Mean Streets (21 page)

We threaded our way through the periphery of the market crowd and cut across the corner of the
zócalo
—partially “opened” by the ruthless removal of towering trees, the memories of which still threw phantom shade over the raised, central “kiosk” where the state band played on Tuesdays, according to a notice nearby.

I could see the memory of the original plaza like a projection over the new design, with huge, thick-trunked trees and Victorian iron benches set along the narrower, shadier paths, and the not-so-long-ago stench of tear gas floating on the warm breeze and an echo of screams. Shadows of the dead protesters glimmered over the memory of blood on the stones in front of the old government building. I could hear the shouts and the shots mingled with the scent of flowers and fresh, spiced bread from the market nearby. The combination made me queasy. No one in their right mind would want to linger there that night.

We turned from the market, the shops, and the cafes that lined the sun-baked zocalo and headed down to the government offices a few blocks away. We entered the usual bureaucratic maze of once-grand rooms chopped into offices and cubicles with flimsy, movable walls, repulsively out of place in the building that pre-dated World War I.

The man behind the registrar’s desk, however, fit in perfectly. He had a small mustache with waxed points and wore his shirt collar buttoned up tight under his conservative tie.

“Hi,” I started, hoping I could manage to make myself understood in English. “I need to locate a grave. . . .”

The clerk’s nostrils pinched in annoyance and he shook his head.
“No habla inglés, Señora.”

I cast a glance at Mickey, who was leaning against a wall again. He shot me back a snotty look. This was going to be fun. . . .

“Mickey, would you translate for me?” I asked.

With a sigh, the teenager heaved himself upright and ambled to the desk.

He made a gesture at the clerk, who gave him a look nearly as disdainful as the one Mickey had given me.

“La gringa busca un sepulcro,”
he said.

“La gringa”
. . . well, at least I wasn’t
“puta”
this time.

The clerk heaved a shrug and spat back something that I imagined was, “Yeah, aren’t they all?”

There was a bit more wiseass chitchat before I put a restraining hand on Mickey’s arm.

“Mickey. Just translate. Commentary isn’t required.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.” Then he gave me a blank look.

“What?” I asked, feeling the ghost dog brush past me to lie down on the floor near the door. I didn’t look down, just stared at Mickey.

“So . . . ? What am I supposed to translate?”

Maybe I should have kicked him harder. . . .

“Ask him if there’s a form I need to fill out and what it will cost for him to find the information right now.”

Mickey made with the rolling eyes again and looked back to the clerk, who was glaring at us, even though there was no one else waiting in his cubbyhole. Mickey seemed to be repeating my request, but this time in a slightly singsong, high-pitched voice.

The man frowned at him.
“Forma? Para qué?”

“He says, ‘A form for what?’”

“Yeah . . . I figured that part out, Mickey. I need to know if there is a form I am required to fill out in order to find out where a certain person is buried here in Oaxaca. If so, I need that form and I wish to know what fee I have to pay to get that information immediately—while I stand here and wait. Now, you think you can be that specific with him, Mickey?”

He huffed and turned back to the clerk, parroting my request in his mocking voice.

The clerk was annoyed by it, too, but he grunted an affirmative and handed over a form and said something about pesos.

“He says it’ll cost a hundred dollars to do it right now.”

“No, he didn’t, Mickey. He said
‘cinco cientos pesos.’
That’s about fifty bucks. My Spanish sucks, not my math.”

“Yeah, right.” And the eye roll. I was getting too familiar with the routine already.

I filled in the form as best I could with Mickey’s non-help and fished a thousand pesos from my wallet. I put it down with the form, saying,
“Apesadumbrado,”
and jerking my head toward Mickey. Even as bad as it is, I can manage a few important words in Spanish: please, thank you, beer, toilet, keys, and sorry.

A smile almost cracked the man’s wooden face as he accepted the form and the overpayment, with an amused snort.
“Momentito,”
he said, taking the form away behind a screen.

I sat down on one of his two cracked green vinyl-covered chairs to wait.

“He only goes back to the computer,” Mickey groused. “He just wants to make it look important.”

I shot him a quelling glance, but said nothing.

The phantom dog got up to chase a phantom cat around the room. I ignored their antics and so did almost everyone else, except a skeletal clerk, who tried to give the dog one of his finger bones to dissuade it from barking. The dog wasn’t having anything to do with the clerk’s finger and backed away, bristling, leaving the ghost cat free to dash out of the room to the relative safety of the hall.

The flesh-and-blood clerk, who looked nothing like his bony predecessor, returned with a sheet of paper. “Hmph,” he coughed, then launched into a rattling discourse aimed somewhere in between me and Mickey, as if he couldn’t decide which of us he was supposed to talk to—Mickey the brat or the illiterate gringa.

Finally the clerk let out an impressively heavy sigh, shrugged, and shoved the paper forward for one of us to take.
“Buenos días,”
he added, turning his back and stomping off to his sanctum in the back.

Mickey grabbed the sheet and held it out to me after a second’s perusal. “You’re fucked. There are three graves for your guy.”

“Three? Not for the same date.”

“Yeah. Look.”

I took the page and looked it over. And there were three grave sites given for Hector Purecete, all with the same death date in 1996. “That’s gotta be wrong—it’s not a common name, is it?”

“No.”

“Great,” I muttered. “I guess I’ll have to go look at all of them and see what shakes loose.”

I stood up and walked out of the government offices with Mickey and the dog trailing me.

We’d started back across the zocalo, passing closer to the site of the teachers’ fatal protest than I liked, when Mickey finally decided to talk again.

“What do you want to find this guy’s grave for anyway?” Mickey asked. “Some kind of creepy ritual or something?”

My turn to sigh. “No. I told you before, I just need to find it and leave something on it. On November first.”

“Yeah, right.”

I stopped, burning in the high-altitude sun and the hot Grey energy of the massacre. “Mickey, is it just for me, or do you always have a bad attitude?”

He turned his head and muttered under his breath, starting to walk on. I snatched his arm and dragged him back to me, through a red blotch of remembered blood and pain. He flinched a little and tried to wrench himself out of my grip, spitting nasty Spanish words.

“Damn, that’s a lot of endearing little nicknames you have for me. How ’bout we make this easier on both of us. You can just call me the GP—”

“Huh? The what?”

“The gringa puta. And I’ll just call you brat-boy. It’ll be so much easier, don’t you think?”

He glowered at me and pulled against my hold. I let him go and sighed.

“Mickey, look: I appreciate the offer of help, but your attitude is just not flying with me. You can straighten up and stop acting like a punk, or I can do without you. What’s it going to be?” My ghostly dog companion circled around us, growling as if to keep something unpleasant at bay.

Mickey seemed to consider my statement seriously, sidling into the sun and away from the crying red energy of the teachers’ deaths. “OK . . . GP. We’ll have to get to the
panteones
soon. It’ll be a lot busier tomorrow. And you really don’t want to be out tonight.”

“You’re serious about that ghosts of the violent dead thing?”

He nodded. “You
norteamericanos
think el Día de los Muertos is just a funny tradition—not real—but we don’t. Not up here. This is the ghost country. We’re not afraid of death—not like you. We live with it.”

“You might be surprised. . . .”

He ignored me. “But we don’t do foolish things like stand where people were murdered on their day to return from Mictlan. That’s just fucking stupid.”

I nodded. “All right. Let’s get someplace better then. Like the panteon—a panteon is a cemetery, right?”

“Yeah. It’s actually pretty safe right now. But we should get the car. Those three aren’t close to each other.”

I was surprised at his change of attitude. He was still kind of surly, but at least he seemed to be helping me instead of making more work. We walked back to the house and Mickey borrowed his aunt’s car—a dusty silver Chevy, which amused me.

I took the passenger seat and held the door open for a moment. The ghost dog stopped at the car’s doorsill and sat on the ground, looking pathetic and thumping its stumpy tail, but wouldn’t step up into the car.

Mickey looked at me. “Something wrong?”

“No . . . no, I’m fine.” I closed the door and the dog vanished from view. We drove away without any sign of the phantom canine until we got out at the first panteon on the list.

The first stop was the municipal cemetery of San Miguel. We drove around a small carnival that was setting up in a courtyard in front and walked across drifts of flowers and greenery that had escaped from the bundles carried by a stream of people entering the panteon ahead of us. The dog trotted up, materializing out of the road dust and Grey mist to rub against my legs and bump its head against me impatiently until we walked through the cemetery gates. The dog ran ahead, into the crowd of animate skeletons and live humans who filled the graveyard.

Everyone was busy, the living and the dead, and I paused to stare. “There are . . . a lot of people here . . . ,” I said.

“Yeah. The graves have to be cleaned and decorated, the family ofrendas made, and the cooking has to be done before Todos Santos on November first. It’s a Sunday this year, so they gotta be done today and tomorrow—or the Church might be offended. Most of these guys won’t bring their feasts until after sundown on Sunday.”

I glanced at him with a curious frown. “Feasts? In a graveyard?”

He snorted something that was almost a laugh. His tone still left a bit to be desired, however. “Yeah. I keep trying to tell you: it’s like a party. El Día de los Muertos is a cycle-of-life thing. We have all this stuff at home—the ofrendas and stuff—but we come to the panteon in the evening to party with the family ghosts. We know death, but we don’t worship it or freak out about it. It’s just . . . part of life. We aren’t afraid of the old bony woman. Just look at the skeletons,” Mickey added, pointing at a pair of children waving paper skeleton puppets at each other in an elaborate pantomime punctuated with much chattering and laughing.

The puppets had jointed legs and arms controlled with strings the children pulled with their fingers while clutching the sticks to which the paper skeletons were mounted. One was a musician with a guitar and a top hat, while the other was a girl singer with a fur stole and long skirt. The kids pranced ahead with their puppets. The ghosts of several other children tagged behind, giggling, as the impromptu cabaret act headed for the family plot. The group was herded along by an aging man carrying an elaborate ironwork cross under his arm and followed by a cold boil of silver and red energy—the imminence of those who died by violence, perhaps.

“Those guys are gonna clean the graves of their family and put that new cross up,” Mickey lectured me; he was almost spitting. “They’re not sad—they’re happy. They work hard today. They remember the dead. ’Cause they know we’re all gonna die. That’s the big deal you norteamericanos don’t get. You can’t ‘cheat’ death. You just have to know it’s there and remember. We all got a skeleton inside us.”

The skeletons. As I looked around the panteon, I saw few ghosts of the type I was most familiar with—the memory manifestations of the dead. Nearly all the ghosts in this cemetery were skeletal with only the barest hint of faces or flesh, a few were purely bones, while a smaller handful had the shape of the living people they had once been. These were the only ghosts I saw that seemed distressed or confused, wandering among the raised graves as if desperate to find something they’d misplaced, blind to the throngs of living and dead around them.

I got it: the manifestations of the Grey depended upon the minds of those who shaped it. Here, where skeletons were the symbol of the dead, embraced, even beloved in all their bony glory as just another part of the cycle of life, most of the spirits of the dead looked like skeletons. In the U.S., where death was the end of life, most ghosts manifested with the memory-shape of their formerly living bodies. But they could have been anything, like the discorporate entities I’d met once or twice, manifesting as changing shapes, or inconclusive features on a mutable column of fog, or the roiling anger of the slaughtered.

The ghost dog trotted back from its peregrinations through the crowd and sat at my feet, tongue lolling, looking happy for the first time since it had appeared. I almost reached to pat its head before I remembered that most people don’t see ghosts. Even as comfortable with death as the Oaxaqueños were, I doubted they would understand my stooping to pet a spectral hound. Mickey would probably think I was crazy and say so. I didn’t believe he’d suddenly decided to respect me; he just didn’t want me to kick his ass. But he wasn’t above a few more needling comments.

I cleared my throat. “Where do you think we’ll find the grave? This is a big place. . . .”