Bones of a Saint Read online

  Freeee.

  God, I run.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cannibals

  I’m trudging to the top of a hill in that muggy heat, my brother clinging to my back. Charley has this way of wrapping his legs around my waist and his arms around my neck so that he weighs no more than a backpack. He knows that one day he’ll be too big and I’ll drop his sorry ass for good. Then I whiff wet grass and I’m back to last week . . . pushing up out of that cellar, brushing past that ancient-looking dude, a stench of something sweetly sick . . . running . . . slipping in the mud . . .

  Cellar. Cell. Cave. Crypt. I know all the words. I read how some monks spend their lives holed up searching for God. But there’s no way. No freaking way to hear Him through stone.

  A truck horn blasts behind me, but I don’t look back. Nino-’n-Smitty’s flatbed with the stake gates whines up the hill, clunks a gear, and passes me with Smitty riding shotgun, his head out the window like a dog and his stringy beard blowing in the wind. The Dead blast from the 8-track:

  Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed . . .

  Smitty’s tattooed arm dangles on the door and slaps the beat against the metal.

  Trouble ahead, lady in red, take my advice you’re better off dead.

  He waves at me and grins as the truck tops the hill, puking exhaust in my face. Migrants are grabbing those truck gates so they won’t fall out the open back. They won’t hear no ranchera from Nino-’n-Smitty. A guy grins from the shade of a flat straw hat and points at us, and the others laugh. Then the truck slides down the grade.

  Manny’s house floats in the ground fog down in the hollow.

  “Okay, Big Foot, it’s downhill from here. You can walk.”

  Charley straightens his tie and follows me. He can talk, but he hardly ever feels like it. His white dress shirt and tie don’t go with the blue jeans, but he always wears the same jeans, ironed, with a two-inch cuff on the left leg, and the right leg slit neatly so it hangs to the ground over the huge right shoe. The tie is for the Corpus Christi Festival near Mission San Miguel Arcangel. Since he just did first Communion, he gets to be in this little flower procession. He’s been practicing extra hard on his walking. That festival is pretty cool when you think about it, a bunch of normal people acting like cannibals chomping on God.

  I sniff my black T-shirt to check the funk. Then I follow Charley down the hill. Manny’s place could be a for real farm if his dad ever tried. But the fields are just dead weeds now. The only animals are chickens that lay wherever they feel like so that Manny and me got Easter all year round trying to find the eggs, and a half dozen sorry pigs that get the eggs if we don’t. There’s a real house that’s hardly bigger than my trailer, with this satellite dish out front that’s near half as big as the house. Since Manny’s mom died, his dad just sits and watches sports.

  Maria and Adelita are sitting on the front porch ratting their hair. Their tits look fine through those peasant blouses. I don’t feel sorry anymore for Manny having one younger and three older sisters. Charley hobbles up the steps and sits between them and they start making their fuss over him and I wouldn’t mind trading places with him, wouldn’t mind at all. People think he’s delicate, the way he looks like one of those porcelain dolls at Mrs. Elliot’s Antiques and Collectibles Emporium. These blue veins web through his skin like the cracks on those dolls. But Charley, he’s as tough as they come.

  I turn and head to the back screen porch. The migrants have slipped away, and Nino-’n-Smitty are already kicking back on beach chairs, a six-pack between them, under the scrawny oak that Manny and me call the killing tree. No pig hangs from it today, but there’s a whiff of old blood from the clawed bathtub sitting in the shadows behind them. Nino has the same snake tattoo as Smitty, but it looks smaller on his thick arm. Nino is Manny’s blood uncle. Smitty isn’t blood, but he’s his uncle just the same. It’s sort of like they’re from one of Abuelita’s tales that Manny squeezes into English for me. Two halves. One dude.

  “Hey, hermano!” Nino calls to me.

  I hop up the porch steps and slip through the screen door.

  Manny gives me our newest greeting: “Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper?”

  I answer: “It’s the uniform.”

  We saber-swoosh.

  I plop down next to Manny on the wicker.

  A smell of beans simmering in cast iron always fills that room. Abuelita stands in front of this Mexican dude, his face scrunched up in pain. Her face is soft skin folds. She rolls up this piece of paper into a funnel and holds it to the dude’s ear. She lights a match with her thumbnail and holds it to the funnel all in one slick move.

  “Aaaiieee!” The dude cries and lifts his hand to rub the ear and Abuelita slaps the hand away. He nods and grins, the pain gone, as she shows him out the door.

  I glimpse Theresa, who is only a year younger than us, back in the kitchen. She used to tie her hair in pigtails with barrettes, but now it’s a ribboned ponytail falling to her butt. Then the kitchen door closes.

  Well, Abuelita is Manny’s grandma, not mine. But I’ve sort of adopted her. She grabs her mug of cinnamon coffee off the table and heads for us. She always wears a black dress and these thick black shoes that clunk on the hollow floor. She grabs a chair and sits down facing us and puts the glass on the window ledge and lets out this sigh like she’s too old and too tired to put up with my mierda.

  Then she puts her hands on her knees and leans back like she’s going to start one of her tales. Her tales are about funny people, the earth and sky, animals that talk, and even witches, what she calls brujas. She tells them in Spanish with this soothing singsong and Manny does his best squeezing them into English for me. When we were little we’d listen for hours. I wait, staring out at the world gone brittle through old screens.

  But instead of starting a tale, she pulls her chair closer and stares into me. Under the cinnamon coffee breath, she has this purplish old-lady smell that I like. The way Abuelita’s brow scrunches up, I’m figuring my own BO must be pretty funky after all. She stares over at Manny and then back at me. She’s probably wondering for the hundredth time whether she really wants her mijo hanging out with me. But it’s years too late to get second thoughts about that.

  “This summer, it is going to be full of . . . aye . . . malevolencia . . . not so easy for you, Richard James. You will have the big choice to make.”

  “Full of . . . evil,” Manny whispers.

  Anyone but Abuelita saying it, and I’d be thinking it was just part of a show. But coming from her, it freezes my insides. I’m seeing back to that root cellar . . . something red, shriveled, a claw . . . a stench like something sweet, dead . . .

  My mind slips back, escaping to a safer place, the day Manny and me met in the first grade when the nuns lined up the class by height for the fire drill and we punched at each other to decide who was the shortest, earning the glory of marching last in line. We fought at the end of lines through the next couple grades until Abuelita shamed us into stopping by telling us stories of Coyote, who jacked his friends with his mean, sneaky ways. Even though we haven’t fought since then, we’ve stayed best friends. We’re sort of the same but opposite, what Mr. Sanders called a paradox. I’m cursed with freckly skin, while he gets brown the color of the mission pews. I got what Mom calls an auburn mop, and he gets straight black hair tied in a cool ponytail like an Indian. I’m skinny and he’s fat. I’ve got five younger sibs and he’s got four sisters. I lost my dad when I was three and his sister Theresa killed their mom just getting born . . .

  “Come on, Manny. We got to take Charley to his festival.”

  He shrugs and follows me out around the house to the porch. The sisters are gone, but Charley sits smiling.

  “Come on, Big Foot.”

  We could be riding bikes. Charley can do that if we go slow. But
Manny won’t ride since the time he was sideswiped near the Banzai. It don’t matter that we’re not going in that direction now. He still won’t ride.

  Manny, Charley, and me are halfway to the Mission for Corpus Christi when Buns Bernie, MJB, and Ed the Head are standing by the road. I haven’t seen them since that night in the cellar. Something isn’t right. If it wasn’t for Charley hanging on my back, I’d take off. They’d never catch Manny or me.

  “Hey.” I nod like everything’s cool and push past, except Buns is in front of me like a wall of Jell-O.

  “Hey yourself.” Buns stares down at me.

  I drop Charley to the ground. “So, what’s up?”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  Maybe I can clown my way out of this. I wave my hand in front of him and chant: “These are not the dudes you’re looking for.”

  I glance at Manny and we both crack up.

  “The Blackjacks want to see you.”

  We’re not laughing no more. My legs go weak. No point running even if I could. Then Charley goes still, his eyes staring into space as he finds that place inside that seems to make him invisible to strangers. It’s like his own superpower or something.

  “Where?” I gulp.

  “Up there.” Buns points across to the hills edging the valley. We can’t see it from here, but we all know he’s pointing to Dead Man’s Gorge. No one is allowed up there unless he’s Blackjack.

  Ed the Head and MJB are silent like the place is some kind of freaking shrine.

  “So why would the Ace want me?”

  “The Blackjacks are POed at that old city dude for buying the Miller place. He stole their best flatland hangout. And worse, he’s an outsider. You and that freak are connected since he’s the one that let you out of that root cellar.”

  “What? How’d they know about that?” Was he really just some old dude? I couldn’t say for sure, but he seemed like a hell of a lot more than that.

  Buns shrugs.

  “You told them,” I answer my own question. What had Abuelita said? Malea . . . mal . . . ? “So what’s it got to do with you three?”

  “You ask too many questions,” Buns says.

  I wait him out.

  “You’re a part of our initiation.”

  “You guys Blackjacks? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Come on,” Buns orders.

  “Wait. No point in Charley coming. He can’t make that climb, you know that.”

  Ed the Head looks away from me and sucks air like he’s toking. MJB cleans his wireframes. But Buns just crosses his arms and stares at me.

  “Charley is on his way to the Corpus Christi Festival.” I rush on before Buns can slip in a no: “He’s in the procession. You can’t make him miss that. It’s like a sin against God.”

  “Oh, crap,” Ed the Head groans. His family is lapsed, and they’re almost always the most afraid of God’s wrath. “Let Charley go.”

  “You think I’m stupid?” Buns demands. “It’s Thursday. Church is on Sunday.”

  “Well,” I say, “this festival is on Thursday, and there ain’t nothing you can do about that.”

  “He’s right,” Ed says.

  “We got our orders,” Buns says. “Charley comes, too.”

  He’s making Charley come ’cause he’s figured out the best way to get to me is through my brother. Buns has hated me since even before I said that stuff about him and Roxanne’s tits.

  “Okay, then why Manny?”

  “Ace did not say anything about this other fellow,” MJB says. “He may even be perturbed at us for bringing unauthorized personnel.”

  Buns is trying so hard to figure it all out that his face is scrunched up like he’s constipated.

  “If you’re going, RJ, then I’m going,” Manny says.

  That’s the bravest words I ever heard anyone say. Man, what a long, strange trip this will be.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Blackjacks

  We’re hiking up the foothills to Dead Man’s Gorge just so we can worship some psycho stoner they call the Ace. Buns goes first. I follow with Charley hanging on, clutching my neck. Manny is right behind me. MJB is after him, making sure we don’t get second thoughts. Finally, Ed the Head huffs and puffs back where we don’t have to whiff his homegrown. Mr. Sanders would’ve called us a pilgrimage.

  We climb the trail into the foothills, and I can see clear across the valley to the hills we call Big Mama. They look like a lady lying along the coastals with huge jugs sticking straight up in the sky, just like she was getting a for real tan. Which is funny since her weeds are just starting to turn brown for summer. The shadows even give her some soft skin folds.

  My T-shirt is already soaked with sweat where Charley is hanging on. We march along and my stomach hollows as I remember all the Blackjack rumors. Beatings. Hazings. Robbery. Protection. Drugs. Rape. And murder. There could be bodies buried up here going back a hundred years, clear back to Coyote Jack himself.

  The Blackjacks hardly ever get caught, and never once convicted. No one climbs up here uninvited. No one. And no one dares to testify. Years go by. Faces grow up and then leave. Some of them find their way out of the valley. Others melt in with those that went before and then become a part of our little world. But there’s always new boys to replace them. There’s always the Blackjacks.

  A whistle skips down at us from way up Dead Man’s Gorge. It’s got to be some kind of lame signal. I feel this slimy kind of honor to be climbing into this darkest place.

  We reach the top of the ridge and walk along a trail with the whole valley there below us. Those farm and machinery buildings look like metal dice tossed across the fields. In an hour they’ll be floating in heat waves.

  Buns stops again. He’s pointing to a rockslide below the trail. The earth humps up like some kind of big animal is buried there. Buns picks up a stone and throws it. It makes a hollow thud against the mound, kind of like hurling rocks at the old water tower on Mission. My stomach flips just hearing a sound, like that coming up out of the ground.

  “See that latch there?” Buns has that low voice guys use when telling stories, like about the ghost with the golden arm.

  A metal latch sticks its head out of that hump of rocks. It’s all peeling yellow and rust. There’s a padlock clamped to it.

  “It’s one of them old water trailers like the farmers used to use,” Ed the Head says, messing up Buns’s story.

  “Right,” Buns says. “But no one knows how it got up here. It’s a mystery like those giant stones over in New York.”

  “England,” MJB says.

  “Whatever. It’s some kind of mystery only the Ace knows about. If someone messes up, they get locked in there until he decides their punishment. He calls it purgatory.”

  “Sounds to me like that is the punishment. Come on, let’s get this over with.” I push past Buns with Charley still on my back. The hot air wiggles on top of the rocks and dead weeds, and I’m feeling dizzy.

  I climb over a rise and that huge oak tree is there maybe a football field ahead of us. Of course, I’ve never seen it before. Well, maybe I caught the shadow of the tip-top branches one time when I telescoped it from far below, Manny not daring to even put his eyeball to the lens. It’s the oldest, biggest living thing in the whole valley. Its branches spread like creepy fingers against that empty sky.

  I almost step on three guys lying in the shade of a boulder. One of them is Bobby Martin. He’s just a year older than me. We used to hang out together. Most of the time, he’d been an okay guy, like when he’d share his Twinkie at lunch. But then he’d do something gross like take insects or lizards or mice and put them in coffee cans and then drop in a firecracker. One day he found this litter of kittens up in the hills. It was his find of a lifetime, and I knew there was no way to talk or even punch him out of it. So I told him to go fo
r the Lady Finger firecrackers and I’d watch the kittens until he got back. Of course, by the time he got back, me and the kittens were gone. After that we hated each other. I hadn’t seen him in a couple years, mostly ’cause he went to Our Lady’s, which I’d got kicked out of. It only takes one look to see that the bad part of him has taken hold and there’s nothing left of that guy who’d share his last Twinkie.

  “Come on, what are you waiting for?” Buns has slipped by me while I’m spaced out.

  I step past Bobby and we pretend we don’t know each other. All the time I’m seeing that oak tree through the corner of my eye. Three guys could spread their arms out wide and not even reach around its trunk. There are two huge roots, each split down the middle sort of like a goat or pig foot. Like the tree is just toeing that dried-up dirt to keep from falling over the edge. It’s still a good fifty yards off, but I don’t want to look at it, so I’m checking out the younger guys sitting in the shade of a boulder. Some of them can’t be more than eleven or twelve. They must be what the Blackjacks call the Deuces.

  If you’re a Blackjack, you live at home, go to school, or have a job in the valley, but this place gets inside you. This place is where you hang for real.

  Platforms are nailed to a couple stumpy oaks, with sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds dangling their legs over, staring down at us. They’re the Jokers. They just watch as we pass.

  Manny is beside me now.

  A narrow gorge cuts into the hill, and a camp has been set up with a big tent and pup tents and a campfire and ice chests and all kinds of cool stuff. The older guys live up here for weeks at a time in the summer. It makes me sick seeing this awesome hangout twisted into something creepy.

  Manny is trying to look cool, but he’s shaking. I punch his shoulder. He manages a grin.

  “Sí, se puede,” he says.

  Don’t know what that means except it’s got to do with the farm workers. Nino says it, so it must be cool. I nod.