Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  Will pulled a chair out from against the wall and sat down. “Not much,” he said smiling. “So why is the highway littered with the dead?”

  Joe rocked his chair back and forth gently. “Nasty out there, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe you ought to at least shovel them off the road, Joe. There’s people around here these days who might question the massacre of small animals.”

  “If I leave them out there, it’s a warning to the other skunks,” Joe said. “Besides, we’re getting a good crowd every morning. If the supply holds out, we can sell tickets.” He pushed himself forward in the chair with some effort. His fingers played with the papers on his desk. “So how come you’re not working?”

  Will shrugged. “We had a job fall through. We’ve got a deck to build next week, so we’re taking a long weekend.” For a few seconds neither one of them spoke, and then Will asked, “Anyway, you still got that redwood out in the yard?”

  “It’s sitting out there aging.”

  “Good,” Will said and stood up. “Save me about five hundred square feet, will you?”

  Joe nodded, and as Will turned to go, he said, “What’s the story with Ray?”

  Will went back to his chair and sat down. “Ray who?” he said.

  Joe shook his head and then raised his hand, palm out. “Forget I asked,” he said. “You know your own business.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way. Tell me. Felipe came in here shooting off his mouth, didn’t he?”

  Joe shrugged. “I asked him where you were. He said you were trying to solve a crime. That you went to interrogate Ray Pacheco.”

  “Damn,” Will said. “Felipe’s like an old woman. You ever notice?”

  “What I’ve noticed,” Joe said, “is that old women like to hang out with other old women.” He looked out the doorway. An old man, his face unshaven and drawn, stuck his head in the office door. He glanced at Will and then asked Joe if he had any gaskets to fix a leaking toilet. Joe told him to look by the hinges and if he couldn’t find them to ask Lawrence.

  Joe looked back at Will. “How was it with Ray?”

  “Not real good.”

  Joe snorted. “Ray was the village cop when I was growing up. What you see is all there is. He can handle the straightaways, but if he has to turn, get out of the road.” The phone on Joe’s desk began to ring. Both of them looked at it until Lawrence answered it up front.

  “Did Felipe tell you we went to see Delfino Vigil?”

  “He didn’t use the word ‘we,’” Joe said and smiled. The fingers on one hand drummed the top of the desk.

  “Tell me,” Will said, “how are you related to Delfino?”

  “What, because we’re both Vigils? We’re not related. Maybe a long time ago. Maybe Delfino’s my father’s fourth cousin or something. Everyone in this town is related if you go back far enough. You know that.” Joe leaned forward over the desk. “Anyway,” he went on, “I just thought I should tell you to be careful.”

  “Careful? All I did was ask some questions.”

  “Will,” Joe said, “you can ask Delfino questions and everyone bullshits and has a good time. But when you go see Ray Pacheco, that’s something else.”

  “Delfino’s story ended with Ray. So I went to see Ray. There’s this girl hanging out in nowhere; wouldn’t this interest you?”

  “No,” Joe said, and Will could tell he meant it. “I have enough problems with the living. I have enough problems with just the skunks. I don’t need to mess around with things like this. Besides, it happened a long time ago. This girl’s already turned to dirt, Will. Guadalupe’s a small town. If this was someone else, you’d tell them to mind their own damn business.” Joe leaned back in his chair. “You think Ray thought you were just curious?”

  “Have you ever heard this story?” Will asked.

  Joe let out a long breath of air. “No,” he said and looked at his watch. “You want to go eat? I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “No,” Will said as he stood up. “I better get going.”

  “I didn’t mean to ruin your day,” Joe said. “If you want to annoy people where you won’t get in any trouble, why don’t you go up to Canto Rodado? That’s where all the old hippies live. The girl was white, Will, wasn’t she?”

  Will drove north with the windows rolled down, the draft pulling the sour stench of skunk out of the cab. He slowed down in front of Felix’s Café and pulled in.

  Inside the café, Felix was sitting, as always, by himself near the jukebox, his head bent low and nodding not far from the surface of the table. No one else was in the room. Will walked into the back, where he found Pepe at the stove mixing together a large pile of potatoes and ground beef. On a shelf above the stove was a small radio playing accordion music.

  “Pepe,” Will said, “where’s Lisa?”

  “Is anyone out there?” Pepe said without looking up.

  “Just your father.” Pepe scraped the pile of food off to the side and sprinkled it with massive amounts of red chile powder. “Where’s Lisa?” Will asked again.

  “Outside on break.”

  Will looked at the food. The kitchen smelled of garlic and grease and chile. “Make me a couple of burritos, would you?”

  Pepe nodded. “Tell Lisa I need her to run to the store.”

  The air was cool outside after the closed-in heat of the kitchen. Lisa was squatting some twenty yards away in the shade of a large juniper tree, smoking a cigarette, her back to him. She smoked with an easy discipline Will envied. Two or maybe three cigarettes a day. Just to think, she had once told Will, and just enough smoke to keep her lungs strong.

  “Hey,” Will said.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “Hey yourself,” she answered and turned her head away.

  “Pepe wants you.”

  Will heard her grunt and watched her stub out her cigarette. She rose with a sigh and walked toward him.

  “What time do you get off?” Will asked.

  “I’m not in a good mood, Will,” she said. She stopped in front of him, the top of her head coming to his chin.

  “Let’s take a ride later.”

  “Where?”

  “I want to see someone in Canto Rodado.”

  She looked at him for a few seconds and then said, “I’m covering for Carla until five. Come and get me at six.” She brushed by him and then turned back. “You better not be late,” she said.

  Five

  I’VE LIVED IN THIS village a long time,” Will said, “and nobody has ever told me to be careful before.” He was sitting alone in his kitchen, his legs stretched out, his hands folded across his stomach. He’d been sitting this way for some time, and it occurred to him that he should check the clock by the stove or he would end up late meeting Lisa. Then there would truly be something to worry about. He hummed out a soft breath of air and closed his eyes.

  What Will said was true. He had always been blessed with the ability to slide into the background with a nod, believing it is better to be quiet than to have people look at you. What that got him was a place at Lloyd Romero’s table for breakfast, a couple of beers at the lumberyard after work, waves from people who drove by him. What it got him was a home. And now, for what seemed to be no reason, he had pissed off Ray Pacheco and Joe Vigil was warning him to be careful.

  Will turned his head and looked at the Lady standing on the table not far from where he sat. “Where did you come from, anyway?” he asked her. He touched the base she stood upon and could feel small indentations in the wood as if someone had once rubbed their fingers there over and over. He knew she was a santo of Our Lady of Guadalupe and that someone who had once lived in his house had placed her in the adobe wall and then covered the opening with a thin layer of mud. She had been there when Will moved in, listening. It wasn’t until a year ago, when Will thought he would hang a calendar next to the stove, that he had found her. Now he turned her a little so that she looked out the open door.

  “How does a girl not from this pla
ce,” he said, “end up hanging from a bridge?” Will closed his eyes again, realizing not only that he was talking to a piece of wood, but that he had been doing so for some time.

  Lisa’s mother lived in a large, unkempt adobe, the exterior plaster pitted and painted a lime green. The yard was cluttered with old sheds jammed full of junk, broken-down trucks, rusted farm machinery that was made to be pulled by horses, and piles of warped gray lumber no one had bothered to clean up since the death of Lisa’s father years before. Every so often, Mundo would scavenge some piece of bent, twisted metal and make off with it as if it were some precious artifact. With its curtained windows and the high weeds that grew everywhere, the house looked as though it had been left behind a long time ago.

  Lisa lived in a small trailer not far from the house, where the debris hadn’t gathered. A few years earlier, she had painted over the faded aluminum siding. To neaten things up, she had told Will. Not long after, the brown paint had curled away from the walls, making the small, round trailer look like the head of a prehistoric man. She grew corn just outside her front door. The stalks were light yellow and spindly and just ankle high. When Will would tease her about the pathetic state of her garden so far into the summer, she’d tell him, “So what. I don’t grow it for food. I grow corn to hear the wind rattle it in the winter.”

  Will didn’t see anyone around when he drove up to the house. Lisa’s small, beat-up car and her mother’s pickup were parked side by side. He got out of his truck, walked to the house, and knocked on the door. A muffled voice from inside yelled for him to come in.

  The door opened into the kitchen, a dark room with one small window facing north that seemed to let in only shadows. The ceiling light, which was centered in the room and strung down from gray aspen latillas, was on. Lisa’s mother and Mundo sat at the kitchen table.

  Will nodded and said hello. Mrs. Segura nodded back and dropped her head. Mundo didn’t say a word. Will always had a difficult time talking to Mrs. Segura. Their relationship was limited to nods. She was in her late fifties but seemed much older. Her gray hair was knotted tightly in back, and her posture was stooped. She was bone thin, and the wrinkles in her face had not come from smiling. She kept busy whenever Will was around, constantly moving, her eyes never near him. Will didn’t know how to breach the silence, and he knew she was relieved when he left. Lisa’s presence would ease things, but even then, Mrs. Segura would ignore him and speak only to her daughter.

  Mrs. Segura rose from the table and went to the sink. She moved some plates around and then walked out of the room. Mundo pushed out her chair with his foot. “Sientate,” he said.

  Will walked across the room and sat down. C’mon, Lisa, he thought. He couldn’t hear a sound in the house and wondered if everyone had gone out the back way.

  “I didn’t see your truck,” Will said.

  Mundo leaned back in his chair, one arm stretched out loosely on the table. “Qué quieres con mi hermana?” he said.

  Will looked past him out the window. He could see a small dog, not much older than a puppy, tied to a piñon tree. It had worked the chain around the tree so there were only a couple of feet of slack. The dog looked hot and tired and beat, almost as if it knew tomorrow wouldn’t be much better. Will looked back at Mundo. “Why?” he asked.

  Mundo was older than his sister, closer to Will’s age. His hair was dark brown and thinning. It lay flat on his scalp and fell to his shoulders. His face was dark from the sun. His forehead and left cheek were marked with the pale streaks of old injuries. He was built thin, and even though Mundo was sitting, Will could feel a tautness in him that was not far beneath the surface.

  “Because,” Mundo said, “I don’t want you around here anymore. I don’t want you with my sister. You understand?”

  Will could see that the lobe of Mundo’s right ear was missing. He realized that in just one day two people had told him to never show his face again. He also realized it was only six o’clock. Plenty of time yet for things to get even worse.

  “Your sister’s not a child,” Will said.

  “My sister doesn’t think, jodido,” Mundo said. “But I do. I won’t tell you this too many times. Besides, even my mother says you bother her.”

  “I bother Lisa?”

  “You bother my mother,” Mundo said, and he jerked his head up slightly. “You come here. You don’t talk. You don’t do nothing. Take my sister off somewhere. What do you think we are?”

  Lisa walked into the kitchen. She crossed the room quickly with long strides and went to the sink. She turned on the tap and rinsed her hands. As Will watched her, he could feel Mundo’s eyes on the side of his face.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  Will stood up slowly. “Yes,” he said.

  Lisa turned around, drying her hands on the front of her jeans. “Joaquín,” she said, “you mind your own business.”

  “This is my business.”

  “Oh, I see,” Lisa said. She put her hands on her hips and leaned toward her brother. “You think it’s fun to mess with this, don’t you? Lisa needs her big brother’s help. Well, like hell I do.”

  Mundo waved a hand at her. “I’m not messing with you,” he said. “I’m messing with him.”

  Lisa pointed at him. “You better watch it,” she said and then looked at Will. “Let’s go.”

  Canto Rodado had a history, and most of it was recent. Some of it Will knew firsthand; the rest was gossip, picked up at the lumberyard or at Felix’s Café over cigarettes and coffee. Before the 1960s, Canto Rodado was a seven-mile wooded slope that butted up to the base of the mountains. The country was empty then, except for a few adobes that were no more than eroded bricks no one remembered much of anything about. A few head of cattle were pastured out on the lower land, and the country higher up was used for hunting deer and fishing the small creeks and cutting juniper for fenceposts.

  Will had never seen Canto Rodado the way it once was. He came later, after it had been bought and settled by people from other places. All he knew of it was what he heard back then, how the area was being shut off, how you couldn’t hunt without running into a house or a fence or a closed gate. And that was years ago. Now, Guadalupe had given up any thought that Canto Rodado was a relation. It was a place their grandfathers had once owned, a place that had changed hands. And that was that.

  Lloyd Romero had told Will a long time ago, “We ran those chingaderas out of here. We just didn’t follow them far enough down the road.” Will had listened and nodded and never asked him the obvious. If no one wanted these people around, how come they were sold land?

  It was Joe Vigil who answered his question. “I was pretty young then,” Joe had said, shrugging, “but I remember my father saying that for a bunch of long-haired, barefoot, sulky people, they sure had a lot of money. Guadalupe’s no different from anywhere else, Will. We just complain about it longer.”

  Will had missed those years. Not long after he came to Guadalupe, Canto Rodado started getting cut up and sold into parcels, and the teepees and plywood shacks became relics, almost like the old adobes.

  Lisa spit out the truck window. Both her feet were planted up on the dashboard, her body slumped down in the seat. She had to twist her upper body toward the open window and kind of throw the saliva out of her mouth. She fell back heavily against the seat. A can of beer was stuck between her legs.

  “Mundo hates your guts,” she said, taking a sip of beer.

  It was a little past six o’clock. The sun was still hot but slowly inching its way down to the west. The light was not as harsh, making the mountains and foothills seem soft and full. Will drove with one hand, his left arm dangling out the window, playing with the wind.

  “I thought you told me he hated everyone,” he said.

  “He has his pets.”

  “It’s good I’m such close friends with his sister.” A truck passed by and the driver raised up a finger in greeting. Will jerked his hand up and waved back. “Has he always be
en like this?”

  Lisa pushed herself up with her feet. She took a long swallow of beer and then belched softly, her cheeks puffing out. “Yes,” she said, “he was always like this. Even when he was little. This is something my mother never forgave herself for.”

  Will glanced over at Lisa and then looked back at the road. “Why would your mother feel that way?”

  “Because of how she gave birth to him,” Lisa said.

  Will held his arm straight up outside the window, the wind pushing against his palm.

  “You want another beer?” Lisa asked.

  Will hefted the beer in his lap. It was half full and felt warm. “No,” he said, “I’m okay. There was a problem with Mundo’s birth?”

  “There was an accident,” Lisa said.

  Will looked out at the valley. Miles of pale green sagebrush and in the middle of it, invisible from the road, was the river. He glanced over at Lisa. She was looking at him and smiling.

  “Mundo had his first accident at birth?” he said.

  Lisa nodded slowly, still smiling. “Do you want to hear the story?”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t really my mother’s fault. It was the fault of the midwife.”

  “Ah,” Will said.

  “When my mother went into labor, my father went to get the midwife, who did not live far. This midwife was an old, old woman. Too old, my mother told me years later. She would forget things. She would forget her name, which was García. Forget where she was going. Sometimes even forget to put on clothes. Her son, who was himself an old man, brought her to our house so she wouldn’t get lost. He and my father stayed out in the other room drinking whiskey until they both passed out.” Lisa finished off her beer and threw the can out the window. She got another one out of the six-pack, popped it open, and sipped the foam off the top.

  “My mother said that everything would have been fine if it wasn’t for the midwife. Poor little Joaquín would have been born normal. The birth was going fine at first. The baby dropped from,” Lisa put her hand flat on her belly, “here,” and she lowered her hand, “to here, and then Joaquín got stuck. He wouldn’t budge. He stayed there forever like he was holding on for dear life. The midwife began screaming at my mother. She pushed with both her hands on my mother’s stomach. She made my mother stand on the bed and then jump down on the floor to get the baby loose. Nothing. Finally, my mother was on her back on the bed, exhausted, so tired, and the midwife whispered in her old, old voice, ‘Hija, if your baby does not come out now, this minute, it will be born muerto. The baby will come from you dead and black.’ So my mother, in so much fear, clenched her whole body and pushed with all her might. She pushed so hard that Joaquín became dislodged and flew out of her across the room, hitting his head on the plaster wall. The midwife screamed that my mother had given birth to a bat, and she ran from the room and out of the house. Little Joaquín, pobrecito, nearly died. He lay without even a whimper for weeks with the front of his head smashed in flat.” Lisa took a small sip of beer. “My mother said that when it was my time, she was very careful and would not let this old woman anywhere near our house. So you see.”