Free Pacazo by Roy Kesey Page B

and his men arrive bearing Atahualpa’s body. Rumiñavi welcomes them. The wake begins. He feeds them, bids them drink. Bids them drink more. Bids them drink more and murders them, these collaborators, these rivals. Quilliscacha’s bones are crushed and a single incision made, the bone shards extracted, head and hands and feet embalmed as if he’d been a criminal, his body made into a drum and perhaps the process can begin while the victim is still alive.
    Two more taxis pass. One of the drivers is too young and the other’s face is not dark enough. I turn onto Ucchuracay, and here the sides of many buildings have been left unfinished: broken brick-ends, rough mortar. There are a few finer structures with completed sides, red bricks painted red, whitewashed cement spacers at regular intervals. It is a means of differing.
    Across the Panamericana to the Texaco station, check my watch, have only thirty seconds to allot. Taxistas in Piura can rarely afford more than a small amount of gas at a time and so circle the stations like moths. It is not the case that I despise them all. Of course I do not. It is only the one. The others work hard and earn little, like so many here. Most were once shop owners, teachers, engineers. The last taxi I took was driven by a former architect. He told me of a partner who absconded, of bankruptcy, of months of rice and water for him and his wife and their son, of two years selling off-brand soft drinks at stoplights. The weight of the cooler, the rope cutting into his back, fifteen hours a day under this fat despotic sun. Then the move up to brand-name soft drinks—a wonderful day, the man said. Another year, and enough saved to rent a taxi from someone else’s fleet. Two years of driving it and then that very week his own taxi, second-hand but solid, a decade of debt but a means now up and out, and he smiled at me, swept his hand from window to window as if showing me a ballroom in a palace.
    This morning all the taxis are clearly wrong. I wait thirty more seconds, forty, forty-five. Then past the Río Azul Hotel, across the street, and another hundred yards of heat and pavement along a wall bearing a mural: the establishment of Piura, first Spanish city on the Pacific coast, Francisco Pizarro, his drawn sword.
    The mural has faded, the paint flaking in places. The figures are drawn simply, childlike, cardboard armor, plastic sword, a basement full of these things, my old Halloween costumes and my father walking among them, walking and falling, that great heart beating as ever, then ceasing to beat. My mother sees the door left open. Calls down the narrow staircase, knows already, must have known. I drive up from Berkeley. He was still warm when I found him, she says, collapses against my chest. Bearing the coffin. I’d thought it would be lighter. Aunts and uncles, cousins. Grief like whitecaps.
    My final night I ask my mother why he had gone down to the basement, what he had intended to do or hoped to find. She says she isn’t sure. She asks why it matters and I say that of course it does not.
    The drive back to Berkeley, empty. My room, empty. Another week of nothing, then classes and that wild whipping powerline, certainty of the absence of certainty and Juan de Segovia is listed among the founding citizens of Cuzco in March of 1534, returns to Jauja with many of the other conquistadors, and Pizarro parcels out the right to extract tribute from the native populations. Segovia receives no such grant, and here the fog lowers. Has he fallen from favor? Is he planning on returning to Spain with his fortune and health intact? Is he already dead, and if so, how? Disease, battle, accident, so many ways and by the end of the year his death is fact. He has left no will, appears to have left no progeny. He disappears from history and I think of my father’s small and absurd lie of love. Perhaps he forgot ever telling it. I wish I had told him: a useful narrative. Carried me at times. Also made