One Life

Praise for David Lida’s One Life

"David Lida’s One Life is full of suspense and beautifully described moments that often conjure Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. Like his courageous protagonist Richard, who often journeys to the most dismal and violent places in rural Mexico in search of an elusive history, Lida fearlessly explores the stark places that often shape the human spirit."

— Maria Venegas, author of Bulletproof Vest: the Ballad of an Outlaw and his Daughter

Lida, himself a mitigation specialist and writer with deep ties to Mexico (where he lives), pours personal emotion into his story. In the process, he brings an elusive sense of dignity to a world where it is seemingly lost.

— Kirkus Reviews

"David Lida’s daring novel One Life will take you on a journey to darkest Mexico, where daily life is rich with irony and pathos, violence and humor, destitution and the homeliest of comforts. Richard, your travel guide, is on a mythic quest; he must descend to the underworld and come out with a story that will move the stone hearts of a Louisiana jury to mercy. His goal is to save the life of a condemned woman whose name, Esperanza, means hope. One life, his for hers. Gripping, suspenseful, worldly, and wise, this thought-provoking novel never lets up and the serious moral questions it raises resound long after the final page is turned."

— Valerie Martin, author of The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

"As I followed Richard, the unraveling narrator of David Lida’s One Life, I kept seeing, peeking around the corner, the whiskey priest from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. They both minister to a population so forsaken it has lost faith in mercy. For the Mexicans of Lida’s novel, there are only labor and fate, the former measured by dollars, the latter doled out by the country that issues them. Which only makes Lida’s achievement more remarkable: To follow Richard is to relinquish Anglo time, Anglo logic, Anglo law — to say nothing about the assumptions that obtain about here and ‘down there.’"

— Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life

Praise for David Lida’s Travel Advisory

Forget your romantic notions about south-of-the-border idylls. Writer David Lida gets at the contradictory, elusive reality of Mexico in this disturbing and powerful debut collection...elegantly conceived and executed...a powerful and original writer, one to follow, wherever he takes us next.

— New Orleans Times-Picayune

David Lida’s powerful, sympathetic, and critical imagination renders Mexico and Mexicans from seemingly every angle — it is like being let in on a secret, one detail at a time.

— Luc Sante, author of Low Life and The Factory of Facts

"Disturbing, provocative and often darkly funny, the stories in Travel Advisory go a long way toward explaining the duality many of us feel toward Mexico."

— San Antonio Express News

Gritty and unforgiving...paints a convincing, unvarnished picture of a struggling country.

— Publishers Weekly

Gets under your skin...the power of Lida’s stories lies in their tawdry, unraveling characters and the uncompromising, even disastrous situations in which they find themselves in this land of sorcery, squalor and seduction.

— Time Out New York

Observant, engrossing, horrifying, warmly humane and cooly yet devastatingly satiric stories. An intimate and convincing fictional portrait of contemporary life in Mexico.

— Francisco Goldman, author of The Ordinary Seaman

"Simultaneously perverse and purifying, Travel Advisory ushers in a talented writer with a mordant eye."

— Rita Mae Brown

These short stories ... capture Mexico at its essence, in intimate glimpses rather than generalities... an easy, narrative style that flows freely from devastating satire to equally insightful compassion.

— Paper

The Unnamed Press

P.O. Box 411272

Los Angeles, CA 90041

Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © 2016 by David Lida

978-1-944700-024-9 (ebook ISBN)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952136

This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.

For my dead

Whosoever destroys the life of a single human being, it is as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whosoever preserves the life of a single human being, it is as if he had preserved an entire world.

— The Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

Whosoever kills an innocent person, it is as if he has killed all of humanity, and whosoever saves the life of one, it is as if he has saved the life of all humanity.

— The Qur’an 5:32

Oh, Mexico, I never really been but I’d sure like to go.

— James Taylor, Mexico

CONTENTS

Opening Statement

Part One: Where the Devil Lost His Poncho

Party at the Ponderosa

Where the devil lost his poncho

Bad cop, worse cop

How I learned to love Nescafé

More errant than knight

Fiction

Media naranja

All this

The girl

Independence Day

Sidebar

Part Two: Welcome to the Club

A half orange among lemons

Sixty-nine motions

A Sunday kind of love

Silent scream

Q&A

True Blue

More media naranja

What a difference a day made

Free trade

The road to Mexico

Investigation

Welcome to the club

Bones in the desert

Exhibit A

Part Three: I’ll Fly Away

King of Hopeless Cases

Getting there is half the fun

M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E

Piecework

Dinner party

Go Greyhound

Back at the ranch

Land of dreams

Lean on me

Home remedies

I’ll fly away

It’s the real thing

It is what it is

Happy hour in the homicide capital of the world

Let’s make a deal

Habeas Corpus Petition

The Defense Rests

May It Please the Court

Acknowledgments

About the Author

OPENING STATEMENT

Ithought of death constantly, but rarely imagined how I would die. Pressed to conjure a vision, an optimistic picture emerged: I’d be one of those lucky slender guys who quietly sneaks into old age in a T-shirt, with thinning silver hair and respectable muscle tone. Not as vigorous as in youth, but without any serious debilitating conditions. You know the type. The guy you see in Starbucks wearing half-frame glasses doing the crossword puzzle, or enjoying the spring sun on a park bench—one of those guys younger men admire, and about whom women remark, He looks great for his age. A man who whistles past the boneyard until checkout time, which comes instantly and unexpectedly of a heart attack or a stroke. If it happened from seventy onward, I would have been more than satisfied. Who needs to live any longer than that?

It never entered my mind that at forty-two I would die suddenly and unexpectedly while passing through a dicey no-man’s-land between where I’d been born and the home I’d made. It’s true that dying that way was congruent to the life I had been leading. Some people thought I was reckless because I had never been afraid of Mexico City, and never frightened of the two-donkey towns to which I traveled, where the previous day they had kidnapped the police chief, or a week earlier six people died in a score-settling shootout on the dusty outskirts, or a dozen headless bodies were found in a mass grave. Where at any moment convoys of skinny soldiers swimming in their uniforms, their faces covered with ski masks, balancing Kalashnikovs against their shoulders, patrolled the unpaved streets. All of that was a problem, but none of it was my problem. I thought I lived in a protected bubble because of the work I’d taken on, trying to help save people’s lives.

Not that I was some kind of devil-may-care macho who purported to be fearless. Travels through México profundo came under the realm of acceptable risks. Other things petrified me. I was dreadfully afraid of contracting a hideous illness, like the ones that had killed both my parents. If I got sick, who would take care of me? After my divorce, I had no wife, no children, no mother or father, brothers or sisters. The thought of dying alone unsettled me, but I was scared shitless when I imagined an extended period of sickness and pain with no one around to alleviate my suffering.

It happened in a karaoke bar in a strip mall in Ciudad Juárez. I had been listening to a poor devil—a stocky guy with a Fu Manchu moustache—warble A Mi Manera, the Spanish-language version of the song My Way, off-key. (What a way to go, right?) Contrary to the cliché, before I died, my life didn’t flash before my eyes. Not precisely. A few Polaroids and postcards crossed my mind. The first snapshots were pornographic; I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say that while alive I thought of sex constantly, so it wasn’t strange that it occurred to me as the life left my body. Occasionally I had imagined a happy death while making love. That I didn’t come close to dying that way was just one of life’s malicious curveballs.

I remembered a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair, singing a song called Gema as she prepared her stall in a Mexican market early one morning. An old man in a white straw cap, snoozing in a pew in a seventeenth-century church. Sneaking a can of Coca-Cola into a jail in my backpack. A rangy woman with Mardi Gras beads strung around the brim of her hat, pulling up one of the legs of her cargo pants to reveal a .38 Special inside a concealed-carry holster.

My father on his deathbed at Saint Vincent’s. He wouldn’t let go, despite the pain, the grief, the agony, all those chemicals coursing through his ruined, diminished body. He clutched my hand and opened his mouth wide to scream, yet no sound came out. A silent shriek: my last image of Dad. My mother in a housecoat, slowly killing herself by lighting up one cigarette after another. Feeding the olives from my Martini to Carla, our little secret that she was two months pregnant. After we lost the baby, her absence emanating from a gunmetal-gray cell phone that refused to ring.

The lavender carpet of jacaranda leaves on the sidewalks of Mexico City in springtime. Oranges, freshly cut in half and glistening, in a stall outside the market. An aging black man who sat with me patiently after I burst into tears. The ramshackle church in the middle of the middle of nowhere, the choir singing I’ll Fly Away.

Once I realized I was dying, there was wonder: I was oddly content, even relieved. I had liked my life. It had been short but often sweet. I smiled inwardly. Was this what they meant when they said you should beware of what you wish for? I was given a death so quick that there was no time to suffer. Sure, I would have liked to have lived longer. If I had actually made it to seventy years, I probably would have wanted to keep going. When I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away. Why couldn’t that have been the last song I heard? My Way?

Regrets? I had a few. But most of them were so trifling they didn’t even merit consideration. Still, I cannot say the end was peaceful. The last thing I thought of gnawed at me inside, put my stomach in anguished knots. There was some unfinished business between me and a woman named Esperanza Morales. It was irresponsible to die before I had a chance to save her life.

PART ONE

Where the Devil Lost His Poncho

PARTY AT THE PONDEROSA

The first thing Esperanza believes will kill her is the smell. It’s a syrupy medicinal odor of disinfectant that comes from the blue liquid with which the floors are mopped in the morning and again in the afternoon. The smell is so hideous that at first, when she awakens at five A.M. for the prebreakfast body count, it brings bile to her mouth. If there were anything in her stomach, she would vomit. The odor creeps up her nostrils to the backs of her eyeballs, where it causes a wrenching headache for hours. And then she realizes that days have passed since she’s last noticed the aroma. She has become used to it.

The second thing she thinks will kill her is the food: pink slices of gristle that leave a coating like Vaseline on her tongue, between slices of stale packaged white bread, smeared with rancid margarine. That’s what they call a sandwich, with none of the condiments that embellish a torta at home—no mayonnaise, tomatoes, avocado, onions, jalapeños, or refried beans. Something else is served at least once a week, a flat brick covered in red paint with yellow powder on top. It’s cold and flavorless—their version of pizza. And then there’s meat loaf in gravy. It’s not clear whether there’s any actual meat in it, and it tastes as if it’s been thickened with sawdust. The entire saltshaker has been upturned in the sauce, which coagulates thanks to the same jar of Vaseline as the gristle sandwich. This is served alongside a ladleful of mushy kidney beans from an industrial-size can. None of it is ever hot, even when it’s doled right out of the pot, pan, or oven.

At first Esperanza won’t eat it, until she becomes hungry enough to remember those moments from childhood when, if the family ate at all, they shared a pot of beans or a pan of potatoes, tortillas divided into two or sometimes four. She remembers what it was like to be so hungry she would have eaten dirt. After a while she realizes that, if she does not precisely look forward to meals or eat them with pleasure, it’s a relief how they break up the day at six in the morning, high noon, and five in the afternoon. She manages to choke enough of them down so that she—who has always run thin, who has been nicknamed La Flaca since girlhood—begins to put on a little weight. She no longer swims in her orange scrubs.

The third thing she thinks will kill her is the group of four women that attacks her one afternoon. It happens during the hour of recreation when the doors to the cells in her gallery are left open. Esperanza often forgoes the yard; the concrete slab frightens her, surrounded as it is by cement and razor wire, guards with guns and pepper spray, gringa and morena prisoners whose language she barely understands. She also likes to stay inside because Pamela, her cellmate, always leaves, and it is the only time of day she can be alone. She has been drowsing on her cot, the lyrics to an old song revolving in her head—if this isn’t a dream, you are my other half—when she realizes that the four are standing in front of her bed. One of them, the stubby stocky one with the shaven head, talks quickly, saying things Esperanza can’t make out. The woman has a smile on her face as if she is telling a joke. The others are grim. The tall dark one with the stud in her nose grabs Esperanza by the collar and pulls her to her feet. "¿Qué haces?" she asks, although none of them speaks Spanish. The tall one pushes her into the stubby one, who loses the smile and pushes her back against the others. And then the four of them are knocking her back and forth as if she were a volleyball. In a tight circle, they manage to keep her aloft in the small cell, until they decide they would prefer her on the ground.

Every year in Puroaire, for a week in the middle of July, there was a fair commemorating Santiago Peregrino, the town’s patron saint. Esperanza’s mother would take the kids to church, where the entryway had been festooned with balloons and crepe paper of red, green, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag. Sometimes a few pennies would be scraped together so they could go to the food stalls on the street by the chapel and share a buñuelo, a square of crispy, deep-fried dough bathed in sugar syrup and sprinkled with cinnamon, or an ear of roasted corn slathered in mayonnaise and powdered chile. But there was never money for the rickety merry-go-round or that other ride where they strapped you into a metal bullet that went around in circles.

Esperanza would have done anything to be one of the children screaming inside the bullets painted purple, green, or blue. One summer when she was six or seven she pestered her mother about it so persistently that somehow Mamá had found a few pesos—saved from what she earned sewing and washing, or maybe stolen from her husband’s pants pockets while he slept—so Esperanza could be fastened into a golden bullet. The first moments of coasting were exhilarating, liberating, an experience so exquisite she wished the ride would last forever. But once the speed picked up, she regretted she’d ever been born. There was such violence to the velocity and the jerking of the cars that she thought her insides were being plastered against her bones, that her stomach would make its way out of her mouth. The fluorescent lights, the shouting toddlers, the painful jolts, all made her yearn for death. On the other side of the circle a boy, his black hair in flight like a bat’s wings, cried out for the ride to be stopped, but people only laughed at him. Esperanza kept her mouth shut. If she could just withstand it a little longer, it would be over.

She remembers that scene as her head bangs against the concrete floor and the four women kick her. With one hand she tries to protect her head and with the other her sex. The tall one pulls her hair. The one with the snarling mouth kicks her buttocks, another her ribs. When she moves her hand to shield her side, the stubby one kicks her in the face, opening skin. If it were one woman, Esperanza might try to defend herself, even though she isn’t a fighter. But what is she supposed to do against four attackers? They are a force of nature that can’t be stopped, like one of those summer deluges in Puroaire that send the tin-roof adobe shacks cascading down the ravines. Or the other storm that brought her to a monstrous world of houses collapsed under the weight of their roofs, or stood upright but with entire walls missing, the rooms exposed like a gigantic doll’s house.

They go through her pockets, find nothing, disappear. She lies on the floor, bent into a crescent, exhausted and bruised, silent tears blending with blood on the concrete. It is a relief to be alone again, until she realizes someone is standing outside the cell. It’s Woodruff, the enormous officer, mammoth bones and solid curvature under the blue uniform, the one who runs her stick across the bars and makes sucking sounds, her tongue against her front teeth, one of which is capped in gold with the shape of a star cut out. Her hair, extravagantly curled and pomaded, is painted red.

They been picking on you, baby? Don’t make no nevermind. They only playing. Ain’t got nothing better to do with their time. Esperanza has little idea of what the guard is saying but the voice, although stern, reassures her. She realizes she had almost stopped breathing and inhales deeply. Now get your butt up off that floor, baby. She lies motionless. Right now, girl, says the guard. She doesn’t know what Woodruff said, but from the tone of her voice perceives the command and pulls herself upright.

All that happened months ago, weeks after the monolithic metal door painted the glossy green of an after-dinner mint slammed behind her with a frightening finality inside the jail in the Plaquegoula Parish Sheriff’s Office. The first day: the shower, the cavity search, the insecticide spray, the baggy white underwear and the orange scrubs, the long walk down the green reeking hall to the cell block. The irreversible closure of that huge metal door, the impossibility of turning around and walking outside, the idea that she might spend the rest of her life staring at the concrete walls and never again see the sun or hear the chirp of a bird.

You don’t have any of those salty peanuts? Pamela, her cellmate from Honduras, asks. I like those salty peanuts. After her pronouncement Pamela begins to laugh and then rock back and forth on her cot. Esperanza nods without saying a word. She tries to be invisible before Pamela and responds only if it’s absolutely necessary. Pamela will sometimes jabber in fragments of sentences. The words may be Spanish, but when Pamela talks she makes as little sense as the gringas and the negras yammering in English. She is thirty-five and flabby with lank brown hair. Her mouth is always open, her wide gums exposed, teeth as big as a horse’s. Every day someone comes with a cart and gives her medicine.

Esperanza’s first cellmate had been an unsmiling woman with a close-cropped natural and a dull gray finish to her skin, who read the Bible all day and never directed a word to her. Then she was gone, replaced with a güera with freckles, pimples, broken teeth, and greasy red hair, uncombed and creeping toward her shoulders. She was in her mid-twenties, about the same age as Esperanza, and because of her lax bathing habits had a sour odor. She spent most of the day directing invective toward Esperanza, words that became easy to ignore because she didn’t understand them, and because the redhead never looked her in the eye when she said them.

The bowl of the seatless steel toilet is two feet from the cot where Esperanza sleeps. At first she panicked at the idea of using it in front of her cellmates. Even in Puroaire, with a dilapidated bathroom, she and the others in her family took care of their necessities privately. But to pull down her pants and squat before strange and hostile neighbors? She peed only when she couldn’t hold it in any longer. Because of the starchy diet absent in fiber, a week went by before the institutional victuals caught up with her and she had no choice but to defecate. It was a thunderous, fluid, suppurating cascade of bile; it felt as if she was evacuating her internal organs and she couldn’t stop herself from groaning. She caught her Bible-reading roommate gaping at her and glared back. When the other woman turned her head, Esperanza felt in a curious way triumphant.

Maybe they’ll give us that thing with the peaches tonight, Pamela says. She refers to a dessert in which a canned fruit encased in solidified syrup is perched atop a hard starchy chunk. The powers that be thought they were doing the few Spanish-speaking inmates a favor by pairing them up in cells. That is how Pamela entered Esperanza’s life. Pamela, who growls gutturally and laughs when nothing remotely funny has been spoken. Pamela, who grinds her teeth and snores while sleeping. Pamela, who grunts as she begins to rub herself. Esperanza discreetly turns toward the wall. You can look at me, Pamela says.

The noise never stops. Atop a cement bunk and an inch-thick foam mattress, Esperanza is constantly disturbed out of a fitful sleep by the bark of shouting arguments, the buzz of a radio, or the blast of a TV infomercial, a solo droning rap or the harmony of several voices in song. In Puroaire she was sometimes awakened by the arguments when her father came home drunk. That happened periodically but predictably; here she doesn’t know from one night to the next what will wake her or prevent her from sleeping at all. Still, she has become more or less accustomed to the interruptions, to the fluorescent lights in the hall that are kept on through the night, to slumber in fits and starts. She wonders whether she is capable of getting used to anything.

She hears the sucking sound of Woodruff’s tongue on her teeth. Sometimes the officer stops outside the cell and talks for a few minutes. Esperanza doesn’t understand why; the words are almost entirely a mystery both to her and to Pamela.

Where you at, Falanza? the guard asks, peering into her cell. Esperanza nods. Woodruff has never learned how to pronounce her name so she more or less makes up a handle each time she addresses her. Esperanza can’t say her jailer’s name either. How they treating you? Ain’t no one been up in your shit lately? She speaks playfully, but there is little comfort in the singsong tone; she holds her stick in a vertical position as if to warn Esperanza not to even think of defying her. You getting to like partying here at the Ponderosa? They worst places in the world. Don’t make no nevermind if you like it or not, ’cause you going to be on the inside a long time. She extends the word long in a breathy drawl.

Pamela doesn’t like the guard. She gets up from her cot, begins to walk around the cell and mumble. In Spanish, she tells Woodruff that she is a fat idiot, and that she cannot cause Pamela any harm because she is protected by San Charbel. Soon the officer will be burning in hell where the devil will make her dance like Juana la cubana. Woodruff ignores her.

I can’t figure you out, girl, says the jailer to Esperanza. Most of these motherfuckers up here is simple as shit, but you like a mystery.

The jailer fixes her gaze on Esperanza, who looks toward the floor.

I seen all kind of freak-ass bitches up in here. Cutthroat hoes steal the yellow out of an egg or the white out of your teeth. Wack-ass bitches who give up all the pussy they got for five dollars worth of crank. Pimpstresses dumb enough to do two dimes for riding in a car with the soldier that pulls the triggers. Pamela stands next to the bars making faces