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by Aaron de la Garza
Surely you've heard of Martin, the god- faced boy. Surely your town has been graced by Emilio, loyal emissary to the darker currents. Surely by now your municipal creek pond and runoff site has floating upon it an oak raft piloted by that somber figure shrouded in blackest robes. Warn your children away from this last visitor. But it is no matter; the coinage he requests is no longer stamped; it is specific to the thirteenth century. There are rumors circulating around your town, that to look into this last figure's eyes is to see the face of death. These rumors are urban legends akin to the tale of the mound of roaches nested in a waitress's beehive hairdo. You would no more see the face of death in his than you would see the real New York by watching the Today show. But the public, dulled by repetition and anxiety, is apt to jump to conclusions. Let us take my town as an example.
The first dark figure appeared over the water aeration pumps near Business Expressway 83. I saw him while I was driving my Bronco to the Target to buy diapers for our two newborns, Courtney and Shane. At first I thought he was a kite. The wind was strong, coming off the ocean, and the water treatment plant's wide and lush fields (necessary to filter out the chemical and human wastes which collect in our river) are ideal for kite flying. I had often thought of taking the twins there, when they were older, and setting aloft the kite my father had given me when I was a child, an enormous blue and white can of Pepsi- Cola. The figure (whom we would later know as "McAllen's Pestilence #1" when the state was to erect a small bronze- plated placard next to the pumps) was floating and stationary over the water's flow, and he is there even today. Six feet tall, a heavy black robe, mumbling something you couldn't hear over the rush of the aeration pumps. The city council voted to turn off the pumps for an hour one evening and record his words for analysis at the local university. They were in Latin, a dead language. Turns out he was mumbling "I have come to visit upon you a pestilence / I have come to visit upon you a pestilence," again and again. Pretty scary, at first.
We were a national oddity. The tourists came in their RVs and their Chevys and they came in greater numbers than ever before. Their agendas read: 1. The Beach 2. Famous Ruby- Red Grapefruit. 3. Inquire with Sunset Vista about Double- Wide. 4. See Figure at Water Treatment Plant. But item four was quickly struck when the same figure appeared in their home towns. Some unlucky individuals walked out some fine morning to find Pestilence, or Hecubus, or a shapeless black mass of smoke, hovering above their swimming pools. I even heard of one woman who was taking a bath, drawing her head under the bubbly water to isolate herself from the world and relax after a hard day, and when she came up, what do you think she saw? A little baby demon, about four inches tall, floating stationary above the oval of her tub! Of course, she drained the water. But once the apparitions are there, they won't leave. She had to run out and buy a $350 white noise machine to drown the baby demon's squeals of "Ennui! Ennui!" I suspect that most of the public bodies of water are claimed by now, each hosting a little spirit of decay, or destruction, or whatever. Odd organization at work: Lake Erie only had one demon, swaying in the fog above the middle of the lake, hundreds of square miles of water around him. Our demon at the water purification plant had about six square feet of water around him.
We're a Roman Catholic kind of town, you see, and within a couple of days there were exorcisms, rosaries, mass confessions, and my mother and her sisters were going to Mass sometimes four times a day. My god! they would yell, and suckle honey lozenges blessed by the priest and kiss olive wood crosses blessed by the Pope John Paul. But the exorcisms didn't take, and the bright lights of the hundreds of international, national, and local television cameras couldn't melt away our figure's velvet robes. And, even by the next week, more figures were appearing, all over the nation and then the world, and the camera crews began to disperse, pulled away from the ghost in our town by the ghosts in their towns. At the end of that first cycle, the only cameras left were those of our local stations, 3, 4, and 5, and 5 left after a couple of days to cover an appearance over a cistern in Mexico City. The thing was, nothing was happening.
Really. Yeah, it's scary to find these figures, at first, and it was probably scariest of all in our town. But after the repetition they became annoyances, like the grackle or the humidity. The figures were hidden beneath dark robes and were quite gore- free, and they didn't even scare the twins, who reached out to them with their little round fingers. Like the figures were a kitten or a puppy, or like they were covered with sweets, or like they knew them from somewhere. I understood the urge of the twins. Every morning, walking from the parking lot to the front door of my office, I would pass a figure which had installed himself over an invisible water main. At first I would just grab a fold of his robes, rolling the heavy fabric between my fingers. Then, later, when no one was looking, I would throw a little rabbit punch to the back of his head or grab his cool hand and shake it firmly, "Pleased to meet your acquaintance, hope I can count on your business." There was some satisfaction in that.
Nothing was happening. One of the twins had a spell of the colic, but nothing came of it. My wife, Heather Ann, caught the flu and missed a couple of days of work. I developed a slight cough, but then it went away. No pestilence, no disease, no poverty, no despair. My town was already poor, and the economy, boosted by the initial rush of tourism and by a bountiful citrus yield, was getting better, not worse. The national economy was good, too, a robust three percent growth to the GDP (as much as you can expect, post- industrial and all), and the crime rate was falling. We, my town and my nation, had sat around in a state of fear for a couple of months, waiting for the omens to prove true. But nothing happened. The figures became a part of daily life, at first a curiosity, and then just another bother. Cover your coffee cup with your hand, the popular joke went, as it might cloud up with... demons! This last Christmas, the figure who floated over the fountain in the food court of our shopping mall was shrouded with green and red tinsel, a flashing star placed upon his bald and misshapen head. He hovered there, graced by plastic reindeer and an organ from the piano shop set to play a medley of holiday favorites. At times the figure seemed to be singing along to the music, unenthusiastically mumbling "Jingle Bells" or adding grunted emphasis to "The Nutcracker's Best." The twins insisted, in their voiceless way, that they be allowed to stare at the figure, and Heather Ann rocked them in her arms for almost fifteen minutes, until the medley was finished and began to repeat itself.
Our economy is thriving. The one negative effect was the closing of the Boy's Town brothel, which had prospered for seventy years across the Mexican border. You see, deer hunters soon discovered female apparitions floating above water holes and resacas (particularly Lust and Depravity -- they were as attractive as any movie star, excepting the concealing black robes and grey pallor). After a few cans of Miller Lite, the hunters began to eye the supernatural figure in a way which would have sent any mortal woman running in terror and shame. But the apparition just kept muttering "Beware the spawn of Lust / Beware the spawn of Lust," something like that. A few beers later (and after attempts to drag the apparition down to the ground by jumping at her and throwing impromptu lassos out of electrical tape and twine had failed), one man got the idea to drive his Ford Bronco into the shallow water. The hunters stood upon the roof of the Bronco, and a tradition was born. Soon the local high school boys learned of the surprising sexuality of the figures (as with civic statues or children's dolls, one expected to find only smooth flesh between the legs of the apparitions). Now, if you were to sit at night in our public square, where Depravity floats over an artificial waterfall, you would surely see groups of howling teenage boys standing on trucks and utility vehicles. Some of the poorer boys bring stepladders, or contraptions they rigged up in their parent's backyards, layers of warped plywood supported by rickety two by fours stolen from construction sites and torn from the walls of abandoned shacks. The city council recently voted to box in the more alluring female apparitions, but I don't think it will do any good. The boys will move onto the homelier spirits, or shatter the boxes surrounding the attractive ones, or, I fear, "experiment" with the male apparitions. Besides, the boys can always travel to Mexico, ten miles away, where regulations and moralities are quite a bit looser. And you can't regulate the guy who has Lust floating above his toilet bowl, now can you? I suspect that the government should stay out of these things.
Our economy is thriving. I just bought a piece of land, two acres of uncut scrub northeast of town. I wanted another tract, but it was far too expensive, $12,000. A co- worker snapped that one up, and I'll admit that I'm a bit jealous. He has Lasciviousness above his cattle pond, whereas I only have Infidelity hovering above my section of the County's irrigation ditch. I'll take the boy out there when he gets older, I guess. But not Heather Ann. I tell her how the things the men are doing with the apparitions bother me, how it all disgusts me, and it would really hurt her to know why I bought the land. I'm all she has, you see, and I don't think she could handle losing that faith. Also, I guess I am a little scared. My friend, the deer hunter I was telling you about earlier, told me that the apparition he first visited has changed in appearance, is bulging about her waist. He fears she is with child.
