Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

His coins soon gone, he got up and roamed the depths of the casino. Sure enough, just as pictured on the ¡Viva! web-site, the waitresses sported ridiculous Carmen Miranda headdresses made of what appeared to be real fruit. The bartenders wore billowing white shirts and wide red sashes around their waists, like the men who ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Mariachi trumpeters blasted away from a corner of the bar.

A display near the hotel check-in desk caught Ortiz’s eye. It was a series of life-sized dancing, grinning skeletons carved of wood, the male figures wearing wide sombreros, the females in lacey granny dresses, their bony limbs comically akimbo.

A voice came from behind him. “Viva la muerte!”

Ortiz turned and beheld a young bellhop pushing a cart of luggage toward the elevators.

The bellhop brought his load next to Ortiz. “Pretty wild, huh?” he said. “It’s like Day of the Dead stuff.”

“Yeah. Who makes it?”

“Some kind of Mexicans. Not your regular kind of Mexicans. I mean...” The kid’s pimples disappeared in his flush, and he looked away. “Here, I think we got some information about them.”

Ortiz followed the bellhop to the brochure rack. Not your “regular kind of Mexicans,” were they? Well, he was just a kid. Learning how easy it was to fuck up when you talked to people. Ortiz could sympathize.

The bellhop produced a brochure about ¡Viva!’s collection of south-of-the-border folk art and handed it to Ortiz. “Enjoy!” he said, moving his cargo along.

Apparently the hotel-casino had a whole gallery somewhere full of colorful ceramics and squat onyx figurines and more of these dancing skeletons. The skeletons, according to a brief blurb, were carved by an indigenous people from the remote lowlands of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The Mictlanos were famous for their wood carving, which they executed entirely with machetes.

Could the odd barrio he’d stumbled across earlier that day be a community of transplanted Mictlanos? Certainly in L.A. it was possible to find neighborhoods of indigenous peoples from specific regions of Mexico or Guatemala. Why not Las Vegas?

The Mictlanos — that wasn’t what they called themselves, but the name bestowed upon them by surrounding peoples. Mictlán, in Aztec mythology, was the ninth circle of the underworld, or something like that. Ortiz tried to remember what else Dr. Talon had said about them in his lectures. Weren’t they the group Dr. Talon had referred to as having particularly “attractive” but “dangerous” women, a remark that had brought complaints from some of the female students? Ortiz recalled Talon describing with relish some kind of ritual confrontation between two Mictlano men over a woman, something about a midnight machete battle following a stylized exchange of insults, and a grave dug ahead of time for the loser.

Ortiz whipped out his laptop and Googled Mictlan and Las Vegas and got zero hits. So: If this truly was a group of Las Vegas Mictlanos undiscovered by ethnographers, what a find. What a fucking find! Now that was something he could write about — something that might impress Talon.

Ortiz abandoned the casino to discover that night had already fallen. The darkness hung thick beyond the lights of the Boulder Strip, as if the Mictlanos (if that’s what they were) had brought the black jungle night with them. He hesitated. Maybe he’d better wait until the next morning before he ventured back into the barrio. But had Talon ever hesitated to go anywhere on the face of the earth? Of course not. The man had balls. Ortiz had balls. He had to check out his discovery one more time before going to his motel.

The odor of the putrid Chihuahua guided him to the square. His Mustang bounced along the rutted road, its headlights brushing up and down the tree the man had been sitting under earlier in the day, carving his wood. Ortiz came to a stop under the tree and shut off the engine. Silence and darkness rushed in on him.

A man’s gruff voice erupted suddenly in the quiet, followed by a slapping sound. Another slap and a woman’s cry: “Ay, ay!” A lull; and then another slap, another sharp “Ay!” It was impossible to tell where exactly the commotion was coming from. Ortiz expected to hear weeping or sobbing, but no: Only a stoic silence followed.

Ortiz waited for a moment, drowning in the blackness, before starting his engine and taking off. Whatever was going on in that shack, he told himself, it wasn’t his place to interfere. To do so would ruin his research before it even got off the ground. Anyway, there was no telling what was really happening. Rough sex? A ritual driving out of evil spirits? Whatever it was, he had to respect these people’s culture and remain neutral.

Just as he suspected, the Lucky Cuss Motel was not for truly lucky cusses, but it wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, the only room they had left smelled as if a dozen chain smokers had rented it for a week. He peeled the sheets apart and looked for hairs, but the bed seemed clean enough. He lay on it and contemplated what he’d heard: the gruff male voice, the slaps, the woman’s cries. But again, there was no need to jump to conclusions. All he knew for sure was that he was one lucky cuss to have that community of transplanted Native Mexicans to do some real fieldwork on.

But his sense of good fortune didn’t prevent him from falling into a restless sleep full of snarling dogs and dancing skeletons and screaming women, and the next morning he woke up groggy and headachy. The sun glowed with hellish intensity bright behind the heavy golden curtains. He showered quickly and threw on a fresh guayabera and khaki pants. He grabbed a large coffee at a 7-Eleven and headed once again to what he already dubbed Little Mictlán. The coffee and crystalline desert air cleared his head. By the time he got to the barrio, he felt better.

The dead dog and its stink were gone. The cluster of trailers and cinder-block shacks, bare of any adornments, were hardly cheery, but the morning light had evaporated the previous night’s sinister feel. Ortiz pinned his name tag to his shirt and strode to the first hut and knocked.

The young woman he had seen standing there the previous afternoon opened the door. She wore the same kind of white dress, embroidered at the square neckline with strangely elongated animal figures. She was small-boned and pretty, her hair woven in a single long, thick braid — hair lustrous and black as his own. She glanced at his name tag. He was glad he’d thought to put it on — it identified him as in some way official.

“ Hola ,” he said. “ Yo soy investigador? Ortiz es mi nombre? ”

His Spanish wasn’t great, he knew, but “ investigador ,” police-y as it sounded, was Spanish for “researcher,” he was sure of that.

“ Investigador? ”

“ Sí .” No need to complicate matters, just yet, with explanations of what kind of investigator he was. He asked if he could enter.

The woman hesitated, then stepped back. Ortiz ducked inside. The room was unfurnished except for a straw-bottomed rocking chair and a long, rough-hewn — machete-hewn, no doubt — bench running along one wall. Aluminum foil covered the one window; an incandescent bulb burned nakedly in the ceiling.

The woman remained standing near the open door, keeping herself visible to the outside.

“ Ustedes son Mictlanos, no? ” he asked, giving his friendliest smile.

“ Sí ,” she said faintly.

Bingo. He had his people.

“ Qué hacen aquí? ” The question — “what are you doing here?” — came out more brusque than he wanted, but his Spanish wasn’t good enough for polite subtleties. He kept his smile, the bright smile an ex-girlfriend had once called “innocent,” and asked if he could have a seat on the bench. She nodded. He motioned for her to sit as well, and she obeyed, taking a spot at the end of the bench where she could still be seen from the street. The sunlight coiled silver along her braid.