Ceremony of Flies (8 page)

Linda creaks and squeals like her mechanical arthritis is acting up. She limps on toward the mission. She might make it that far. Probably not.

The semicircle of buildings takes shape in the distance. I can’t believe I didn’t see them before. They’re stucco with tile roofs. Not that fake kind of stucco that you see in every suburb, these buildings look authentic like the mud bricks were made by hand. The colors go with the landscape, but they don’t make the buildings invisible. I know I looked in this direction before and didn’t see them. I thought about asking Rex if that was the kind of thing God might do, but I didn’t want to come off sounding crazy. What if it wasn’t the kind of thing God would do?

“Did you know this was out here?” I ask. “Because it seems pretty weird that there’d be something up ahead at the exact moment the car breaks down. Pretty fucking convenient.”

“Ask and ye shall receive.” Rex pats the car. “Those are the Lord’s very own words.”

“Your Bible shit is starting to get on my nerves. You know that?”

Why can’t he just be quiet for a minute? Is that too much to ask? I have not had any coffee.

Rex scoots up in his seat as though doing that will make the car go a little farther.

“Just because you don’t believe it, doesn’t make it not so.” Rex smiles that particularly smug smile that believers have. “If it wasn’t for God smiling down on me, I wouldn’t even be here. I’m blessed.”

“
Blessed
is that what you call this shit storm we’re embroiled in? Blessed?”

Linda grinds to a halt a block or two away from the mission. Rex turns the key off and the car goes dead. Steam pours out of the grate at the front and wafts back to steam up the windshield. It smells like burning plastic and hot tar. He pulls out the keys and rubs the head of the little gold statue with his thumb.

Before Rex can open his mouth to piss me off more, the boy stirs in the backseat. The dog hops to attention and barks. The sound of it rolls across the desert to meet the thunder. Without any more fanfare, the weird naked creature from hell jumps out of the car and faces the odd buildings in the distance. He growls and snarls. If he’d had hackles, he would have raised them.

“Silence,” the boy says in his too-deep-for-a-kid voice as he climbs up over the door and jumps down in the sand. “I don’t want to go there.” The kid points to the mission’s front door.

If he’s got a better idea, I’ll damn sure listen to it. I don’t much want to go there either.

The dog whines and Rex turns on it like he might grab something and smack it. “That’s one ugly mutt, right there. What’s his name?”

“Chauvey,” the boy says.

“Whoo! Whoo! Not your name, Harvey, the mutt’s name.” Rex ruffles the boy’s hair as he studies the dog for a minute. “I’m going to call him Baldy, what do you say?”

The boy shrugs.

He tilts his head like he’s listening for something. “In the dry place I eat
ranas
for a hundred years. Nothing happens to me.”

That’s a weird thing to say. Do all kids spew random creepy bullshit?

“You ain’t a hundred years old, kid.” Rex chuckles but it’s not very convincing.

“We should go.” I take Harvey’s hand and start walking toward the buildings. His hand feels weird and tiny in my hand like I’m holding a bird with hollow bones. If I’m not careful, I might squeeze too hard and break them.

The dog acts like he doesn’t want to go, but he follows us anyway. I guess he doesn’t want to be separated from Harvey.

“Hey, Kitty, you think Linda’s going to be safe out here by herself?”

Rex could use a shave and he’s got some shadows under his eyes from lack of sleep, but he still looks pretty good. I am probably a wreck. I don’t even want to know. I try to think of something witty to say, but the concepts just won’t coalesce. “She’ll be fine, Rex. She’ll be just fine.”

What the hell. The guy loves his car.

The dog whines as we walk. It annoys me more than it should. I fight the urge to grab a rock and throw it at him.

The kid is dragging his feet. This is going to take forever. I hope I don’t have to carry him. I will, if I have to, but I hope I don’t.

I hear a sound. It’s separate from the rolling, far-off thunder, the dog whining, and the scrunch of our feet in the dusty sand. A peep, peep sound. “Do you hear that?” I say out loud because of course they do. As soon as the words leave my mouth, we’re deluged with a choir of peeping.

“
Ranas
,” Harvey says. He’s got a half-smile on his face, a smirk. Do little kids smirk?

“
Ranas,
” Rex says with a nod.

The sound is like a plastic imitation of an animal noise as if someone pulled a string on a giant toy.
This is what the frog says.

“Are those frogs?”

“Yep,
ranas
is Spanish for
frogs
,” Rex says with a superior tone.

“Aren’t frogs aquatic?”

Rex thinks for a moment. “Yep, I believe they are.”

Rex strides down the path. His step grows bouncier the closer we get.

I wait for him to make the connections. But he doesn’t. Good thing he’s attractive.

Amphibians don’t live in the desert. But here we have irrefutable evidence of the existence of
ranas
—in the desert.

Why?

The peeping hits a crescendo and settles to a constant level.

A panicky feeling starts creeping over me. I squeeze Harvey’s hand, but not too hard. “You like frogs, Harvey?”

“No.” The boy jerks his hand away and turns to go back to the car.

Fuck.

I run after him and scoop him up.

“I don’t want to go. It’s bad for me there.” He twines his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist. He smells kind of froggy, like maybe he had been eating
ranas
for a hundred years.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say, which may be a lie. “It’s going to be okay.” I rush to catch up to Rex again.

“You know, Kitty, couldn’t hurt you none to learn a little Spanish, what with you on your way to Mexico and all.”

“Couldn’t hurt me
any
,” I correct him.

“That’s what I’m saying.” Rex flashes his brilliant grin. “I could teach you.
Como se
—”

“No, you said
none
. The correct word is
any
. It wouldn’t hurt you
any
. Seems to me you should learn to speak one language before you start on a second.”

Rex looks at me like I ate his last Oreo.

I guess I was a little mean. I’m cranky. It’s hot holding this kid.

A cloud passes in front of the sun. My heart flutters. For an instant it feels like night is falling. I look up. That is one hefty cloud over my head. Black and pregnant with moisture, it looms over me as if threatening to blot out the sun.

As we draw closer, it’s obvious the buildings are a mission. The pocked adobe is crumbling in places. Vines weave in and out of a trellis that covers the front wall. The leaves, shaped like hearts, reach up and climb onto the tile roof. The mission even has a bell in a tower.

Charming.

Baldy the dog does not want to have anything to do with this place. He turns one way then the other and whines. Harvey squirms in my arms. If I let him go now, he’d run away and I’d never catch him. I’d like to put him down. But I don’t.

A woman, wearing black nun’s robes with a wide white collar, steps through the doorway. She looks too young to have a job as a nun. She waves like she knows us.

I doubt that’s the case.

“Here we go,” Rex says like he knew all along we were going to find a nun in the middle of nowhere. Like he’s happy about it. Like it solves all his problems.

It’s too hot for that uniform. I’ll bet she’s every bit as uncomfortable as I was in my stupid showgirl dress. Whoever decided that women’s clothes should be all about suffering? We all have our burkas to bear, I guess. At least she gets reasonable shoes.

The nun grabs the rope hanging next to the door and pulls. The bell tolls. Thunder rumbles. The two sounds pass each other as one departs and the other rolls in. Thunder cracks like a gunshot right over our heads. Icy drops hit me and fall to the ground. They bounce.

Heavy balls of ice smash into the car. Even though it should be too far away to hear, I hear:
thump, thump, thud
as hailstones pummel Linda.

The ground turns white with ice. A sharp chunk pelts my shoulder. I cover Harvey’s head and run for the door.

8

A door should be an entrance—or an exit, not something that is neither, nor a combination of the two. That’s the way doors work. What’s the point of having a fucking door if going through it only leads back outside?

Harvey clings to me as I run through the door straight into some kind of courtyard. It doesn’t have a roof and the ground is covered in hailstones. The hail looks like a dusting of snow.

Pretty, the white against the pink blossoms of the roses and bougainvillea, but strange.

Confusing.

The nun scampers after me and grabs my arm. “This way.” Her voice is nearly drowned out by the drumroll of the hail. She pulls me under a covered walkway but not before a huge hailstone nails me on the head. At least they put a roof on some damned thing.

Rex grins at me with his snow-white smile as if he knew all along how the place was laid out. I suppose he doesn’t realize I’m suffering from a hammer blow to the head that does nothing to relieve the headache behind my eyes, or maybe he’s an asshole. At least that rock didn’t hit Harvey.

I set the boy down on the ground. He clings to my leg and holds on tight. The hail stops. The silence hangs in the air, heavy and threatening. I wait for a bomb to explode, which is ridiculous, I know, but that’s how it feels.

No bomb explodes.

Like nothing ever happened, the sun reappears and glares down on the compound like it’s just another day in the desert. The frosting on the ground curls up and disappears, leaving only the largest chunks to drip and sweat like pieces of old snowmen.

“I’m so excited you’re here,” the nun says.

The nun has chipmunk cheeks. A moon face, my white mother would call it, sprinkled with freckles. She’s light-skinned, but something about the way she holds her mouth as though it’s poised to speak Spanish signals that she isn’t Caucasian. Tendrils of her hair bounce as if to emphasize her words. She doesn’t wear one of those nun hats. My white mother would have been happier if I had turned out like this girl. She never said it, of course.

She didn’t have to.

My mom never really got over the fact that I didn’t go to college. That I did what
I
wanted instead of what
she
wanted. In retrospect, I’m thinking that maybe I could have toned things down a bit. Maybe when I get to Mexico, I’ll give her a call and let her know she wasn’t completely wrong.

“And you brought a little child,” the nun says. “I love children. Children are a gift to us all. I am so very happy you’re here. It feels like my birthday.”

Take a breath already, damn.

She reaches out to Harvey.

He makes a startled sound and pulls back. He bares his little pebble-like teeth.

Baldy growls a warning and he too bares his teeth.

I hope I’m not going to have to deal with biting.

“We’ll be good friends before you know it.” She hugs herself to express her joy. She is so cheerful she is actually wiggling.

I’m wondering how hard I’d have to squeeze her head to make it pop.

“We had an accident a while back,” Rex explains. “Poor ole Linda, that’s what I call her, my car. You know what
linda
means in Spanish?”

The perky nun shakes her head.

I call bullshit. This chick is Mexican.

“Means
beautiful
.” Rex looks like he could scoop her up and give her a hug. “And beautiful she is!” Rex is positively glowing. “’71 Pontiac GTO with eight horses, dual overhead cams, a posi-track rear end…”

He continues, but it all turns to
blah, blah, blah
.

The nun locks her sparkling, enthusiastic eyes onto his.

Bitch.

“She’s going to need some work to make her road worthy,” Rex says. “I can do the body work once I get her to L.A., but she’s not going anywhere without a patch to her radiator.”

“Father can help you with that. He’s very handy.”