Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  There was a lot of traffic on the road, pickups with kids and fishing poles, heading up into the mountains to fish the creeks and get away from the heat. The lot in front of the lumberyard was full. The skunks were gone from the highway, but Will could still smell them, and he could see the stains on the pavement where they’d lain.

  He drove to the north end of town and pulled into the village office. It was a one-story, plastered building built years ago with state money. The mayor had a small office in the back, next to the dispatchers. The front half of the building consisted of a village council chamber, where half the town got together every month and argued, and a small visitors’ area filled with maps and brochures that were faded yellow and coated with a fine layer of dust.

  Monica Chavez was behind the front counter shuffling through a stack of papers. She looked up when Will came through the door. He walked up to the counter, leaned against it, and reached for a cigarette.

  “No smoking,” Monica said.

  “I’ve seen the mayor in here chain-smoking,” Will told her.

  “So what does that have to do with you?” she asked, looking at him seriously. She cocked her head slightly. “I see your ears haven’t burned to ashes.” Will was nearly fifteen years older than Monica, but she treated him, as always, as though their ages were reversed. She had the same dark, quiet look in her eyes she’d had years ago when her grandfather, Marcello Rael, stooped down next to her and said, “This is the man who will build a house for you, hija.”

  Will had lived in his house by the creek for three years when Marcello stopped by and said that he had been thinking. Since he had long ago sold his cows and no longer needed the pasture, and since no one in his family wished to live in an old adobe that always needed repair, he thought he would like to sell the house and acreage to Will. Will, who had never owned anything of value in his life, told Marcello that he had little money and that work was sometimes hard to find. Marcello looked away and rubbed the side of his face and said again that he had been thinking. He said he would part with this land, which was so close to his heart, if Will would agree to pay him five thousand dollars cash over as much time as he needed and sign a paper promising to build a house for each of Marcello’s two granddaughters. Marcello would purchase all of the building materials and Will would provide all of the labor. If Will died or left Guadalupe before the houses were built, the property would be returned to Marcello. If one of his granddaughters died, Dios perdones, or left town, a thing even worse, a house would be built for the next granddaughter. When Will asked what if one of his granddaughters wished to have a castle built, Marcello told him not to worry, that they were reasonable men.

  Marcello brought his granddaughters with him to Will’s house to sign the papers, two skinny little girls all dressed up, their long black hair combed and ribboned, both of them too shy to look up from the ground. Marcello crouched down between the two of them and pointed at Will. “This is the man who will one day build a house for each of you. For your families. No, not now, Monica. When you are older.” Will looked at the two girls and tried not to smile. In his soul, he thought that although Marcello was a gentle man, he was also foolish and that Will now owned a house for nothing.

  Twelve years later, he and Felipe built Monica’s house. Will worked weekends, nights after real work, wondering why he had been so naive as to make such a deal with a man who had so cleverly taken advantage of him. Monica and her husband and their new baby lived in a small trailer on the house site. Marcello would stop by, smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes, telling Will to make sure the corners were square, the roof watertight.

  They all got drunk the afternoon the house was finished. Beer and too much tequila. Monica’s sister, Estrella, was there with her boyfriend. She whispered to Will that she was engaged as though that would make him happy. Marcello stood off by himself smoking and staring at the house until the sun was gone.

  Now, three years later, Will asked Monica, “Why should my ears have burned to ashes?”

  “Because my roof leaks, that’s why. Right on my hijo’s bed. If you can make it never rain again, I wouldn’t care, but I don’t like it when my baby sleeps in a puddle.”

  “By the stovepipe, right?”

  “If you know where it is,” she said, “how come you can’t fix it?”

  “I’ll come by.”

  Monica grunted. “Sure,” she said. She leaned back in her chair, raised her eyebrows, and gently hooked a finger in her hair and moved it away from her face. “So,” she said.

  “How’s Marcello?” Will asked.

  “He’s fine. Slower, but not so slow he can’t go fishing.” Marcello had cracked his ankle the winter before, falling on the ice outside Tito’s. The fall hadn’t hurt him, but the six-pack he’d been carrying had flown up in the air and landed on his ankle.

  “When did you start working Saturdays?”

  Monica looked down at the papers on the desk and then back up at Will. “Since I got behind,” she said. “All this has to be in the mail Monday morning.”

  “Ah.” They looked at each other for a while, both of them smiling slightly. Finally, Will said, “Let me ask you a question, Monica. What happens to all the old village records?”

  “They get stored away.”

  “They don’t get burned after so long? Tossed out?”

  Monica shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been here that long. The records in the building go back four years.”

  “How about police records?”

  “It’s the same with them. Each month everything gets closed out and filed.”

  “So what if I wanted something from a long time ago?”

  “Like how long?”

  “Like twenty-five years long.”

  “Eee,” she said, and leaned forward in her chair. “I don’t know. There’s boxes and boxes of papers in the old building out back. Maybe there. But twenty-five years ago is a long time.”

  Will didn’t say anything. He looked at the clock on the wall behind her, the second hand creeping.

  “How’s Lisa?” Monica asked.

  “Lisa’s fine,” Will said. “She’s in Las Sombras with her mother.”

  Monica nodded and looked past Will, out the front door. There wasn’t much to see. Will’s truck parked next to her car. The New Mexico state flag hanging limply from the pole. The sun was reflecting off something lying on the ground in the middle of the parking lot. “You’ll fix my roof so my hijo doesn’t drown?”

  “Oh, sí,” Will said.

  She reached in the desk drawer and threw a key on the counter. “There’s a light switch on the wall,” she said. “I don’t know what is out there, but don’t make a mess.”

  The two-room adobe sat in the weeds, looking forgotten and in utter disrepair. The roof was pitched slightly, and the multicolored roofing paper had split along the seams and was patched heavily with tar. There was a swollen look to the roof as if it were bloated with water. The glass in the one small window by the door had been broken long ago, and the plastered walls were so cracked that weeds grew from the dirt beneath. Will opened the padlock and pushed the door open. He found the light switch, and the room filled with a dim yellow light.

  He could see how the vigas inside sagged from years of snowloads and how stained they were from moisture. Something fluttered against the far wall, and Will wondered whether a bird had become trapped in the room or if the building was full of bats. The entire space was jammed with junk: old push lawnmowers, a snowmobile that was half dismantled, parts kicked about the floor, a small tractor covered with dust and old oil. There were water pumps and gasoline engines that looked as if they’d been used in the last century. Rakes and shovel and picks leaned haphazardly against the walls along with coffee cans full of nails and screws and bolts. In the middle of the room was a cast-iron stove, without a stovepipe, and beside it sat a small oak table and chair. The surface of the table was thick with dust and littered with the droppings of rodents. When
he stepped inside, he could smell the odor of damp and rot.

  He made his way through the debris to the back room. Set in the far wall was another small window, and sunlight filtered through the cobwebbed glass. A string dangled from a lightbulb on the ceiling. It took Will a few pulls, but the bulb clicked on.

  “My God,” Will said softly. Boxes and boxes of paper crowded the room. They were stacked up along three walls, almost to the vigas, and layered three or four tiers deep. Some of the boxes had tipped over, and papers were spilled out on the floor. An old desk sat in the midst of all this, piled high with books, their bindings thick and warped.

  Will picked up the book lying closest to him. The cover was thick and spongy and badly chewed at the corners. He could see the date, 1924, inscribed on the leather. He opened it to the middle. The date at the top of the page was June 2, and it was written awkwardly in Spanish and in large print, as if by a child. Will read slowly.

  Juanito Griego, son of Juan and Estelle Griego, drowned in an irrigation ditch that runs behind their house. Juanito’s sister, Victoria, said that he fell in and floated away too fast.

  More was written below that, but it had been blurred away by water. Will turned a few more pages.

  September 23: Tomás Rael’s truck ran down the hill going into the village with no driver and killed a horse belonging to Horacio Medina.

  November 8: It snowed through the night and is cold. Rose García’s house which sits near the river caught fire and burned.

  December 2: The priest of this village, Father Joseph, who was priest here for so long, died in the night.

  Will placed the book back carefully and picked up another. The handwriting was the same and, again, it was full of entries. He slid it back with the others and thought that here, buried in this room and written in journals, was the history of the village, at least back to 1924. He wondered who else knew of these books and why they had been left here to decay. He felt as if he had found something of great importance that no one remembered.

  Will went through all of the books. Sometimes reading, even giving the words meaning when he wasn’t sure what they meant. Sometimes he just carefully turned the pages. The handwriting changed in 1938, but the journals went on as if those who wrote these things slowly faded away until someone else took over. Most of the entries were still in Spanish, but a little English was mixed in. Births were noted, baptisms, deaths. The last journal was for 1945, and the last entry in it was for December 31.

  There has been no snow this winter but the air is freezing. Albert and Claudia Herrera’s son, Filemon, was killed in the war. On an island in the Pacific Ocean. Father Jerome will say a mass tomorrow. Filemon was a good boy.

  Will put the book back. The sunlight coming in the window had changed, and he wondered how long he had been inside. The journals were stacked neatly on the table now, and Will thought that someday he would return here and read every word written in each book.

  He turned away from the desk and stared at the boxes. With a groan, he stooped down and went through the one closest to him. The outside of the box was labeled “1979, January-April.” There were thick manila folders inside, one for each month. He took one out and opened it. About two-thirds of it consisted of village affairs; the rest were police reports, all in English. They were mostly about traffic violations, occasionally a fight at Tito’s bar. The names were all listed, and Will noticed that Felipe was down for running over Melvin Cortez’s dog while speeding.

  Will shoved the folder back in the box, thinking that this shouldn’t be too hard. Delfino had given him the date, September 1968. Every carton in the row in front of him was dated in the 1970s. He took a deep breath, the smell of age and mildew, and started digging in.

  When he finally found the right year, the muscles in his thighs were cramped from kneeling, and all about him was a mess of files and papers that had fallen to the floor when the damp boxes had split open. There were three cartons with the year 1968 printed on the sides. He carried them away from the debris, cupping his hands underneath so the bottoms wouldn’t fall out.

  The first box ran from January to April. The second one held the summer months. In the third, he found the folder for September. He laid it on the dirt floor and took out a cigarette. He crouched down, smoking and thinking that this had gone too easily. Maybe Delfino had gotten the years mixed up. Maybe it was all just talk, an old man’s hallucination. Something mixed up in memories. Will brought the cigarette to his mouth and opened the file.

  The first page was typed minutes from a meeting. After that were pages of forms in triplicate, applications for state funds for various projects. Will skipped through all of it and got to the police reports. The forms were standard. Name, address, time of day, who reported it, the citation issued. At the top of each paper was a line for the officer on duty to sign. On some, the name was Frank Martínez. On others, it was Ray Pacheco. The first few were traffic, one an accident south of town with no injuries. There was yet another fight at Tito’s, who spent the night in jail and who was driven to the emergency room in Las Sombras for stitches.

  Will found her in the back, behind everything else. The form was blank except for the name of the officer on duty, and there, printed at the top of the page and signed, was Ray Pacheco’s name. Stapled to the back of the sheet of paper were two black-and-white photographs. The first one stopped Will’s breath. It was a picture of a young girl, naked, hanging by the neck from Las Manos Bridge.

  Donald Lucero, one of the two Guadalupe police officers, was with Monica, leaning against the counter picking at his teeth with a toothpick. Although he had been born and raised in Guadalupe, he had one of those qualities local police officers seemed to possess: no one really knew much of his life, and many were even confused as to what family he came from. It was as if Lucero had grown up in a vacuum for the sole purpose of issuing citations to his neighbors when he came of age.

  He nodded as Will laid the key on the counter. “Thanks, Monica,” Will said.

  “I almost forgot about you,” she said. “You were gone so long.”

  “I got lost in there.”

  “You straighten everything up?”

  “Everything’s the same disaster it was when I went in.”

  “I’ll check, you know.”

  “Tell Marcello I said hello.”

  “Don’t forget my roof.”

  “Never,” Will said and nodded at Lucero as he turned to leave.

  Will drove over to Felipe’s house. There was no sign of Felipe’s truck, but his kids and a couple of their cousins were outside, half naked, swinging sticks at each other and screeching. Will stuck his head out the window.

  “Hey, Octaviano,” he called out, “where’s your dad?”

  Felipe and Elena’s oldest boy looked at Will and shrugged his shoulders up and down quickly. Then he swung his stick hard and caught his brother Refugio on the knuckles with a loud smack. Refugio looked as if he might faint for a second, and then he dropped his stick and fell to the ground as if he’d been shot. He writhed around in the dirt, kicking his feet and making low groaning sounds. Octaviano and the others stared at him, and then they all ran around the side of the house.

  Will got out of the truck. He walked over to Refugio and helped him into a sitting position. The boy’s fingers looked as short, stubby, and dirty as they always did. Will patted his back and got him to stand up. Refugio picked up his stick.

  “Where’s Octaviano?” he said. “I’m going to get him.”

  Will pointed. “That way,” he said, and without a word, Refugio ran off.

  Will looked at the house. Elena was standing in the open doorway. The front of her jeans was dusted with flour. She was wiping her hands together.

  “He’s still alive, I see,” she said.

  “Not without a scar.”

  “I’m the one with scars,” Elena said. “He’s already forgotten why his fingers hurt. By now, he’s probably fallen on his face.” As if on cue, one of the
kids howled from the other side of the house. Elena smiled. “Boys,” she said, “have these tiny, tiny brains.”

  “I was a boy once.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I hear you’re being real smart these days.”

  The phone rang from inside the house. “Felipe ran down to the lumberyard,” she said. “I have coffee on if you want to wait.”

  “No,” Will said. “Go get the phone. I’ll run over there.”

  The lumberyard was open only until noon on Saturdays. When Will pulled up in front, it was a good thirty minutes past that. Felipe’s truck was parked beside Joe’s and Lawrence’s. The door was locked, but when Will cupped his hands and peered through the glass, he could see Lawrence inside staring back at him. He was smiling, and he pointed at his wrist and mouthed, “Closed.”

  “C’mon,” Will yelled. “I’m looking for Felipe.”

  Lawrence got off his stool, wearing a pained expression now. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Twelve o’clock, the sign says.”

  “I know,” Will said. “How come you’re here? I thought you were always the first one out.”

  “Funny.”

  Will moved out of the sun into the store. “Damn,” he said, “it’s hot. Where’s Felipe?”

  “He’s in the office with Joe.”

  Joe was behind his desk, stretched out in his chair, his hands behind his head. He looked half asleep. Felipe was sitting on one corner of the desk, his arms folded, a Styrofoam cup in his hand. Will took the step up into the office.

  “Late, as usual,” Joe said. “If we’re closed, Will comes by.”

  “You ought to park in the back if you don’t want company,” Will said. “What happened to the skunks?”

  Joe shrugged. “We got a complaint.”

  “Imagine that.” Will looked at Felipe. “What’s wrong?” he asked.