Fantasy: The Best of 2001 Read online

  “Manuel!” My shout winged over the desert.

  No answer. I slid in a stumbling run down the hill, thorny mesquite grabbing at my jeans. About halfway down reason came back and I slowed down, moving with more caution.

  I reached the bottom without seeing anyone. Yet a tendril of smoke wafted in the air. How? No fire burned anywhere.

  Music started again, behind me. Turning, I faced the shadowed hill. My feet took me forward, toward the drift­ing notes, toward the hill, toward the music in the hill. Yet as long as I walked, as many steps as I took, I came no closer to that dusky slope. It stayed in front of me, humped in the moonlight.

  With no warning, I was on the edge of a campfire. What I had thought was the hill, it was smoke, hanging in layers and curtains. I walked through the ashy mist, trying to reach the campfire that flickered red and or­ange, vague in the smoke-laden air.

  Someone was sitting on the ground by the fire.

  “Manuel?” I asked.

  He didn’t stir. I continued to walk, but came no closer to him.

  It wasn’t my cousin. The stranger gave no indication he knew I had come to his fire. He stared into the flames, a heavy man with rolls of flesh packed around his body. The ground began to move under my feet, bringing him toward me, while I walked in place.

  Guitar notes drifted in the smoke, joined now by drums, a Chamula violin, and a reed pipe. They keened for my mother. The melody hit discords, as if offended that it had to play for itself when I should have brought the music in her honor. But where in Los Angeles could I have found Zinacantec instruments or musicians to play them?

  I had so little of what I needed to give my mother a proper burial. She lay in an unmarked grave in Califor­nia. But I would do my best in this in-between place. Manuel should have been the one to perform the cere­mony, as head of the family, but I knew what he would say if I asked him. He trusted his Uzi far more than the ways of our lost home.

  The ground continued to bring the stranger to me. He stopped only a few paces away. With a slow, sure motion, he turned his head and smiled, a dark smile, a possessive smile.

  “Akushtina.” He pressed his hands together and lifted his arms. When he opened his hands, a whippoorwill lay in the cup of his palms.

  “No!” I stepped forward. “Let her go!”

  He clapped his hands and the bird screamed, turning into smoke when his palms smacked together. “She’s gone.”

  I knew then that he had trapped my mother’s spirit when she died, catching it before she could return home to the mountains around the Lake of the Lightning. She hadn’t been buried with the proper rituals, after a mourner’s meal at dawn, her head toward the west. It had let this unnamed stranger steal her soul, just as he stole the spirit of the whippoorwill, her companion among the wild creatures that lived in the spirit world.

  Wait.

  The whippoorwill wasn’t my mother’s spirit compan­ion. An ocelot walked with her. In her youth, she had met it in her dreams, as it prowled the dream corrals on the Senior Large Mountain. If the ancestral gods had been angry when she died, it was the ocelot they would have freed from its corral, leaving it to wander unpro­tected in the Chiapas highlands.

  A whippoorwill made no sense. It came from this place, here, in the desert. During the year we lived in New Mexico, in the ranch house where my mother worked, she and I had often sat outside in the warm nights and listened to the eerie bird voices call though the dry air. So I thought of the whippoorwill when I thought of her. But if this stranger had truly captured her spirit companion, he would have shown me the oc­elot.

  Why a whippoorwill? I had no answer. All I could do was make the offerings I had brought. I pulled out the bag of pine needles and sprinkled them on the ground. The smoke around us smelled of copal incense, this stranger doing for himself what should have come from me. I fumbled in my pocket for the rum bottle. It wasn’t true posh, a drink distilled from brown sugar and made in Chamula. This came from a store in L.A. But it was the best I could do.

  The man snorted, giving his opinion of my offerings. He motioned at the rum. “You drink it.”

  Flushing, I tipped the bottle to my lips. The rum went down in a jolt and I coughed, spluttering drops everywhere. The rattle of the stranger’s laugh made haze whirl around us, smoke curling and uncurling, hiding the de­sert, revealing it, hiding it again in veils of gray on gray.

  Then I remembered the candles. Candles, tortillas for the gods. Taking them out of my pocket, I knelt down and set them in the dirt. They were ordinary, each made from white wax, with a white wick. When I lit them, they should have burned with a simple flame. Instead they sparked like tiny sky rockets straining to break free of the earth.

  The man rose to his feet, ponderous and heavy. “This is all you have for me?”

  I looked up, trying to understand what he wanted. A shape formed behind him, hazy in the smoke. It stepped closer and showed itself as a deer, a great stag with a king’s rack of antlers. Two iguanas rode on its head, their bodies curving down to make blinders for its eyes, their tails curled tight around its antlers. They watched me with lizard gazes. The stranger had a whip in his hand now, not leather, but a living snake, its tongue flicking out from its mouth, its body supple and undu­lating, its tail stiffened into a handle.

  I scrambled to my feet. “I know you,” I rasped, my throat raw from the drifting smoke. “Yahval Balamil.”

  He stood before me and laughed, Yahval Balamil, the Earth Lord, the god of caves and water holes, he who could give riches or death, who could buy the pieces of your inner soul from a witch who took the shape of a goat, or trap your feet in iron sandals and make you work beneath the earth until the iron wore out.

  Greed saturated his big-toothed smile. “You’re mine now.”

  The smoke in the air curled thick around us. I tried to back away from him, but I was walking in place, my feet stepping and stepping, taking me nowhere.

  “Mine,” he said. “Both you and the boy.”

  “No! Leave us alone.”

  He cracked his whip, and it snapped around my body in coils, growing longer with each turn, pinning my arms. The head stopped inches from my face and the snake hissed, its tongue flicking out to touch my cheek. I tried to scream, but no sound came out.

  “Mine,” the Earth Lord whispered.

  “Tina?” a voice asked behind me.

  “Manuel!” I spun around. “Where have you been? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.” He stood with the gun dangling at his side. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can’t you see it?”

  “See what?”

  I glanced around. We were halfway up the hill, just the two of us. No snake, no spirits, no gods. The fire had vanished, and the smoke had solidified into the moun­tain.

  Turning back to Manuel, I said, “He’s gone.”

  “He?” My cousin scowled. “Why do you smell like liquor?”

  “I drank some rum.”

  “When did you start messing with that shit?” He stepped closer. “I told you never to touch it. You know what happens when men see a pretty girl like you drunk? It makes them think to do what they shouldn’t be doing.”

  “It was part of the ceremony.”

  “Ceremony?” He looked around, taking in the candle stubs and pine needles scattered on the ground. Then he sighed, the fist-tight knot of his anger easing. In a gen­tler voice he said, “There isn’t no one here. I checked the whole area.”

  “Then why did you shoot?”

  “It was a deer. I missed it.”

  I stared at him. “You shot at a deer with an Uzi?”

  “It surprised me. I’ve never seen deer here before.”

  “What if it had been me who surprised you?”

  He touched my cheek. “You know I would never hurt you.”

  “You didn’t shoot at a deer. It was Yahval Balamil.”

  His smile flashed in the darkness. “Did I hit him?”

  “Do
n’t make fun of me.”

  “You’re mine,” the Earth Lord whispered.

  With a cry, I jerked back and lost my balance. I fell to the ground and rolled down the hill like a log, with mesquite ripping at my clothes. When my head struck a rock, I jolted to a stop and my sight went black. A ring­ing note rose in the air like a bird taking flight, then faded into faint guitar music.

  “Tina!” Manuel shouted, far away.

  “Mine,” the Earth Lord said. “Both of you.” A snake hissed near my ear.

  “Stop it!” I struck at the dark air.

  “Oiga!” Now Manuel sounded as if he was right above me. “I won’t hurt you.”

  My sight was coming back, enough so I could see my cousin’s head silhouetted against the stars. He was kneeling over me, his legs on either side of my hips. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Why did you scream?”

  “Mine,” the Earth Lord murmured.

  “No!” I said.

  Manuel brushed a lock of hair off my face. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Smoke was forming behind him, tendrils coming to­gether in the outline of a stag.

  “Leave him alone!” I sat up, almost knocking Manuel over, and batted at the air, as if that could defeat the smoke and protect my cousin.

  “What’s wrong?” Manuel stayed where he was, his knees straddling my hips, his thighs pressing on mine. He grabbed my hands, pulling them against his chest. He held them in his large grip while he caught me around the waist with his other arm. “Tu eres bueno, Tinita. It’s okay.”

  The smoke settled onto him, a dark cloud soaking into his body, smelling of incense. Curls of smoke brushed my hands where Manuel held them, my legs where his thighs pressed mine, my breasts where his chest touched mine. The invading darkness seeped into him.

  Manuel jerked as if caught by the smoke. Then he pulled me hard against himself, his breath warm on my cheek, his body musky with the scent of his jacket, his shirt, his sweat. He murmured in Tzotzil, bending his head as if searching for something. I turned my face up—and he kissed me, pressing his lips hard against my mouth.

  I twisted my head to the side. “No.”

  “Shhh . . .,” he murmured. “It’s all right.” He lay me back down on the ground, his body heavy on mine, like the weight of the dead.

  “Manuel, stop!” I tried to roll away, but he kept me in place.

  “Mine,” the Earth Lord said. “Both of you.”

  “No. Go away!” A breeze wafted across my face, bringing the smell of sagebrush—?

  And candles?

  Manuel kissed me again and pulled open my jacket with his free hand. “Akushtina,” he whispered. “Te amo, bija.”

  “Not like this.” My voice shook as I struggled. “You don’t mean it like this.”

  “Soon,” the Earth Lord promised. The snake hissed again.

  Panic fluttered across my thoughts. I still smelled candles. That scent, I knew it from when we had lived here. Luminarios. On Christmas Eve my mother had filled brown bags with dirt, enough in each to hold one candle. She lined the paths and walls of the front yard with the glowing beige lanterns. My mother’s love in a paper bag, warming the darkness while distant whip­poorwills whistled in the night.

  “We can go together.” Manuel moved his hand over my breast. “Together.”

  “Manuel, listen.” I was talking too fast, but I couldn’t slow down. “Do you remember the luminarios?”

  His searching hand stopped as it reached my hip. “Why?”

  “Remember what we swore when we were watching them? About family? How we would protect each other?”

  He lifted his head to look at me, his memory of that time etched on his face. The smoke that had funneled into his body seeped out again. It swirled around him, as if trying to go inside and finding its way blocked by the power of a memory. Finally it drifted away, into the night. Somewhere an owl hooted.

  Manuel made a noise, a strangled gasp he sucked into his throat. He jumped to his feet and backed up one step, still watching me. Then he spun around and strode away. Within seconds the shadows of the hill had taken him.

  I got up to my knees and bent over, my arms folded across my stomach, my whole body shaking. A wave of nausea surged over me, then receded. What if he had gone through with what he started? It would have de­stroyed us both.

  What had he meant by We can go together?Go where?

  Then I knew. Under the earth. Forever.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran up the hill. It wasn’t until I came over the top that I saw him, a dark shadow by the truck. My hiking boots crunched on the rocks as I walked. I stopped in front of him and looked up at his face.

  Once I had seen a vaquero forced to shoot his horse after a truck hit it on Interstate 10. The dying animal had lain on its side, dismay in its gaze until the cowboy ended its pain. Manuel had that same look now.

  He gave me the keys to the truck. “Go back to town.”

  “Not unless you come.”

  He shifted the Uzi in his hands. “I’m staying here.”

  I struggled to stay calm. “When people hurt, sometimes they do things they shouldn’t. But you stopped. You stopped.” I pushed at the Uzi. “Manuel, put it away.”

  “You’re all I got left.” His voice cracked. “And now I made that dirty, too.”

  I thought of his words: Te amo. “You said you loved me.”

  “You don’t know nothing about how I meant it.”

  “I’m not stupid. I know.” I shook my head. “It was him, making you act that way.”

  He stared at me, his stark face hooded by shadows. “It was me. It’s always been there.”

  “But you didn’t do it.” I tried to find the words to reach him. “Everyone has darkness inside of him. You turned away from yours. That says how strong you are.”

  He snorted. “You got this seeing problem, Tina, like you look at me with mirror shades. They reflect away the truth about me, so you see what you want, this good that isn’t there.”

  “It’s there.” For all that Manuel denied it, the good lived in him. The changes we had weathered in our lives had worn him down, eroding him like the wind and thunderstorms on the desert, in part because he was older, more set in his life, and had lost both his parents as well as my mother. But also because his height, strength, deep voice, and brooding anger frightened people. He looked like the warrior he would have been in another time, and in his frustration with a world that had no place for him, he had begun to live out that expectation.

  “It’s still there,” I repeated, as if saying it enough would make him believe it.

  He just shook his head.

  “Mine,” the Earth Lord whispered. “Both of you.”

  This time I gave no hint I heard. I kept watching my cousin.

  “Take the truck,” Manuel said. “Go back to town. Back to L.A.”

  “Why?” Everything that mattered to me was slipping away. I knew what he would do if he stayed alone here in the desert. “So you can take away the only family I have left?”

  “You’ll do better without me.”

  “No!”

  A shadow moved on the cab of the truck, a small one, barely bigger than my hand. Whippoorwill. With a soft flapping of wings, it rose into the air and circled above us, then flew away over the hill, into the endless open spaces of the night.

  “Mine,” the Earth Lord rasped. His voice had an edge now, no longer gloating, more like a protest.

  Then, finally, I understood. My mother’s spirit had never been the one in danger. It was the two of us here, Manuel and me. We couldn’t accept what we had lost, our home, our lives, our parents. That was why we had come to this in-between place. Our grief had made us vulnerable.

  “I was wrong,” I said. “The bird that Yahval Balamil was holding, it wasn’t Mama. It was me.”

  Manuel clenched his fist around the Uzi. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The Earth Lord,” I told him. “He’s come for us.
He knows we’re hurting now. It makes us easy prey. He’s come to take the pieces of our souls.”

  “Stop it.” Manuel’s voice cracked. “We’re the only ones here. Not dead people or fat gods. Just us. No one else. No-fucking-one else.” He flipped over the Uzi, hold­ing it by the barrel, and swung it like a club, smashing it into the door of the truck, denting the weathered chrome. As I jumped back, he flipped the gun back over and aimed it at himself.

  “Manuel, no!”

  He didn’t move, just stood like a statue, the Uzi pressed against his chest. I was afraid to breathe, to look away, even to blink.

  Slowly, so slowly, he turned, and pointed the gun away from his heart, out over the desert—

  And he fired.

  Bullets punctured the night like rivets ramming metal. Shadow clouds of dirt flew into the air and rocks broke in explosions. He kept on firing, his long legs planted wide, his hands clenched on the gun, shattering the night, until I thought he would crack the land wide open and fall into the fissure.

  After an eternity, the bullets stopped. Manuel sank to his knees and bowed his head, holding the gun like a pole in front of him. He made no sound. After a span of heartbeats I realized he was crying for the first time in years, in silence, even now unable to give voice to the grief that had torn apart his life, as he lost almost everything and everyone that had ever mattered to him.

  I went to him and murmured in Tzotzil, nonsense words meant for comfort. He drew in a choked breath. Standing up, he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. We stood with space between us, a space that would always be there now.

  I gave him the keys. “Will you drive?”

  He stood watching my face. Then, finally, he said, “We can stay in town tonight. Leave for L.A. in the morning.”

  “Okay.” My voice caught. “That sounds good.”

  I knew that our surviving this one night wouldn’t solve the problems we faced in L.A. It wouldn’t take away the inner demons Manuel wrestled or bring back my mother. We still had a long way to go.