Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [88]
Red waited as she steadied herself. The same sorts of doubts had assailed her as she stood in the church narthex waiting to join Stockton at the altar, and had made her withdraw into sarcasm when Lewis behaved tenderly. They were the protests of a frightened, atrophied virgin dwelling in some coal bin of her psyche who spoke up only to rail against the invasion of love.
Red’s hands were lightly on her hips, and they were moving again, into the bedroom. There was his bed, the comforter in its brown paisley cover, the pillows at odd angles. And the back door—such an easy leap! She imagined the cold, ridged roundness of the doorknob, the sudden abyss of daylight and vivid blue sky.
She took a long breath and spun instead within Red’s fingertips: a neat, perfect ballroom spin. He was smiling and she kissed him, gingerly because of his bruised jaw. As he lifted her onto the bed, she knew this was the most serious, and most adult, and most appropriate thing she had ever done.
TWO
DAVID IBAÑEZ, now forty-one years old and seventeen years sober, worked at the Villa de San Miguel Arcángel, a clinic for the alternative treatment of chronic pain in Tijuana. He’d been at the Villa for four years now, and had moved in with the woman who ran it, Pauline.
The clinic employed a variety of pain specialists: an M.D. from India with a vast knowledge of Tibetan medicine, two yoginis, a hydrotherapist, a hypnotherapist, a curandero named Olivero who’d attended chiropractic college in Utah, and David, who practiced his own syncretic mix of tantric medicine, acupuncture, and curanderismo.
In early May, when Olivero was at a conference in Dallas, David met with his clients. One old woman came in with severe headaches, and David treated her with acupressure, herbs, and prayers. Reading David’s treatment notes upon his return, Olivero became agitated. The old woman, he said, was a bruja very unfriendly to his village. She’d already given cancer to one member of his family, and made his niece go blind. Olivero worried that she’d taken something of his—a photograph from his desk, a business card, anything she could use for mal puesto, evildoing.
David assured him that they’d met in his office, while Olivero’s was locked up tight. Still, Olivero would not be pacified. Did she say anything odd? Had she given David anything out of the ordinary? David said no, no, she’d paid him with a few pesos and a small cake. This wasn’t unusual: poorer clients often paid in fresh eggs, tamales, fruit, whatever they had of value.
“What kind of cake?” Olivero wanted to know. “Was there anything distinctive or unusual about it?”
“No, no—just a little sweet cake, with the number twenty-one stenciled on it in green sugar.”
“Where’s this cake now?” Olivero asked.
“I ate it,” David said. “I was running behind and hadn’t eaten lunch.”
“And you’re sure it said ‘twenty-one’ on it,” said Olivero.
“A lucky number,” David said, “and a lucky cake, since I was so hungry.”
This cake was not lucky, Olivero told him, not lucky at all. Most probably it was made with the veintiuno herb, which kills a man in twenty-one days.
David had never heard of veintiuno, and he wasn’t too worried; he felt fine, and besides, many folk herbs and concoctions were placebos. But he did call his uncle and teacher, Rafael Flores, back home in Rito. Rafael didn’t answer, and David remembered he’d gone to Arizona for two weeks. David then put in a call to a toxicologist at USC. Yes, the man said, there actually was a poison called veintiuno, and a few documented fatalities from it, but not many, and none since the fifties. Nobody knew how or why the herb was fatal: the plant itself contained no known toxins. The poisoned, it seemed, scared themselves to death.
David laughed, relieved by the absence of toxins, and promptly forgot about the veintiuno until a week later, when, as he was drawing his long, thick brown hair into a ponytail, a sickening clump fell out in his