Chapter 1 — No Proof. But Still
Rio Zapata woke gasping, the dreams still on him. What he had just slept through had been High Evil. The pure stuff.
He lay on his bed, breathing rapidly, replaying the horrifying scenes. There was a beheading of a dog and a cat with a curved sword, something right out of the Arabian Nights. He had been forced to witness the beheading, had seen the terrified mongrel kicking, howling, and snarling while desperately trying to escape.
A bearded man wearing eyeliner had cried, "Off with Rusty's head!" and up went the banana shaped sword aimed directly at Rusty's pulsating neck. Rio zoomed in on the dog's one terrified eye, which widened to the size of a Kennedy half dollar, when the dog saw the executioner bring the sword down with all his might. Then swiftly, cleanly, the razor-sharpened blade sliced through the dog's neck, live and in living color. Dead dog.
"That was messed up, ese," Rio muttered to himself, and closed his eyes tightly. "Fucking dreams."
He again saw the dog corpse as it was swiftly removed by the tail. A Hispanic woman dressed like a waitress rushed into the spotlight, and using a wet rag, wiped the table of blood and dog hair.
Then it was the cat's turn. As it was being placed on the table, it wriggled loose from the many hands holding it and hightailed it, darting between the executioner's legs across a cobblestone street in the direct path of a sputtering, smoking, French compact. The executioner yelled,
"Nine fucking lives! What did you expect Rio?!"
Next, Rio found himself in a mausoleum made of enormous sweating stone blocks. It was damp, dark, cold, and far-out creepy. Sitting at the edge of a concrete slab, he had encountered his dead mother. She was half-alive, and in a zombie-like state. She was sitting up, slumped forward, and loosely draped in a threadbare nursing home smock. There was a foul odor in the air and he gagged. It was the smell of death. The bearded man with the sword suddenly lunged at him out of nowhere, aiming the tip of the sword between Rio's legs and yelled, "The shark has pretty teeth!"
Rio tightly shut his eyes, pulled his thin bed sheet up to his shoulders, and began to shiver underneath it. A faint ray of yellow sunlight creased through a small crack on the wall, and the dim beam grazed across Rio's eyelids, and he opened them. He tracked the gentle shaft up to the thin curtains covering his lone bedroom window. The diaphanous fabric then gradually transformed from a moonlit blue into a pale, golden yellow.
Later, at the kitchen table, he stared vacantly at his pets, a dog and cat, Rusty and Pitty Sing. They were looking inside their food bowls, which were empty. Rio put an arm on the table, and the back of his hand brushed up an empty cup sitting there. He took it by the delicate porcelain handle, and looked inside. In faint blue type, it read "Brecht & Weill."
His mind returned to the dreams. He was back at the mausoleum, reliving the encounter with his mother. And that awful smell of death. Pitty Sing brushed up against his leg, and Rio gently nudged her to one side with his foot. Rusty the dog yawned, leveled a gaze at Rio and held it, but his master ignored him in helpless favor of another nightmare replay. During his dream encounter with his mother, she had said something to him. Something important. Something profound. Throughout Rio's life, he had been connected to a disturbing event that occurred during his youth, something he had always tried to distance himself from. He had a strong feeling that what his mother had said might clear everything up, absolve him. But he couldn't quite remember what she had said. She had muttered a hazy, out-of-focus string of words that hung by a thread at the tip of his tenuous, nebulous memory.
At the very end of the dream a person he once knew and had not thought of for many years rushed up to him, took his hand, and vigorously shook it. It was a kid from his childhood, a boy who delivered newspapers, Mario something.
"You should have listened to your mother and become a priest like Monsignor Dunn, you pinché son of a bitch," he sneered at Rio, and hurried away with an exaggerated evil laugh, like Vincent Price in The Pit and the Pendulum.
Then Rio heard, "I know what you did, man. It's not quite the secret you think it is. It's all connected, dude. The dreams, your past. Your secret past. Comprende, vato?"
But it was he who said it. He had spoken to himself out loud, which he often did. And he answered himself, which he also often did.
"I've never really done anything wrong. There is no longer any proof anyway."
Rio had gone through this progression many times before — a spoken question followed by an answer. Rio's Method included snapshots that resembled faded Polaroids flashing before him, like a far-out slide carousel, in 3D. The Rio Q&A and all its images told "The Story" the same way, every fucking time. He would end by saying:
"So what. No proof. But still…"
