Chapter 19 #4
“We’ll have to place him in the driver’s seat and jam the accelerator with something.”
“Yes, of course,” she whispered, but they didn’t move. Instead, they looked at the chasm below. It was a steep drop, dozens and dozens of meters deep. Ulises lit a cigarette and took a nervous puff, then turned to gaze at the car. Cándido remained slumped in his seat, he had not stirred an inch.
“He looks dead. What did you give him?”
“I boiled floripondio. If you have too much of it, it can kill. And then I hit him with a rock as you suggested.”
“You’re a regular Lucrezia Borgia, a natural,” he said. It sounded like a taunt, yet had an edge of approbation.
She did not reply. The wind stirred the trees. An owl hooted. Ulises looked at her and she looked back at him.
“We might as well get it done,” he said, and handed her the lit cigarette. She put it out.
He yanked open the car door and began pulling Cándido back into the driver’s seat. Suddenly the dead man opened his eyes and gasped, clutching Ulises. Shocked, Ulises remained frozen in place.
“What are you doing here?” Cándido mumbled.
Ulises sprang out of the car and fell upon the ground while Cándido winced, looked around, and caught sight of Inés. This set him off like tinder. He opened his eyes wide. All at once he must have understood his plight and the general contours of the situation.
He yelled, it was a vicious roar, and threw himself atop Ulises, circling his neck with his hands.
“Fucker!” he yelled.
Cándido was bigger than Ulises, and rage seemed to provide him with a prodigious strength; Ulises was unable to shove him aside, not an inch. He was pinned underneath, scrabbling at the dirt while Cándido roared obscenities.
Inés reached for her purse. With sweaty hands she gripped the rock she’d used before and slammed it down on Cándido’s head. This time, however, the blow seemed to have no effect. Cándido’s spittle hit Ulises in the face, and she was forced to deliver another blow.
At last, the man released his grip on Ulises and stepped away from him, howling in pain, blood streaming down his face. Frantically, he tried to wipe the blood away from his eyes, his mouth, but it gushed down freely. In a panic, he stumbled on unsteady legs, not knowing where to go.
Before he could regain his wits, Ulises snatched the rock from Inés’s hands and took two resolute strides until he was standing in front of Cándido, then hit him in the face with it. Two, three, four times.
Each blow was delivered with a brutal force that drew moans from the victim. There was a loud, awful crunch and Cándido let out one last cry of pain, then lay still, his face in the dirt. Ulises dropped the rock. They both stared at the man sprawled on the ground.
“My God. We really did it,” Ulises whispered.
Ulises walked back and forth. He repeated the same thing. “We really did it.”
Overcome with fear or anxiousness, he crouched by the vehicle and vomited. His hands were stained red.
She rubbed her arms and watched him. She also felt sick, but she pressed a hand against her mouth, swallowing back the bile that accumulated in her throat.
“You need to put him in the car,” she said, loud and firm.
He snapped back to attention and looked at her. She returned the look.
“Help me. Grab him by the feet.”
She didn’t want to, hesitated, but now it was his turn to speak firmly. “Come on.”
She grabbed his legs and together they maneuvered Cándido into the car. It was harder to tip the car down the ravine than she’d imagined, but Ulises put it in gear and after some heaving and much cursing it rolled down the ravine with a mighty crash.
Then it stopped suddenly. It had tumbled a good six or eight meters, then wedged itself atop a narrow ledge, two wheels spinning in the air. They stared at the car in horror. It was not stuck in the bottomless pit they’d hoped for.
“Shit,” Ulises said.
It started to rain. She grabbed him by the arm and tugged. “We need to go. It’s forty minutes back to town.”
“Maybe the rain will wash it down the ravine,” he said hopefully.
“Maybe,” she said, but the rain would also slow down their progress. It was one thing to walk the roads in the daytime, and another at night, with all that water coming down the mountain.
Yet they began the brisk walk back to Puerco Ahogado. They were ready to leap for cover if the lights of a car suddenly illuminated the road, but only the rain kept them company, and by the time they arrived in town most of the drunkards were snoring and the streets were lonesome.
When they reached the gates of the house, exhaustion had set in. Their clothes were soiled with mud, they were both dripping wet, shivering, and she told him to hide the filthy garments; she would wash them in the morning.
Still shivering, she slipped into her bed.
She dreamed of death, but it was not Cándido’s death, it was her mother splayed at the bottom of the stairs. Then she woke up, the morning light came through the curtains, and she realized in astonishment that she was a murderess. They’d done it. They had really done it, just as Ulises had said.