Mean Streets

The flesh-and-blood clerk, who looked nothing like his bony predecessor, returned with a sheet of paper. "Hmph," he coughed, then launched into a rattling discourse aimed somewhere in between me and Mickey, as if he couldn't decide which of us he was supposed to talk to—Mickey the brat or the illiterate gringa.

Finally the clerk let out an impressively heavy sigh, shrugged, and shoved the paper forward for one of us to take. "Buenos dias," he added, turning his back and stomping off to his sanctum in the hack.

Mickey grabbed the sheet and held it out to me after a second's perusal. "You're fucked. There are three graves for your guy."

"Three? Not for the same date."

"Yeah. Look."

I took the page and looked it over. And there were three grave sites given for Hector Purecete, all with the same death date in 1996. "That's gotta be wrong—it's not a common name, is it?"

"No." "Great," I muttered. "I guess I'll have to go look at all of them and see what shakes loose."

I stood up and walked out of the government offices with Mickey and the dog trailing me.

We'd started back across the zocalo, passing closer to the site of the teachers' fatal protest than I liked, when Mickey finally decided to talk again.

"What do you want to find this guy's grave for anyway?" Mickey asked. "Some kind of creepy ritual or something?"

My turn to sigh. "No. I told you before, I just need to find it and leave something on it. On November first."

"Yeah, right."

I stopped, burning in the high-altitude sun and the hot Grey energy of the massacre. "Mickey, is it just for me, or do you always have a bad attitude?"

He turned his head and muttered under his breath, starting to walk on. I snatched his arm and dragged him back to me, through a red blotch of remembered blood and pain. He flinched a little and tried to wrench himself out of my grip, spitting nasty Spanish words.

"Damn, that's a lot of endearing little nicknames you have for me. How 'bout we make this easier on both of us. You can just call me the GP—"

"Huh? The what?"

"The gringa puta. And I'll just call you brat-boy. It'll be so much easier, don't you think?"

He glowered at me and pulled against my hold. I let him go and sighed.

"Mickey, look: I appreciate the offer of help, but your attitude is just not flying with me. You can straighten up and stop acting like a punk, or I can do without you. What's it going to be?" My ghostly dog companion circled around us, growling as if to keep something unpleasant at bay.

Mickey seemed to consider my statement seriously, sidling into the sun and away from the crying red energy of the teachers' deaths. "OK… GP. We'll have to get to the panteones soon. It'll be a lot busier tomorrow. And you really don't want to be out tonight."

"You're serious about that ghosts of the violent dead thing?" He nodded. "You norteamericanos think el Dia de los Muertos is just a funny tradition—not real—but we don't. Not up here. This is the ghost country. We're not afraid of death—not like you. We live with it."

"You might be surprised…."

He ignored me. "But we don't do foolish things like stand where people were murdered on their day to return from Mictlan. That's just fucking stupid."

I nodded. "All right. Let's get someplace better then. Like the panteon—a panteon is a cemetery, right?"

"Yeah. It's actually pretty safe right now. But we should get the car. Those three aren't close to each other."

I was surprised at his change of attitude. He was still kind of surly, but at least he seemed to be helping me instead of making more work. We walked back to the house and Mickey borrowed his aunt's car—a dusty silver Chevy, which amused me.

I took the passenger seat and held the door open for a moment. The ghost dog stopped at the car's doorsill and sat on the ground, looking pathetic and thumping its stumpy tail, but wouldn't step up into the car.

Mickey looked at me. "Something wrong?" "No… no, I'm fine." I closed the door and the dog vanished from view. We drove away without any sign of the phantom canine until we got out at the first panteon on the list.

The first stop was the municipal cemetery of San Miguel. We drove around a small carnival that was setting up in a courtyard in front and walked across drifts of flowers and greenery that had escaped from the bundles carried by a stream of people entering the panteon ahead of us. The dog trotted up, materializing out of the road dust and Grey mist to rub against my legs and bump its head against me impatiently until we walked through the cemetery gates. The dog ran ahead, into the crowd of animate skeletons and live humans who filled the graveyard.

Everyone was busy, the living and the dead, and I paused to stare. "There are… a lot of people here…," I said.