Mockingbird by Sean Stewart

Author:Sean Stewart [Stewart, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

After Rick Manzetti was gone, I stalked to the chifforobe and demanded of the Widow how she meant for me to keep my family, how I was to provide for the child growing inside me. Now, when I really needed to hear her, the Widow didn’t answer. The gods never do.

For that matter, the Widow didn’t seem to be giving Candy much help landing her man, either. The spring dragged on, and when Carlos finally spoke about the possibility of marrying Candy, he was talking with me. It was a few days after my aborted meeting with Rick Manzetti that Carlos asked me to come for a ride in the Muertomobile. It was Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, always a big day in the Hispanic community, celebrating Mexico’s independence from the Spanish. It was also pretty close to four and a half months for me: halfway through my pregnancy. I finally had a bit of a tummy, just a little bulge above the seat belt.

A tiny skeleton—whittled from real human bone, Carlos said—jiggled from the rearview mirror. I wished Carlos a happy Cinco de Mayo and he wished me the same. Then, more delicately, he said, “Candy tells me there will be no money from the professor after all. Los duendes drove him away. Too bad.”

“You can only be luckier than average fifty percent of the time.”

“Es verdad.” Carlos had shown up on the doorstep like a man braced to make out his will, saying he had to talk to me. It was just past lunchtime, 85 degrees outside, and Carlos was in his summer uniform, a white muscle shirt that showed parts of his tattoos: red lines radiating from the Sacred Heart on his left breast; the top edge of a Mayan mandala that covered much of his thin back, and black widow spiders, six or seven of them, scuttling along his ropy arms. I had invited him in for a beer, but he shook his head. “No, we should not talk here, por favor. Anyplace else you like, or just in the car maybe. I need to talk to you alone.”

“I am alone. Daddy’s on the road.”

“Your pardon,” he said, “but you are not.” And he glanced at the chifforobe where Momma’s gods were watching us.

So it was I found myself in the front seat of the Muertomobile, sinking in crushed red velvet as we rolled solemnly through the residential Montrose streets. It was hot and horribly humid but the hearse predated air conditioning, so all I could do was roll down the window. Sluggish waves of sweaty Houston air oozed into the car. A year before I would have said it smelled like hot grass and engine exhaust, but now my pregnancy-enhanced nose discriminated a much more complex chemical bouquet: warm asphalt gave off its distinctive scent as it softened in the sun, for instance. There was the car wax Carlos had buffed lovingly into the Muertomobile’s body, and the hot rubber stink of its big black tires.

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