Are you alive enough?
The human soul. When it’s trapped, it resembles a bird in an attic, thought Mikki. It circles the darkness, fooled by one shaft of light, then another, bouncing softly from one window to the next.
On a bed in front of Mikki was a priest. Eyes black, body naked. It was a sturdy bed, carved from mahogany hewn from the forest where Mikki’s grandfather hunted and his father before him.
The priest’s room was lined with tiers of candles flickering on worn wooden tables amidst trinkets from the market, a yellowed and torn wedding dress, piles of bent and faded photographs, broken toys, stolen cellphones, pornography, plastic sacks of cocaine, heroin and weed, boxes of bullets and wads of one hundred dollar bills bound with rubber bands.
A large bolt cutter stood propped in a corner and the purl of night rain babbled in the courtyard gutters. Atop a chest of drawers in a wicker bassinet and swaddled in tatted lace and dried flowers was a withered husk of skin and hair – an infant. Her eyes were sewn shut.
When Mikki was a boy, one of the stray dogs from his Michoacán barrio chased a chicken under a truck. The dog circled and barked and scratched at the ground. It crouched and squirmed underneath and the chicken skittered to escape but the dog scrambled and cornered it beneath the truck again. Mikki watched the dog for a long time.
Eventually it trapped the chicken, dragged it flapping into the light and shook it to death. As the chicken died he wondered – was it alive enough?
From a wooden chair, Mikki hunched toward the priest lying naked on the bed and smelled the breath vent past his lips. “If you do not fully live your life, do you deserve to be alive?” asked Mikki. “How alive are you, priest? Are you alive enough?”
The priest’s soul fluttered, trapped like the bird in the attic or the chicken underneath the truck. A small crucifix on a silver chain lay piled on his chest whose heart now dithered on the threshold between the light and eternal blackness. Mikki’s finger caressed the trigger of the gun in his hand.
Prayers hung in the room like oily smoke. Not the kind of prayers which commanded the lame to walk or the blind to see. These were the black petitions of the narco-cult. Santa Muerte, Black Magic and the occult, wrapped in the rites of the ancient Mexica priests. They were prayers steeped in blood, invoked with rage, wielded in retribution and exquisitely tailored for a man like Mikki. A draft of frigid air flooded the bed. The body was stiff and the priest’s breath escaped in ever shortening puffs.
“Priest,” whispered Mikki. The priest’s soul lingered. Batting from one end of its diminishing realm to the other as the dragon, Xozutl, hosed through Mikki’s mouth into the priest’s very essence like a surge, turgid and thick, coursing through his consciousness, pouring into the priest’s inner self and soaking his very fiber, crowding his spirit into the rafters of his being.
“Xozutl will stay with you forever. He’ll be your friend when everyone else has forsaken you.”
Mikki broke his gaze from the priest and fought a wave of nausea. He packed up a small leather case containing a set of syringes and a vial of clear liquid and scanned the tiers of flickering candles where he spotted a photograph. He picked it out from the others and held it to the light. In it was a young woman with curly brown hair singing songs at a piano with an elderly man in a nursing home. The caption read,
Soulmay Haaven and Mr. Maudry sing the blues.
“You lucky butterfly,” he whispered. He slipped the photo in his shirt pocket, tucked his gun away and stooped to flip the latches of a battered metal toolbox on the floor. He opened the lid and lifted out a tray filled with an array of wrenches, some small pipe fittings and a handheld, battery powered tattoo machine. Woody shreds of kapok sponged up from the cavity beneath the tray and Mikki gently lifted the dried remains of the infant swaddled in lace and flowers from the bassinet atop the dresser and placed it back in the toolbox where it settled into shadow. He picked out the tattoo gun from the toolbox’s tray.
If an implement had a trigger, it felt good in Mikki’s hand. He made this one himself. It was a single-needle machine bound with electrical tape that was one part ancient technology, one part prison brotherhood and one part rechargeable, cordless bliss.
He stepped up onto the 500-year old bed, straddled the priest and sat on his chest. He plucked the priest’s lower lip with a thumb and forefinger, peeled it back and fired up his instrument.
In the silence after Mikki clicked off his machine, he glanced at the artfully arranged bags of cocaine and weed, piles of pornography and stacks of hundred dollar bills illuminated by the dancing candlelight. On a night stand next to the bed was a glass bottle, empty except for a drift of brownish silt at the bottom. Two small cups sat next to it, also empty.
“Consider this my contribution to The Church. La quinta real.” My royal fifth. The priest stared at the ceiling, his eyes dark, his body trembling in rigors and runnels of black ink draining from the corners of his mouth. A sheaf of scenes flashed through Mikki’s thoughts. Bees swarm a dead mule. Piles of fish rot in the sun, a car shredded by bullets, blood pooling on a dashboard, a crow speaks, a child rides a dragon into the sea. Mikki checked his watch. The boys will be here soon. The shrine of drugs, money and pornography could stay, but everything else would ship out with the priest.
“Welcome to The Corporation, Padre. I hope you enjoy Iowa. The endless fields of corn will amaze you.” Mikki slid off the bed and attended to stowing his equipment. He clacked shut the latches of the toolbox, picked it up and turned for the door.
At the nightstand he stopped and plugged the cork back into the empty bottle. Why? He wasn’t quite sure. Out of respect, perhaps. He plucked the bolt cutters from the corner of the room, leaned them on his shoulder and stepped out into the rain and darkness of the courtyard. When he reached the street he looked for the van. The drizzle soaked his shirt but he didn’t care, it doused the spring heat. On the side of the van in faded, hand-painted lettering were the words: “Plomeria del Penumbra.” Penumbra Plumbing.
Busy night, thought Mikki. He thumbed through a list of names on his phone and selected one: Obregón. “Another mule is ready,” he texted. “Shipping to US in morning.” From the passenger seat he turned and looked behind him. Stretched on a pallet and wrapped in a patterned wool bedspread was a different little man. He stared at the ceiling, eyes dark, face lined and sun-paced, runnels of black ink running from the corners of his mouth too. He reminded Mikki of someone. A Yaqui Indian he shipped to a retirement home up north a few months ago.
“Careful, Padre. Someone could mistake you for a skeleton and put you on a pole in a parade,” he said with a smile.
A text appeared on his phone.
“Pack your bags.
You’re leaving for the States in the morning.”