The House of the Scorpion (28 page)

“So?” Emilia said. “I’ve known that for years.”

María stared at her sister as though she’d just seen a tarantula. “You …
knew?”

“Of course. I’m older than you, remember? I saw her go, and Dada shouted that she was dead to us now. It seemed the easiest way to explain things to you.”

“You let me think she was lost in the desert.”

Emilia shrugged. “What difference does it make? She didn’t care about us. She thought taking care of losers was more important.”

“The important thing is to get this clone to the hospital, where it can do some good,” said Steven.

“Steven,” whispered Matt. In all this time he’d thought Steven and Emilia were—if not his friends—not his enemies, either. He admired Steven. In many ways they were alike.

“Take him.” Steven signaled the bodyguards.

“Wait!” shrieked María. “You can’t do this! Matt’s not an animal!”

“He’s livestock,” Steven said with a cold smile. “The law is very clear. All clones are classified as livestock because they’re grown inside cows. Cows can’t give birth to humans.”

“I won’t let you do this! I won’t let you!” María threw herself at the guards, and they rather sheepishly ducked their heads to avoid her blows. The pilot grabbed her from behind and pulled her away.

“I’ll call Willum,” Steven said, heading for the cockpit. “I can see we’ll need sedatives before we can send her back to the convent.”

“Emilia! Help me! Help
him!”
screamed María, but no one paid her the slightest attention.

Matt walked between the bodyguards. He hadn’t a hope of fighting them off, and he didn’t want María’s last image of him to be of a terrified farm animal being dragged off to slaughter. He turned to look at her, but she was too busy struggling with the pilot to notice.

The bodyguards held Matt’s arms, but they didn’t insist on carrying him. He smelled the night air, the scent of jasmine and gardenias that had been planted everywhere for the wedding. He smelled the distant odor of the desert, perhaps even of the mesquite surrounding the oasis. Things traveled so much farther at night.

He saw the fantastic gardens of the Big House, the statues of babies with wings, the orange trees festooned with lights. This was his last night on earth, and he wanted to remember everything.

Most of all, he wanted to remember Celia and Tam Lin. And María. Would he ever see them again? Or, if he was denied heaven, would he wander through the night like La Llorona, searching for something that was forever lost?

23
DEATH

M
att was strapped to a bed in a room full of alarming machinery. Two guards sat outside the door, and another two waited by the window, which was covered by iron bars.

He was utterly terrified. This was where they had kept MacGregor’s clone. This was where the bad things happened.

If only I’d escaped when I had the chance
, he thought.
Everything was ready for me. Tam Lin gave me maps and food and showed me how to climb mountains. I didn’t understand. I didn’t
want
to understand
.

He was sick with dread. Every noise in the hall made him try to free himself. At one point Willum and two strange doctors appeared and proceeded to poke Matt’s stomach and take his blood. They untied him so he could pee into a bottle, and Matt took the opportunity to run. He got only about six feet before being tackled by one of the guards.

Fool, fool, fool
, Matt told himself.
Why didn’t I escape when I had the chance?

After a while Willum and the other doctors returned to discuss Matt’s health. “It has mild anemia,” said one of the doctors. “Its liver functions are a little off.”

“Is it cleared for transplant?” inquired Willum.

“I see nothing against it,” said the strange doctor, peering at a chart.

They left Matt alone with his fear and his imagination.

What was María doing now? They would have drugged her, as Fani had been drugged before she was forced to marry Benito. Perhaps Felicia had been given laudanum in the beginning, to keep her obedient. One day there would be another grand wedding for María and Tom. María would have to be propped up as she walked toward the altar.

I can’t save her
, thought Matt. But perhaps he’d done the one thing that could rescue her. María knew about her mother now. She could call for help. And Esperanza, if Matt knew anything about the woman who wrote
A History of Opium
, would descend on the convent like a fire-breathing dragon.

The door opened, and a pair of bodyguards entered and proceeded to untie Matt.
Now what?
he thought. It couldn’t be a good sign. Nothing was good anymore, not for him.

The bodyguards, keeping a tight hold on Matt’s arms, led him down the hall to a room unlike any he’d seen in the hospital. It was decorated with fine paintings, elegant furniture, and carpets. At the far end, next to a tall window, was a small table with a teapot, cups, and a silver plate of cookies.

And next to it lay El Patrón in a hospital bed. He looked extremely frail, but life still sparkled in his jet-black eyes. In spite of himself, Matt felt a wave of affection.

“Come closer, Mi Vida,” said the whispery old voice.

Matt approached. He saw more guards standing in the shadows and Celia in a beam of light from a gap in the curtains. Matt braced himself for a stormy scene, but she was dry-eyed and grim.

“Sit down, Mi Vida,” said El Patrón, indicating a chair by the table. “As I remember, you like cookies.”

I did when I was six years old
, thought Matt. What was going on here?

“Cat got your tongue?” the old man said. “It’s like the first time we met, when Celia rescued you from the chicken litter.” He smiled. Matt didn’t. He had nothing to be happy about. “Ah, well,” sighed El Patrón. “It always comes to this in the end. My clones forget about the wonderful years I give them, the presents, the entertainment, the good food. I don’t have to do it, you know.”

Matt stared ahead. He wanted to speak, but his throat had closed up.

“If I were like MacGregor—a good Farmer, but a
foul
human being—I would have had your brain destroyed at birth. Instead, it pleased me to give you the childhood I never had. I had to grovel at the feet of the ranchero who owned my parents’ land for every damn sack of cornmeal.”

Celia said nothing. She might have been carved out of stone.

“But once a year that changed,” said El Patrón. “During Cinco de Mayo the ranchero had a celebration. I and my five brothers went to watch. Mamá brought my little sisters. She carried one, and the other held on to her skirt and followed behind.”

Matt knew this story so well, he wanted to scream. El Patrón slipped into it effortlessly, like a donkey walking along a well-worn trail. Once he got going, nothing could stop him until he reached the end.

The old man spoke of the dusty cornfields and purple mountains of Durango. His bright black eyes saw beyond the hospital room to the streams that roared with water two months of the year and were dry as a bone the rest of the time.

“The mayor of our village—dressed in a fine black-and-silver suit—rode on a white horse and threw money to the crowd. How we scrambled for the coins! How we rolled in the dirt like pigs! But we needed the money. We were so poor, we didn’t have two pesos to rub together. On this day the ranchero gave a great feast. We could eat all we wanted, and it was a wonderful opportunity for people who had stomachs so shrunken that chili beans had to wait in line to get inside.

“One year, during that feast, my little sisters caught typhoid. They died in the same hour. They were so small, they couldn’t look over the windowsill—no, not even if they stood on tiptoe.”

The room was deathly still. Matt heard a dove calling from the roof of the hospital.
No hope
, it said.
No hope. No hope
.

“During the following years each of my five brothers died; two drowned, one had a burst appendix, and we had no money for the doctor. The last two brothers were beaten to death by the police. There were eight of us,” said El Patrón, “and only I lived to grow up.
Don’t you think I’m owed those lives?”
El Patrón spoke so sharply, Matt jolted up in his chair. The story wasn’t ending the way he’d expected.

“There were eight of us,” the old man cried. “We should all have grown up, but I was the only survivor. I am meant to have those lives! I am meant to have justice!”

Matt tried to stand. He was shoved back down by the body-guards.

“Justice?” said Celia. It was the first word she had spoken.

“You know what it was like,” El Patrón whispered, his strength deserting him now after his outburst. “You came from the same village.”

“You’ve had many lives,” Celia said. “Thousands of them are buried under the poppy fields.”

“Oh, them!” El Patrón was dismissive. “They’re like cattle running after greener grass. They scuttle north and south across my fields. Oh, yes,” he said when Matt raised his eyebrows. “In the beginning the tide was all one way. The Aztlános ran north to find the big Hollywood lifestyle. But the United States isn’t the rich paradise it once was. Now the Americanos look at movies about Aztlán and think life is pretty sweet down there. I catch about as many going one way as the other.”

“El Viejo was the only good man in this family,” said Celia. “He accepted what God gave him, and when God told him it was time to go, he did it.” Matt was amazed by her courage. People didn’t argue with El Patrón if they wanted to stay healthy.

“El Viejo was a fool,” whispered El Patrón. For a few moments he stopped speaking. A doctor came in and listened to his heart. He gave him an injection.

“The operating room is ready,” the doctor said in a low voice. Matt was swept by an icy wave of terror.

“Not yet,” murmured the old man.

“Ten more minutes,” said the doctor.

El Patrón seemed to gather his strength for a last effort. “I created you, Mi Vida, as God created Adam.”

Celia sniffed indignantly.

“Without me, you would never have seen a beautiful sunset or smelled the rain approaching on the wind. You would never have tasted cool water on a hot summer day. Or heard music or known the wonderful pleasure of creating it. I gave you these things, Mi Vida. You …
owe
… me.”

“He owes you nothing,” Celia said.

Matt was afraid for her. El Patrón was capable of destroying a person who angered him. But the old man merely smiled. “We make a fine pair of scorpions, don’t we?”

“Speak for yourself,” said Celia. “Matt owes you nothing, and he’s going to pay you nothing. You can’t use him for transplants.”

The guards stirred when they heard this. The doctor looked up from the monitor he was watching.

“When you had your first heart attack, I poisoned Matt with foxglove from my garden,” said Celia. “I’m a
curandera
, you know, as well as a cook. I made Matt’s heart too unstable to transplant.”

El Patron’s eyes bulged. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The doctor rushed to his side.

“I couldn’t keep on giving Matt foxglove, though. It’s much too dangerous. I needed something that would make him sick, but not too sick. Then someone told me about monarch butterflies.”

Matt sat up, only to have a bodyguard’s hands tighten on his shoulders. He knew about the monarchs. Tam Lin had talked about them in the garden, the night of Matt’s coming-of-age celebration. The air had been heavy with perfumes, some pleasant, some not, from the flowers Celia had become interested in. She’d pointed out the black-eyed Susans, larkspur, foxgloves, and milkweed, and Tam Lin was stirred when she’d mentioned milk-weed.
It’s fed upon by monarch butterflies
, he’d said.
They’re clever little buggers. Fill themselves up with poison so nothing will eat them
.

Matt had paid no attention to this remark at the time. Tam Lin was always coming up with facts he got out of the nature books he read so slowly and carefully.

“I needed something like the poison in monarch butterflies,” said Celia, breaking into Matt’s thoughts. “So I began feeding him arsenic.”

“Arsenic!”
the doctor cried.

“Arsenic creeps into the whole body,” Celia went on, her eyes as cold as the eyes of a snake. “It grows into the hair, it makes little white lines on the fingernails, it settles into the
heart
. I didn’t give Matt enough to kill him—I wouldn’t do that!—but enough to kill anyone already weak who tried to steal his heart. You’ve had your eight lives, El Patrón. It’s time to make your peace with God.”

“¡Bruja!
Witch!” shrieked El Patrón. His eyes flamed with murderous rage. His skin flushed an angry red. He struggled to claw his way up from the bed.

“Emergency!” yelled the doctor. “Take him to the operating room! Move! Move! Move!”

The guards rolled the bed away. The doctor ran beside it, pushing on El Patrón’s chest. Suddenly the whole building seethed like a wasp nest. More guards appeared—an army of them. Two of them hurried Celia off in spite of Matt’s attempts to stop them. A technician snipped off a strand of Matt’s hair and retreated.