The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Y’know” he said to no one in particular, “once upon a time you were a pretty nice guy.” And then he rolled down the window and sent Howard Hughes’ fedora tumbling into the night.

In the distance, somewhere beyond the November wind, came the low whistle of a train riding steel rails.

HARVEST

Arboles de la ladera porque no han reverdecido

Por eso calandrias cantan o las apachuria el

nido…

—Las Amarillas

(Traditional Folk Song)

Raphael Baca split the skin, weeping as he uncovered the skull beneath. He slipped his fingers under a fleshy flap and tugged. The skin peeled off in one piece and he dropped it to the floor, a limp, bloody husk.

He threw the skull into a corner and kicked the skin after it. How many times would it happen? How many seasons would pass before he peeled an orange and found only fruit?

Through the winter, through the spring, he had prayed that things would be different this year. And just this morning his hopes had swelled when he discovered the first orange of the new season, for the fruit had not screamed when he chopped it from the dead branch with his machete.

But in the end it had all been the same as the year before.

Raphael sat at the kitchen table and sharpened his machete. He listened to the wind, heard the woman wailing above it as she wandered the empty streets of C-Town. Raphael prayed that he would look up from his work, through the kitchen window, and see the bruja leading the children’s ghosts through the deserted streets and away. But Raphael did not bother to look up, because the kitchen window was dirty

It didn’t matter. He had never seen the woman — not even once.

He had only heard her cries.

And then, suddenly, he could not hear her at all.

The music of the flies was much too loud.

They came, fat and black, squeezing through chinks in the window, buzzing around the bloody fruitskull, ignoring the other skulls that had been picked clean during the previous season.

A stray fly danced over Raphael’s bloodstained fingers. He listened to its music and did not move. The fly was hungry, and he would not disturb it. He would not raise his hand against even the most disgusting of God’s creatures.

He stared at the dirty window and imagined the woman out there, somewhere, weeping for an audience of ghosts.

The afternoon waned. The flies had gone, their bellies full. Raphael left the shanty. He checked the mailbox at the end of the road, hoping for a reply from the government, but there was nothing waiting for him. There hadn’t been any mail in more than a year. He started along the border of the grove, avoiding the bruja’s domain.

Not far from the mailboxes, a car was parked on the shoulder of the dirt road. Dead trees blanketed it with feeble fingers of shade, printing strange cracks on the white hood and hardtop. Raphael looked inside. He saw keys hanging from the ignition and a wallet tucked haphazardly beneath the front seat. He glanced into the grove but saw no one there.

He hurried away. The wind was rising, and he could almost hear the evil woman weeping again.

This was not the first abandoned car that Raphael had discovered. He imagined the bruja falling upon the driver, an innocent who took a wrong turn off the highway. An innocent who had no protection. These days, people didn’t believe in creatures like the one that haunted C-Town. They had no faith to protect them.

Raphael wished that he could do something to protect the people who came here, but he could do nothing. Gripping his machete, he walked to the west side of the grove, almost to the highway. The sunlight was still strong there. He skirted the dead trees and was happy at their nakedness, pleased by the spindly shadows that were much too feeble to frighten him.

He sat down and thought about the bewitched fruit. The bruja’s bugs had killed the trees when the farmers stopped spraying. Raphael imagined that the insects made her witchcraft possible, even though the trees were long dead. He wished he could find a spray that would kill the cursed bugs, and he decided that tonight he would write another letter to the government and ask if they knew of such a spray.

The sun drifted slowly from the sky. Raphael’s shadow stretched before him, as long and gray as a rich man’s gravestone.

None of Raphael’s children had gravestones. Not Ramona, not Alicia, not Pablo or Paulo. Before his wife left him, Raphael had promised her that he would buy stones as soon as he had enough money to fix the old car. They had to do that first, he said, because they needed the car to visit the cemetery. It was too far away, otherwise.

But it never worked out. His wife left him, and he never had any money. He didn’t have the car anymore, either, and the only time he visited the camposanto was when nobody came for the cars that he found near the grove.

When that happened, he would drive to the camposanto and park nearby. Then he would visit his children. He always found their graves, even though they had no headstones.

Except when the long shadows fell.

And when the shadows turned to darkness and the gravestones disappeared, he walked back to C- Town.

Alone. Crying

Shadows fell across the grove, thickening, stretching toward him. Raphael moved on and found a rabbit trapped in one of his snares. He took it back to the shanty, where he built a fire beneath a dead oak tree.

Sometimes he worried about eating the rabbits. If the lawyers were right, the animals could be sick with the same disease that killed the children.

The idea frightened him. He looked at the rabbit, suddenly afraid of it. But he was hungry, and he knew that the lawyers were wrong. He had eaten many rabbits in the last two years, and he was not sick.

Still, he was afraid, because he knew that C-Town was bewitched. He hung the rabbit and skinned it, his hands unsteady, his face dripping sweat. And then he laughed and laughed, because it was only a dead rabbit, after all, and there was only good meat in the places where he had imagined that he might find sticky fruit.