David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

Abatangelo studied him. Crazed lab rat, he thought. Freaks like me. “Getting kinda chatty there, Wax.”

Waxman nodded, staring at the curtains again. “I’m frightened.”

Abatangelo went over and placed his hand on Waxman’s shoulder. “Me too. That any consolation?”

Waxman looked up at him. “No.”

They laughed uneasily.

“Anyway,” Abatangelo said, searching for his shoes, “bad acid, speed. What’s your point?”

“My point,” Waxman said, “is that was all a quarter of a century ago. It’s not a question of where have all the flowers gone. The question is, how did characters like you, the ones out to prove what a joke it all was, how did you outlast the scene as long as you did?”

Abatangelo shrugged. “Steered clear of bad acid.”

“No. Be serious. How did you drag out that ridiculous dream for so many more years?”

“What dream? Wax, come down out of your tree, will you? I was a pig, remember? I was venal. I had larceny in my heart. I suffered from bad genes.”

“What charm did you think protected you?”

“Wax, I was lucky. That’s it.”

“You enjoyed the mysterious good fortune of the blind,” Waxman countered. From the sound of the phrase, he’d been working up to it all along. He got up from the bed, went to the sink, unwrapped the cellophane from a plastic drinking cup and drew himself a glass of tapwater. He drank the whole glass down and then another. Avoiding his reflection in the mirror above the sink, he turned around and said, “You are an incredibly proud man, do you realize that? It’s not a criticism. Just an observation. But I’ll tell you a little something I’ve learned, all right? Pride is just a way of thinking you deserve what you want. And in that regard, pride is a sort of cowardice. It takes a lot of courage to simply want something.”

His eyes were strangely kind. Forgiving.

“So tell me what I want, Wax.”

“You want to be with the woman you love,” Waxman said. “But the more I think it through, the less confidence I have she is alive, or will remain alive, no matter what we accomplish by going out there tonight. I wish that weren’t true.”

“Then stop talking about it,” Abatangelo said. He collected his jacket, wallet and keys. “You ready?” Not waiting for an answer, he went to the door, calling out over his shoulder, “Bring the map.”

Abatangelo headed out to the car and checked the trunk. He still had all of Mannion’s equipment with him from the night before. There were two spare cameras, stocked with both infrared film and 3200 black and white. There were flash guns, two tripods, the Passive Light Intensifier, and an infrared focus beam, not to mention a canvas bag to carry it all. He closed the trunk and told Waxman, “All aboard.”

As they drove, Waxman returned to the article from the local social column about the quinceañera . “The daughter’s name is Larissa,” he said, reading aloud. “She’s fifteen. From the sounds of it, her father’s spared no expense.” Rain began to fall, heavily at first, then easing back into a drizzle. Waxman looked out at the verdant fields, then returned to the article in his lap. “Relatives are coming up from Mexico,” he said. “And Papa Rolando is addressing a civic group tonight, too. The Sacramento Valley Mexican-American Cultural Exchange.”

“That’s a mouthful. Speech all by itself.”

“It means there may be other reporters there,” Waxman said hopefully. “The ones covering the speech, they can join the party and add a little color to their coverage.” He folded the newspaper over. “We should blend in, at least to begin with.”

They continued on toward Suisun and turned east along the road to Rio Vista until prominent signs, in English and Spanish, designated the turnoff to the hotel. A trio of men wearing orange reflective vests and bearing flashlights stood out in the rain at the corner of the cross-county highway and the hotel road. The men waved them south toward the river.

The hotel lay beyond a range of treeless hills, and every hundred yards a torch decorated with flowers and gold and white bunting stood at the roadside. The rain had extinguished all but a handful of the torch flames, and the waterlogged bouquets sagged.

The El Parador was a massive hacienda in the Mission style. A searchlight stationed in the parking light scoured the low clouds with its beam. Music echoed festively from the hotel’s bright interior. Abatangelo pulled into a parking lot crowded with limousines and directed the car into an isolated space on the periphery that would be easy to find when it came time to leave. He killed the motor, reached behind his seat for his camera and asked Waxman to retrieve several rolls of film he’d stored in the glove compartment. “Ready or not,” he said, opening the door. They crossed the distance from the car to the hotel portico on a run and shook off the rain once safely inside.

Upon stepping beyond the lobby doors, they entered an extravagant chaos of white-clad revelers, celebratory ornament and antiquarian decor. Abatangelo likened the effect as half Porfirian Gothic, half an acid-laced reverie of Frida Kahlo giving birth to a zoo.

Gold and white bunting, like that tied to the roadside torches, hung in long coiling festoons from every wall. As many as a hundred piñatas, fashioned from a rainbow of bright feathery paper- donkeys, elephants, clowns, angels, gauchos, a princess, a bandit, a whale, sombreros, cacti- hung by ribbons at various heights from the vaulted lobby ceiling. Beneath them as many as four dozen children, varying in age from four to sixteen and dressed in white tuxedos and brocaded gowns, wandered blindfolded, bearing sticks, to the cheers and proddings of manic adults- women crying out and clapping, men holding bottles of Chanaco and bellowing praise.

Absent the decorations, the hotel’s design was simple and vaguely monastic. The floor was fashioned of sandstone palavers; archways connected the various rooms; the white plaster walls were accented with quatrefoils, wood beams and ironwork of medieval severity. Heavy wood doors were fitted with yellow quarreled glass.

Off to the side on a dais, a full mariachi band struck up a song called “El Sueño” with a fanfare of brass arpeggios. The air was thick with the smell of cigars and orchids and café de olla. A pyramid of champagne glasses had been erected at the center of a long white table, behind which sat ice chests filled with bottles of Dom Pérignon. Atop a second table, a cut-glass punch bowl was attended by a servant in white livery, stirring with a ladle a pink concoction swimming with orange slices and melting ice. Further into the room, white-clothed tables bore platters of Oaxacan fare, meats roasted with lime and pasilla chile , tlayudas made with blue corn tortillas, squash blossom soup with purslane leaves and masa.

Beyond the main desk a chapel of sorts had been erected, fashioned of two symmetrical flanks of folding chairs and a temporary altar. A statue of the Blessed Mother, on a pedestal mounted with roses, stood in modest serenity off to the left. Two altar boys sat by themselves beyond the statue, a plate of food on the chair between them. They still wore their cassocks and surplices and, after checking to see who might be watching, drank fast and hard from a bottle of beer.

Waxman and Abatangelo made their way through the crowd, negotiating the maze of ficus trees, maidenhair ferns and palmetto palms the party’s mastermind had inserted to perfect the tropical mise-en-scène. Beneath the escalator to the mezzanine, young girls sporting pink tiaras and dressed like bridesmaids sat in phone booths with glasses of punch and accepted the doting attention of boys. Damas and caballeros : fifteen couples in all, one boy and one girl for each year of Larissa Moreira’s life.