She said, “Milo,” one time, in a shaky voice.
But she didn’t cry. In fact, when the server—a serious-looking woman in a cowboy hat—appeared at her table, she ordered a mess of tamales and a margarita.
“Rocks,” she specified. “Not frozen.”
“Bueno,” said the server, and started to walk away.
“In a bucket,” Suzie further specified.
The server said, “Good for you,” and walked away for real.
Crying wouldn’t change the boa one bit.
Neither would getting drunk, of course, but she was going to do that anyway.
“Tu mama estan gorda,” she said to the universe. “Your mama is so fat…”
She was going to sit and drink and hate the universe in Spanish.
And it wouldn’t be the first time.
—
It was a long time ago (or not).
She woke up one day feeling good and tired of it all.
Good and tired of what, exactly? One day she tried to make it rain on a drought-plagued Guatemalan valley, because three hundred million earthworms were drying out, slowly, in the soil. The universe twisted around and flipped her out of there, reminding her, in its way, that she was Death, not Rain or Mercy.
The next morning, giving the afterlife the finger, she emigrated downstream to a little fishing village on the Caribbean Sea and lived in a house there for a time.
She didn’t quit. She still rode her winds and shadows and performed her work. But she also started wearing her hair in braids, eating mangoes, and having conversations with mortal people.
Odd conversations, because, naturally, most people mistook her for a witch.
“Mi esposo tiene la respiración más horrible,” someone might say. “My husband has the most horrid breath! What can I do?”
And, because of course she was old and knew things, she would maybe say, “Probar algunas de las hojas de menta por la laguna. Try some of the mint leaves over by the lagoon.”
They called her bruja, behind her back, but they meant it in a good way and a bad way, both.
The grandmothers, though, knew exactly what she was. They looked at her the same way they looked at fire.
The children and the men simply accepted that she was mysterious in some way. Not unlike Don Chico, the mayor, who had been struck by lightning six times.
The village was called San Viejo. People fished and lived and played guitars in the evening before she started living there, and they did the same after. They played baseball before. They still played baseball.
When she first moved to San Viejo—the edge of San Viejo, on a hill above the beach—she made a good friend almost right away.
Maria Ximena had the same job as a lot of the women in San Viejo, which was to wait for the fishermen to come sailing home in the evening and then take a sharp knife and cut up the fish. One day she was standing at a little wooden table, doing that very thing and cut off the end of her finger. It lay like a tiny cookie amid the fish guts.
Suzie happened to be standing there. Some of the fish were still vaguely alive, and she quietly brought their little fish deaths to them. When she saw Maria Ximena’s fingertip lying on the table, she stepped up close, took Maria’s hand in her own, and made the finger whole again.
Maria said one thing about God and one thing about the devil, and after that they were friends. Maria started watching the sunset with her, every night down among the boats, and taught her how to play the tambourine.
At the same time, in those early days, the young men began falling in love with her. They couldn’t help it. They were afraid to bring her flowers, though, because when they dreamed about her, she had sharp teeth. The only one who was not afraid was a man called Rodrigo Luis Estrada Alday. He was, as the old women said, one of those men God sometimes makes by mistake, the body of a man with three or four men inside it. He had wild eyes and a vast mustache.
“If I swim out to sea and kill a shark with a knife and bring it to you,” he whispered to her one morning, after church, “you’ll kiss me. Won’t you?”
And she said, “No,” and gave him a sad look, which he misinterpreted. And he swam out to sea with a knife, and the currents took him.
In time, another of the young men, Iago Fortuno, tried to court her. He started by tying bundles of flowers all around the door of her house.
“Gracias,” she said. “But flowers are sad, don’t you think? You snip them and give them to someone, and then they die.”
Instead of being hurt, Iago Fortuno looked thoughtful. Inside his head, he thought, Maybe there’s a way to make flowers last longer or even, like birds, live free of the soil. And he quit being a fisherman and became a florist. He became one of those mysterious things that people didn’t quite understand—like Suzie, or like Don Chico (who had been struck by a seventh bolt of lightning and was dead. No one could agree on a new mayor, so there wasn’t one for years).
If the people of San Viejo noticed that they tended to die more often or more easily since Suzie had appeared among them, they shrugged and talked about other things.
Meantime, Suzie did her grim work. Like everyone who works, she continued to learn. She learned that every death was different. Sometimes it was good to go slowly. Animals, especially wolves and tropical birds, liked to be sung to as they died. Other times it was best to be quick. Presbyterians and hamsters, for example, both preferred a nice, quick, no-nonsense death.
The longer she lived in San Viejo, the more she appreciated the kind of things that went with living. Like having a window open when you slept, and grass, and tortillas. Being happy when people came to visit, and being happy when they left. The way certain things felt wonderful when you held them in your hands: a book, an ax, a baby, a beer, a big-ass pile of M&M’s.
She loved living among these things, these sensibilities, in San Viejo, although she was content, as it were, to sit beside the water rather than to plunge in. She took no lovers (although she was tempted, out of kindness, once or twice, to kiss poor Iago Fortuno, who continued to bring her flowers, and damned if the flowers he grew didn’t start to stay fresh and alive longer…). She almost took a job helping at the schoolhouse, but one thing the old women seemed to insist on, quietly, was that she not spend overmuch time around the children. She didn’t start a store or organize dances or say political things.