La policía were called out to the neighborhood again. At the end of my shift, as I drove my cab home, the red and blue lights bounced off the windshield like a celebration for the dead.
They actually came, la policía, a fact that was becoming more damning than their absence. The narcos were more brazen, all but daring them to come. They would be there each night, watching la policía handle the scene, the medics load the body into the ambulance, the people of the neighborhood in their panicked stoicism. La policía, they knew who did it, but there never was a witness. No one in the barrio wanted to say a word against them.
My wife was standing at the window, holding our child and watching the crowd when I got home. “We came here to get away from them,” she told me when I came inside.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to stay.” She kept watching la policía outside, the narcos laughing as they drank their beers, la policía not bothering to say anything. The worst of the narcos stood surrounded by his men. Malverde laughed as la policía eyed him, his shirt open and his chest exposed to the world, the tattoo of Santa Muerte giving him the perception of protection. Where we came from, la policía worked for the narcos, killed for them, and kept the full accounting of their crimes from the light. Here, they took no sides and did nothing but protect their own lives, or those who were the right color.
“Rosa, we can’t go anywhere,” I said as went to the kitchen for my dinner. Our child was asleep in her mother’s arms.
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“I still owe the coyote.”
“Madre says it’s better at home. The war is all but over.”
“The war will never be over. Do we have any tortillas left?”
“The war followed us.”
“Don’t be silly. Do we have any more lengua?”
“On the counter. That was Gloria, from across the hall.”
“How is she?”
“That’s her in the ambulance.”
“Jesucristo.”
“I don’t want to know what they did to her.”
“Rosa.”
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“Rosa.”
“Once the coyote is paid, we’re leaving.”
“Rosa.”
“I will not argue this.”
Rosa took our daughter and went to bed. I put the lengua on a cold tortilla and sat in the living room, silently eating. I started my next shift at six, and though it was nearing one, I couldn’t sleep.
Out on the street, Malverde stood with his men, proud in the fact that he could not be touched. His men looked up to him like the congregation to the sacerdote.
I took my wallet from my pocket, and removed the picture I couldn’t show Rosa and held it in my hands. Rosa would never understand. She thought it heresy, the worship. Her father had believed, too. Her mother found out and burned every relic of the Saint she could find in the house. I never told Rosa that I believed.
I held the sacred image for several long moments while the lights of la policía reflecting off her visage, while the sounds the laughter of the narcos, the cries of the dead woman’s loved ones. La policía would ask the people out there if anyone saw what happened, but after a few silent faces, eyes darting swiftly to the face of Malverde, it would seem the neighborhood had been deserted when the woman was robbed and murdered in the middle of the street, and then la policía would leave and forget about the poor souls here.
Thinking of the man who ran the streets out there, Malverde, I had met him once, as I was coming home from a shift. I parked my taxi on the street and there he was, weaving drunk on his feet, a knife held between us. “Give me your money,” he had said, and when I told him I had none, that I had left it with the taxi company, he laughed and walked like he would pass me by, then pushing me to the gutter and holding the knife to my throat. “Next time,” he said, “have the money with you.”
I prayed, “Nuestra Señora de las sombras, se lo ruego, proteger a mi familia, nos protegen de los que nos quieren mal. Pida al Señor Jesucristo y nuestro Padre, para hacer lo correcto. Amen.”
Placing the image back in my wallet, I went to the window again. Malverde was still there, smoking and drinking and laughing as the patrol car lights were extinguished, and la policía left the neighborhood defenseless.
In the dark, there seemed to be a silver thread coming from Malverde, reaching up into the sky. A trick of the light. A woman walked out onto the street, unnoticed by the narcos, by the world as she approached. She wore a long black robe, almost like a nun’, and she carried in one skeletal hand a set of scales, in the other a scythe with a long handle, long enough to reach anywhere in the world. The woman lifted the blade and cut Malverde’s silver thread. He laughed and joked and did not see this.
I turned from the window to go to bed, and the woman was before me, her skull exposed but smiling. I fell to my knees and kissed the bottom of her robe. I promised my dedication, I promised any sacrifice she desired.
The neighborhood was silent that night, with no policía and no narcos to be seen. The word about Malverde had spread to all corners: heart attack.
When Rosa went to work in the morning, dropping our child off at the old woman that watched her for a few dollars a day, I lit candles around the Saint’s image and I prayed to her.
My debt to the coyote was forgiven upon his death.
©2009 Chris Deal
Chris Deal has published over 50 poems and short stories. See him online at cdeal.blogspot.com.
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Tags: Chris Deal
January 2nd, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Holy Smokes! This is a scary one. The set of scales in her skeleton hand - just yikes. Very cool story.
January 3rd, 2010 at 5:10 am
A real chiller.