The Right Eye of God Read online

  Before he could move, the old man, who’d been working his wrinkled mouth, made a sucking noise and spat at Hebrano. The spittle wound itself into a marble of dust and rolled to a stop near Hebrano’s boots. “Bah,” he cackled. “My magic is stronger than yours. I’m not afraid of you.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Hebrano said.

  Navarre swung the heavy gun up to his hip. The weight and heft of the old piece were reassuring. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the despicable old scalawag. Was he real? A bag of leathery, wrinkled skin sunburned to the color of dried cowhide, stretched over a frame of bones. Scaly, sharp ankles. His skin—shiny, wrinkled with age, and blotched with patches of purple tissue—was covered with a patina of dirt, like scum on a painting, yellow on black. He was repulsive and fascinating. His thickened fingernails and curving toenails, like grungy talons, were caked with embedded dirt. Jesus Christ! A human pestilence.

  The pointing revolver did not disturb him. He scratched his crotch and cocked his head at Navarre, his eyelids drooping in lazy appraisal. From his throat came a sly, cracked voice. “Hey, norteño, you think you can frighten me? I fart on your intentions. Gringo chingado.”

  Navarre understood the insult well enough and the rest of it. Suddenly, this filthy old rat’s nest was no longer a curiosity. “I think I can kill you,” he said.

  He cocked the pistol. The hammer made a decisive metal snap in the stillness. The old man batted his eyes, an owl startled from sleep, and hobbled to his feet. As he stood swaying, his round, almost hairless head truncated between his narrow, upraised shoulders, he did indeed resemble a crouching buzzard, even to the loose pouches of waffled, overlapping skin that sagged in circular folds around his neck. Without warning, he shot his right arm out like an arrow, pointing a curving forefinger and black nail at Navarre’s chest.

  “I see you, man. Your stomach is full of ants. By the balls you have lost, I swear a truth on you. A woman with two mouths will speak for a dead one. You will straddle a mountain and dance in the air. In a black tunnel you will meet death . . .”

  Navarre heard Hebrano’s quick step, saw him charge past, swinging with both hands the pan of dirty dishwater. It left the metal basin in a curving stream, splashing upon Zopo’s black face. Still in stride, discarding the empty pan, Hebrano reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small cloth bag. His thrusting fingers came out clutching and covered with black grains, which he flung in a spray at the dripping old man.

  Navarre thought he’d never smelled anything so horrible. The water streaming down the fanatic’s black face, drenching the outer layers of his numerous shirt garments, released an effluvium of stale human rot so powerful Navarre thought he would choke. Through watery eyes, he stared in terrible revulsion at the Indian, and flashing in his mind came the warning: Leprosy. Mal de pinto. Of course, one or the other. The hard scabs on his arms surrounded by patches of pink, the saddle nose, the faded scars like indelible whip marks on his skin. Symptoms of the scurrilous disease.

  The Indian was frozen in his tracks now, and steaming vapors rose from his thick wad of ragged shirts in poisonous fumes. His glistening bald head was speckled with pepper flakes. They dotted his face and ears and nose like tiny flies exploring a corpse.

  Navarre started to warn Hebrano away, but the priest was advancing slowly upon the shrunken figure, his right arm thrust forward, his fingers pointing accusingly as he made the sign of the cross, first in the direction of the Indian’s head, then next to his heart, and finally his scrotum. And three times he repeated the curer prayer: “Casa de Jerusalén, donde Jesucristo entró, con este sahumerio, amén. Pido que se me retiran los espíritus malos que me rodean.”

  Hebrano stepped back then, took the revolver from Navarre, and said to the quivering, stinking old man, “Hey, indígena, you are powerless. The holy water washes away your spells. The pepper cancels your salt. Now Tepe Remolino is free to chase you. Your bad strength is gone. Now you cannot go to the farm of Rodriguez and tell your employer that you have bewitched the village. Go back to wandering, old buzzard. No one here will call upon you to eat their sins again.”

  Upon the lined, leathery face of the old brujo came such an expression of malevolence and hate that it had the intensity of physical shock to Navarre. The brujo’s eyes rolled in his head, the chalky orb glistening like curdled milk. His voice hissed through his broken and flat lips, and he poked a trembling finger at Hebrano. “Chingado cabrón. By your mother’s breath, she who sat upon the jabbing penis of a goat to conceive you, I swear I am not through with you. The pepper burns the salt, but my work is done. I take the name you gave me—Zopilote. Watch for me, sacerdote. I will fly over you and smell your blood.”

  He picked up his straw hat and wiped his frothing lips with his scabby hand. Hebrano, tired of his vile smell and his presence, fired the revolver . . . a startling, brassy thunder in the late day. Navarre saw the slug kick up a deep furrow of dirt near the Indian’s right toe and whine away. Particles of sand stung the sandaled foot and raised hives of blood on his dirty toes. He flinched, glared at Hebrano, then limped away, and Navarre caught once more the thick, stale-rot smell of him. Hebrano stood silently until the hunched and ragged figure disappeared from sight beyond the cottonwood trees, and Navarre felt as though a deep sigh had run through the awakened village. He could imagine the heads nodding. You see? The priest has the greater power. He has vanquished the ugly sin eater.

  Hebrano turned to Navarre. “One more thing to do. Please go to the vestry and bring the small tin of kerosene under the sink. I have another ceremony to perform.”

  Navarre nodded. When he returned, he found Hebrano with a sack of lime in his hands. He had obtained it from the house of the carpenter, where Raldon was lying in his coffin. He was spilling the lime upon the ground in a straight, wide swath. Then, he crossed the vertical swath with a short horizontal stream of the powder and emptied the sack as he came to the end of the bar.

  With the toe of his boot, he scuffed and kicked the clay plates, bowls, and cups into the white ribbons on the ground. He took the kerosene from Navarre and poured a stream vertically and diagonally so that the lime cross was wet. Then, he knelt and blessed the cross, the lime, and the kerosene. He pressed a wooden match to his lips, a kiss blessing, and swiped it alive across the seat of his pants. The lime boiled as the flames raced to cover the cross with fire. The clay bowls and cups cracked; the morsels of uneaten food crisped and turned black. “Enough of this crap. Let’s go in,” Hebrano said, and Navarre followed him into the church.

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  Chapter IV

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  Hebrano pumped up a kerosene pressure lamp which threw giant, flickering shadows of himself and Navarre upon the walls of the vestry. The two sisal hammocks of handwoven fishnet design, strung earlier by the priest from railroad spikes long ago driven solidly into opposing corners of two of the adobe walls in the vestry, were magnified in the harsh glare and cast shadows upon the floor as black, hairy-threaded spider webs.

  Navarre poured strong black coffee from the pot on the small, portable kerosene stove for both of them, splashed a dollop of brandy in each of the cups, and placed Hebrano’s on the table across from his own. Hebrano finished washing his hands with hard yellow soap, dried them, and threw the towel on the wooden sink cover.

  “What’d you think of my performance?”

  “Impressive.”

  “Shit! Mumbo jumbo. But the damn fools believe it. I know a hundred versions of contrabrujería. I could have made him piss a cross on a bandanna and wear it around his neck. That’s supposed to purify the bad thoughts in his head. Milk mixed with the saliva of the brujo traced in the sign of the cross will do as well. A black hen held above the head while the creed is repeated three times is supposed to dissipate evil powers. Bogus spiritualism. It’s endless. I chose the burning-lime cross and the creed because it’s spectacular. Anything works, as long as it’s mysterious and dramatic enough. But, my friend, what I did won
’t stop the rest of the people from leaving. There are too few left to survive by themselves. They depend upon one another.”

  “What about the food they put out for him and him sitting there, brazen as a brass monkey?”

  Hebrano sipped cautiously from his steaming cup. “God, that’s good,” he said. “By eating their food, he takes into himself their sins and their bedevilments. Gobbles them away. It’s a common-enough practice. Placate the devil, and maybe he won’t bother you. Mental buggery. Also, it was a test. How strong is our priest? Can he truly banish the Zopilote? They’ll have something to talk about for years.”

  “You know, don’t you,” Navarre said, “that he’s probably a leper or is suffering from mal de pinto? I saw some bad cases of both years ago in Chiapas.”

  “That’s one reason I didn’t want to touch him. Pinto is contagious.” Hebrano’s eyes twinkled. “You’re sure you don’t want me to sprinkle some pepper on you, just in case?”

  Illogically, Navarre was annoyed. “No, thanks. A woman with two mouths will speak for a dead one. What is that supposed to mean? Gibberish.”

  “Got to you a little bit, didn’t he? Proves my point about superstition. Nobody’s immune.”

  “Nonsense!” Navarre said, ruffled and red faced. “Just because I got rattled doesn’t mean I put any stock in what he said. And it’s not inconsistent to wonder how a filthy indigent I’ve never seen before could know there is a dead woman in my life. I’ve not even told you about my wife, Meg.”

  “Calm down,” Hebrano said soothingly. “You’re jumping to conclusions. How do you know he was referring to your dead wife? That’s assumption on your part. Everybody’s got somebody dead to remember. A tender spot. The brujos rely on that. He may be a charlatan, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid, Thomas.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Navarre murmured sheepishly. But he was uneasy, unsatisfied with Hebrano’s explanation. “Dirty, crack-brained old buzzard,” he said. “Just plain crazy. A woman with two mouths will speak for a dead one. Straddle a mountain and dance in the air. Meet death in a black tunnel. It doesn’t make any sense. He actually cringed when you threw the cold dishwater. Dishwater and common pepper. He believed . . .” Navarre faltered, made an odd-sounding laugh, and acknowledged with an embarrassed grin, “I guess he did get to me.”

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of . . . Look,” Hebrano said, “you can’t comprehend the Zopilote because he is an anachronism. He is living proof of the faith in black magic, evil spirits, death dreams, and the powers of sorcery and demons. And the faith out here is absolute. Absolute.”

  “Just remember one thing, amigo,” Hebrano added softly. “For all their fears and prejudices, these people are gentle as angels and loving. Finer than bad. More innocent than ignorant. Feet of mud, eyes of glory. The human anomaly.”

  “Nicely put,” Navarre responded, not surprised when the priest flushed.

  “Hen-yard philosophy,” Hebrano said. “Chicken pucky, but it’s true enough.”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  Hebrano yawned widely, then stretched the muscles of his arms up and back by reaching into the air, the lamplight throwing twin quivering, elongated shadows on the adobe wall. He seemed refreshed by the exercise and said to Navarre, “I’ve got to leave early after seeing Raldon buried. You’ll be heading to Mexico City, I take it, to report to Peñas, to tell him what you’ve found here?”

  Navarre sighed, looked up at the priest with a somber expression, and said, “I’ve deceived you about something. I’ve been to Duelos before. I was the victim of a drunk driver on the highway. I lost my wife that night two years ago. When I called at your church and was told to meet you in Duelos, I was certain something was terribly wrong with Raldon. I panicked. I wanted to jump in my car and head for El Paso as fast as I could drive. I didn’t want to confirm that he was dead, or that it was the vet Rodriquez who saved my life.”

  “So you’re the one,” Hebrano said, shaking his head. “I heard about you. I should have guessed. Well . . .” He put a wry smile on his face. “I feel foolish.”

  He hesitated, then said, “In the few hours we’ve been together you’ve underplayed yourself, Thomas, as if you’re afraid that something you’re hiding will slip out unintentionally. What is it? What gives me the impression that you’re . . . well, dangerous . . . like . . . a lighted fuse ready to go off?”

  Navarre shrugged evasively. “Just that by now everybody within a thirty-mile radius will know that the American who came to look at the body of a mutilated corpse is the same one who almost died in an accident on the highway.”

  “Yes, it’s a strange coincidence. And it’s true these country folk have long memories. They still talk about your accident and how the farmer who found you on the highway carted you and your dead wife to the vet.”

  “You knew all the time!”

  “About the accident, yes. Who you were until you just told me about it, no. I heard about the accident weeks after it happened. I knew the truck driver who was killed, a borrachón, a drunk who drove his sisal truck recklessly. But Tato Hernandez, the farmer who found you, refused to talk about what he saw at the accident. That was a great disappointment because it was something exciting for the village to gossip about. The strangeness of fate on a lonely highway at night.”

  “I take it that he is dead.”

  “Yes. He was not a young man.” Hebrano added reflectively, “It’s strange how one tragedy leads to another. There was nobody to work his farm when Tato died, so it was taken over by another tenant. His daughter, Gracia Esparza, and her little girl had no place to stay, so they moved to Chihuahua. She was the wife of Amparo, the truck driver who ran into your car. Tato was married to Amparo’s older sister.”

  A brief shadow of sadness passed over Hebrano’s swarthy face. “Gracia was a lovely child. Willful, headstrong. She became a beautiful woman. It’s a damn shame. She went to Chihuahua to practice the oldest profession of them all.”

  “You mean she became a prostitute?”

  “Yes, ironical, isn’t it? Your wife was an innocent victim. Gracia became one by choice.”

  Hebrano paused, and then added with a frown, “I called on her once where she works, but they don’t like priests at the Glorieta. I thought I could change her mind, but . . .” He shrugged and looked directly into Navarre’s eyes. “Whatever you’re holding back about Rodriguez makes you dangerous to him and perhaps the men who killed Raldon. The sooner you put Duelos behind you, the safer you’ll be. Raldon must have given your name away and why you were going to meet with him. No one could stand up to the kind of torture he took without talking. You’re in as much danger as he was just by being here.”

  Hebrano hesitated, weighing an idea, and then deciding against it. “I was thinking that maybe we should leave at the same time tomorrow after I’ve buried Raldon. But something tells me that being with a Catholic priest is not going to reduce the threat to you. You need an edge, and I know what will give it to you.” He turned his head quickly. His eyes narrowed, and Navarre saw he was staring at the sturdy black Colt that lay on the wooden table. The priest had placed it there after firing between the sin eater’s shiny black legs, stinging one foot with his shot.

  “You want me to take that with me?”

  “Yes, I insist. You can give it to me tomorrow after you reach Chihuahua. I’ll delay my annual trip into the mountains for a day. It’ll take you close to an hour to get back to the highway on that imitation of a road you came in on. Another hour for you to reach Chihuahua. I have to give last rites to Raldon before we bury him, so I probably won’t leave here till late morning. Why don’t you hole up in a hotel—call Peñas and then me. I’ll get to the archdiocese about two. I’ll go straight to my bishop and tell him what’s going on. He’ll get through to Peñas to confirm the danger to you. The man who’s the heir to the red hat in Mexico doesn’t suffer fools easily. Peñas will react quickly to the voice of authority. After I know you’re sa
fe we’ll have dinner together.”

  Hebrano held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture of surrender. “Have I forgotten anything?” he asked.

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Bueno. For God’s sake, Thomas, don’t forget the drill. I’ll be on pins and needles until I hear from you. I’ll give you the number for the archdiocese.”

  Hebrano rubbed his bleary eyes. He got to his feet and yawned. “I’m beat; we’ve both had a long day. Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow. I’m going to bed.”

  After Navarre undressed, turned down the kerosene lamp, and wrapped himself in a light blanket in the coil of his hammock, he stared upwards into the blackness. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shallow ceiling became vaguely substantial. A swath of light from the moon pierced the room through the faint blue outline of the small, paneless window. As his ears grew accustomed to the quiet night, he heard the scuttling, sniffing passage of a food-hunting desert rat. An owl close by hooted like an abbreviated, faraway train whistle. He thought he could hear the murmur of voices, but that was his imagination. The villagers had bedded down long before Hebrano, snoring softly beside him, had curled into his hammock.

  As he lay there, he acknowledged how shrewd the priest was in insisting he was hiding something. Harry Abbeglen, his former boss of fifteen years who had convinced him to return to Mexico, had made the same accusation, and he had denied it. He recalled vividly Harry’s statement when, reluctantly, he agreed to the assignment: “I’ve got a hunch, Thomas, that whatever you are concealing about the accident will be resolved when you go back. And I wouldn’t worry about being a little rusty. Once you’re back in the saddle, all the moves will come back to you. Have you forgotten what they call you in Mexico? El Viejo. The wise one.”

  And so it happened: He had flown south. On the final leg of his journey, he was conscious of the dryness in his mouth, the chilling stabs of fear, the sweat popping out on his body the closer he got to Chihuahua in the Buick he had rented in El Paso. Now, lying in the dry, dark Mexican night in the temporary sanctuary of the old church, he knew that even with the passage of two years, he could recall, as if it were yesterday, the event in the desert that had destroyed his life. In his memory, the long, dry night rolled out like the searching lights of his Mercedes playing a bright swath on the highway leading to El Paso. On the seat next to him with her head cushioned on a pillow was the woman he had married three days earlier in Mexico City. Just to glance at Meg’s sleeping face in the soft radiance of the dashboard lights was enough to make his throat thick with gratitude and love for her. From the moment of their first meeting, her presence was a miracle in his life. It had changed him from a cynical, solitary journalist whose passion for his work consumed him into a bemused forty-year-old who depended upon her smile for his inspiration and sense of purpose.