The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  Suddenly Tomás was leaning there against a pine, backlit by the moon, standing slant like he did in the doorway on the night of Abuela’s funeral.

  “Whasup, vato?”

  Mister opened his eyes. By the light of the last few coals, he found a pen and tore a clean piece of paper out of Rocky’s notebook.

  Later, by the light of the last few coals, he found a pen and tore a clean piece of paper out of Rocky’s notebook.

  Querida Ramona, he began, and with the pen clenched in his fist, he wrote out what was in his heart.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Across the river, a red sun rose over the sand hills. Mister pushed Rocky’s hair away from her sleeping face and kissed the warm silky spot behind her ear.

  “Wake up,” he whispered. “I want to fuck you.”

  Her eyes opened.

  She shivered when he pulled off her T-shirt. In the cool morning air, her nipples stood erect, tight and dark pink. When he put them in his warm mouth, she moaned. Pulling her to her feet, he knelt in front of her and pulled her panties down around her ankles.

  He rubbed his hands along her cold butt to warm her, and along her legs as he kissed the insides of each white thigh. His knuckles felt large and clumsy against the damp corn silk between her legs, but when he kissed her there he felt the heat begin to rise off of her in waves, and her legs quivered in his hands. Once, he pushed his head back to see her standing over him, bare-breasted in the red sun, softly calling his name, and he felt like he was flying.

  “Don’t stop,” she said, but he pulled her down on the blanket. When he kissed her mouth, he tasted her deep in the back of his throat. Trembling, he knelt over her, pushing her legs apart with his knees.

  “Tienes un pene grande,” she said, and smiled.

  “For you,” he said.

  “Now!” she cried, but he held himself back.

  “¡Ahorita!”

  Then he drove himself deep into her. She cried out once, then gripped his arms and rocked her hips against him. Back and forth, they rode each other, faster and faster until they hit a long, hard wave and everything was pressed together and shot with light, like at the bottom of a river.

  20

  April 20, 2001

  Star

  Ramona sat in a cloud of cigarette smoke at her kitchen table reading the letter from Mister.

  Querida Ramona!

  Señora de mi Alma; the reason for this letter is to inform you que hemos sufrido un Accidente. Mortal. Where your Son and I decided to quitarnos a vida al mismo tiempo—El a mi y Yo a Él.—Al disparar—Su pistola no dio Fuego. y with very much Lament—mine did—SO I KILLED SU HIJO. I think he did want to die but I was wrong to do it. Por favor yo necesito su Perdón. o sino. If you want to turn me over to the cops—please wait until my son is born. At that time I will send Las direciones where I can be found. Bajo La Condícion que ningún daño se Le Haga a Rocky. She had nothing to do with it.

  Mother, I am sorry.

  Mister

  Every time Ramona read the letter, she poured another glass of wine. With these clues, even Ernesto Vigil could catch the little bastard, but she felt too tired to call him. I’m sorry I killed your son. How do you like that?

  With difficulty, she stood up. Trailing ash from her cigarette, she brought the crumpled piece of paper to the mantel. “¿Como te gusta esto?” she asked San Ramón Nonato, patron saint of midwives and prisoners. She flapped the letter over the grimy garland of plastic flowers, pushing the edge of the paper against the bare, wooden feet that stuck out under the santo’s robe. “He’s sorry he killed Tomás. He calls me, Señora de mi Alma, Lady of my Soul. Ha ha. That half-breed got the girl, Ramón.”

  The cigarette slipped out of her hand, and she got on her knees to look for it. “You’ll burn the fucking house down, you stupid bitch,” she was saying to herself, when she felt a warm, strong hand on her shoulder. She looked up, but no one was there.

  “Look under the chair,” said a kind male voice, and when she did, she saw the glowing red cherry. Quickly, it grew into a hand that reached up to push one finger along the ripped underside of the upholstery. “Be careful,” the voice said. “Don’t burn yourself.”

  Like a child, Ramona answered, “I won’t,” and then she began to cry. “Who are you!” she demanded.

  Again, she felt the hand on her shoulder. “Me llamo Ramón. You came to me for help.”

  The torn foil beneath the santo’s feet had turned into a liquid pool of gold. Smoke billowed around the pink flowers, and a halo hovered over Saint Ramón’s kind face.

  “I am going to set you free, Ramona,” he said as the flame caught the edge of her housecoat. “Te amo. Dios te ama. We have always loved you so much, Ramona.”

  “Oh,” she said. She felt the love burning through her heart. It was huge, bigger than anything she had ever imagined, bigger than the bright, orange sky and the beautiful beyond.

  21

  Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

  Migrations or Spirals

  At the gas station in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Mister and Rocky bought blue raspberry slushies and mirrored sunglasses on the gas card.

  “Tu eres mi vida,” he said, leaning over to kiss her as they leaned against the hood of the Hoochie Mobile. Most of the radioactive stencil had peeled off the hood of the car, but a few yellow and black marks remained. She smiled at him, showing a piece of the blue sky in her shades.

  He was seized with the sudden fear that she should die. “Stay here,” he said, suddenly. “Keep the car. I’ll hitchhike. It’s not far—I can get there in a day or two.” She said nothing. His tight, worried face stared back at him in her mirrored lenses.

  “You can have the car,” she said coldly. “You can have the fucking gas card too. I’ve been on my own before.”

  “Rocky! You don’t understand. They might shoot at me. And if they catch me, they’ll try to nail you too.”

  “They won’t get you.”

  “They might.”

  “Then we’ll go to prison,” said Rocky.

  “I don’t think they have married housing in prison.”

  “We’re not married.”

  “You want to get married? If you want to get married, I’ll marry you.”

  “You can do better than that,” she said, turning away from him.

  “You know I want you to be my wife. I’ve wanted that since tenth grade. You want me to get down on my knees?”

  “It’s one knee,” she said, and he knelt down in the parking lot.

  Back on the interstate, they rolled the windows down. Her hair whipped behind her like bright silk, and the sunlight danced off their mirrored lenses. The air smelled of exhaust and sage and the sweet familiar scent of the Hoochie Mobile.

  “Una real baby,” he said to the wind. Picking up The Way of the Pilgrim, he began to read. “By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by my calling a homeless wanderer of humblest origin, roaming from place to place …”

  22

  Quasimodo Sunday

  River

  Quasi modo geniti infantes … As newborn babes, alleluia,

  desire the rational milk without guile, alleluia, alleluia,

  alleluia. Rejoice to God our helper. Sing aloud

  to the God of Jacob.—I Peter 2:2

  Padre Pettit stood at Ramona’s graveside in the Sierra Vista Cemetery with his Bible in his hand. Tumbleweed blew across the artificial green grass. “My children,” he began in his flat, clear voice, “let us pray.” He bowed his head. They were putting Ramona next to Tomás.

  Most of Taos had turned out for Ramona’s burial, as well as a few out-of-towners and reporters who had seen the newspaper article. Rising Dawn drove up from Albuquerque. She wore a billowing purple skirt with a leotard. A new deerskin medicine bag with intricate beading hung around her neck on a leather strap. Holding it out for Chief to see, she smiled and said, “A very gentle Nativ
e American man in Santa Fe gifted this to me.”

  “Them gentle ones are trouble in the long run,” said Chief.

  “She’s well endowed,” whispered Ernesto.

  “Well enough,” said Chief.

  “O God, by Your mercy, rest is given to the souls of the faithful,” said Padre Pettit. “Be pleased to bless this grave.” The synthetic lawn reminded him of the green fields in Wisconsin. He missed the gray sky and the way everything was cut into squares. He missed blonde hair. He missed bratwurst and smelt and frozen custard. He wanted to hear someone call a water fountain a “bubbler” and a traffic light a “stop-’n’-go light.”

  “Let us pray silently now,” he said. “Speak to God in your own words. Tell him what is in your heart.”

  It was the first time Cisco Cisneros had ever prayed. He had always pretended to pray, even when he was alone. But now, as the sun bore down on the back of his head, he looked into the dark hole and once again felt the Milagro Creek Bridge breaking beneath his new Dodge Ram. Again, he hung in that suspended second of disbelief before he rolled into blackness. Underwater, Mister had pressed his face to the window of the truck and looked at him like he was a fish in a tank.

  “Señor,” Cisco prayed, “I shot straight at that kid.”

  When Padre Pettit sprinkled the grave with holy water, he asked God to let Ramona rest in peace. He asked for mercy on her soul, and he made the sign of the cross. He was praying that perpetual light might shine upon her, when he glanced up at the purple ridges of Taos Mountain and lost his train of thought. The sky was too blue out here in New Mexico. The white clouds were always moving, stretching themselves into lonely faces. The wind talked. Or was that the crowd around him? From the corner of his eye, he saw the sheriff approaching him. Again, he crossed himself, and then he brushed his hands off, so that they would know he was finished with the business of the ceremony.

  In the back of the crowd, Ernesto nudged Chief. “I’ve been meaning to say something to you. About shutting down your sweat lodge. I feel bad about it. The way things have played out, I guess we need all the churches we can get.”

  Chief nodded. “The spirits have told me things. Things are happening. I’m not at liberty to say everything I would like to, and I think it might scare you.”

  Ernesto looked at his black shoes. “As long as you got a hose out here, I guess it’s okay.”

  Chief took a deep, ragged breath and held one hand over his heart. Karen stood right across from him, stark naked. You settle down, he told himself, as his new therapist had recommended. Nobody else is gawking at her. According to the therapist, a jumpy little redhead from California, making distinctions between reality and imagination should make Chief feel better, but this time it didn’t. He felt a lot better seeing Karen in the raw. Suddenly it occurred to him, as if that California doctor-lady was standing right beside him with her two-dollar-a-minute advice, that he could ask old Rising Dawn for a date.

  Popolo approached Padre Pettit cautiously, the way they do, the priest thought, when they have a theological question. He nodded and smiled at the sheriff, noticing that he had gone gray. It happens fast like that sometimes—especially with politicians and lawmen. “I’m sorry she had to go this way,” said Popolo, shaking his gray head. Seeing that the man’s eyes were filled with tears, the priest put a hand on his arm. “It is sometimes hard to see God’s will,” he said.

  Popolo nodded. For the life of him, Padre Pettit couldn’t think of the man’s real name. It was an American name, something like Steve or Bill. Not Barney. Now that they were standing close to each other, Padre Pettit noticed the disheveled brown suit he wore. There was an orange spot, chili sauce probably, on his tie. That was odd because Popolo—Bryan, that was his name!—Bryan Tafoya had always been a dapper dresser, something of a lady’s man. This morning, he looked like he’d been on a bender, but Pettit didn’t smell liquor on him. “You were close to Ramona?” he asked, even though he knew the rumors. Some people said that he fathered one of the children.

  “Yeah,” said Popolo, fingering something in his pocket. Padre Pettit didn’t approve of worry-stones and the like. “If you worry, why pray, and if you pray, why worry?” he told his parishioners and advised them to keep their fingers on the rosary.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” said the sheriff. He had taken something out of his pocket, and he held it in the palm of his hand, staring at it as if it might move. It was a little silver thing, probably a milagro—a heart or a foot or even a little pig. “I was just wondering,” the sheriff said. “Don’t you think we’re all about equal amounts good and bad?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the priest, biding his time. People sometimes made shocking confessions at funerals, especially out here in the West. With the endless sky and endless land, death brought about a rare, definite finish to things.

  “Well,” said Popolo. “I’ve thought about this a lot in my line of work. You see somebody do something terrible to somebody else, and you think, ‘what the hell’—excuse me, Father—you think, ‘What on earth is wrong with him?’ This guy seems less than human or worse than human—worse than any animal. Okay. But then that same man, or woman, can do a great thing. Worst killer I ever saw—brutal man—he knocked on a woman’s car window while she was backing out of a grocery store parking lot and got her to stop. Turns out she was a new mother, real nervous and half crazy from lack of sleep, and she’d left her newborn in his carrier-basket thing on the roof of the car. The killer—same guy who strangled women with extension cords—saved that child’s life.”

  Manny Pettit nodded.

  “That kid grew up to be a teacher,” said Popolo.

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Well, that’s about it. Except that when I see what some criminal has done, I ask myself, Bryan, could you have done that?”

  All of sudden, it seemed to the priest that everyone was looking at him. He experienced a moment of vertigo in which the earth and sky rolled over each other, and the wind chimed like a bell in his ear. He felt the stir of memory, but when he tried to think, his mind scattered like mercury.

  “To tell you the truth, Padre, I’ve been up all night thinking about this,” said Popolo. “I apologize for my breath; I didn’t even brush my teeth.” When Bryan reached into his pocket, the priest winced, afraid to see the silver earring again, but what he held out was a pack of gum. “Want a piece?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “The first answer that comes to my mind,” Popolo was saying, “is ‘No, I could not have done what that criminal did. I’m a decent man.’ But I’ll tell you what, Padre,” said the sheriff, leaning closer as he lowered his voice. “I could have done it.” His minty breath was warm on Padre Pettit’s cheek. “This is just my opinion—you’re the expert here, Father—but I think Jesus could have done it. Jesus was a man.”

  The sheriff reached back into his pocket. “Ernesto gave me this last night,” he said. “He picked it up from the floor-board of your jeep the day you drove him to Abuela’s wake. Does this look familiar, Padre?” he asked, holding his palm open.

  Father Pettit leaned forward and looked at the silver earring. He shook his head.

  “No? Are you sure?” With his other hand, the sheriff reached into his pocket and retrieved the matching earring. “This is the earring we took from the corpse,” he said. “I’ve been carrying it around all this time, worrying over it, I guess.” He put the earrings side-by-side in his palm and held them out. “See?” he said. “They match.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  That evening, Padre Pettit walked down the lonely road to the Bridge to Nowhere. The dust rose around his feet as he walked, and he wished, just this one last time, for gray skies and a drizzle, or better yet, a good hard rain. Leaning against the bridge railing, he looked up at the interminable blue sky and felt his spirits sink.

  Deciding to pray, he dropped his hand into his pocket, but instead of the w
orn wooden beads of his rosary, he touched the card the sheriff had given him that morning. “Call me at your convenience,” he’d said. “We need to talk.”

  The earring had belonged to a woman with long, blonde hair named Tova, a one-night stand from the summer before last. The Right Reverend Monsignor Horshak had been blunt about the temptations of the flesh in the ministry.

  “You’ll run into a certain kind of woman in the ministry,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve got them out there in the desert just like they do here. This woman is what the clergy like to call a predatory female. They like to get a man of the cloth, see. To them, it’s a challenge. She might be young, old, fat, skinny, pretty, or plain, but pretty soon you’ll realize that you’re looking at the devil in a bra and panties.”

  Although Padre Pettit still believed that Tova had seduced him, he felt somewhat responsible for her death. She was a transient, from Sweden or Norway, he couldn’t remember, and after the macabre excitement of finding a body in the river had died down, the town seemed to have forgotten her. Apparently, the sheriff had remembered.

  After the incident, the padre had gone on a four-day retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. There, asking God to remove whatever lust might lie dormant in his heart, he had renewed his vows of celibacy. He had felt fine since then except for this growing homesickness for Campbellsport, Wisconsin, and one of his mother’s limburger sandwiches with a scoop of her famous cherry Coca-Cola Jell-O salad. Now, with this disgrace on his shoulders, he would never be able to go home. As the Right Reverend had warned him, he had stayed too long.

  When a dusty toad no bigger than his thumb hopped onto the rail of the bridge and froze, Padre Pettit saw it for what it was—one of the random acts of nature that a superstitious pagan like Ignacia Romero would read as a sign from God. All the same, when he peered into the toad’s wet black eyes, he found himself looking into a maze that led him to a single still point of being. “Oh, God, yes,” he said. Then he jumped to his death on the rocks of the Rio Grande.