The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Read online

  “So you going to open it?” Tavi almost whispers after she disappears through the stained curtain into the little kitchen.

  “In a minute.” Now José Antonio is holding the letter in both hands, running his thumb back and forth across the embossed address of the Office of the National Lottery. Both men already know what it must say, the letter. The Office of the National Lottery does not waste a sheet of its official stationery, folded into one of its pale blue envelopes, to inform a citizen that after the annual drawing in the capital, his ticket still remained at the bottom of the great iron cage among the thousands of others unplucked by the archbishop.

  They know this because for the past thirty-two years, ever since the two classmates were fifteen and each old enough to enter the lottery, they have failed to receive such a letter informing them with profound regret that they have lost yet again. They have come to understand, without saying so or even acknowledging it to themselves, that this is the lesson of the lottery: the inevitability of loss. Why waste paper on the confirmation of the obvious?

  Nonetheless, the agent of the lottery arrives each autumn under the protection of the Southern Crescent circuit manager and his payroll guards. The little man sets up on a table in this very cantina the framed placard announcing the unimaginable prizes to be awarded the following spring. Then he unlocks the cash box and, like the last year and the year before and the year before that, once again enrolls each of the villagers in his ledger. Each name is inscribed beside an ornate number printed in the margin, a number matching the one stamped on the blue ticket the bespectacled gentleman offers as a receipt of the wager.

  So José Antonio need not draw his knife from its sheath between his shoulder blades and splay open the seam of the envelope to know he has been invited to present his ticket at the Office of the National Lottery in Puerto Túrbido, where he may claim his prize.

  “Come on, amigo, let’s see it,” pleads Tavi.

  But slipping the envelope into a pocket, his friend is firm. “Later.’’ José Antonio nods toward the tarnished mirror behind the bar, which flickers with the reflections of dark figures crowding the room as they wait out the downpour.

  Tavi sighs. “I’ll bring a bottle, yes?”

  “Yeah, later ...” The voice trails off into that trackless waste of memories and dreams where Tavi has often lost his friend.

  The foreman finishes his drink and pats the other man on the shoulder. “God smiles on you,” he whispers. But he knows José Antonio doesn’t hear him.

  ~ * ~

  2

  The house, his since childhood, has fallen into disrepair these last few years. The roof leaks, of course. In the bedroom upstairs, scattered pots cluck with dripping water. It sounds as if something is beginning to boil, as if José Antonio is making tea for the whole village.

  At least, that is what he is thinking as he takes his siesta, half asleep in the bed he has dragged to the center of the floor, the one dry spot left in the room. The Virgin watches him from her framed portrait on the wall, her hands cupping a heart in flames, tears weeping from her eyes.

  He has only to glance at the picture of Our Lady, he knows, and he will be back in the doorway, once again the five-year-old answering his mother’s screams in the middle of the night as his father, still cursing the woman, pushes past him and flees down the stairs. The Virgin was the last thing she saw, his mother, as the sheet dampened beneath her in this very bed. He remembers the blood oozing, just in front of his face, between the long fingers she pressed against the gash in her belly and how it pooled red, and then darker than red, in the hollow of her curled body.

  Even after his great-aunt had scrubbed the blood from the coarse linen with lye on the bank of the river, working the sheet against the washing stone worn smooth by generations of Indian women, the stain’s brown shadow lingered as though scorched there by a hot iron. But the old woman, too frugal to discard a possession with use still left in it, slept on that soiled sheet in her niece’s deathbed for the next twelve years until the afternoon she herself died, delirious and cursing the priest.

  In his memory, José Antonio cannot distinguish his mother’s face from the face framed on the wall. There was no photograph of her, Elena. As a boy he convinced himself that maybe she did look like the Virgin, with pursed lips and blue eyes saddened for her son. When he told his great-aunt about it, though, she cackled. “Blue eyes?” the old woman scoffed. “One of us?” But then she softened. “The Mother of God is the only mother you have, niño, so yes, your mother has the face of the Virgin.”

  From then on, the old woman had the child say his prayers each night on his knees before the portrait. Every year at Eastertide, she replaced the small palm branch wedged above the frame with a new frond blessed by the priest. The spine of green needles protected the houses of faithful Christians and all those who dwelled there, she believed, just as she believed every other superstition countenanced by the Church. In fact, the fury she unleashed upon the itinerant priest who administered her last rites had sprung from the failure of his holy water to shrink the tumor in her gut. At first she had dipped two fingers in the carved font just inside the door of the crude chapel before Mass each month and slipped them under her skirt to rub the swelling. But then near the end, when the pain had clawed her into a whimpering madwoman, José Antonio found his great-aunt lapping the water from the font like a scrawny monkey drinking rainwater cupped in the crook of a tree.

  He had the old woman wound in the stained sheet on which she had died with knees clutched to her shriveled bosom against the agony of her last hour. The young man had thought to bury his mother’s ghost in his great-aunt’s grave, but when he came home after the funeral, he found it still there, the shadow of Elena’s death, blurred on the ticking of the mattress. He sees it still every time he strips the bed and stuffs the mattress with fresh husks, smoothing the clumps of sheaths with arms sunk all the way to the shoulders through the slits of the bedding. And there have been times when, kneeling beside the bed with his cheek on the brown stain of his mother’s blood, his fingers deep inside the mattress to find the hard core of withered chaff that disturbs his sleep night after night, José Antonio could have let himself weep like a child.

  Thinking of his mother, he lowers himself to his knees before the image of the Virgin and repeats the prayer he has offered for more than thirty years, professing a vow that now — thanks to the lottery— can finally be honored, a vow to find and kill his father.

  Then, making the sign of the cross, he pulls himself up along the wall and slides his hand behind the frame of the holy picture. Just beneath the barbs of the palm frond he has continued to replace each year since his great-aunt’s death, slipped into the groove of the frame that locks the mat against the picture, a delicate strip of paper rustles under his fingertips. Reassured, he smiles to himself as he riffles the slip of blue paper, stamped, he knows, with a string of maroon numerals and emblazoned with the ornate crest of the Office of the National Lottery.

  ~ * ~

  3

  The steamer that has delivered José Antonio’s letter will leave at first light tomorrow morning on the return voyage to Puerto Túrbido; Southern Crescent trades at no villages farther upriver. Already Tavi has gathered a crew to load the crates of rare orchids and the baskets of iridescent butterfly wings gathered by Indians along the slopes of an unnamed valley six hard days’ trek from Bejucal. Because it is the rainy season, the company warehouses are nearly empty. The lumber, black with water, is too heavy to cart back through the rutted mud of the logging roads, and the jungle crops can’t begin to be harvested until the rain breaks in another month or two. So this time of the year, the company sends the little boat, and it does not bother to stop for long at the small settlements on its way back to the capital.

  José Antonio finds his friend on the landing, checking a bill of lading, and the two men walk together to Tavi’s office. Rain licks their faces with its hundred small tongues.

 
; Inside the company cabin, Tavi bends before the safe that Southern Crescent has provided each of its outposts. The one at Bejucal is an antique; his father taught Tavi its sequence of numbers twenty-two years ago. Now without even repeating the code to himself as he spins the brass knob to first one number and then another, twirling it back and forth between his thumb and finger, the foreman opens the safe and counts out the wages owed since the last payday nearly three months ago. As José Antonio signs the ledger to document the transaction, Tavi realizes he will never see his old friend again. Why would a man return to this godforsaken place?

  “Bring a case of whiskey when you come home,” he says as he locks the red ledger back in the safe.

  “For a fiesta,” the voice behind him promises.

  There is much to be done, and José Antonio is not used to being rushed. With his pay and if he sells his father’s gold watch still locked in the strongbox that is squirreled between two joists of the floorboards of his bedroom, the man will have enough for his journey to the capital — even with the debts he has to settle before he leaves the village. He owes Doña Ananá for a month of drinks at her cantina. There is the money for the ax he borrowed from Xavier and lost in a hole of the river when his canoe capsized last spring. And then he has to do something about Maciza.

  He needs a mat to sleep on and a new hat, one with a band on the inside that keeps the straw from scratching the forehead. He has to wash his clothes and pack them in the woven bag an Indian traded him for a pocket mirror on the mudflats below San Ignacio Falls. He has to sharpen his knife, he reminds himself.

  The day drizzles away. José Antonio dislikes being pursued by obligations yammering after him like pups snapping at his ankles. It is already dark before, finally finished with everything else, he sends a boy for Maciza.

  A bottle forgotten beside his rocker from last night or the night before glistens in the lamplight with a finger or two of rum. José Antonio pours the dregs into two glasses and carries them upstairs to the woman who, already undressed, waits for him in his bed.

  Maciza sniffs the drink when he hands it to her.

  “Go on, it’s rum.”

  “Why do we drink tonight?” She senses his unease.

  “Tomorrow, I’m taking a trip.” He feels her eyes on him. “A long trip.”

  “How long?”

  He shrugs and swallows the black liquid. Then he loosens his clothes.

  She lays her cheek against the mattress, her knees beneath her. Maciza will let herself be rolled onto her back, but it embarrasses her to be taken like a white woman, and her shame stifles the whimpers of pleasure he likes to hear her make. So he kneels behind her on the sagging bed, rolling his hands along the curve of her back until he seizes her shoulders and holds her fast.

  Afterward, he tells her to live in the house until he comes back.

  “Come back?” she laughs. “Why would anyone come back?”

  “You never know,” he whispers in the dark. “Maybe I’ll miss you.”

  “Oh, hombre,” she purrs, pleased.

  “And if I don’t come back, you keep the house.”

  The woman, her back still to the man, is both touched and hurt by the promise of his gift to her.

  ~ * ~

  4

  After an hour or so, José Antonio no longer notices the pistons huffing below the deck. Sitting upon a bale of blouses embroidered at the cuffs and the bibs with tribal talismans, he observes the roiling water the stern leaves in its wake. But lifting his eyes, he sees the churning ease, then calm just twenty yards back, as if the boat had never passed.

  He has never felt the need of a watch, not in his entire life. But now, gliding over the brown river that thickens behind him before he’s even taken its next bend out of sight, the man asks a crewman what time it is.

  “Ten minutes,” the sailor assures him impatiently, “since the last time you asked.”

  “Ah, sorry. It goes slow on the water.”

  “Not if you have work to do,” the man snaps as he lashes a tarp over the three bales of blouses and aprons and festival skirts carted from Xinutlan to Bejucal for shipment to the capital. They store textiles on deck; the dampness in the holds would mildew and stain the cloth long before they reached Puerto Túrbido.

  José Antonio waits for the man to move on to other duties, then stretches out on top of the tarp and the three stacks of clothing it covers. Drowsing on the makeshift pallet, he learns his first lesson of what it means to have money: the rich often endure boredom.

  He is confused by his feelings. Already today he has done more, seen more, said more than he has often managed in a whole week in Bejucal. Even as he considers what is happening, the surging of the boat rocks him to sleep.

  The crack of a parrot’s caw tumbles him awake. He slips to his feet from the bales on which he has slept. The parrot, perched on a rail of the gunnel, squawks off to a tree overhanging the bank of the river. The branch bobs under its weight.

  José Antonio is hungry. He doesn’t know how long he has been asleep, but it is still morning. A dream nags at him until it fades like something big just beneath the surface of water, a pirarucu maybe, going deeper. He peels a banana.

  It goes on like this, the sleeping, the eating, the jungle and its river closing behind them, until José Antonio would believe they have been traveling a week, a month, whatever he was told.

  Over the next days, the boat fills its holds, and the deck grows impassable with bales of textiles, cages of croaking macaws, tin vats of tortoises clambering over one another, tubs of something that looks like human fingers floating in vinegar. The nooks where one might doze away the afternoon under a canvas awning are filled with loose cargo. But José Antonio hardly notices. He paces the bow, cramped as it is, like the caged ocelot or the little peccary leashed to a cleat.

  He grows impatient to arrive and fulfill the vow he has repeated as a prayer for nearly as long as he can remember. But always nagging him through the ten thousand nights — no, more — he knelt before the Virgin was how to carry out his promise to avenge his mother, how with his father fled and no means to follow? How, without help, could he track the murderer across that wilderness of years? How could he hunt a beast that had hidden itself in a thicket of time, whose black hair had turned to ash, whose handsome face sagged under a mask of wrinkled age, whose fierce eyes had dulled to tarnished coins? But it is all unfolding now, the path he could not see, like the brown river snaking silently through the impenetrable jungle all the way to Puerto Túrbido.

  José Antonio will not be lulled again, not by the thrum of engines beneath his feet, not by the lassitude of a damp breeze, not by the sway of a loose-rigged boom. The lethargy of the jungle —- the plodding gait of the ai slung along the underside of a dripping branch, the tapir’s shamble through giant cane grass, the slumber of the anaconda — yields to the wariness of prey, the watchfulness of predator. He is alert, straining to see beyond the next bend.

  Eventually, the next bend reveals a stand of huts, tottering on stilts sunk in the muddy wastes of the lapping river. Then, farther on, children peer from tin sheds in a clearing.

  The jungle thins. Trees shrink to bush. Bush droops to brush. Brush crumbles to burned plains. Fires smolder across the horizon.

  People emerge from the smoke. At first, one or two straggle out of shadow. Then the shadow thickens into a knot of human figures. Suddenly the whole plain is writhing with creatures, moving in aimless circles and dark with soot.

  On both sides of the river, the mud banks are stamped with footprints, littered with refuse. The boat glides on.

  Mud hardens into rude walls, rises into raw houses. Incinerators, like huge tree trunks, spire beneath the dense foliage of their yellow smoke. Foam bubbles halfway across the river wherever a factory squats on the bank. Rusted warehouses, barges lining their wharves, fill the spaces between.

  The captain slows his vessel as it approaches a complex of whitewashed buildings and docks. Signaling with
one long shrill of his whistle followed by one short blast, he waits for an echo from the harbormaster, then comes about and eases his boat against the wharf of a two-story shed.

  Longshoremen are already on board, hefting cargo on their shoulders, before José Antonio can bid the captain farewell and make his way down the gangplank.

  He follows the wharf along the river past warehouse after warehouse until it swings into the harbor itself. Jutting from the murky orange sunset behind them, the cathedral’s three steeples, flanked by the cupola of the old colonial garrison and the little dome of the city hall, tower over the masts and the smokestacks of ships at anchor.

  For the first time since his journey began back in Bejucal days and days ago, he is afraid. The welter of people, the clanging of sounds, the labyrinth of buildings — he stands confused in the church’s vast plaza and doubts himself. Seeking refuge through the small wooden entrance set into one of the enormous carved doors of the cathedral, the man kneels before the statue of the Blessed Mother crushing the serpent Satan under her heel. Banks of candles flicker at her feet. José Antonio prays for guidance and, lifting his eyes, recognizes the snake: it is a bushmaster. The knowledge calms him; he realizes, whatever Puerto Túrbido may look like, he is still in the jungle.