AZTECHS Page 9

  “What’s goin’ on?” I asked him.

  “Waitin’ for you is all.” He said this amiably, and waved at the hills behind the carrier. “Some of Ramiro’s people followed us from the barrio. Took ’em a long time to find us. They didn’t get here till an hour ago.”

  “Where are they?” Lupe asked.

  “I dealt with ’em.” Dennard straightened. “I put one in back ’case you wanted to see.”

  He led us around the side of the carrier and flung open the rear door. It took me a moment to recognize Felix Carbonell. Most of his hair had been burned off, and the skin of his face was bloody and blistered. His flat black eyes, shiny and full of crazy rage, gave him away. His clothing was foul, tattered, but he still had his gold rings and necklaces. When he recognized me, he let out a string of enfeebled curses. His spittle was bloody.

  “Man’s had a rough week,” Dennard said.

  Frankie scuttled into the carrier to get a close-up of Felix.

  I was more interested in Dennard than Felix—he seemed much the same as he had been before visiting the kingdom. Just like me and Lupe. I recalled what Zee had said about him being the same as he was before he met his father, only purified. I was beginning to suspect that Zee had always been a religious nut. Montezuma had made him into an efficient nut—which might mean that the religious gloss on what was happening had been applied by Zee. What did that make me and Lupe? More efficient hustlers, I supposed.

  “What you want to do with him?” asked Dennard, and Lupe said, “Leave his ass. Maybe Montezuma can use him.”

  Felix struggled as Dennard helped him from the carrier, but he was too far gone to cause any trouble. “Puto maricon!” he said. “Chu cha!”

  The accord among Lupe, Dennard, and me struck me as peculiar. For three people who had recently been at odds, we were getting along extremely well. No apparent distrust or doubt. It seemed we had been together for years.

  Dennard propped Felix against a boulder. I scanned the hilltops for riders. None were in sight, but I knew one would be popping up any time to sniff Felix out. He sat there dribbling blood and curses. If we saw him again, he’d be a lot more reasonable, but I doubted I’d ever warm up to the guy.

  “El Rayo?” asked Dennard, wiping some of Felix’s blood off on his fatigues.

  “Where else?” I glanced at Lupe, who spread her hands in a gesture of bewilderment.

  Dennard piled in the driver’s side of the carrier, and Lupe sat between us. We didn’t talk much on the drive to El Rayo. I assumed Lupe and Dennard were, like me, assessing themselves, trying to understand where we were going and why we were going together, and I was also wondering what this whole thing had been about. Had Montezuma actually been negotiating with the Carbonells, or had his real intent been serious media exposure, an announcement of his presence? Gods were given to that sort of big opening. Burning bushes, virgin births. All that lightning-bolt-from-Olympus crap. Montezuma’s birth had been as virgin as they could come, and his blissfully mad prophet had been right in step with John the Baptist and the rest. You had to figure the Son would be along any moment. Maybe we had that to look forward to. But unlike Zee, I had no certainty. Who could say if Montezuma was a machine chumping itself into playing god, or if this was how gods happened, or if god was just mindless process, an incarnation of principle working things out over and over until he got it right…and you knew he was never going to get it right. We drove past the stone head. In its glowing eyes were speeding images of the personnel carrier. Signs of our advent. Dennard switched on the radio, tuned in a border station. A call-in show. People were asking what was this deal about an eternity, this for-real paradise? They asked who was Dennard? Was he Sammy or what? They asked personal questions about Lupe and me. Were we truly in love, or was it just for the show? Was Frankie a puppet? We weren’t just tabloid creatures now-we were celebrity heroes. The host talked about the party going on in the streets, celebrating the notion that God’s kingdom might be real, and that El Rayo, this unimportant residue that had collected at the bottom of America, this thin red line of poverty and madness, might have a destiny to fulfill. Then he played an interview with Papa, who was his usual supportive self.

  “My son is not unintelligent,” he said, doing his professor delivery. “But he doesn’t use his intellect. He mistakes bravado for true courage, and he’s less competent than lucky. But he is very lucky. I think that what’s happened proves my point.”

  “Asshole!” Lupe switched the radio off.

  When we came to El Rayo, I needed a moment to pull it together. I told Dennard to stop on the outskirts, a weedy patch extending from the backs of two ruined houses, fragments of their whitewashed walls still erect. We climbed out, and Frankie scuttled off to get a wide shot of the three of us. Dennard took a stand, rifle at the ready. Lupe and I held hands and stared at El Rayo, at the fiery fence dividing the sky and the violent places beneath it, the sewer worshippers of Barrio Ningun and the cartels and the gangs, the dog men and the wasted women, the wretched and the insane, all the delirium and grief of that least of cities…

  Our city.

  Between buildings some 200 feet away, the lights of Calle 99 burned in crumbling gold bars. I heard a faint riotous music and joyful shrieks. Frankie must have been transmitting live because before long people started coming out from the backs of buildings and alleyways, realizing the picture they’d been watching was being shot close by. They kept their distance, probably worried about Dennard, but they shouted our names.

  Lupe waved at them, our welcomers, and they shouted louder.

  I felt a quickness of self I’d never before known. Some things were coming clear, the little glittering pieces fitting into place, the fragmented thoughts I’d had since entering the kingdom beginning to cohere into a structure. But I didn’t need to think about any of it. Even if the future was pre-ordained, written in silicon, I was never going to understand what was happening. Not even god could understand it all. Everything was different, but everything was more-or-less the same, and I’d had enough of the unfamiliar, the incomprehensible, the strange. I wanted to walk the streets of El Rayo, have a drink at Cruzados, join the party that was being thrown in our honor, and I gestured toward the lights, the music, the fire in the sky, and to Lupe who was looking at me happily, as if I were something she truly liked to see, I said, “Hey, what about it, girl? You’n me…a little fiesta? It ain’t such a bad night to have no future.”