Dancing with the Tiger (24 page)

“
Santísima Virgen
, take pity on me. I told Hugo a lie. The words rose up before I could stop them. Forgive me. Allow me to prove myself worthy of your blessings. I have seen inside the chapel and understand now why the
señor
needed water. Every night the light in the chapel shines, I watch and pray. Gruesome things call my attention. Evil is as confusing as goodness is plain. The
señora
refuses to see. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is open your eyes. I understand the test you have laid before me. This good work I do in your name. In return, I beg you,
Virgencita,
make me an honest woman. A lie is a lie only as long as it remains untrue. I could be a good mother.”

Frost covered the open fields of Connecticut as Daniel Ramsey drove to the airport, where his electronic ticket was waiting. His dry eyes shifted from road to speedometer to vodka bottle in the passenger seat. Damp wind smacked his face.
Wake up, wake up, wake up
. He had not slept. Thomas Malone, the name a curse in his mouth.

Route 1 was backed up. Accident or roadwork. He shifted into park, plotting his revenge. He'd be cordial, shake hands, accept a patio chair, before calmly levying his accusations.
I think you sold me some worthless masks a while back. You and Gonzáles.
If Constance heard, so be it. Let her know what kind of man she'd married, a liar, a cheat. Thomas would feign confusion; deny everything in his creamy voice:
I realize you've had a tough time, and I'm genuinely sorry for that, but surely you don't blame me for your troubles?

Traffic picked up, but barely. He was late. He should have taken the interstate. The last thumb of vodka sloshed about. Sometimes a man needed a drink to get off his ass. Shakespeare had known this. Churchill, too. His knees ached. The vodka was annoying him
. Finish the damn thing.
In a single swallow, he did.

The accident was impressive. A white sedan lay in the median like an enormous wounded gull. He passed the carnage, accelerated, making up time, going fast enough that at the intersection he sailed under a red light. Cars careened forward, greedy bastards, not waiting for traffic to clear. A maroon minivan shot into his path. Through the window, he made out a child's pale face in a pompom hat. He swerved, overcompensated, ran onto the curb, then crashed back to the road. He gave a girlish cry. His hands trembled as he patted his chest, checking himself, his heart. No accident. No injury. He merged into the slow lane, chastened but still moving, and that's when he heard sirens. And he thought:
Thomas Malone is the devil and no one can stop him.

He could tell it was a big deal for Chelo to be out at night with a man. She ordered limeade and a slice of chocolate cake. He had a beer with a side shot of whiskey. They had spent the day strolling the city, stopping for shaved ice, snapping silly pictures of each other. By six, they collapsed in a café. Tomorrow, he'd track down Malone, but he wasn't feeling ambitious today. He bought a rose from a woman with a basket on her head. Full price. No bargaining. Chelo pressed her nose into the flower's curled heart, set it down, as if she had many suitors, many roses, as if she had a collection.

The looter tried to relax, but paranoia chipped away at his good feeling. Who knew when Reyes's ugly face might materialize? If Chelo could show up on a bus and make everything good, then Reyes could show up in a café, guns loaded. Chelo had promised to help him, but
she couldn't protect him from Reyes or take him to Malone. Maybe he should pray.

“Tal vez debería rezar.”
The looter skimmed the pride from his voice. “For help finding this friend of mine, this thing.”

The girl nodded like she'd been expecting this. “God could help if you asked.”

“What should I say?”

The girl tapped her painted nails against her straw. “Speak in your own voice. Nobody else's.”

“What voice?”

“Who you are.”

“What if that's not good enough?”

The girl pursed her lips. “Be a better man. Earn his respect.”

This comment pissed him right off. He'd been looking for reassurance and she'd made him feel small. She was knocked-up but playing it chaste.

“What do
you
know?” His voice came out mean and he didn't try to fix it. He would not be judged. Not by a girl who couldn't scrape two pesos together.

The girl's eyes turned cold. “I know God.”

“Nobody knows God.”

“I do.”

The looter scoffed, fished for a cigarette. Chelo sat centered, hands on her Buddha belly, like everyone should rub her stomach for luck. All at once, the looter didn't care if he hurt her—or the baby. She was nobody to him. She was a tramp he'd met on a bus. She didn't know he'd dug up one of the greatest treasures in Mexican history. She didn't know that he'd sold it, stolen it back, sold it a second time, and
now, even as she sat sipping limeade, was devising a plan to steal it a third time, not for profit but to honor the Virgin of Guadalupe,
her Virgin
. What had Chelo done in her life? Spread her legs, peeled potatoes, passed judgment. He didn't have the Spanish vocabulary to express all the ways she was inferior to him. He just said: “And what does God say about your baby?”

The girl's face hardened, a security wall eight inches thick. Her lips covered her braces. “God says my baby is His son.”

“Your son is an
hijo de la chingada
.”

It was one of the most insulting things you could say to a Mexican.
Your son is a son of the whore
, not any whore, La Malinche, the Indian who slept with Cortés. The girl bent her head like he'd smacked her.

He threw down his money and left her, too furious to steer. When the market appeared, he dove in, pushing past synthetic T-shirts, past chorizo dangling like vulgar necklaces. He hated this country. Mexicans had nothing. Nothing but land they soiled. Nothing but animals they killed, relics they pawned, drugs they pushed. Nothing but God, who did nothing. The looter shoved past sleepy children awake too late at night.
Go to bed. Go to school. Stop eating candy.
He thought of his mother. The calamity of his life was her fault. She had not made him into the man he wanted to be.

The meat stalls went on forever. A skinned pig's head stared at him, a regular Supreme Court judge. Its lips moved. The looter rubbed his eyes, hoping to shut down the weirdness, but the foul, fleshy, avuncular, chalk-colored, blue-eyed swine resting on the butcher's table was communicating over the chasm of species and language.
Listen to the girl,
it said.
Believe in something. I know. I'm a pig.

The looter glared at the beheaded turkeys, the skinned rabbits, the
whole dead menagerie, daring other animals to offer two more lousy cents.

The butcher turned away from the chicken parts on his scale.

“Can I help you?”

“Your pig is talking to me.”

The butcher wiped his hands on his apron. A red splotch covered his heart. He looked down at his pig, amused, impressed.

“If my pig is talking to you, you'd better listen,” he said. “He never tells me anything.”

The looter put his ear to the pig's nostrils. Not a peep. What had it said?
Listen to the girl.
He pictured Chelo, the moon of her belly, her constellation of freckles. Why had he lost his temper? He no longer remembered. With a stab to the gut, he realized he wasn't sure where she lived and didn't have her number.

He ran out of the market now, knocking into people, not caring. What he wanted mattered more than what he upset. Chelo was the house he would live in. The children he would father. The love he would make. The proof he was a man, alive, no longer a twigger buried underground. Breathless, he reached the café, scanned the tables,
their table
, but the girl was gone.

The pain of her absence took his breath away.

He picked up a rock and hurled it. Something snapped in his shoulder. Something snapped in his heart. He was unloved and unlovable. Both things were his fault.

Room 7 of the VIP Hotel hadn't changed anything but its sheets. Same sad desk where no letters were written. Same lamp, its shade tilted and frayed. Anna didn't want to think about who had slept here in the interim, and the many ways what they had done was different from and the same as what she was about to do. She was going to seduce Thomas Malone and, while he slept, steal his keys. All of them, not one. She was done being subtle. She'd go to the chapel, swipe the mask, take off like Holly, meet the Tiger on Friday, retrieve her mother's ashes, fly over the border and never return.

Thomas lay on the bed, peering into his phone. Anna drank mescal from a recyclable cup. At the foot of the bed, another box, unopened. Maybe Thomas was giving her back the death mask. She smiled at the absurdity of the idea. The thing you wanted most was never inside someone else's box.

“Open your present.”

“I will.” She didn't move.

“Open it now.”

Anna studied him, debating whether at his core, beyond his vanities and greed, he was a good man or a bad man. She cut through the tape with scissors. Her desire for a happy ending was so strong she slowed down. As long as the box remained closed, her wish still might come true.

“You didn't have to do this.”

She lifted the top of the box. It was a mask, all right—a mask of a skull, a grinning chalk-white
calavera
with sloppy red lipstick and gnarly clenched teeth. Beyond ugly.

And Anna thought:
I used to date nice boys.

“Put it on.”

Anna shook her head, slid the box across the cheap comforter. “It's too much. What's next? A donkey?”

“I want you to wear it. You must.”

“I must?” The ridiculousness of his statement gave her an edge. “Why?”

He set his mouth. “I was looking for a woman to go places with me. I thought you were her.”

“You really want me to wear this?”

“It's Calavera Catrina. Posada mocking the Indians who wanted to be European, putting on airs. You'll be the height of fashion. The elegant cadaver.”

“In bed?”

“Sex, death, religion. They all go together. Why do you think the French call the orgasm the ‘little death'?”

“Because they're French.”

“Don't be so conventional. We're playing. You like the circus.” From his cigarette case, Thomas produced a joint. This surprised her until she remembered he'd been a drug rep. Who knew what combination of substances kept him afloat?

He inhaled, passed the joint to her. “You like?”

Anna took a hit. Sweet smoke filled her lungs. She remembered a lacrosse player she'd dated one summer, a bully with a tapestry belt. She exhaled. “Like has nothing to do with it.”

Two minutes later, she was stoned. Not high, but low, like a stone, a stoned stone, or maybe the creature that lives under the stoned stone, a slug with no eyes.

She volunteered to fetch ice, a pretext for fresh air. The parking lot reeked of diesel and fries. At the ice machine, her phone bleeped a text. David.

I heard yr dad's sale fell thru. Sorry. For everything. Come home. Be w/ me.

Ice cubes dropped into the plastic bucket. Anna searched for her feelings—love, regret, fear—but she was as full and empty as the parking lot of the VIP Hotel. Was David really sorry? Did he love her? Did she love him? There were no facts to check. No book, no census data, no website that confirmed sincerity, that diagrammed the tricky arteries of the heart. She pictured David, asleep in bed, when she'd lain awake nights, sifting through what she lacked the nerve to say. So many things. Or maybe just one:
I wish you loved me enough to make me tell you the truth.

She walked back to room 7, hugging the ice bucket to her chest. It wasn't too late to start over. Anna was good at beginnings. She would start by being honest with Thomas Malone.

She closed the door behind her. The collector patted the bed, his
expression enigmatic. The room grew smaller. She was frightened. Honesty had this effect on her. Any mask was safer than no mask at all.

“I need your help,” she began, joining him on the bed. “I've gotten myself into a real mess.”

He toyed with her hair. “I am an expert at cleaning up messes.”

She swallowed, pushed the words from her mouth. “That night, at the Excelsior when I blacked out, I lost something—”

“Lost what?”

“A death mask I bought in San Juan del Monte from that old woman who was killed. I had it with me that night, but when I woke up at your house, it was gone.”

His face registered no emotion. She continued. “A man in a tiger's mask came to my hotel. The same tiger who killed the old woman. He threatened to kill me if I don't give him the mask. He works for Reyes. Did you take the mask that night? I don't care now, I just need your help.”

“The death mask in the postcard?”

Anna nodded.

“You had Montezuma's death mask and didn't tell me?” His voice was high and brittle. “Though you worked for me, though we'd shared intimacies, you said nothing. You wanted the mask, I suppose, for the Ramsey Collection.”

A stone fell through Anna's body. She saw three versions of everything, none of them good. “How did you know?”

“How dumb do you think I am? Stealing my key. At that ridiculous dinner party, your face was so transparent. Scurrying off to the bathroom to compose yourself. I called Gonzáles.
Who is she, and what does she want?
In two minutes, I'd dragged it out of him. So Anna Ramsey came to Oaxaca to spy on me. She's sick of her father's incompetence.
She's ambitious, wants to join the real collectors. She gets her hands on a treasure, but there's one complication: Reyes has already hung a nail over his heart-shaped bed for this particular trophy, already sent a victory postcard to his rival.” Thomas paused. “How am I doing so far?”

Anna reached for a cigarette. She might be sick.

“But poor Anna loses the mask. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she trusted someone she shouldn't have. Now Reyes wants it back. He sends his tiger to do his dirty work, and now scared little Anna wants Thomas Malone, the man she has lied to, the man she has seduced and betrayed, to save her. Thomas Malone becomes attractive when there's something Anna needs or wants.”

Anna looked up at the door. No cross. She prayed to the ice bucket.

“To answer your question, I don't have the death mask. But could I help you? Maybe. I could call the American embassy or smuggle you over the border in my truck. Hire a bodyguard. Contact Reyes and plead your case. Anything is possible, but why don't you first show me why I should care?”

He held up the skull mask.

“I'm sorry,” Anna began. “I thought it was a silly knockoff. The tiger stole my mother's ashes.”

“Anna. You're a writer. Show, don't tell.”

“Will you help me?”

“Help yourself.”

It had come to this. Perhaps she'd always known it would. She took the skull mask, stumbled to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, wiggling her bare toes. Half-moons of color. If Thomas didn't have the death mask, who did? If he did have the mask, the only way forward was to see the night through. Catrina was heavy. Anna's breath warmed the wood
as she tied the mask over her face.
He's got some sexual fetish. He thinks this is fun. How does a skeleton dance? I'll walk out like a zombie and—

A woman screamed. A gun fired. The television announcing its presence. Maybe Thomas had changed his mind and they'd snuggle up to a nice mafia movie. Anna opened the door. He'd turned off the lights. By the TV's light, she made out the bed, bureaus, blinds, but Thomas had disappeared. The room swept past in unstable rushes. Whatever she'd smoked had clouded her insides, leaving her limbs heavy and numb. She called into the dark. “Thomas . . . I don't feel well all of a sudden.”

The blow to her neck came from behind. She blocked her fall on the bed with one arm. Then he was on her. His weight crushed her spine. His hand clamped the mask over her mouth. They struggled. He tore her clothes.
Thomas, you're hurting me!
but her voice had no power and Thomas was chanting gibberish,
Dueña y señora de la vida,
Ángel que nuestro Padre creó.
He dropped his pants. Through the mask, she caught snatches of the ceiling, square panels, removable. The mirror reflected the headboard, his back. Everything happened quickly. Everything happened slow. He was going to rape her, this horrible man. She kicked and struggled. Did she scream? She clamped her thighs. His face glowed, frantic eyes not seeing. She braced herself but nothing happened. She wrestled high enough to see his groin, pale and limp, and he saw her see this, his failure.

With one furious motion, he hurled her to the floor. Her head smacked the desk. He kicked the mask on her face. Her cheek split open. She moaned. Car chase. Broken glass. Gunfire. Family entertainment. The room door slammed. Face pressed to the carpet, Anna felt the vibrations of traffic, the single car that merged, disappearing into the night.

Out the window, the
MARISCOS
sign pulsed. Above it, the moon, half in light, half in shadow. The moon, where the footprints of astronauts would remain forever because there was no wind to blow them away. Anna held herself in the only place he hadn't touched. A Mexican saying floated up from memory.
El que con lobos anda a aullar se enseña.

He who walks with wolves learns to howl.