Dancing with the Tiger (18 page)

Bigfoot popped a beer. “I like how you dance.”

“I moved here to join a convent.”

“Sister Ginger. I'll pray for you.”

Bigfoot put his palms together, pushed down her panties, making the final swish with his foot. He was not a natural athlete or lover. His erection was the boldest part of his body, one pure idea—
I know how this thing works.

Jimmy was singing about changes in latitude.

Bigfoot guided Anna to the bedroom. He dug up a condom, wore it like a third sock. He smelled like gel. They fell on the bed. The closer Bigfoot got, the farther away he seemed. When he got real close, Anna gripped his shoulders, ready to dream up some tawdry Mexico erotica, all firecrackers and smoke, but before she had patched another man's face on his body, he was done. Hiccup sex. A wet dream without the dream.

They lay on their backs. Bigfoot told her she was sexy, promised to do better next time.

“Thank you for being with me,” he said.

Anna whispered,
“De nada.”
It was nothing.

Anna was good at nothing. It occurred to her what she'd had with David had been nothing. Just a rhythm, parallel play.
I'll go to the gym and you make dinner and you stop at the store and I'll have a drink with my friends and we'll meet and floss our teeth and have sex and sleep.
They didn't talk about difficult things. Or rather, they talked about other people's difficulties, not their own. They never fought; they left, calling a friend, running. She knew who David was. Vain, selfish, careless with people, but he also had many gifts. Intelligence. Humor. Ambition. Generous—but he gave only gifts that required no sacrifice; he would spend money, but not be inconvenienced. Perhaps somewhere deep down inside her, wherever the subconscious, that blind mole, lay hiding, she'd known he would fail the Clarissa test. Maybe she had wanted it to happen, because she needed their demise to be his fault.

What the hell was wrong with her?

She often wept after sex. Sometimes she was happy and sometimes she was sad and sometimes, like now, she had no idea why she was
crying. Maybe because sex was a metaphor for something you could never really have. That, and knowing her single kiss with Salvador had meant more than this. She should have outgrown these cheap stunts: using men to prove her worth. Because she knew better. Because they never worked.

Bigfoot looked sort of dear, drinking his glass of water, messing with his phone. He wasn't a monster, just another Steve who liked pretty girls. She pointed a finger gun at his back. No, that wasn't right. Turning the gun, she pressed her finger muzzle hard against her sternum, pulled the trigger, and thought:
This is the way I hate myself.

The looter grew impatient waiting for his skin to heal. He liked the garden—the mottled sunlight, the Virgin Mary—but fuck it. It was time to go. On the fourth morning, while Mari slept, he made his escape. His life had new purpose. He had someone to thank and someone to screw over. Both goals formed part of a singular campaign. Forget Jesus. Resurrection didn't make you a saint. He had returned from the dead the same man: A looter. A man lucky with treasure. A man with the patience to dig. And yet he had new energy, because he was ready to prove that the Maddox Principle held water. Cultivate the good inside him. Turn himself inside out.

He took a bus to Mexico City, beelined to the juice stand. When Pico saw him, his face fell away, confusion, then fear.

“
Hombre
, you are supposed to be dead.”

“I was dead, but I didn't like it.”

Pico shook his head, full of objections. “They said you were buried in a bathtub. Now you're here. It's not right. If Reyes sees you, he's going to kill you.”

“Again?”

Pico laughed, like the looter was a disobedient dog he couldn't bring himself to punish. “I am not seeing you.”

“I'm not here.”

“Okay, then. What do you want?”

“Weed.”

Pico looked doubtful. “That's it?”

“New Year's resolution.”

“It's almost March.”

“Late start. Hey, what's that on your shirt?” The design looked like a jigsaw puzzle.

Pico shrugged. “Some Aztec god. Hummingbird something. God of sun and war, a real
cabrón
. You had to kill a lot of people to keep him happy.”

“Like Reyes.”

“Nah. Reyes doesn't kill for sport. Reyes is family. You just can't leave him or fuck up.”

“I did both.”

Pico started up the juice. His hands shook, like he was about to cut himself and make blood orange juice.

The looter thought of Mari and made a fresh connection. This was a pilgrimage. He was a pilgrim. Sunday-school stories flooded back to him. The worst sinners crawled on their knees. The looter dropped to the pavement, testing his joints. His skin was gossamer thin. Dirt and pigeon mess splotched the sidewalk, but pilgrims weren't supposed to mind. The looter crawled a few paces, to get the hang of it.

Mid-squeeze, Pico peered down, shook his head. “Get up, man. The juice isn't that good.”

Pico had half an orange in his hand. The sections formed a circle, equal parts of a whole. The looter admired its perfection.

“I can see everything now,” he said. “More than everything.”

Pico folded his arms. “What are you on?”

“You just need someone to hate.”

“That won't work.”

“An asshole gives your life purpose. An angel or an asshole, and I've got both.”

“Not Reyes . . .” Pico wagged his knife. “He's an octopus. You are no match for him, my friend, dead or alive.”

“What about dead
and
alive?”

The looter pushed off one knee and rose. He did a little jig to prove he wasn't wrecked yet. His pants slid under his hipbones. He hoisted them, jammed his shirt inside, making his clothes behave.

“I'm going to Colorado after this,” he announced. “That's the endgame. Settle my debts. Hey, throw me an orange. This time I'm going to eat it.”

The fruit fell
thump
into his waiting palm. The looter peeled back the skin to where the sweetness was waiting.

—

He bought a ticket
on a second-class bus. The death mask was somewhere in Oaxaca, but that was all he knew. He had no luggage, just his satchel, his lucky toothbrush, and now, mercifully, most of his skin.

He smoked a joint before the bus took off.

Reyes thought he was dead. It had been worth the trip to confirm
this. So long as he remained a ghost, he was free, provided he stayed clear of the safe house, and Pico kept mum, and he didn't run into Reyes. The drug lord had a house in Oaxaca. A summer home. An assassin's retreat.

When no one sat next to him on the bus, the looter stretched over two seats, pillowed his sweatshirt, read the passing graffiti claiming various political candidates were prostitutes, assholes, and frauds.

The girl across the aisle seemed to be pregnant. She had braces and reddish-brown hair. In her lap, she coddled a basket. Two round things. The belly. The basket. You couldn't call her face pretty. Too many freckles. She smiled at him, as if she had a few phrases in English she wanted to try out.
How do you do? My name is Gloria. I like the city more than the country.

The looter couldn't think what to say. It was hard to be aroused by a girl someone else had knocked up, though he'd heard pregnant girls wanted it bad, hormones all jazzed for one last dance. She looked like a woman who worked hard. He wanted to ask her,
Are you good with a mop?
But he couldn't think of the Spanish word for “mop” or even “broom.” He didn't know the word for “braces,” either, the other obvious topic. He offered her a tab of gum, saying,
“¿Dónde vas?”
It was a lame question. The bus went only one place.

“Oaxaca.” She smiled again. Once you got used to her freckles, they were sort of attractive, like God spent some serious time painting her face.

“You live in Oaxaca?”

The girl gave a tiny nod.

“Oaxaca is pretty?” He was buying time here, deciding what to do next.

“
Sí.
Very pretty.” The girl looked ahead, like she didn't want the
other passengers to see her talking with an American man with no luggage and bad skin.

“I need a room to rent. Do you know one?”

The girl stared at the back of the seat in front of her, blue fake-leather nothing. Maybe he'd gone too far. Clearly, she had run into trouble with men. She wasn't old. Maybe twenty-one tomorrow.

“My aunt has an extra room in the garden,” she said, shyly.

“How much does she charge a night?”

“Thirty pesos.”

Two bucks. He could afford it. He couldn't tell if she was happy about this room idea or reluctant. “Then I will go with you when we arrive in pretty Oaxaca and you can show me the room.”

The girl nodded into her basket. The looter wondered if women still found him good-looking. They used to, before he spent so much time digging in caves. He didn't talk to the girl the rest of the bus ride, so she wouldn't think he was trying to get in her panties.

He turned his face to the window, hoping to tan through the glass. The desert was an empty place for being so full. He wondered if real pilgrims took the bus or whether this was cheating. Maybe he should pray. He hadn't prayed in years, give or take a decade, and wasn't sure how to begin, especially on a bus. Maybe he'd pray to Mari. Thank her, in his head. Women were always saving him. The Virgin. Mari. This knocked-up girl with the basket.

The world of men had only led him underground.

The girl pulled sewing out of her basket, squeezed yarn through a needle's eye. Needlepoint. His mother had been into that, covered a bench with flowers, then wouldn't let anyone sit on it. His mother probably missed him, even though he'd stolen her VCR. She'd probably cry if she saw his face. Jug wine. Saran wrap. Aerobic sneakers. His
mother wasn't as bad in person as she was in his head. Banging out cube steaks, losing herself in romance novels and reality shows, like all that love and money was real. The snow in the Rockies never melted. Not completely. His mother was a mountain peak. Chilly. Inaccessible. But there was warmth under her surface. The earth's core was a ball of fire. Use your imagination. Dig with your fucking heart.

And now he was crying, face to the window, back to the girl. No one saw his baby tears but the agave, the prickly pear, the thistle flowers streaming past, and none of them were talking. Not anymore.

His mother thought he was dead.

The death mask was fake. Her father was boozing. She'd slept with Bigfoot. Her trip had been a
fracaso total
and now she had to dispose of her mother's ashes. There wasn't time to purchase a grave site, and she wasn't sure her mother would have wanted one anyway. No, she would have to find a tree in the countryside, a mystical, magical, heavenly shade tree, like O'Keeffe's Lawrence tree, where she could scatter her mother's remains. She'd take a photograph to show her father, so they could visit the spot.

Anna knew only one person well enough to borrow a car.

Constance agreed to lend the old Fiat, but insisted she come to lunch. Anna accepted. A Last Supper, of sorts. She would not tell the Malones she was leaving the country. She didn't owe Señor VIP an explanation. Let him ring up Holly, have her finish the guide.

Soledad buzzed open the gate at the security wall, then waited for
Anna to walk down the driveway to the front door. Frowning like a sour nun, the housekeeper refused to make eye contact. Inside, Anna set down her pack. The death mask was still inside, her burden to carry. She walked through the vestibule, past the living room.

“Anna!” Constance called. “We're all in here.”

In the kitchen, a man and woman in their fifties were dipping cocktail tomatoes into herbed sauce. Constance leaned against the tile counter, wearing a freshly ironed tunic and white pants, glass cocked, staring into the attentive eyes of a handsome man who Anna realized with a sickening jolt was Salvador.

Oaxaca was smaller than small. Oaxaca was a
telenovela.

Constance planted an air kiss. “Meet our friends, Margaret and Harold Fuller. Marge leads tours and Harold is retired from insurance.”

Marge Fuller was a doughy matron in a wraparound skirt and Birkenstocks. A chopstick secured her silver hair in a bun. Harold, a feeble-looking specimen with wide hips and narrow shoulders, reminded Anna of a blown lightbulb, the kind you shake and hear a distant ping. Anna recognized Harold from the English library, where she'd seen him taking Spanish classes from a ravishing Mexican.
Yo voy. Tú vas. Él, ella, usted va.
Having now met Marge, who managed to be both fat and flat, Anna understood the allure of Spanish lessons.

Constance guided her arm. “I believe you know Salvador Flores.”

Salvador looked amused.
Now I get to see you in your natural milieu.
His attitude infuriated her. Having lumped her with all the other silly expatriates, he now expected her to apologize for a tribe she didn't claim.

Anna offered a cool smile. “We've met.”

“It is a pleasure to see you again.” He kissed her and touched her
arm. Anna had always considered sending mixed messages her personal forte—never commit to anything you can't take back, never reject someone you might want later—but Salvador made her look like an amateur. She scouted the room. No sign of Miss Venezuela. Salvador winked. “I am learning where to buy organic peanut butter.”

Constance handed Anna a cocktail and the keys to the Fiat. “Let me know if that drink is too sweet. Here's Thomas—”

Dressed in black and scowling, Thomas cast a shadow over the room. He spotted Anna, and kissed her cheek a little too firmly before peeling off to find Soledad and discuss the scarcity of ice cubes.

Anna sipped her cocktail, sprinting through the afternoon's intricate dynamics. She'd nearly slept with Thomas, but had a crush on Salvador. Constance was setting her up with Salvador—who already had a
cariño
—to stop her husband's philandering. Salvador and Thomas hated each other. No one knew Anna was Daniel Ramsey's daughter or that she was leaving Mexico in three days. Anna needed to borrow Constance's car to spread her mother's ashes. The trick was to survive the meal and secure the vehicle without alienating her tipsy hostess, who kept a rifle in the patio armoire. The plot had more twists than a French farce.
It's a Mexican farce. With guns.

“My,” Thomas said, rubbing his hands. “What a festive menagerie we've assembled.”

Yes,
Anna thought.
Welcome to the zoo.

—

They ate at the long kitchen table
. The house had a formal dining room, but Constance complained it was too dark and stodgy, too far away from the food should you need something, though Soledad was present
at all times during the meal, scurrying to fetch and clean. Anna and Salvador faced each other at Thomas's end, while Marge and Harold clustered on either side of Constance. Each plate arrived with a slab of meatloaf, a bunker of mashed potatoes, an arsenal of peas. By each setting lay a mini American flag. The guests huddled, waiting for the hostess to lift her ceremonial fork.

“Take up your flags, troops,” Constance commanded. The guests glanced at one another. “Don't you remember? Monday was Presidents' Day. Or today is National Tortilla Chip Day. Take your pick.”

Anna shook her flag with mock enthusiasm. She needed the Fiat. Salvador tilted back in his chair, contemplating world peace or apocalypse. It was impossible to tell which.

Glass raised, Constance gave Harold a fond glance. “To old friends and new friends. To art and artists. To collectors, who have the eye and discretion to recognize beauty—”

Thomas finished her sentence. “In objects and women.”

Harold chortled an appreciative “Hear, hear.”

“And to Soledad, for her fine cooking.”

As Soledad didn't understand English no matter how loudly it was delivered, Constance repeated herself in her plodding Spanish. Soledad flashed her golden teeth, went back to the sink.

“Did I miss anything?”

Anna jumped into the breach. “To our hostess for bringing us together.”

With a rousing
“Salud,”
the guests drank, set down their flags, thankful the humiliation was over and no one had seen fit to take a photograph.

Thomas addressed Salvador: “I understand you took Anna to San
Juan del Monte. Did you see anything worth buying? My show is in three weeks. I'm still acquiring.”

“Thomas is ruthless,” Constance said, sucking her dry cubes. “Buys masks right off a dancer's face.” It was impossible to tell if she was proud or disgusted.

“Where is your collection?” Salvador looked around.

“There's a chapel on the property where I store everything.” Thomas gestured behind him.

“I'd like to see that.”

Thomas gave Anna a coy look. “My collection is private. I find keeping things secret heightens their pleasure.”

Anna considered her fork as if it were a new invention.

“Art should be shared,” Salvador objected. “Not locked up.”

“The artist shared his art with me.”

“Just you?”

“All artists should be so lucky as to make art for an appreciative patron who pays well and stores their work in perpetuity.”

Salvador gripped the stem of his glass. “So art is only for the aristocracy?”

“Look at the Medicis, the Salon. Poor men make art for rich men. The artists' angst, their struggle, is what makes their art powerful. Frankly, I prefer to pay someone to struggle for me. I don't collect a mask unless it's been danced. Let the tourists mop up the ornaments. All the great museums were built by powerful collectors—”

“Who robbed poor countries to decorate their . . .” Salvador couldn't find the word he wanted.

Thomas interrupted. “The desire to collect is a basic human instinct. Every man wants to surround himself with the things he likes. Some
men just have better taste than others.” Thomas turned to Anna with a triumphant expression. “It is no crime to love beauty.”

“Changing the subject”—Constance tapped her glass with her fork—“have you been reading the papers? Oaxaca is the new Juárez. Two murders this month alone. Some dancer was stabbed at Carnival.”

“Three couples have dropped our butterfly trip,” said Marge. “The paper said the killer was wearing a tiger's mask.” She gave Thomas a leading glance.

“Anna and I were there,” Salvador said.

Thomas squinted, considering. “It might make a good footnote for our book.”

“Our book?”
Salvador raised an eyebrow. Anna pushed peas around her plate.

“Anna and I have plans to collaborate on a book. You've—”

“What was the second murder?” Anna cut in. She didn't want to talk about books, hers, theirs, real or imagined. To her surprise, Salvador answered.

“You met her. Leonora Rodríguez. The old widow near Luna's. Who would want to hurt her? It's crazy. Someone saw a man with a tiger's mask walking through the woods.”

“Wait. The same tiger killed them both?” Marge asked.

Harold patted his mouth with his napkin. “A serial killer is roaming Oaxaca.”

“San Juan del Monte,” his wife corrected.

“A serial tiger,” Malone corrected again.

“Fabulous meatloaf,” Marge said.

“Reminds me of my mother,” Harold said. “She made a bread pudding—”

“Someone is licking my toes,” Marge said. “Thomas, is that you?”

“I'm afraid Honduras beat me to it.”

“So what happened?”
Anna pressed, trying to steer the conversation back around. “No one has found the killer?”

Constance gave her an
Oh, please
look. Her face was flushed, on its way to mottled. “Here's the worst part: The tiger not only kills an old, defenseless woman,
he sets her on fire
. The crazy newspaper ran pictures! The poor woman is dead, and do they run a nice photograph from her wedding day? No. They show her charred body lying in embers. Remind me never to be murdered in Mexico.”

Harold turned to Marge. “Things like this don't happen in Shaker Heights.”

“I have the paper somewhere.” Constance got up, disappeared into the hall.

“Puppet, let's change the subject. We don't need to see—”

Constance returned, passed the newspaper to Harold, who passed it to Anna without looking. It was her, all right. Head scarf, wizened features frozen in rictus. Anna set down her fork. How could anyone eat? Her horror was coupled with a sinful tingle of excitement. There was only one reason to murder Leonora Rodríguez. Somebody had come looking for the mask. Why had she believed Lorenzo Gonzáles? Why did she believe anybody?

“Constance,” Thomas chastised, shaking his flag like a pompom, “it's Tortilla Chip Day. Not Day of the Dead.”

His wife's pale hair formed a frazzled nimbus. “Go ahead and kill me if you have to, but don't set me on fire.”

“Puppet, can we move on to breezier topics? Taxes? Scorpions?”

Heat rose to Anna's forehead, her neck.
The good news is, the mask in my pack is worth a fortune. The bad news is, someone may kill me to get it.
Her flight home left Monday. The trick was to stay alive until then.
One of these two men could help her. The married, egomaniacal American collector. Or the moody, womanizing Mexican painter. Some girls had all the luck.

“Actually,” Constance said, ignoring her husband. “There was a third murder. I almost forgot. An American fellow was cemented into a bathtub.”

“Oh, come on.” Marge rolled her eyes. “Now you're making things up.”

Constance made a Boy Scout pledge. “I squeezed the story out of Soledad, who got it from the housekeeper. Some guy Gonzáles—Thomas knows him, a dealer with a mail-order Ph.D.—comes home and finds a strange man buried alive in his bathtub. Drugs, I suppose, or a shady art deal. I've always wanted to find a naked man in my bathtub, though I'd prefer he were alive.” Constance smiled at Thomas, who considered his reflection in his knife. “I am sending the mashed potatoes around again. You know there's no word in Spanish for ‘leftovers'? It simply doesn't exist.”

Thomas leaned into Anna and whispered playfully, a boy with a frog in his pocket. “Buried alive in cement. Hell of a bath.”

Salvador watched this exchange. Anna blushed. There were times when being an American was the world's most embarrassing affliction. A million U.S. citizens had relocated to Mexico—all of them looking for something. The most cynical came for the exchange rate. The romantic came for the scenery, the color. Retirees came for the weather. Surfers came for waves. Hippies for weed. Liberals wanted to escape the American capitalist machine. Poets sought a simpler life, a humble dirt road.

Settling in the prettiest cities and seaside resorts, they re-created the
culture they'd left behind while complaining about all the ways Mexico disappointed them: the bad plumbing, the slow Internet, the wait for a phone, the aggressive drivers, the pollution, the toxic water, the firecrackers, the parade of saints' days, the strikes, the bureaucracy, the corruption, the
mañana
syndrome, the blind religiosity, the poverty.
Aprovechar
—an essential Spanish verb with no satisfying English equivalent. “Take advantage of” came close. That's what expatriates like the Malones did. They came to Mexico to take advantage. So had her father.

As if he'd read Anna's mind, Thomas called down the table, “Look at us, greedy Americans. All that fine food and we forgot to say grace. Constance, will you do the honors?”

His wife flung her cigarette hand. Her charm bracelet jangled: London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, Chichén Itzá. “You should have thought of that earlier. It's too late for grace now.”

The guests had laid down their forks. No one wanted to be the first to resume eating. They reached for their drinks instead.

Anna excused herself. In the bathroom, she splashed her face with water, wondered whether she was going to vomit. She hoisted the window to let in fresh air. Just how much danger was she in? Pressing her palm to her chest, she slowed her racing heart. Outside, everything was still. The only person in sight was Hugo, on break, smoking by the pool, which, presumably for lack of sufficient chemicals, had turned a faint shade of green.