Felicia flushed from cheek to chest. The points of her nipples peaked through the silk of her robe. She put down her glass with a clatter and stood, turning toward the house. Fernando followed after her, back inside and up the grand staircase. His eyes bore into her from behind. When she snuck a glance back at him, she nearly missed her step. Clutching tighter to the banister than a drunk person should, she ascended mincingly the rest of the way.
By the time they reached the landing, she seemed
Fernando returned several times to the Hollywood house in Antigua. As Felicia had said, Mondragón was never there. With its grandiose stylings and furnishings, its garage of sportscars and motorcycles, its pools and palms and flamingos, its silent maids and sleek silver hounds, the place had the look and feel of a poor boy’s playground fantasy, a dream deferred realized into a trophy house—and Felicia was its crown jewel. Placed there with pride only to be forgotten. Beautiful and bored and
Felicia craved direction. Whether this was her nature or simply the result of her circumstances was difficult to say, but Fernando suspected the latter. This made her uninteresting to him fairly quickly. There was always excitement with a new woman, the novelty of seeing them exposed for the first time. To Fernando this wasn’t necessarily synonymous with seeing them naked. In Felicia’s case, he’d seen the breadth of her in their first rendezvous.
Most men would have been thrilled to have
Fernando would have to begin again, distancing himself from her.
There were many ways he could accomplish this. The goal was to wean Felicia off him without provoking her to hysterics. Fernando enjoyed playing with women. He even enjoyed tormenting them a little—but to cause them real pain was never his intent. Women’s tears of anguish sickened and repelled him. A clean break was best for all parties concerned. Arguably tricky to accomplish when a woman’s pride had been exploited for his
It was one of Lalo’s guys who first alerted him to the trouble. Fernando followed him downstairs, weaving after him along the broad path he cut through the seething torrent of the crowd. Fernando went out back to find himself pitched headlong into a scene of scandalous turmoil. In addition to Lalo, Fernando saw that Chico, Pepe and Tito were already there, along with several others of Mondragón’s crew—and a straggling contingent of gawkers which was growing by the second.
Smoke rose from
Fernando didn’t have long to wait. He was out smoking on the crumbling, graffitied overlook, surveying the motley sprawl of Cortez old and new, when Pedro’s crew-cab truck drew up beside him. Pablo sat in the backseat. Their looks were sober, grim.
“Primo,” Pedro said.
Fernando nodded to him.
Crushing out his cigarette beneath his bootheel, Fernando walked over to the passenger side of the truck and got in. Pedro ferried him away to a part of Saguero he’d never been. A graveyard place of
Fernando watched the shadows play over the clapboard walls, chinked with cracked clay, packed with moss and palm floss. In the flicker of the oil lamp, the shadows bent and twisted, undulating salacious and sinister over the racks of dried herbs, the grubby tallow candles, the rough-hewn shelves of bones and beads and carved icons, the yawning seed husks and glowing amulets, the murky vials of potions and jars of insect wings, the clusters of tin crosses and the painted faces of the saints, sunken
Fernando lost track of the days in his convalescence. In the gloom of the hut day and night seemed to meld together, shadow for eclipsing shadow. Eventually, Chico and the others came to visit him. Whether they had spent the intervening time mustering up the nerve to cross the witch’s threshold, or bracing themselves for the sight of him that lay beyond, it was clear that their imagined fears had been worse than the reality.
Clustered around Fernando’s cot, his friends sat hunched together
Fernando’s body creaked like the cot as he dragged himself out of it. His grandmother harried him, imploring him not to get up, telling him he needed to lie still and rest. Fernando brushed her off. He knew that if he lay here any longer in this bed he might never get out of it. It wasn’t the weight of his injuries he felt as he sat up and stood, but a burden of grief that oppressed him. Crushing and unseen, and all the more terrible for it.
He set tasks for himself around the homestead. He
The skies grew dark well before dusk. Fell winds gusted, breathy and portentous. Hushed whispers of warning that skimmed the ear. The dense, damp air stirred like a broth. Grey-black thunderheads thickened as they rolled in above the lashing trees. Murky clouds churned slow and viscous overhead, like a cauldron of conjured night.
The old woman peered up at the growing tumult, the lines of her face shadowed with presentiment. “A storm is coming.”
Swiping a hand across his sweaty brow, Fernando