Dispatches From Small Businessland

Difficult weekend. Saturday was dead. Nary a soul came into the Little Store all day. There was a brief flurry of sales shortly after sunset, and they were all big ticket sales: we almost made the minimum amount below which I start panicking and wondering where I hid my pill stash and staying up all night to watch Snoop Dogg bios on E! Entertainment.

But not quite.

Consequently when I got out of bed Sunday morning, I knew more about Snoop Dogg than any other person on the face of the earth with the possible exceptions of Suge Knight and Mrs. Broadus, Snoop's own mother.

Sunday, on the other hand, was much, much busier than normal although, little dance hall hostess that I am, I had to work hard for that money – reciting practically the complete bibliographic oeuvre of Harry Turtledove to force that fat guy to buy a bottle of coffee barbecue sauce; having to listen to the insurance guy rant and rave about the supervisor who was 20 years younger than he was and had an MBA from Harvard and knew nothing about selling insurance before he'd spring for that bottle of Ass In the Tub.

Right after dark, though, the Perfect Customer came into the store – this tall, unbelievably handsome guy who looked like Kyle Chandler and who loved chile. And who kept saying, "This is the most amazing place in the world; I love it, I love it." And who let me feed him an assortment of my own favorite flavors. And who bought stuff! Lots of stuff.

Still. Because last week was so far below my projections I find myself in the cash crunch that usually doesn't come till January. And I'm not really sure what to do about it. I feel paralyzed, kind of as if I'm sitting in a crawl space watching it fill up with water. At some point, the water is going to go up over my head and I'll drown. I should be looking around for ways to bail the water out. But I'm tired. Very, very tired.

However, really, there's nobody else but me to do it. So I better get crackin'.

(3)

When finally I saw the thing I was disappointed. I surprised myself by the intensity of the emotion really. Who pays attention to the man behind the curtain? Only the most terminal of burnouts; he’s almost always a bust.

What had I been expecting?

A woman with a cash box sat on the other side of the curtains. She had a broad face, slightly crossed eyes – the epitome of Mayan beauty circa 1100 AD, only now it was 2007 and she just looked weird. Genaro slipped her a C-note, she gestured us into the room.

Behind us waited a girl with thick black braids. She forked over fifty-three cents.

“Hey, I think you owe us ninety-nine dollars and forty-three cents,” I started to tell the woman.

“Shut the fuck up!” Genaro hissed.

The woman just smiled. The knowing expression in those eyes, the come-hither movement of her beckoning fingers unnerved me – or maybe it was just that my own eyes had gone through too many transitions of shadow to light to shadow again.

This room was packed too. Different crowd from the one on the other side of the curtains. These were the guys you picked up early mornings from the Wal-Mart parking lot when you had heavy furniture to move. Some of them had brought their women or their children or both. The special effects budget had only been enough to spring for a few strings of Christmas lights flashing red and green against the wall, but rows of candles flickered beneath them, a rainbow assortment of colors. The stench was over-powering – sweat, tequila, burning candle wax, incense, cigar smoke.

The thing sat in the middle of the room like the facilitator of a twelve-step meeting, natty in a European-style dark woolen suit and multiple black fedoras; a cigar in the hole that was its mouth; around its neck, an assortment of colorful silken scarves; an ammo belt across its chest.

Genaro was right. It was Charlie McCarthy on corn tortillas.

Not even a particularly interesting piece except for the head that had been carved from some wood I didn’t immediately recognize, a knotty wood with many discolorations that gave the thing’s face a merry, squinched-up, malicious expression.

It couldn’t have been worth more than a couple of hundred dollars. And you’d have to hustle hard to get that.

Why had I hounded Genaro into bringing me? I had stuff to do – not woman stuff, real stuff: I was supposed to be leaving the next afternoon for Belize. Seven hour flight followed by six hours in a jeep over roads that were mostly rubble and mud slide, until finally I got on a boat that would take me downriver past sugar plantations and rain forests to the remains of Lamanai. Some people I knew knew a groundskeeper there with access to interesting things. For three thousand years, Lamanai had been a center of trading and ceremony; for the past four hundred it had lain in ruins. I really should have been home rereading Ozymandias.

All around the thing, people had fallen to their knees, rocking back and forth, murmuring incantations in Spanish, English and the hissing, clicking language I couldn’t recognize.

Brother Simon, Brother Simon, you who have suffered, do not allow your servant the same pain. The immigration fucks showed up at the warehouse yesterday. Make me invisible. Cloak me in your essence –

I don’t come up with two hundred and forty dollar by tomorrow, man, they take my ride away, I can’t get to work. Help me, Mam, in this strange place like you help my father in my home –

Nine days late. He done it in the ditch – we pickin’ fresas, he push me down, he do it. She don’t believe me, ‘Papa don’t do a thing like that, bitch, whore, puta.’ I run away. Nine days late. No place to sleep, nothing to eat. Help me, Uncle Judas –

Next to the thing, a guy in a warm-up suit stood with his arms folded, studying the candles against the wall with an expressionless face. Seemingly at random, he would approach one of the petitioners, tapping him or her three times ritualistically with a stick. Then he would lead the petitioner to the thing where he would bend close and begin whispering in the petitioner's ear.

I elbowed Genaro. "Who's that?"

"I don't know how you say it in English, man. Abogado Espíritu, in Spanish. Spirit lawyer. How the Maximon talks to his people."

The spirit lawyer wasn't choosing his prey at random after all, I noticed. There was a pattern to it. From time to time one of candles would sputter up into a cascade of sparks. That seemed to be the signal.

I found myself oddly fascinated by those candles, the shadows their shifting flames cast against the wall. In particular my eyes were drawn to a certain red candle whose glass holder had been embellished with a representation of – of all things – St. Lazarus, a familiar name because it was my name, my real first name, camouflaged on the title page of the PhD dissertation I never finished by the letter L. Of course, I never used it. Would you? But I had memorized the saint's symbols when I was still quite young, a wolf and a goat kid lying at the feet of a half-naked man. I wasn't a Catholic. Perhaps it was the child's delight in discovering others who share some odd kinship with oneself, a birth date, a secret mispronunciation of a familiar word. A strange first name. Or maybe it was just the earliest awakenings of my interest in what one might call applied anthropology.

The red candle flared suddenly. I think I jumped.

And then I felt it, a tap, tap, tap upon my shoulders. I turned around.

The spirit lawyer.

Fine. If it got me closer to the thing, I could size it up better although I was pretty sure my first impression was the right impression: the thing was worthless.

The spirit lawyer had terrible breath. Garlic, cigars, something behind them that was… charnel.

The spirit lawyer began to whisper:

He gave it to you. He should have kept for himself, he paid enough for it. But hey man! You offered it back, he didn't want it. What more can you do? He'll be sorry. You're flying to the wrong place. Love waits for you but not there. Some place close but not there. You didn't kill her, she killed herself –

"What the fuck?" I screamed, and tried to push the spirit lawyer out of my way.

But he just stood there, frozen into place, his eyes vacant, his lips moving though I could no longer hear whatever it was he was saying.

I picked Genaro out in the dark, made my way towards him. I'd developed one of those headaches that feel like an ice pick in each eye socket. I didn't remember it coming on. One minute I was fine; the next, I was staggering. "We're outa here, cowboy. Chop, chop."

"The Maximon picked you, Hazard," Genaro said slowly. "Big honor."

"Fuck the Moshymon. Game over. I've got things to do. Lets go. Now."

The woman with the cashbox laughed at me as I fled through the beaded curtains, and then I was on the other side, in the full garish glare of those florescent overheads with the restaurant refugees in their overpriced clothes and their affected drawls laughing hysterically into my ears –

I felt as though my head was going to explode.

Fortunately the botanica's front window exploded instead.