had not minded their laughter, but lately his feeling had been changing.

TUCSON, CITY OF THIEVES

HIMSELF, Mosca preferred to call Tucson “City of Thieves” because there were fourth- and fifth-generation thieves living there. Tucson was a place where betrayals ticked off with each second, most of them little stabs in the back, and then, once a day, a murder or two. Mosca could feel sorry for the old and the weak or ill who had to live in a place such as Tucson where the police were as predatory as the mob and the gangs. There was no honor among the generations of thieves in Tucson. Mosca himself had never felt even the slightest sensation of loyalty. He understands loyalty exists for some, and therefore Mosca recognizes loyalty as a variable, though Mosca sees loyalty is more easily bought and sold than most commodities.

Mosca did not have any embarrassment about killing the Santa Fe poet. He hadn’t been disloyal to Calabazas or the others. The police were always killing innocent bystanders with stray bullets. FBI agents in Phoenix had accidently shot their own female agent. Mosca wondered what the true story had been in that case. Mosca did not claim to be anything more than who and what he was, and guys in his line of work often had to fire guns around innocent people. Mosca had never sworn or promised to serve or uphold anything for anyone. If Mosca had ever sworn himself to any cause, the cause would have been land and justice for native people. The Santa Fe poet had been an intruder. It was one thing for a crazy guy such as Mosca to shoot someone, but it was a whole worse matter when the locos were the police with.45 automatics.

Mosca believed his mother’s illness during his childhood had been the cause of his mistrust of people who were close to him. Mosca believed he had been affected by nursing his mother’s milk laced with the strange natural chemicals of her poor schizophrenic brain. Mosca had listened to radio show experts discuss human milk; weak mother’s milk had left Mosca shorter than he should have been. Mosca did not thank his mother. No one had asked him if he wanted to be born short, skinny, dark, and dirt-poor in southern Arizona. Mosca’s mother had betrayed Mosca when she had conceived him in the swirling rainbows of her deranged blood.

Mosca had always enjoyed imaginary plots, fantasies in which he was a traitor. Mosca loved to imagine the expressions on all their faces — Calabazas and Root, the bitches Sarita and Liria, when they learned of their betrayal by Mosca. Mosca reveled in the pain they would feel at the moment his treachery was revealed to them. The betrayal of Jesus was Mosca’s favorite Bible story. Mosca and the other street kids had gone to Mass on Palm Sunday to rip palm fronds out of the hands of rich Catholics outside the Tucson cathedral. Mosca had laughed wildly as he seized palms the priest had blessed for old, rich women because the rich were suffering a little, suffering to remind them of Jesus’ suffering. The betrayal of Jesus had not stopped with the crucifixion; Paul and Peter had corrupted Jesus’ creed of forgiveness and brotherly love. Mosca had seen all the gold and silver and silk and satin on Catholic Church altars. Mosca had seen the big Cadillacs, new every year, parked in the drive of the monsignor’s residence.

Mosca did not expect women to be loyal because men threatened them and their babies and slammed them against walls. Mosca did not blame women, but he was careful around women. Treachery was everywhere throughout history. The prophet Muhammad had preached tolerance and love, as Jesus had; but when Muhammad had passed to heaven, the Moslems, like the Christians, forgot the teachings of their God.

Christians and Moslems had lost contact with their Gods whenever they had slaughtered their own brothers in so-called holy wars. Only God had the right to kill everything because he had created everything. Accidents, plagues, and famines would carry away the unbelievers; it was not necessary to make war, to take God’s will into puny human hands.

Mosca thought someday the Moslems might take over the world. They might simply settle for Western Europe because European Christians would be dangerous and troublesome captives who would require the Moslems’ undivided attention; or perhaps the Moslems would simply wait a few hundred years until fertility and birth rates among Moslem immigrants in Western Europe gradually overtook them, overwhelmed the Christians. What would Moslem Germans or German Moslems resemble? Mosca imagined the bellowing cattle sounds of German opera side by side with the nasal caterwauling of Arab music. Would there be a Moslem Reich? The Europeans should never have left their homelands in the first place.

KILO OF COCAINE

SEESE TOOK A CAB to a cheap hotel on Miracle Mile, and while the driver waited, she hid the kilo under the foot of the bed. She kept telling herself over and over that Root hadn’t rejected her, he had only refused to buy the cocaine. Wholesale prices were low, Seese could believe that. If something happened to Lecha or her job with Lecha, Seese would need cash. If she was able to endure the old routines, Seese knew she could easily sell the cocaine to the pimps on Miracle Mile. The easy way out was to sell the kilo for what she could get from Tiny because Tiny had everything worked out with the undercover cops — Tiny always had things worked out with the law.

The Stage Coach was quiet on weeknights. The married men stopped by on their way home from work, but after seven there were only bikers playing pool and the diehards watching the dancer under the black lights. Seese did not recognize the girl on stage — a skinny, boyish blonde in black panties and bra. Three bikers nursed bottles of beer and watched the topless dancer in silence. In the corner Seese saw the same jukebox she had danced to in the old days, when she had worked for Tiny. An “out of order” sign was taped to the front. Nothing had changed; Tiny was still as stingy as he had been when Seese had danced at the Stage Coach. The jukebox used to stay broken for weeks. There had been days when Tiny told the dancers to turn on the radio because no one cared about the music except the girls; the afternoon crowd only wanted titties, ass, and crotch.

Seese didn’t see the bartender, but saw the storeroom door was open. She knocked on the door to Tiny’s office. Tiny always kept a.38 on the desk beside the phone. Seese had seen the pistol many times while she had worked for Tiny. If there was a knock at the door, Tiny always slipped his hand over the.38. Tiny didn’t care whose voice it was outside the door; Seese knew he didn’t move his hand from the gun until he could see the visitor in the doorway. Tiny was a fat man, but Seese had watched him, and he was faster than he looked. Seese and Cherie and some of the other dancers used to joke about Tiny’s shooting someone in the tit if she forgot to knock. Tiny did not lock the door, but Seese knew he liked privacy to snort coke at his desk and sip whiskey all evening long.

Seese had to repeat her name three times before Tiny said, “Come in.” Tiny seemed surprised to see her. He was sitting at his desk with bookkeeping ledgers and computer printouts stacked around him. Cherie said Tiny had another bar, on the east side, not a dump like the Stage Coach, but a cocktail lounge that booked Playboy playmates of the year. Off- duty Tucson police and sheriff’s deputies drank at Tiny’s other bar. Tiny had been in the Marines and so had most of the deputies and cops. Cherie said Tiny had a rule; he never talked about the other bar, and he never wanted to see any of the Stage Coach dancers near the east-side place.

Tiny had gotten even fatter, but still wore a Marine Corps haircut. Seese was reminded of the color illustrations in children’s books of Humpty-Dumpty. Seese had never felt comfortable with Tiny, and not just because he had been in love with her once. There had been something else too — only a feeling really; Seese thought it might be Tiny’s connection with the military and her father. Seese glanced down; the.38 was on the desk by the telephone. Tiny stood up from his chair behind the desk and took both her hands in his; suddenly he seemed very happy to see her. He buzzed the bartender for a bottle of whiskey and brought out a brown vial and a little spoon from a desk drawer. Seese shook her head and set her vial of cocaine on the edge of the desk.

“See what you think of this,” she said. Tiny looked at her closely. Seese knew he was trying to figure how she had managed to turn her luck around in Tucson. Tiny could see the glitter of pure crystals that had not been “cut”; Tiny held the vial, then set it back on his desk without opening it. There was a voice and a knock. Seese watched Tiny’s hand settle on the snub-nosed.38. Suddenly Seese wished she had taken the taxi back to the ranch. The bartender brought two glasses and whiskey. Seese needed the whiskey; otherwise she was going to have to reach for the vial of cocaine. Seese had forgotten the negative charge in the air when Tiny knew he could only look but not touch. She should have taken the train case home and pushed it to the back of the closet until she thought of someone else besides Tiny or Root who might buy the kilo.

Tiny wasn’t interested in buying cocaine, he was interested in her. After all that time the fat pig was still after her. No money — nothing — was worth the clammy, bulging belly or thick black hair that grew out of the crack of his ass. Seese reached for her purse on the floor by her feet. Returning to the Stage Coach was always a mistake. Seese wondered if she would ever learn. She hardly knew Cherie anymore; there wasn’t much they could safely discuss in front of Cherie’s boyfriends or husbands. A few years had made a lot of difference. Cherie’s eldest was in sixth grade. Tucson was seedier and more run-down. The pavement on big streets such as Oracle and Broadway had cracked and left potholes. Stores and restaurants where Seese had once shopped with Cherie were gone. Even the shopping malls were partially vacant; real estate FOR SALE signs were everywhere. “Money’s been tight in Arizona ever since the feds took over all the banks,” Tiny said, as if he had read her thoughts. The apology in his tone was unmistakable. “I’ll see what I can do,” Tiny said, his eyes on hers. “How much do you want for it?” Seese took a big swallow and finished the whiskey. “A kilo for twenty thousand,” she said. “It’s never been cut.” Seese knew she should have started at thirty because Tiny would take the price down five thousand right away. All the bluffing and bullshit in drug deals bored Seese. “Ten max,” Tiny said. Seese stood up to leave. Her hand was on the doorknob. “All right, twelve. But not tonight.” Seese nodded and walked out the door before Tiny could get out from behind the desk. Tiny followed her past the bar to the pay phone.

“Use the phone in my office,” Tiny said.

“Oh, thanks, I’m just calling a cab. I need to use the ladies’ room.” Seese knew if she went back to his office, Tiny would try to kiss and fondle her. Tiny knew he had lost his opportunity and had a disappointed expression on his face. Seese smiled and winked at him as she went into the ladies’ toilet. She had outmaneuvered Tiny tonight, but she would have to be careful next time. When she came out of the rest room, Tiny was gone, and the cab honked outside. Seese got the train case with the kilo from the motel room, and the cab took her back to the ranch. No wonder Beaufrey had been so generous with Seese. The wholesale price of cocaine had probably started to slide back then. A kilo was cheaper than hiring a gunman, and nothing had to be explained because Seese was an addict. Beaufrey had really counted on Seese to OD.

Seese gave the cabdriver a big tip for driving her over the dirt road to the ranch house. Some cabdrivers were afraid to drive inside the gate because of the snarling guard dogs behind the chain-link fence on each side of the driveway. Seese shoved the train case to the back of the closet and lay down on the bed to smoke a joint. She regretted she had asked Root to help her sell the kilo. Root probably thought she had fucked him for the favor. A man with a limp and slurred speech was not likely to have many girlfriends or get much sex unless he went to whores. Seese thought she might like another evening with Root. He seemed different from other men; he seemed more gentle. But now Root would not trust her. She had ruined her chances with him because of the cocaine. Going to Tiny at the Stage Coach had been a mistake too. Seese didn’t know Tiny anymore; she didn’t even know Cherie.

All night Seese had nightmares about losing the train case, or about how the kilo had spilled open all over the floor of Tiny’s office, but then the cocaine had congealed like white pus or sperm. Lecha might help her get rid of the cocaine, but Seese did not want to ask. Lecha had been working past midnight every night, poring over the old notebooks. Lecha said there would be old acquaintances at an upcoming convention who might have questions about Yoeme’s old notebooks.

Seese telephoned Tiny’s office at noon the next day. Her hands were perspiring as she waited for Tiny to answer. She wanted to get rid of the kilo as soon as possible; every week the wholesale price of a kilo fell lower. The whole U.S. economy had gone soft. She had nothing else to sell; no other way to hire a detective to find Monte.

BAREFOOT HOPI

ROOT HAD STILL felt sad the next day when Mosca drove up with a hail of gravel. Root could see Mosca was flying high. Mosca said he had not slept two nights running because the Barefoot Hopi had come to town. They had been chewing peyote and talking for more than forty-eight hours. “I couldn’t stand it, man,” Mosca told Root. “I got so excited I had to tell someone. “I went by Calabazas’s, but no one was home. So I came here!” Mosca had left the big Blazer idling in the driveway; he wanted Root to come with him right away.

Root was still in his bathrobe. Mosca had been complaining lately about how boring the work was. Smuggling was just another dumb job. Mosca had his truck paid for, but now he complained that he had everything he wanted. Mosca couldn’t think of what else to buy except more semiauto rifles. Calabazas had teased Mosca for buying so many firearms; Calabazas and the other Indian smugglers had not armed themselves in the old days; but all of that had been changing. The old-timers who used remote trails still did not arm themselves, but suddenly there were more players, complete strangers. The new players were Salvadorians and Guatemalans.

Root pulled on a dirty T-shirt and some jeans he found on the floor. Mosca had started to tell his story while Root was tying his shoes, but refused to tell the good stuff until they were safely in Mosca’s truck. Root shook his head. Mosca thought the authorities might have bugged Root’s trailer, but when Root asked him about “bugs” in his truck, Mosca had been indignant. Root left his trailer for hours at a time, while Mosca seldom left his truck unattended. At night Mosca parked the truck outside his bedroom window. No one in the neighborhood dared come near Mosca’s adobe shack because they feared Mosca. Root had learned to fasten his seat belt and save his breath; no one could win an argument with Mosca, especially not an argument about Mosca’s power or invincibility. Root watched cars and pedestrians scatter in front of them as Mosca casually ignored red lights at intersections. For Mosca this was it. The message had arrived. The Barefoot Hopi was the messenger.

The Hopi had no permanent location but kept moving — one week in Ontario, the next in Guatemala, then to New Mexico to lead demonstrators protesting police brutality in Albuquerque. Because the Hopi traveled around so much there had been other rumors too, rumors the Hopi was a spy or special agent. The Hopi traveled the world to raise political and financial support for the return of the land to indigenous Americans. After five hundred years of colonialism, and the terrible bloodbath in South Africa, the African tribal people had retaken Africa. Now the Hopi had received not only encouragement but financial aid from African nations sympathetic to the Hopi’s cause.

Mosca drove to the big arroyo where the homeless people had made small camps and shelters under mesquite trees. In the beginning, the homeless had mostly been white men who wintered in Tucson then fled the heat; but now the big arroyo sheltered families, and the women and children did not leave when the heat came. Two men wearing green berets watched Root and Mosca from the homeless Vietnam veterans’ camp, which had expanded since the last time they’d seen it.

Mosca seemed slightly embarrassed about the Hopi’s accommodations. Mosca was anxious for Root to understand the Barefoot Hopi traveled like this because of the police and FBI. “He travels like this on purpose,” Mosca said in a confidential tone. “The government’s been tracking him since he got out of prison. They don’t know what he’s up to, but he worries them. See, the Hopi talks to the Mexicans and Africans; he even talks to the whites. People will listen to the Hopi. Even bikers and Ku Klux Klan, because what the Hopi talks about is the day all the walls fall down. Ask him if he means earthquakes or riots and the Hopi smiles and says, ‘Both.’ ”

But the Hopi was not under the mesquite tree; a neat circle of river cobbles held ashes that were still warm. A pair of green shower sandals and a small canvas pack were in the crook of the tree. Mosca said the sandals were the Hopi’s so he must have gone for a walk along the river to feel messages from the earth through his bare feet. The Hopi wouldn’t mind; they’d wait. The Barefoot Hopi’s entire philosophy was to wait; a day would come as had not been seen in five thousand years. On this day, a conjunction would occur; everywhere at once, spontaneously, the prisoners, the slaves, and the dispossessed would rise up. The urge to rise up would come to them through their dreams. All at once, all over the world, police and soldiers would be outnumbered.

The Barefoot Hopi was not more than five feet five inches tall, but he must have weighed almost three hundred pounds. Root did not think the Hopi looked fat; more like the Hopi was built like a brown boulder. The Hopi’s full-moon face was always wider with a big grin; his teeth large and perfect. Root did not think the Hopi looked old enough to have spent ten years in federal prison or five years out already. The Hopi shook Root’s hand warmly and smiled. “So we both know this loco coyote,” the Hopi said, looking at Mosca. Root nodded his head. “I told him you’re all right,” Mosca said, touching Root’s arm. “I told him you’re my brother.”

The Hopi had been a celebrity in prison. The media had followed his crime closely; the cameras had loved the bare feet and the traditional Hopi buckskin moccasins the Hopi carried in his woven-cotton shoulder bag. The cameras had loved the Hopi’s mouthful of perfect, pearly teeth, and his wonderful laugh. He was not sad or angry at all for going to prison. The Barefoot Hopi had confided to Mosca and a few others that he had no regrets about shooting down the helicopter. The helicopter had been hired by rich tourists from Beverly Hills to hover over the Snake Dance at old Oraibi.

Nothing had equalled the exhilaration and joy everyone at the Snake Dance had shared the day the Hopi had shot the helicopter out of the sky. The Hopi had used the carbine he had “liberated” when he had been shipped home from Vietnam. The Barefoot Hopi regretted the injuries to the pilot and passengers, but he did not regret prison. In prison he had discovered the work he must do for the rest of his life; he must work tirelessly until all prisoners went free, and all the walls came down. The Hopi knew he might work to make preparations the rest of his life, yet never see the day when prisons and jails all over the U.S. were hit with riots and strikes simultaneously. But that didn’t discourage the Hopi. One human lifetime wasn’t much; it was over in a flash. Conjunctions and convergences of global proportions might require six or seven hundred years to develop.

They sat under the mesquite tree in the shade. The Barefoot Hopi took a plastic bottle from a crook in the tree and offered Root water. Mosca fished a fat marijuana cigarette from his shirt pocket, and the Hopi struck a match. For a long time they sat in the shade and shared the cigarette in silence. The cicadas in the mesquites were already buzzing. Drought and heat were international news on TV, but in Tucson and the surrounding Sonoran desert, the rainfall had been normal. The cicadas had almost drowned out the whine of semi trucks on Interstate 10 across the big arroyo.

“You going to that conference they’re having here next week?” the Hopi asked. He had stretched out on the ground with a mesquite trunk for a headrest; his eyes were closed. “I’m too old to sit up two nights running with old man Peyote.”

“What conference?” Mosca wanted to know. Mosca sat up and took off his dark glasses; he glanced at Root to see how Root liked the Hopi so far. Root nodded. “Indigenous healers. Native healers,” the Hopi said, “from all over the world.” He was sitting up now, massaging his feet with both hands. He put the palms of both hands flat on the sand in front of him and closed his eyes. “Earthquakes,” the Hopi said. The tribal people had tried to warn the Europeans about the earth’s outrage if humans continued to blast open their mother. But now all the warnings were too late. The Hopi could feel the earth grinding and groaning from Alaska to the South Pole. For days at a time, the ground had not been still in northern California; dozens of volcanos had erupted along the Aleutian chain, land of ten thousand smokes. Underground nuclear test explosions in Nevada had destabilized critical faults along California’s coastal plain. A gigantic earthquake centered in a populous U.S. city might be just the occasion for their national prison uprising.

The Hopi explained that he and his followers were biding their time; they had to watch the rest of the world for signals; they were in close contact with their sisters and brothers on the streets and in the hills on reservations. They were waiting for the right moment — for certain conjunctions between the spirit forces of wind, fire, water, and mountain with the spirit forces of the people, the living and the dead. Otherwise, the prisoners and the people in the streets and hills were certain to be crushed. The U.S. government would not hesitate to firebomb the jails and prisons or hundreds of city blocks. If anyone needed proof of this, the Hopi only had to point to the Attica prison riot years ago and to the blocks of rowhouses fire-bombed by the Philadelphia police.

But the time was drawing closer; the right moment might come after Mexico had been engulfed by unrest and violence. U.S. troops would be sent to Mexico to protect factories owned by U.S. corporations. At the same time, human waves of refugees would pour across the U.S. border from the south. The U.S. government might have enough firepower to crush the coordinated prison-jail uprisings; the government might have enough fire-power to halt the people in the streets and in the hills. But the Barefoot Hopi did not think the U.S. government would be strong enough to fight its own people at home while millions of refugees stormed the border. The Hopi had paused to take a drink of water from a plastic bottle. “Oh yeah,” the Hopi said, “while all this is happening, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado — all the southwestern states will run out of drinking water.”

Just then a black man and a white man, both wearing green berets, approached them from the ’Nam veterans’ camp. The Barefoot Hopi rolled to his feet gracefully for such a big man. He excused himself and went to shake hands with the black man. The black man introduced his companion, and the Barefoot Hopi grinned and shook his hand. Root heard the Hopi tell the black man he’d meet them later.

Root watched the Hopi curl his toes into the sand and wondered what signs or messages the Hopi was getting. Mosca and Root stood up too and shook hands with the Barefoot Hopi. “You should come to this healers’ convention,” the Hopi said, “I’ll make a speech there. You might be interested.” Mosca swore absolutely he would be there; Root had nodded too, although Root thought the Hopi was crazy; no one got prison inmates to cooperate. If they could have helped one another and organized to work together, they would not have been locked up in prison in the first place, that’s what Root thought.

Mosca kept talking as they were driving to Calabazas’s house. The Hopi had begun writing letters while he was in prison and kept writing letters once he got out. The Hopi had written thousands of letters to prisoners all over the United States, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The Hopi had sent cigarettes and food boxes to hundreds and hundreds of men;

otherwise the Hopi would have been rich because he had found a deep freeze full of hundred-dollar bills buried in the desert. In a dream, a giant snake had showed him where to dig, or that was the Hopi’s story. There had also been rumors the Hopi had befriended an armed robber or an investment banker dying of AIDS in the prison hospital. The disclosure of the hidden cash had been made on the death bed.

Mosca had not actually seen one of the Hopi’s letters, but he knew the Hopi wrote to the prisoners about their dreams. The Hopi worked only in the realm of dreams; the Hopi’s letters made no mention of strikes or uprisings; instead the letters had consisted of the Hopi’s stories about the Corn Mother, Old Spider Woman, and the big snake. The black convicts and the Hopi talked about African spirits. Even redneck bikers ate up the Hopi’s stories, but that was because the Hopi had already infiltrated their dreams with the help of the spirit world.

CLOSE CALL

ROOT HAD NOTICED Mosca kept glancing into the rearview mirror, so Root looked over his shoulder and saw a Border Patrol car on their tail. Mosca had pretended to ignore the Border Patrol car and kept talking, but Root saw Mosca was tense. Root watched Mosca’s hand on the.357 magnum between them on the seat. Root had not prayed so much as he had focused all his mental energy at Mosca’s brain with a message. Don’t reach for the gun, they’ll go away; or they’ll run names and they’ll let us go; please, Mosca, please, Root had concentrated. Don’t get mad, Mosca, don’t blow their heads off while I’m with you. The last time the Border Patrol had stopped Mosca, he had sworn he would never again give any migra pig ID or answer any questions except with his.357. By some miracle the Border Patrol unit had turned off the street without stopping them. Root wiped sweat from his forehead.

Mosca glanced in the rearview mirror as he spoke. His dark eyes glistened with feeling. “Well, you are right. I almost killed me some pigs then.” Mosca watched Root’s face for a reaction. “Only one thing stopped me—”

“You didn’t want me to go to the gas chamber with you,” Root joked.

Mosca shook his head. “Because pigs are low on my list.” Then Mosca slammed his fist into the padded dash. Root thought he heard bones crack. Mosca crushed the accelerator to the floor. The big four-wheel-drive truck leaped forward, and Root thanked the god or spirit who had given Mosca empty lanes ahead. When Mosca was upset, his truck became a lethal weapon. Big tears rolled down Mosca’s face. “I wanted to blast the pig’s face off! I wanted to smash his teeth down his throat so much! Fucking gringo pigs! Where’s my green card? I’m a fucking U.S. citizen! I don’t fucking need no kind of card! My people lived here in palaces while Englishmen still lived in caves!”

Root was relieved when he saw the side street to Calabazas’s place; Mosca turned off Oracle so fast he drove over the curb and the tires squealed. Root felt the seat belt harness tighten around him; this wouldn’t be the first vehicle Mosca had rolled over. Root didn’t blame Mosca for his fury; there were Border Patrol agents all over Tucson stopping anyone who looked dark complected or “foreign.” Root himself had been stopped at Pima College where the agents waited outside classrooms where students learned English as a second language.

“Yeah, it’s really fucked,” Root said, “and all the white people in Tucson love it because it makes them feel safer.” Root had listened to his family for years. They had Mexican relatives, it was true, through Root’s grandfather. But Root’s mother and the others had been careful not to socialize with the Mexican cousins and kinfolk. Root’s father liked to joke the Irish weren’t choosy. But his father had lied; his father had not wanted a son who limped or sounded like a retard when he tried to talk. Root had learned a lot about his family and about white people when he was eighteen. They were afraid when they looked at him. They didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened to him. They would have been happier if they had buried him. What was Caucasian was perfect, and Root’s skull and brain were no longer perfect. His mother was not surprised. Root listened to her tell her friends who had come to visit him in the hospital; one of her five was bound to be a “wild one.” His mother never said “crazy Mexican,” but they all knew what she meant.

“But that’s okay,” Mosca said through clenched teeth as he turned onto the gravel of Calabazas’s driveway. “We’ll take care of the pigs when the big day comes!” Mosca slowed the truck and looked intently at Root. Root shook his head. The Hopi must be crazy. White inmates hated black inmates and Hispanic inmates, and vice versa. Snitches were everywhere. Even if rioting started, what was the purpose? Mosca had been driving down Calabazas’s driveway and braked sharply. “The purpose? What’s the purpose?” Mosca started laughing, then stamped the accelerator so hard the big four-wheel-drive fishtailed and splashed gravel all the way to the big cottonwood tree in the yard. “Making big trouble is the purpose,” Mosca said. “Those fucking pigs won’t know which way to run!”

A SERIES OF POPES HAD BEEN DEVILS

ROOT SAW CARS he did not recognize parked next to Calabazas’s pickup; Mosca shrugged his shoulders. “Church people,” he said. Mosca did not care, but the strange cars made Root nervous. Liria and Sarita knew better than to hide refugees there, but sometimes they held meetings at the house.

Calabazas had been sitting outside under the cottonwood tree in the remains of an old recliner chair, drinking a beer. There was a beat-up Styrofoam ice chest next to the chair. The sun had already dropped behind the trees along the river. Calabazas grinned at them. His hair was white at the temples and his mustache was silver. As they dragged lawn chairs to the tree, Calabazas popped open two more cans of beer. Calabazas looked a little drunk.

“You still trying to figure out the meaning of life, old man?” Mosca said.

“That’s right,” Calabazas said, “I thought I better get started on it while I’m still alive.” A cool wind rose from the river and stirred the cottonwood leaves. The three men drank silently and watched the sunset blaze red-orange across the sky. Actually Calabazas had been thinking about time.

In the darkness Mosca could make out figures, but the voices were whispers. Cars started and turned down the driveway. The meeting was over. Mosca was already drunk. Mosca said he didn’t trust anything connected with the Catholic Church, and he didn’t trust anyone connected with the Catholic Church either. Mosca was always ready to bicker with Liria or Sarita over the Church. Mosca had been restless for weeks. He wanted action, he wasn’t happy with the things he had bought. The new clothes, new truck, and better whores had been exciting to dream about, but once he had them, he had realized how worthless they were. The clothes and the truck had changed nothing. The whores had worked like vacuum cleaners sucking him off, and for the money, Mosca understood why men invested in plastic inflatable women or Japanese battery-operated vaginas.

What did the Church want? Was it different from what the generals wanted, or from what the rich wanted from the poor and the Indians? All the Church had ever done was snatch food from the mouths of the hungry in the name of Jesus Christ. The nuns and priests who called themselves the Liberation Church were puppets used by the Church to give poor people the illusion the Church was on their side. Anytime they wanted, the Church could have stopped their clergy from smuggling political refugees out of the South. But over the centuries the Church had learned to keep potential troublemakers, priests and nuns and “penitents” such as Sarita and Liria, safely occupied.

The Church demanded the Indians pray only to Jesus. The Church didn’t want the people to listen to the spirits of ancestors or animals or rocks. The Church wanted Indians to feel and think like whites. Mosca wasn’t fooled; it was like the routine the pigs had: bad cop, good cop. The Church played the good cop. Smuggling out a few political refugees gave the Church good publicity.

Mosca had got himself worked up. From the Catholic Church he had leaped to the Italians and the Mafia; the pope was part of the Mafia. Mosca knew his catechism. Mosca had been swatted with a flyswatter by the nuns if he did not repeat his catechism. The pope could stop Church sacraments to anyone for any reason; yet the pope had not stopped the sacraments to the army officers who hunted down and shot Yaqui women and children. The Church had two faces it wore in Mexico; both were mask faces. The truth was the Devil had taken over the Catholic Church sometime after Saint Peter died. After the takeover, the Devil had declared himself pope; a series of devils had been pope, and often the popes had had numerous wives and illegitimate children. The popes had been poisoners and sexual inverts because the devils lived in them and in their priests and nuns, whom Martin Luther had finally caught at their devil Masses and lewd celebrations. The Devil, the Church, and the Mafia were a world conspiracy as Mosca saw it.

Root had been baptized a Catholic, but had refused to have a priest visit him in the hospital. Root had stopped believing a couple of years before the accident. He didn’t care what Mosca said about the Mafia and the Church; but he had been surprised when Mosca started talking about Max and Sonny Blue. Root had not heard Mosca talk about the Italians for a while; the Tucson families had had the pie split up before the Italians ever got to Tucson. The Mafia had been warned by the other white men; leave the border to the Indians unless you have wings. The Indians were allied with the desert inferno; all others died there. Mafia nephews and son-in-laws bought “legitimate” small businesses — sausage shops in shopping malls, or pinball and vending-machine concessions or private garbage collection. Max Blue’s wife kept buying real estate.

Mosca had always enjoyed imaginary plots in which he surprised everyone and betrayed them all. Mosca loved to imagine the expression on Calabazas’s face when he discovered his wife had fucked to death a Church monsignor. Even with the old monsignor dead, Calabazas had lost his wife to the Church. Having the other sister was no consolation that Mosca could see; both women were under the control of priests. Sarita had taken up the refugee work only because the priests had threatened her with eternal hell for killing the old monsignor with sex. Churches had always made clever use of the money and manpower of sinners. Penitent sinners would do anything the Church told them to do.

THE HOPI HAS ANSWERS FOR EVERYTHING

ROOT WANTED to get Mosca off the subject of the Church so he could find out more about the Barefoot Hopi. Root asked Calabazas if he had ever met the Hopi. Mosca had, of course, answered before Calabazas himself could speak; no, only Mosca knew the Hopi, but soon people all over the world would hear about the Hopi. The Hopi was the organizer. The Hopi had dedicated his life to one day of mutual cooperation among all incarcerated persons in North America and in Mexico. Mosca was high and drunk. After his release, the Barefoot Hopi had traveled to prisons all over the United States where he had petitioned federal courts to obtain special permission as a clergyman to perform religious rites for imprisoned Native Americans.

In prison they’d all learned to respect the Hopi because he had continued to practice his religious beliefs. The Hopi claimed his religion included everyone; everyone was born belonging to the earth. Some Hopis and other Indians had called the Barefoot Hopi a witch because he talked about the dead as if their spirits still hovered among the living. Those who objected to talk about the spirits of the dead were either Christians or staunchly traditional Navajos and Apaches uncomfortable with the subject of dead souls.

Mosca had attended all of the Hopi’s Sunday services while he was in prison, and he had watched how the Hopi’s strategy worked. At first there had only been Indians and Mexicans; that week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people. Mosca had listened to the Hopi talk for over an hour.

As the months passed, more guys showed up, and they had permission to meet for two hours. Then a few blacks had come, blacks who believed they had Native American ancestry. After the black Indians, then other blacks had showed up; these guys had been quiet and never spoke; last came the white guys — some who were mixed bloods, and others who felt like Indians in their hearts — whatever that meant. The Hopi’s religion made no distinctions. A few had showed up because they had heard wild rumors. The Hopi was always aware some might be spies.

Mosca took a big hit off the joint and passed it to Calabazas; he puffed out his cheeks and chest and held his breath until he started coughing. “You should hear the Hopi tell it,” Mosca said. “He’s in town for some kind of healers’ convention. You should go.” Calabazas and Root had both nodded, and the three sat listening to the sirens and what sounded like gunshots in the distance. A police helicopter flew over the neighborhood flashing searchlights over roofs and backyards. Mosca’s attention shifted briefly to the police helicopter. “The Hopi has an answer for everything,” Mosca went on dreamily. “We know what the Hopi’s answer to a helicopter is. Boom!” Mosca pointed his finger at the sky.

“You they’ll put in the gas chamber,” Calabazas said. “The Hopi had an excuse; he was protecting his religion.”

“They might shoot me, but they won’t put me in no gas chamber,” Mosca said. “There won’t be any more prisons or gas chambers left by then anyway.”

Calabazas and Root had learned not to argue with Mosca. Root could tell Calabazas was as skeptical as he was about any plans to organize a national uprising of prison riots and jailbreaks all over the United States. It wasn’t likely all the prisons and jails would participate, and everything in the Hopi’s plan depended upon simultaneous riots so that police and other law enforcement would be overwhelmed. Calabazas had asked what the Barefoot Hopi planned to do about the National Guard and the U.S. army. Even if state police and law enforcement were overwhelmed, there were still the military and of course, citizen volunteers. The air force would drop bombs on jails and prisons to stop the uprisings. Root had expected an angry outburst from Mosca when Calabazas asked about the air force; instead, Mosca had remained calm.

“Well, you’re thinking just like the white man thinks, aren’t you?” Mosca said. “Listen to the Hopi. Army, Air Force, or Marines — the Hopi doesn’t worry about them. When the time comes, they’ll all be busy too. Anyway, bombs and guns are the least important weapons. The power lies in the presence of the spirits and their effect on our enemies’ morale.” The Barefoot Hopi was not the only one in contact with the spirits. Mosca reminded Calabazas and Root about the spirit voice in his own right shoulder. So far the spirit voice had not said much. A spirit didn’t actually need a voice to communicate; the spirit put the idea into your head out of the blue. When the spirit had filled the people, then all at once the people would know what they must do. The Hopi didn’t mean any Christian Holy Spirit either.

The Hopi refused even to argue whether it was one spirit with many dimensions or many spirits with singular dimensions. That was white man talk. Instead the Hopi had talked about Buffalo Man, who had seduced Yellow Woman in the old stories. Buffalo Man’s spirit had moved from a human body to a buffalo bull’s body effortlessly.

BOOK TWO. THE WARRIORS GETTING OLD

IT HAD BEEN a long time since Calabazas had got so drunk by himself; Mosca and Root had left hours before. Calabazas liked the way the sound of the crickets and his own breathing were in harmony. The whole world had gone crazy after Truman dropped the atomic bombs; the few old-time people still living then had said the earth would never be the same. Human beings could expect to be forsaken by the rain clouds, and all the animals and plants would disappear. All over the world Europeans had laughed at indigenous people for worshiping the rain clouds, the mountains, and the trees. But now Calabazas had lived long enough to see the white people stop laughing as all the trees were cut and all the animals killed, and all the water dirtied or used up. White people were scared because they didn’t know where to go or what to use up and pollute next.

It was after three but neither Liria nor Sarita had come home. The U.S. government did not want the people Liria and Sarita and their Church comrades were smuggling across the border. Zeta and Lecha would say right there was the best reason to do it — because the U.S. didn’t want any more brown Indians or white Spanish-speakers on the streets of Los Angeles or El Paso. Still Calabazas tended to agree with Mosca that the motives of the Church might not be as simple and pure as the fervent nuns and priests imagined.

Calabazas took full responsibility for how things had turned out with Sarita and Liria. At one time Calabazas had spent a great deal of time with Zeta on his mind. The two beautiful sisters hadn’t been enough trouble; Calabazas had not been able to resist Zeta, who called herself an enemy of the United States government. Zeta swore each shipment of contraband was a victory against the United States government.

Calabazas liked to watch sunrise the way the old people had when he was a child. He thought it was funny the way the human mind only copied itself over and over, yet everything found itself radically changed. He watched the sky but he did not see what they had seen. Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves — each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.

Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.

Calabazas no longer recognized himself in the stories Mosca or the others told about Calabazas’s adventures thirty years before. The man in the stories sounded familiar, and Calabazas could recall what had happened, but the man he had once been was gone. Liria and Sarita had recently accused him of getting soft inside like white-bread dough; maybe they were right. Most of his life Calabazas had traveled back and forth across the border in a beat-up old truck or leading a string of pack burros on his little spotted mule. Calabazas had not been careful with money. If he had worked alone, and for himself, he might have been rich, though who knows? But Calabazas had worked with the people who had loved and cared for him as a child; he had worked with his relatives and his clanspeople in the Sonoran mountain villages. He had routinely made advances and gave out loans for no interest. He split profits fifty-fifty with village farmers, but he paid all the expenses himself as his pledge to them. He had not been a good businessman. He had not bought land and new houses; he had not bought gold or guns as Zeta had. He had given Sarita and Liria all the money they had ever asked for.

Calabazas could also feel his own time running inside himself, pounded out by his heart. The bones and meat hauled the soul around for fifty or sixty years then let go. He had seen a great many changes in the United States and in Mexico during his lifetime, and they had all been ominous. Calabazas had asked the elders, but native people around Tucson could not remember when they had seen so many white people — women and children — living in cars and in camps under the trees.

Now even crackpots such as Mosca’s pal the Hopi were planning and plotting. All the past summer, Calabazas had watched the riots and the looting in a dozen U.S. cities. Calabazas had noticed an important difference: this time the rioters did not loot or set fires in black neighborhoods. They had set fire to Hollywood instead, and hundreds and hundreds of both black and white youths had blocked fire fighters and fought police on Sunset Boulevard. The rioters had chanted, “Burn, Hollywood, burn!”

Calabazas remembered the riots and looting in the sixties vividly. The U.S. president and Congress had done nothing for the poor until the poor had taken their anger to the streets. The people had high hopes for the war on poverty, but soon U.S. strategy makers had seen a better way to stop the riots in U.S. cities. If those young black and brown men rioting wanted to fight, then the U.S. had just the place for them in Southeast Asia. Those who had managed to survive Vietnam had been returned to their neighborhoods by the United States government addicted and maimed to ensure they wouldn’t take to the streets and fight anymore.

Calabazas had given up on politics. Politics got you murdered in short order. Calabazas didn’t trust any government; Calabazas didn’t trust the Catholic Church either. Mosca had a good point: what business did the Church have removing political dissidents and activists? How were the people of those areas ever to rise up without their own leaders? The Church removed dissidents thousands of miles to the United States to keep them from causing any more trouble.

Maybe there was something wrong with him, maybe time had worn something down inside Calabazas, as Liria had accused, and the flame had burned out. He was not ignorant. He had listened to the old ones bitterly recount the stories of the great war for their land; the people had never got tired of recounting Yoeme’s narrow escape from the hangman’s noose during the flu epidemic. Yoeme had been a big troublemaker among the Yaquis even before the revolution. The Mexican government had kept a bounty on her scalp; only Zapata might have pardoned her for her fierce war against the government, and the whites had murdered him.

Calabazas had been lucky with his life; he had been born during the lull in the great war and had bought himself a safe perch. But now the war was spreading, and in a few years there would be no safe perch for anyone. Yoeme’s great war for the land was still being fought; only now it wasn’t just the Yaquis or even the Tohano O’Dom who were fighting. The war was the same war it had always been; the people were still fighting for their land. The war would go on until the people took back the land.

Calabazas reached into the ice chest for another beer but found only melting ice and water. He went inside to get another six-pack from the refrigerator and rolled himself a fat joint to smoke outside. He had not stayed up all night for years, not since he had worked across the border. But tonight he was wide-awake. He could not stop thinking about Mexico. Rumors and conflicting reports came from village couriers, and from Salvadorian and Guatemalan refugees. Mexico was chaos. The Mexican economy had collapsed, and fleeing government officials had stripped the National Treasury for their getaway. The army and police had not been paid for weeks. Battles had broken out between the Federal police and the local police. The citizens were fighting both the army and the federal police. Fighting between the Citizens’ army and the Mexican army had cut off the Federal District from deliveries and food supplies. Electrical power lines and water-main lines to the center of the city had been dynamited. Thousands in Mexico City were starving each day, but Mexico’s president had refused the people emergency food. The Mexican air force had opened fire on thousands of squatters rioting for food at the entrance to the city’s main dump. Hundreds of squatters, women and children, had died as army bulldozers had leveled miles and miles of shanties and burned lean-tos. Within hours of the big fire at the city dump, hundreds of thousands of rats had swarmed through Mexico City, where starving people in the streets had caught the rats and roasted them. There were rumors of bubonic plague and of cholera.

The army and police had seized food and livestock so the Yaquis and other people once more headed for the high mountains where they had fled during the last revolution. In their mountain strongholds the people had already begun the vigil; the people were praying the white men would kill off one another completely. All the people had to do was be patient and wait. Five hundred years, or five lifetimes, were nothing to people who had already lived in the Americas for twenty or thirty thousand years. The prophecies said gradually all traces of Europeans in America would disappear and, at last, the people would retake the land.

The old-time people had warned that Mother Earth would punish those who defiled and despoiled her. Fierce, hot winds would drive away the rain clouds; irrigation wells would go dry; all the plants and animals would disappear. Only a few humans would survive. Calabazas knew the story by heart, but he was not sure if he believed it anymore.

DEAD BRITISH POET AT YAQUI EASTER DANCE

THE SPIRIT VOICE in Mosca’s right shoulder groaned and creaked odd messages. Mosca had not been the same since he had discovered the spirit voice in his right shoulder. Root did not ridicule Mosca because he had heard Mosca’s shoulder make creaking or popping sounds even when Mosca had not moved. Root didn’t think the spirit voice could be any crazier than Mosca was himself; the spirit voice might even be an improvement. The spirit voice had told Mosca to get Sonny Blue and his brother and cousin. So Mosca had spent the day at the racetrack, consulting his paid informants in the shade of the grandstand.

Sonny Blue and Bingo had brought two strippers from the Stage Coach to watch Angelo’s filly race. They had made a high-profile arrival in a red Testarossa followed by a Lincoln. Mosca’s spies had taken in everything. Sonny Blue and Bingo had been laughing, bragging to the strippers about “being met” at the airstrip near Yuma. The people behind Sonny and Bingo were so big that a special code had been radioed to the Border Patrol and state police advising them to ask no further questions and to let them go. The authorities had not even opened the back of Greenlee’s truck or touched a single suitcase. “They think they own this town,” Mosca told Root with a big grin. “Those Italian boys are crazy.” Mosca’s spies had got a great deal of information, and he had plans in his mind already. Root had nothing to worry about; Mosca wanted to work on this alone.

Mosca refused to admit he had done anything wrong. The confusion and crowds of tourists milling with Yaqui men and old Yaqui women on lawn chairs had been exactly what Mosca had counted on for his strike. A great tactician took advantage of the unexpected; Mosca’s spies knew Sonny Blue’s big buyers from New York had been warned about doing business in Tucson. The New Yorkers had demanded a crowded public place for the meeting. Oddly enough, the New Yorkers had specified the Yaqui Easter Dance as the meeting place because they wanted to see real Indians.

The British poet had been much taller than the other spectators at the Yaqui Easter deer dance, and Mosca’s bullets had gone high and missed just about everyone. The bullets had missed children, and anyone seated or kneeling. Mosca said it was the white man’s own fault the bullet had got him between the eyes; the poet had been too tall, and he had been impolite to stand in front of all the other spectators when really, he should have stood far at the back where he belonged. The bullet wouldn’t have found him back there.

What a sight! Here was the British poet lying dead in the dirt under the big ramada of freshly cut cottonwood boughs, and the poet’s three ugly girlfriends all were hysterical and crying. The cops pointed guns at the sobbing women as if they had shot the poet, and not the gunman, who witnesses said was small, thin, and wore a Yaqui pharisee mask, a cowboy shirt, blue jeans, and beat-up cowboy boots. The stupidity of Tucson’s police was amazing. They had immediately suspected the victim — the dead tourist — because he had carried a British passport and lived at a Santa Fe address. Tucson police generally worked on the assumption that victims somehow deserved what they had got; the police task was to determine exactly how the poet had earned a bullet between the eyes. The easy and most reliable assumption for Tucson police had been that the Santa Fe quartet were smuggling cocaine to the rich artists.

The dead poet had immediately been forgotten because the Tucson police now had the three sobbing women. The report of a short, dark Indian male seen leaving the area with a handgun, did not interest the police as long as they had three attractive women to interrogate. By the time the dead man’s three female companions had been cleared of all suspicion, the trail of the gunman was cold. Mosca’s excuse for his bad aim with the pistol had been the mask; the bullet had whizzed over the short wop’s head into the poet standing a few feet behind him. Sonny Blue had known instantly the bullet was intended for him, and Sonny had panicked and both had pulled out pistols. Bingo was already running and pushing and stumbling through the crowd. The New Yorkers had tried to follow.

The crowd watching the all-night deer dance had not been alarmed at the sound of shots because all evening Yaqui children had been lighting firecrackers. If Bingo and Sonny had not panicked, if they and their New Yorker pals had remained calm, the Tucson police might never have noticed them in the crowd. Mosca’s years of experience with police had shown him cops were like sharks or stupid fish that respond only to sudden movement.

After he had fired the shot, Mosca had casually tucked the 9mm in his pants under his T-shirt, then coolly moved through the crowd to the attaché case Sonny Blue had dropped. Mosca picked up the case and walked in leisurely mannner until he reached the darkness in the church parking lot, where he removed the mask and tossed it in the back of a parked pickup truck. He didn’t mean any disrespect to the mask or to the deer spirit, but this was war. The 9mm had a date with old man Santa Cruz River, but Mosca had stayed around in the parking lot to watch the police have fun with Sonny Blue and Bingo.

The New Yorkers had been lucky enough to be arrested in the deer dance ramada surrounded with hundreds of witnesses. But Sonny Blue and Bingo had been caught in the dark parking lot. Mosca had watched the undercover cops take turns kicking Sonny Blue and Bingo between the legs and in the belly and face. Mosca had heard the cracks and thuds, Bingo’s groans, and Sonny’s muffled profanity.

Mosca thought it was funny. The cops had got their wires crossed. Max Blue had paid off the police chief, and in return the police had mashed Sonny’s balls and had knocked out two of Bingo’s front teeth. Mosca had waved the attaché case above his head with both hands. “Finders keepers!” he said; he was triumphant. The attaché case was full of New York money.

Calabazas has told Mosca before that he had not expected Mosca to last six weeks, let alone six years in the smuggling business. Mosca always laughs and shakes his head, fully in agreement. He is sincere too. Because Mosca may refuse to admit he has done anything stupid, but Mosca is as surprised as Calabazas about his own survival. As far as Root has been able to figure, Mosca counts survival as the absolute proof. And here he is again, Root thinks. Everything done wrong, the worst possible sequence of events — but Mosca gets away with everything: the money, even the shooting. Because Sonny Blue had stepped right in the trap, panicked after the shooting.

Although things might have gone better, Mosca had been hurt that Calabazas had called him “loco” when almost everything had gone exactly as planned; and now Mosca would begin phase two, which was “drop a dime,” dial 911 and leave the names of Bingo and Sonny Blue. When Calabazas saw the results, he would understand that the shooting at Yaqui Easter marked the beginning of the end for Max, Sonny, and Bingo. Blow away your Blues! Mosca was counting on maximum trouble and misunderstanding between the Tucson police and old man Blue and his ass-wipe sons. Whatever the “arrangements” were between Max Blue and the Tucson PD, shooting tourists from Santa Fe hadn’t been one of them.

Mosca had been so delighted he had even done a little victory dance before he got in his truck. None of it would have been possible if Sonny Blue had not frozen with panic. Everyone had seen the “Italian stallions” with their pistols pulled after the tall tourist fell dead. Calabazas was getting old and soft; his mind was coming unstrung almost like a white man’s. In time, Calabazas would see the genius of Mosca’s plan.

TUCSON POLICE BRUTALITY

SONNY COULD FEEL his chest tighten and his heart pound when he remembered them swarming over him with.45 automatics shoved hard against both ears and the top of his head. They had smiled as they’d kicked him in the balls, then in the back; and then they had kicked him in the stomach and in the balls again. Sonny had been on the ground puking when a pig in uniform walked up and kicked him in the side of the head. The cops were talking about the briefcases and who had grabbed what; a suspect had been seen fleeing with a briefcase.

Sonny had let the waves of nausea and pounding pain in his ear and head drive his anger harder and deeper; he wouldn’t just get mad, he would get even. If it took the rest of his life, he was going to fight his own little war with the pigs; and his father would never have to know about it. Fuck the million-dollar payoffs to the Tucson pigs. Fuck all the money! What difference did money make if pigs were all over your ass every time you stepped out the door? What good was anything if the pigs beat you up whenever they felt like it?

Sonny had taken the worst beating because too many curious people had gathered before the undercover cops could start beating Bingo. People standing nearby had helped pull the undercover cops off Bingo, but there had been no one to pull the pigs off Sonny. Sonny had been trapped on the far side of the car in the darkness.

Max had promised that the undercover officers and cops in uniform who had kicked Sonny would get what was coming to them. Max had asked Sonny to trust him, to leave the matter in his hands. Angelo and Bingo had both tried to calm Sonny, and to remind him everything was okay, and there had been no arrests except for the New Yorkers caught with the cocaine. But Angelo saw the reassurances had only made Sonny Blue more furious, so Angelo and Bingo kept quiet. They would have to leave Sonny alone for a while, and they would meet the shipments for Mr. B. as scheduled. Angelo and Bingo had even talked to Max Blue alone, to ask if Max could send Sonny on a Caribbean vacation for a while. Because all Sonny had wanted to talk about had been ideal assassination weapons and schemes for getting the undercover cops or the pigs in uniform. Sonny had bought detailed information as well as the names and home addresses of undercover police from the county attorney’s office computer. Angelo noticed Max got pale when he learned that Sonny had already got the cops’ work schedules. The three of them were silent for a moment, then Max had excused himself. Sonny Blue refused the offer of a Caribbean vacation.

Angelo had noticed a change in Bingo since the cops had jumped them; Bingo seemed happier and more confident about himself. Bingo told Angelo he had always been scared of pain — terrified of being slugged and kicked. But now that Bingo had been hit and kicked by the pigs, he was no longer afraid. He had imagined the pain and the humiliation to be far worse than they had actually been. Of course the big Yaqui Indian women had dragged the undercover pigs off him; the cops had been disgraced by the three-hundred-pound women.

Max Blue was angry at the Tucson police over the missing briefcase full of cash, not because they had kicked the shit out of Sonny Blue. Sonny had needed the beating; Bingo too. Max had been surprised at how angry Sonny Blue was; Max didn’t want Sonny to do something stupid. The Tucson police had their days numbered anyway. Once a U.S. border crisis alert began, Tucson and the entire Mexican border area would be placed under the jurisdiction of the military police or Federal marshalls. Large amounts of cash made the pigs piss their pants. “National security” flights and shipments had been hijacked and stolen by local police in Miami and Baton Rouge. That had been Mr. B.’s reason for hiring Max Blue and for the relocation of his operations in Tucson.

When the senator and Max played golf alone, Max received his “national security briefing.” The senator served on the select committee on National Security. The senator had invaluable sources to leaks at the highest levels. The senator had already been deeded ten acres of prime commercial property in future downtown Venice, Arizona.

The senator claimed the CIA had bought members of the Mexican aristocracy fifty years ago, and it was only a matter of time before the Mexican president and his cabinet would request U.S. military aid and intervention to prevent the antigovernment forces from taking Mexico City. How could the senator be certain of the events to come in Mexico? Their mutual friend, Mr. B. Mr. B. had been working for more than ten years against the communists in Mexico and Guatemala.

AMBITIONS

MAX PLAYED ALONE on the back eighteen holes after the judge and the police chief had gone. With each stroke he was driving away the stink of the judge and the police chief. He loved to watch the arc of the ball and the way wind currents held the ball aloft perfectly suspended as if time no longer existed. Max enjoyed the collision of the fairways and greens with the desert boulders, cactus, and shrubs. Desert mesquite and paloverde trees along the edges of the fairway grew tall from the golf course water. Some players were disturbed by the desert setting, and before they left the clubhouse, they would ask Max about rattlesnakes and coyotes. Max had never walked into the desert from the fairway. The desert meant danger and death, but he did not mind that they were close by. The whole thrill of the game was to follow the little ball on its hazardous journey from hole to hole safely. Max feared nothing as long as the sky was open, high overhead and no low, gray clouds of overcast closed overhead like a coffin lid.

Max had laughed at what Tucsonians called “rainstorms”; compared to New Jersey’s gray, suffocating overcast with rain for days on end, even Tucson’s violent summer thunderstorms were trifles. The sun was almost always shining or partially visible in some part of the valley even as torrential rains fell at other locations. Even downpours did not last long; Max would wait five minutes wrapped in a rain parka, then go right on playing. Max did not stop even when the wind gusted violently and rain mixed with sand stung his face; he kept his head down and swung with all his weight behind the golf club. Storms were invigorating. When the lightning sirens were sounded, the other golfers scurried to the clubhouse for shelter; but Max loved the desert storms. Nothing compared with the first smell of rain in the dry desert air.

Max had briefed Sonny, Bingo, and Angelo. The job was simply to count the suitcases as they were unloaded from the plane. No screwups; that had been Mr. B.’s peeve with others he had worked with in the past — real lowlifes, military and former enlisted men from Florida to Louisiana. Max doesn’t tell the boys that for an operation such as Mr. B.’s, Tucson is a minor-league pit stop. Max let Sonny, Bingo, and Angelo eat it up when Mr. B. said, “Arizona is a welcome change”; B. was a liar. B. had owned the airfield west of Tucson all through the Vietnam War. Max had been introduced to B. by the senator. The government later had got cold feet, but Max had been paid a fabulous sum anyway. The deal had been to supply professional assassins for certain “targets” in a half dozen U.S. cities.

Max knew how Sonny and Bingo felt about the vending machine business — rancid sandwiches and video games jammed with metal slugs. Those jobs had been good experience when they first got out of school, but now Sonny especially was impatient to make money. If everything went smoothly, then Max planned to let the boys run the operation. Max looked at Sonny and Bingo and felt uneasy about the offspring, who did not resemble him or Leah. Not that he thinks Leah cheated. Sonny and Bingo are his sons, but Max saw the family resemblances; they had favored the weaker side of the family. Max remembers his older brother, Bill. Bill is written all over that kid Angelo. Max has never known what to make of the family — his family, and the business. Max feels nothing anymore for “family”—not even his own sons. Leah used to argue with Max that his feelings for people would return, that the doctors had already warned her that Max might experience temporary personality changes including anger, depression, or some memory loss. When Max looks at Leah, he tries to recall memories with feelings for Leah but there is nothing.

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 ground 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 certain 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.”

These upstairs girls were reserved for special customers, the madam said, opening the door. One rule the judge had was never to look at a woman’s face; women’s faces did not attract him. The judge imagined the police chief ramming it in from behind dog-style while the whore braced herself with both hands against the steel bedstead. The judge felt his cock twitch and his balls shift against his inner thighs as he imagined the police chief’s cock, swollen, stiff, and blood-red, its nob oozing sperm. That got the judge ready. When he thrust his cock into her, the whore had gasped and pressed her hands against her belly, moaning that he was too deep and too large for her. She tried to move out from under him, but he seized her nipples and pulled her back under him, thrusting even harder and faster. He slid a hand down to her cunt, engorged and swollen so tight; the pressure had popped out her little pink jalapeño, wet and erect as he seized it. His fingers were locked tight so she could not protect her little pepper, and he would pull and squeeze until he milked her dry, until her little jalapeño was flat and white with a trace of dried blood on its tip. The judge could not remember when he had enjoyed a visit to a whorehouse so much; of course all the pleasure had been due to the police chief’s companionship.

Judge Arne had not seen the police chief since the El Paso lawmen’s convention. The judge had no interest in the cocktail and dinner parties in Tucson. He preferred to work with his dogs or play a little golf. The judge and the senator played golf with Max Blue on Thursday afternoons when the judge was free and the senator was in town. This week though, the police chief would join them. There had been trouble between Tucson police and Sonny Blue over a shooting. A few days later, the judge had got a call from the senator’s office about Sonny Blue and a mix-up with Customs and DEA over one of the “special planeloads.” Sonny Blue was batting zero.

After the U.S. military had been accused of smuggling drugs from Southeast Asia and Central America in military aircaft, Mr. B. and others had turned to the private sector, to independent contractors such as Max Blue and his wife, Leah. The arrangement had been for Customs and the DEA to look the other way; “authorized” aircraft were allowed to cross border radar without identifying themselves or destination. The judge had learned about the national security plan some years before. He had been approached by special Treasury agents on behalf of a convicted cocaine smuggler the judge had been about to sentence to thirty years in prison.

The judge had startled the special Treasury agents with his cooperation; they told him many judges at the federal level were reluctant to cooperate even after the national security issues had been explained. The judge luxuriated in the praise of the special agents. They were relieved to be dealing with a man of his intelligence and sophistication. They confided that other federal judges had demanded numerous delicate telephone calls from senators and even higher before they had agreed to cooperate. Occasionally, the special agents even had to withdraw their requests from judges who refused to acknowledge the urgency of the secret strategy and agenda for national security.

The judge was sophisticated enough to understand the strategy for national security: cocaine smuggling was a lesser evil than communism. Cocaine smuggling could be tolerated for the greater good, which was the destruction of communism in Central and South America. The fight against communism was costly. A planeload of cocaine bought a planeload of dynamite, ammunition, and guns for anticommunist fighters and elite death squads in the jungles and cities of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Communism was a far greater threat to the United States than drug addiction was. Addicts did not stir up the people or start riots the way communists did. Addicts didn’t live long, and what time they had was devoted to scoring to get high or stealing money to score with.

In recent years the judge had received more and more requests from various agencies involved with issues of national security. The judge, like all dedicated conservatives, understood the greatest dangers to a nation lay within, among its own people who had become degenerate and had betrayed their Christian nation. The judge had not been fooled by the communists; he knew their secret agenda to rule the world had not been altered. All civilized nations had secret agendas known only to a select circle of government figures. Fortunes and national fates could not be left in the hands of the ignorant masses. The judge was proud to do his part against the spread of communism in the Americas.

Max Blue wanted to meet for a golf game pronto because Tucson police had roughed up Sonny Blue and Bingo pretty badly the other night and a large amount of cash had been “lost.” The judge had seen police out of control before in Tucson. One of the reasons the city council had hired the new police chief was because he had grown up in Phoenix and had no relatives in Tucson. Tucson’s last police scandal had involved police officers fencing stolen goods for family and friends involved in car-stereo thefts.

Police were useful to the secret agenda, but only as long as they were kept under control. Control and order were all that mattered; even the senator and Max Blue had agreed on that. That was why they played golf every Thursday; to keep all lines of communication open; to minimize accidents or mistakes such as the ones Sonny Blue had made the week before. Mistakes led to disorder; accidents led to loss of control. The judge planned to ask the police chief to have lunch with him soon so he could give the chief a little “fatherly” advice. The judge would particularly have to caution the police chief about the gradual deterioration that had taken place with law enforcement in Pima County. From two or three cops stealing car stereos for extra cash, the ring of car-stereo thieves had grown until the police had been working with the largest retail car-stereo sellers in the state. The judge recalled the burglary ring might never have been detected except that the cops had devoted more and more time to stealing and fencing car CD players, and less and less time to their actual patrols and paperwork. Finally, other officers had got fed up with the extra work and someone had ratted to the local press. What had been lacking was control; the former police chief had been a lazy bastard who only wanted to collect his piece of action.

Max Blue had asked the judge to call the senator too, but the judge had persuaded Max to cool off a little, that he was upset and trying to make federal cases out of a little misunderstanding and an unfortunate mix-up. There was no need for the senator to be there when he and the police chief were coming. The matter was trivial. No one had really been hurt except a tourist, and Sonny Blue had not fired the fatal shot.

Somewhere the judge had read about a South American country, maybe Brazil or Argentina, where the police force had started by using torture to interrogate political prisoners but had soon become so addicted to torture they no longer wanted to leave work at the end of their shifts; they’d take short naps, eat, and come back for more torture. The judge blamed lax supervision; there were valuable lessons to be learned from Argentina about the necessity for control over the police.

GOLF GAME

AS THE JUDGE pulled his car into the clubhouse lot, he checked the horizon for thunderclouds. Sudden, violent storms occurred in late afternoon all summer and ruined golf games. Max Blue reputedly ignored precautions even when the lightning strikes were close. Official policy on all municipal and resort golf courses was mandatory closure at the approach of thunderclouds, but Max was exempt from that policy. The back eighteen holes were his private course.

The old man had used thunder and lightning to terrorize Arne when he was a child. The old man said balls of lightning would bounce out of the chimney, then come bouncing up the stairs into Arne’s bed. Lightning melted zippers that burned off your balls and cock. The old man had teased him mercilessly when Arne had visited at the old man’s ratty mansion. Electricity in Tucson had not been reliable before the Second World War. Lights in the mansion blinked on and off and fuses blew out. The old man preferred candles and had left boxes of matches everywhere. “Little boys who play with matches pee their beds! Little boys who dance on tables at night make the lights go out!” The judge could still hear the old man’s voice. He blamed the old man for the nervousness he still felt about lightning.

The skies to the west were hazy blue, which might signal extra pollution drifting down Interstate 10 from Phoenix, or it might be the first traces of rain clouds drifting off the Sea of Cortés. But the judge didn’t worry about those clouds; he worried when he saw purple, big-headed clouds that billowed into anvil shapes thousands of feet high. The judge had read all about bolts from the blue; they were true occurrences, not old wives’ tales.

The police chief had not arrived yet, but the judge knew Max would already be out on the course. He took some practice drives and did some practice putting while he waited. The putting greens were parched and hard as brick. The judge did not care much about golf. Billiards was a refinement, down to the perfection of green felt instead of weeds and turf, without the worry of lightning or heatstroke. In Tucson, billiards had another advantage over golf: the green felt did not require millions of gallons of water every year. The judge had not known or cared how much water a golf course used in a year until the water rights dispute had come into his court. Water for golf courses was top priority because tourism was all the industry Arizona had left. Tucson had steadily lost population after the U.S. economy had faltered, and Arizona’s banks had all failed. The blue-chip companies such as IBM or Motorola had become more and more fearful of the political developments and upheavals in Mexico and had relocated in Denver.

Judge Arne was the last of his line, and he was glad of it. Let Tucson slide back to its rightful place in history, which was as a dusty, flyblown village of bootleggers, whores, and soldiers. Mexicans and Indians the judge didn’t count because they had lived in Tucson so much longer and were, in any case, much different than white people. Mexicans and Indians grew connected to a place; they would not leave Tucson even after all of Arizona’s groundwater was polluted or pumped dry. He had seen the evidence, the exhibits by hydrologists, in the water rights lawsuit. Arne didn’t care; he would probably not live to see it: Tucson and Phoenix abandoned by the hundreds of thousands after all the groundwater had been consumed.

The judge had been practicing with his woods on the driving range when the police chief joined him to take warm-up swings. The police chief wore baby-blue shorts and a baby-blue polo shirt, then had the bad taste to top it off with a navy-blue baseball cap with SWAT in white letters across the crown. The judge chuckled as he shook the chief’s hand; the cop just couldn’t leave his SWAT cap home. The police chief was more nervous about the meeting than he wanted to admit.

The judge had not witnessed Max Blue betray emotion before, not even in golf games after other players made idiotic drives or talked nonsense. The judge could hardly blame Max Blue for being upset. Sonny Blue was supposed to get Tucson police protection, not Tucson police beating.

The police chief had squinted off in the distance at the Rincon Mountains while the judge talked to Max Blue. Max had been too upset to play golf. Instead, they had gone in two golf carts, followed by Max Blue’s cartload of bodyguards. They parked the golf carts under a tall mesquite tree in the rough beyond the twelfth hole. Max had been upset that the judge had not invited the senator also. The incident on the landing field near Yuma was the senator’s responsibility. Someone had been doing a sloppy job of alerting the Border Patrol radar units to let their planes and pilots through.

The judge had gently reminded Max that with only two telephone calls, the entire mix-up at the landing field had been resolved. No one knew better than the senator how important safe landings were. The senator’s reelection campaign fund depended on those shipments; other party candidates had been financed as well with the proceeds from the shipments. Max had the goods on the senator. The judge knew that. Max had saved the senator’s ass with a bundle of dynamite under the car seat of a certain Los Angeles investigative reporter who had alleged the senator’s involvement in a San Diego real estate fraud.

The judge watched the police chief: the more angry Max Blue got, the more nervous the cop got. The police chief began with an apology, but Max had cut him off. Max held a seven iron in his hand and made gestures that worried the judge. What was the use of spending a million dollars on the Tucson police if all they did was kick your boys in the balls and steal their cash?

The police chief tried to explain that the undercover officers worked by rules of their own, and it was unfortunate that Sonny Blue and Bingo had chosen the Yaqui village for the drop. The judge listened to their voices — Max Blue’s voice was quivering with fury while the police chief’s voice was even and conciliatory. Arne was bored with their bickering. He hoped Max would get off the police and get back to the lawsuit over water for Leah Blue’s Venice development. Arne had good news. His clerk had located a number of possible legal theories and strategies to legitimize sending the water rights lawsuit back to state court where Leah Blue had already won against Indian tribes and environmentalists.

Max Blue had promised the judge a house next to the golf course Leah was planning for her Venice dream-city. Players could reach the back eighteen holes in quaint gondolas or in golf carts.

Arne, of course, would never consider leaving the home place. Mother had planned for everything. She had even removed the old tennis courts to make way for the dog runs and kennels. She had recognized immediately that Arne had no interest in coarse outdoor sports; basset hound breeding was a perfect hobby. She seemed not to have acknowledged warnings from nannies and later from teachers that her son showed “unnatural” curiosity and interest in the sexual habits of dogs. In high school, Arne had openly proclaimed to horrified classmates his preference for watching dogs fuck over watching a Chaplin comedy. Arne had always hated the mute little tramp and did not think Chaplin funny or poignant at all.

Arne had begun to regret they were not playing golf after all. Hitting the practice balls had awakened the urge to whack the little balls to kingdom come. Acting as liaison between the police and Max Blue was just one of the duties Judge Arne performed; there was also an entirely different realm of border crossings and dealings with certain local businessmen who secretly worked for the U.S. government.

Max had refused to let go of the police beating once he had started ranting and raving about the undercover cops. Here was where Arne’s role as liaison got tedious. The police chief said payment did not buy protection for transactions occurring in “no-man’s-land”—the term Tucson police had given to those parts of town where they feared to go even in force. The Yaqui village fit the police chief’s definition of noman’s-land, at least no-white-man’s-land; only undercover police dare enter no-man’s-land. “Then why were your men there?” Max Blue had asked. The police chief seemed to shrink inside his baby-blue golf shirt and shorts; the judge noticed how thin the chief’s thighs were. What a disappointment at the crotch! The cop was hung like a canary! The judge enjoyed watching other men argue and struggle as if the world itself depended on them, and all the while the judge already knew who would win and who would lose.

The undercover cops could have the cocaine, but Max demanded the return of the cash. The police chief shook his head. In the confusion of the shooting, the bag full of cash had been lost. Sonny was at fault for choosing a Yaqui village for his rendezvous with the New York buyers.

Now the police chief and Max were sitting in Max’s golf cart hunched over a notebook comparing calculations and figures. The judge saw Max’s face had relaxed, and he knew the little tempest had passed. But off to the southeast and southwest the judge could see big puffy, white clouds hugging the shoulders of the high blue mountains. There was no sign of lightning yet; the clouds were still silver-white. He had learned to keep an eye on the clouds when he was a boy riding his horse alone on the old man’s ranch. Gradually over the next few hours, the clouds would swell and darken purplish blue until thick bolts of lightning and their thunder shook the ground. The old man had taught Arne that sunshine and blue sky over his head were no protection. If there was a big thunderstorm across the valley, distance was no guarantee, the old man used to cackle. Because lightning might travel diagonally for twenty or twenty-five miles, before the bolt struck the ground.

The judge took no chances with lightning. He would keep an eye on the cloud mass above the mountain peaks. He had certain rules regarding lightning that he had followed since he was a boy riding his horse. At the first clustering of purplish, big-bellied clouds, Arne used to spur his horse home. The judge did not care if Max and the young police chief were discussing the matter of the “national security” shipments; at the first rumble of thunder, the judge was going to excuse himself and take cover in the clubhouse.

After Max Blue and the chief had concluded their business, Max had called over his walkie-talkie, and a golf cart approached slowly. Arne saw a waiter had ridden down from the clubhouse with a picnic basket and ice chest. They ate sitting in the golf carts parked under a grove of mesquite trees near the back boundary fence of the golf course. Arne had heard rumors that Max Blue had armed guards who secured the desert area outside the golf course fence; and if a small aircraft circled from time to time, it was part of Max Blue’s security against assassination attempts from the air. Max did not worry about reprisals from the victims’ families; he worried about former clients and his own associates. Max had made “arrangements” to solve “problems” for a great many interest groups including the “family,” foreign governments, even the U.S. CIA. Max had the goods on everyone, and that was dangerous.

The judge ate his club sandwich and potato salad. Max Blue always served the same lunch. If Max wanted to make a deal, plenty of champagne and beer would be served; if Max was chewing a new asshole for someone, such as the police chief, then there would only be ice water or ice tea. They ate without small talk. Cicadas droned in the trees, and there were the sounds of chewing and potato chips; for an instant there had been no city sounds, no jets or cars, no dogs barking or voices. The judge watched as the clouds began to darken over the mountains; he heard the first rumble of thunder. Max Blue had heard the thunder too and he grinned at Arne. Max and the judge had a private joke about Arne’s dislike of lightning and thunder.

The judge started to speak, but Max had cut in, “I know, I know — your grandfather showed you corpses of sheepherders split in half by lightning!”

“And stone walls four feet thick reduced to shattered rock by a single lightning bolt,” Arne himself had continued.

“You’d never know what hit you,” the police chief said. “It beats the gas chamber.”

“How do you know?” Max Blue said, looking sharply at the police chief. Max always forgot how dull-witted police were until he spent a few hours with a cop.

BELOVED BASSET HOUNDS

ARNE COULD HEAR the thunder from the storm over the Rincon Mountains quite distinctly now. He was tired of sitting in a golf cart in the heat. The misunderstanding had been resolved, and Arne had given Max the good news: Leah Blue could begin to pump water from her deep wells at her Venice, Arizona, development whenever she wanted. The judge wanted to go home. They left Max preparing to tee off on the fourteenth hole. The police chief drove the golf cart as fast as it would go.

Arne much preferred the company of his bassets to the company of humans. His grandfather had felt the same; more than once the old man had declared that his dog’s mouth was cleaner than a human’s mouth. Arne only wanted to go home and recover from the heat and the sun. But the young police chief wanted to talk about the “national security” shipments. Others in the department had been complaining they got no cut off the “national security” shipments. Suddenly the judge had not been able to restrain himself. Something about the little-boy cowlick on the police chief’s head infuriated him; stupidity passing for innocence. “Greed is so ugly in the police,” the judge said, “and really, it is quite useless to talk about law and order if you can’t control greedy ‘pigs.’ ” Arne was delighted with the police chief’s shocked expression at his use of the term pigs in the conversation. Arne had continued, “The French call the police vaches—‘cows.’ All I can picture are the milk cows on the old man’s ranch with bright green shit smeared all over their asses.” The judge wanted to make a point clear to the young cop: they had hired him out of Phoenix to work for them.

Arne waited for some response, but the police chief had been too stunned by the attack. “Get too greedy and see what happens,” the judge said. “I’ve been on the federal bench for twenty-five years. There’s only so much pie to go around. Get out of line too often and the feds will call secret grand juries and flush you down the crapper like they did your predecessor.” The young police chief nodded soberly. The judge put a hand on the chief’s arm. “No hard feelings, Sean,” Judge Arne said, “I only tell you this for your own good. Clean house the first chance you get.” The young police chief nodded solemnly; the judge saw big circles of sweat under both the cop’s arms. “The men call what they take ‘combat pay’ and ‘fringe benefits,’ ” the police chief said hopefully, but the judge had turned away abruptly, leaving the police chief in midsentence. Arne was in no mood to argue about police salaries or Arizona’s brain-dead economy. Arizona had been sliding toward the financial abyss for years. One disaster had followed another. Arizona’s tax revenues had plunged. Hughes, Motorola, IBM — the list ran on and on; like rats off a sinking ship they had relocated to Denver or Las Vegas.

The judge did not bother to look back or wave to the police chief. The senator had let the cat out of the bag the other night at the Thursday Club. The senator had been too drunk to stand up or focus his eyes, but he had delivered one of his spontaneous sermons, this time in front of the big urinal in the downstairs bathroom. “Things are looking up! Things are looking up,” the senator said, all the while letting his limp cock droop in his hand and piss on his own shoes. The judge had stayed close by to be sure the senator did not let too many cats out of the bag. The senator had just finished briefings about top-secret U.S. border policy. Yes, Arizona’s economy would certainly look up if suddenly, overnight, Tucson became command headquarters for all U.S. military forces assembled along the Mexican border.

Judge Arne eased the Mercedes onto the dirt road to the home place. He was thinking about Max Blue’s wife, Leah, the real estate tycoon. She had spent millions drilling the deepest water wells in North America. The water from her deep wells had been salty, but all the better for her “canals of Venice.” Leah Blue was a gambler. Even the most expensive spas and resorts for the rich in Tucson had lost money, but that did not discourage Leah about her dream city in the desert. Leah Blue was lucky. Thanks to the judge’s directed verdict, she had all the water she wanted without interference from environmentalists or Indian tribes. If U.S. troops were sent into Mexico to restore order at the request of the Mexican president, then Tucson and all the border states would be booming again, and Leah Blue would be rich beyond imagination. Beside her, Max Blue would be a minor league player even with his assassination franchise.

It was always a relief to come home to his basset hounds after a day in the courtroom. The judge had the maid and cook leave each night by six because he wanted to enjoy his privacy. The judge rather liked how fierce the badger hunters were with their huge basset heads, and thick dirt-digging claws; and yet bassets were nearly helpless without human assistance during mating. Bassets and basset-breeding weren’t for everyone; how many people wanted to guide a wet, pink, banana-size basset-hound prick into a bitch in heat? The judge certainly didn’t mind, but he knew he was not like others. Basset-breeding had required the utmost dedication for hundreds of years, by European nobles who had selectively bred the dogs for badger hunting.

The judge poured himself a martini from the chilled shaker the cook always prepared and refrigerated before she went home. He went outside to sit on the patio where he could watch the kennel runs and his bassets, all barking their greetings to him. He closed his eyes, took a sip, and settled back on his chaise lounge. The martini warmed his veins and he began to relax. It was always a mistake to work with the dogs if he was tense or had had a difficult day. More and more he enjoyed being alone with only his dogs for companionship. During his sexually active years he had always preferred prostitutes of either sex. He did not think gender really mattered; sex after all was only a bodily function, a kind of expulsion of the sex fluids into some receptacle or another. Now at the Thursday Club, Arne found he was far more excited by watching the antics of the other club members or the sex videos on the club’s big-screen TV. Even the two or three words one had to speak to a whore were too many words to waste on such creatures. Sex had always been filthy and deadly even before the outbreak of AIDS.

How much better the old man’s methods had been — how casually the old man had unbuttoned the fly of his trousers, then slipped his hard dick into the milk cow’s heifer tied and hobbled in the barn. Arne had watched his grandfather speechlessly. The heifer did not seem to mind. The old man’s dick was long and rather thin like a bull’s pizzle anyway. Afterward the old man had talked about the Greeks and their gods and the offspring of the gods who were part man and part horse or part man and part bull. Even as a young boy, Arne had not been confused. He knew there could be no such thing as minotaurs or centaurs. But even then, Arne had understood the old man’s urge to fantasize that he was no longer a man, but a bull.

The bassets were pure and noble. They waited their turns with him one by one; it was their ritual, their excited barking in anticipation; then, after martinis, he had sex with the four bitches. His basset stud was a good sport. The bitches were receptive to the dog only twice a year, but they had been trained to accept their master from behind anytime. The stud dog smelled what went on in the bedroom off the patio; by the time it was his turn, the basset stud had performed gloriously on Arne, who lay belly down on Mother’s carved mahogany bed. Nothing was as deliriously potent as the orgasms that seized Arne when he fucked his basset hounds.

TUCSON’S SEX MALL

LEAH BLUE was already late for her meeting with Trigg, but she stopped her Mercedes anyway to look at the site of her dream city. Grayish gravel and yellowish creosote bushes were all that were there now, but since Judge Arne had thrown out the last motions for an injunction, Blue Water Development Corporation could begin construction on the hundreds of miles of canals that would crisscross the entire development. She imagined how stunned, then proud, her father and her brothers would be when they saw all the maps and blueprints. The water wasn’t just decoration either; the sight of foundations and canals everywhere was reassuring to newcomers in the desert. Surveys showed both residential and commercial buyers responded most strongly to property with flowing water; in the absence of a bubbling stream, fountains or canals greatly enhanced chances for quick sales. Leah closed her eyes and could see it all — sapphire water in canals weaving between brilliant white walls of palazzos and villas bordered with lawns that ran into fairways and greens. No vulgar wire fencing or asphalt parking lots in Venice, Arizona.

Leah had been afraid Trigg might be angry because she was late. But as she drove into the Arizona Inn parking lot, she saw Trigg had been late too. He had just started down the sidewalk in his wheelchair. Leah called and waved for him to wait. Trigg seemed surprised she was late. When she leaned down to kiss him, he pinched both her breasts. “See if that arouses you,” he said. The last few times they had met at the hotel for sex, Trigg had kept asking Leah what excited her. He claimed he wanted to find out what women really preferred sexually, but Trigg was a liar. He got aroused when she told him what excited her, and for Trigg that had been all that mattered.

Leah sat in the bed with the sheet pulled around her, watching Trigg lift himself from the chair to the toilet. He took great pride in his bladder and bowels, which emptied when he massaged and pressed his abdomen. These partial functions were evidence not everything had been severed; and Trigg talked constantly about his hope, his belief, that someday there would be transplants, a cure, for spinal cord injuries. Trigg talked the whole time she sat on top of him, his cock inside her hard and dead as a dildo. She ignored Trigg as she always did when they had sex, and she visualized a brutal French dwarf in a medieval castle who forced her to ride his huge, hairy rod instead. Trigg said he had to watch her excitement before he could come; but lately Leah had begun to wonder if Trigg really got that much out of sex, or if his “mental” orgasms were imaginary, his denial that paralysis had made him a eunuch.

Lately Leah had noticed their afternoons for sex at the Arizona Inn had dwindled from hours of nonstop sucking and bouncing with cocktails and a light lunch afterward, to fifteen minutes in which Leah bounced on top while Trigg used his tongue only to talk about the outcome of “their” bid on the bankrupt Tucson shopping mall and a partially completed resort hotel. Finally Leah told Trigg to be quiet or she’d never come; if she got sweaty, filthy, and rubbed raw while his chattering distracted her and she didn’t come, that would be the last time she bothered with Trigg.

She looked down at his face for a reaction as she spoke. His eyes opened wide and blue, and for an instant Leah was seized with the urge to slide herself up over his chest so his neck was between her thighs to strangle him or break his neck.

Instead, she slid up his chest and thrust himself at his mouth and leaned into his tongue, his most lively member. She whispered to Trigg, “Don’t waste your tongue talking.” They could talk about money later. Trigg had been trying to persuade Leah to sink more of her money into his sex mall scheme. Trigg’s bankers in Phoenix had all been sent to prison for making sweetheart loans. Trigg had depended on his banker friends in Phoenix for the “financial packages” Trigg had used to buy blocks of downtown Tucson, and to finance the plasma donor centers.

Leah was getting bored with Trigg, although she still got a sexual kick out of his helplessness; however, his financial helplessness was boring. Trigg talked about the past — how he had flown to Phoenix for a million-dollar unsecured loan and his banker friends had made the loan to him that same afternoon. Finally Leah had lost patience. She told Trigg what “used to be” was gone. Screw the loans Trigg had got before. They were talking now. Trigg had tried to discourage Leah about building her dream city of white marble palazzos and canals in the desert. He said it wasn’t just because he wanted her to invest in his project; American and foreign manufacturers and businesspeople had still not forgot Arizona’s last paralyzing water crisis. But Leah Blue had thought about water before she had thought about anything else for her Venice plan.

Arizona’s worst water problems had accidentally been solved after the closure of the copper mines and the rapid loss of jobs and the drop in population in Tucson and Phoenix. Leah had the research and statistics; Arizona’s last water crisis had been blown out of proportion by the world news media. The drama of millions of middle-class, white Arizonans waking up one morning to find no water in their faucets had obscured the facts. Arizona would not have run out of water that infamous summer if federal water-management officials had not allowed too much of the Colorado River to escape to Mexico.

Leah Blue had got her idea from reading about oil-field bankruptcies and court-ordered auction sales in Oklahoma and Texas. She had read with fascination about the deep wells and the gigantic drilling rigs that were required, rigs costing millions of dollars. Leah remembered how Trigg and the others had made fun of her flying to Houston to bid on a deep-well rig; she had got it for a flat five hundred thousand dollars — a savings of almost a million dollars. Max had even caught wind of Leah’s purchases from the senator, who had heard about it from Judge Arne. Max had only mentioned the gossip in passing; he never interfered with Leah or how she spent the money. Trigg had bet Leah Blue’s rigs would hit salt water at two thousand feet; she could drill to China or to hell, but salt water was all she would get. Leah had not worried. If the canals and lakes of Venice, Arizona, ran with salt water that lent authenticity; salt water could be used to flush toilets. For drinking water, Leah would provide bottled glacier water from the Colorado Rockies. Trigg had anticipated that Arizona’s Indian tribes and the environmentalists would go to federal court to stop Leah’s deep-water well from ever pumping. Opponents argued that the salt water threatened to ruin the last of Arizona’s potable water. What Trigg had not anticipated was the quick denial of the injunction against Leah’s deep well by Judge Arne. Leah’s attorneys had argued that the deep wells were Arizona’s last hope for precious water. Leah Blue was a visionary, her attorneys said, because her deep wells would pump water even during drought years when the Colorado River had dried up. A little salt in the water was still preferable to no water at all.

Trigg sat in a white terry-cloth robe eating French toast and arguing with his mouth full of bacon. The water supplied by the deep wells might be enough now, but Leah had no guarantee in ten years or even five. Trigg was still trying to “sell” her more stock in his sex mall. Arizona’s financial collapse had begun to spook little guys such as Trigg as they watched their banker friends fall. When two-bit hustlers got scared, they started to think small. Leah had always thought big, but Trigg saw no reason for Venice when thousands of residential properties in Tucson were still empty, unrented and unsold, or inhabited by squatters. Leah shook her head. Trigg knew nothing about real estate. Residential property priced over a million was still reliable. Leah’s homes in Venice would be priced beginning at two million. Leah did not mention that Mr. B. had already inquired about forty units for himself and business associates.

Trigg was not interested in hearing about the security features that the canals and lakes would provide; he wanted to know who were these people and why would they bother to come to, much less buy property in, a state such as Arizona, the first state ever forced into federal receivership by her creditors. As both the U.S. economy and the civil war in Mexico got worse, Arizona’s population would continue to drop. Why build a new city from scratch when you could buy Tucson already built for ten cents on the dollar? “That’s all I want to know,” Trigg said, lifting each leg into his trousers before he lay back on the bed to pull the trousers over the dead weight of his thighs and hips. Trigg wanted Leah to invest in the Tucson that was already there. They had to get Tucson back on “her” feet; they had to counter the ugly rumors. Had Leah looked at the faces on downtown Tucson streets lately? They were all Mexican and Indian; the only whites downtown were police, lawyers, and the clerks and workers in the county and city courts.

Leah had put the cart before the horse, Trigg told her. The city of Tucson was standing there all around them; commercial property was 85 percent vacant with residential properties running at a 47 percent vacancy rate. The Federal government owned all the vacant property by default. Here was a golden opportunity. Tucson was desperate. Attorneys for the City of Tucson had unsuccessfully sued to stop a network broadcast that called Tucson a “ghost town” or “ghost city.” People didn’t want to see empty storefronts and empty houses; empty buildings scared people off. Even the Hollywood rich came less often to Tucson’s fat farms because limousine rides from the Tucson airport to the spas passed through acres of open desert shrubs dotted with the tents and the shelters of the homeless.

Leah looked at her Venice blueprints, then at Trigg. Even if he lied about feeling orgasms in his brain, Leah admired the man’s energy. Trigg never gave up, but he wasn’t very bright either. Her dream city had been calculated with Arizona’s financial collapse and Mexico’s civil war in mind. Venice, Arizona, would rise out of the dull desert gravel, its blazing purity of white marble set between canals the color of lapis, and lakes of turquoise. The “others” had to live someplace; let it be Tucson. Leah didn’t care how cheap real estate was, all she saw were dingy, decaying storefronts and defunct shopping malls in Tucson. Tucson had been rundown too long; forget Tucson and start over.

Leah pulled on her panty hose and combed her hair. She watched Trigg in the mirror as he pulled himself into his wheelchair. Leah didn’t bother to argue. She had noticed the pattern in Trigg all along. Trigg was always ready to steal what was there and make the best of it as fast as he could. Maybe that had been the effect of his accident, Leah wasn’t sure; but she knew it was important to Trigg to brag about sex with her and the imaginary threat Max posed. Max got reports that Trigg liked to say he might be in a wheelchair, but he still had more balls than the others did because he fucked Max Blue’s wife. Trigg didn’t know that Max had spies. Trigg didn’t know Leah told Max everything. Sex was unimportant to Max — something Trigg would never understand because Trigg was obsessed with standing up; more than anything Trigg himself wanted to be erect.

“What are we doing arguing?” Trigg had said, suddenly widening his blue eyes at Leah. He pointed at a large blank area on one map: “Venice, Arizona, City of the Future,” he said to show Leah he had been persuaded to accept her plans; now Trigg wanted Leah to support what he called his “comprehensive plan.” Trigg’s plan took a hard look at Arizona’s economy. Even in the best years, Arizona’s economy had never been famous. Arizona mined some copper and grew some cotton, but mostly Arizona had been the place Americans went when they went on vacation or got sick. Politics across the border had become so explosive that the wealthy vacationers and rich fitness addicts might be difficult to lure back to Tucson. But patients confronting fatal illnesses would be willing to take the risk Mexico might blow up while they were in Tucson. The terminal patients would not notice that Tucson’s parks and arroyos were full of homeless people. Tucson was already a heart-lung transplant capital. Trigg’s comprehensive plan would make Tucson an international center for human-organ transplant surgery and research.

The beauty of Trigg’s plan was it took advantage of existing facilities and personnel already located in Tucson. Trigg kept development costs down that way. He wanted Leah Blue to realize that starting from scratch cost too much. All he had to do was to redesign the defunct Tucson resort hotels he had bought in bankruptcy sales and voilà! They would have luxury hospital accommodations to lure billionaires for organ transplants and other delicate operations. They would offer luxury outpatient treatment centers where new transplant patients might reside permanently in a luxury condominium only minutes away from the transplant center emergency room.

Trigg was convinced his plan took everything into consideration. Since the international market for organ transplants might at first be unpredictable, Trigg had been careful not to scrap his faithful standbys, the plasma donor centers, or his private hospitals for substance abusers and disturbed children and teens. Trigg dreamed of making Tucson and southern Arizona the health and beauty capital. The Arizona water crisis a few years previous plus recent border violence had frightened visitors away. Trigg would lure them back with his grand resort hotel in the mountain foothills where a luxury hospital and outpatient accommodations for cosmetic surgery would be featured. The beauty of this business was even when the fat came off or was sucked out, yards and yards of sagging wattles and crepey skin remained to be snipped off or tucked.

Trigg’s proposal even took into account the possibility of war in Mexico; even if the trouble in Mexico scared off wealthy transplant and tummy-tuck patients, Trigg wasn’t worried. If Mexico blew up, the beds of Trigg’s hospitals would be filled with wounded U.S. soldiers paid for by Uncle Sam. And of course, if civil war broke out in Mexico, there would be no shortages of donor organs in Tucson. Trigg wanted to draw transplant patients from all over the world to one location. The secret was how to obtain the enormous supply of biomaterials and organs which was necessary, and the civil war in Mexico was already solving that. Even if there were no war, still Trigg had come up with a brilliant solution. Trigg had a gold mine. Hoboes or wetbacks could be “harvested” at the plasma centers where a doctor had already examined the “candidate” to be sure he was healthy. A lot of those people on the street were full of worms and sick but didn’t look it.

Leah Blue felt the hairs on her neck rise on end. She rerolled the blueprints slowly while she chose what she would say. At the core of Trigg’s plan was a research center for nerve-tissue transplants for spinal cord injuries. Tucson had barely been able to keep the heart-lung transplant center after the university hospital had gone bankrupt, much less support an even more experimental transplant research program. Trigg’s capacity for self-delusion was inexhaustible. “All your millionaire transplant surgeons and their wives will have to live in Venice,” Leah said. “I can’t imagine they will tolerate living in Tucson.” Trigg had a puzzled expression. He didn’t get it. “I mean the surgeons and their families won’t want to live in Tucson once you get the ‘sex mall’ going,” Leah said.

Trigg reminded Leah that he and his business partners preferred to call it the Pleasure Mall. Trigg was touchy about the use of the right terms. The defunct Tucson shopping mall had been a blight on Tucson’s face; gangs of homeless had broken in and squatters had been living in the Penney and Sears stores. The mall would be completely renovated; first class all the way. Nothing would be cheap or dirty about the Pleasure Mall, Trigg argued. The finest food and liquors would also be available as well as luxury hideaways with hot tubs and pools for nude swimming. All the shops would be tasteful or at least educational. Theirs would be the first shopping mall of its kind in the world. Lingerie shops would be next door to video rentals and adult bookstores. The Pleasure Mall would feature a gallery of erotic art. Sex toy stores would offer live demonstrations to promote safe sex. If all that wasn’t educational enough, Trigg had been negotiating with a promoter in London to lease a rare collection of specimens in jars and under glass consisting of the scrotums and penises of all species, including a number of human specimens. Trigg also hoped to lease a nineteenth-century wax museum devoted to unnatural sex positions and unnatural sex partners. This was only the beginning, Trigg said. The best was yet to come. Not even the Japanese had devoted an entire shopping mall only to sex.

Leah glanced at her wristwatch. She smiled and shook her head. Trigg could argue all he wanted, but no one who could afford better was going to live in a town with a sex mall. The ugliness of Tucson would only make the white marble palazzos and canals of cobalt-blue water more irresistible. Leah was getting tired of Trigg and his obsession with his paralysis. She lied and said she was late for an appointment and left him with his Pleasure Mall blueprints spread open on the bed. Trigg’s dream of nerve transplants for spinal injury patients was pathetic.

BOOK THREE. THE STRUGGLE LUXURY CRUISE

THE EASY PART had been emptying the vaults, packing the car, and driving to the airport in Oaxaca. Once Menardo was dead, the others had immediately shunned her; even the maids and cook had left after Tacho had disappeared. They had fled back to their barrios or villages until the official investigation had been completed or abandoned. No one had expected the new widow suddenly to disappear before the funeral, not even the police chief and the general, who had been suspicious of Alegría from the start. Alegría had made her moves while all the attention was focused on dead Menardo.

Alegría felt her heart beat more slowly as the jet taxied down the runway. She had cleared everything from the vaults — Menardo’s “savings” in uncut emeralds, pearls, and gold nuggets from Peru. The most important contents of the vaults had been the half dozen bank safe-deposit-box keys and the worn address book with the locations of the banks in San Diego and Tucson. Within a few hours after Menardo’s death, Alegría had made all the necessary arrangements. The travel agent in Culiacán had been the brother-in-law of the doctor’s wife Alegría knew from the country club canasta tables. The travel agency “specialized” in group tours to the United States.

Alegría had been instructed by the doctor’s wife to request the “deluxe luxury tour”; the doctor’s wife had been born in San Salvador, and a number of her cousins and their friends had taken the deluxe luxury tour to the United States. Sure it was expensive—$2,000 U.S. — but from start to finish you traveled in complete luxury and safety. You could carry with you as much as you wished because special arrangements had been made with the authorities. There were no stops for inspections. At the border itself there would be a short walk — nothing more than a mile or two — and then waiting on the U.S. side would be air-conditioned motor homes stocked with ice-cold beer. A large truck followed with excess baggage and crates containing art objects or antiques. After refreshing showers in the motor homes and a change of clothing, members of the tour would be allowed to examine their luggage and crates traveling by truck, to assure group members their precious belongings had made the border crossing intact. A champagne brunch would be served during the drive to the train depot in Yuma. The doctor’s wife had giggled; certain art and antiquities dealers took the “tour” regularly for “business” reasons. Others went because they had heard about the “love bus” and the wild parties that went on all night while the tour bus cruised north.

The luxury bus tours operated out of a travel agency located in a run-down mansion in the old residential district of Culiacán. The wide doors of the old mansion’s dining room and ballroom had been rolled back to accommodate the bus tour passengers and their belongings. Alegría’s companions appeared to be an assortment of Mexicans and Central Americans — all light skinned and well dressed — who kept their hands on their briefcases and other carry-on luggage at all times; the wealthy Salvadorians were all young married couples. The women were dressed much like Alegría, in linen suits and lizard-skin pumps; the men wore stylish golf shirts or seersucker trousers and blazers.

The travel agent introduced himself as Mario. “Welcome to the luxury bus cruise.” They would be getting under way within a few hours. Boxes, trunks, and suitcases were stacked in a great mound in the center of the hardwood floor of the mansion’s ballroom. Alegría watched Mario’s eyes dart from tour members to the pile of luggage and back, over and over, as if he were sizing up each of them and their belongings. Mario had then met privately with each tour member in the mansion’s library. When Alegría went into Mario’s office, he asked for her payment, then counted the cash twice before slipping the money into a briefcase between his feet. Alegría felt relieved that Mario’s attention was on the money, and not on questions about the weight or the contents of her luggage. That’s what $2,000 U.S. bought: no questions and no need for passports or visas because the buses took “special routes” through the mountains at night to reach the border.

Mario had been looking at lists on the desk when he asked if Alegría had any questions. She could sense immediately he did not expect questions or maybe he didn’t want any questions. Alegría had been curious. What shoes should she wear? She had been told there was a distance to walk. “The walk? A short walk!” Mario had answered, nodding rapidly as his eyes darted to her feet, then to the briefcase between his own feet. “You walk from one bus to another,” Mario said as he walked Alegría to the door. “Relax! Enjoy! There’s nothing to worry about,” Mario said as he motioned for a young Costa Rican couple to enter the office.

There was no music, but maids brought out glasses of champagne and little crackers covered with anchovies, green olives, peppers, and cheese. Some of the Salvadorian women, friends since grade school, had taken suitcases to dressing rooms upstairs where they had changed into party dresses, chattering gaily about the interior decoration of their new homes in the U.S. They would have their babies there. This tour made it all so easy and convenient. They could bring jewels, antiques, and art without duties, or taxes. Alegría had gone to boarding school with young women who had enjoyed similar privileges of wealth and white skin. Alegría was just like them; they were all on the run, taking as much family wealth as possible as they fled north to the United States. They wanted only to burp babies wearing satin baptismal gowns and to enjoy the wealth that rightfully was theirs, without fear of bloodshed. Alegría could see only one difference between herself and the others: they thought they had a right to their wealth, and she knew that she did not have any right to wealth — no one did — but she had taken as much as she could. Alegría had learned to take and take; because those who didn’t ended up dead.

More champagne had been served while Mario announced a slight delay with their luxury cruiser bus. Two hours later when the bus had finally arrived, all the tour members, including Alegría, had been drunk on the cheap champagne. Mario had disappeared upstairs, and soon disco music began to pound from intercom speakers in the ballroom. The young Salvadorian couples were in a party mood, and the young husbands had got drunk enough to change to their tuxedos for the luxury bus cruise. Why not celebrate? They had almost reached the United States; they were almost to begin exciting new lives. They were proud they were not like others; they did not have to run and scramble or arrive as the peons did with backs wet from sweat or river water. The young Salvadorians were proud of their wealth and the privileges wealth had bought them.

The luxury cruiser had two levels; the sight-seeing level had a cocktail bar, with a disco music setup that the bartender could control with the touch of a finger. New orange carpet covered the bus interior; the bus seats had been freshly upholstered in orange velvet. The men’s and women’s rest-rooms were no larger than closets, but each had tiny lavatories with lighted mirrors, new yellow vinyl wallpaper, and yellow vinyl floor tile to match. Two “bus hostesses” in maid uniforms had been drinking with the bartender. The bus swayed and lurched and the hostesses staggered and giggled in the aisles as they gave out blankets and pillows and took orders for cocktails with crackers and cheese or beer served with popcorn or peanuts.

Alegría could feel the approach of a headache from the champagne. She sat with the reading light out and her seat back fully reclined. The throb of the disco music overhead played against the roar of the big diesel engine as the bus raced through the darkness. Alegría closed her eyes and listened to the voices around her. When wealthy Mexicans got drunk, they had to brag to each other about all the money they had stashed in U.S. banks. On and on they went, speeding north through the night; the driver was “making time” in the light traffic and the bright moonlight. Money was all that the Tuxtla country club couples had ever talked about, and Menardo had been no different from the others. They had talked about the good years, when money had flowed from the foreign bankers: money, money, everywhere; millions and millions in U.S. dollars! Enough they could afford to live anywhere. The billions and billions owed to foreign bankers the people of Mexico never even saw.

Bartolomeo had confronted Alegría about that. Wasn’t it so? Hadn’t Menardo and the governor stolen millions from the hydroelectric project that was never completed? Alegría had laughed and nodded her head. Of course the accusations were true. Of course the money had been stolen, but the common people had never expected to see any benefits for themselves. Alegría had never been afraid to argue with the Marxists or others because she believed each was born to a fate. The poor had been born to suffer; suffering was their fate. Alegría could not change her fate, which had been always to enjoy wealth and luxury effortlessly. She had studied philosophy at two universities and had got no further than to call it “fate.” Bartolomeo had called it “accident.”

The celebrating Salvadorians had finally passed out or fallen asleep in their party clothes, the young marrieds with their arms thrown around one another. A few women had kept overnight bags with them, but all other luggage had been transported separately by truck, so they could not change clothes. Alegría watched the silver light of the moon reflect off the dry coastal mountains in the distance. The Salvadorians had been the only talkers; the others and the Mexicans like herself traveled alone and each had remained aloof. They all had secrets they carried in their luggage, or perhaps secrets pursued them — Alegría could not guess. She had heard the wives at the country club talk about cousins and sisters married in Honduras and Costa Rica now frantic to escape the spreading civil wars. The paperwork took months; even priority and privileged lists at the embassies were eight to ten weeks behind. Hundreds of travel agents offered U.S. tours like Mario’s. As the doctor’s wife at the country club had said, the question wasn’t the expense but the quality and the guarantee of no embarrassments; no scrambling or running, no swimming across rivers, no wet backs.

Back in Tuxtla the authorities would begin to search for Alegría after she failed to appear at the church for Menardo’s funeral. The police chief and the general would issue bulletins to locate her for “questioning.” The federal police would find the Mercedes parked at the airport in Oaxaca. They would lose her trail in Culiacán, and neither the police chief nor the general wanted to trouble himself further except to issue alerts to customs officials on all flights departing to foreign cities. They were happy to be rid of her; whatever funny business had gone on between Menardo and the Americans or Menardo’s wife and the communists, the police chief and the general both wanted to keep it confidential. The increased unrest in countries to the south had only added to the burden of providing protection and security in Tuxtla. The general wanted no scandal at a time when Universal Insurance and Security was about to make him even more rich than before.

Sometime in the night Alegría had felt the bus turn off the pavement to a gravel road. At dawn the bus stopped, and Alegría saw four men standing by a pickup truck. One of them was Mario, who appeared to be angry and shouting at the others. Alegría washed up in the ladies’ closet-size toilet; as she combed her hair, she imagined how good a shower would feel. She heard someone vomit in the other bus toilet and decided fresh air and a walk might help.

Mario the travel agent was all smiles as Alegría stepped down from the bus steps; he snapped his fingers at one of the men near the pickup, and instantly Alegría had a paper cup full of hot coffee. She could feel cool breezes stir as the sun climbed over the horizon; Alegría shivered. She was not accustomed to the dryness of the air or the chill of the desert night. Jungle was either moist or moister; either warm or warmer. The jungle was lush, its vegetation seemed to promise all-around protection and plenty; the desert was all distance and exposure and emptiness — dry, gray foothills ascended flat, blue mountain ranges that ended in jagged peaks.

Mario’s deluxe luxury tours. Mario handed out paper cups filled from quart tins of orange and pineapple juice. The bus hostesses served coffee boiled over the campfire by the truck. The Salvadorians were sick with hangovers and asked for medicine. Mario had produced a large bottle of aspirin, but apologized for his helpers, who had remembered cups, sugar, orange juice, coffee, pineapple juice — everything but the breakfast pastries. That was all right because they had plenty of coffee and juice for everyone.

A SHORT WALK

ALEGRÍA LOOKED around to see if she could locate any indication of the international border. The foothills were scattered with dark volcanic rocks the size of fists, yet the underlying ground was curiously hard and white, volcanic ash packed hard as concrete. The Salvadorian women pretended to be afraid to step from the bus to the hard gray desert in their high heels and party dresses, but they had already seen how easily Alegría had walked in the desert in her high heels.

Mario instructed everyone to remove their purses and other carry-on items from the tour bus, which was due back in the city. While his assistants refilled cups with juice or coffee, the travel agent explained that the sumptuous new motor homes bought expressly for this tour had had minor difficulty negotiating a steep ravine down the road. Fortunately this would be no problem at all because they would simply walk a short distance where they would find the motor homes and drivers waiting for them on the U.S. side of the border. The group would be reunited with their luggage and other belongings, and the motor homes would then depart, but in five different directions, with one bound for San Diego, another for Los Angeles, and the others to Phoenix, Tucson, and El Paso.

After the tour bus had disappeared, the only sound had been the men arguing behind the pickup truck. Mario acknowledged the men with a smile and wave of his hand; Indian guides — no one knew the desert better. Nowadays they didn’t want to work; they only wanted money. The travel agent glanced at the sun still low in the eastern sky but already heating the dry air. Time to get under way; otherwise they would keep the drivers in the motor homes waiting with the engines and air conditioners running needlessly. He nodded to the guides, then slid behind the wheel of the pickup and started the engine for the trip back to Culiacán.

Good-bye, Mexico! Alegría was not sorry to walk across that invisible line because, bless her, poor Mother Mexico had been gang-raped by the world. Alegría knew she had been destined for the luxuries and refinements of life, and she was not sorry to leave behind the sadness and the mess. Mexico would only become more violent. Alegría was sad for Mexico, but she had watched Bartolomeo and the Marxists struggle to teach the people and it was hopeless; there was nothing to be done. The masses were naturally lazy everywhere, and they often starved; that was nature. Her destiny had always been different; she had tempted fate by associating with university radicals. Bartolomeo had been Alegría’s peculiar weakness, but even he had not been able to stop her. She had stepped across the threshold to her new life in the United States. She could not think anymore about Mexico. She was almost within reach of Sonny Blue. Sonny had been all she had allowed herself to think or dream about on the tour bus. She had put aside all damaging thoughts or fears. The police chief and the others had bigger fish located closer, if they wanted someone to fry.

The foothills were broken by wide, sandy washes and gray basalt boulders as big as motor homes; around every curve and over each rise Alegría had visualized five shiny new motor homes waiting for them. If not over the first or second foothill, then behind those boulders up ahead a little farther. At any moment Alegría expected the blinding reflections of the sun flashing wildly off the windshields and mirrors of the motor homes. Walking agreed with Alegría. She imagined how she would design the gardens for the new home she would build in Tucson.

The volcanic ash packed firmly under the heels of Alegría’s shoes. Concrete or pavement were not always necessary; she wanted her rock garden to appear to be a natural desert landscape. Perhaps she might have a knack for landscape architecture too. Alegría stopped to look around. The sun was still climbing and the dry desert air was pleasantly warm. The tour had broken into four groups: the Indian guides walked a distance ahead, then the men; Alegría followed with the other women; and last came the five Salvadorian couples, who were complaining loudly and calling at the guides to stop. Tempers were short. Where were the motor homes? How much farther must they walk? The Salvadorian husbands shouted angrily and began to fling pebbles at the guides, who ignored them and kept walking.

Alegría had observed that treacherous chauffeur Tacho long enough to know when Indians were going to make trouble, and her heart had beat faster when she saw the three guides disappear over a hill. Behind the hill must be the motor homes and drivers. As she neared the summit, a sudden gust of wind had chilled the sweat on her neck and scalp. A moment later as she stood on the hilltop, she realized what had happened. There were no motor homes and drivers waiting for them; there never had been; the Indian guides had been instructed to abandon them.

The guides had carried away all the drinking water in their big backpacks. The four Mexicans still clutched their briefcases, but they were not much farther ahead of her now. She wondered why, in this heat, they did not remove their sport coats to make covers for their heads against the intense sun. Alegría stopped to look at the others behind her; they had all drunk too much of Mario’s free liquor the night before. The Salvadorians appeared to have the worst hangovers; the young husbands in their tuxedos were far behind, almost as far back as their wives, who still wore last night’s party dresses and high heel shoes. Alegría had wished she had a camera then for a snapshot; otherwise no one she told would ever believe this had happened.

Alegría had snapped the high heels off her shoes after the second hill. She had been mistaken about the sun in the North. To hear those fools along the equator talk, no sun was more fierce than theirs; but they had never seen skies seared white above the parched earth. This northern sun smoldered fiercely for hours above a red horizon before it disappeared only briefly.

Alegría argued with the voice of panic inside her head. Over the next hill they would find the motor homes and drivers waiting with the guides in the shade. The voice of panic was understandable in view of the strain Alegría had been under since Menardo had been killed. This tour company had been highly recommended; traveler safety had been one of Mario’s big selling points. Alegría adjusted the pink nylon un-derslip she was wearing on her head to prevent sunstroke. The Salvadorian husbands were carrying their wives piggyback now. The men had covered their heads with their jackets, and then the women had copied Alegría and wore underskirts on their heads. Just over the next hill and they’d be home-free; ice-cold beer and ice-cold water waited. They would take cool showers and rest in the air-conditioning of the motor homes.

Alegría soon overtook the four Mexicans. They had sunburnt their faces before they had removed their jackets to cover their heads. They were standing on the big gray hill Alegría had nicknamed the Elephant’s Ass. Alegría used silly, funny words to keep her mind off the heat and to keep herself moving. Elephant’s Ass was a good name all right because that had been exactly where they were: a place where only shit could rain down. From the grayish clay hilltop they were able to look out over a vast barren plain that wobbled like a mirage in the waves of heat rising. Up the Elephant’s Ass and into the Blast Furnace. There were no more hills to hide the air-conditioned motor homes and drivers or the three Indian guides; there were only miles and miles of pale, arid plains broken by odd black volcanic formations and scattered with volcanic rocks.

Alegría looked at the faces of the four Mexicans. They had begun to realize they had been abandoned. One of the four kept muttering, “This has never happened before”; he was one of Mario’s satisfied customers. He had made the journey twice before and nothing like this had ever happened. “This is not right!” the Mexican said forcefully; even the route they had taken this time was unfamiliar. “Why tamper with success!” the Mexican had repeated until one of the others told him to shut up. The other three men had grim expressions on their faces; Alegría saw they believed Mario had abandoned them deliberately. All along Mario had been setting them up for this big one. Mario had safely delivered them and their “goods” across the U.S. border a number of times to gain their trust. But Mario would not get away with it. “Too many of our families know,” the man said, wiping his face across the sleeve of his white shirt. “He won’t get away with this!”

Alegría thought it must be the heat; she burst out laughing at the four Mexicans and their threats of what they were going to do to Mario when they caught him. She told them if they didn’t get out of the sun, they were all going to die. They had to find shade and rest until the sun went down; then they had to find water. She knew the highway should lie parallel with them and to the west. After dark, they’d walk in the sandy wash because the night air was cooler in the wash, walking was easier. The four men stared at Alegría in a daze; they were not accustomed to Mexican women making decisions without men. They nodded and moved slowly down the hillside to the dry wash to find shade. Alegría looked back at the others. The Salvadorians were moving again, but in slow motion; the husbands no longer carried their wives. They had broken the high heels off the women’s shoes too late, and the women’s feet had become too blistered and swollen for shoes. Alegría saw six of them huddled together under a shade canopy they’d created by hanging sport coats and petticoats on the branches of tall yucca plants. If they stayed under the makeshift shade by the yucca plant, they might survive; but the best bet was the dry wash where the temperatures were a few degrees cooler, and the steep clay banks of the arroyo provided good shade. Below her, Alegría saw two Salvadorian men about to pass the others huddled under the shade by the yucca. Alegría considered for an instant returning to tell the Salvadorians and the others about the dry wash on the other side of the hill. But the voice of panic whispered she must conserve her own strength or she’d die in the desert too, with the rest of them. They were silly, ridiculous people anyway, those bourgeois Salvadorians and Mexicans; they wouldn’t listen to a woman either.

Alegría sank into the cool shade of the steep north bank of the arroyo. She tried not to think about water; the coolness of the shade refreshed almost like a sip of cold water. The shade and coolness in the arroyo must have revived the four Mexicans because when Alegría awoke later, the men were gone and Alegría found four sets of fresh footprints following the arroyo west. Men always had to be first; let them go. Before any of the others straggled into the arroyo, Alegría had made certain she could not be seen, then had reached inside her blouse and under her skirt to make sure her money belt was securely fastened. Mario and his thugs could have her trunks and suitcases full of “art” Menardo’s first wife had collected, but the emeralds and the safe-deposit keys in the money belt were a different matter; anyone who wanted the belt would have to kill Alegría first.

Sobs and swear words woke Alegría. The Salvadorian couples had managed to reach the arroyo while Alegría had dozed. The sun was low and motionless in the sky and reminded Alegría of a blowtorch she had once seen at a construction site; the torch had been on one side of a steel panel burning a hole through. She had only been a first-year architecture student then, and the professors and male students had made lewd comments as they watched the torch cut the steel. They had forgot a woman was present; Alegría had got used to vulgarity in architecture school. Alegría did not move or speak. She watched the Salvadorian husbands half-carry and half-drag their wives on their backs and shoulders.

The four Mexicans were in better condition. They did not stop. They were walking in the shade of the north bank of the arroyo. Alegría could not see them, but she heard their voices in the distance; the men sounded strangely exhilarated as they talked. The shade in the arroyo would be enough; no need to wait. They would start walking now and be that much closer to the highway and water. Alegría watched the last Salvadorian couple disappear as they rounded a curve in the arroyo. She estimated the temperature was still above 110° F, but the humidity was also less than 8 percent. The real danger was dehydration, not the heat.

Alegría woke again after sundown. She had dreamed of nothing; the perfect, dark blank of nothingness. She had feared the torment of dreams about drinking water, or ice cubes in iced teas, and cold beer in chests full of ice. She had started walking; she could feel thirst take over the voice inside her head. Thirst was chanting its name over and over. Alegría put a pebble in her mouth because she had read in a novel once that a pebble might help. But the novel had not showed what happened after a while; novelists used poetic license that architects never got to use. After a while, the pebble in her mouth had not helped because all the saliva the pebble had stimulated had been used up. Alegría had read about death from thirst in Bartolomeo’s nasty little counterinsurgency training manual captured from the U.S. CIA. He had asked her to read everything because he loved her and he wanted her to know the risks. Thirst had seldom been used as a torture method by the CIA, the manual asserted, because the tongue swelled out of the mouth as thirst intensified, and the “subject” could not talk if he wanted to.

Alegría knew she had only hours to find water or reach help at the highway after she saw the Salvadorian women. The two had died in each other’s arms, sitting upright against the arroyo bank. The contents of both their purses had been emptied out on the sand. At first Alegría had thought the husbands or maybe even Mario’s treacherous guides had sneaked back to empty the purses. Then she had realized the two women had been delirious from thirst and had dumped the contents from their purses in a last desperate search for something to drink. One woman had drunk her French perfume; the empty bottle was in her lap. Their expensive party dresses had held up under the ordeal very well; the fuchsia ruffles and pink crepe pleats had somehow remained clean and untorn, and only a little wrinkled. Alegría thought how odd death was to leave the party dresses without a tear or even a stain. She did not look at the faces, not for fear she might see black, swollen tongues or buzzard-eaten eye sockets, but because she had not noticed the women’s faces while they were alive and certainly did not want to bother with these Salvadorian cows now that they were dead.

The white arroyo sand reflected the light of the three-quarter moon so Alegría could see plainly a hundred yards away. She squatted in the sand and cupped her hand to catch her own urine. She drank it all. She didn’t see what difference it made when it was her own; men routinely required lovers or wives to swallow their sperm. The urine brought the saliva back, and Alegría hardly bothered to notice the identity of the corpses she passed. She wasn’t curious or interested in those who had died. They hadn’t meant anything to her alive, and now they meant even less. She alone was going to live; she herself would survive. Alegría felt euphoric each time she passed another corpse. Guatemalans and Hondurans seemed to die in twos and threes; the Mexicans dropped like flies, one by one alone. She had lost count, but she knew the “secret system”: each corpse she passed advanced Alegría closer to safety. The more the others died, the more likely it was that Alegría would be saved; that was only simple mathematics.

Alegría had walked steadily all night. After dawn she passed the corpse of one of the four Mexicans; his briefcase was gone; before he had died, he had torn off all his clothes. Alegría did not stop again until the rotting smell was left behind. Before the sun got high, Alegría searched for shade where she could sleep until darkness. The arroyo was much wider now and there were desert trees growing along both banks. In the shade, under the desert trees, Alegría sat down with her back against a tree trunk. At her feet, half-buried in the sand, were empty cans and brittle, cracked plastic bottles that had once contained water. Alegría held a plastic bottle up to the sky in both hands; when she had first seen the bottle partially buried in the sand, she had thought it might still contain some water. But then she had noticed the gaping hole in the lower half of the bottle, filled with fine white sand. Alegría tried to sleep, but she was too thirsty. She had been weeping when suddenly Alegría had had no more tears. Her eyes felt burned and swollen. Now when she urinated, she had difficulty passing more than a few drops, which burned her cracked lips and tongue.

Alegría refused to die. She didn’t care how weak and sick she was, she would sit there under that tree, and she would not die. She could feel the money belt with the pouch of emeralds against her ribs. Menardo used to spend hours examining and admiring them when he brought them out of the vault. Their intensity of color and the almost supernatural light that shone out of the emeralds, together with their flawlessness, made the emeralds worth millions. Only the Japanese had better emeralds, Menardo said. Now she had the emeralds. As long as she had the emeralds, Alegría refused to die. She was too thirsty to sleep, but she could think about the emeralds; they were hers now and they would keep her alive. In their endless depths of green, Alegría saw lagoons and pools of pure water surrounded by thick jungle leaves; the bluish-green light was a tropical rain-mist spread across the sky. She was determined not to die. Sonny Blue was in Tucson. So were hundreds of thousands in gold and in cash, even a town house. All that was hers now. She was going to live to enjoy it no matter how thick or dry her tongue got.

Alegría had not truly slept, but she had dreamed and hallucinated. From the shade under the tree Alegría had watched as the large basalt boulders and big rocks had slowly moved down the wash as if they were beasts grazing on the sand; next Alegría had heard the sound of a car engine, the Mercedes engine, and before she could move, she saw Menardo’s car driven by Tacho, moving slowly through the arroyos as if Tacho were following or tracking her. Alegría saw Tacho’s face clearly, but he did not see her; he seemed to be gazing out of the car window at the sandy ground where Alegría saw rounded stones transformed into human skulls the farther the car drove up the wash. Then the car disappeared, and Alegría could smell the dampness of rain in the air, although the sun burned in an empty blue sky. Alegría could smell roast turkey and saw that where the stones had been human skulls, there were now roast turkeys on silver platters that reflected the sun. Alegría heard voices from the direction the ghost Mercedes had taken; she could feel the blood in her veins begin to thicken, to dry up gradually in her veins. Her eyes no longer opened because the eyelids had swollen, then shriveled shut.

Alegría had always known life meant nothing, so dying was nothing at all either. She did not wish for her mother or father. There was no love between them. Her father would turn the story of her death into after-dinner conversation; her mother would say nothing, as if Alegría had never been born. Alegría rested her hands on her belly to feel the bulge of the pouch of emeralds inside her money belt. If her eyes dried up forever, she would replace them with two big emeralds. A natural blonde as she was would look even more stunning with green eyes.

Alegría woke with water pouring off the top of her head, down her face and chest; she rubbed at her eyes with her hands. She heard a woman’s voice in Spanish call out, “This one’s still alive.” Someone knelt beside her with a canteen and helped Alegría rinse her mouth and tongue with water to moisten her throat so she would not choke when she drank. Alegría tried but could not focus her eyes. She could hear men’s and women’s voices in English and Spanish now. They gathered around her. Alegría could make out their shoes and their legs. Something was very familiar about the identical black shoes the women wore. Alegría thought it had to be another hallucination because she was surrounded by a half dozen Catholic nuns, and two Catholic priests. The nuns wore modern short veils, white blouses, and dark skirts; they were clearly gringas chattering excitedly in English. The dark woman who spoke Spanish returned with a woman who appeared to be her sister. They had both looked closely at Alegría, then shook their heads. She wasn’t one of theirs. They had expected none by that description: blond hair. It must be the coyotes now were crossing a higher class of people as the civil wars in the South worsened.

In the back of the van Alegría had managed to whisper in Spanish to one of them, “Please, no police or hospital.” Liria and Sarita had nodded in unison. Nothing to worry about, they told her in soothing tones. Relax. Sleep. Everything was going to be all right. Alegría tucked her knees up to her belly and felt the pouch in the money belt against her ribs. She closed her eyes and whispered to her emeralds, “Oh my little beauties! I love you, I love you; I owe you my life.”

ENEMY LIGHTNING

ZETA HAD NOT HEARD from Awa Gee in days. He had not returned messages left at a computer answering machine. All his other phone lines had been busy, including a private line Zeta had been paying for, a line that supposedly was always open to her. Awa Gee was obsessed with telephone lines, and in a closet he proudly showed Zeta his “official” telephone-lineman coveralls complete with a fake Asian name embroidered on one pocket. New identities were one of Awa Gee’s many specialities. Zeta did not ask, but she assumed Awa Gee tapped into other phone lines for special jobs.

Zeta went to find Awa Gee. He had recently located what he called his “dream house” in a block of seedy, crumbling bungalows on Glenn Street off Stone Avenue. Two large arroyos cut through the neighborhood where vacant lots and yards had been retaken by the desert plants, the creosote bush and paloverde, which had always grown in the gravel floodplains of the desert washes. Before Awa Gee had located the dream house, he had moved frequently. He was wary of being caught by the telephone company and seemed always to be listening for unfamiliar sounds. Night and day he expected federal agents to knock at his door. But worse than federal agents, Awa Gee feared and hated lightning. Awa Gee had ridden all around Tucson on his old Vespa scooter, looking for “safe pwace, safe pwace.” Awa Gee’s enemies were lightning, power outages, and any and all interruptions of telephone lines. The neighborhood Awa Gee had chosen was flat and had few living trees taller than mailboxes — all excellent recommendations against lightning strikes. Awa Gee used to close his eyes and pretend to shiver at the mention of lightning. A pellet-shaped aluminum trailer was parked next to the little house he had rented. He had bought the trailer; it was necessary to house all the small computers he had wired together for the hundred-digit project.

Whenever Awa Gee talked about lightning’s threat to his precious computers and programs, Zeta was able to detect a bitterness that Awa Gee kept concealed with his wide grins and apparent cheerfulness. They had been standing in the semi-darkness that Awa Gee preferred for work at his terminals. Awa Gee said U.S. military and foreign governments had taken steps to secure their computer centers much too late. Only rank amateurs and blunderers had ever been detected or identified for computer-network break-ins. The biggest heists, the best penetrations, would not be detected for years; millions and millions of dollars per hour had evaporated out electronic circuits. Awa Gee said international banking and finance were all part of a great flowing river where immense quantities might disappear before the river level fell noticeably. Theoretically, somewhere, someday, the figures would catch up with themselves and somebody would come up short; but in fact, unless all the lights went out, the electronic river would never stop flowing, and the two-nanosecond lead that the deposits had would forever keep them ahead of the debits.

Awa Gee had a great deal of money in offshore bank accounts. He need never lift a finger again if that was his pleasure. Awa Gee collected “the numbers.” His prospective clients were asked to supply entry codes. Ninety-nine percent of his clients had been former employees motivated by revenge. His collection of numbers had saved Awa Gee the innumerable hours of computer time required for random “safecracking” as he called it. Of course he had always kept meticulous records of every entry and entry attempt he had ever made. To assure that he would not duplicate sets of numbers in his search for new networks to penetrate. Awa Gee screened prospective clients according to whether he had any interest in the particular network that was to be entered. Naturally Awa Gee could have demanded top dollar for his expertise, but he had been careful not to get greedy. Awa Gee called the global networks “a big-tit cow” he was going to milk and milk; but always before he had stopped short. Up until then. But now Awa Gee saw the day approaching when he must strip “the cow” of everything, milk her, then bleed her dry. On that day he would set loose a host of allied computer viruses and time bombs that would combine and interlock to alter financial records and data in systems around the world.

Zeta had never asked any questions, but sometimes the strange little yellowish man talked nonstop when she came to make inquiries about the work he was doing for her. Awa Gee had recommended Zeta demand all payment in gold. Gold, always gold, because anything else was only paper or a few electronic impulses encoded on bank systems vulnerable to tampering.

Awa Gee had carefully taped blackout cloth all over the windows of the little house. The only light had been from a huge fish tank and from a mute color TV in the center of the room near the zebra-hide sofa. Awa Gee had dumped pillows and bedding to the floor to make space on the sofa for Zeta to sit. Awa Gee perched himself on his work stool; his eyes, strangely magnified by his glasses, shifted from her eyes to the terminal screens and blinking red, yellow, and green lights that filled the room from floor to ceiling. Awa Gee did not show Zeta what was inside the trailer, but they had stepped over two bundles of heavy cable that seemed to connect the little house to the trailer. The cable had been carefully wrapped in plastic garbage bags and taped securely.

Awa Gee had been working night and day for weeks on an international project. “All goodwill — no pay! By invitation only!” he told Zeta proudly. All the other participants had had billions of dollars of research facilities behind them. Awa Gee had been the only “little guy” to reach the last level for entry to the project. Split the atom? They had done that easily with sheer force. But to split a one-hundred-digit number into two primes! That had not been accomplished until last week, Awa Gee said, smiling.

Awa Gee had acted as if he had not seen another human being for weeks; the little man could not seem to stop talking. Zeta told Awa Gee he must feel very pleased with himself, but the little Asian shook his head and the bitterness had returned. No, he could feel no pleasure, not while there was injustice. Injustice allowed others with inferior brains, intellectual imbeciles, to receive all the millions in research grants, while he, Awa Gee, had to settle for what he could make from the junk he found in the dumpster behind the university’s computer-science center.

Awa Gee’s last outburst seemed to tire him, and he sat down muttering to himself in Korean. Zeta settled back on the zebra-skin couch to watch the huge lion-fish. Awa Gee reached into a Styrofoam ice chest on the floor by his feet for a cold can of beer. He offered it first to Zeta, who shook her head.

They sat in the dim light, and Awa Gee drank the beer while they watched the lion-fish beg for food. Awa Gee seemed to revive after the beer and was ready to talk some more. During the special prime-number project he had barely had time to call orders to the liquor store. He had paid cabdrivers to deliver cases of beer because his constant attention to the project had been indispensable. He had gone days without sleep. A brooding expression spread over Awa Gee’s face. “The others, they had all they needed — not like Awa Gee!” Awa Gee had been forced to string together an odd assemblage of old computers considered obsolete by others. Strands of computers had been Awa Gee’s secret of course, and his “strands” could match the best the universities might have, though not the government. Of course, the government researchers themselves had third-rate brains; without human intelligence computer power hardly mattered. Awa Gee’s face tensed when he talked about the “government.” The advantage the government and the universities had was no lightning. They could all afford the latest protective devices for their precious equipment. But not Awa Gee. One bolt of lightning, one great electrical surge, and the genius of all his endless months of circuitry intermeshing and wires would be vaporized. Zeta picked up a book with huge slashes and forks of lightning blazing across the book’s dustcover. “Lightning,” Awa Gee said. “I am learning all I can about my — my worst enemy!” Zeta flipped through pages of lightning photographs; lightning leaped out of volcanic eruptions, lightning coiled inside tornado funnels, and zigzagged across the mushroom cloud of an atomic blast.

Awa Gee was sorry the special project had taken him away from his best customers, but the prime-number project had been absolutely essential. The governments of many nations had not wanted the hundred-digit prime-number project to continue because project results might jeopardize national security by facilitating hackers who broke through elaborate secret entry codes. Citing national security, the U.S. government had seized all Awa Gee’s project notes in Customs and had prohibited further work with codes by Awa Gee. “But they can never find me,” he had told Zeta proudly, “because to them, I am connected by way of Seattle and San Francisco. To them, I am a certain Professor Kew on sabbatical leave from Stanford University.”

One of Awa Gee’s specialities had been the creation of new identities complete with passports, driver’s licenses, social security numbers — everything obtainable through computer records. Awa Gee had created a great many identities for himself while he had lived on the West Coast, where Asian births and deaths were plentiful. “The dead are my friends,” Awa Gee had confided to Zeta. “I go to find birth dates on the gravestones or in the newspaper, then I write to the state capital for a new birth certificate.” Awa Gee had already created three new identities for Zeta, complete with U.S. passports. Awa Gee charged extra for Canadian or Mexican identities because it required him to travel.

SOLAR WAR MACHINE

AWA GEE FINISHED his beer and with a big smile brought out another. Zeta could see he was just getting warmed up. She thought about making up excuses to get out of there, but Awa Gee was easily insulted. Alcohol brought round red splotches to Awa Gee’s cheeks. He went to the corner where two speakers sat on the floor. “Hear this,” he said. Ocean waves crashed rhythmically and endlessly on the sound track. Zeta saw the petals of the lion-fish’s gills undulate in rhythm with the ocean sound.

Awa Gee sat at a keyboard where his left hand worked a terminal while the right hand dialed phone numbers. Awa Gee’s fingers moved over keys with amazing speed. Awa Gee did not need the company of other human beings. He was most relaxed, most “at home,” with his own thoughts and the numbers. Numbers were alive for Awa Gee; some numbers “sang,” while others flashed complex patterns of iridescent colors as if they were exotic blossoms or jungle birds. Numbers were his companions, his roommates, and his allies. One morning the “big cheeses” would wake up to discover how the numbers had suddenly all added up to zero for them. The power of the numers would reside with the poor and the dispossessed.

For Awa Gee it had become increasingly clear that the people were up against the giants. But the giants had been ruthless for too long; the giants had become deluded about their power. Because the giants were endlessly vulnerable, from their air traffic control systems to their interstate power-transmission lines. Turn out the lights and see what they’d do; turn out the lights on one of their state executions. Awa Gee had already infiltrated emergency switching programs. No interstate backup transfers, no emergency at all would register even after miles of high-voltage transmission line were gone. They’d never catch him. They’d blame the ecofreaks.

Awa Gee had no interest in personal power. Awa Gee had no delusions about building empires; Awa Gee did not plan to create or build anything at all. Awa Gee was interested in the purity of destruction. Awa Gee was interested in the perfection of complete disorder and disintegration. At first Awa Gee had experimented with disorder by unwinding spools of rope to snarl and tangle deliberately into mounds of thick knots; then he studied the patterns of the snarls and tangles as he worked to remove them. Empire builders were killers because to build they needed materials. Awa Gee wanted to build nothing; Awa Gee wanted nothing at all to happen except for the lights to go out; because then he would top them all with his “necklace” of wonder machines so efficient they operated off batteries and sunlight. Earth that was bare and empty, earth that had been seized and torn open, would be allowed to heal and to rest in the darkness after the lights were turned out. The giants of the world would fight of course, but their retaliation would serve Awa Gee at every turn. The greater their retaliation, the greater the destruction.

The University of Arizona was a giant that must die soon. The university had fired Awa Gee and sent him to hell at a photo-finishing lab. Awa Gee had written the computer programs for polishing the giant mirrors and lenses the university had developed for the government’s secret space-laser project. Awa Gee had planned to stay with the university for a few years longer to perfect his solar war machine, but one of the old white professors had caught Awa Gee polishing the war machine’s special components after hours, in the university’s optics plant. That had been the end of Awa Gee’s top-security clearance, but the end had also been the beginning for Awa Gee.

Although the lens of the solar war machine weighed at least forty pounds, Awa Gee had mounted the machine on the back of his bicycle, to show it was indeed a weapon for the poor masses, who had little or nothing in the way of transportation. The simplicity of the solar lens was also an important feature. A one-day demonstration and briefing was all it would take. No prototype could be expected to be perfect. The solar war machine had to be unpacked and assembled on a tripod that fit onto the bicycle frame. Awa Gee had many modifications to make, but the single most important element had been the glass lens he had salvaged from the university optics department.

Awa Gee watched Zeta relax with her eyes closed. He watched the rhythmic flutter of the gills of the lion-fish and regretted he could not tell Zeta about the success of the machine’s first test. But Awa Gee had made himself a few simple rules, and he intended to live by them. Complete secrecy had been the first rule. Awa Gee had loaded the machine and his video camera on his bicycle and pedaled down Stone Avenue to the corner of Speedway. Awa Gee had been planning and preparing for some time for the test target: a motel coffee shop where city cops drank coffee and ate lunch. Two or three Tucson police cars were usually parked outside.

Awa Gee had recorded all the tests of his weapon in order to make improvements.

First Awa Gee had set up the video camera on its tripod. The camera took attention away from the war machine on its short, stout tripod. The video camera was an old model, and its bulk was just what Awa Gee liked in case of gusty winds. Awa Gee set the video camera on auto and zoomed in first on a police motorcycle, then a squad car.

Awa Gee had kept his breathing slow and deep like the lion-fish sleeping in his tank. He had taken a leisurely look at the sky. No clouds for a hundred miles. Perfect weather for the solar war machine. Awa Gee squinted up at the sun and began to adjust the legs of the war machine’s tripod. The glass face of the lens remained hooded in black velvet. Awa Gee had sewed the cover himself. The lens had been a prototype — one of a kind — and Awa Gee wanted no scratches or dust to mar the surface of the powerful lens.

Awa Gee had not worried about passing motorists or people on the sidewalk in Tucson. Because people in Arizona were generally ignorant and assumed that all Asians with video cameras were wealthy tourists. Awa Gee knew he was practically invisible to almost everyone driving by or sitting inside the coffee shop. He removed the velvet hood from the solar war machine and adjusted the angle of the tilt of the war machine’s lens until a tiny point of blinding white light light was focused on the windshield of the police car. Awa Gee had watched through the telephoto lens of the video camera and counted the seconds. Suddenly the point of blinding white light had been surrounded by a flash of red as the interior of the car burst into flames. Awa Gee had walked casually to the war machine and turned the lens away from the sun. He had kept the video camera recording as he carefully repacked the war machine on the back of his bicycle. The police eating lunch in the coffee shop did not emerge until a fire engine pulled up to the flaming patrol car. Awa Gee watched the motorcycle cops scramble to move their machines and wished he could have aimed for their gas tanks while he was at it. But that might have caused suspicion, and Awa Gee was no fool.

English words that he had once studied and memorized to impress a lovely English teacher suddenly came to mind: Euphoria. Euphoric. Awa Gee had never felt anything so powerful sweep over his entire being. The fire had made roaring, popping sounds loud enough to be heard over the sirens’ noise and the shouts of firemen spraying water over the cop car. Awa Gee had visited the fat brown whores walking Sixth Avenue, but he had never confused trivial amusement with profound pleasure. He was the mighty author of the comedy scene that had played in the motel coffee shop parking lot. He was the sole author of the comedy’s opening lines: a series of small pops and explosions. The best part had been that the police and firemen had no idea what had happened. Awa Gee had zoomed the camera onto the faces of the cops just as the car’s gas tank had exploded. The brown whores were delicious, yet one visit didn’t last Awa Gee long; but the thrill of the burning police car did not diminish.

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS!

AWA GEE HAD FALLEN a little in love with Zeta. Zeta had always made it quite clear to Awa Gee that she was not interested in anything physical. Awa Gee felt both of them would remain quite safe this way. Awa Gee would act out his love for her through his work with the computer entry codes he cracked for her. There were always the ladies on South Sixth Avenue for sex. He loved Zeta because she understood what he could do with computers and numbers, and she had trusted him enough to pay for any experiments he wanted.

Awa Gee had tinkered with the solar war machine in his spare time. War machines were his hobby. The war machines he was most interested in were the machines that did not require electricity or high technology. After hours and hours each day with computers, Awa Gee’s mind had been refreshed by the contemplation of wind machines and catapults. The giant had many vulnerabilities, but the greatest was the giant’s massive dependency on electrical power. The giant had made a great tactical error with electricity in the United States; all high-voltage transmission lines were unguarded in remote locations. The first strikes must be made against electrical power sources.

Awa Gee knows he is not the only one who hates the giant. He knows there are others like himself all over North America; small groups but with unusual members who would bring down the giants. It is not necessary to know more than this, Awa Gee tells himself; there are others of us and we will know when the time is at hand. No leaders or chains of command would be necessary. War machines and other weapons would appear spontaneously in the streets.

Zeta was always amazed at Awa Gee’s freewheeling discourses. His black, slanty eyes twinkled. He loved to go on and on about the computers he had “broken and entered.” “Arpanet, Internet, Milnet,” Awa Gee intoned. “Mean anything to you?” Zeta shook her head. “Well, don’t worry, my friend,” Awa Gee told her, “these names are just a sample of the connections I have!” Awa Gee was drunk. His face was flushed from the alcohol. Awa Gee bragged about his employment record: it read like a nightmare — beginning with the best university computer-science departments, but with a fast decline after the Stanford job. His last job had been at a photo-finishing lab where he had presided over simple button-pushing amid deadly chemical fumes.

Awa Gee loved to brag about himself. Zeta had to smile and shake her head as he rattled on about the secret German computer hackers’ club that called itself Kaos. Awa Gee had been in regular communication with club members until he had broken inside their data storage systems. Awa Gee called this “ransacking”; he said he could confess to Zeta because she was a friend. All his life Awa Gee had not been able to resist snooping and peeking — of course he would never do such a thing to Zeta! Zeta had only nodded; she didn’t want to bet on it. Awa Gee’s first task had been to reroute phone calls to Max Blue’s home and to the pay phone at the golf course locker room. Awa Gee’s system had automatically put the calls through a special relay modum that recorded the caller’s number and entire conversations for later playback.

As Zeta had suspected, the actual calls had been nothing. The calls had been taken by secretaries, who were merely told the day and time for golf at the Desert Golf Course in northwest Tucson. But mostly the information Awa Gee had gathered for Zeta had merely confirmed what Zeta had already suspected: the federal judge, the senator, and the police chief all got calls from Max Blue. Something had changed; Ferro had got reports from their people in Mexico.

Awa Gee had worked for months with equations in which he had altered slightly the value of one factor consistently throughout the entire computation. Over time, the error would multiply itself, and the enemy would be far off course before he realized anything was wrong. Now Awa Gee was working to create little “leaks” in their shipment pipeline. Zeta could then make use of the “leaks and spills” as she wished. Awa Gee’s small, deep-set eyes glittered. He needed just a few more numbers, a clue from the wastepaper basket — old printouts or a floppy disk — then Zeta would see results! Zeta visualized the layout of Greenlee’s desk and computer terminal in the basement vault. She knew how to get a disk from Greenlee.

If Zeta wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the computer networks of business associates, competitors, or enemies, then Awa Gee swore to see it was done! Zeta stood up to leave. She could not be sure how much of Awa Gee’s enthusiasm was due to the beer and how much was lust. The longer he had talked, the closer Awa Gee had inched toward her on the zebra-striped sofa. “You are a beautiful woman,” Awa Gee said, still sitting but staring up at Zeta’s breasts. “Never mix business with pleasure, Mr. Gee,” Zeta answered. “Business is my pleasure!” Awa Gee said, jumping up to walk Zeta to the door. They had not yet discussed his plans to divert electronic cash transactions before they infected the rival systems with the virus. But Awa Gee had saved that discussion for another day. Soon Zeta would have results; whatever network of traders Zeta wanted to sabotage, Awa Gee felt confident he could bring them down with his software.

Awa Gee’s dream was to create the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, a computer program that would destroy all existing computer networks. He dreamed of a series of secret “raids” into networks across the earth in which he would use computers to destroy other computers. Awa Gee realized computer time-bombs alone were not enough. Awa Gee had to watch and work and wait until other conditions were optimum. One person alone could do little, but Awa Gee knew if the timing was just right, then only a few warriors like himself could change forever the contours of the world. When the time came, the people would sense it; they would feel it in their blood without recognizing what they were about to begin. They would seize whatever was at hand and they would bring down the giants.

Awa Gee had to admire the arrogance of the U.S. government. They had not been able to imagine that emergency reserves or alternate power systems might be needed. Always the assumption was “everything would be all right”; no matter what had happened, Americans believed it could be rebuilt or repaired in a matter of hours or at most days. But Awa Gee had intercepted messages between individuals who traded maps and diagrams of interstate power-transmission lines. The maps and diagrams had not been in code, but the accompanying messages had been, and Awa Gee had been intrigued. He had easily deciphered the code.

At first Awa Gee had thought the messages might be one of those government decoys; but after he had monitored the messages for a few weeks, Awa Gee had detected no traps. The maps located the high-voltage transmission lines; diagrams showed the concrete and steel towers that supported the huge high-voltage cables. The coded messages with the maps and diagrams outlined procedures for placing explosives to topple the high-voltage towers. Awa Gee had been elated! He had jumped up and down for joy. He had turned to the lion-fish in its tank and shouted, “Aiiii!” He had been right all along. Out there in the wide world there were indeed others, others like himself who were making preparations, secretly working until suddenly all the others realized the time had come. They would know the time had come by certain signs. The signals would be in the air — they would feel it! No organizations, no leaders and no laws were necessary; that was why success would be certain.

Awa Gee was content to leave the dynamite and crashing steel towers to the mysterious group that used code names such as Earth Avenger and Eco-Coyote. He monitored their communications daily. They became his favorites. Someone called Eco-Grizzly had sent out long-winded, angry ravings in code, and Awa Gee had worked on the “memos” as if they were great puzzle games. Eco-Grizzly and the others practiced what they called “deep ecology,” and from what Awa Gee could tell, “Back to the Pleistocene” was their motto. Eco-Grizzly and the others genuinely wanted to return to cave living with the bears as their European forefathers had once lived. To Awa Gee, such a longing for the distant past was a symptom of what had become of the Europeans who had left their home continent to settle in strange lands. Awa Gee estimated it took two or three thousand years before migrant humans were once again comfortable on a continent. But Eco-Grizzly and the others were truly aliens because Awa Gee could always return to Korea, but they could not get back to the Pleistocene. Not unless something cataclysmic happened, and if something cataclysmic occurred, they would still not find the pristine planet their Pleistocene ancestors had enjoyed.

Awa Gee had spent hours each day and many nights scanning thousands of transmissions. All his life he had seldom needed more than two hours of sleep, and this had enabled Awa Gee to accomplish a great deal with his studies and experiments in computer cryptology. No one could scan as fast as Awa Gee. But Awa Gee could only scan for a few hours before he needed a break to rest his eyes. Then he would get on his bicycle or if he felt tired, the little motor scooter, and he would take a ride at midnight or two A.M. to refresh his brain and stretch his legs. As he rode around Tucson, Awa Gee always marveled at the wastefulness. Everywhere on the northwest side of Tucson, Awa Gee saw acres of new buildings in so-called industrial parks. But the offices and warehouses had stood empty and unrented since completion. It was about time someone pulled the plug on the waste! The eco-terrorists were right about that. Awa Gee was not alone. There were others dreaming just like him.

Change was coming! Awa Gee could fee it! Chills ran down his arms and back; he shivered, then laughed out loud. He was the only one on the street. He was the only one who knew about all the others. As he pedaled and coasted, his thoughts had soared away. All over the planet there were other small, secret groups; what they believed or what they grieved over was not important. All that mattered was these people burned with the blue flame of bitterness and outrage. They would not have to wait much longer. Awa Gee had intercepted a long memorandum from Eco-Kamikaze. In what appeared to be a farewell memorandum, Eco-Kamikaze had announced that “he was going out on a limb”: Machine-gun station wagons driven by pregnant mothers of five; build a wall across the U.S.’s southern border to keep out all the “little brown people.” Then Eco-Kamikaze had got down to the substance of his memorandum: don’t linger with an expensive, painful post industrial malignancy in your brain or liver; and don’t just swallow that handful of capsules or connect a hose to the auto exhaust; “contact us first!”

Balls to the wall, U.S.A.! Awa Gee was gleeful. The eco-terrorists were recruiting the terminal and dying, the suicides and the eco-true believers who were fed up, who saw the approach of the end of nature and who wanted to do some good on their way out. The eco-terrorists were making final plans: kamikaze hang-gliders and kamikaze balloonists to bomb the White House; trained dogs with payloads of TNT strapped to their bellies; eco-kamikazes in wheelchairs wearing vests of plastic explosives outside the U.S. Supreme Court building. Awa Gee could hardly believe what he was reading. Political assassination was of limited interest to Awa Gee, although he thought the U.S. Supreme Court was a very good place to begin. Human bombs had been sent to great hydroelectric dams and electrical generation plants across the United States. The human bombs would leap at the most strategic points of the dam’s structure. All the interstate power transmission lines had been scheduled to go down simultaneously after the dams had been destroyed.

Zeta had left Awa Gee hunched over a computer terminal muttering to himself. Zeta agreed with Awa Gee; they must secretly try to aid Eco-Grizzly and the others in their efforts to hit interstate power lines, dams, and power plants all at once. Awa Gee had developed a computer virus to disable the emergency reroute systems in computers of regional power stations so the U.S. blackout would be complete. But before Awa Gee could investigate any further the “cocaine for guns” transactions, he needed more numbers. Awa Gee didn’t try to weasel money from Zeta, only more numbers. Now Zeta would have to decide what to do before she visited Greenlee. She had thought about driving past Calabazas’s place to talk to him, but she drove back to the ranch instead; there were too many people coming and going at Calabazas’s place. Anyway, the decision didn’t really involve anyone but Zeta.

FERRO IN LOVE

FERRO HAD SPENT as much time as possible away from the ranch house since Lecha had returned. The bitch thought she could appear out of the blue in a taxi one day and pick up where she had left off. Ferro had never felt he had a mother; Zeta had always made it clear she was a stand-in for Lecha. He was not sure how he felt about either of them. Ferro had rented a town house on Ina Road after Lecha had returned. Paulie was left back at the ranch to sleep in Ferro’s room. Ferro drove to the ranch each morning. He could not sleep under the same roof with Lecha. Her sudden appearances and disappearances throughout his childhood had triggered nightmares and bed-wetting.

Ferro had told Paulie nothing about Jamey’s moving into the town house with him, but Paulie had sensed a rival almost at once. Ferro hated the puffy, bloodshot eyes staring at him mournfully.

Ferro had thought Jamey was too beautiful even to consider him. Ferro was thick around the belly and face while Jamey was lean and blond and perfectly proportioned.

Jamey said himself he was no Einstein. The university was only a place he and friends of his had heard about for good parties. But even when Jamey did not bother to go to his classes, Ferro had not been able to get over the awful feeling Jamey would find a new lover on campus, someone who was as blond, slender, and blue eyed as Jamey. Ferro could not stop making comparisons between Jamey and a runt like Paulie. Paulie was rough trade; Paulie was a sucker. Whatever white powder or substance was put before him, Paulie had lapped it up. Paulie had a grimy face and the close-set eyes of a rodent. Paulie had wandered up like a stray dog that got fed and had stayed. Ferro had never wanted Paulie. Paulie had only been there to work for the old woman, Zeta.

Later Ferro recalled conversations with Jamey; and Ferro hated himself for not guessing Jamey’s secret then. Ferro blamed distractions for his lapse: Lecha’s unexpected return, the unrest and the U.S. troops along the border; Jamey himself had been a distraction. The mere sound of Jamey’s name had caused Ferro’s heart to beat faster and sent chills down his neck. Ferro had never been so in love before. He had been consumed with pleasure as long as Jamey had remained close by; but if Jamey was away, Ferro’s pleasure had suddenly given way to the most terrible sensations of doubt and fear that somehow Jamey and Jamey’s love for him were about to be lost.

Ferro savored each moment and all the pleasure he got with Jamey. Jamey and Ferro. Ferro and Jamey. Ferro wanted to stop Jamey’s nights on the town without him. Ferro had offered to match whatever “Perry” paid Jamey for the drops and pickups, but Jamey had lightheartedly refused. Ferro was reacting to the stress and the pressure, Jamey said. There were important details Ferro could not work out when his mind was always whispering, “Jamey, Jamey.” It seemed funny how Jamey had eclipsed all the rest of it — the return of Lecha, the trouble with Max Blue, even the rumors of war in Mexico. Ferro was relieved he was about to retire. He did not want to take any chances of losing Jamey; all the nights Ferro had to spend with Paulie moving shipments might jeopardize their love. The reappearance of worthless Lecha was another sign it was time for him to retire with Jamey and enjoy life far from the dirt landing strips and desert jeep trails. Ferro wanted to escape the stink of women in the ranch house. Zeta had always said half was his. Half of all the gold and the guns Zeta had hidden in abandoned mine shafts on the ranch property. He would finance Jamey’s calendars, and later they might branch out and publish a men’s magazine. As magazine publishers, they would travel the world together. Ferro was glad to take his share before Zeta gave away all of it to the Mexican rebel Indians or worse, to the new religious cult founded by the twin brothers who took their orders from two blue macaws.

UNDERCOVER SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT

JAMEY LOVED the purple, pink, and violet of the sky over the Catalina Mountains after sundown. He loved feeling the warm desert breeze against his face when he drove the Corvette with the top down. He knew wind-whipped hair got split ends that looked tacky on long hair. Appearance was nine-tenths of undercover work or any other police work for that matter. The undercover assignment had been a disappointment because Jamey had loved how he looked in his police uniform. But the new police chief had chosen Jamey right out of police academy to begin a special undercover assignment, to be part of an internal security unit for the police chief. The others in the narcotics undercover unit had no idea Jamey was there to watch them as well as to work with them.

Jamey loved the mock orange blossoms’ perfume in the air, and he loved his role of “boy toy” for a shakedown at the Stage Coach later in the evening. Jamey liked to sing along with the radio and talk to himself. Working undercover two years had changed Jamey’s idea about wearing a uniform and being a cop. All the uniform cops ever talked about was their dicks and how much they hated homosexuals. Jamey had felt so lonely he wanted to quit the department, but then Ferro had come into his life.

Jamey had never responded so strongly to a man before, and Ferro had wanted to keep fucking all night. Jamey had not been taken to an expensive resort suite before; he had been accustomed to the hurried brutal thrusts and abrupt embraces in the dark with balding fraternity alumni brothers. Ferro had been different from the start for both of them. Jamey had not felt so captivated in years; Ferro’s blazing dark eyes made Jamey weak with desire.

The police academy had not really been Jamey’s idea; he had followed two fraternity brothers to the police academy after graduation. His two buddies had dropped out the first week, but Jamey had stayed because it seemed easier to stay. He liked being with the rest of the guys, and he didn’t mind having someone else make the decisions. That was what Jamey had enjoyed most about Ferro; Ferro took command and told Jamey what they would do. Jamey got chills whenever Ferro gave him instructions. Jamey had got chills too whenever the police chief called him into his office alone to brief Jamey on his special assignment. Upon graduation Jamey had left the academy immediately on special assignment to narcotics and vice. The police chief said they liked his “blond, blue-eyed good looks” so necessary for undercover work at university fraternity and sorority parties.

Jamey was proud of his versatility; he could look preppy and clean-cut or grow out his hair like this and walk on the wild side. Jamey enjoyed watching his own reflection in the plate glass as he eased the Corvette up Oracle. Tonight he wore tight black leather pants and a black leather shirt with silver studs open to his navel. His blond hair had grown so long it had reached his shoulders. He looked perfect. He loved his life undercover, dressing up and pretending to be someone he was not.

Jamey had told Ferro about his passion for uniforms, and he had told Ferro about his fraternity brothers who had wanted to be cops. Jamey remembered vividly how Ferro had spat at the mention of cops. Right then Jamey had known that silence was better, silence had always been better than trouble. Jamey had intended to explain to Ferro that police work was only a job; but Ferro had not wanted to talk so Jamey had let the subject drop. Jamey had learned as a rookie not to be surprised when he saw the undercover officers and cops in uniform fill their pockets with the cash and the drugs they had confiscated for evidence. Jamey had learned the rules. He let the others know he was easy. When they offered him a share or cut, Jamey took it. Jamey had played the dumb fraternity jock who did anything the others told him to do.

The chief had asked Jamey to watch for any suspicious behavior he might notice among his fellow undercover officers. The chief had spent an uncomfortable interval staring directly into Jamey’s eyes after he said that. It was crazy, but when Jamey was under intense pressure such as that, he sometimes imagined straight men were coming on to him. At first, it had seemed to Jamey, the police chief had done him a favor by assigning him directly from the academy to narcotics undercover work; others waited years walking a beat or writing traffic tickets. Undercover narcotics was the big cookie jar. But very soon Jamey had sensed jealous undercurrents within the department, and suspicion focused on him. Jamey didn’t know why the police chief had singled him out from the other recruits, but others in the department thought they knew. Jamey was one of the new chief’s pets, and a spy sent to report on the others in the narcotics unit. Jamey found his picture from the Cop Cakes calendar taped to the door of his department locker. Jamey had felt all their eyes on him, but Jamey had been cool; he had laughed it off. He knew the sergeant and the others behind desks had the best jobs of all; they got thousands in cash just for passing on classified police information, or for zealously “cleaning out” files or for evidence in the department vault that had mysteriously disappeared.

Jamey drove past the Stage Coach to check out the vehicles in the parking lot to see if the others were there yet. He drove under the freeway overpass to the bridge on the Santa Cruz River. The water in the river came from the city sewage treatment plant; still the cattails and other greenery along the banks looked succulent. Jamey parked the Corvette and walked down the riverbank. He was always a little nervous before a shakedown, and this one at the Stage Coach was important. According to Perry, the guy Tiny who managed the Stage Coach owed them because his dancers didn’t keep their pussies covered. Anyway, Perry said all they had to do was wait until they saw the blonde go into Tiny’s office. Tiny had called them about the blonde with the kilo of “top grade”; Tiny was setting up the blonde so they would get a kilo worth five times what he owed them.

Jamey was supposed to pull his.38 to make the shakedown look convincing. Jamey let the others handle the details; he was content to follow orders. Still, he could feel his stomach tense and his bowels heat up as he parked the Corvette next to a row of Harleys in the parking lot. It all seemed simple enough. They would wait until backup units had surrounded the bar parking lot. They wanted to give Tiny and the blonde enough time to cut up some lines to sample before they rushed the office door. Perry would give the signal, and uniformed officers would kick in the back door to the office a moment before Jamey came through the front door.

SHOOT-OUT AT THE STAGE COACH

SEESE REMEMBERED a horror movie she had once seen in which blood had flowed out elevator doors in waves and had flooded a hotel lobby. The police had forced Seese to sit in the chair with her feet in the pool of Tiny’s blood. The blood had soaked through the soles of her shoes and through her stockings, but the police refused to move her. She sat handcuffed in the chair until six o’clock the following morning while internal affairs investigators came and went. Seese had closed her eyes but kept remembering the movie with the blood flowing from the elevator doors, oceans of blood. Tiny had been a huge man, over three hundred pounds. How many pints in a quart? How many quarts in a gallon? Seese could not stop her thoughts from spinning; her brain was a slot machine rolling up words and images from everywhere. Her father’s blood in the South China Sea. The undercover pig had deserved what he got. Maybe Tiny had deserved it. Or maybe the police had got sick of Tiny. Now they were rid of him and they had got his bar and assets too. Seese couldn’t stop thinking. She had been drinking vodka tonics with Cherie before she took the train case into Tiny’s office.

Seese had watched the police all night. They regularly had different interrogators ask her the same questions again and again. Did she remember who came through what door first? Who was shot first? Who shot the undercover officer? Who shot Tiny? No questions about the kilo of cocaine in the train case. The train case had been removed by the first undercover-unit officer into the room after the firing had ceased. She had hit the floor after she had seen Tiny reach for his gun. She had been splattered with the undercover cop’s blood after Tiny had fired and had dropped the cop in his tracks as he came through the door. She had been facedown on the floor when the other cops in uniform had opened fire on Tiny, so she had only heard him hit the floor.

Seese began to notice the odor of the blood almost at once. The police had turned off the air conditioner in the office, and the big pool of Tiny’s blood was beginning to spoil. They had removed the dead undercover cop almost at once, but they had left Tiny on his back near Seese’s feet. Somehow the police had assumed Tiny was her lover, and the sight of his body was intended to shake some information loose from Seese. Where had the kilo come from? They had already assumed the cocaine did not belong to her because bitches might haul coke for their men, but it wasn’t theirs.

Seese could think of no reason why she was still alive. Why hadn’t the police shot her? They had shot fat Tiny full of big holes. The explosive force of the bullets had blown out his fat like pillow stuffing. Human fat was bright white. She had dived to the floor to save herself; but for what? Every chance she might have had to find Monte and all her hope were gone now.

Seese had lapsed into dreamlike states while she was awake; she saw David’s face on Tiny’s body, which seemed to be bloating from the heat. This was cop fun; to display their trophy; this must be a big one. The police chief himself and the sheriff stood away from the blood at the back of the office and had listened as the detectives questioned Seese about the sequence of events.

Maybe David was dead and Monte was dead. Maybe she would soon be dead. The handcuffs and her arms bent back around the chair had caused her upper body to go numb. The police refused to let her use the toilet. Seese slipped into a trancelike calm, as if she had just polished off a pint of whiskey and a half a gram of coke. A strange form of exhaustion had agitated her thoughts while her body gradually became numb. Yes or no; wet or dry. Seese had not thought about the precise meanings of words since she quit school. Seese wet her pants and smiled as she saw how this had excited the police; they had left her handcuffed to the chair because this was what they had wanted. She had not overheard them discuss freeing her until three or four in the morning.

Finally Seese had passed out from exhaustion; she woke up when a sheriff’s deputy decided to unlock the handcuffs because her hands and arms had swollen. The police were rolling Tiny’s old-fashioned box safe out the door; behind them were the ambulance crews with body bags. Seese saw then that the dead narc had only been taken outside and left facedown on the floor by a pool table. His long blond hair was soaked with blood, but no one had bothered even to throw a bar towel over him. She had assumed when they took the dead pig out of the office, they were taking him to his glorious reward; to lie in state at a local funeral home, then the police honor guard and twenty-one-gun salute at the graveyard.

Seese tried to figure it out. She wasn’t sure she trusted her own senses, but something seemed odd. The behavior of the others was not what she had anticipated; sheriff’s deputies and police whispered and walked past the corpse without looking down or stopping. When the police chief and the sheriff had arrived at the scene, they had studied the close-ups the police photographers had taken hours earlier, before the corpse of the cop had been moved from the office. Then Seese knew. The dead cop had been set up by his own people. Cops took care of their own kind if they stepped out of line. They had kept asking her if she was sure the undercover man had come in the door first because the department had certain guidelines and procedures to prevent confusion during police raids. Uniformed officers broke through doors first; undercover followed. Otherwise, suspects pulled guns the way Tiny had. Was she certain the undercover cop had come through the office door first? Yes, she was certain. Had he yelled “Police”? No, he had not yelled “Police.” Could she be mistaken? Wasn’t she snorting cocaine with the deceased that night, wasn’t she drunk as well? Was it possible she had not heard the officers come through the back door first? Maybe she had only imagined the undercover cop coming first. Then Seese knew. Seese got the picture.

Seese said nothing. She let them ask the questions over and over. Could she be mistaken? After all, she had old arrest records for misdemeanor prostitution in Tucson. Hadn’t the uniformed officers shouted “Police!” as they broke down the back door? Didn’t the undercover man shout “Police!” too as he came through the front door? Seese understood what they wanted her to remember; if her memory improved, they would be happy to see her leave town, and even the state, and she wouldn’t ever be asked to return to testify. In fact, they would recommend Seese leave Arizona and never return again, if she knew what was good for her. For all Seese knew, the police had shot their own man; Tiny had only fired once, and he might have missed. The police had sprayed Tiny’s office with bullets; stray bullets had torn big chunks out of the phone book on Tiny’s desk, and bullets had shattered the fake maple paneling like the plastic or fiberglass it really was. Police bullets had pierced the cheap plasterboard walls of Tiny’s office. Yes, her memory had improved; it was clear now, the uniform cops had come through the door first. Then Seese had remembered Cherie and the other dancers and the customers who had been in the Stage Coach when the shooting started. She had not heard if there had been other injuries.

The police chief himself had talked to her alone in the backseat of his unmarked car. Seese had seventy-two hours to gas up and get out of town. If she was caught in Tucson after seventy-two hours, they had a list of charges they would slap her with; for starters, they had accomplice to felony murder. Seese did not know why she felt giddy at a moment such as that; she felt like laughing because the police chief did not want to get too close to her because she stank of her own urine and Tiny’s blood. She had watched how his eyes had examined her breasts and thighs; she wanted to laugh out loud. Luckily she had been a mess because the police chief looked as if he might like to fuck her.

She did not want the police to follow her so she did not call a taxi. Instead Seese had left on foot from the Stage Coach. She hurried across the frontage road. She was nothing to the police really; she wasn’t even a problem. Probably the police chief and sheriff were already riding together in the helicopter back downtown to prepare statements for the press. They were already erasing her. No woman had been in the office with Tiny, contrary to early reports. Seese imagined that by next week and the funeral, they would already have forgot the real reason the narc had got blown to kingdom come. By the time the big state funeral for the narc rolled around, they would only remember that the dead man had been a cop and one of their own, whatever else he might have been. All they would remember was the fat fucker at the titty bar had killed a good man.

Seese waited in the scrubby greasewood bushes that grew on the plain of old river gravel the city had bought for a park that was never built. She heard loud police radios in cars that raced over the bridge, and she wondered if the police were trying to follow her. She felt strangely relaxed and calm, certain she was safe, crouched in the sand, hidden by the greasewood as if she were a desert animal. The police would expect to find her hitchhiking down Interstate 10. Seese was shivering and could not stop. She did not feel either cold or afraid: it was as if the shivering of her muscles had been separate from her, from her real self. She stretched out on the ground under the greasewood; she was nauseous with exhaustion but still her eyes would not close. Her eyes were wide open and she knew she could not force her hands to cover her eyes. She saw the sandy ground close up with the tiny yellow greasewood leaves scattered over it; she saw, only inches from her eyes, the gnarled, twisted trunk of the greasewood.

When Seese and Cherie had worked for Tiny, the police used to find dead whores dumped in the greasewood flats near the bridge. Naturally whore killers didn’t take the trouble to haul the bodies very far; Seese had hidden deep in the greasewood thickets where people could hardly get through. Seese lay on her side and stared at the river gravel; the ground resembled a map with villages and cities marked with pebbles of varying size as one might expect to see, if one could fly over a map instead of the earth.

How cool it felt to lie on the ground with the greasewood for shade; in a few hours the sun would be high enough to penetrate the thin shade. Seese knew she’d have to move, but by then, the police would be gone. Seese wished she had her picture of Monte with her then because something had happened. Probably it was exhaustion, but she was having difficulty remembering Monte’s face. Her memories of his face as a newborn had blurred together with her memories of Monte on the day he had disappeared. Even the strange dream Seese had had of Monte as a much older child had become part of her memory, and she cried because she could no longer remember how Monte looked.

Seese took deep breaths to help her relax and remember. She rolled over on her back and saw the bright blue sky through the spindly branches and twigs. A mother always remembers; a mother never forgets. Tears filled her eyes. She had to remember. She had to remember because she had to find Monte. Nothing else mattered. In the distance, she heard police radios and car doors slamming. She knew she should be alert for footsteps, but it had been as if her veins were flooded with morphine, and she felt powerless to move. Dying was like that, easy and natural as breathing out and in. If the police found her, she would never know; a bullet in back of the head and she would simply not wake up. That was fine with her; she didn’t want to be awake anymore. In her dreams she could be with Monte and with Eric again. In her dreams she could forget she had lost everything; she wanted to sleep forever.

When Seese woke, her face and body had been sticky with sweat, and tiny black ants had been crawling over her feet and hands. She jumped up and brushed off the ants. She rubbed the skin on her legs and feet through torn panty hose. The dried blood had worn off her shoes and left only a dark stain. Seese imagined Tiny’s corpse as a pig’s carcass with a man’s head; she could feel an invisible film of rancid oil on her ankles and feet, wherever Tiny’s greasy blood had touched her skin. She could hear the rush-hour traffic on Interstate 10 and on Silverbell Road. The cops who had been searching for her would have finished their shift. It was almost nine A.M. Seese tried to wash up a little in the river so she could use the pay phone at the 1-10 truck stop without attracting attention. The water felt so cool Seese had been tempted to drink some; she had expected the water to stink like shit, the way the air smelled near the sewage treatment plant. But all she had been able to smell had been the terrible odor of Tiny’s blood as she tried to wash off her shoes and feet in the shallow water.

SCATTERED IN ALL DIRECTIONS

STERLING WOULD NEVER forget the morning Seese had not returned from town, and Ferro had learned his friend was dead. Lecha had rolled herself out to the kitchen in the wheelchair to get her medication. She had asked Sterling if he knew where Seese might have gone, then she had gone back to her bedroom. Sterling had been bundling up the garbage in the kitchen while Zeta sat at the table with Ferro and Paulie watching the morning news on TV. Ferro had been drinking from his cup of coffee when suddenly he had let the cup drop from his hands. Coffee had splashed the wall, and broken pieces of the cup scattered across the tile floor. Zeta and Paulie had both looked at Ferro, but Sterling saw Ferro’s eyes were fixed on the TV screen, and the close-up photograph of a handsome young man with blue eyes and blond hair. The video report that had followed showed the interior of a dingy bar and two corpses in body bags leaving the bar one after the other. Ferro had bellowed like a wounded animal—“No! No!” Sterling heard Lecha’s telephone ring, and then Lecha had called his name. “Sterling! Sterling! Quick!”

Sterling had wanted to alert Lecha to the developments in the kitchen, that someone Ferro knew had been killed, but Lecha had been in a hurry. She gave Sterling the keys to the old Lincoln and slipped a pistol from under a pillow into her purse. Then she got out of bed in her red silk robe and stepped into the wheelchair. She had seemed healthy enough to walk, and she wasn’t crippled. She rolled herself around in a wheelchair; for sympathy and to fool the cops, she said, but still, Sterling had felt something was odd.

In the kitchen Paulie was on his hands and knees wiping up the spilled coffee; Sterling saw the paper towel had spots of blood where Paulie had cut himself on shards of the broken cup. Zeta had her arms around Ferro, who stood rigidly, resisting her comfort, shivering as if he were about to explode. Sterling saw wet streaks down Ferro’s pale, fat cheeks. Lecha had looked at Ferro and Zeta, and at Paulie; Lecha had seen Ferro was upset, but Sterling knew her mind was on the phone call, and they had to hurry. Lecha had not told him, but Sterling thought he knew: it was Seese who had just called. Lecha didn’t want Zeta to find out Seese was in trouble. Zeta had focused all her attention on Ferro as she tried to console him, and she did not look up even when Lecha and Sterling came into the room. Paulie had kept his head down, but Sterling saw the tears in his eyes.

Zeta could not stop the stampeding horses that had scattered in all directions — that had been her nightmare after the police shootings. Now Ferro had gone off with Paulie. Paulie wanted to park a junker car loaded with dynamite next to the Prince Road police substation. Zeta had seen the expression in Paulie’s eyes; Paulie wanted more than anything to prove his love to Ferro now that the rival was dead. Paulie’s devotion had only made Ferro’s grief more fierce and Zeta was afraid Ferro might want to follow his boyfriend to the grave. Zeta’s grief had surprised her, and she felt a terrible pain in her chest as if her grief had crowded her heart against her ribs.

She and Calabazas had been fools. Their lives were nearly over and what had they done? What good had all their talk of war against the United States government done? What good had all their lawbreaking done? The United States government intended to keep all the stolen land. What had happened to the earth? The Destroyers were killing the earth. What had happened to their sons? She loved Ferro; she didn’t want him to die.

The time had arrived more quickly than any of the people had ever dreamed, and yet, all the forces had begun to converge. Lecha had learned a strange story from the gardener, Sterling.

A giant stone serpent had appeared overnight near a well-traveled road in New Mexico. According to the gardener, religious people from many places had brought offerings to the giant snake, but none had understood the meaning of the snake’s reappearance; no one had got the message. But when Lecha had told Zeta, they had both got tears in their eyes because old Yoeme had warned them about the cruel years that were to come once the great serpent had returned. Zeta was grateful for the years she had had to prepare a little. Now she had to begin the important work.

Packing a great sidearm put a rare glow in Zeta’s eyes. She had walked the dingy street along the railroad tracks and felt light on her feet because the.44 magnum was in her purse. Greenlee had phoned to say he was ready to do business. Zeta told Greenlee she’d sell him the.44 Blackhawk he wanted. Her hands weren’t as steady anymore, and she wanted to buy a pistol that was less demanding.

Greenlee had never realized how much Zeta hated him. The more tense and stony faced she had been, the more animated and friendly Greenlee had become. Zeta had allowed the misunderstanding to continue for years because he had sold her guns without any questions. But now, messages from the South had indicated Greenlee was a key man.

Greenlee had waved off the six security men pointing Uzis when he saw it was only Zeta with the.44 Blackhawk in its holster. She was one of their “best customers,” Greenlee had exclaimed as he pretended to scold the security guards for not recognizing Zeta. Zeta had always let Greenlee think she was swallowing the flattery with the lies. Today she smiled and winked at him. She wanted to be left alone with him in the huge basement vault; she wanted plenty of time, no hurry. She let Greenlee show her special laser scopes to fit handguns and examined an automatic rifle he had taken from the rack on the wall.

He had a hilarious new Indian joke for her too, Greenlee said as he answered the red phone next to the computer terminal. Zeta could barely stomach Greenlee’s jokes; she knew the jokes were his way, his little test, for dealing with Mexicans or Indians and blacks. His theory had been that anybody who got huffy or hot while he told his nigger and beaner jokes would eventually try to cut his throat. “Cheaters win, and winners cheat,” Greenlee liked to say. So he got them first. Greenlee thought his jokes and “tests” were foolproof.

Today Greenlee seemed enormously pleased with himself; Zeta knew business was good; Awa Gee had just intercepted computer data that revealed big transactions between Greenlee and Mr. B. Greenlee’s small, pale-blue eyes were bloodshot. He had always watched Zeta’s eyes as he told the jokes, and she had never flinched. Greenlee really liked this one, he said, “because it’s about that TV broad — you know, what’s her name? Bah-bah Wah-wah! So anyway the bitch is talking — interviewing this Indian chief.”

Zeta smiled; she still had to marvel at the hatred white men harbored for all women, even their own.

“Oh, by the way,” Greenlee added, “the joke’s title is ‘Never Trust an Indian.’ ”

Zeta had burst out laughing.

“I knew you’d really like that!” Greenlee said.

Zeta was still chuckling and had nodded her head. Zeta really was going to enjoy this one.

“So Bah-bah Wah-wah asks the chief why he has so many feathers, and he tells her, ‘Me fuck them all — big, small, fat, tall — me fuck them all!’ ” Greenlee tried to imitate a falsetto scream. “ ‘Oh, you ought to be hung!’ ” he lisped, then Greenlee had bellowed, “ ‘You damn right me hung! Big like a buffalo, long like a snake!’ ”

Zeta had laughed out loud because everything essential to the world the white man saw was there in one dirty joke; she had laughed again because Freud had accused women of penis envy.

Greenlee had mistaken her laughter as a compliment and preened the hair at the edge of his shirt collar. “So Barbara Walters cries out, ‘You don’t have to be so hostile!’ The chief says, ‘Hoss style, dog style, wolf style, any style, me fuck them all!’ ” Here Greenlee had doubled over with laughter until his pale eyes watered.

Zeta smiled and had nodded to encourage Greenlee to laugh harder.

“So she cries out, ‘Oh, dear!’ The chief says, ‘No deer — me fuck no deer. Asshole too high! Fuckers run too fast! No fuck deer!’ ” Greenlee had not laughed so hard before. Zeta could feel a chill at the base of her spine. Greenlee was almost hysterical, and Zeta could not resist laughing at the bright pink color of his face. How perfect his face was for this one moment! Ah, his laughter! How it echoed up and down air-conditioned aisles of the basement vault. “No fuck deer!” Greenlee kept repeating the punch line over and over.

“Bombproof, bulletproof, fireproof, but not foolproof!” Greenlee had loved to brag about his office in the basement vault. Because only a fool would dare attack this vault. Zeta had let the revolver rest comfortably on her lap after she had removed it from the holster. She had used both hands with the barrel at a perfect forty-five-degree angle the pistol butt braced against her stomach. “No, not foolproof,” Zeta said as Greenlee’s grin went flat on his face when he saw the pistol was cocked. “Soundproof though,” Zeta said as she squeezed the trigger. Soundproof but not foolproof because only a fool fired a.44 magnum without earplugs. Zeta took her time. Greenlee’s security unit would not return for hours unless Greenlee called them. The vault was off-limits. With her ears ringing, deaf as dirt, Zeta had gathered the disks and readouts Awa Gee needed to complete his work.