Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“But tonight was Oriental Night?”

“Yes, tonight Olga went on stage wearing the veils like the others. The Cossack thing is only Saturdays. She did know Sleepy Joe, and believed he was crazy. A bastard, mad as a fucking goat. I told her she was right. She saw him after Maraya’s death, but swears she has no idea where he is now. I believe her, because it is clear that she detests him. I asked her about the clothes raffle, you know, the dead woman’s clothes, and the issue of the dice on the eyes, all that crap organized by Sleepy Joe during the wake. Olga said it was a fiasco. First, because nobody wanted the clothing, those old-fashioned things in Lycra and spandex, which didn’t fit anybody well because Maraya had become a skeleton. And second, because there was no longer a seventies night at Chikki Charmers. It was canceled for lack of interest and because the recession forced management to cut down on costumes.

“Olga said Sleepy Joe insisted on the weird ceremony very much against their will, or at least against the will of Olga, who just wanted to show some respect for the deceased, and particularly against the will of the owner of Chikki Charmers, who just wanted to bury Maraya as quickly as possible, because the poor man had been in a state thinking of the Jacuzzi boiling Marya. The whole thing was a mess. All the owner wanted was to wrap things up and leave the whole disturbing episode behind, which of course was already affecting his business and starting a lot of gossip. But he couldn’t stop Sleepy Joe from getting his way. In the end, Sleepy Joe was the only family member or close friend who had immediately shown up at the morgue after hearing the news. I asked Olga if she believed Sleepy Joe had anything to do with what had happened, I mean, with the death.”

“What’re you asking me, Papi, if he killed her?” Olga said. She stood on the table in heels and snuggled up to Rose so his face was against her navel as the fluttering veils began to come off. “No, at all, Grandpa, not at all involved. Her vice killed her, my love, a cocktail of tecata, boozy fried heroin. Smack, Grandpa, smack, see if you can pinch yourself, right? Horse, my good horse. Giddyap, horsey, giddyap. That was a Sunday morning. Sunday night she didn’t show up for her shift, and because this place is closed on Monday, it wasn’t until Tuesday night that her absence became suspicious. It wasn’t until midday Wednesday that we found out what had happened, and it wasn’t until later that afternoon that the police came to remove the body, or I should say came to get Maraya out of the Jacuzzi. No, Granpapi, Maraya’s boyfriend is a flea-bitten dirtbag of the worst kind, a cockroach with a tyrannical streak, what they call a dark spirit. He dropped by here every so often, each time with a different truck, hitting Maraya up for money. As it is common with these players. Until he was no longer able to compete. I don’t mean because of another man, I mean the horse. Giddyap, horse; you understand, old man? I mean the tecata, the white lady, lover, she of the long fangs that she plunges into your neck. Pleasures you have no idea about, Grandpa, my little old man. And that’s when things went really awry: Maraya’s boyfriend not only hated the white lady, he had forbidden Maraya from going near it, not because he was a puritan, not that, or moralistic, but because the horse was stealing his money, you know? She was spending all her money on the drug. When she tried to come back, the owner had to tell her they didn’t touch or deal with leftovers. That woman was killed by her vice, and that detonation took place deep within her. The contribution of the groom was only the slapstick at the end, the gambling of the clothes, the dice in the eye sockets, and the desecration of the corpse. He didn’t kill her. But who are you, Granpapi, a cop? Why do you ask so many questions?”

“Didn’t I try to tell you, Mr. Rose?” María Paz told him later that night in the motel room. “He’s not a murderer.”

“How long ago was that with Maraya, two years, three?” Rose continued their old argument as a response.

“Three… around.”

“That’s right, then, three. Sleepy Joe was just beginning. Barely warming up. Today the situation is totally different.”

“It looks that way, Mr. Rose. It looks that way,” María Paz said with a dismissive wave of her hand, as she stared at the television screen. “In the end, we solved nothing by coming here.”

“Well, Olga says that if we want she can take us to Maraya’s grave tomorrow.”

“Incredible — is it true that someone can commit suicide swallowing iodine?”

“What?”

“Lara’s mother,” María Paz said, pointing to the television. “Watch, she is supposedly going to commit suicide taking iodine because her daughter became Komachosky’s lover, or Komarovsky, whatever his name is, the lawyer…”

“It’s impossible to talk like this. It’s just an old film, some melodrama without any scientific accuracy. Turn that off, María Paz, and let’s talk.”

“I can’t turn it off; it’s pay-per-view. It cost seven dollars. It’s a medical drama.”

“I wish you would tell me what’s next. I mean, I’m just wondering what awaits us. You and me, and three dogs. Is there any way you can inform me?”

“Wendy Mellons. Another one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends. Maybe she knows where he is. We should find her and ask her. The only bad thing is she lives in Colorado.”

“Colorado? Are you nuts? Do you know where Colorado is? On the whole other side of the fucking country! This is not Monaco, Princess Grace. You can’t circle the kingdom in a couple of hours.”

“The whole Colorado chapter was completely insane,” Rose says after three hours of talking. “Miles and miles of road, going round and round to the last circle of Hell, with snow falling diagonally, the flakes striking the windshield like coins. The three dogs in the back, drunken with so much sleep, and me at the helm following the instructions of María Paz, who in turn was guided by the stories she had heard about Sleepy Joe’s other loves.”

They were sometimes gruesome secrets and sometimes pornographic ones, some likely real, others undoubtedly invented, and they snared María Paz in a spiral of jealousy and of wanting to know more. One of the recurring characters in these tall tales was Wendy Mellons, owner of a tavern called The Terrible Espinosas. Looking for that woman, Rose and María Paz had gone from bar to bar in the hunting lodges of the hamlets in Cangilones on the old bed of the Huerfano River: Animas, Santo Acacio, Ojito de Caballo, Purgatorio, and Garcia Mesa — little more than ghost villages bathed in the dust of the dry river to reach the ravine where once the legendary Chavez Town had stood.

In Chavez Town, they found only ashes, pieces of broken pottery, and a chilly silence. It was a cold but sonorous silence, according to María Paz, who immediately sensed that something was resonating, and although she could not tell exactly what it was, it most clearly made her break out in goose bumps, and her eyes welled with tears. Echoes? she thought. Rather a thread of smoke far in the distance that clutched her heart.

“Makes one feel like praying,” she said.

“Can’t hurt,” Rose responded.

The few people who had crossed their path had warned them that in those parts it would be difficult to find someone, because the dead were the only ones who had not gone off at some point. Along with the dead, the shadows of the Penitent Brothers haunted the place, they who once had flayed their own backs with whips in their own Via Crucis, climbing the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo, those mountains studded with sharp boulders that they had christened themselves after. María Paz let out a long sigh. She mentioned how much she loved all those old Hispanic place names: Alamosa, how pretty, and Bonanza, like on TV, Candelaria, Lejanías, Animas, Perdidas, and Culebra Creek. She blurted out that when she had a son, she would name him Íñigo or Blas. Rose listened and remembered what Dummy had told them — that María Paz would never have children because of damage they had done to her insides in the prison hospital. Every cloud has a silver lining, Rose thought. At least no child would have to suffer the name of some ancient swashbuckler.