OFF THE TRAIL IN TALAGAYA

I drank my way through that year, half on the sly. Put down a bottle of hard stuff every two days without a thought. But this story isn’t about that, it is about Grandpa.

We were living in a cabin way down a holler south of Mexico when he decided to drive himself down in his 98 grey Caddy with the crimson faux leather interior. The last US highway patrol to interfere with him told him to drive faster, or else get off the interstate. Then in a blink of an eye Grandpa was through Tamaulipas, oblivious to the bullets and grunts of falling bodies that played like a cartoon across his rear view, the slugs from semi-auto sawed-offs and cholos thrown like stuffed bunnies from their white Suburbans yo-yoing blood and spit horizontally from their smitten, slow-motion screaming mouths, their last testament to this earth, of the way they had chosen.

Grandpa stopped in a gas station and said to the girl attendant, Fill her up with unleaded, boy, and check the radiator. I think she is running a little hot. You do that for me now.

The girl blinked and said, ¿Señor, será Magna o Ultra?

Our cabin was fixed up with a recycling bin made of four wood posts and some chicken wire strung chest-high, and I completely filled that son of a bitch with bottles over the course of just eight months. I drank and I howled because we were way down the holler from Talagaya, tucked into the deepest neck of the woods. I ran naked through the brambled high sierra forest, butt naked but with boots on, wood pimpled as it was with skunk nests and discarded sheets of tin roofing, stubbed and arched with twenty-year stands of pine oak, splashed with violent flowers, and peopled with serpents with blue heads and white bodies, striped and collared of all Tlatlauhaqui’s colors. When the moon was high I chased the coyote off the chicken coop with a machete, both of us snarling and ears pinned back, gums bared in the light of my torch, my dogs circling, and then the bastard jumped the fence and was gone.

What do you have these dogs here for if they don’t do nothing, Grandpa said, swaying in the doorway of our cabin, surprising me as I mashed nixtamal in just my jocks. Behind him Grandpa’s Caddy ticked in the heavy spray of dust he had kicked up skidding to a halt in the dirt drive.

I asked Grandpa how he found us but he would never say.

And in the morning there was another crater of bloody feathers where the canis latrans had met the gallus gallus domesticus, a pesky, foul-tempered leghorn I was in my heart of hearts not sorry to see go.

Grandpa said, You got to get yourself some rhode island reds, they are the best laying hens.

And every third night the cayote got one more hen. I started with fifteen and now had eight, I told Grandpa. Started out with five liters of mezcal – now had none.

I looked deep into my bottle and my bottle winked back.

Grandpa said, You been drinking, boy? but I denied it every single time.

I went and made up a bed for him in the room at the end of the long hall. We called the place a cabin but it was more like a giant chalet, had two floors of bedrooms on one side, a huge kitchen with hanging pots, living room with sofas made out of the boulder that served as one half of the foundation, a fireplace the size of Grandpa’s Caddy that I kept lit from dawn til I slumped over into my own drool at night, and huge windows that looked out down the side of the mountain, and one lonely swing hung from a pine tree out past the cabbage patch. Looking down off the tips of your boots and bare legs from that swing you noticed it was a good tumble down the hill from your perch.

It was cold as a summabitch, Grandpa told me as he stood in his golf shorts and Hawaiian shirt. He asked me how far it was to the beach.

I said, About fourteen hours by Caddy.

He said, God damn it, how do you expect us to get any action around here, Gee, drinking alone in the middle of the goddamn woods? There ain’t even any chicks around here, just a lot of little brown boys.

I told him that the cleaning girl was technically a chick, the one he had made a pass at yesterday.

Grandpa said, That was no girl.

I would line up the bottles on the expansive lacquered pine countertop beneath those swaying pots like it was my own private bar and sit there and talk to Lloyd about my troubles.

Lloyd, you the best goddamn bartender from Tamaulipas to the setting sun, I told him.

Thank you, sir, Lloyd would always reply.

I probably told Lloyd too much, but what was I supposed to do, go crazy down in that woods? Bottle it all up and never say a word to no one?

Grandpa stayed a total of two nights and then drove off to Acapulco.

Grandpa stood looking at our car, softly kicked out one boot to touch the tire, then withdrew the boot in disdain.

He said, You got to get mud tires for the roads up here, who do you expect to rescue you out of some ditch up here, the National Guard?

At night we would stand next to the crackling bonfire I made in my Cadillac-sized fireplace and burn the garbage, since the trash service had been canceled by federal law. The fireplace had been designed to be an entire space for the señoras to boil their stews and grill their tortillas over the course of long, predictable lives but this is not what I used it for.

Grandpa said, You have to get yourself a rifle, boy. This is no country to walk around in unarmed.

I bought beers for us in a case, four by six, twenty-four in all, and we drank them lukewarm because Grandpa refuse to drink his beer poured over ice, which I had also drug in from the shop, which was how I normally drunk mine. The ice sat and sank in its bag in the sink and in the morning was gone.

Later I learned I had got a hex cast upon me by the locals because we snagged the last case. The person who hexed me left a bundle of feathers and bloody nuggets of chittlin hanging from a piece of twine off my bedroom window, and from that moment I began to experience nightmares of the sort from which you do not wake up.

Such as when you dream of a hoodoo bundle that thumps once like a dead bird against your cabin bedroom window, laid there in the witching hour by your enemies, and hours later in the light of day, having forgotten the dream, having made breakfast, having gone through the drawers in search of the lost bottle, you draw back the curtain and find yourself beak to beak with the hoodoo bundle, humped there and twined to a nail like a crucified sparrow, and at night your leg goes dead stub where the blood crystalizes like old molasses, and when you finally lie down with your leg propped up on a suitcase and seek out the dark you dream that you are lying in your own bed, leg propped on a suitcase, and the window goes thunk.

Grandpa said, These goddamn beanos don’t even know how to fish through the ice, but that was about ten beers in. I think what he meant was it was about bedtime.