“A guy like Fin?” Bobbie said, just as he came outside, looking the wrong way.
Then Fin spotted Shelby reeling across Revolución, barely dodging traffic. Fin followed after them with Nell and Bobbie bringing up the rear.
Now that it was early evening young Americans were milling everywhere, stopping only long enough to buy more beer cans to toss from car windows. A dozen drunken kids were hanging from the patio of a restaurant directly over their heads, yelling, “Cool it, Pancho!” to a harried traffic cop on the corner.
“Let’s move outta the way,” Bobbie said, “before one a those dweebs hunks a bellyful on our heads.”
“Keep an eye on Pate and Durazo,” Fin said. “Something’s going down. A guy came in and talked to them.”
“Probably a pimp,” Nell said.
“I don’t think so,” Fin said. “The conversation was very …”
“Intense?” Bobbie asked.
“Right,” Fin said. “It was very intense.”
“They’re just shopping, for chrissake,” Nell said. “Intense.”
Since they now had more time to kill, Abel wanted to keep the ox out of bars. He’d never seen his partner so wild-looking, not even on the night when he’d kicked the biker senseless.
“We got lotsa time,” Shelby said. “Let’s go git our knobs jobbed!”
“We walk, Buey!” Abel said. “Joo are drunk already.”
“Me, drunk? Are you mental? I kin drink two quarts a that cheap tequila and not even feel it!”
“Too much speed,” Abel said.
“Naw, this ain’t even good cringe,” Shelby said. “I’m jist mellow.”
Abel said, “Le’s go see jacket, Buey. We go down to pasaje. Good down there.”
Shelby was getting twitchier. He was wrinkling his nose like a hungry rabbit. He jerked his head this way and that every time he spotted something that gleamed, sparkled, or shone. He was blinking and snapping his fingers. And he’d started sweating.
Shelby’s anxiety level climbed in relation to their descent down the steep concrete stairway into the narrow passageways below the avenue. Shops were jammed cheek by jowl in a rabbit warren of arcades. There they sold ponchos and sarapes and papier-mâché birds as big as a human being, and velvet paintings, jewelry, souvenirs, curios and leather goods galore. Shelby stopped for a moment and played with a dangling Bart Simpson puppet. Everywhere he looked there were Bart Simpson dolls and figurines. He was getting light-headed and staggered more.
An old Indian woman with a face like a walnut, all bundled inside a sarape with violent stripes, startled Shelby by clicking castanets in his face. She laughed at him toothlessly, and a small boy next to her shook some hissing red maracas at him, hissing like rattlesnakes. “Good price, meester,” the boy said, and Shelby feverishly wondered if the kid had ringworm.
“All the peoples own their shops.” Abel tried to talk to him, but the ox was getting dizzy and wasn’t listening.
He wanted to stop for some cringe, but Abel made him walk. Shelby was afraid to get left behind, and he started feeling a sliver of panic behind his ear somewhere. It was like a shivery cold blade, and he was breathing faster in huge gulps.
Everywhere there were piñatas, and puppets and cardboard dancing figures in the shapes of skeletons and witches and goblins.
“Guess they celebrate Halloween here, huh?” Shelby said, leaning against a block wall to steady himself, his Grateful Dead T-shirt damp and sticky.
Abel saw that the ox’s face was flushed and his pupils were dilated. “Tomorrow ees El Día de los Muertos,” he said. “Day of the Dead. For two days the dead peoples they come home.”
“Whaddaya mean come home?” The ox just couldn’t stop blinking and twitching. He didn’t like this voodoo shit. And he couldn’t get enough air down there.
“We tell them welcome home. We burn candle at the cemetery and we put many flower on the path to their house. We feex altar for them. Berry eemportant day.”
“I don’t wanna see no dead relatives,” Shelby said, looking around at a life-sized witch hanging at eye level. He had an urge to kick that bitch clear off her broom!
“Eet ees no’ so sad eef there ees a day when the dead ones can return. My mamá, she see my papá every year. Eet ees true. The dogs bark always on the Day of the Dead. The dogs, they know.”
“What the fuck do they do when they come back?”
“We put out the bread for them. Sweet bread and chocolate and salt. They eat and they watch over their family. Then they go back to the graveyard. The leetle dead childrens they play weeth the toys we leave for them. We make the bread eento leetle animals for the dead childrens. My mother, she always puts out the mole. My father use to love mole. And some beers for my dead brother. He use to like beer. We have lots of beers and tequila in the cemetery on El Día de los Muertos.”
“I seen them cemeteries on TV,” the ox said. “They ain’t like ours with our little flat stones. You got humongous stones with pictures of the people on them and fences around these sorta walk-in graves. It looks like Munchkinland. Bunch a creepy little houses for dead people.”
“Ees berry beautiful our cemetery,” Abel said. “Many colors and pretty stones.”
The ox said, “You people’re Catholics, ain’tcha? I thought Catholics ain’t allowed to believe in that pagan zombie shit.”
Abel said, “We Católico but we use to have Indian gods long time ago. They was berry strong gods, ’mano.”
They started strolling again. Colors and exotic shapes swirled around Shelby Pate. The colors of Mexico were too vibrant, the lights too hot. He stumbled into a Ninja Turtle piñata made of cardboard. His body temperature had gone vertical and he was nearing meltdown.
Abel said to him, “Joo don’ do no more speed, Buey! I tell you!”
They found themselves in a passageway where there were less exotic shops selling Guess? and Ralph Lauren, and Fila. Shelby calmed down a bit, and stopped at a display window full of soft Mexican gold jewelry.
“Hey, dude!” he yelled to Abel. “I gotta buy somethin fer my bitch!”
But Abel had walked ahead and had turned the corner past a very narrow passageway where shopkeepers had installed overhead flashing colored lights, like in the Bongo Room.
Shelby lost sight of Abel for a moment and staggered into the wrong passageway. The smell of new leather overwhelmed him, conjuring images of dead animal carcasses. The winking colored lights bedazzled him. The passageway got too narrow! The colors of Mexico kept blazing away at him! Skeletons and witches dervished all around!
There was another Indian woman squatting in the passageway. Her bare feet looked like they’d never been washed. A little boy with her was even grimier. On a spread-out blanket was a handful of chewing gum, and the little boy said to Shelby: “Chicle? Chicle?”
Shelby Pate bellowed, “Noooooo!” and started running away from the boy into another passageway. And he still couldn’t find Abel. And the colors-the swirling vibrant Mexican colors-were enveloping him!
Then he whirled and saw a man moving toward him in that demon cloister. The man was his age, perhaps older. The man was three feet tall. He did not walk on legs, but on stumps that ended six inches below his buttocks. The stumps were padded with leather for “walking.” The most grotesque part was that protruding from between his stumps in front was a tiny deformed bare foot. At first, Shelby thought it was a Halloween prank. A fake foot sticking out between the little man’s stumps. But when the man plodded past him he saw another foot protruding from between his stumps in the back. Two deformed bare feet which would never support a human being-growing out of what should have been his thighs!