The Demands of the Dead (26 page)

I decided to stop being a coward, and called her.

“Hello?”

“Ah. You’re home.”

“I know where I am, Mark. I wonder where you are.”

“I’m home, too. I have a lot to tell you.”

“Oh yeah? When?”

“Tonight? Dinner?”

I waited.

“Okay, I’ll be over.”

I had limited time. I was already showered. I needed a shave. I managed without cutting myself. I unpacked and tidied up the place, then changed into my best shirt and maybe put a bit too much cologne on.

She unlocked my door and walked right in. She wore a black dress with a red shirt over it. She had straightened her hair. She was smiling. She was carrying a suspiciously large bag in addition to her purse.

I said something about how she looked.

“Mind if I leave this here?” she asked.

Not if it meant she had to come back for it, no. “No.”

We went to a restaurant where I could blow a significant portion of the money I’d just made. We got drunk. I told her about Walter. She told me she’d had lunch with my mom. At some point, we ended up back at my place.

“I realize I have had a few drinks,” she told me seriously, “but I had a chance to think about some things when you were gone all of a sudden.”

Since I'd had a few myself, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to hear her thoughts more or know what was in the bag.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Oh, the bag.” She opened it. It wasn’t a special gift for me. It was just her toothbrush, contact solution, hairbrush, and underwear for tomorrow.

That left me with little choice but to ask her, and listen very carefully to, the things she had a chance to think about while I was away.

Justin Podur, 2014

Note to readers:

This is a work of fiction. All the characters who appear in the foreground of this book, including the deceased, are fictional. The situations that occur in the book and the case itself are fictional. The village of Hatuey is fictional. The story of Hatuey, recounted in Bartolome de las Casas’s ‘Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies’, is real. The organizations depicted in the foreground of the book, such as the Chiapas Human Rights Defense Network and Corporate Research and Analysis Resources are fictional. The larger organizations—the Mexican Army, Chiapas Public Security, IMECO, and the Zapatistas—are real, but the depictions of them in this book are fictional and should be regarded as such.

A discerning eye might recognize that the martial art Mark practices is Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee's version of MMA, which borrows from other arts – including Jiu Jitsu, specifically Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, specifically Gracie Jiu Jitsu. My firsthand experience of JKD comes from Shawn Zirger, who learned with Dan Inosanto, Larry Hartsell, Paul Vunak, and others, and from Shawn's apprentice Simon Walder. The tracker skills taught by the Manleys are actully taught by Tom Brown Jr. at his Tracker School in the Pine Barrens, New Jersey.

The events in the background, such as the elections, the strike at UNAM, the massacres at Acteal and El Bosque, the murders of the villagers from Ejido Morelia, are all real events. The numbers recounted—70,000 soldiers occupying Chiapas, and 21,000 refugees, for example, were true at the time the story was set (April 2000). For facts about Chiapas, I am indebted to the work of many real organizations and individuals, including John Ross, Hermann Bellinghausen of La Jornada, Al Giordano of the Narconews Bulletin, irlandesa, the Zapatistas themselves in their writings and speeches, the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolome de las Casas, Enlace Civil, and Estacion Libre. Credit for the real information in this book I owe to them.

Justin Podur

###

Thank you for getting all the way to the end of this book, which is the first book I started writing (this book was started in Chiapas, in 2000) but not the first one that's come out. If you liked it, please consider doing a review at your favourite retailer.

Thanks!

Justin Podur

About the author:

Justin Podur
is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. He is the author of
Haiti's New Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake, and the UN Occupation
(Pluto Press (UK), Between the Lines (Canada), Palgrave Macmillan (US) 2012) and contributor to
Empire's Ally: Canada and the War in Afghanistan
(University of Toronto Press 2013). He has also worked as a journalist, reporting from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Pakistan, India, Colombia, Venezuela, Israel/Palestine, and Chiapas, for Z Magazine/ZNet and other outlets. His PhD is in forestry, and his scientific research on forest fires and climate change has been published in
The International Journal of Wildland Fire
,
Ecological Modeling
,
Ecological Applications
, and
Environmetrics
.

Connect with me:

Follow me on twitter @justinpodur

Visit my blog http://www.podur.org