Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper Read online

  She made a shooing gesture and strode up the hall to the room of Sylvia LaGuerta, an ancient, emphysema-stricken crone who, in her day, had dealt a mean hand of blackjack at the casino in Monterrey. Death peered into the room and, while her fleshless visage was incapable of real expression, Lupe heard her finger bones begin to agitate and her teeth grind together. The tip of her Cohiba flared and smoke began to puff from its ash. Death was displeased, and her fury altered the quality of the air, making it clammy and corpse-cold.

  La Flaca stood at the foot of Sylvia LaGuerta’s bed as though she were a vigil-keeping mother waiting for LaGuerta’s eyes to open or her hand to twitch. But even Lupe, spying from the doorway, could tell that Sylvia, the real Sylvia, was long gone and that what remained was of no more consequence than a junked car on the towing lot.

  Meanwhile, Death fretted beside the bed in mute pique, clicking her fingerbones together as though keeping time to an infernal song.

  Lupe inched her way to Death’s side and whispered, “About my question, Holy Death…”

  La Flaca snapped her mandible and said, “Persistent pest, aren’t you? I’ll come again tomorrow night. Then we shall see.”

  “Lupe, something dreadful’s happened.”

  Lupe was watching a morning talk show featuring people who’d had sex change operations discussing their lovemaking techniques when Nurse Espinoza charged into her room, looking distressed and frazzled. She cut off the TV, pulled a chair up next to Lupe’s and sat down with a woebegone sigh. She looked close to tears, and Lupe wanted to comfort her, but it was difficult — Espinoza scorned La Santa Muerte, insisting that she wasn’t a saint at all, but the fabrication of the ignorant and misguided, undoubtedly leading the lot of them to damnation.

  Lupe tried to be forgiving, though, having heard that Espinoza’s own mother, with whom she was very close, had died less than a year ago.

  “Oh, Lupe,” said Espinoza, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “Sylvia passed away last night.”

  “I know,” said Lupe sadly.

  A small frown line appeared in the pale flesh of Espinoza’s brow. “What do you mean?”

  Lupe knew that Espinoza would think she was one of those old people lost in a fog of dementia if she talked of seeing La Senora Blanca go into Sylvia’s room and tower over her bed, so she said quickly, “It was in a dream. I saw a great white sailing ship, like a magnificent swan, sailing across the ocean. Jesus was at the helm, the Virgin Mary by his right hand and Sylvia kneeling at His side.”

  Lupe had to fight not to giggle at the banality of the image, a version of which she had once seen painted on a china plate in a Mexico City souvenir shop, but Espinoza’s eyes flooded with tears and she nodded, yes, yes, as though she’d seen such a ship herself and talked with Skipper Jesus. Lupe looked away and rolled her eyes.

  “It’s for the best, you know,” said Espinoza. “Sylvia suffered dreadfully with emphysema. She was fortunate to have an easy death.” She plumped the pillows behind Lupe’s back and squeezed her hand. “Would that we all could go so peacefully.”

  To hell with peace, thought Lupe. I want to know why La Flaca let Naldo die.

  Munching fried potatoes at the evening meal, Lupe shot furtive glances around the room, wondering who La Flaca was going to take next. Would it be eighty-nine-year old Guzman Torres, who lost a leg in the Great War and liked to brag that he’d lived through three marriages and two airplane crashes? Or eighty-year-old Bertie Angelina, who carried on long, rambling conversations with her dead brother and sometimes screamed out “Call 066!” — the emergency number — for no apparent reason? Or maybe Vincente Montoya or Olive Patalla or even prissy little Luisa Sentavo with her nose stuck in a book all day and then moaning and groaning all night. Or maybe, Lupe thought, she was the one Death was coming for.

  Later, she lay awake, alert and listening. Around two a.m., she heard Espinoza singing softly in another room, the sound so melodious and comforting that she almost drifted off to sleep, but jerked awake when the telltale odor of cigar smoke reached her nostrils.

  Creeping into the corridor, she saw Espinoza leave Bertie Angelina’s room, sighing and typing out a text message on her phone. Espinoza ambled toward the rec room, where Lupe knew the portly nurse often passed the wee hours playing Internet poker or watching heartwarming rescue stories on the Animal Planet. She didn’t see what Lupe saw — the black-robed skeleton puffing on a cigar just outside Bertie’s door, her skull head metronoming side to side as she moved with lithe, insectile grace into Bertie’s room.

  When Lupe tiptoed in behind La Flaca and saw what was on the bed, her heart wilted like a drought-stricken camelia.

  Her old friend lay with mouth agape and sightless eyes bugged out, as though she’d watched La Santa Muerte come for her and died purely from fright. Her arms were outside the covers, hands clenched into claws. Even in death, she appeared to be trying to fight her way free of some terrible assault.

  Lupe gave a little gasp, and La Flaca’s head jerked up. She opened her jaw in a feral grin and snapped her teeth so viciously she almost bit her cigar in half.

  “You again!”

  “Holy Death,” said Lupe, bowing low to show her deep respect and reverence, “if you would only talk to me a minute about how my husband died—”

  Fast as a swung machete, Death lunged across the room, seized Lupe by the back of her nightgown, and hoisted her high. Lupe’s bare feet paddled the air, the breath left her lungs in a whoosh. The prayer card she kept tucked in her bra shook loose and fell to the floor.

  “What do you care why your old man died?” hissed La Flaca. “He’s worm food now, there’s no bringing him back. I’m a one-way door, don’t you get it?”

  “But what about all that Naldo did to show you his affection and respect?” Lupe exclaimed, her fear squelched by indignation. “What about the statue of you he carved with his own hands?”

  “Ah, yes, the statue, I do remember that,” La Flaca said, baring the toothy semblance of a smile. “Before he brought it to the shrine, he packed the nostrils full of snow. It was a thoughtful gesture.”

  “He did much more than plug your nose with cocaine. He also built you a shrine.”

  Death’s mouth split wide with lethal mirth — she might have been hooting with laughter or braying with rage. “Don’t talk to me about shrines! The only shrines I give a shit about are the bodies I leave behind. Every time you see a rotting corpse, a cadaver laid out on a pallet, that’s another shrine to me. Remember that, Guadalupe Mendoza-Delgado.”

  Lupe gasped. “You know my name?”

  “What do you think, that this whole dying business isn’t organized? I know everybody’s name, I know the names of your papa’s bastard children and your puta of a grandmama’s johns.” She shook Lupe so hard that her head bobbled and her eyes bulged. “Beside, ungrateful pendeja, your name was on my ledger a long time ago — you’re luckier than you know just to be sucking air.”

  “Then why wasn’t I the one who died?” demanded Lupe. “Why Naldo?”

  La Flaca ground her teeth. The cold silence of gravestones in the Panteón de Delores radiated from the black depths of her ancient eye sockets. “You are a bitch, a cabrona,” she said, “and your man made a foolish bargain.” She impaled Lupe with a meatgrinder stare. “Now get back to bed, and if you wake up, consider yourself lucky.”

  Lupe fled back to her room and burrowed under the covers. Soon after, she heard footsteps and held her breath, but it was only Espinoza, come in to check on her. And though Lupe pretended to be asleep, the nurse must have sensed her distress, for she began to sing a soulful lullaby, part mother’s love and part lament, that made Lupe think of times gone by and filled her with bittersweet longing.

  She fell into a fretful sleep and dreamed about that terrible day when Naldo stormed into their little house, bloodied an
d shaking with rage.

  Lupe was trembling, too. But before she could tell him her own dreadful news, he began to curse and shout, “Mierde, but a frightful thing has happened!” For a flustered instant, she thought he was talking about her test results, but then he went on, “The government sent soldiers with bulldozers this morning and tore down La Santa Muerte’s shrine. The people who’d come to worship tried to stop them, but they beat us back. Everything’s gone! The beautiful robes and the holy statues, the paintings and icons have all been carted off to the dump! They say we are a cult of criminals and devil worshipers.”

  Lupe, overwhelmed by this surfeit of sorrow, began to weep and Naldo, not understanding that she was crying for herself, began to reassure her.

  “Never mind, mi amor. I’ll build a new shrine, you’ll see. I’ll make it bigger and more beautiful than ever.”

  He talked and talked, working himself up, until finally Lupe interrupted to tell him about her visit to the clinic and the cancer the doctor had found nesting in her womb. After that, he was silent for a long time, and then he cried.

  All through that summer, Naldo worked alongside others in the barrio to build the new shrine. A few so-called upstanding folks chipped in, but mostly it was the outcasts, Gloriana the prostitute who stood in the alleyway all night selling her used-up flesh, the gangs and the drug addicts, the alcoholics, cab drivers and policia, fringe people whose lives were fraught with danger and risk, people who needed protection.

  Lupe had lived that summer in mortal fear, but Death — whose fearsome image leered down from every wall in their house, whose face even stared out at her from across her husband’s tattooed chest when he was mounting her, ­— never came.

  “Look what I found in Bertie’s room,” Nurse Espinoza said. She held up Lupe’s slippers, one in each hand, as if they were week-old kittens. Her eyes were smiling but her mouth was crimped tight as a fist. “These are your slippers, aren’t they?”

  It was early morning and Bertie’s body had just been wheeled out on a gurney by two white-clad attendants. Along the hall, the residents of Sierra House crept warily out of their rooms to watch the sorrowful passage. Olive Pattala pinched Bertie’s toes to make sure she was really dead, and Guzman Torres lifted up a corner of the sheet with one palsied hand and gave Bertie a smile and little three-fingered wave. The same silent question played on all of their faces, a mix of dread and expectation — when does my turn come? Will I be next?

  Having had little sleep the night before, Lupe had been dozing when Espinoza came in. Now she sat up, rubbed her eyes and squinted at the slippers as though she’d never seen them before. “They must be Bertie’s.”

  Espinoza looked peeved, a teacher disappointed by a bright pupil’s inadequate response. “But Lupe, these slippers are size six. Bertie’s feet were big as barges. Your feet are like a doll’s.”

  Lupe said, “I thought I heard Bertie cry out and went to see if she needed help. I must have left my slippers.”

  “And what did you see when you went into Bertie’s room? Whatever it was, you can tell me.”

  “There was nothing to see. Only poor Bertie, looking like she’d been scared out of her wits when she died.”

  Espinoza’s eyebrows lifted like elevators.

  “How frightening it must have been for you to walk in and find her dead. Not only did you jump right out of your bedroom slippers, but you left behind this ugly thing as well.”

  From her pocket Espinoza whisked out Lupe’s prayer card, which she flourished like a poker champ producing a winning Ace. She held the card up between two fingers, as though it were dipped in filth.

  “La Santa Muerte wouldn’t be pleased to hear you call her ugly,” Lupe said.

  “Death is no saint, and you’re risking your immortal soul to worship such wickedness. I’m going to burn this, Lupe. It’s an evil thing that can only bring you harm.”

  “But that was Naldo’s!” Lupe cried.

  For an instant, she glimpsed that tiny spark that sometimes flared up like an unvoiced scream in Espinoza’s eyes, but then it vanished. Espinoza sighed forlornly and looked at Lupe with tenderness and sadness. “Haven’t we had enough death around here, Lupe? For God’s sake, let’s pray there isn’t anymore.”

  Too exhausted to keep her vigil that night, Lupe sank into a stuporous sleep and dreamed a young and virile Naldo suddenly thrust himself atop her.

  She smiled and opened herself to him, but his urgency proved overpowering. Brutally, he held her down, smothering her face with hot, asphyxiating kisses. She began to kick and claw, trying to make him understand that she was suffocating.

  You’re crushing me, mi amore. Stop, please! I can’t breathe!

  But the reckless assault grew more merciless. A blow jerked her face to the side, her nostrils were pinched shut — she flailed out— Naldo, no, don’t do this! —as his strength punched the air from her lungs. Lightning webbed behind her eyes, and a chainsaw chewed at the back of her brain.

  Then it ended.

  There was only silence and glacial cold, and Lupe thought she had died.

  The pillow smashed into her face grew feather light and dropped to the floor. Gasping, her head spinning, she made out Espinoza’s face, ashen and stupefied, trying desperately to free herself from the skeletal fingers that gripped her biceps so tightly they opened bloody punctures in the flesh.

  “Cabrona!” Death rasped, rocking Espinoza side to side the way someone would shake a milk carton. “You go around snuffing people out like bugs and I let it go, because what’s one more dead body here and there when I’ve got billions waiting. But then you make the same mistake as all the other psychos. When you decide who lives, who dies, you feel immortal. You imagine as long as you’re in control of other peoples’ dying, your number’s never coming up!”

  Espinoza’s tongue planked and her eyeballs bled. Lupe could see her puffed-out cheeks working frantically to dislodge the object in her mouth, a wadded prayer card that suddenly began to blacken and curl at the edges. There came a branding iron sizzle of flesh as the nurse’s face blazed a furious scarlet.

  “Your mamacita called it right the day you murdered her,” La Flaca said. “You are indeed a stupid puta and up to no fucking good!”

  With a snort of disdain, she dropped Espinoza, whose body slithered to the floor in a burnt and boneless heap. Death lit a fresh cigar and tipped the ash into Espinoza’s open mouth. She turned to Lupe, who was crouched in terror by the bed. “Still want to worship at my altar, cabrona?”

  Lupe got to her feet on creaking knees. This time her question came out a whisper that was barely audible. “You said Naldo made a poor bargain. Tell me what you meant.”

  Death leaned so close that Lupe could look directly into her gaping, empty sockets — their fierce indifference to all human plight a stark reminder of her power. “Remember when cancer infested your belly and the doctors said you would soon die? What happened?”

  “The cancer went away,” said Lupe. “ The doctors said it was a miracle, but I knew it was you, Santa Muerte, who cured me.”

  “You see?” said Death. “That’s why you are a cabrona, I gave you back your life and still you bitch. It wasn’t your paltry prayers that saved you, it was your husband’s. He pestered me night and day to spare you. But don’t be a stupid zorra about these types of transactions. Your life still came with a price attached.”

  Lupe absorbed this like a blow. “Naldo paid for my life with his?”

  “Nothing’s fucking free. The world is commerce, nothing else.”

  “But I was the one afraid of death,” said Lupe, “not Naldo. That’s why he promised me we’d die together.”

  “Tough luck, old woman. You got left behind.” She gathered her cape around her. As it swirled and eddied about her ancient bones, Lupe saw time’s passage stitched into th
e fabric, the rise and fall of city-states and nations, the scourge of plagues and mass exterminations, a vast and undulating tapestry of deaths past and deaths to come woven into the folds of La Flaca’s robe.

  Entranced by the terror and beauty of Death’s garment, she reached out to touch the hem.

  “Please, Santa Muerte. Don’t leave me. Before you go … one dance.”

  The black pits in La Flaca’s skull glowed, and she grew preternatuarally still. “What a night! One puta tries to do my job, the other cabrona’s so crazy she wants me to hang around for a bachata.”

  But then, after a moment, she took Lupe into her cold embrace and began to glide around the room, slowly at first, with a kind of stately measure befitting a last waltz, then picking up speed until they whirled and capered out into the hall, raising a draught of frosty air, like wind off the highest peaks in the Sierra Madres. The icy breeze roused Vincente Montoya, who yelled out for his long dead wife to go downstairs and turn up the thermostat. It blew the roses on Olive Pattala’s dresser so fiercely that she would awaken the next morning, astonished to find her bed covered in scarlet petals, and it chilled the bare butts of Guzman Torres and Luisa Sentavo, who were happily fucking away as they did every night, oblivious to Death passing by close enough to observe their octogenarian ardor and add one of their names to her To Do list

  Their wild bachata carried Lupe outside Sierra House and over the lawn, through dense woodlands and wild, weedy fields, down to the train tracks where Death spun to a stop and placed her spidery fingers against Lupe’s heart, the grin on her face like that of a rigored corpse. Tic toc, tic toc.

  Panting and gasping, Lupe stared into La Flaca’s skull eyes. To her surprise, she saw not emptiness but all eternity, where universes were conceived and thrived and perished, only to be replaced by others in an endless cycle of creation and collapse.