The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  “Yes ma’am, I understand,” he said, hooking his thumbs into pockets as he leaned back on the worn heels of his cowboy boots. “You’re a very important person.” A breeze blew across the porch, carrying the smell of grease and dough and sugar, and he took a deep whiff.

  “Bueno, cowboy,” I said. “What can I do for you today?”

  “I need a wench and a bucket of water.” He smiled at me with a jack-o-lantern grin. “Pardon me, Ignacia; I meant to say wrench.”

  At that moment Dolores Cisneros laid on the brake, and the doors on the school bus opened with a pop. Mister shot out first, then Tomás, and they waved quickly before they bolted down to the creek with their jackets slipping off their shoulders, flapping like wings.

  “Them your boys?” asked Chief. I didn’t answer. The Jicarilla Apache never talk about their children in places where the spirits can hear them. We might ask, “How many sticks do you have?” Or “How are your rocks doing today?” The spirits love to steal pretty babies, so we tell each other in loud voices, “God, what an ugly baby you have!”

  “I want this back,” I said, when I handed Chief my wrench.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said. “I’ll just fix that hole in my radiator and be out of your way.”

  Half an hour later, when I came out on the porch with coffee and fry bread, Mister was standing on the bucket with his head under the hood of the broken-down Olds Vista Cruiser. “Just spread that gum out even,” Chief was telling him. “That’s right, real even. We don’t want any holes.”

  “This is Chief,” I said, when I handed them each a steaming mug of coffee.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “I fixed his radiator with my bubblegum,” said Mister.

  “I knew a mechanic who used Dubble Bubble on all his radiators,” said Chief. “Said nothing else held like it. He hired a boy just to stand there and chew it for him. By the end of the summer, that kid had the biggest jaws you ever saw.”

  “I could do that,” said Mister. “Did he buy gum for that boy?”

  “Yes sir, he bought the bubble gum. Don’t you ever take that job if you have to buy your own materials.” Chief reached in his pocket and handed Mister a quarter. Then he turned to me with an old fox smile and said, “You wear that dress real well.”

  “Many lick before they bite,” I replied.

  “He’s seen Star Wars five times,” said Mister, smiling hopefully between the two of us.

  “A Jedi shall not know anger,” recited Chief. “Nor hatred.” He gave my old dress another long look and added, “Nor love.”

  “I know why a Jedi shall not know love,” said Mister. “Because if that person dies or goes away, the Jedi will go to the dark side.”

  “I’ve been there,” said Chief, shaking his head, and he tried to catch my eye, but I was looking at my garden, planning a spot for the tomatoes. They like to catch the morning light, and stand alone.

  That evening, when Layton Scroggins drove off in his clanking old car with a chewing-gum-patched radiator, I thought we’d seen the last of him, but he was back before breakfast.

  “Did you smell the bacon?” asked Mister running out to the porch to greet him. From the kitchen window, I watched the man take a long, appreciative sniff, but he stopped Mister from going back in the house to get him a plate. “I’ve got some work to do first,” he said as he pulled my wrench from his back pocket. “Yesterday I noticed that your front door hangs a little crooked.”

  “I was gonna fix it,” said Mister, straightening his shoulders.

  “It’s a real ingenious idea,” said Chief. He ran a beefy hand along the peeling image of the woman’s slim white arm. “Hanging a billboard. But this bottom corner is wearing a rut in the plank.” Pressing the toe of his cowboy boot into the worn groove, he mentioned warp. “If you ask your grandmother for a screwdriver,” he said, “I’ll give you a hand with this door.” Then the old rascal looked at my face in the kitchen window and nodded as if we were friends.

  An hour later the door swung silently, and the latch closed with a satisfying click. When I came out with a plate of warmed-over breakfast and a steaming mug of coffee, Chief was leaning against the porch railing like he owned the place.

  “Do you work around here?” I asked him.

  “I’m a highly functioning psychotic,” he explained.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  In March, I got my tomato seedlings going on the kitchen windowsills. With Chief’s help, I got the peas and lettuce and onions planted before the runoff in mid-April.

  “Fishing opportunities are limited at this time of year,” he said the afternoon he brought home a trunkload of old garden hoses from the dump. “So I thought I’d build an irrigation system for your garden.” Mister and Tomás helped him bury the hose in a neat furrow, and as soon as the hard work was done, the neighbors came out to see what was happening.

  “You get you some quality garden hose,” Chief explained to Jesús Cisneros. “You get you some valve splitters and a timer.”

  “What about pipe?” asked Ernesto.

  “If you’ve got lots of money,” said Chief, “bury your hose in one-and-a-half-inch ABS pipe. Otherwise, don’t stick a pitchfork in it.”

  I could see Ramona checking him out. By then, I’d cleaned him up—fed him a few decent meals and trimmed the beard. He wasn’t movie-star material, standing out there in his overalls and cowboy boots, but you could tell he’d been to college. When he started talking about ecological factors and water zones, everyone wandered away except Cisco Cisneros.

  “I’ve got some high-friction silicone tape,” Cisco said, rolling a piece of damaged hose over with his bare foot. “I can patch up that soaker hose in the second water zone if you want.”

  Cisco’s real name was Cicerón, which means chickpea. Jesús, his father, had sensed competition from the start and wanted to keep him in his place. A few weeks after the baby was born, Jesús called me over to the house to do something about his toes. Everyone knows that the person with the longest second toe will be the leader in the family, and this baby’s next-to-biggest piggy was a whopper. All the Cisneroses had monkey feet. Jesús could wriggle the lug nuts off a tire with his feet, and his father could open a beer and drink it. When I held these little pink feet in my hand, I knew that Cisco would be different.

  Already, he had blond fuzz on his head, and his eyes were bright blue. If the child hadn’t come out with the family toes, Jesús wouldn’t have claimed him. Luckily, Dolores had an even row of stubby toes on each foot.

  “What a beautiful boy,” I said, “You should be very proud,” but Jesús wouldn’t settle down until I had given Baby Chickpea a treatment. He paced back and forth in the kitchen, raising his hairy fist to God even as he prayed the Our Father.

  I lit a braid of sweetgrass and smudged the three of them, praying that Cicerón would grow to be a good, humble man, obedient to his parents and to God. I sprinkled his feet with cinnamon, to keep them small, and then I held him upside down, facing north. The infant screamed like a wild Indian the whole time, and I knew we were in trouble. Cisco was gay.

  “Look what I found!” Mister yelled that afternoon in the garden, running up to Chief with one of my canning jars. He’d caught a tan lizard with a pointed snout and a yellow-striped tail about as a long as a shoestring. “His name is George,” said Mister as he tapped the glass.

  “That’s a whiptail lizard,” said Cisco. “All whiptails are female. They can make copies of themselves, so they don’t need males to fertilize their eggs.”

  When we crowded around the jar, the hooded eyes on the sides of the lizard’s head took us in without blinking.

  “Are you a whiptail?” Mister asked Cisco.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you make babies with another man?”

  “No,” said Cisco, smiling nervously. “Only whiptails do that. God was experimenting.”

  “Cisco is a homosexual,” Mister explained t
o Chief. “He can play the trumpet with his toes, but he doesn’t do it in the mariachi band. He plays with his hands.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Chief. He looked at the bunch of us—the witch, the orphan, the fag, and the lesbian lizard. Then he turned to Cisco.

  “All right,” he said rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s see that tape.”

  All afternoon, Mister followed Cisco around the garden asking questions. Was every whiptail the same whiptail? Did they sees themselves everywhere, and if one of them died, did it matter?

  “He’s a bright kid,” said Chief.

  “Yes,” I said, “but he still has a lot to learn.” I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough time. That spring I showed Mister how to do the digging and planting in the garden. Peppers, corn, and tomatoes had to be sown on the rising moon; potatoes on the dying moon. Everything was done in the dark hours of the morning, and if you didn’t pray, nothing would come up.

  In the hot, dry days of summer, the new irrigation system kept my garden green. Cisco came over often to check the hoses. In June, he planted zinnias around my peppers for shade. Chief snipped them regularly so they’d branch out—at least that’s what he said when he handed me the bouquets.

  In late July, my tomatoes ripened on the vine, and Mister bit into them like apples, letting the sweet juice run down his chin. He was eight that summer, skinny and brown with knees and elbows that cut through the air like blades when he ran. He always ran—or jumped or slid or rolled or wheeled—never walked. His mouth ran like a motor sputtering to keep up with the spinning wheels in his mind. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night to find him standing by my bed, en route to the bathroom, yammering about the fate of germs that went down the drain after a hand washing. “Do they go to germ heaven?” he asked.

  He wanted to know why the sky was blue and who created the alphabet. Did Eve have a belly button and why is hell dark if they have fires? Why did bananas turn brown and would Ramona go to heaven, and if she did, would she still hit Tomás? He asked why parents had to love God more than they loved their children and how many times could a person burp in one day?

  “How many people are in the world?” he asked one night, pushing Chief over to crawl into bed beside me.

  “I don’t know,” I said tiredly. “A lot.”

  “How many galaxies are there?”

  “Go to sleep,” I said.

  He tried, for a minute, then he asked if you could fall out of heaven.

  In a groggy voice, with his eyes still closed, Chief said, “There are over six billion people on the planet and at least a hundred billion galaxies. How the hell can you fall out of heaven if you’re wearing wings?”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  I waited until late July, the month the Indians call Moon of the Horse, to show Mister the book of life. “You mean the petroglyphs?” Cisco said when Mister told him that we were going to see the rock drawings out past Fort Burgwin. He offered to drive us, but I wanted to go alone with Mister. Chief’s car was up on blocks in the front yard, and Dolores wouldn’t let me borrow the school bus, so I ended up taking El Auto.

  Ernesto and Popolo were at the town hall meeting, and the cruiser was parked at the station with the keys under the seat, as usual.

  “Tío Ernesto is going to kill us,” Mister said, tossing his light saber into the backseat. He was tall enough to see over the dash if he sat on his knees, but then his feet didn’t reach the pedals, so I put him on the floorboard to work the gas and the brake while I steered. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, but we got out of town without incident, and once we were out of earshot of town hall, I turned on the siren, and the other drivers got out of our way. The medicine bag I had hung on the rearview mirror twirled around and around. In the end, we didn’t hit anything but a jackrabbit.

  Trees flew by, and clouds. The jagged outline of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains cut into sky just as it had when Abuela Leonora brought me out here on a donkey, but some things had changed. There were power lines. Houses dotted the dusty road now—squat adobes, slanting trailers, and the occasional gringo palace rising behind a thick mud wall. I had never taken Ernesto or Teodoro to read the book of life, but Mister was different. He had the Apache heart, the Tiwa soul.

  On the way we stopped to pee, and I led him up a ridge so he could get a view of Fort Burgwin. From the top of the hill, you could see the fort the way it must have looked when it was built in 1858, eleven years after the Taos uprising. “The white-eyes had many guns and cannons,” I told Mister, “but the Indians had other powers. Even the women had power. Your great-great-great-abuela Standing Flower saw tres milagros in her life. Each time she asked the Great Spirit for a miracle, and each time she received one. The first time, she was only thirteen years old, and she prayed to live when the white-eyes shot a cannonball into the little pueblo church where she was hiding. You are too young to hear that story today. It is sad. The second time she asked for a miracle, she was a woman, and she had no husband because so many of the men in the pueblo had been killed or died from disease. Do you want me to tell you that story?”

  “Only if it’s not a love story,” he said, and it was, but I told him anyway.

  “A man tells this story one way,” I said, “and a woman another way. According to your great-great-great-grandfather, the Apache Cow Horn, your great-great-great-grandmother, Standing Flower, was past her prime and only so-so-looking, and her family was not important. According to Cow Horn he and his amigos were bored, so they raided the pueblo. As soon as this woman, Standing Flower, saw him ride by on his horse, she tore off her dress and ran after him. Seeing how much she liked him, he thought it would be rude not to steal her.

  “That is his story. When Standing Flower heard him telling it, she would nod her head and always let him finish. Then she explained how she felt so sorry for the brave who rode his steed like a grandmother. She described how his ears stuck out like squash, and how the other girls covered their laughing mouths with their hands.

  “Cow Horn would listen to her, nodding, and when she was done, he would add that she had cried out, ‘Let me be your esclava, you great hunk of a man, and open my legs to your log of fire!’ Then Standing Flower would mention that it took many months to teach him how to ride a horse well enough to plow a field. He said that Black Sky and Earth Woman gave them seven beautiful niños. She said that these seven beautiful children came up through a hole in the earth with their faces painted black.”

  “No entiendo,” said Mister, screwing his face up at me.

  “You’re not supposed to understand other people’s love stories,” I said.

  A dog’s bark rose up high on the wind, but nothing moved on the road below us. From up there, it was just a line drawn in the dust with a stick. The cannon that sat in front of the log fort was no bigger than a toy. Great Spirit, Great Friend, I prayed, forgive us for our stupidity. Then I said three “Our Fathers” and two “Hail Marys,” but I was still mad.

  “Things grow small in the distance,” I told Mister, “and weak over time, but you must remember what’s important. Look around. What you see is built on the bones of your people.” I scooped a handful of coarse sand and shook it angrily, spilling it on the pebbled ground. “This is the dust of their bones! What can you make with goddamned dust?”

  “Adam?” he suggested.

  On the hike down the ridge, we smelled roasting corn, so we crossed a broken fence, followed a path stubbled with weeds, and made our way around the smooth curve of an adobe wall to a house. A six-foot crucifix leaned against the wall, and strands of chili ristras hung from a nail.

  In front of a wide, blue porch, a burly man in a black hat stood in front of his kiva, husking corn. He wore a denim jacket buttoned over a canvas shirt and glasses that darkened when he faced the light.

  “Venga comer algo de maíz,” he said, handing us two ears.

  “Gracias,” said Mister, just like a man. Beneath the crackling husks, we
burned our lips and fingers on the good sweet corn.

  “El maíz es bueno,” I said. “God bless you.”

  “Jesus should come soon,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Mister.

  “It’s terrible,” the man said. “This world.”

  “¿Cuánto?” I asked, reaching into my pocket.

  “No charge today,” he said. “Aquieta.”

  When were back in the car, Mister said, “That was a nice man. Did his people kill our people?” I said I didn’t know for sure. “I think Tomás’s people killed our people,” he said. “Before the Americans.”

  “The left hand gives energy,” I said, “and the right hand takes it away.”

  He looked at his hands. “What was Abuela Standing Flower’s third miracle?” he asked.

  “She had a baby.”

  “That’s not a miracle.”

  “That is always a miracle, but anyway, it was her first one, and she was fifty-three years old.”

  “That’s old,” said Mister. “That’s like almost dead. Was she a mummy?” He burst out laughing at his joke. “She was a mummy! Get it? A mommie? A mummy?”

  I sighed, feeling old myself. I was a young girl when Abuela Leonora took me to the petroglyphs, and I wasn’t sure I’d recognize the old acacia tree—if it was still there. Cat’s claw, we called it, because the flowers were long and fluffy like cats’ tails, hiding sharp thorns. I drove, turned around, backed into a ditch, gunned out of it, and drove some more. Then I turned down one more dirt road, and I saw that same Acacia, with same red rocks behind it, cat tails flicking in the breeze.

  “¡Estamos aquí!” called Mister as he jumped out of the car, knocking the thorny limbs back with his light saber. He ran toward the hill, then stopped and turned around. “Where is the book of life!” he yelled.

  “We’re standing on it,” I said when I caught up to him, and I showed him the picture etched beneath his feet. “You see the dots on this horn? That’s agua, the water that you came from. The sharp end is dry; that’s where you are going.”