The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  When the bells on the door tinkled, Mister looked up, but it wasn’t Rocky.

  “Come in!” called Boris. “I’m back here making cocoa.”

  “Excuse me,” said the woman who had come into the shop. She was wearing khaki hiking pants and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She held up a square of brown soap wrapped in plastic and tied with a piece of twine. “Is this one really rosemary? It smells like something else.”

  Wandering along the book aisle, Mister touched the covers: Care of the Soul, The Tao of Pooh, The Screwtape Letters. He wanted to buy all of them for Rocky. He remembered how she liked to sniff the pages of a new book, how she sometimes pressed it against her chest. “I like to hold the possibility of a new world,” she’d said.

  Boris was telling the woman his joke. “After the third year, the abbot tells the monk that he can say two words. The monk says, ‘I’m leaving.’ ‘Good,’ says the abbot. ‘You’ve done nothing but complain since you got here.’”

  She tittered.

  He was telling a joke about the Buddhist, the Jew, and the priest when the bell over the door rang. Two men wearing khaki uniforms, hiking boots, and gun belts entered the shop.

  “Hola,” said the short one, making the sign of the cross before he shook Brother Boris’s hand.

  Mister’s ears began to ring so loudly that he couldn’t hear what the men were saying. Was that his name? Why didn’t they look back here? How stupid he was! Why shouldn’t she call the cops—he had killed her boyfriend.

  Lifting a book of poetry from the shelf, The Owl Question, Mister hid his face. They had him in here. The window was next to the door. Did Brother Boris know? It didn’t matter. His body tensed, waiting for the bootsteps; the command; the snap of handcuffs.

  Then she walked through the door, bells jingling.

  “Hello, Rocky,” said Brother Boris.

  When she paused by the window where the sunlight poured through the golden jars of honey, Mister saw how like them she had become, how she stood without shifting her weight or fiddling with her hair or tapping her fingers. Like a nun. Or an Indian.

  “My mother wanted me to be a priest,” the short cop was telling Boris, “and for a long time, I thought that was my calling. But I couldn’t do it.”

  “Was it the women?” asked Boris, his eyes twinkling.

  “I was just too shy is what it was. I couldn’t talk to people.”

  “For me, it would be the women,” said the other cop.

  “I tried phone sex,” said Brother Boris, “but I got an ear infection.”

  Rocky waved at Mister and came toward him. She’d lost her tomboy stride—maybe it was the long skirt keeping her steps small, but there was something else, something new. She walked the way Abuela walked when she was carrying eggs. He met her gaze as she came forward, and his heart pounded.

  “Is there a problem?” Boris asked the men.

  “We just rode up here to see how far it is. People are asking us all the time.”

  “It’s 13.2 miles.”

  “That’s something the Park Service needs to know.”

  Rocky sidled up close to him, leaning over his shoulder to read the title of the book. She smelled of chocolate and sage and faintly of peppermint.

  “I know this poet,” she said. “Her name is Faith.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Mister sat nervously on the edge of Rocky’s cot while she undressed. The square white curtain blew over the open window, and from somewhere in the distance, a cow lowed.

  “I’m four months pregnant,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, and swallowed.

  She wore a pair of white cotton underwear. He glanced at her breasts and looked away. He was not unfamiliar with pregnant women—Yolanda had been continually knocked up since she was sixteen, but the sight of the faint blue vein running down Rocky’s round white belly made his palms sweat.

  “Tomás is the father,” she said matter-of-factly, and for one moment he felt sick with jealousy. “I went back to Taos last Christmas and saw him. You probably heard.”

  “Sí, sí,” he said, with his head bent, rubbing his hands across his face. She continued to stand there in front of him, like a teacher in white underpants.

  “You didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “Yes, I did. I shot Tomás. We were standing on the Milagro Creek Bridge. I had a gun in his mouth, and he had a gun in mine. He had set the timer on his watch. I don’t know if it went off or not. I don’t know what happened—I felt a jerk—an explosion …” He stood up and walked to the window so he wouldn’t have to look at her. A baby! He couldn’t wrap his mind around it, couldn’t think what a baby was, exactly. Something small and squishy and loud. She was talking now, but the blood in his ears drummed out the sound of her words.

  “… father … wanted … so so sorry …” she was saying. When he parted the curtain and looked out the window into the falling darkness, he saw the river stretched out like a black snake.

  “What?” he asked, turning to her.

  “I mean,” she said, wiping her tears, “I don’t think Tomás shot at you.”

  “I murdered him.”

  “No. He let you commit his suicide for him.”

  “Don’t try to make it okay; I killed him, Rocky.”

  “Listen to me! He knew I was going to have this baby, and he knew he couldn’t be the dad. Drunks can’t be dads. I know you think he was dumb, and maybe he wasn’t as smart as you or me, but he knew some things. This is what I think. I think he loved you. He loved us. I think he wanted it to be like this.”

  “Why didn’t he just kill himself?”

  “Scared? Lazy?” She snorted, trying to suppress a giggle. “That’s not funny. Why am I laughing?”

  “You’re nervous, baby. This is crazy. I’m sorry I brought this to you.

  “We made a pact when we were kids,” said Mister. “To die together.”

  “Well somebody has to stay alive,” said Rocky. Her plump breasts shifted as she raised one arm to wipe her face. A thin, clear stream of snot stayed, and the tears kept coming.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?”

  “I’ll be the dad.”

  “Okay,” she said, and blew her nose in a long, satisfying honk.

  19

  The Day after Easter

  April 16, 2001

  Blanket Design

  Rocky put some clothes and a notebook in a saddlebag. “Roll the blankets tight,” she said, tossing Mister some rope.

  “No,” he said, standing with his arms crossed stubbornly over his chest. “I can’t let a pregnant woman ride a horse. This whole thing is too dangerous. I told you that I would send for you as soon as I cross the Mexican border.”

  “Fill those water bottles,” she said. “I’ve been riding horses my whole life.”

  “Cops might shoot at me,” he continued, but she was looking at a map and paid him no attention.

  “We’ll avoid Nogales,” she said. “There must be a fence we can crawl under somewhere. Hey, here’s Truth or Consequences. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

  “And, anyway,” he said, as if she were listening to him, “how do you know the mechanic even fixed the Hoochie Mobile? What if we get to Abiquiu and find out that it’s a junkyard deal? Besides the fact that we don’t have money to pay him—was it the starter?”

  “Hmmm?” she looked at him for the first time, green eyes shining with excitement. “I think it was the starter, or the radiator.”

  “Great. The starter or the radiator. One or the other.” Mister slumped down on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. “So we ride these two horses, one of them blind, thirty miles to Abiquiu, where I show my mug around in case anyone hasn’t seen enough of it on the news, and without any cash, we ask this mechanic to give us the car he has probably fixed, and we tell the horses to go home—”

  “We’ll tie them together,” said Rocky.

  “Rig
ht. We tie them together—does the blind one go first?” Suddenly he jumped to his feet, fists clenched. “No!” he cried. “I won’t do it. I won’t let you go through with this.”

  Calmly, Rocky wiped the water bottle she had just filled at the sink. Pushing her hair behind one ear, she remarked, to no one in particular, that Mister was apparently afraid to ride a horse.

  “El tió,” he said. “I give up.”

  While she saddled the horses, Mister packed their food: apples, cheese, a stale hunk of bread, coffee, and chocolate Easter eggs. Referring to her list, he added toothbrushes, soap, and an army knife. He remembered the coffeepot and mugs and checked his pocket for the lighter. As he was leaving the cell, he stopped at the bookshelf, picked up a slim book titled The Way of the Pilgrim and dropped it in the bag. Then he stood on the portico, listening to the bells for vespers.

  At the toll of the bell, the monks emerged into the dusky light with their lanterns and began to file up the hill to the chapel. The dark, silent, hooded figures that had looked so strange to Mister two days ago now seemed like a normal part of the landscape. Rocky had slipped two of the black robes out of the laundry room and packed them in the bedrolls. They would camp tonight and disguise themselves in the morning, when they’d be riding in daylight. Mister thought her plan was full of holes, but he didn’t have a better one, and although he had begged her to stay and wait for him, he was secretly glad that she was going. She appeared around the corner of the stables, her face illuminated by the lantern she held up high to light the path for the horses. They were taking the blind one because she knew the way home. Mister would ride the one that looked like a broken couch. It can’t be that hard, he thought, watching tired, old Absalom plod toward him.

  The mud had dried, and the horses stepped with confidence along the familiar service road. “They are walking,” Rocky insisted, when Mister asked how to shift from trot to walk. “Ease up on the reins, honey. Absalom isn’t going to run. Push your boots back in the stirrups. Don’t lean over like that; you might fall.” She rode with a straight back, chin up.

  In Spanish, he told her that he did not need her instructions. “Yo sé lo que hago,” he said curtly, but he had leaned too far forward to tell her this, and he tumbled to the ground.

  Absalom turned around and waited patiently for him to get back up. “Shit!” said Mister, shoving his boots into the stirrups. Then he looked at Rocky and forced a smile. “I think he’s all right now.” He patted the horse’s neck and then sat up straight, holding the reins like a steering wheel.

  “Good,” said Rocky, pushing back a laugh. As the last light fell from the sky, she guided Liza Jane off the road and onto a zigzag of sand washes that led down to the river. The horses stepped alongside their shadows on the pebbly path, avoiding the prickly pear and cholla. When they reached the river, Rocky led them to a broad gravel wash shaded by willow trees and dismounted.

  “Let them wade out into the ford to drink,” she said. “They won’t go far.”

  While she unrolled their blankets and fixed a pot of coffee, Mister gathered brush and sticks and built a small fire in the stone ring. “You’ve been here before,” he said.

  “I have to get out sometimes.”

  “They give you a lot of liberty—letting you have a guy in your cell.”

  “I’m not an aspirant. I get room and board in exchange for the work I do with the horses.”

  “You’re not going to be a nun, then.”

  “No! I told you that.”

  “So we can have sex?”

  She threw a chocolate egg at him, which he opened and ate.

  “I can’t believe we’re laughing,” she said. “We’re nervous; that’s why.”

  “Not me,” he said. He sat down on a rock, picked up the army knife, and with his shaking hand tried to enlarge the hole he’d cut into the toe of Tomás’s boot.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  They lay on the blanket in front of the fire, shivering. She pulled her shirt and bra off at the same time, and for a moment, her face was hidden in the shirt, and her arms were stretched over her head, leaving her breasts bare. He touched them and ran his hands along the sweet curve of her hips and over her smooth, rounded belly.

  “Can you feel the baby’s heartbeat?” he asked.

  “It’s too soon,” she said, but he tried anyway, pressing his ear against her belly button. When he reached up to kiss the erect nipples, her elbow hit him in the eye.

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry.” His zipper stuck, and when he had jerked his jeans down his legs and kicked them off his feet, the cold air hit him, and his penis went limp.

  “Oh,” she said, and scratched her ear.

  “I guess I have to apologize for my dick,” he said.

  “You don’t.”

  “Nunca se ocurrió antes.” He wasn’t sure if she had understood the Spanish, so he said, “This doesn’t usually happen to me.”

  It had never happened. Mister was nineteen years old, and he was not a virgin by any stretch of the imagination, but his experience had been limited to backseats and broom closets and a jacket spread under the Milagro Creek Bridge.

  Sometimes when they were younger, Tomás would steal a bottle of wine from Mercado de Milagro. Pussynip, the boys called it. They’d take the chicas under the bridge and pass the bottle until their mouths were stained with red. You had to run all the bases with most girls, and even then you might not score. Tomás was pretty good at getting them to hold his cock.

  It was a lot of trouble. The girls didn’t want to take their pants off because they would get dirty, and the bank was too steep for a blanket. Most of them didn’t like the darkness, or the dank smell, even when Mister lit smudge sticks and stuck candles in the dirt. Sometimes they toasted marshmallows in the candles. Once, a girl called Felícitas let Mister stick hot marshmallows on her tits and suck them off, but the next time she didn’t want to.

  Still, it was fun. While Mister was working on his jaina, he’d listen to Tomás on the opposite bank. If he heard a zipper over there, he tried to go faster, but he couldn’t go too fast, or she’d quit. Sometimes he thought the girls were listening to each other too, seeing how far the other one would go, daring each other. The boys were silent, but the girls would make moans and little cries, and Mister could imagine that he was by himself, making out with two hotties at the same time.

  Rocky never went down there. She said it was skank. She said she was going to lose her virginity in a motel room like a lady.

  “You know,” he said one day, “you should break up with Tomás.”

  “Why?”

  He thought she knew about the girls under the Milagro Creek Bridge, and if she didn’t, he wasn’t going to rat on his homey.

  “Dios mio, cómo tiene un pene pequeño!” he said.

  “Actually,” she said, “he’s well-hung.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Out here by the river, Mister could feel the well-hung bastard watching him from the shadows.

  “There’s a lot going on,” Rocky said, gently tracing the scar on his forehead.

  “I have to go alone,” he said now. “I have to hide.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  “Take a plane. Meet me in Nogales.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “You don’t? You said you could buy the gas.”

  “My dad sent me a gas card. It’s one of those things he wins. A shiny red Marlboro jacket, a JCPenney coupon, and a gas card—that was my Christmas package.”

  Mister got up and poked the fire with a stick. The dark seemed to be full of faces, so he kept his gaze on the fire. When he heard even snores coming from Rocky’s blanket, he spoke to Abuela.

  “This isn’t a prayer, or anything,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t see you.” He waited, listening to the faint rustle of leaves. Something that splashed softly in the river. “I guess you saw this co
ming,” he went on, “but it caught me off-guard. I miss Tomás. I miss you.” He cried for a while, letting the tears and snot run together. When he was done, he wiped his face with a bandana and moved closer to the warmth of the fire. “There’s three of us again,” he said. “She deserves better—a doctor or a lawyer or at least some guy with a couple of furniture stores. Abuela, this woman is smart. What does she want with some cholo with no money and no education and a big fat prison sentence waiting for him?” He shook his head, as if Abuela were arguing with him.

  “I think the baby is a boy,” he said. “I saw the blue line on Rocky’s belly—just like the one Yolanda had when she was pregnant with Sam.”

  He stirred the fire, then closed his eyes and went inside his own Kiva, the way Abuela had taught him. There, in the darkness behind his eyelids, he climbed down and down into the cool hollow that Padre Pettit called the God-shaped hole.

  He remembered when they got off the bus on first day of school, Tomás with his new haircut and a big black eye.

  “Your mama beat you down,” said a third grader, and Mister had felt something go tight in his chest.

  “Bull chit,” he said, stepping between Tomás and the big kid. “His house was robbed last night.”

  “Yeah,” said Tomás. “You shoulda seen that big mothafucker come down the chimney.”

  Tomás was a good kid; he used to sneak fireflies into Yolanda’s jar. He’d steal groceries for his mom and sometimes money for her cigarettes. It was a hard world, but when they were down at Milagro Creek, playing Indians or just dicking around under the bridge, that was something else. Before Rocky came, that’s when he loved him the best, like a brother.

  “Women mess everything up,” Chief said once. “They’ve got that power. Sometimes you can’t so much as look at one without getting cockeyed and bottlenecked and screwed into a sailor’s knot.”

  “Yeah,” said Mister. “Abuela told me,” and he told Chief about the bumblebees that lost their legs in milkweed.