The Sky Below (28 page)

“Ah-oooo,” I cried. “Ah-oooo.” Everyone else in the tree laughed. I laughed, too, victoriously. I felt not only well but better than well. Nothing hurt. I had tons of energy. Let the lazy lion pad around below the tree. Let him gaze up, frustrated, at the bird he'd never catch now.

 

There were eleven of us at dinner that night—seven from the tree plus a short English professor who was walking from Ixtlan to Oaxaca and his very tall ceramicist wife, two teenage boys from the town in soccer jerseys, and their mother, who cleaned the church. We ate in one of the larger stone rooms, in which paintings of saints hung on the walls and a string of multicolored lacy paper squares ornamented the ceiling's center beam. From across the table Malcolm X asked me, “So what brings you to us?”

“I needed a change,” I said. “All I ever did was think about money—I worked on Wall Street.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Uh-huh.” My tamales were limpid, meaty, with intricate spicing. Indeed, the food at the ex-convento was always astonishingly, even hypnotically, good. I've never, before or since, tasted food quite like it.

“So did you see September 11?” In addition to her very large
breasts, Malcolm X, who was around forty-five, had a sharp, restless way of looking.

“I was late for work that day,” I said, “so I was halfway to the office before I realized what had happened. And then, it was the oddest thing, I didn't turn around. I walked toward the noise and the smoke and the chaos. I was somewhere on lower Broadway and I looked up and saw the Trade Center buildings and then I saw these shapes. They looked like starfish falling through the air. And I thought, Oh, the world really is ending, the starfish are in the sky. It took me a minute before I understood what they were. Then the first tower collapsed, and I ran like everybody else. I think I ran all the way home that day, gagging.”

“Starfish,” she said with her sharp look.

It must have been that, her way of looking, that made me confess through a mouthful of exquisite tamale, “Yes. Starfish. And you know what? I hated it—the constant smell and the dust and the pall everywhere, for months. And you know what else? Secretly, I think the world did end that day. The sky did fall.”

“Could be,” she said. “So this is the afterlife, is that it? We're all shades?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” She laughed a throaty laugh. “You've come to the right place if that's what you think. Did you try the
chicharrones?
”

“Do you think I'm right?”

“That we're all shades? I don't know. But then again, it's in the nature of shades not to believe they're shades, isn't it? They're all still hoping for another chance back up top.”

I nodded, considering her point. Who had Malcolm X been “up top”? What had she wanted? She wasn't shy about her breasts, but in her black T-shirt she didn't display them much either, in the way of a woman who might have given up on sex.
Strong shoulders. Expressive hands. A teacher? A shrink? An actress? “Are you hoping for that?”

She smiled, but her smile was sly. “Of course,” she said. “Aren't you?”

At the other end of the table, Jabalí tapped his knife against his water glass. “I have an important announcement,” he said. We all hushed. He put a hand on Julia's head. “Julia had a nap this afternoon, and she dreamed that CNN isn't coming this week. They'll come later.” Everyone clapped. Julia beamed.

“Oh, damn,” said Malcolm X. “What?”

“That means we have to build the latrine. We start on the new moon—day after tomorrow. You'll be my helper.”

By now, I had surrendered to not understanding anything, so I said that would be great. On the way to my room that night, I saw my wings through the open doorway of one of the stone rooms. They were hanging from a hook on the wall. Beneath them were the frog head, the squirrel tail, the fox mask, a large shark fin, and a few other hypertrophic animal parts. I stared at my wings with longing, then, darting in, I plucked a feather from the right one and carried it off to my room. I clutched the stolen feather as I fell into a deep sleep.

The next day, after breakfast, I sat on a cracked stone wall in the airy courtyard and spread out my map. There was the big beige hulk of the United States, and beneath it, like a rudder, the curve of Mexico and the countries beyond it: wider, narrower, narrower still, like the tail of the dolorous mouse in
Alice in Wonderland.
So many doors. He could have gone in through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California. He could have wandered to Baja and drowned. Most of the map fell over the wall like a thin tablecloth. A stone under the paper made a bump, like the bump on my thigh, in New Mexico. A leaf twirled down and covered most of Guatemala.

Julia, the veil tied around her head, Hell's Angels style,
walked toward me along the wall. She stopped, tapping at Texas with a bare, dirty toe. “
Qué es?
”

“I'm trying to figure out something important.”

She tapped her toe on Mexico. “We're here.”

I put my finger on New York, which was tiny. “I come from here,” I said.

Julia shrugged.

“No, it's great. Don't you want to see other places?”

“Not really. This is
paraíso.
” She crouched down on the map, wrapping the veil and her arms around her knees. Perched on North America, she covered it. The Pacific Ocean spread out from under the tatters of her veil. “What's your important thing?”

“It's a secret.”

Julia's face brightened. “I love secrets. Tell!”

“Not now,” I said. “Not yet.” I touched the map, trying to feel for him, where he might have gone. The stone wall was cold under the paper.

The rest of the day before the new moon was dull, drifty. Malcolm X sketched ferns in the courtyard. Jabalí, looking like a cobbler out of a fairy tale, tapped at the heels of a pair of large, cracked leather boots. I pretended to read Pablo Neruda, wandered partway down the road toward the tiny town, got hot, wandered back. Stray dogs lay sleeping in the fields. There was nothing in that town anyway. As I approached the ex-convento, I saw Julia by the tall church gate in her Hell's Angels bridal/Communion/tablecloth veil. She was sitting on an upturned green plastic bucket, back straight, hands folded primly in her lap. The gate was propped open with a brick, but Julia was posted just behind it, her toes on the rusty bottom rail. On her face was an expression of melancholy and fervent expectation.

“What are you doing, Julia?” I said.

“Waiting.”

“For what? CNN?”

“It's a secret,” she teased, but she didn't move from the gate for hours, staring down the road, until the dinner bell rang.

 

I remember the latrine pit. I pushed and dug and heaved next to Malcolm X, trying to convince myself that we were falling into a rhythm and were getting somewhere. The dirt was like sand in some places, like iron in others, and at times it shifted unpredictably. How would we ever get to twenty feet? The chickens clucked, watching us from the chicken coop/library nearby. The little library had an odd grandeur, ruined as it was, roof falling in; it must have been beautiful once. My arms ached and my hands blistered within the first hour; my knees began to shake before it was time for lunch.

“Why do they need this? There are bathrooms inside,” I said, leaning on my shovel.

Malcolm X sat down in the dirt, lifting the back of her shirt and leaning against the coolness of the earth. “Oh, that feels good. It was one of Julia's dreams. And it's not such a bad idea, because the plumbing inside is ancient, and sometimes we have gatherings of folks here. Extra facilities will be a help.”

I dropped my shovel, hard. “What do you mean, Julia
dreamed
it? We're busting our asses in the heat all day because some kid had a dream?”

Malcolm X took off her mud-caked sneakers. “She's not ‘some kid.' Don't you know? She's an indigo child.”

I stared blankly at her.

“An indigo child is a kid who's been given special abilities and sent to Earth to change the world and lead us into the future. They have prophetic dreams and some of them can read minds, things like that. It's very bad to force them or try to make them conform. When Julia was born, Jabalí saw her indigo aura right away, and he's been careful with her ever since. She's very important.”

“Do you believe this bullshit?”

“Well—”

“And is there some sort of rule that indigo children can't get braces? It's amazing the girl can chew her food.”

“Jabalí can't afford anything like braces. Can't you see that? That's why he's always going down to Ixtlan to talk to the
communal
about buying the land around the church. He's trying to set up an ecotourist-spiritual center—for Julia. He knows he won't be around forever.”

I leaned forward. “Who is her mother?” I said in a low voice. “Doesn't she have anything to say about this?”

“Oh.” Malcolm X's usually sharp look softened. “That's a sad story. Let's dig, okay? I'll tell you later.”

Unsatisfied, I dug. We got our rhythm, we dug until our hands were in shreds, we talked. Malcolm X had been a political science professor at Berkeley. Up north, she'd left behind years with a gloomy husband, and a baby they never actually had but endlessly fought about. The circumcision question for the phantom baby, she said, had proven to be the final straw. They divorced. And anyway, she had wanted a baby girl, named Laurel. I agreed that Laurel was a pretty name, a name that would be right her whole life, child to woman. No Laurel, though, said Malcolm X. No anyone—she'd had her tubes tied. The gloomy husband, who drank, killed himself a year ago. She'd been an occasional visitor to the ex-convento before, but since his death she'd decided to stay on; she'd taken a name. What kind of father could he ever have been? said Malcolm X, digging and tossing dirt out of the pit. A child would have been swept under by him, his impossible needs. He was inconsolable, she said. An inconsolable man. Bottomless. We talked about names through the afternoon, digging ourselves down past Nathaniel and Margarita to John and Mary until, by the time the dinner bell rang, we had made a pit as deep as Malcolm X was tall.

“Not bad for one day,” said Malcolm X, leaning on her shovel. Dirt dusted her all over. “And now we're friends.” She smiled. My hands had left blood smears on my shovel handle.

At dinner that night, gauze wrapped around my thumbs and crisscrossing my palms, I watched Julia trot around the room, beaming at everyone with her buckteeth. She was wearing the Communion veil again. Javier, a dark-eyed boy about her age, chased her, running at the veil with his fingers at his forehead like bull's horns, and she shrieked with laughter, wiggling the veil and yelling “
Toro!
” After dinner, as we drank strong coffee and ate
dulce de leche
smooth as spun silk, Julia stood on a chair behind Jabalí and braided more things into his hair: a yellow ribbon, a bit of green paper. “
Papi,
be still,” she said. When she was done, she threw her arms around his neck, resting her cheek in his already much-ornamented hair.

Malcolm X and I dug for three days, until the handle of that shovel felt like an extension of my hand, which finally stopped bleeding on the afternoon of the third day. Calluses had formed. We had a ladder now, leaning against the dirt walls of the latrine pit. We had considered the fate of the world, written it off, and offered it a thread of hope, several times over. The pit had begun to seem almost cozy, familiar, ours. Above us, the southern sky was high and clear; throughout the day, from where we stood digging, back to back, we could hear muffled footsteps, the murmur of voices, passing cars.

Malcolm X's rump was close to mine all day, every day, and her rump, like the rest of her, was surprisingly muscular. Feeling companionably sweaty, rump to rump in the pit, I almost told her who I really was and why I was here, but I didn't, for fear of jinxing things. Because every time my shovel hit the earth and I was able to loft more dirt out of the pit, I felt death move back an inch. Another, another, another. I beat my lazy-ass cancer with that shovel. Until death was at least twenty feet away. Twenty feet and a half, for good measure. We scrambled
up the ladder, threw our shovels out ahead of us, and collapsed at the edge of the pit, giggling, giddy with fatigue. We drank huge gulps of water out of a plastic jug. It was the shank of the afternoon; everyone was working. I tossed a rock into the pit and listened for the small thud.

“Fuckin' A,” I commented. “All this for people to shit? What kind of prophecy is that?”

Malcolm X rolled over and crawled on her belly to the edge of the hole. Resting her chin on her fists, her large breasts scooped between her arms, she said, “Look.”

I crawled next to Malcolm X and peered into the pit. A rough column of dirt ending in dirt. I saw what she meant. It looked like art, like an earthworks piece by Michael Heizer (Sarah had loved those), or like a meteor had plunged into the ground and disappeared, or like a door. It looked impossible, ominous, beautiful. It was exhilarating. With a surge of energy, I swung myself around and hopped back down the ladder. Malcolm X, laughing, followed me.

At the bottom of the pit, she turned to me and pressed her body against mine. I bent my head to hers, but we didn't quite kiss. Instead, we stood like animals, nose to nose, quivering. I was shocked to feel myself hardening. I hadn't had sex with a woman in so long that it barely seemed like a possibility anymore. And yet. She unzipped my pants and slowly ran the back, then the palm, of her hand along my dick, closing her eyes, taking it in her hand as if it were a precious object she was weighing. “Shhhh,” she whispered, though I wasn't saying anything. “Shhhh.” Her shirt, when I pressed my face down into it, tasted like dirt. I unbuttoned it. Her large nipple was as warm as the rest of her and it stiffened in my mouth. Then the other. Her skin tasted of salt. Her breasts were so large I couldn't hold them in my hands, which made me harder, the way a regular guy would get. It was strange to be a regular guy.