Mean Streets by Anthology

Author:Anthology
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-08-24T16:36:30+00:00

in it.

Mickey lounged against the wall outside, smoking a noxious-smelling cigarillo and shifting his fake-sleepy gaze around the street like a hoodlum looking for a chump in a black-and-white film. I stood on the doorstep for a minute while he ignored me. Then I tapped his foot with mine to get his attention—OK, maybe a little more insistent than a tap, but not a full-on kick. He jerked upright and muttered a phrase under his breath even I knew was an insult.

"Hey, I thought you were in a hurry," I said. He grunted and threw down his smoke, grinding it out under his toe with more malice than the horrid thing deserved.

"Yeah, right." A sentence that seemed to mean nothing when he said it. He gathered himself after a final glance around and turned his back to me, heading out into the street.

"This way."

I wondered if his shoulders got tired carrying the weight of that chip.

I was there because of the holiday, yet I hadn't thought of some of the implications of its presence beyond the possibility of office closures and an increased presence of the dead. Once out on the street with Mickey, it became obvious that el Dia de los Muertos

was a much bigger thing than Halloween and there was more to contend with, both living and dead, than bureaucrats on holiday. We walked down the wide, gray-bricked road, hemmed in by a mix of adobe and buildings of pale green stone, none newer than the late 1920s, many painted, like the Villaflores house, in rich shades of red, yellow, orange, or the native pale green. The bricked street boiled with ghostly traffic on foot, in cars, on horse-and donkey-back, even a group of ancient Spanish soldiers march-ing with pikes pointing at the sky.

I was startled to note that unlike the ghosts of Seattle, most of these looked like skeletons in clothing and not like the remembered shapes of live people. Skulls grinned and empty eye sockets gleamed with only the memory of eyes. They were completely aware of us, too, watching us as we went and seeming amused. It was unsettling to be observed through eyeless, unblinking sockets, and so much more closely than I was used to.

We scuffed through the legions of phantoms without talking for a while, to a huge central plaza. Miguel paused and pointed into it, saying in a bored voice, "That's our famous zocalo. Where the Federales shot all those teachers a couple of years ago. That was in front of the old palacio de gobierno, but it's a museum now. We'll have to go through the market to get to the new one—I hope you don't want to stop and go shopping," he added with a sneer. He didn't know me very well. . . .

I rolled my eyes and ignored the jab—for now. "I'm not much of a shopper. I just need to find this guy's grave by November first."

"You know which cemetery?"

"Nope, just have a name and a date of death.

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