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Dead Man for a Partridge
Author’s note: Hover your mouse over Spanish phrases for their English translations.
Smell doesn’t know how to keep a secret. With unabashed indiscretion, smell discloses everything, whether sacred or profane. The smells of suntan lotion and salt on the skin reveal a day spent at the beach. Pine, cinnamon, and orange together conjure images of jaunty gifts stashed beneath the Christmas tree. And the aromas of ancho chiles, onion, pork, rose water, and burning candle wax meant Chucho had arrived home.
Jesús Esquivel, Marco and Alejandro’s stepfather whom everyone called Chucho, was a long-haul trucker frequently gone for weeks at a time. On the nights he was set to leave, his wife Irma would sit by the altar and pray the rosary, crying and asking San Cristóbal to protect her husband on the road. On the nights that he returned, her ritual was much the same, except that she thanked the saint for bringing her husband safely home. Tonight, she had prepared one of Chucho’s favorite meals and had perfumed her hair with rose water in anticipation of their reunion night together.
As Marco and Alejandro entered their home, the smells that greeted them indicated that their stepfather arrived, but it was sound that alerted them to another presence. That they could hear the soft hiss of corn tortillas frying in the kitchen as well as the whispered, melodious chanting of their mother praying the rosary meant another woman was present, for since Irma was sitting at the altar, someone else must have been making the tortillas.
“Hello?” It was Alejandro who called out, throwing his backpack into the hall closet and making his way to the kitchen.
A head popped out from around the kitchen wall. It was a smiling, round head with fat cheeks and two long, heavy braids. When the boys saw her, they ran to her, laughing, and threw their arms around her.
“¡Tía Conchita!” Aunt Conchita!The boys squeezed their aunt’s ample waist, burying their faces in her flesh. “What are you doing here?”
The woman patted the boys on the back, kissing them on the tops of their heads, on their cheeks rosy from the cold. “Dios mio, how big you’ve grown! You must eat like a goat, ah?” Laughing, Conchis handed each of the boys a hot corn tortilla, which they stuffed dutifully in their mouths. “It’s good? I make special for you.”
“Real good,” Alejandro said from around a mouthful of tortilla. “How long are you staying?”
Conchis wiped her hands on her apron and turned off the fire on the stove. “Coupla days,” she said. “I heard your father was back and I wanted to see him before Christmas. I’m spending the holidays in Mexico with my family. I don’t get to see Chucho often enough,” she lamented, her voice thick with regret.
Irma stood from the altar then, crossed herself a final time, and approached her sons. She bent to kiss them, and Marco breathed in her smell — rose, castille soap, cumin. “Do you boys have homework?” she asked.
Marco shook his head. “It’s vacation,” he reminded her. “Where’s Chucho?”
“Se fue al mercado,”He went to the store Irma said. “Why don’t you go wash up for dinner? And put on a fresh shirt; we don’t get to have dinner with Auntie Conchita every day. I won’t have you looking like a pig,” she said, her voice loving but stern. The twins groaned but obeyed with haste. They flashed Conchis a smile before disappearing into the bathroom.
They heard the front door slam moments later and, dressed in the freshly pressed polo shirts Irma had laid on their beds, emerged to see Chucho standing in the living room carrying a six pack of Bud Light. Manny Larson, Chucho’s buddy, stood idle near the door, clutching his cowboy hat against his chest. Both men looked upset.
“Something’s going on at the Bautista place,” Chucho was saying. “Bunch of cop cars out there; one of ‘em was taping the place off.”
Marco and Alejandro exchanged curious glances as Irma hurried to pick up the telephone. She dialed quickly, holding her breath. “Ay, ¿qué pasa? ¿Por qué la policía está — ” What’s going on? Why are the police at—
The twins watched as their mother covered her mouth with her free hand, eyes wide as tears began to well up in her eyes. “Madre de Dios, Mother of God” she whispered, shaking her head in disbelief. She covered the receiver with her hand as she indicated for Chucho to come closer. “It’s Rubio,” she said, her voice shaking. “He’s dead.”
***
As the women lit candles and prayed at the altar and the men gobbled down Irma’s meal and finished off the beer, Alejandro and Marco pulled on their coats, snuck out the back door, and took off on their bikes for the Bautista place.
Marco pedaled slowly, unsure he wanted to be part of this particular excursion. “We shouldn’t go, Alex,” Marco whined. “We barely know Mr. Bautista. Barely.” Rubio Bautista taught chemistry at the high school in Placerita and had spoken at the twins’ school once or twice for career day. Inés Bautista frequently spent afternoons with their mother at the Laundromat, but as they had no children, the twins had relatively little use for them.
“Don’t worry, we don’t have to bother them,” Alejandro called over his shoulder. “We’re going to Junior’s. To see if he saw the body.”
Junior Azuelo, surly and prone to troublemaking like most of Alejandro’s friends, lived across the street from the Bautistas. They found him sitting on his porch with Cheehawk and a boy from school. They were huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, when Marco and Alejandro rode up, dropped their bikes on the front lawn, and bounded up the steps.
“Junior,” Alejandro said, lifting his chin in greeting. “What did you see?”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Alejandro, who was not known for his compassion for others, wished he hadn’t asked the question. Junior, who caught lizards by the tail just to see the tails come off, who asked for a slingshot for Christmas so that he could stone armadillos, and who had once set Blanca Leonard’s hair on fire in art class, was sitting on his hands, his face pale, snot dripping onto his upper lip. He had been crying, though he was trying to wear a brave face for his friends. His eyes were swollen and red. He looked as though he had been crying for a long time.
“He was hanging from the tree in the front yard,” Junior said, his voice hoarse. That the other two boys did not react meant they’d already heard the story. Marco felt his stomach go queasy. “He was hanging from the tree and his face was all messed up. Like the chupacabra got him.” His shoulders were shaking, but no fresh tears fell.
“The chupacabra got him?” Alejandro’s voice was soft with fear. He was twisting the bottom of his shirt into a knot.
Junior threw his shoulders up, his cheeks quivering. “I don’t know!” He was shaking his head, his voice rising high. “I don’t know if the chupacabra got him; how would it get him up in the tree like that? He was hanging up there with a rope…” He couldn’t finish the thought. The boys followed Junior’s gaze across the street where the police had quarantined the yard with yellow tape, and where neighbors had gathered on the street to rubberneck or console the widow, or to perform the first by way of the second.
“Were you scared?” Marco sat down on the bottom step, looking up at Junior’s face.
Junior nodded, eyes still fixated on some unknown point across the street. “Mom and me were in the kitchen making cookies when we heard screaming,” he said. “So we ran outside to see what was happening. Mrs. Bautista was standing in the front yard screaming, and we could see something hanging from the tree but it didn’t look real. Mom told me to stay put, but I didn’t listen…”
Junior swallowed, and looked down at the hands he hand balled into fists in his lap. “Mr. Bautista was going to hang the Christmas lights on our house.”
Junior stopped talking. He folded himself in half and buried his face in his lap. The screen door pushed open and Mrs. Azuelo stepped out, holding the door, her face also streaked with tears. “Why don’t you boys come in and have some hot chocolate,” she said. “I’ll warm you up some empanadas.” Sniveling, Junior stood and followed his mother into the house with Alejandro and the boy from school close behind.
Marco lagged behind the others until he heard the door swing shut. Across the street he could see Inés Bautista, the newly widowed, huddled in a blanket on the edge of the lawn, the arms of her neighbors wrapped protectively around her. A woman in slacks, an overcoat, and a button down shirt was asking her questions and writing in a notebook. Every once in a while, Mrs. Bautista would shake her head, her shoulders would heave, and she would break out in a fresh run of heart-rending sobs.
Without thinking, Marco began to walk slowly across the street. He was surprised to find Cheehawk keeping step beside him. “Whatcha doing, Marco?”
Marco lifted a shoulder noncommittally. “I didn’t know you were in town,” he said.
Cheehawk nodded. “Just got in. Today was the last day of school, but Ma said I didn’t have to go since it was a half day. We’re spending Christmas break with Aunt Bibi.”
“Yeah? You’re here for two weeks?”
“I guess so.” Cheehawk checked over his shoulder, saw that no one was paying attention to them. “Where we going, Marco?”
Fifteen paces from the edge of the Bautista lawn, Marco stopped, leaned his head back to look up. The desert sky was black and full of stars. The lack of ambient light allowed Marco to see every constellation, to marvel at the pale smudge of stardust across the sky they called the Milky Way. The sky looked so deep, like he could dive into it. He reached into his pocket and took out a square of paper. He unfolded it carefully and handed it to the older boy. “Do you know what this is?”
Cheehawk held the paper up to his nose. It was difficult to see in the darkness. “Looks like a rabbit,” he said.
“Yeah. Does it look familiar?”
Cheehawk handed Marco back the paper, bemused. “It looks like a rabbit,” he repeated. He spoke the words as though he were speaking to the mentally handicapped.
Marco sighed, refolded the paper, and shoved it in his pocket. “Never mind.” He looked over to the Bautista place, to the tree where the body had been found. He pulled up the collar of his coat against the growing cold of the evening, watching as the tree’s limbs swayed in the mounting breeze. As he watched the tree move, throwing shadows across the face of the house, across the lawn, and out onto the street, the rest of the scenery began to melt away. First to go were the police and Cheehawk, then the neighbors, the houses, and finally the terrible sobs of the bereaved. Before long, Marco was alone on the silent street underneath a canopy of stars, in front of that horrible tree. The wind blew harder and the tree shook in kind, and the watery image of Rubio’s body hanging heavy from a bough like a piñata ripe for the smacking slowly faded into view.
He wore a gray, cabled sweater and clean blue jeans. His cordovan loafers were polished to a high shine. His skin was white and smooth as porcelain, curly blonde hair glowing in the starlight. Around his neck, the rope cut into the impossibly white skin; angry red welts reminded Marco of Halloween zombies from a movie poster. His face was destroyed — there was no sign of the bright blue eyes, the slightly crooked nose, the shy smile that sent high school girls tittering down the hallway. Marco couldn’t look at it. It made every hair on his body stand on end.
Nervously, he reached out to touch the corpse, expecting to feel Mr. Bautista’s presence and kindness, but instead his fingers found stone — cold, smooth, and hard.
He pulled away, fear and sadness filling him up like a water pitcher, and as he clutched his hand to his chest, he smelled it in the air — something familiar yet just out of reach, something visceral, metallic. Just as the aroma of ancho chiles and pork had alerted him to Chucho’s safe arrival home, the smell that now tickled his sixth sense alerted him to a presence of something alien, something unnatural, something he alone knew all too well.
Marco’s stomach flipped and flopped. It gurgled in his ears.
The smell dissipated and he heard a tinkling laughter, like silver bells in the snow. Marco spun on his heel, but there was no one there. And then the laughter faded into singing, and to his intense horror, Marco recognized the voice immediately.
“Four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a dead man in a tree.” Her voice felt like oil on Marco’s brain. “You made this possible. Thank you, Marco.”
Marco shook his head, swallowed hard. The words of the Christmas carol echoed in his mind, and Marco felt Rubio Bautista’s death wash freshly over him as he realized with a sick, dawning horror that his man was dead because of him.
The other houses on the street swam slowly back into view. He blinked, noticed Cheehawk, Mrs. Bautista, and several of the police officers watching him in confusion. His skin felt hot. He tasted something acrid in the back of his throat. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, afraid he was going to be sick.
He felt, in the pit of his stomach, a swirling darkness begin to gnaw. It roiled inside him, rising to press against his lungs. He opened his mouth, greedily sucking down oxygen. He smelled it again — the metallic, burning smell. He squeezed his eyes against it, pushing it away with all his will.
As he opened his eyes, his breath caught in his throat. The houses lining the street ran like watercolor into the night. Cotton filled his ears and Marco stumbled, tried to cling to his waning consciousness before his knees buckled and he fainted dead away onto the dusty road.
