Heiresses of Russ 2012 Read online

  I took my shawl from my shoulders. It was light, just enough to guard against the chill that settled over the desert at night, but I draped it over her waist, using some of the slack to cover her breasts.

  I caught another glimpse of the bruising on her back. It wasn’t indigo or violet, shadowed in yellow. It was veined in black, and filled in with orange. Two great, bruised wings, like a monarch’s, but out of focus, spread across her back.

  I wanted to touch them. I didn’t.

  “Are you a warrior?” I asked, even though I doubted it; her hair was gold as new corn silk, and the tan of her skin looked dirty, not coppery like the raw sienna that ran in my family.

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you one of them?” I asked. “Un ángel caído?”

  She winced. It was as close to a nod as I’d get. I took her in my arms. She was light, lighter than she should have been even with how thin she was, but she grew heavier as I came closer to our back door, like she was becoming solid and human. She fell in and out of waking, asking me over and over again to leave her alone, leave her out there. But when I put her in my bed and wrapped her in my grandmother’s ojo blanket, she slept.

  I needed clothes. She might let me touch her if I gave her clothes. The shops in town wouldn’t open until morning, and the skirts Carmen, Lucia, and I wore would look strange on the ángel’s boyish body, with her short, messy hair. Adriana’s dresser was my only choice.

  She was the heaviest sleeper of all of us. I eased her door open and snuck toward the heavy dresser. But my foot hit the only board in her room that creaked, and she started awake.

  “Little sister?” She sat up in bed, groggy. “What are you doing?”

  “Could I borrow some of your clothes?”

  “Why would you want to borrow clothes from me? You never wear pants. Besides, they wouldn’t fit you.”

  “Please?” I said. “I’ll explain in the morning.”

  “Is there a man in your room?”

  “Of course not.”

  She got out of bed, pushed past me, and slipped toward my room. I followed after her, but I had to slow as I passed the hallway mirror and the side table I always ran into if I wasn’t careful; my hip hitting its corner would wake my sisters for sure, especially if one of the earthen jars fell to the tile and shattered.

  Adriana threw my door open and saw the black and orange bruising on the ángel’s back. “You brought home una caída?”

  I shut the door behind us. “She needed help.”

  “Carmen will have a fit when she finds out. She doesn’t even like me going around with women. If she finds out you have one in your bed…”

  “Then don’t tell her.”

  She clicked her tongue all the way down the hallway and came back with trousers and a collared shirt. “These might be a little big and too long.” She left them on the dresser and nodded toward the ángel. “She’s cute. I can see why you like her.”

  “Adriana.”

  “Don’t worry, little sister.” She eased the door shut as she left. “She’s not the kind I like.”

  I dressed the ángel in Adriana’s trousers while she slept. The shirt I’d let her put on herself. When she woke just after midnight, I heated a chile relleno in the oven and tried to get her to eat.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, still a little asleep.

  I looked over her bony frame. “You look hungry.”

  “So do you,” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “You still look hungry.” She turned over, sucking air in through her teeth at the sudden pain.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re hurt. I knew it.” I pulled the quilt from her shoulders, freezing when I saw the scrape on her shoulder, the one that had been against the ground. It glistened like liquid garnet, warm and alive, the blood of a living woman, not a dead man.

  I caught myself biting my lip.

  Even in the dim room, I saw the flicker of understanding in la caída’s face. “You’re a salt girl,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We call you salt girls, because you want the salt in the blood.”

  I swallowed to keep from crying. I wanted her warmth, and to run my tongue over that slick of blood so badly it was driving me to sobs. “I don’t know why. We’ve been this way for a hundred years. Maybe more.”

  “Even we’re not told why things are the way they are.” She lowered her gaze, like shame was weighting it down. “Why we want what we want.”

  I pulled a strip of cloth over her wound, both to help it heal and so I wouldn’t see it. I wanted to dampen the smell of iron, as sweet as rain-made rust. “Why did you fall?” I asked.

  A wry laugh stuck in the back of her throat. “Why do you think?”

  “You wanted something.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  Two shallow breaths wavered in the back of her throat, one, then the other, before she grabbed me and kissed me, her desert-warm mouth searing my lips.

  “Soft.” She buried her nose in my hair and dug the heels of her hands into my back. “You’re so soft.” Then she dropped her hands and pulled away. “I’m sorry.”

  I stopped myself from grabbing her back. “I don’t understand.” I straightened my posture. “You fell because you wanted someone?”

  “No.” She dropped her head, letting her hair shadow her face. “That’s the worst part. There was no one. I didn’t fall in love. I just wanted.”

  I crawled on top of her, slowly pinning her down, and kissed her. She startled, but then gave her mouth to mine. I let my mouth wander down her neck toward her breasts, but it strayed, and her blood stained my lower lip. She arched her back to press her body into mine, but her blood heated my mouth, like hot sugar on its way to caramel, and I scrambled off her so quickly I fell from the bed. She grabbed my waist and pulled me back.

  I licked my lip, blushing and guilty.

  “You are hungry,” she said.

  “I shouldn’t be,” I said. “I eat all the time. My sister says if I don’t stop, I’ll get so chubby, I’ll look like a little girl forever.”

  She pushed a piece of hair out of my face. “You don’t look like a little girl.”

  I watched her mouth; her lips parted. She turned her shoulder toward me. “And you’re hungry for this, aren’t you?”

  I looked away. I didn’t want to see the jeweled red again. She cupped my face in her hands. “Could you live off me?”

  I raised my eyes to hers. “What?”

  “Could you live off me?”

  I tried to wrench away from her. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Because it’s not possible?”

  “Because I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “Yes, you could,” she said. “I’m no good for anything else.”

  “You’d be weak whenever I had some of you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I snuck a look at the streak of garnet on her shoulder. “Would you let me give you something?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “What you wanted.”

  “I couldn’t ask you for that,” she said. “I’m fallen. I’m dirty.”

  I slid my hands under the sheet and onto her hands. “And I’m a nagual.”

  She moved my hands back on top of the blanket. “If I could be your nourishment, maybe I’d be something good again.”

  I got up from the bed.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, baring the red jasper of her shoulder.

  “I need a cookie.” I paced in front of the door. “Do you want a cookie?”

  “No. I don’t want a cookie.”

  I put a hand on the doorknob. “Well, I need a cookie.”

  “Why?”

  Because I still thought the food of my former life would fill me. “Because when I get upset, I want cookies.”

  She laughed a soft laugh. That made me madder,
and I left.

  I hadn’t even closed my bedroom door behind me when the barrel of my grandmother’s pearl-handled pistol was in my face.

  “Good,” said Salazar, his drunken breath pressing me against the wall. “The littlest puta. Come on.” He gestured with the gun, and I followed the gleam of the handle toward the living room. Carmen always kept my grandmother’s pistol in the armoire in her room. I didn’t understand how Salazar could have it until I saw my sisters lined up against the mantle, Carmen with a gash across her right temple. Their bedroom doors were open, and they were in their nightclothes.

  “All four putas.” Salazar shoved me toward them.

  “Leave her alone,” said Lucia, in a louder voice than anyone but her sisters had ever heard her use.

  Salazar pointed the gun toward her. “The Virgin Lucia has something to say?” He twirled the barrel through her curls.

  Adriana lunged at him, but Salazar jammed the hilt of the gun into the side of her head, and she reeled back toward the mantel.

  Lucia stayed silent, glaring at him. “Any of you whores have anything to say?” he asked.

  Blood from Carmen’s wound glistened on her eyelashes, heating her stare. Adriana held the side of her head, but glowered through the hair in her face.

  “That’s what I thought.” He lowered the gun, but held it tight. “I want to hear what you did to him. I want to hear where you hid my brother’s body.”

  La caída’s face appeared in the hallway mirror out of the darkness, the steps of her bare feet quiet on the floor. She lifted a terra-cotta vase from the side table. Salazar turned at the slight sound of dried clay against wood, but la caída had already lifted the vase over her head, and brought it down on Salazar’s.

  The gun went off, shattering the mirror in the hallway. Lucia screamed. Salazar fell to the floor, hitting his head on the ceramic tile.

  I searched the dark for la caída’s face. She was nowhere. I stepped over the glass shards. “Caída?” I heard her soft moan and followed the sound. She was on the floor, her wound spattered with blood. I knelt to look at her.

  I hadn’t remembered the wound as that big, that open.

  It was on the wrong shoulder.

  “He shot her,” I said, feeling her forehead and brushing her hair out of her face. “He shot her.”

  Lucia grabbed her shawl. “I’ll go wake Marcus.”

  “She’s going for the doctor,” I whispered to la caída.

  “No,” said la caída. “Please.”

  Adriana turned on every light in the hallway. “Get her away from the glass.”

  Lucia cleared a path with the broom and I pulled la caída away from the broken mirror.

  La caída tilted her head, sweat dotting her forehead with glass beads. “Take what you need.”

  “No.” I kissed her forehead. “No.”

  Carmen found the bloody bullet among the glass shards. “It’s not in her.” She held it up. “It grazed her.” She crouched near us, taking in the black and orange wings on la caída’s back with a slow nod.

  Adriana began boiling water on the stove. Lucia crossed herself and whispered a prayer I couldn’t make out. Carmen held la caída’s arm by her elbow, not rough, but no more gentle than she had to be. “It’s not deep. But you should see the doctor anyway.”

  “What will he do to me?”

  “Nothing I don’t tell him to,” she said. “He’s my brother.” She looked at me. “Where did you find her?”

  “Outside,” I said.

  She set her elbow back down and nodded at Lucia. “Marcus will come here.”

  “Aren’t they going to come take me?” La caída asked, pulling her limbs into her chest.

  “Who?”

  “I killed him,” said la caída.

  “No one will know.” Carmen tossed her hands toward Salazar’s body. “Who’s hungry?”

  I couldn’t lift la caída’s body anymore. She was as heavy as a real woman. Adriana helped me get her back into my bed, where our brother checked her wound, pressing his lips together and nodding at my bandaging. “Not bad, hermanita.” He gave la caída something for the pain, and she slept. “She saved all my sisters, huh?” he asked when he saw the lines of her monarch’s wings. “Should be enough to get her back into heaven when she dies.”

  “What, now you’re a priest?” said Carmen, shooing him out of the room when he was done. “Get back to your wife.”

  As my sisters took their meal in the field outside town, I lay in bed next to la caída, tracing my finger along the thin cut where a shard of glass had sliced along the edge of her hip. Marcus had missed it because he was worried about the wound on her arm. La caída moaned awake. I pulled my hand away.

  “No,” she said, almost humming. “It feels good.” She reached up, her eyes still half-closed, and rubbed a lock of my hair between her fingers like it was silk ribbon. “You’re still hungry.” She pulled the sheet back to expose the cut on her hip.

  I flushed. “I can’t. You’re hurt.”

  “Will you take care of me?” She gave me a lopsided smile in the dark.

  “Yes.” I curled her hand into a loose fist and kissed her thumb. “Yes.”

  “Then take what I want to give you.” She pressed her palm into her hip to thicken the little thread of blood. “Take what you need.” She cradled the back of my neck in her hand and gently guided my mouth toward the cut.

  Part of me wanted to drain her; I’d silenced my hunger for the months since my eighteenth birthday. But she was so warm, all salt and no sweetness, that I wanted to savor her like the wine of black Tempranillo grapes or the darkest bittersweet chocolate. I drank slowly, and before she was too weak I stopped and slid my mouth across her thigh to the triangle of soft hair between her legs. I sucked on her labia, one at a time. I touched her as I kissed her, and she shuddered when I felt her wetness, and again when my curious fingers made her wetter. I drank her wetness and tasted the same perfect salt I found in her blood. She pulled me on top of her and traced her hands under my dress. Her palms painted my shape so I no longer felt young and hungry, rounded with baby fat. Her hands and her salt were shaping me into something nourished and womanly. Soft.

  Her fingers found me, and she touched me in the way I’d tried to touch myself every night for years. She covered my mouth with hers to keep me from waking my sisters. We mapped each other’s bodies with our mouths, and when her touch made me as weak as she was, we slept.

  When la caída was well enough, she and I joined my sisters on their walks, Carmen and Lucia with the lovers that followed them from town to town, Adriana with her woman of the week. As we passed the town cemetery, a headstone caught my eye. It was too new, too free of weeds and dry lichen, and carved with only the letter ‘S’ and the current year. The grass covering the grave looked new and tenuous.

  La caída stopped with me, but couldn’t tell what I was looking at. She hadn’t passed the cemetery a hundred times.

  “Mother told you we would never defile good men’s graves,” Carmen whispered as she passed. “Instead, we make new ones.”

  La caída watched Carmen, and her eyes narrowed as she listened. She didn’t yet understand the ways our family, how the undertakers and stonecutters, the doctors and butchers, all worked together to shield the desires of the women. She didn’t yet understand how we worked, humans or naguales. She didn’t yet know the million little sins we committed to turn our hunger for salt into the best thing it could be.

  Carmen took my hand and la caída’s and put mine in hers. “Welcome to Earth, ángel caída. You have a lot to learn.”

  •

  The Thick Night

  Sunny Moraine

  Mkali is a proud woman. She knows it because everyone says so, though she’s never thought of herself as proud. They say that she was named well—fierce, strong—but as with her pride, she only knows this about herself from what others say. What she knows is that she has kept her siblings—the only remnant of her family—saf
e through two wars, and now the drought, and the drought will not best her. When the Lord’s Resistance Army came streaming back down from the north like an unholy wind and swept the lives of her parents away, she lived her name, because she had to; because the other choice would have been to die, and, before so doing, to watch her brother and her sister die in front of her.

  The night the LRA came was very dark, and thick with smoke and screams. Buqisi and Kani were so small, huddled against her, Buqisi barely months old and Kani only just walking; how could anything so small stand against a night like that? So she stood against it for them, terrified and still practically a child herself, dragged into an abrupt and unwelcome adulthood. She led them out after, and she rebuilt the burned house with her own two hands. She beat the earth into submission, pulled food from it, kept them all alive. So if to be alive is to be proud, if to shake one’s head at death is to be proud, then yes, Mkali is proud. Too proud to get a man? Perhaps.

  Perhaps it is merely that she doubts that any man can be relied upon.

  •

  Not too proud to take a handout. They don’t say it, at least not aloud, but she’s thinking it as she walks down the dusty streets of Gulu. She wouldn’t have if there had been anything to be done about it, but it’s been a hard season, and the goats aren’t giving much milk, and if Buqisi and Kani are going to go to school even some of the day…

  There are foreign men in Gulu, Mkali has been given to understand. White men, at least some of them, and wearing blue helmets, at least some of them, and they have bags of rice and lentils and cornmeal, and bottles of medicine. They are giving these things away to those who are willing to stand in the hot sun to receive them.

  Mkali is a proud woman, if to do what needs to be done is to be proud.

  It’s a long time since she was in Gulu, and it feels like an alien place, this much noise and this many people, chickens squawking under the wheels of ancient cars, open-air cafes pungent with cooking meat, lanky boys sitting under rough tarps and crying out their wares to her as she passes: CDs, DVDs, American movies, beautiful men and women and guns, explosions, bang, boom, so much excitement! Such foreign excitement.