Ortiz whipped out his laptop and Googled Mictlan and Las Vegas and got zero hits. So: If this truly was a group of Las Vegas Mictlanos undiscovered by ethnographers, what a find. What a fucking find! Now that was something he could write about — something that might impress Talon.
Ortiz abandoned the casino to discover that night had already fallen. The darkness hung thick beyond the lights of the Boulder Strip, as if the Mictlanos (if that’s what they were) had brought the black jungle night with them. He hesitated. Maybe he’d better wait until the next morning before he ventured back into the barrio. But had Talon ever hesitated to go anywhere on the face of the earth? Of course not. The man had balls. Ortiz had balls. He had to check out his discovery one more time before going to his motel.
The odor of the putrid Chihuahua guided him to the square. His Mustang bounced along the rutted road, its headlights brushing up and down the tree the man had been sitting under earlier in the day, carving his wood. Ortiz came to a stop under the tree and shut off the engine. Silence and darkness rushed in on him.
A man’s gruff voice erupted suddenly in the quiet, followed by a slapping sound. Another slap and a woman’s cry: “Ay, ay!” A lull; and then another slap, another sharp “Ay!” It was impossible to tell where exactly the commotion was coming from. Ortiz expected to hear weeping or sobbing, but no: Only a stoic silence followed.
Ortiz waited for a moment, drowning in the blackness, before starting his engine and taking off. Whatever was going on in that shack, he told himself, it wasn’t his place to interfere. To do so would ruin his research before it even got off the ground. Anyway, there was no telling what was really happening. Rough sex? A ritual driving out of evil spirits? Whatever it was, he had to respect these people’s culture and remain neutral.
Just as he suspected, the Lucky Cuss Motel was not for truly lucky cusses, but it wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, the only room they had left smelled as if a dozen chain smokers had rented it for a week. He peeled the sheets apart and looked for hairs, but the bed seemed clean enough. He lay on it and contemplated what he’d heard: the gruff male voice, the slaps, the woman’s cries. But again, there was no need to jump to conclusions. All he knew for sure was that he was one lucky cuss to have that community of transplanted Native Mexicans to do some real fieldwork on.
But his sense of good fortune didn’t prevent him from falling into a restless sleep full of snarling dogs and dancing skeletons and screaming women, and the next morning he woke up groggy and headachy. The sun glowed with hellish intensity bright behind the heavy golden curtains. He showered quickly and threw on a fresh guayabera and khaki pants. He grabbed a large coffee at a 7-Eleven and headed once again to what he already dubbed Little Mictlán. The coffee and crystalline desert air cleared his head. By the time he got to the barrio, he felt better.
The dead dog and its stink were gone. The cluster of trailers and cinder-block shacks, bare of any adornments, were hardly cheery, but the morning light had evaporated the previous night’s sinister feel. Ortiz pinned his name tag to his shirt and strode to the first hut and knocked.
The young woman he had seen standing there the previous afternoon opened the door. She wore the same kind of white dress, embroidered at the square neckline with strangely elongated animal figures. She was small-boned and pretty, her hair woven in a single long, thick braid — hair lustrous and black as his own. She glanced at his name tag. He was glad he’d thought to put it on — it identified him as in some way official.
“Hola,” he said. “Yo soy investigador? Ortiz es mi nombre?”
His Spanish wasn’t great, he knew, but “investigador,” police-y as it sounded, was Spanish for “researcher,” he was sure of that.
“Investigador?”
“Sí.” No need to complicate matters, just yet, with explanations of what kind of investigator he was. He asked if he could enter.
The woman hesitated, then stepped back. Ortiz ducked inside. The room was unfurnished except for a straw-bottomed rocking chair and a long, rough-hewn — machete-hewn, no doubt — bench running along one wall. Aluminum foil covered the one window; an incandescent bulb burned nakedly in the ceiling.
The woman remained standing near the open door, keeping herself visible to the outside.
“Ustedes son Mictlanos, no?” he asked, giving his friendliest smile.
“Sí,” she said faintly.
Bingo. He had his people.
“Qué hacen aquí?” The question — “what are you doing here?” — came out more brusque than he wanted, but his Spanish wasn’t good enough for polite subtleties. He kept his smile, the bright smile an ex-girlfriend had once called “innocent,” and asked if he could have a seat on the bench. She nodded. He motioned for her to sit as well, and she obeyed, taking a spot at the end of the bench where she could still be seen from the street. The sunlight coiled silver along her braid.
Spanish was clearly not her first language either, but he managed to ascertain that her husband and the rest of the men in the community worked construction jobs as well as carved the comical calacas, as she called the skeletons, for ¡Viva! That was where they were at the moment, at their construction jobs — they’d be back later, she said, though she was unable to specify exactly when. It occurred to Ortiz that these men might make better informants, to use the anthropological term — and his was an anthropological investigation, was it not? — than this hesitant young woman.
Ortiz had a weakness for women’s legs; the sight of a well-shaped female leg made his own legs literally weak, gave them a heaviness. This woman’s brown calves were perfectly shaped, as if turned on a lathe, and her small foot arched nicely in her sandal, a sandal very similar to his huaraches. Her toes were small and round. She was certainly no India patarrajada, no “split-footed Indian,” to use the most common anti-Native epithet in Mexico, the equivalent perhaps of calling an African American “nappy-headed.” He flicked his own Native hair behind his shoulders with both hands.
Slowly, discreetly, she bunched her dress in her hand, drawing it up along her leg. He swallowed, and watched. There, beginning about mid-thigh, she revealed to him a gigantic bruise, yellow-tinged on the edges and shading into a deep, mottled purple.
“Jesus!”
She jumped to her feet and smoothed her skirt. “The men will be back later,” she repeated. She stepped out of the house. It was clearly time for him to go.
Ortiz made his way back to ¡Viva! and the conference in a kind of daze. He attended another panel presentation, but all he could think about was the young woman, and her bruise, and the way she’d inched her skirt up to reveal it to him. He fantasized tending her injury, applying Native-style poultices made of wild herbs and macerated cactus fruit they’d gather together in the flowering Mojave, and his own legs grew weak again.
He found the gallery of Mexican folk art and contemplated the Mictlano calacas there. The skeletons in this display wore formal dress, the females in furs and gowns, the males in tuxedos. One of the male calacas was a dapper little guy in glasses who reminded Ortiz of the rude professor from the day before.
Ortiz returned to the barrio around 5, when most of the conference-goers were heading off to their wine-and-cheese receptions for this new program or that new journal. Good for them. He, Ortiz, had fieldwork to do. And the balls to do it.