Playing for the Devil's Fire. Phillippe Diederich
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thing.” Mosca grabbed my arm. “The tickets are super expensive.”
“With a lineup like that, they gotta be like a million pesos, no?”
We turned the corner. A group of boys was running up the street. It was Raúl Guerrero and three other boys from the elementary school.
“What do you think’s up with them?” Mosca asked.
“They probably want to play you for the devil’s fire,” I said.
“Yeah, they wish.”
They stopped in front of the butcher shop where Raúl’s uncle worked. Two butchers came out on the sidewalk, their white aprons covered in blood. Raúl pointed to where he’d come from. One of the men nodded and gestured toward the plaza and went back into the shop. Raúl and the boys ran up the sidewalk and crossed the street to meet us.
“We found a body,” Raúl said. He was panting and out of breath.
Mosca shoved him. “Liar.”
Raúl crossed himself. “I swear to God.”
Mosca and I looked at each other. We had to be thinking the same thing: the body of el profe Quintanilla.
“We’re on our way to get Pineda,” one of the boys said.
I grabbed Raúl’s arm. “Where is it?”
He pointed east. “The Flats. In the weeds right before you get to the dump.”
Mosca and I ran as fast as we could. The dump was just outside town at the end of a long field where we played soccer and where they set up the feria and the circus whenever they came to town.
The dump was always smoldering, but there were never any flames, just a long line of whitish smoke that rose like a thin string up to the sky. Most of the time the wind blew the stink away from town. But when there was no wind or in winter when the wind swept up from the east, they could smell the rot all the way to the top of Santacruz where Mosca lived.
The field was deserted except for a few dozen vultures and crows pecking at scraps and circling the sky over the dump. By the dry weeds, a pack of stray dogs growled and barked at each other.
We made our way across the dusty field. The dogs raised their heads, waited, then scampered away, their tails between their legs.
It was not the body of Enrique Quintanilla. It was a woman. She was lying face down. And she was naked. She was missing the fingers of her right hand—just had five red stumps with white bits of bone at the end. But there was no blood. It must have been what the dogs were biting at. She had long black hair. Her skin was pale and tight against her swollen body. It had a weird shine to it like oil. Flies were crawling all over her back and ass and between her legs. It stank of rotten eggs and shit.
It was the first time either of us had ever seen a naked woman. We just stood there, hands over our nose and mouth, staring at the strange nakedness, at her ass and arms and her wide thighs.
“She’s…dead, right?”
I nodded, but I really had no idea.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We were breathing fast, sweating, staring.
“You think we should turn her over?”
“What about Pineda?”
A group of men and women were heading toward us from the row of small wood and cardboard houses that lined the field. The dogs kept watch from a short distance, waiting.
I don’t know if it was because the woman was naked or because she was dead or if it was the foul stench of rot that mixed with the burning trash that came and went with the breeze, but suddenly I realized something really ugly was happening. A fire burned in my throat. This wasn’t like when we found el profe Quintanilla’s head. This was worse.
Just as the group arrived and gathered around the body, Captain Pineda’s little Chevy turned off the road and bounced up and down as it cut through the field, its lights flashing like wet fireworks. When he arrived, he pushed everyone out of the way. One of his men covered the body with a white sheet. He waved us off and ordered the women to take us away because this was unfit for children. Then he picked up a rock and threw it at the dogs.
I knocked on the door of my grandmother’s bedroom. I was always the one who had to get her to come to dinner. It was never easy. I opened the door slowly. She was sitting in her rocking chair, facing the open window, a Superman blanket over her lap. “Abuela?”
“Yes, mijo?”
“Mamá told me to come get you. Jesusa’s serving dinner.”
“I’m not hungry. Gracias.”
“Come on.”
“Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”
“Ay, Abuela. You know she’s just going to tell me to come back and tell you that you have to come.”
She was rail thin. Her white blouse hung on her bony frame like a blanket. She had small dark eyes and thin lips. Her translucent skin was crisscrossed with wrinkles like cracks on dry earth. She wore her long gray hair pulled back into a bun set with a big ivory comb.
“Abuela, por favor.”
This was how it was. She didn’t like coming to the table. She didn’t eat. She just sat in that rocking chair all day, staring out the window, dreaming of who knows what because the window looked out to the small patio where there were just a few plants in pots and cans and a few rows of laundry line where our maid Jesusa hung our clothes to dry.
“Abuela?”
She nodded slowly and raised a delicate hand. “Be an angel and help me up then.”
We walked into the dining room together. Jesusa came out of the kitchen. She was a small, dark Indian woman from the sierra in Oaxaca. She’d been with us since before I was born. She was quiet and rigid and didn’t let me get away with much. Somewhere, though, in all that toughness, there was a little soft spot. She went around the table and served soup and quesadillas and green salsa.
No one spoke. Even Gaby didn’t say a word and she was a chatterbox. She brought home all the gossip and always went into painful detail about everyone and everything.
Something was going on.
I thought my parents were angry. I thought maybe if someone said the wrong thing, they would lash out. It was so quiet I could hear our spoons touch the bottom of the plates, my father’s slurps. They were the same sounds we made at every meal, but they were amplified by the silence—the chewing and swallowing. Even the fabric of my father’s sleeve as he reached across the table for a tortilla made a soft noise like a sigh. I closed my eyes. For a minute, I thought I even heard my mother’s heartbeat.
“She was jealous,” Abuela said suddenly. “She was jealous about my date with Carlitos. That’s what started it.”
My father glanced at my mother.
“But it was not my fault. Father arranged the whole thing,” Abuela went on, “because Carlitos is the son of Jorge Tizapa. He runs the terminal at the end of the port. It’s true, they are very wealthy. But I do not care for him.” She pouted. Then she nodded and whispered, “He’s a dandy.”
“Mamá,” my mother interrupted. “Please, not tonight.”
Abuela ignored her and looked at me as if I were someone else. “My father thinks he can control me.”
“Esperanza,” my father said. “Por favor.”
“What?” She stared at my father. “What ever happened to that boy from Xalapa, what was his name?”
My