J. Jance - Day of the Dead

Minutes after that, he was in the bathroom, puking his guts out. He slept on the couch in his studio that night. Much as Delia didn’t want to admit it-especially to Marcia and others who had tried to warn her away from Philip in the first place-she knew it was the beginning of the end. She hung on for a time, hoping things would change and he would get better. That was why, a few months later, it hurt so much to realize that even Aunt Julia, more than two thousand miles away, somehow knew how bad things were and tried to help by sending Fat Crack Ortiz to the rescue. She responded to his offer of help by more or less telling him to take his job and shove it.

Two weeks later, she came home from work early with a migraine and walked in on a disaster that had been ten years in the making. There in the apartment she found Philip passed out in the company of a sixteen-year-old male prostitute. Delia turned around and stormed out of the apartment without waking either of them. She made her way back to her old neighborhood and checked into the Savoy. The next morning, she called in sick and made an appointment to see her ob-gyn, where she underwent a series of tests for sexually transmitted diseases. Then she went back to the hotel to await the results, which wouldn’t be available until the following Monday.

She called no one, not even her mother. Especially not her mother. Instead, she sat in the hotel for the next eighteen hours, staring blindly at the traffic on Wisconsin Avenue and wondering whether or not Philip had contracted AIDS, and if he had, had he already passed it along to her? How long did it take to die of AIDS, she wondered, and how painful was it?

It wasn’t until the sun was coming up the next morning that she found the strength to pick up the telephone and dial Santa Fe information. There were several Cachoras listed, and it took time to jot down all the numbers. When her office opened, she called in sick for a second time. Once it was eight o’clock New Mexico time, Delia dialed one of the numbers she’d been given.

She hadn’t picked that number at random. Several of the Cachoras listed included male names. Delia skipped those, opting instead for M. A. Cachora with no address. That number had to belong to a single woman living alone. Not surprisingly, a woman answered. “Hello.”

For a moment, the sound of the voice stunned Delia to silence. “Hello?” the woman repeated. “Is anyone there?”

“Ms. Cachora…” Delia began hesitantly.

“Yes. Who is this?”

Delia’s voice trembled. So did her hand. She almost dropped the phone. “My name is Delia,” she said finally. “I wondered if you happened to know someone named Philip Cachora.”

“If we’re talking about the same person,” the other woman answered, “then he used to be my husband, the creep. What about him?”

“I married him, too,” Delia managed. “I was wondering…” She stopped, unable to continue.

The woman on the other end of the line didn’t make it any easier. “Wondering what?” she asked.

“If you’d tell me why…”

It was such a stupid thing to ask. Delia could barely believe she’d done it.

“Why what?” the woman demanded. “You mean why I divorced him? I’ll tell you why-because he liked other people better than he liked me. Philip needs a home base, you see-a place to leave his paint and his easels and all that shit, but when he’s out on the road, honey, he’s also on the make. And he’ll screw anything that walks. Male or female, it doesn’t matter.”

By the time the woman stopped speaking, Delia was sobbing uncontrollably into the phone.

“Oh, my God!” the woman exclaimed. “You just found out, didn’t you!”

Still unable to speak, Delia nodded.

“I’m sorry,” the woman continued. “I know how I felt the day I found out. I wanted to kill him. I should have killed him! If I had, this wouldn’t be happening to somebody else, to you. Are you all right, honey? Do you have any friends there with you, someone you can talk to?”

“I’m all right,” Delia managed. “I’ll be okay.”

“Yes, you will, but it’ll take time. Years, probably. Where are you?”

“Washington,” Delia answered. “Washington, D.C.”

“I wish I knew somebody there I could have come talk to you. That son of a bitch! I’d tell you to sue his ass and take him for everything he’s worth, but I already did that, so there’s not much to take. When he left me, he was dead broke. I got the house and a garageful of paintings, which I’ve been selling, by the way. If you have a chance, at least try to pick up some of the art.”

“He’s not painting much anymore,” Delia admitted.

“Drugs?”

It was as if the woman, this stranger halfway across the country, knew every sordid detail of Delia’s life. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Get out then,” M. A. Cachora advised. “Get out and stay out. And go by the health department and have yourself tested. That stupid bastard is playing Russian roulette, and he isn’t smart enough to figure it out.”

“I already have,” Delia said. “Been tested, that is. I get the results on Monday.”

“Keep my number in case you need someone to talk to in the meantime. My name’s Marcella, by the way. Call me anytime you need to talk.”

“Thanks,” Delia said. “I will.”

But she didn’t call Marcella back, and she didn’t call any other numbers in Santa Fe, either. Delia had found out everything she needed to know.

She stayed on in the hotel all through the weekend. Somewhere along the way she finally realized she was hungry and ordered food from room service. Time moved in incredibly tiny increments. Occasionally she thought about calling her mother and Ruth, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Ruth really liked Philip, and Delia didn’t want to break the spell with a harsh dose of reality. With Ellie, it meant history repeating itself in a new generation.

When Delia returned to the doctor’s office on Monday afternoon, her anxiety level was off the charts. When Dr. Hanley told her she was HIV-negative, the words hardly registered. She left the doctor’s office in a daze and made her way to the nearest pay phone. It took a while to get the tribal chairman’s number, but finally Fat Crack Ortiz came on the line.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s Delia,” she said quickly. “Delia Cachora. Remember me?”

“Of course.”

“I’m calling about your offer,” she said. “Is the tribal attorney job still available?”

“Yes,” Fat Crack answered. “As a matter of fact it is. Why?”

Delia paused and took a deep breath. “If you’ll have me,” she said, “I’d like to accept the position.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m glad you’re coming home. Your aunt Julia will be pleased.”

For the five men who gathered in Ban Thak that Sunday morning, digging Fat Crack’s grave was as much a time of remembrance as it was of physical labor. They arrived in four separate vehicles just as the sun cleared the jagged tops of the Tucson Mountains off to the east.

There was little left of the village-only the feast house, a tiny chapel, a few crumbling adobe houses, an equal number of mobile homes, and the parched-earth cemetery. Some of the graves were well tended, marked with headstones or crosses that were decorated with wreaths or vases of plastic flowers. Others moldered in obscurity, with the names of the dead long since obliterated from crosses that tipped precariously in one direction or the other.

Leo and Baby unloaded shovels, pry bars, and a wheelbarrow from the truck. Then they hauled the yellow-and-red watercooler over to the cemetery and perched it on a fence post so it would be close at hand when needed.

Long habit made it easy for the brothers to work without need of extraneous conversation. They had toiled together in their father’s tow-truck and auto-repair business from the time they could each hold a wrench, and they had played in Four Winds, a modestly successful chicken-scratch band, from the time they were in high school. By the mid-nineties, people had teased them about being so e wehem-so together-that neither one of them would ever have room for a woman in his life. Then Delia Chavez Cachora appeared on the scene in her slick Saab 9000, and both Leo and Richard wanted her.