Mean Streets

"Competition ofrendas," Mickey explained. His sneer wasn't quite as pronounced now. "Each group makes an offering in a traditional style and they compete to see whose is the most authentic, or whatever. Home ofrendas are more plain, they usually have more food and personal stuff. This is mostly for the tourists." He pointed at one table where a pair of men were lashing tall, dusty green plants into a seven-foot-tall arch attached to the front legs. "That's sugarcane—it's traditional. Those guys are Purepeche Indians. See the little clay dog? That's really old school." He stared at me. "Hey… was your statue like that one?"

I glanced at the table and saw a small black figurine, much like the one I'd started off with. I walked closer and the men stopped work and stared at me. One of them said something I couldn't translate.

"He says, 'Can I help you? " Mickey supplied.

"Ask him about the dog," I replied, pointing to the small clay figure sitting on the table with a pile of other items waiting for its place. "Where did it come from? Are all the little dog statues the same?"

Mickey asked and translated his reply. "It's from Mita—that's a village near here. It's a traditional design."

"May I look at it?"

The man listened to Mickey, then shrugged and picked up the clay dog. He offered it to me with a half smile.

I smiled back and took the dog, turning it over and studying the rough shape and paint. It was the same shape, but the black glaze was very ordinary—I'd bet there was no blood or volcanic sand in this one's finish. The lines around the legs were the same, but there was no lightning bolt on this one. The hole in its belly was unpatched, open, and had a fine lip where the glaze had tried to drip around the rim. I handed the dog back to the man, who grinned at me, showing gapped teeth stained by tobacco and coffee. “Could you ask him if he ever met Maria-Luz or Hector Purecete?"

Both men frowned and shook their heads, apparently telling Mickey they'd never heard of either. We thanked them and headed off to find the caretaker and look for grave number two.

"That statue is almost identical to the one I had that broke," I said as we walked away. "But mine had a white lightning bolt on the side."

"A glyph to keep the spirit inside the dog. Someone worked magic on it."

"I guessed that, but how do you know?"

Mickey shrugged. "Like I said, magic is kind of interesting…."

Mickey seemed to have been studying more than he admitted. I decided to fish a bit. "I was thinking that the bit of hair that fell out was part of the magic, too."

Mickey shot a startled glance at me. "Hair? There was hair inside the dog?"

"Yeah, a little bundle of five or six strands tied with red thread. It looked like human hair, not animal."

"Tied with red thread? Inside the dog? With the lightning bolt?" He looked both excited and scared. "That's witchcraft."

I frowned at him. The only witch I knew was good, but Mickey was plainly not acquainted with the same sort of witch—and like a lot of young morons, he seemed to think it was kind of sexy.

"It's death magic," he explained. "The dark-side stuff."

"I thought you guys weren't into that death-worship thing."

"Not normal death, the cycle-of-life stuff. Death-cult stuff. It's black magic from the colonial days—half native magic, half Christian mysticism stuff. It's all about Santisima Muerte—Most Holy Death, the reaper of souls, Death triumphant over Man." Frightened reverence resounded in his tone and set his aura sparking red and gold. "Your Maria-Luz used black magic to hold the dog's spirit inside the statue. Trust me: I know this shit."

"It didn't feel like evil magic when it broke," I said.

He shrugged, pretending sudden disinterest he then undermined by saying, "I wonder why she wanted to put that thing on this guy's grave."

I didn't know, but I wanted to. If I knew who Hector Purecete was to Arbildo, maybe I could figure it out. But we'd have to find his grave first.

Once again we were directed to a grave and picked our way through the people who were cleaning and decorating throughout the cemetery. Here, the families and friends of the dead were making sandcastle coffins over the graves, mounding the wet sand up into caskets and even the archetypal long pentagon. Some were bordered with cement block or brick to retain the wet sand, others were freestanding. Other groups were just beginning the process of clearing off the weeds and grasses that had invaded the cemetery during the year, attacking the plants with hoes and hands and, in one case, a big knife, to get down to raw earth.