
El Mano Negra by Mario J. Gonzales
Once there were fires.
Macario started them, at first in the empty lots dotting our town. Several times I caught him feeding kerosene into trash-filled barrels near the hotel that doubled as a wax museum on weekends. The police were always one step behind as was the whole town who suspected Macario but had no proof.
I even found him in my grandparent’s shed, dancing among the preserves—chokecherry jams and the hearts of pickled squash nearly falling from their place in the cupboard. At the end of the dance, Macario would take the meatiest preserves and smash them against the brick wall in the alley where the police captain raced his Enfield motorcycle through on Saturday nights.
“Why are you doing this?” I yelled while trying to stop him.
But I knew why. His father’s latest stint in the nearby island prison was for Macario a good reason to set fires, break jars and steal things of little value.
I suppose that’s why many called Macario a ‘born thief.’ Though to me, his face wasn’t criminal. The hurting curl of his lips, the arched eyebrows dark as crow’s feathers and the gentle slope of his brow gave him the washed look of fresh made innocence.
Innocent or not, Macario did smash the church’s collection box for the blind kids of San Jacinto. It was Easter Sunday and palm fronds littered the church steps. The large evening sky looked down on us and everyone who had gone home after services was sitting down to dinner. You could hear their chattering. The sound of bowls and plates being emptied were everywhere. We were passing by the blind’s kid’s box in front of the church when Macario said, “Let’s open this treasure chest,” and then threw it against a ten-foot high black and blue cross. Forty-seven pennies flew into the air before shifting winds turned them into bats that fluttered toward the beach and beyond.
Shortly after destroying the box, Macario went blind. This is what happened. We’d gone to the train station to check-out the migrants who jumped on and off on their way to the United States. Some real beauties showed up and we’d try to get their attention. No dice. Macario thought the girls acted like princesses, “Like they shit silver and exhale gold,” he’d say.
The train slowed as it neared the station, with the grinding force of its metal brakes throwing thick orange sparks. Several hit Macario’s face. He shrieked, an awful stabbing sound, saying, though I barely understood, “Everything’s floating in white light.” He tried rubbing vision back into his eyeballs and when he couldn’t, Macario pulled at his hair, took out his knife and threatened to tear deep into every shadow, turn each piles of air into piles of ash. I grabbed a nearby brick in case he lashed into me. But the buzz-saw cut of his voice fizzled to a low mumble and he scowled like a young thug glimpsing for a moment their cruel solitude.
On our way home clouds boomed, signaling a monsoon rain that dropped a few meager drops before retreating over the mountains, “The rains are falling in the Huesca Valley. The llano must be green there and the barrancas loaded with wildflowers.” I said and then regretted every word, feeling embarrassed at how fruity I sounded. None of it mattered since Macario’s mind was elsewhere, ignoring me, so I said without thinking, “You know, your blindness is divine justice, Macario, God’s punishment for breaking the coin box.”
Quicksilver light blew in and out of his eyes and then came a rage. An awful one, bodied with a crooked spine and the scabbiest of rat bones.
“Fuck the blind kids. Everyone takes a hit. Just like everybody gives one. It’s got nothing to do with God. It’s all crazy, anyway. Even normal things are crazy stuff in disguise. Like did you know that my mom’s new husband was already married to a Tres Lagunas woman? Yeah, he told her after the wedding, wouldn’t shut up about it, proud of having two women, I guess. That’s how it is, Ludo. Makes no sense, none.”
I said nothing and walked ahead of Macario who held onto my belt and made small rings of dust twirl like yellow devils at his feet.
After a short while, Macario eyes lolled side-to-side as if he were having a seizure. The wind blew a wicked gust of the sun’s fire onto our backs. I’d stopped to look up the road at some men fixing a flat tire. Oil and sweat poured from their foreheads. Engine sounds came out of their mouths and their teeth were as sharp and uneven as broken glass. Afraid, I turned to Macario. His mini-seizure had ended, all the stiff muscles masking his face let go. With his pain and tension eased, Macario pushed back his shoulders like a bird readying itself for flight and began talking about his old man,
“My father was happiest when he could pick locks, lift wallets, plunder stores. He especially loved the trick action of a switchblade. He called it his dancing partner.”
Macario then showed me the spot on his knee where his father had jabbed a knifepoint years ago. I said the scar was shaped like a clown’s smile. Macario thought it was more like a baboon’s skull.
“And Ludo,” he said, drawing me so close I felt the thump of his heartbeat crash into mine, “Few know, but my father was sick, ulcers on his chest, bleeding ones. But get this, the ulcers gave him visions and he’d see El Mano Negra rising like the dead from the sea.”
Macario suddenly changed topics, saying innocently enough,
“Hey Ludo, describe the trees, the dirt lots filled with dead cars. Describe the statue of a fat baby riding a sea turtle in the center of the park.”
“Don’t be ass. You know what they look like. They haven’t changed since yesterday,” I said, not knowing why I spoke like a muddy creature to Macario, my best and only friend.
I then paused and thought about the childhood we’d shared: throwing white slimy stones at pirated ships from the banks of Cienfuego cove. Or sleeping as one in tattered hammocks thin as spider webs, our bellies limp from hunger. Dreaming about calabash flower soup and waking with a jicaro taste in our mouths.
Macario also stopped and stood before me: eyes useless, shirt off, back sloped as if he were expecting a hit. It came from the muddy creature as I pushed Macario. He fell, hitting the ground hard.
When he did, time splintered, the moment cracking in two. Then I remembered a great slowing. I was sure of this as I could hear the old men waiting for a barber’s shave clear dust from their throats and picture the ash from the trash pit fires fall like little bits of hell swarming. It was like a beam of light shining through darkness allowing me to clearly see Macario as he was now and would be forever. In that place I saw the sweat living on Macario’s chest roll downward. I saw its electric path flow to his stomach where it disappeared at the border separating his tanned waist and shorts. And when he opened his mouth to speak, I saw heat blossom full upon his lips and could sense the soft wet reaches of his tongue, lifting, curling, arching. It was a kiss. Made from the waters of some inconsolable dream.
When the world started-up again, Macario had his finger in my face, shouting awful things about my family. How my uncle Ribero, lost at sea, was queer; how my grandmother’s dread of being photographed and my grandfather’s fallen arches were proof they lived in constant fear. He grabbed the shirt slung over his shoulder and tried to strangle me. He was strong as a stone cutter’s grip, but my knee found his balls and I gave him a good one.
“Go the fuck home, you thief,” I yelled. Macario staggered, with nowhere to go, past the sterile fig trees we use to climb as boys and the thorny bits of grass our senile mayor dares to call a park.
Feeling odd, with only time to lose, I held sand dollars to my eyes trying to figure out what the blind see. The brittle shells felt ancient and something emerged from the one pushed against my right eye. Removing the dollar, I saw a tiny worm poking its body from a hole. Meanwhile, Macario had snuck behind and punched me hard right center on my back.
“What the hell? I thought you were blind.”
“Only in one eye. Come on, it’s getting late. Let’s go to the beach.”
On the beach, ocean turtles would crawl on their bellies to lay eggs. Macario got it in his head that his father would escape prison by dressing as a turtle and swim unrecognized among them. We spent the night, a moonless one, watching the turtles enter and leave the beach after doing their business. I fell asleep. When I woke in the morning Macario was covered in seaweed, eating turtle eggs. They made him retch and I said with a voice scratched and pitted, “It serves you right.”
Tired from lack of sleep, Macario passed out on the shore. The tide licked at his toes as I watched over him, brushing away the speckled sand crabs. While he slept, I built a castle wall from cracked and worn shells littering the beach to protect us from the hurly-burly cries of inmates imprisoned across the sea. Talking from the confined space of his firelit visions, Macario raved about El Mano Negra using words only the condemned could understand.
After his long sleep, Macario woke-up and we watched the tides shrink and grow. I asked him about the fires, if they’d ever stop. He looked at the ground, searched for a firmness that wasn’t there and said, “Everything burns eventually, Ludo. Didn’t your grandparents ever teach you that?”
§
“At first sign of more trouble we’ll jump into the ocean, hand in hand. If it rains we’ll open our umbrellas and dare lightning to strike us twice,”
I said this to Macario the next time we met. One of his eyes was bandaged and so we walked carefully through a weedy field. Half of it was stubble while the other half was overgrown and golden, deep with insects. Whenever the wind changed directions small locusts popped into the air. One caught in the tangled strands of Macario’s long dirty hair. Without moving his head, he reached for the grasshopper, crushing it in his palm.
“Tough guy,” I said. He shrugged and with the back of his hand felt for a mustache he’d been trying to grow for months but his face was always too young, too soft.
In the evening, we saw the lighthouse light was off and the bats had gone, resting in their caves. Their bellies are full we both said at the same time. We pinched each other’s arm and noticed how sad the sea was. No waves and it looked like an endless cemetery with the white and black seabirds listlessly gliding just above the water. We had nowhere to go and all day to get there. Everyone else: the shellfish poachers, the head-scarfed practitioners of Santeria and the hollowed-out junkies who peddled their bodies for a taste of morphine had gone home. All was quiet, and the silence was brutal. We camped at a rock called Whale Maiden. I sat on the tail and Macario lay like a murder victim across the hump.
In a voice burned green, lazy with sun and salt, Macario said, “I’m bored. Tell me a story, Ludo, make it a good one.”
“We’re the last humans in the world,” I began.
“The earth is doomed. Earthquakes, floods and fires are near. But we don’t care and so as we wait for the ruin to begin, we learn to hover like colorful kites in the sky. We pass the time climbing snow-capped mountains and racing miniature peacocks on motorbikes through fern and redwood forests. When we get hungry you roast fish and pig: cabrillo and acamaya and give me the fattest portions of roasted pork ever seen. We eat till our eyes grow tight and small. Then we smoke cigarillos. Black-tongued river monkeys from the far side of the mountains come to gamble with us. They offer gifts: elephant whistles and cherry bark candies. In return, we teach them to read the flights of birds for signs of the apocalypse.”
More silence came and then it died, killed by sirens. We weren’t the last people on earth anymore. There were others and they meant to take Macario away.
EL MANO NEGRA CAUGHT!!!
That was the newspaper headline announcing Macario’s capture .
An epidemic of rats at the police station led to the cops being out full force and there was Macario, kerosene in hand, about to douse the police captain’s beloved motorcycle. ‘We’ve got you,’ they said with faces screaming like men trapped inside carnival mirrors. Macario sneered, filled his breath with the poisons corroding his soul and lunged at their throats. They attacked. Blinding him once more by pouring salt directly into his eyes and then throwing him in a dirty cell where he gorged on rats and nothing else. After a week, Macario was released on the condition he leave town and never return.
Once free, Macario said, “There’s not a prison alive that can hold me. Give me the keys to the cell, I’ll burn them. The houses, the barns, the fisherman’s boats, I’ll burn it all.”
That same night the lighthouse light blinked meaning someone had escaped. Prison boats made their way to land. Macario believed it was his father. Later we heard the escapee had drowned. Eaten by sharks was what the pimple-nosed barber told us after returning from shaving the heads of 100 prisoners.
“Who was he?” we asked.
“Who knows and who the hell cares,” he said. “It’s a well-known fact that the world does better without lice-infested men.”
Later that week, I went to my cousin Miguel’s wedding in Primavera. I drank too much and spent most of the night at the top of the stairs in the dance hall. My Tia Marci came to me, felt my forehead and asked why I was so cold.
“I’m not cold,” I said, knowing full well that while everything else moved with fever, I stayed frozen like a frightened rabbit.
“You can’t fool me. I gave you the touch. You’re cold and in this heat, it’s no wonder you don’t fall dead right here. Let me see something else,” she said and then pinched the back of neck until there was popping sound that echoed against the wall.
“Cold. You’ve been visited by El Mano Negra. I’m never wrong about these things. Never. I have something for you.” She went downstairs and returned with two tacos stuffed with meat.
“Here, eat.”
“What’s in it,” I asked
“Axolotl mixed with some burrowing owl,” she replied. “Eat it all. Don’t even think about leaving a crumb for the saints. Those nags can find their own food.”
I ate both tacos and quickly passed out.
My Tia’s words rolled inside me restlessly, picking at my thoughts, so the next time I saw Macario I asked, “Do you believe in El Mano Negra? That it is what people say?”
He was drinking mulberry wine, the worst of all wines. And after hearing my question, the blackened copper in his eyes flashed and he drunkenly said to get my head straight. “Ludo, soon I’ll be in Villahermosa with my mother and bastard stepfather. He has a bar there. I’ll spend my time selling shrimp cocktails to fat tourists with fatter wallets. El Mano Negra? Give me a fucking break.”
I stretched my bones like a cat climbing out of a box and considered selling everything I had and moving to Villahermosa. For a minute or two I saw this dream and then looked at the reality of the land. The ground is harder than a pick-axe and so nothing grows. The air boils in the summer and the fish stink of oil and gas. My pockets are always empty and it’s no wonder that the people here fear their dead. Many choosing to lock them away in caves and under limestone barrancas outside of town.
This was my home, where I belonged, I concluded
“Right, no big deal. Let’s go,” I said. A diesel truck almost hit us as I led Macario across a road. The driver stared us down. Macario returned the stare, his blind eyes not moving until the driver blasted his horn.
That night I lay in bed, thinking about how Macario would soon join his stepfather and mother somewhere far away. Outside my window, a blue iguana sat on the lowest bough of a dried-up rosewood tree while I sulked and repeatedly said, “We’ll walk into the ocean some other time. When we’re old men. When our backs are hollowed, our eyes opened.”
Soon after, I visited my Tia Marci at her house. She was working: reading the lives of people through their hands. When I entered the room, my Tia rose from her seat and with a panic in her voice said,
“Dios mio, my body hurts with the sight of you. You’re even colder. What a shame the angels would rather carouse with strangers than help my people. Well, no one ever got rich in a confessional. Give me your hands.”
I gave her my hands which she rubbed thoroughly with talcum powder. She then took out a large aspirin, cut it in two and offered me one half while she swallowed the other. “I’ve had a bitch of a head ache all day,” she said after blowing her nose and sending away a pockmarked child who came in search of his father. “That boy,” Tia Marci said, pointing to the fatherless kid walking out the door, “will never stop looking until one day he will become rough. His eyes will fail. His scent will turn to sulphur. Not even El Mano Negra would dare cast a shadow past his early grave.”
“El Mano Negra?” I answered while the fan overhead spun unevenly. I worried that time was splintering again since outside the evening’s blue light sang a cowardly song. It covered everything in a foul wind and an ash that floated like a plague in the air. Everyone in town felt it too, causing upheaval. Windows were shuttered, doors locked and the sound of a thousand rosary novenas ate deep into my heart. Even Tia Marci was forced to snuff out her candles and light new ones in their place, saying as she did,
“You know, El Mano Negra was once promised to the sun. But he fell to earth one day disguised as rain. And people crazy with love and fear, dressed him in paper clothing and danced around him until his soul caught fire. He then became an orphan, a black coral snake, the moonless sea, the enemy of time and possessor of the dawn.” Tia Marci then studied my face for awhile. In an almost-whisper she finally told me what I already knew, “Your heat will return but your sleep will always run cold.”
She then gave me a black coral amulet saying as I left, “Steal the words of Santeríans and make an offering to the sea where El Mano Negra dies and is reborn.” I went home, and tired of time playing its tricks, I snuck into my grandfather’s room and took a prized watch from his dresser. Just before dawn I walked to the beach, dug a hole well deep and buried the watch. Then I filled my mouth with sea water, twisted its bitter taste through my tongue and spat out the residue on the watches grave. Thinking that I could steady the burning world by removing its most potent fires. Finally I prayed, begging El Mano Negra to lift sight back into his Macario’s eyes. So that he could see the world as I did.
Then I waited for daylight and for Macario who agreed to one last meeting on the red-clay rooftop of the hotel that doubles as a wax museum on weekends.
But everything continued to burn just as Macario predicted. Caught in the flames were the late spring flowers on the hillside that withered and the little fish in the shallows of the sea that disappeared. I remember watching the fires from a distance, standing with Macario on the rooftop overlooking the sea. “Let’s jump, Ludo,” he shouted. I hesitated, thinking we’d break our necks. But jumped anyway, landing softly on the beach. The muddy creature returned and animating my voice, spoke to Macario, “You’re a thief, an arsonist. If you keep it up, you’ll end up in prison just like your dad.”
Macario laughed, “Don’t say nothing, Ludo. Ever since we’ve been kids I’ve gotten into trouble and then you warn me about this or that. I break and burn stuff, steal things that need to be stolen. I don’t do nothing else. Don’t want to.”
“But you’ll be locked up,” I said.
“You never can see that we’re all in jail, all of us prisoners of something. Look at the houses, at their bars and fences. What does that say?”
“They’re houses, Macario, people just wanting safety.”
“Safety? What makes them safe? You tell me. People are afraid, that’s all they are. Everyone hiding from their shadow. First, they get rid of my dad acting like this keeps them safe. But it never does. Cause what people really know, all they know is fear. Okay, they’ll get rid of me, later it’ll be another. You’ll see, Ludo. You’ll see someday. Carry me to the rocks where the tide pools collect.”
Armies of sand fleas crawled under our skin as I carried Macario on my back from where he whispered in my ear, “Ludo, someday you’ll need to break every goddamn jar in your grandparent’s lousy shed.”
On that day, sand flew on my wet lips and Macario tore my shirt, the one that read, ‘Life is love.’ He then held me. He held me closer than the wind before letting go. I fell, hitting the shore. It was there I saw dozens of hungry ravens soar overhead and heard children baying like wolves at my sadness. But I didn’t care. “The doomed earth is ours,” I shouted long after Macario’s mother and stepfather had come and taken him away.
At dawn, river monkeys appeared, singing songs about the water and begging for safe passage through my sprawling sorrow. I bowed yes and so did they. Our shadows mixing in front of great roasting fires. The air smelled of pork drippings and fish oils and orange embers singed the banners of a vacant heaven. Still it was not enough. Macario had disappeared. It was then I knew that no amount of Tia Marci’s divinations would save us from the black-handed one; the one that tricks and splinters time; the one whose fires burn wild, as if they were not even fires at all but only some kind of spell that comes and stays and never leaves.
That was long ago. But ever since on those nights I can’t sleep, I’ll go to the beach and watch 100 fugitive men rise from the ocean and walk onto the shore. Unlike fire they seem solid, with their shaved heads wet from a moonless sea and their mournful prisoner movements scorched from years behind bars. And while they go slowly, moving as if they’re entering a dream, I’ve wondered, and always will, if El Mano Negra walks among them.
Mario J. Gonzales was born in Fresno, CA and raised in the small farm-worker community of Parlier in the San Joaquin Valley. His short fiction has appeared in the Sonora Review, the Blue Mesa Review, the New England Review and other literary journals. Currently he works as a professor of cultural anthropology in Santa Fe, NM where he now lives.
What a beautiful vivid story -loved it!