Trauma Page 12

  “On certain days of the Aztec calendar, she would fly like a butterfly through the towns and villages with scores of dead witches, also butterflies, swarming behind her. They would enter people’s houses and settle in their ears, whispering evil words to them, persuading them to murder their wives and their children. Itzpapalotl wanted more spirits in Mictlampa with her, even more butterflies, and the most loyal spirits were those who had loved their families dearly but had turned on them, and killed them.”

  “That’s it,” Bonnie nodded. “They killed the people they loved the most. That’s exactly what happened in all of the three cases where I discovered these butterflies.”

  Juan Maderas stared at Bonnie, and his hooded black eyes glittered like beetles. “Can you really believe, in the twenty-first century, that these people were murdered by an ancient Aztec demon?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It really sounds crazy. But none of these people seemed to have much of a motive … not for killing their children, anyhow. One family was having problems over child custody, and one family was full of druggies, but the other family … Everybody said the father was such a good father, but he shot his three kids for no obvious reason at all.”

  “Sometimes people do that kind of thing. You should know that better than anybody. It doesn’t mean that they’ve been encouraged to do it by Itzpapalotl.”

  “But the only common elements between these three trauma scenes were the butterflies and some kind of Mexican connection. I don’t suppose the Mexican connection would mean much, normally, but Howard said that the Clouded Apollo butterfly is never found here in California. Never.”

  Juan Maderas was silent for a long time. He sipped his wine again, then took out a black silk handkerchief to wipe his lips. “I don’t know what to say to you. There are many who still believe in Itzpapalotl and Micantecutli, the great lord of hell, and the Tzitzimime. I saw some old men when I was younger, friends of my father’s, who drew blood out of their noses and their ears and dripped it over walking sticks to keep away the evil spirits that they believed were concealed inside them. But these days, I’m not so sure.”

  “What did people do to keep Itzpapalotl away?”

  “They sacrificed people, usually, cut their hearts out, and they would sing her a flattering song, calling her their mother and their protector.”

  “And it worked?”

  “According to the picture writing, yes. The Aztec priests kept extraordinarily detailed records of everything they did, every sacrifice they made.”

  Bonnie thought for a while. But then she said, “I’m a very practical woman, Mr. Maderas. I’ve seen a lot of dead people, and I don’t believe in ghosts. But something’s happening here, something very strange, and there has to be a reason for it.”

  “Well … you may be right. The Mexican people suffer many injustices in Los Angeles, and a great deal of prejudice. Perhaps Itzpapalotl has come back from hell to start some kind of crusade on their behalf.”

  Esmeralda’s father suddenly cleared his throat and said, “When I was young, the man who ran our local store insulted my mother. They found his body in Griffith Park, with his tongue cut out. That was the way that Xipe Totec, the night drinker, used to kill his victims … cut out their tongues so that they bled to death, and drink it.”

  “They never found who killed him?”

  “How could they? It was Xipe Totec.”

  Bonnie stayed a little while longer, but she was very unsettled. She couldn’t decide if Juan Maderas really believed in Itzpapalotl, or if he was humoring her. His tone of voice was dry and monotonous and matter-of-fact, as if they were discussing the price of candles, yet there was something sly about him, too. Occasionally Esmeralda’s father would interject some odd non sequitur, such as, “You mustn’t sleep in hell.… You must keep awake to endure your punishment.… That’s what they say.”

  Bonnie left the apartment building feeling confused and depressed. She thought of calling Ralph at home, but then she decided that it would probably make him even angrier with her than he was already. She had felt so elated after spending the night with him in Pasadena, especially after her humiliation at Kyle Lennox’s party. She had really felt that her life was going to change. She hadn’t allowed herself to consider the possibility that she might have actually left Duke and gone to live with Ralph instead; but she hadn’t been more than one step away from it.

  She played “Evergreen” on the car stereo as she drove back home. She sang along, and suddenly the tears burst out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks and dripped onto her new stonewashed jeans. She couldn’t bear the thought that Ralph might never make love to her again.

  Up ahead of her, the traffic signals danced red and blurry and bright, like lamps at a Mexican carnival.

  An Unusual Silence

  When Bonnie opened her eyes the next morning, the first thing that struck her was the silence. She lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. There was a hairline crack in the plaster which had always reminded her of a witch, with a pointed nose and a pointed chin. The sun shivered across her face and made her look as if she were winking her eye. After a little while she sat up and checked the bedside clock. It was 8:23 A.M.

  She sat up, horrified. Duke was going to be late for work and Ray was going to be late for school and she was going to be late for—

  Then she suddenly realized. None of them was going to be late for anything. Duke didn’t really have a job and Ray wasn’t going to school and she didn’t have a job to go to, either—not unless Ralph changed his mind about Phil Cafagna.

  She prodded the bundle of sheets next to her. “Duke—it’s almost eight-thirty. You want some coffee?”

  He didn’t answer, but then, she didn’t expect him to. You could have crashed a 747 right outside the house and he wouldn’t have woken up. She prodded him again. “Do you want some coffee? I’m not cooking you anything this morning. I wouldn’t want you to accuse me of murdering you.”

  Still he didn’t answer. Exasperated, she said, “Come on, Duke, you’re not lying in bed all day. You’re going out to find yourself a job.”

  She took hold of the sheets and dragged them off him. Except that he wasn’t there. The shape that she had thought was Duke was simply the extra pillows that she must have discarded in the heat of the night.

  She frowned, and stood up, and padded across the pale blue nylon-carpeted floor. “Duke?” she called, opening the bathroom door. No Duke—and for the first time ever in the history of the Winter marriage, the toilet seat was down.

  She went through to the living room. Sometimes Duke got so drunk that he fell asleep on the couch in front of the television. But the television was switched off, there was nobody lying on the couch, and the cushions were all straightened. This was very weird.

  “Duke?” she said, but this time she spoke so softly that he wouldn’t have been able to hear her.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen. She even opened the larder. He wasn’t in the yard, either—and thank God, his body wasn’t floating in the pool. She saw herself frowning in the gilt-framed mirror in the hallway as she went back to see if he had dropped off in Ray’s room—although why he should do that, she couldn’t think. He always called it The Funkatorium. She could almost hear him now. “Kids today, you know why they fart so much? It’s the food. All those goddamned vegetables. How can they call that health food when it practically asphyxiates you?”

  She knocked on Ray’s door and said, “Ray? Is your father in with you?”

  There was no answer, so she knocked again and looked around the door. There was no Duke lying on the carpet, but then, there was no Ray lying in the bed, either. The bed was tidy, and the drapes weren’t even drawn.

  Bonnie was becoming seriously worried now. She remembered going to bed last night. She remembered taking a long shower and putting on her nightgown and climbing into bed. She remembered wondering how long it would take for Duke to come to bed, because when he did he almost alwa
ys woke her up, cursing and burping and falling over his feet. But that was all. She couldn’t remember kissing Ray good night, the way she usually did.

  She went to the front door. It was locked and bolted from the inside and the chain was on. The patio door at the back was safety-bolted, too. None of the windows were open, and they all had locks. So Duke and Ray must have left the house before she went to bed, and she must have locked all the doors after them. Yet she couldn’t remember doing it, and she couldn’t think why Duke and Ray would have gone. Duke had hardly any money, so it was doubtful that they would have gone to a hotel; and Duke had hardly any friends, either. Maybe they had spent the night with one of Ray’s buddies.

  But why? She could remember arguing with Duke because he had lied to her about finding a job. She remembered Ray saying something about cheap Mexican labor ruining their lives, and Mexican drug traffickers killing one of his friends. But that had been early in the afternoon. She simply couldn’t remember what had happened next.

  Oh, yes. She had called Esmeralda at three o’clock, and showered, and changed, and gone down to Sixteenth Street to see her. And talked to Juan Maderas. And then come home again. But had Duke and Ray been at home when she got back? They couldn’t have gone far, because she had borrowed Duke’s car—which was still parked next to her truck in the driveway outside.

  She felt as if she had been to a very drunken party the night before and simply couldn’t piece things together.

  She went into the kitchen again and poured herself a glass of orange juice. When she had finished it, she drank some more straight out of the carton. There was no sign of a serious fight. Nothing broken, so far as she could see. In fact, the house was immaculate. Even the carpets had been vacuum cleaned and the pile raked up with a carpet rake.

  She went back to Ray’s room and found his Bart Simpson phone book. Most of the pages were crowded with scribbles and cartoons and exclamation points, but she managed to find the number of his closest friend, Kendal.

  “Mrs. Rakusen? It’s Bonnie Winter. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, but I was wondering if you’d seen anything of Ray. No? He didn’t ask to stay with you last night or anything? I see. Well, could you ask Kendal? Okay. Well, if you do hear from him, can you ask him to call his mother? He didn’t come home last night, and I’m a little worried about him. Well, yes, after that last business. Thanks.”

  She called two more friends she could think of, and a girl he used to go out with called Cherry-Jo. None of them had seen him or heard from Ray.

  She sat in the living room biting her lip and wondering what to do. She took another look all around the house, even bending down and looking under the beds.

  At last she called Ruth.

  “Ruth … something weird has happened.”

  “Don’t tell me that you and Duke have actually—you know—”

  “I’m not kidding, Ruth. Duke and Ray have both disappeared.”

  “Hey, congratulations! How did you manage it?”

  “They’ve gone, Ruth, and I don’t know how and I don’t know where.”

  “Hey, you’re serious, aren’t you? What do you mean, they’ve disappeared?”

  Bonnie told her everything about her argument with Duke, and all about the empty beds and the toilet seat down and the doors locked on the inside. “They must have gone, but I don’t remember them going. It’s like a blank. It’s like they never even existed.”

  “Nah,” said Ruth, dismissively. “I think they’re pulling some kind of stupid stunt. Duke’s the kind of guy who hates it when a woman tells him what to do, especially when it comes to getting his butt off the couch and earning himself a living. They’ll show up, believe me, as soon as their guts start growling.”

  Bonnie was about to tell Ruth about her visit to Esmeralda’s house yesterday evening, and Juan Maderas, and Itzpapalotl, but then she decided against it. She didn’t want her to think that she was totally bananas.

  Bonnie Calls Ralph

  “Ralph, you have to—crackle—that I didn’t come on to Phil Cafagna.” The connection kept breaking up.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s forgotten.”

  “But I don’t want it to be forgotten. What happened between us was something—crackle.”

  “I know. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But Glamorex is falling apart, Bonnie, and I don’t have the time to think about anything but saving it.”

  “Ralph, Duke’s left me.”

  “What?”

  “He’s left me. I don’t know where he’s gone, but he’s taken Ray, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Bonnie. It doesn’t make any difference if Duke’s left you. It wouldn’t make any difference if Vanessa dropped dead. There are times when things work out and there are times when they don’t. Call it fate. Call it what you like.”

  “Ralph, I’m actually pleading with you. What you gave me—you showed me that a man could—crackle—for me. I’ve never felt that before. Never. And don’t tell me you didn’t like what I did for you.”

  There was a pause so long that Bonnie felt her heartbeat twenty times. Then Ralph said, “I love you, Bonnie. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’m hurting, too. But we both have to accept that it’s just one of those might-have-beens, isn’t it?”

  “No, Ralph! Listen, Ralph—”

  But then she stopped herself, because she knew that it was no use, and that she never got lucky like this. She didn’t switch the phone off, but slowly lowered it and stood in the street right opposite the Glamorex building looking up at Ralph’s office, where she could see him standing next to the window. After a while he hung up his phone. Then he stood with his arms tightly folded and his head bent, like somebody suffering from agonizing chest pain.

  Butterfly

  When she returned home, she called more of Ray’s friends, but none of them had seen him. She even called up Duke’s elderly mother, who lived in a nursing home in Anaheim. All Mrs. Winter did was mumble and cough and ask her repeatedly to remind her who she was. “Bonnie who? Duke? Who wants to know?”

  She called her own mother, too, who made the nearest noise that Bonnie had ever heard to an audible shrug. “Pwoff, that’s what men are like. They leave you when you least expect it. I never could tell what you saw in him anyhow.”

  She searched the house for anything that could give her a clue to what might have happened. Behind the water heater she found a copy of Hustler, corrugated with damp. She found a lock-knife under Ray’s pajamas, and a twist of kitchen foil with a minuscule amount of marijuana in it. But nothing that explained how and why they might have disappeared.

  Ruth called. “Any sign of the wandering boys yet?”

  “Nothing. I can’t work out what’s happened to them.”

  “They didn’t say anything before they left?”

  “I don’t remember them leaving.”

  “That was only yesterday. How can you not remember them leaving?”

  “I just can’t, that’s all. We had an argument. Maybe they walked out then.”

  “You know what you need? You need a break. Why don’t you come on over to my place and we’ll have a couple of drinks and polish our toenails.”

  “Ruth, I’m really worried.”

  While she was talking to Ruth, her eye suddenly caught a movement on the potted plant on the windowsill. A slow, humping movement, like a caterpillar.

  “Hold on, Ruth. Just hold on a minute.”

  She carefully laid down the receiver and walked across to the window. With the tip of the ballpoint pen she was holding in her hand, she carefully lifted up the leaves of the plant, one by one. And there, underneath the third leaf, was the black spotted larva of Parnassius mnemonsyne, the butterfly known as Clouded Apollo, or Itzpapalotl.

  Bonnie stared at the caterpillar and didn’t know what to do. On the table behind her, she could hear Ruth saying in a shrunken voice, “Hello? Hello? Bonnie—are you there? What’s wrong?”

  She let the leaf fall back and returned to the pho
ne. “Ruth … I’m beginning to think that something dreadful might have happened.”

  “Come on, Bonnie … you know Duke. He’ll be back before you know it.”

  “I think I have to talk to Dan Munoz. I really think that something dreadful might have happened.”

  Dan came around an hour and a half later. He was wearing a cream blazer with gold buttons and a black silk shirt.

  “Hi, Bonnie, how’s it going?”

  She let him into the living room. “You want a cup of coffee or something?”

  “No, thanks. I was supposed to be over on La Brea about fifteen minutes ago. Some kid stabbed his best friend through the heart with the pointy end of a beach umbrella.”

  “I wouldn’t have bothered you, but I’m really worried.”

  “Hey, that’s okay. What are friends for?”

  She handed him a small glass screw-top jar. “I found this crawling up that plant over there.”

  Dan held it up and peered at it, his eye magnified by the glass. “Ugly little dude, ain’t he?”

  “It’s the same kind of butterfly that I was telling you about … the Clouded Apollo.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “And Duke and Ray have both disappeared, and I think that something terrible must have happened.”

  Dan looked around the living room. “Something terrible like—what?”

  “Well, suppose that thing is some kind of a Mexican demon goddess—supposing she looks like a butterfly by day, but when it gets dark she turns into this insect monster with knives on her wings?”

  Dan opened his jaw wide and thoughtfully rubbed his chin. “Oka-a-ay … suppose she does?”

  “She could have killed them … and then she could have taken them away.”

  “If she killed them, where’s the blood? She’s got knives on her wings, right? And a knife for a tongue? There would have been catsup all over. But this place looks like a centerfold for Ideal Homes.”