Xavier nodded. “Whatever you say, lady. Redstone.”
Retrospective No.3 ~ 1910
A century ago…
Old Tomas Delgado nearly shit his britches when Winston Watt’s motor carriage rumbled around the last ridge to the southwest of a vast stretch of grazing land that had once been a part of Rancho los Feliz and into view of the field where the Tree that Grew Below the Hole in the Sky used to be.
That’s right, Tom had to tell himself: used to be. Past tense. Someone else had beaten him to the punch in cutting down the ancient Tree.
Somebody else had thought the unthinkable, and acted upon it. Then they’d done him one better, too. The natural prairie the live oak once dominated was now cleared and graded, and a concrete foundation had been laid down amidst a grid of newly demarcated city streets. A cage of new steel girders towered into the sky, stacked up from exactly the place where the old encino had stood for well more than a thousand years, according to the tales the old people had preserved and passed on.
“Watt, what the fuck is this?” Tom said, aghast, although it was plain enough to him what was happening. These distempered fools were putting up a goddamn skyscraper. Right under the Hole in the Sky, where los Muertos crossed over into the realm of Mictlan. And it already reached higher than the old Tree ever had, even in this early phase of its construction.
Anyone could find their way up there now. Anyone.
“Believe me, it’s not my idea,” Watt muttered, letting his engine stall as he coasted down to a stop in a wheelrutted lot that was stacked high with construction materials and situated across the road from the building-to-be. From the Tree-that-was, that was.
Tom could hardly believe it was gone. The landscape looked wrong without it.
He took a moment to look up at the man-made blight that had replaced the oak-that boxy metal skeleton silhouetted against a darkening sky. Watt, who was far too drunk to be in any sort of a hurry, nodded complacently over his car’s steering wheel while Tom examined the newly-assembled framework that stood before them.
There were no other buildings around here like this one, not for miles. It was going to be at least ten whole stories tall, too, at a minimum. You’d have to travel as far as downtown, to Los Angeles proper, with its theater and business and manufacturing districts, to find a comparably ambitious structure. At least that far, if not all the way to the island of Manhattan.
It looked ridiculous, an incipient skyscraper standing alone in the middle of what was still essentially farmland.
Tom had assumed that if he cut down the Tree, it would take another thousand years for a new one to grow back in its place. The worlds would’ve been safe for at least that long, and his selfish, squandered life might’ve come to have a little meaning yet.
He could never have conceived of a project like this one, though. This incongruous erection out here on the prairie. Not in his wildest dreams or his worst nightmares. He couldn’t imagine an undertaking more dangerous or more foolhardy than this, and he had to wonder just who it was that would set such a thing in motion.
“Tio Tomas!”
Tom swiveled his head toward a gang of workers who were just then coming across the road, laughing and joking with one another after a wearying day’s labor. They wore coveralls and caps and carried tin lunchpails, and one of them, the foreman (a handsome young man with thick black hair and a face Tom remembered all too well from his younger days), was grinning his ass off and waving to him.
It was Oscar San Martin. Ramon’s boy. He’d been a kid the last time Tom saw him. Now he was well over six feet tall and as broad as an ox through the shoulders. He looked so much like his father that it took Tom’s breath away. Seeing him now was like traveling back in time.
“Bienvenidos, Tio Tomas,” Ramon’s boy said, as Tom made his careful way down from Winston Watt’s Model T. “Welcome home.”
“Oscar,” Tom said, wanting to hug the kid (the ‘kid’ who stood more than a foot taller than him and had a rough shadow of late-day stubble growing along his jaw), but not doing it.
He and Oscar hadn’t been as close as Tom might’ve liked after Ramon… went over.
Xochitl, Ramon’s widow, hadn’t really blamed Tom for what happened. Not exactly, and yet it had been clear enough that he was welcome to keep his distance from her boy after it was done. She hadn’t wanted Oscar following in his father’s (or in his pseudo-uncle’s) footsteps.
Especially if those footsteps led him here, to this field. And, as much as it pained him, Tom had seen the wisdom in that position. It’d even been a factor in his decision to travel the world so late in life. There’d been other reasons for that too, of course, but as far as Oscar went, it’d simply been easier not to be around. Convenient.
And yet, despite the aloofness and the loneliness that resulted from it, here Oscar was. Working for el Rey. Like father, like son. The San Martin family had a legacy now.
Tom clasped the young man’s large, calloused hand in both of his and held it warmly, for a long moment, looking up at him. “Gracias, mijo,” Tom said. “It’s good to see you again.”
Oscar nodded, clearly pleased to see his father’s oldest friend, yet feeling as unsure about the content of their relationship as Tom was himself.
“Oz,” Tom said, as his eyes were drawn back up to the black steel bones superimposed over the purple evening sky, like some sort of artistic photographer’s effect. “What is it you think you’re doing out here?”
“The bidding of el Rey, Tio Tomas. What else?”
“But… this wasn’t your idea, was it?”
“Oh, hell no,” Oscar said, and laughed. He ran his hand back over his hair, a little nervously. “Don’t blame me, I just work here.”
“Then who?”
“La Bruja Roja,” Winston Watt piped up from the Model T’s front seat, jerking himself out of a drunken stupor in order to speak. He craned around to look at the other two men. “The Red Witch,” he said, as if it explained something. “The Scarlet Woman.”
“Who?”
“The King’s new girlfriend,” Oscar said quietly. Turning to Watt, he put a finger to his lips. “Shhh, now, about that.”
Construction laborers were crossing the lot as they knocked off for the day, men piling onto a horsecart that would take them ‘home’ to a nearby migrant camp. Some got into private carriages of their own, horseless and otherwise. (Otherwise if their work happened to be of the more skilled and better paid variety, Tom supposed.)
Watt looked the dispersing workers over and nodded sagely to Oscar, preserving the secret they both were in on. Very craftily, too, Tom thought, raising an eyebrow.
“Have you two been drinking?” Oscar asked quietly.
“Watt insisted we stop,” Tom said, under his breath. “El hombre es un borracho, you know.”
Oscar nodded, watching as Watt observed the last of his crew departing for the day. The final few stragglers were heading home on foot. Within minutes, Tomas, Oscar, and Watt-the preservers of the mysteries of Mictlantecuhtli-were all alone in the gloaming.
“A witch?” Tom said, turning to Oscar for clarification as soon as the last of the workers were out of earshot. “Like a person, a woman?”
Oscar nodded.
“Not a nymph or a succubus or some damn thing like that from over on el Rey’s side of the sky?”
“An actual person,” Oscar said. “Alive. Flesh and bone. And she comes and goes as she pleases, if you can believe that.”
“What, between the rooms?” Tom asked, his tone filled with disbelief. His old friend, Oscar’s father Ramon, had showed them both what was likely to happen when a human being stepped through the door between the worlds and into the King’s sacrificial chamber.