Catherine sat shaking her head.

“I thought she treated that lovely man unforgivably,” she said.

“Ah, Koshoo’ll get over it. He thinks he’s a lady-killer anyway. I guess he’s got enough evidence to back him up.” He winked at me. “I’m glad to see there’s one lady he didn’t kill.”

Catherine sulked. Reload the cameras, folks. There’s at least three Koshoo Jackson’s here.

30

“You dream with your eyes open.”

“What?”

“You were dreaming with your eyes open.”

“How did you know I was dreaming?”

“Because you were laughing and shaking your woolly head.”

I sit up in the peacock chair, and Catherine is standing over me. “I bet you just scare your lovers.”

“What?”

“They wake up in the middle of the night and find you dreaming with your fucking eyes open. I bet you scare them out of their trees.”

“Some of them.”

“What do they do?”

“The smart ones run.”

“What do the others do?”

“What do you think?”

“Fuck the zombi.”

31

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Encobierta asked.

We were walking in her herb garden. I’d shown her the flakey, scaly skin on my back, and she said she had just the herb, brewed in tea, that would cure it. She was reaching down to tear up the plant now.

“Yes, I don’t know, it just suddenly started; my skin started scaling.”

“I meant what happened to him. Besides his thing, yours is a little thing; yours is a chigger. I can’t cure his by snatching up ipecacuanha. His is heaven’s punishment; it can only be cured by heaven.”

“Why do you call it heaven’s punishment?”

“Because he turned his back on his destiny.”

Her back was turned to me as she squatted and pulled up the weed. She was wearing blue jeans and a purple blouse. Her rear end was broad and flat. She had no waist. Her hair was a frizzy gray and tied in a knot in the back. It looked like it had been rubbed with mink oil. She smelled like oranges.

“I won’t call him Ensinanco anymore. I won’t call him by his real name. I call him Ensinadelo; that means heaven’s punishment. But he’s changed his own name.”

“What was his destiny?”

“To be a curandero, a curer.”

“Like you?”

“I’m no curer. I fool with herbs, that’s all. I’m a little amateur healing woman, but my profession’s keeping inns, and keeping travelers happy with clean rooms and good food in the belly. But Ensinadelo was born with the gift. He was born with it. When he was just a baby, a little crawling baby, he touched a man’s ailment and healed it.

“But when he got older, he didn’t want to have a thing to do with it. He wanted to have something to do with the modern world, he said. He doubted his powers, anyway; he said it wasn’t his powers that healed; it was ignorant country folks’ superstitions.”

She had turned to face me now but was still squatting on the ground, holding a green plant in her fist. The garden wasn’t symmetrical like English gardens, but it was allowed to grow wild and haphazard, and one wondered how she found the herbs she’d planted. There were little paths for one to walk, but there was no pattern or logic to them, not even the pattern and logic one finds in a maze. I could see the inn from where we were standing, but I would certainly need her to guide me out.