The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  As if to prove him wrong, Liza Jane returned. “Sorry are you, old girl? Well, come here,” said Gabriel. Stroking her head with one hand to calm her, he adjusted the tack and then, with a moan, slid his boot in the stirrup and hoisted himself on the saddle. “I’d give you a ride,” he said, smiling down at Mister, “but she might kill the both of us. I’ll send a car for you.” He let the horse take a few steps, then looked back over his shoulder. “Were you visiting someone at the monastery?”

  “Raquel O’Brien.”

  “Ah, Rocky!” Gabriel’s face broke into a grin. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  “Gracias, señor.”

  “De nada, my friend.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  With his heart banging in his chest, he clomped to the jeep and swung the door open.

  “Get in! Get in!” she cried as he sank into the seat. “Look at you! What happened?”

  She was so beautiful. A pink bloom on each cheek, bright eyes and curved lips, much too pretty to be a nun. He had forgotten the space between her two front teeth—liar’s gap, Yolanda called it. She was always jealous. Like him. He looked down at his boots. The snow was melting into a brown puddle on the floorboard.

  “I’d hug you, but I’m strapped into this thing,” she was saying. He thought about how bad he must smell and scooted closer to the door. “You cut your hair,” she said. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “Water,” he said.

  She reached behind the seat and handed him a grubby plastic bottle of water that tasted better than anything he could remember, even the rabbit.

  “I bet you’re starving,” she said. “I have some bread and cheese in my cell; it’s just around the corner here.”

  “Cell?”

  “That’s what they call the rooms. I’ll show you around. You look like you have a story to tell too—is that blood on your clothes?” She laughed. “Did you kill someone?”

  “I was hunting,” he said hoarsely. He pushed his short hair behind his ears and stole another look at her.

  Downshifting on the rutted track, she pointed out the simple wooden sign at the entrance to the monastery:

  THE MONASTERY OF CHRIST IN THE DESERT

  Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ … let all kindness be shown them.

  —Rule of Saint Benedict

  Wiping the foggy plastic window with his sleeve, Mister squinted into the murky night. Hooded monks with lanterns walked up the hill to a chapel jutting out of the bluff. With the black robes covering their feet, they appeared to float.

  “This is a Benedictine monastery,” Rocky said. “We practice the rule of silence. Basically, you can only talk in your cell—or in the gift shop. Brother Boris is our motor mouth, so he runs the gift shop. He used to play the saxophone down at Jilly’s Piano Bar on Rush Street in Chicago; he’ll tell you all about it. You’d be surprised at some of the people who end up here—we’re an odd lot.”

  “Sí, sí señora,” said Mister, and he remembered that she had once accused him of speaking Spanish when he was scared.

  “Even the horses are castoffs,” she continued. “Did Brother Gabriel tell you that the Spanish mustang, Liza, is blind? I found an Internet site that places older or disabled horses with gentle owners. So far, we’ve saved three from the dog-food factory. This is the perfect place for them. When I got here last summer I was basically a refugee, but I fixed up the stables and started horse trading—”

  “Tú tienes Internet ?” he interrupted.

  She looked at him in the dim light and laughed. “You looked scared for a minute there. Yeah, there are a couple of computers, but they are usually down. It’s hard to get a signal up here.”

  At a coyote fence, she parked and jumped out. The snow had stopped, and a few streaks of orange light hung in the clouds. “This is my place,” she said, leading him through the gate.

  On the tiled portico, he took his boots off and hung his wet blanket on a peg.

  “Pasa,” she said, waving him forward. Her eyes shone.

  “I’m wet and muddy,”

  “It’s okay. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Then you can take a bath.”

  Ducking into the doorway, he touched his hand on the rough viga that crossed the ceiling—for good luck.

  “Take off that wet shirt,” she said, unfolding a towel. “Would you rather have coffee or tea?”

  “Tea.”

  She lit the gas burner and filled a bright red teapot with water from a ceramic basin painted with blue birds. When he sat in the straight wooden chair, brown water dripped over his bare feet onto the clean tile floor.

  “Toast?”

  “Sí, gracias.”

  She had gained some weight since he saw her last; her breasts were fuller, and there was a new curve to her belly. He watched her cut a loaf of bread into thick slices, and then stab each piece with a fork and toast it over the blue flame. From the shelf over the stove, she took a jar of honey and a knife. Her arm and breast and flank moved in seamless motion. “You can light a fire if you feel like it,” she said. “The matches are on the mantel.”

  Someone had stacked mesquite over a pile of twigs in the kiva, and he wondered with a quick stab of jealousy if she had a man. He lit the match, illuminating Our Lady of Guadalupe, who stood in the plaster niche with her head bowed, hands folded. Around her neck someone had hung a thin chain dangling the milagro of an infant. When the tinder crackled, he bent down and blew softly, closing his eyes against the smoke until a flame grew. She brought the tea and toast to the table and sat down beside him in front of the fire.

  “I heard that Abuela passed,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” They fell into a stiff silence, and suddenly the toast stuck in his throat.

  She said, “I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral.”

  “I didn’t go,” he said. “Abuela wouldn’t have gone if they hadn’t carried her in.” He wanted to say he was sorry for her too. He wanted to say, I’m sorry that Tomás beat you and you ran away and I’m sorry that I killed him. Lo siento. The words were on his tongue; then they were gone. Crazy people talked like that—he was crazy at the police station in Taos and crazy at the Echo Amphitheater, but he was okay now. Not normal—he would never be normal again.

  Her skin glowed in the firelight; he had to make himself look away.

  “Did you make this?” He touched the crooked bookshelf. If she said that her boyfriend made it, he would spend one night and then go up into the cliffs to live in a cave.

  “I worked as an apprentice in the woodshop so I could learn how to fix the stable. We didn’t have one of those things to make it level.”

  “Un nivel?” he asked. He couldn’t think of the English word either. Pretending to look at the books on the shelf, he watched her fingers curl around the handle of her mug. He read the titles—The Secret Garden, The Collected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Your Money or Your Life.

  When she refilled his mug, their knuckles touched, and he wanted to pull her body close against his, feel the heft of her, press his face into her neck and never let go.

  “Time for your bath!” she said cheerfully. He smelled pretty bad.

  In the shower, the dirt ran in rivulets down his flat belly, across his groin, and along his legs. At his feet, a pool of brown water swirled into the silver drain. Rocky had handed him a cake of peppermint soap made at the monastery. It woke him up and made his skin tingle. He scrubbed himself, dried off with the rough towel, and combed his hair with his fingers. With the tiny scissors on Rocky’s Swiss Army knife, he cut his fingernails and toenails. He brushed his teeth with the cellophane-wrapped brush she had found for him. Then he looked at himself in the tarnished mirror that hung by a piece of twine over the tiled sink.

  “I killed him,” he told the face in the mirror.

  The face looked back.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  When the bel
l rang for vespers, Rocky took two lanterns from the mantel over her kiva and led Mister into the dark courtyard. “You can go if you want,” she said, “I have to feed the horses.”

  “I’ll go with you.” He followed her to the stable, watching the familiar shift of her haunches beneath a long black skirt as he breathed in the cool peppermint smell from his skin. When she lifted the latch on the wooden door of the paddock, there was a soft, enthusiastic nicker followed by a deep snort.

  “Hey, Esperanza,” said Rocky, swinging the light over a skinny, spotted saddle horse. “Hey there, honey. Are you hungry?” As she patted the horse’s head, she combed her fingers through the tangled forelock. “Esperanza, this is Mister. Say hello.” Mister remembered how Rocky’s voice fell back into a southern drawl when she was around horses.

  “Hello,” he said, pulling his hand back when the old mare stretched out her neck and licked her lips. “She wants to bite me.”

  “No, licking her lips means she understands you.”

  “She just met me. How can she understand me?”

  “Well, I told her a few things,” said Rocky, flipping her hair out of her face. “She’s thirty years old—she’s been around the track a few times.”

  He started to ask in a knowledgeable voice how many hands high she was, but before he could phrase the question, the gray monster in the next stall let out a neigh so sudden and loud that he jumped, lost his balance, and fell backward into a pile of hay.

  “Careful,” said Rocky, and in the shadowy light, he couldn’t tell if she was laughing at him or not.

  “I haven’t had much sleep in the last few days,” he began, but she was already moving on with the feedbag.

  “Let me know if you see any mold on the hay,” she called over her shoulder. “That gives them colic. Oh, good, Brother Gabriel got us some alfalfa. Toss some of that into Absalom’s manger. The gray gelding. The one with the deep voice.”

  “Here ya go, old man,” said Mister, tossing the hay harder than necessary. “¿Qué hay de mal con éste uno?”

  “He’s swaybacked,” said Rocky.

  “He looks like an old couch.” Tentatively, he ran a hand along the horse’s back. “You know, the one that sags in the middle because the kids have jumped on it too long.”

  “He reminds me of my first horse,” said Rocky. “Hand me that fly stick, hon. Fandango was an unbroken two-year-old; I got her cheap. She was a beautiful paint horse, maybe fourteen hands high, with buckskin coloring and white socks on all four legs. She had a black tail and a black mane and a white bull’s eye on her shoulder. I was only twelve when we got her, and I taught her to neck rein. Luckily, she was mellow, but she was also stubborn. If I put too many kids on her, she would just lie down on the ground. She was always good to me. When I went to foster care, my mom sold her within forty-eight hours.”

  Absalom looked from Mister to Rocky, and Mister thought he was jealous.

  “You dream on,” he whispered in the old horse’s ear. “You ain’t da man.”

  “The next time I go to town,” she was saying, “I’m going to buy some mineral blocks.” She brushed that same lock of hair from her eyes and put one hand on her hip. “I don’t care what it costs.” Her shirt had come untucked, and there was one curl of a wood shaving on her cheek. Mister realized, with something like nausea, that he loved her.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Meals at the monastery were eaten in silence. In the refec-tory—a small room off the kitchen with slab floors and long tables and benches—two monks wearing white aprons over their robes brought the platters around: potatoes, carrots, macaroni and cheese. The nuns ate on one side, and the monks on the other, with Rocky and Mister in the middle. In the far corner of the room, one of the nuns sat on a high stool and read them a story about an abbey that had tried to deal with the strain of celibacy by allowing some of the monks to dress as nuns. Her voice was raspy, and Mister wondered if she ever wanted a man. Then he tried to think of something else.

  Forks clicked on plates. “More potatoes?” the server asked quietly.

  Mister nodded. He didn’t know where to look when people weren’t talking, so he kept his eyes on his food. When he had cleaned his plate twice, he watched Rocky’s hands.

  “I have princess hands,” she had told him in the tenth grade after some girls had painted GO HOME BITCH on her locker with red nail polish. “See how my fingers are tapered?” Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were standing at the bottom of a dry well, and he was afraid she would cry. “Peasant hands are square,” she went on. “The fingers are short and stubby.” She held out one ink-stained hand with the nails bitten to the quick, and without thinking, he dipped his head and kissed it.

  As they were filing out of the refectory, one of the brothers leaned over to Mister and whispered, “Tomorrow we’re having chicken.”

  Outside, slipping her hand into his, Rocky led him under the arch and down a long gravel path to a narrow portico.

  “This is the boiler room,” she said, opening the door to a small cave humming with the sound of a generator. In the buzzing darkness, row after row of recharging lanterns blinked tiny red lights. In the distance, a coyote yowled.

  “I have something to tell you,” Mister said, shaking his head to clear his ears.

  “Okay, shoot.” She put her lantern on the shelf and plugged it back in, keeping her back to him. He tried the words out in his mind. I killed Tomás. I shot him. It was an accident. He was supposed to kill me too. Me also. As well.

  Her scream would be terrible, bringing the quick scuffle of feet, the rustle of robes. Someone would tie him up, put him in a cell. Forever.

  Suddenly, she turned to face him and put her hands on his shoulders. “Ready?” she asked, and then she kissed him, pressing her body against his, sliding her tongue into his mouth.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  She stood before him in the whitewashed room with the shined sink and the neatly made bed. Her lips were red and swollen from kissing him. Drawing the short white curtain across the window, she asked, “Do you want to make love to me?”

  He drew in a hard breath. “Yes. But first I have to tell you something.”

  “You have a girlfriend.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. The fire crackled at her feet, and she turned to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Outside the cell, voices chanted, Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur Nomen tuum.

  He looked at her in the fire glow and smelled the clean peppermint smell of her cell and felt the perfect stillness he would not break.

  “You look tired,” she said. She made him a pallet on the Navajo rug next to her cot, and he pretended to sleep while she undressed in the light of the fire.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Sometimes in the dream, Mister was Luke Skywalker, and Rocky was his undiscovered twin sister, Leia, and Tomás was Darth Vader, and sometimes he was Darth Vader and Tomás was Luke Skywalker. When Tomás was the Dark Lord, he would slash at Rocky with his light saber and say, “I saw you eat a red ant. I saw you use somebody else’s Band-Aid. I saw you blow your nose in a tissue and eat the whole thing.” Then Luke would have to kill him.

  Abuela’s tortoiseshell rattled, and he looked all over for her, but he could not find her in the rocks.

  Climbing the mesa, Rocky wore a pair of cutoff shorts and the shiny red Marlboro Man jacket her father had won at the casino; the cuffs dangled below her wrists. Through the open jacket, her nipples stood erect and pink.

  “Watch out, he’ll shoot you,” said Tomás.

  “Shut up,” she said, laughing and falling backward as she tried to slap him.

  Mister caught her and pushed her down with his fingers splayed under her ass. The cut-offs were tight and frayed; the white lining of one pocket stuck out.

  “Go on,” said Tomás, holding her arms behind her back. “You want her.”

&nb
sp; The brass zipper was hot on his hand, and his cock was so hard that it hurt.

  “I’m losing my money,” she said, and he saw the bright coins rolling out of her pocket.

  Mister opened his eyes. It was 3:40 a.m., and the bells for the vigil were ringing with a sound like coins dropping on the floor.

  17

  Ramona’s Witness Statement

  Spider or Spiderweb

  Tomás means twin. Illuminada I called the other one. Every light casts a shadow. The women in Pilar, you know how they talk. Too much inbreeding I’ve met smarter cows. Habla, habla, habla. They said I killed Illuminada but she swallowed a button. The Apache used to kill the twins and the old people. My grandfather had one of the original parcels of land granted by the king of Spain. Good bottomland across from the river. He got it from Jicarilla farmers and it was his. The Indians only used it some of the time. Well, okay, blood was shed and we’re walking on their bones and we know it! They’re not like us even the ones who have some Spanish blood.

  It’s the gringos who come out here and take all the jobs.

  I was a single mother working two, sometimes three jobs. I ran the store and the rafting company until we had that incident and had to close. After that I cleaned houses. I swished Padre Pettit’s toilet and I considered it an honor. I was always religious. Yolanda—she back-talked me all the way to mass. But Tomás had religious feeling. My boy had the fear of God in him, may he rest in peace. But that Mister was a pagan—his abuela raised him that way.

  Ignacia Romero. Some people said she was a curandera and some said brujería. Habla, habla, habla. Those heifers told their stories: fireballs shooting from the chimney, coyotes begging like dogs at her door. People said she had their chickens sleepwalking down the road to get in her coop. Yo no sé, maybe she did. When I couldn’t get rid of those corns on my feet she mixed up a paste and told me to rub it behind my ears for three nights. I didn’t want to get the pillow-case dirty, but I did and the corns went away. She couldn’t do nothing for Illuminada.