“I do.”
“I thought all the homes in this area were evacuated back in May.”
“I'm still here.”
“What's your name?”
“Carmenita Jaramillo.”
“Ms. Jaramillo, you-”
“Carmenita. Please.”
“Carmenita. Okay. You said those men won't come in here? How do you know they won't?”
The rocking chair moved so slightly I thought maybe it was my imagination. Great stillness surrounded her, and even the tiniest twitch rippled through her like an earthquake.
“They need to be healed sometimes, the men. I heal them when I can.”
Heal them? How?
I took a quick glance around the room and saw odd things-dried herbs hanging above the back door. Dried chicken bones were laid out deliberately on the window sill. There was a basket of brown eggs on the floor next to her chair. I looked at the items, and a thought came to me.
“You're a curandera,” I said. A Mexican faith-healer, a tradition brought to South Texas from the Indian mountains of Northern Mexico.
She smiled.
“I didn't think there were any more curanderos left,” I said.
My dad was a cop on the south side of San Antonio for 36 years, and I remembered him telling me stories of curanderos. Stories of their strange rituals and their followers so fanatically devoted to them that in some parts of South Texas and Mexico, local Catholic priests were forced to acknowledge their gifts, their don de Dios, in order to appease their congregations.
“Not many,” she said, but not sadly. Her eyes were bright, happy.
I remembered a story my Dad told me. He was driving through his district on the south side one afternoon when an old woman ran out into the street ahead of him, waving her arms wildly and speaking very fast in Spanish.
Dad realized the woman wanted him to follow her inside her house, and he did. Inside, on the couch, on her back, was the woman's very pregnant daughter-in-law, covered in sweat, deep in labor. Dad was calm, because he'd already delivered three babies during his career. He washed his hands, sat on the couch between the girl's legs, and got ready to deliver the baby. Dad's Spanish was okay, but not great. He spoke it with a slow, East Texas drawl. The women were telling the girl to wait, don't let the baby come yet, but Dad didn't understand why.
Then another woman came in through the back door, and everybody seemed relieved. The woman knelt next to the pregnant girl, took a chicken egg from a pocket of her apron, and with the flat of her palm rolled the egg across the girl's belly, all the while muttering a prayer in Spanish.
When she was finished, Dad delivered the baby. He went to the sink and washed the blood and amniotic fluid from his hands, dried them, and then as calmly as if he were ordering a cheeseburger, got on his police radio and requested a case for Assist the Public, checked on the status of the ambulance, and got a time check for the birth of the baby. Dad was a veteran street cop at that point in his career and very little rattled him.
He returned to the living room just as the woman, the curandera, he soon learned, was cracking the egg into a bowl.
She looked up at my Dad and said, “For protection against the mal de ojo. The evil eye.”
She emptied the egg into the bowl. The yolk was the burning copper yellow of the sunset, and it was streaked through with blood.
“That rattled me,” Dad said. “It's hard to explain, but looking at that egg, I knew something had happened, something strange. There was a sort of charge in the air.”
I remember him shaking his head, unable to explain further.
I asked Carmenita Jaramillo, “Do you do that thing with the egg?”
She smiled.
“The people who come to me are simple people. For them, I offer the pouches of barley and crushed sage. I roll the chicken egg over their skin and crack it open for them to see the mal puesto, the bad magic. But it is no magic that I do. It is peace of mind I give them. Nothing but that.”
Her smile shifted to one corner of her mouth and I could tell she was studying me.
When she spoke again, it was like her voice had joined her thoughts mid stream.
“But not that for you,” she said. “You I can tell, you need something else.”
I was fascinated with her, and even though I thought her folk cures were, well, silly, the woman herself still intrigued me.
She put a gnarled finger up to her nose and said, “You are looking for the shiny people.”
“The shiny people?”
“Yes. A man and a woman. Dressed like you. Their clothes shine in the sun. And their troca too, yes?”
“Troca?” I said. Unlike my dad, I was never able to pick up Spanish. At one point, I got good enough at it I could ask for somebody's driver's license and their insurance, but when I promoted to detective, I lost even that. But then I clicked. I remembered the word, and I got excited. “You mean a van? Yes. I am. Have you seen it?”
“Yes, I see them. Yesterday morning. I hear the man yelling. The woman screaming. There was a fight in the street.”
“You saw them fighting? The man and the woman?”
“I hear them fighting. Voices. Like today, when they were chasing you.”
“You mean it wasn't the man and woman fighting with each other? They were fighting someone else?”
“The man was fighting with another man, yes. There was much yelling. Four or maybe five gunshots.”
“Could you see who the other man was?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But after the shooting, I see their troca going into that garage over there.” She pointed out the window to a battered gray wooden garage across the alley from her backyard. “Inside there.”
Beyond the garage was a two story house with a rickety, unpainted wooden staircase and balcony along the length of the second floor. It looked quiet. No one else around.
“Carmenita, this is important. I have to go there. Are there any more of those men around here?”
“They wander everywhere. You must be careful. Do not let them find a pretty young woman alone. I can not protect you from what they would do.”
“Understood.”
“Detective, may I-”
“Call me Lily. Please.”
She smiled. “Lily. You do not believe in the curandero, do you?”
“They're not really part of the culture I grew up in,” I said, conscious of the thin evasion.
“The only magic we do is to know what the people who come to us need. We are listeners only.”
“What is it that I need?”
“You are sick.” She touched her chest. “Here.”
At first I thought she meant with H2N2, and I said, “No, I'm fine. I get check ups every other day.”
“No. In here.” She pointed to her chest again, the heart. “Susto.”
I shook my head. “I don't understand. Susto?”
“Loss of spirit.”
I could have laughed it off, I told myself. I could have smiled and said that's nice and thank you and left. But I didn't. I stayed. Like my Dad on the day he stood in that woman's living room, staring at that bloody egg yolk, I had a feeling I couldn't explain, but at the same time one that I couldn't deny.
“We live in a bad time,” she said. “This is a bad place. The living and the dead are not so different.”
I frowned at her. She couldn't see that behind my gas mask. I wondered how she could see anything at all about me behind my mask.
“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.
“Chocolate,” she said, her voice suddenly and strangely like that of a little girl, happy.
“Excuse me?” I wondered if she was teasing me. She must have known there was no chocolate to be had anywhere in San Antonio, at least none that didn't come out of the black market.
