Day of the Dead by Adam Moorad
Day of the Dead
I followed the Mortician’s instructions up the dirt road into the barrio, my gut empty and bubbling in a cloud of exhaust, my head something less than conscious.
A brood of chickens scoured the cobblestones for ant feed. A donkey neighed, zebra-striped in black spray-paint. It stood before me roped to a lamppost, lashing its tails, fluming mare fume in the afternoon heat.
I shielded my eyes and as I moved a sharp pain wrenched through my abdomen. My knees buckled and my equilibrium tilted with the planet to the point of inflection, and there, heaven and earth entwined horizons.
A procession of pilgrims meandered up the road, a file of hundreds of faces shaded, bloodless, in a parade proceeded by a marching band, and a gaunt brigade of elders waving bleached flags, each expression, drunken, primal and cadaverous.
I scuffed my feet against the ground, kicking up dust that tasted like rust in the back of my mouth. I edged through the crowd, lugging my knapsack, the pills inside it rattling like maracas.
I dabbed the riveted tissue on the ribs above my liver. The wound opened and dark blood cooled on my fingers. My eyes squirmed like blind grubs, inflating, writhing, deflating and writhing again.
The sidewalk looked like a stall of skeletons: men, women and children, their scrawny shoulders exposed in the baking sun. The muffled sound of mariachi sprang from nearby bodegas. Every storefront had an awning and from each hung teakwood catrinas – fragile, bare-boned Barbies – their tiaras streaming in the sourceless draft.
I walked to the end of the block and stopped under an awning with a neon tarot sign. The windows had been canvassed with newspaper, yellowing behind sandy glass.
I knocked on the door three times and waited. I gummed my lip and swallowed. My breath bit like bad metal. The deadbolt rattled. I hid my blood-smudged fingers.
The door opened and a girl appeared. She wore a worn sweatshirt with a hood. I could hardly make out the contours of her face as the cowl parachuted from the crown of her head down to her clavicles. I blinked, my vision blurred in and out of focus.
She eyeballed me presumptively, chewing the skin on her hand between her thumb and index finger.
“I thought there was two of you?” she said, her voice lazy, wavering like a robot with a low battery.
“It’s just me,” I said. “The Mortician sent me. He said you would drive me home.”
“That’s right,” she said. She pulled the hood from her head and rubbed her tiny eyes. I could see she was just like me, a young, punk-ass Midwestern kid with a brassy accent. She looked at me, her runny nose blooming like a dry rosebud. “You’re bleeding?” she said.
“It’s not bad,” I said. “Can I come in?”
She nodded and stepped aside. “Gracias,” I said, slipping past her through the narrow entry. The space was dark and dank, smelled like a fish tank.
She led me down a hallway into a hexagonal den with mustard-colored walls. A kit-cat wall clock tick-tocked above a black futon. A small television set played an episode of That 70s Show on SAP audio. I took a deep breath. My gonads throbbed against my ribs.
“Do you live here?” I said.
“I do,” she said. She walked over to the futon and ruffled an old newspaper.
I watched Ashton Kutcher jump up and down, modulating brusque Spanish. He waved his spidery arms and shook his head like a wet dog. There was something hypnotic in his snakelike movement, his muscles twisting themselves from the screen around my head in the mildewed light.
“It’s…nice,” I said. I looked up at the low ceiling blotched with spots of fungus. A police siren chirp through a door in the back of the den.
“I was going to clean up,” the girl said. “But I have low inhibitions.”
“Do you smoke pot?” I said.
The girl paused for a moment and eventually mumbled, “Occasionally” as if to indicate she did and didn’t care. And we stood staring at one another in an awkward silence. The kit-cat clock ticked its tail. Ashton Kutcher made a rhythmic exclamation in a pervy Latin drawl.
“So you’ve had the tour,” she said. “We should get going.”
“Lead the way,” I said, and I followed her through the den towards the door in the rear of the room that led out into an alleyway where her short-bed Chevy was parked.
“It’s unlocked,” she said. I climbed into the passenger seat, moved the knapsack onto my lap. The girl drove up the alley and into town. The bumpy cobblestone squelched the axel as we moved. A large crowd of people wandered around.
“What’s the occasion?” I said, nodding at the hordes sifting through the debris of the bygone parade.
“Día de los Muertos,” she said.
“You’ll have to translate,” I said.
“Day of the Dead,” she said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s today,” she said.
We rode in silence to the outskirts of town where bent fence lines webbed around rundown buildings, summoning what once was. A flattened armadillo splayed the yellow line on the road. A vulture dined. Tumbleweeds surfaced through the skin of a mirage.
“How do you know the Mortician?” I said.
The girl swallowed and cleared her throat. “He was my husband but it didn’t work out,” she said.
“What went wrong?” I said.
“He was a tomcat,” she said reminiscently, quaintly sleeve-sawing her sinus. “And he knew how to make me woof.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I said.
“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “We agreed on everything except staying together.”
“I’ve never met him,” I said. “What’s he like?”
“He’s just your average crazy ass,” she said.
“Define crazy,” I said.
“He once cut off a man’s arms,” she said.
I nodded without responding.
“Miraculously, he survived,” she said.
Afternoon became evening and the road tilled a two-lane depression through the desert. The horizon began to slant through a small bramble of rocky moraines, angling upward from the ratlands. I clutched my belly and slowly exhaled.
“He said there would be two of you?” the girl said.
“There was,” I said.
“What happened?” she said, her lips twitching with interest now, forming soapy beads of spittle in the corners of her mouth.
I looked at the profile of her face. Peach fuzz bristled like the skin of a frosty mug across her neck as she clenched her jaw joint. A beige wart jutted from her chin, reaching forward as if attempting to point something out. “There was an accident,” I said.
“An accident?”
“On the train,” I said. “The other guy didn’t make it.”
“What train?” she said.
“It happened fast,” I said, shrugging. I shook my head. “He had our passports and everything.”
“Does the Mortician know?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. I coughed and tasted pepper in my saliva.
“How’d you get across the border without a passport?” she said.
“I squeezed through some sewer pipe,” I said. “After that I followed a dirt road.”
“I bet it looked pretty out there,” she said.
“I saw a lot of cacti,” I said.
A beetle splattered against the windshield and the girl flipped on the wipers. Juice smeared across the glass and glowed in the oncoming headlights.
She nodded at my knapsack. “What kind of drugs are those?”
“Testosterone,” I said.
She tilted her head to one side and looked in my direction. “To get high?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Then what’s it for?”
“People who want a sex change.”
“Who wants that?”
“”Trannies,” I said. “Or, hermaphrodites.”
“What’s the difference?” she said.
“I can never remember,” I said.
“Ever try that stuff?” she said, nodding again at my knapsack.
“Testosterone?” I said. “Never.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. She giggled and as she did I could hear air whistle through her beezer, her chortle conjuring phlegm.
“Not once,” I said. “I’m afraid of what could happen.”
“Once I did so much cocaine…” she began, “I had to stick tampons up my nostrils.”
“Were you alright?” I said.
“I felt sick on the inside,” she said.
The sun had set completely and the moon limned the highway in lunar light.
“So what happened?” the girl said. “On the train?”
My heart fluttered and a chill cascaded down my spine. “I pushed him,” I said, and then a great weight lifted from my chest. I filled my lungs and hiccupped.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“The bastard shivved me, ” I said, twisting towards her slightly, revealing my wound and mimicking the act of puncture with my hand. “See? Just like that.”
“Fuck,” she said. “What for?”
“For the money,” I said. “What else?”
“Anyone see you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Happened on the other side of the border.” The pores in my face opened and oiled, the globules drizzled from my nose onto my pants and evaporated.
“So it wasn’t an accident?” she said.
My throat pulsed to the point of obstruction. My stomach muscles tightened and recoiled in fast spasms.
“No,” I said. I moved my leg and a sharp sting needled through my right thigh. I closed my eyes. I saw the shimmer of the railings. I heard the train bisecting tracks of human bone, a scream cackling inside me – in that moment, submitting to the monsters of my own creation.
“What were you thinking?” she said.
“I think I forgot what I thought,” I said. “Is that bad?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said, sighing, “…if it happened in Mexico.”
“What will the Mortician do?” I said.
“No telling,” she said. “Just tell him it was a heart attack.” She tuned the radio dial. Static crackled softly like a campfire. I lowered my head and fell asleep on the knapsack.
When I awoke, we had stopped in an abandoned industrial mall of cement pylons. Weeds crept upright through cracks in the fractured tarmac.
A man stood in the doorway of a brick building smoking a cigarette. I felt the cherry eye of the butt on the Chevy as we gravitated towards it. The man stepped from his stoop into the streetlight. He looked strong enough to knock a man down and exhaled upward like a mushroom cloud.
“That’s the Mortician,” the girl whispered, rolling to a stop. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, gimping slowly from the vehicle.
“I like you, man,” she said. “I think we’re on the same octave. I hope everything works out.”
“Thanks again,” I said, and turned away and moved into the night. A fungal moon lurked behind notched mill chimneys. Crooked lampposts fluttered with the infrared glow of moth light.
The air was foggy, thick and difficult to move through. I limped towards the Mortician, dragging my dead leg. I watched him wave goodbye to the girl, blowing her a kiss with his cigarette hand as she drove away through the malicious landscape.
“You look roofied?” the Mortician said, palming his bald head, his scalp glistening in the lamplight.
“I feel tired,” I said.
“Where’s the other guy?” he said.
“He didn’t make it,” I said. “Heart attack.”
I held out the knapsack and the Mortician took it and looked inside. He smiled and exposed his crooked teeth. He looked at me, then past me. I took a knee on the asphalt and slumped over like a rotten pile of beef. My cock wet and petering into my shallow testicles. The Mortician pursed his lips and exhaled again through the side of his mouth, eyes focused and holding on me.
“Are you fucking with me?” he said. He dug into his pocket, produced a wad of cash rolled up in a rubber band. He dropped it on the ground beside me and then smirked as though I didn’t deserve it but he had no other use for it.
The rheum in my throat congealed. I could feel the sensation of air fizzing through blood, making foam inside the cumbered bulge my neck had become. I watched the checkered sky void slowly through my closing lashes.
“No,” I said. “It’s the truth.”
Beyond my lashes, the horizon opened up for thousands of miles, and somewhere beyond the horizon, the ocean, and beyond the ocean, the universe.
* * *
Adam Moorad is a writer, salesman, and mountaineer. He is the author of I Went To The Desert (Thunderclap Press, 2010), Oikos (nonpress, 2010), Book of Revelations (Artistically Declined Press, 2011), and Piñata (propaganda press, 2011). He lives in Brooklyn.
Visit him here at his blog.