At Acoma, it was Calzas’s world I entered. No sooner had we started driving west out of Albuquerque than I felt he was completely in his element. He didn’t change much around other people, whether at the hotel or in Las Vegas itself when I accompanied him on business errands. But in New Mexico something dropped away from him—he seemed more alert to his own needs rather than the needs of others. In his wraparound Polaroids and long-brimmed baseball cap, he always enjoyed driving in the open air, the top down, no matter what the temperature. And he was naturally taciturn: if I didn’t speak, he wouldn’t; but if I brought something up, he was always open—though never voluble—regardless of the subject. That particular day, though, barreling down the shimmering desert highway with sand stinging our cheeks and the backdraft fiercely hot, he was far more preoccupied than usual.
Over time I had discovered the exact nature of Calzas’s employment with Samax. In addition to his far-flung troubleshooting with antiquities, Calzas had a ten-year contract with Samax for his exclusive services as an architect. His projects were Samax’s various real estate acquisitions: hotels, office buildings, several theaters, and an opera house, which Calzas gutted, redesigned, and renovated. His contract expired in 1973, at which time, with Samax’s blessing (and regret), he planned to go into business for himself. So when I turned eighteen, his role in my life—part surrogate brother, part godfather—would come to an end. On account of his youth alone—when I was otherwise living exclusively with men in their fifties and sixties—I never underestimated the importance of that role, despite the fact that Calzas was on the road more than he was at home at the hotel. As with Desirée, the age difference between Calzas and me was such that the older I got, the more I became his peer. For a while, though, I had often imagined him and Desirée as my ideal parents—talented, beautiful, and happy reincarnations of Luna and Milo, or better yet, of my ever-mysterious real-life parents—even though I knew Calzas had a fiancée in Santa Fe, a Zuni girl named Cela whom he visited every other weekend and planned to marry as soon as he set up his own business. Calzas looked hard at Desirée on occasion, but, the son of a philanderer, he was faithful to a fault.
Aside from his fiancée, Calzas rarely brought up his personal life or his family in New Mexico. So I was surprised when he broke into my thoughts about twenty minutes into our drive.
“We’re going to see my father’s grave,” he said.
In the years I had known him, Calzas hadn’t said much about his father, but I had assembled a thumbnail sketch from others. Like me, Calzas had never known his true father, who left him, his mother, and his two brothers when Calzas was two. His father ran around with other women and worked as a sheet metal cutter in an airplane factory in Phoenix. Later he went east and became a construction worker, on skyscrapers and suspension bridges. Like many Indians, because of his extraordinary sense of balance he was made a riveter assigned to the greatest heights. Eventually he died in a fall on a job in New York City and was buried there. That was all I knew.
“You mean, we’re going to New York?” I said, sitting up.
“Of course not,” he replied. “I don’t know where he’s buried there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When the Zunis don’t know where one of their own has been laid to rest, they bury some of his possessions on their land and erect a marker on the site. When the dead man’s spirit returns here, as they believe it must, it will have a resting place. Outside of Acoma, near Mesita where I grew up, there is a small burial ground called the Hill of the Lost. Most of the ‘graves’ there are from the last century, warriors who never returned from the wars with other tribes and with the army. A couple are GIs who were lost in the war in the Pacific. My father is one of the few civilians represented there. I thought this trip you’re old enough to come with me. Okay?”
I nodded. “You must have searched for his grave in New York,” I said.
“Many times. I wanted to find it, just to put him to rest in my own head. Even using your uncle’s connections, I had no luck,” he said ruefully. He turned to me, and I saw myself twice, reflected in his sunglasses. “You must have traveled over the George Washington Bridge when you lived in New York.”
“Sure.” With Luna and Milo, I thought, and once with Alma in her white Impala.
“That’s where my father fell.”
“Oh.” I had a feeling in my stomach as if I were falling.
“The police fished him out of the Hudson River and took him to the morgue. But there’s no record of him in any cemetery in New York, including the potter’s field. Most of the riveters were Mohawk Indians and Cayugas. My father was one of three Zunis who went east for these jobs because they paid top dollar. I tracked down the two other Zunis, living in Brooklyn, by the way, but they were working in Philadelphia when he died. They thought his body had been sent back here, but that never happened. He always mailed my mother half his salary—no letters ever, just a money order—and she got the last one the day she found out he died. A year later, she erected the grave here.”
The Hill of the Lost was just that. Sun-baked and dusty, it rose on the edge of a hazy salt flat. The graves were circles of smooth stones, about two feet across. Calzas went up to one of them, doffed his hat, and looked down with no visible show of emotion. I wondered what his feelings were for his father, whom he knew only from a handful of photographs, and whether he came to this place strictly out of a sense of tribal respect. A few minutes later, we were back on the road and Calzas’s somberness lifted at once.
I found myself wondering where my own father—if he was dead, that is—was buried. Maybe one day I would feel compelled to raise a surrogate grave, as the Zunis did. But I had no information on which to base such a gesture: no name, no image, no place or time of birth and death, and certainly no possessions of his. My father may as well have been a spirit pure and simple, unattached to any corporeal life. Discovering who Bel was the day I met Samax hadn’t gotten me any closer to discovering my father’s identity six years later. The person most in a position to offer me clues was not Samax—who flat out told me that, despite strenuous efforts, he had never been able to find out—but Ivy, who was more privy than anyone else to her sister’s activities at the end of her life. And of course whatever Ivy knew—it might be a lot or nothing at all—she wasn’t going to pass on to me.
That phantasmal figure shadowed in the photograph of Bel afforded only a cursory description that could fit millions of men—tall, broad-shouldered, with long legs. It could fit the cowboy climbing into his pickup beside the tire pump, I thought, as we pulled off the highway into a gas station, or the soldier going into the men’s room, limping slightly.
While Calzas filled the jeep with gas, I went into the office to buy some soda. The man behind the desk, his thatch of red hair plastered down flat, rolled a pencil in his fingers and peered at me through his cigarette smoke. I pulled two bottles of Crush from the machine, popped off the caps, and gave the man five cents for the deposit before stepping outside. A white convertible, a rental car, was parked in front of the office. Draped over the back of the front passenger seat was the soldier’s jacket. It was part of an Air Force uniform, a major’s, with several rows of ribbons and medals. But it wasn’t to them that my eye was drawn; as I lowered the soda bottle from my lips, what nearly sent a stream of Crush down my windpipe was the name tag on the jacket pocket, which read CASSIEL.
“Enzo,” Calzas hollered. He was already behind the wheel of the jeep, pulling away from the gas pumps.
I stood there, frozen in place.
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” he called again, and Sirius in the rear seat barked at me for good measure.
Slowly I walked over to them, looking back several times at the convertible. What was I waiting for? It was true I didn’t think Cassiel was a common name, and of course I immediately associated it with Samax’s longtime enemy, Vitale Cassiel; but common or not, surely other people possessed the name, some of whom mi
ght be Vitale Cassiel’s relatives. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off the convertible, even as I handed Calzas his soda.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said, for he was eager to get on to Acoma.
It was then, as I circled around to my side of the jeep, that the soldier reemerged from the men’s room and got into the car. From behind his sunglasses he stared at us for several seconds across the steaming asphalt. Then we swung onto the highway and he spun the wheel and left the gas station by its other exit, heading toward Albuquerque. Over my shoulder I watched the convertible disappear into the heat haze and then rubbed the moisture from my soda bottle onto my forehead.
I hadn’t realized how close we were to Acoma, which emerged suddenly as we rounded a series of ridges: a steep, enormous sandstone mesa that rose four hundred feet in the air, from sheer cliffs to precipitous terraces and finally the broad, tabletop summit. Beyond it was a twin mesa nearly as tall and even more box-like, called the Enchanted Mesa. Within a few miles, we turned off the highway onto a winding road of two-lane blacktop. I had been distracted since we left the gas station, but the sight of the mesa, as exhilarating as the first time I had visited, brought me out of myself. Calzas had been watching me sidelong while he negotiated the sharp curves.
“What was it back there?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“There was something.”
I told him about the name tag on the soldier’s jacket, but this information didn’t elicit much of a reaction.
“Anything else?” Calzas said.
I shook my head and looked out over the scrub brush and boulders that bordered the road.
“So of course you thought of Vitale Cassiel. Still spooked by the notion that he’s going to have you locked up for arson?”
“Not so much that. Uncle Junius told me about their feud. How much does this Cassiel really hate him?”
“Your uncle told you about his going to jail. But there’s a lot more history, some of which I know. I can tell you that, given the opportunity, Vitale Cassiel would destroy your uncle—and vice versa. Financially, physically, I don’t know where they’d stop. For a long time there’s been a stalemate between them, which is not the same as a truce.” Downshifting into the last bend on the road, Calzas looked at me. “So, should you take notice when you encounter that name? I suppose so. But will it always tie in somehow to Vitale Cassiel? I doubt that.”
The moment Calzas parked the jeep, Sirius leapt out the back and ran to the foot of the rocky trail that spiraled up the mesa. At Acoma, Sirius behaved as he did nowhere else. At first, he was very much himself, and as we began our ascent to the sky-city, he preceded us energetically, never more than twenty feet ahead. Every so often he sniffed at the thick weeds off the trail or froze, nose twitching, at the scent of another animal. Or he paused to track the flight of a bird; he had a phenomenal eye and was often mesmerized by the receding speck of a hawk circling skyward far out in the desert.
After a short time, we reached a small plateau before the last stretch of trail to the summit. Calzas took off his knapsack and I passed him the canteen I had slung over my shoulder. The sweat shone on his bronze arms. The air was noticeably thinner now, and the wind stronger. Rock dust fine as pollen gusted off the overhangs. I could taste it on my lips, and gradually it coated my face and arms a dull red.
It was on this plateau that the change came over Sirius. As soon as we reached it, rounding a thicket of brambles, he froze, then slid down onto his belly. Growling softly, he stealthily approached a pyramid of rocks surrounded by tall lavender grass.
“That’s where I found him as a puppy,” Calzas said.
I was about to follow Sirius, but Calzas laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Let him go,” he whispered.
The pyramid was as Calzas had described it: flat black rocks piled about twelve feet high, where there was just enough room for a dog to lie down. But he was certainly correct in saying no dog could have climbed there. His pale eyes fixed on the pyramid’s peak, Sirius crawled within a few feet of its base, then leapt up suddenly, ran around the pyramid barking, and bolted up the remainder of the trail to the top of the mesa. He still never came to me in a straight line when summoned, but he always stopped when I ordered him to. Not this time, though. Disappearing in a cloud of dust, he did not so much as glance back when I called out to him—the first time ever that he had been openly disobedient.
“He’ll be all right,” Calzas reassured me, but I could see that even he was puzzled.
When we reached the unpopulated southwest corner of the mesa, the site of the Zunis’ ancient city, we heard cicadas whirring in the gray ruins, sparrows fluttering in the brush, and toads croaking, but there was no sign of Sirius. He had hidden somewhere, and though when I was younger we had often played hide-and-seek around the hotel, this wasn’t the way the game went. I called to him repeatedly, walking up and down the narrow packed-dirt streets that wound among the roofless adobes, but he simply would not come out. Finally I gave up and joined Calzas on a ledge overlooking the desert to share the bag of avocado and tomato sandwiches and the thermos of iced tea we had brought with us.
“Those are the Gallo Mountains,” Calzas said, pointing to a distant line of mountains, white behind a curtain of haze. “That tall peak to the right is Madre Mountain. And there across the plain, that winding silver thread is the Río San José where it branches from the Río Puerco. In the other direction, there’s no river for a hundred miles. The only water is artesian.”
I took a long draught of the tea, which was sweetened with thyme honey. “So that town beyond the river,” I said, pointing east, at a low cluster of houses, “would be Los Lunas.”
“That’s right. Have you been studying the map?”
“Sort of.”
The Río Puerco was the river Friar Varcas had been following en route to Albuquerque. Late the previous night, while we were still naked in her bed, Dalia had unfurled the map I had brought her. It was a map Desirée had borrowed for her from a friend of Samax’s at the historical society in Las Vegas. Roughly drawn in pen and ink, with the place names in Spanish, it was a copy of one of Friar Varcas’s maps, dated 1886, twenty-five years after his death. To my surprise, I saw that the map was centered around the same area for which Calzas and I would be heading in a few hours, including Albuquerque, Acoma, Santa Fe, and the San Juan Mountains to the north, in present-day Colorado, where the source of the Río Grande was marked with an X. Aside from villages, indicated by circles, the markings on the map were all single crosses, †. There seemed to be no pattern to them: some were in settlements, others in the mountains, and many more on rivers or out in the desert. Altogether there were twenty-seven crosses.
“You know what those crosses are?” Dalia asked, loading her little pipe with more of the moon flower blossoms.
“There couldn’t have been that many churches, especially in the wilds.”
“They’re not churches.” She flicked her lighter and the flame sprang up gold in her irises. “Those are where he recorded his sightings.”
“Of vampires.”
She nodded and lit the pipe. “Desirée told me that you would be able to help me determine the locations on a current road map. I plan to visit each site, so I need to know how close they are to roads and to motels where I can spend the night.”
For the next two hours we sat up in the tangled sheets surrounded by maps: Varcas’s map, a U.S. Geological Survey map, and a Shell Oil road map, on which Dalia penned in her itinerary. We drank more of the red tea, and listened to more flute music from the Isla Cook, and soon we were making love again. Having never been so intimate with a woman, I was stimulated to the point of exhaustion, and when Dalia woke me three hours later, running her lips along my cheek and forehead, I found myself still sprawled out on top of the Geological Survey map, clutching the sheet across my chest.
“You said you had to be up an hour before dawn,” she whispered, pushing a lock of hair f
rom her eye.
As I threw on my clothes, she remained naked in bed, curled around the pillows, one foot dangling over the carpet. “I thank you from the heart,” she smiled, “for all your help, Enzo. Now, Varcas drew two other maps: one detailing this part of Nevada, and one covering northern Arizona. This Albuquerque map has the most sightings by far, but I hope you’ll return to help me with the others.”
“I’ll be back,” I said from the door, and within the hour, showered and changed, I was boarding the plane with Calzas, pulling Sirius along in his traveling case.
“I hear there used to be vampires around here,” I said to Calzas.
Unwrapping his second sandwich, Calzas turned to me. “Who told you that?”
“That girl visiting from South America. Desirée’s cousin.”
He didn’t know who I was talking about.
“She’s translating a book about it,” I went on.
“Is she,” he grunted. “And what exactly is in this book?”
I told him what I had learned from Dalia. Calzas’s expression never changed. For a long time, his eye locked on an orange butterfly flashing in the light, dancing off the cliff face below us.
“I never heard of this Varcas,” he said finally, “but I can tell you, there are stranger stories than that out here. See that smaller mesa toward the mountains?”
I could barely detect a dark, boxy smudge on the horizon where he was pointing.
“That’s close to the caves where the Zunis believe our ancestors first emerged into this world. It’s called the ‘Forbidden Mesa,’ and even today no one ever goes there. No one could, even if they wanted to.”
“Why not?”
“Because no matter how far you travel toward it, it always stays that distance from you. You can’t get any closer. And that’s just as well, because if you did, you wouldn’t come back alive.” He poured himself some more tea. “See, it’s said that there are four underworlds through which our people journeyed to arrive in this world. Each is illuminated by a different light: blue, white, red, and yellow.”
A Trip to the Stars Page 25
