Redshift Part 41

"Manuel?" I called. "Did you find anyone?"

Gunshots cracked, splintering the night into pieces.

"No!" I broke into a run, sprinting to the edge where he had disappeared. Then I stopped.

The slope fell away from my feet, mottled by mesquite and spidery ocotillo bushes, until it met the desert floor several hundred yards below.

"Manuel!" My shout winged over the desert.

No answer. I slid in a stumbling run down the hill, th.o.r.n.y 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 whip-poorwill, her companionamong 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 G.o.ds 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."

Flus.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.d 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 eachturn, 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 G.o.ds. 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 s.h.i.+t?" 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?"

"Don'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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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, hija."

"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 luminaries?"

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 bodyshaking. 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.