Perdido

by Rick Collignon

“Nothing’s wrong,” Felipe said, which was not the truth. For the second day in a row, Felipe found himself in a lousy mood. He’d had an argument with Elena that morning, while still in bed, about how his junk pile, which only grew bigger and was full of used building materials and odd pieces of metal that Felipe found interesting, was beginning to irritate her again. “You’ll feel bad,” Elena had said, “when Octaviano falls into the pile and cuts his head off.” Later, after a meager breakfast, when he went outside to put some order to these things, Felipe had found himself surrounded by his children and their cousins, who were all waving sticks and hitting each other and running around without clothes. He thought that of all the children he knew, his were the only ones who were deaf when their father spoke.

  Felipe had fled his house to have a quiet cup of coffee with Joe. Now, seeing Will, the day before came back to him and how Will had dragged him to see Delfino about a girl who wasn’t even smart enough to hang herself where she wouldn’t bother people. He thought maybe an argument would cheer him up. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said again. “I just get tired of doing your work.”

  “What work?” Will asked.

  “Getting the redwood ready for Monday.”

  “I already did that.”

  “Now you tell me. After I waste half my day.”

  “So quit wasting time,” Will said, “and go back home.”

  “Eee,” Joe said, slapping his hand on the desk. “I don’t believe you two. People let you on job sites?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Will said. “It’s Felipe. If you say it’s dark, he talks about how bright the moon is. If you say it’s hot, he puts on a coat.”

  Lawrence called out from the front that he was leaving and would lock the door after him. Joe yelled back that he’d come by Lawrence’s house in a little while.

  “We’re going for wood,” Joe told Will.

  “You’re going for wood already? It’s only July.”

  “It’s July now,” Joe said.

  People from Guadalupe seemed to start hauling wood as soon as they were done burning it. Will would see pickups winding up into the foothills as early as May and returning late in the day with loads of piñon and spruce stacked above the cab. It always depressed him, not only because his own woodpile looked like nothing but scattered bark but also because it made it seem to him that summer was just a brief pause before winter fell over the village once again.

  “Will waits for December to get wood,” Felipe said. “And when he runs out in January, he comes and steals mine.”

  Will looked at Felipe. Although the expression on Felipe’s face was serious, Will could tell he was having a good time. “You told me you had plenty,” Will said, “and to take what I needed. And it wasn’t January, either.” He reached in his back pocket. “I found something,” he said.

  Will laid the photographs in the center of the desk. Joe leaned forward for a better look. He breathed out a long, slow whistle. “Jesus,” he said softly. Felipe didn’t move. He didn’t know what he was seeing at first, and when it became clear that Will had just placed before him two pictures of the girl on the bridge, he shut his eyes. Somehow Will had opened a door that should have remained closed, and Felipe knew no good would come of this.

  She looked far more naked on the desk than she had when Will opened the file. She looked like she wanted to move her hands and cover herself, turn her face away from their eyes. The photos were black and white, and everything looked gray. The sky, the water, the hills, the girl’s skin. One photo was of her hanging from the bridge. Her limbs were slack and her legs were slightly apart. Her toes were pointed down like a dancer’s and her shoulders were slumped. She was staring at the camera, but the picture had been taken from a distance and it was difficult to make out her features. Felipe could tell her hair was light. He could see the dark line of the rope around her neck and how it rose behind her and wrapped around one of the trestles. He could see the cows on the far bank of the river.

  The other photograph was up close, after she’d been taken down. Someone had straddled her body and aimed the camera down. Will could see the slats of the bridge beneath her and a grayness between them that was water. The picture caught her from just below the waist and up. Her head was turned slightly to the side. Her eyes were open, and Will thought that maybe they were actually glazed or something, but the angle of her head and the half-lidded look of her eyes gave her a dreamy expression. Her hair was short and in disarray, but he could make out the part on her scalp and could tell she would brush her hair to the side. Her mouth was full and parted, and he could see the even line of her teeth. There wasn’t a mark on her body. She seemed flawless, from the curve of her shoulders to the fullness of her breasts to the flatness of her belly.

  The three of them stood around the desk and stared at her. “Jesus,” Joe said again. “Damn, Will, where’d you get these?”

  “They were stored away in the back of the old village office,” Will said. “Do you know what’s in that building? There are journals that go back seventy years. Entries written down for each day. Who was born. Who died. How much it snowed. You wouldn’t believe what I read in there.”

  What Felipe couldn’t believe was that his friend, whose brain seemed to have left town, was babbling about old books while sitting before him were pictures of a dead girl that Will should never have taken from his pocket. He looked up at Will. “You broke into the village office?” he asked.

  “I got the key from Monica.”

  “Monica gave you the key,” Felipe repeated. He blew some air out of his mouth and shook his head and looked down at the floor.

  “There was a report filed along with the pictures,” Will said. “Ray’s name was at the top.”

  “What did it say?” Joe asked.

  “Nothing. No name. No date. Just these pictures and Ray’s signature.”

  Felipe looked at the photographs again. He thought that Delfino had been right. This girl didn’t look dead. She looked like she was resting, like when she woke she would be full of life. He also thought it wasn’t right for him to be looking at her this way. He reached out and turned the pictures face down. “I don’t believe you have these,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I don’t believe you have these.” He looked at Will. “What are you going to do with them? Put them up around town? Keep them in your wallet?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,” Will said, and he flipped the photographs back over. “But look at her. There’s not a mark on this girl. Something’s wrong with all this.”

  Will left the store with Felipe trailing a few steps behind. Joe was still inside. He had called Lawrence before they left and told him to forget about going for wood, that he was going to buy some beer and go home and sit beneath his apple tree and get a little drunk. Felipe walked Will to his truck. They both leaned against the hood.

  “I don’t remember it ever being this hot,” Felipe said. He wiped at his forehead and his hand came away damp. “Jimmy came by yesterday,” he went on. “He wanted to know what you were thinking. He said you were messing with his family and you should know better.” Felipe turned his head and looked at Will. “You know Ray is his uncle?”

  “I know that now,” Will said. “Jimmy and Lalo came by the house last night.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” Felipe said, “but if you don’t stop soon, this could get crazy.”

  Will looked at him for a few seconds and then shook his head. “I’m getting all confused in this, Felipe. I got home last night and this girl was out of my head like smoke. And then Jimmy and Lalo show up and treat me like some stupid gringo and I get pissed off and end up at the village office. Now we got these photographs and I’m wondering again who this girl is and how did she end up on a bridge in nowhere.”

  Felipe stared at Will. He thought there were a number of things he could say about Will being a stupid gringo, but he let it go. What he did say was, �
��What do you mean, ’we got these photographs’?”

  Will smiled. “Did I say that?”

  “Yes, you said that,” Felipe said. “We don’t have these pictures, you do, and whatever you do, you better be careful.”

  “You think this is nuts, don’t you?”

  Felipe pushed away from the truck. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “If I think too much about this, I’ll be as confused as you are.”

  Eight

  WILL STOPPED AT TITO’S to pick up a pack of cigarettes and a six-pack of beer. Fred Sanchez was drinking alone in the bar, and he held Will up for a few minutes asking about work. When Will told him work was slow and that he’d call if things picked up, Fred nodded, his glass to his lips, and stared vacantly away. “Bueno,” he said.

  When he got home, Will popped open a beer and lit a cigarette. He sat in the shade of the open doorway and watched a flock of small birds suddenly pick up and fly from one side of a hill to the other, disappearing up a canyon. He looked for what might have startled them and saw nothing. The empty beer cans still lay on the ground, and Will thought that he should pick them up. Instead, he finished his beer and went indoors.

  He wandered around the inside of his house for a while, then rinsed out the coffee cups he and Henry had used that morning. Then he went to the place in the wall where the Lady stood. He moved the calendar from the opening, took the two pictures from his pocket, and put them there. He thought that he now had two women hidden in his wall, and he understood neither of them.

  Will went into his bedroom, lay down on the bed, and pushed open the window. He stared outside for a while at his truck parked in the driveway, then rolled over and gazed up at the ceiling. There were four vigas above his bed. The bark had been removed with a drawknife, leaving deep gouges in the wood, and the limbs had been snapped off with the butt end of an ax. There was a dark stain on one of the vigas where it butted into the wall, and for the first time Will thought that it wasn’t grease or pitch or mud, but blood.

  Just before sleep, he remembered the day Telesfor Ruiz had told him that his father had died in the mountains when Telesfor was grown and with his own family, and that he had not been with his father when he died. A thing, he said, he often thought of even now.

  Telesfor’s father, who was born Eloy Ruiz and who cut firewood and latillas and vigas for the people of Guadalupe, did not return home one day. That night his wife, Berna, walked to Telesfor’s house and told him she knew in her heart that his father was dead and by himself. Telesfor had gone into the mountains to where his father had cut for years and had found him as his mother had said. Telesfor’s father was beneath a spruce tree that had fallen across both his legs. He was sitting upright, and his upper body lay across the trunk of this tree as if embracing it.

  After the burial, Berna Ruiz asked Telesfor to go into the mountains and bring back the tree that had killed her husband. He brought to his mother’s house each piece of wood, each limb and branch from the tree. He stacked it beside the large woodpile his father had gathered over the years, and there it sat, untouched and unburned forever. Each morning until her own death, Telesfor’s mother would walk outside and stand before it and say nothing out loud, as if she and this tree knew something no one else did.

  When Will awoke, he was facing the window, and the first thing he saw was Lisa’s car parked beside his truck. The sun had set. The air coming in the window was both cool and warm. He could hear movement in the kitchen and then footsteps coming through the house into the bedroom. The bed shifted as she sat beside him.

  Lisa put her hand on the back of his neck and threaded her fingers along his scalp. “I know you’re awake,” she said.

  Will groaned. She balled up her hand and gave his hair a slight tug. “I go to Las Sombras,” she said, “and I come back and find you still in bed.”

  Will grunted and rolled over. “How long have you been here?”

  “I drank a beer outside,” she said. “I watched the sun go down. I waited for you to wake up.”

  “Is your mother here?”

  “No,” Lisa said. “I took my mother home.” The shadows were growing in the room and shaded parts of her face, making her eyes look darker, deeper than they were. She smiled. “You did nothing today?”

  “I did a few things.”

  “Hmm.” She reached behind her neck and undid the clasp holding her hair. She shook her head gently and her hair fell about her face, dropping below her shoulders. “I have a few things for you to do,” she said, and she tugged her blouse loose from her jeans.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. Dinner hadn’t been much, a couple of cheese sandwiches with green chile, but Will had made a pot of strong coffee and it tasted fine. He lit a cigarette. Lisa reached for the pack and took one out for herself. The kitchen door was wide open, and Will watched the draft take the smoke out of the house.

  Lisa was stretched in her chair facing the open doorway, her legs out before her, her bare feet crossed at the ankles. She took a deep drag off the cigarette and exhaled slowly. “This is my first one today,” she said. “If I smoke around my mother, she tries to slap me.”

  “I want to ask you a question,” Will said.

  “Yes?”

  “This is only a question. Don’t look for more in it, because it’s not there. All right?”

  Lisa’s eyes moved from the doorway to Will. “Is this a trick question?”

  “No,” Will said. “It’s probably a stupid question, but there’s no trick.”

  “So ask.”

  “Someone mentioned to me that you’ve slept with everyone in Guadalupe.”

  Lisa stared at him for a moment. She brought her cigarette to her mouth and blew the smoke out slowly. She looked back out the open door. “Is this your question?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “And I shouldn’t get angry or scream at you for not minding your own business because it’s only a question.”

  “That’s right,” Will said.

  Lisa smoked quietly for a few seconds. “If I asked you this question, what would you say?”

  “I’d answer it.”

  “Yes, but you would treat it like a joke. It would make you feel proud to have this question asked. That if it was true it would make you a better hunter or something. Not a whore.”

  Will didn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he said, “You’re right. If I didn’t say that, I’d feel it. I won’t ask you this. Forget it.”

  She looked at him and smiled. “Sure,” she said, “forget it.” She took a last hit off her cigarette and threw the butt overhand out the door. She leaned back in her chair. “For a long time,” she said, “if I didn’t like someone, I would sleep with him.” She shrugged her shoulders slightly. “Who knows why? But I found out there are a great number of men in this village that I don’t like. Does that answer your question? I’m not ugly, and at the café I knew many of them came because of me. We would drive and drink some beer and then park somewhere, and the next night it would be someone else.”

  Will put his cigarette out in the ashtray. He thought that there were some things better not asked.

  “What you heard is true,” Lisa said, “although I don’t think I made it through the whole village.”

  “How did Mundo feel about this?”

  Lisa turned her head and looked at him. “Joaquin? He hated it. We’d fight and I’d tell him to watch out for his own life and to keep out of mine. There are some things you don’t understand between me and my brother, Will. I know how he seems to you, but when we were small my father would come home drunk all the time. He would beat up on Joaquin. He would beat up on my mother. But it was Joaquin who always got it the worst. My father never touched me because my brother would hide me in the back of the closet when he saw my father coming. This went on for years. Until our father died.”

  Will looked out the open door. He couldn’t see anything past the small rectangle of light. When he turned back to Lisa, he asked,
“Did you go out with me because you disliked me?”

  She stared at him for a long time and then smiled. She rose from her chair and stood straight and stretched her arms over her head, her blouse pulling up until Will could see skin. She moved her chair to the table and sat across from him.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t know you enough to not like you. I went with you because I was so cold in that storm and you had the heater on.” She leaned against the table and rubbed her mouth back and forth against Will’s, her eyes open. He felt her lips tighten as she smiled. “Who’s gossiping about me?” she asked, and he could taste chile and smoke on her breath.

  “Sounds like it could be just about anyone,” he said.

  She grinned. “You taste like coffee,” she said, and she brought her mouth down hard on his. Then she sat back in her chair. “A nice little talk,” she said.

  “It was Lalo Pacheco,” Will said. “He and a friend of his and his brother Jimmy came by last night to tell me to stop bothering their Tio Ray. Your name came up.”

  “I hope you defended me.”

  “I was more concerned with surviving.”

  “They really came here and did that?”

  Will nodded. “Jimmy said he came along to keep the peace. Lalo pushed me around and called me names.”

  Lisa smiled. “Poor baby,” she said. “I’ll have Joaquín shoot them for us.”

  “Good. Would he do that for me?”

  “No, but he would for me.” She stared at him for a moment and then leaned across the table. “I told you,” she said, and for the first time Will could hear anger in her voice. “You don’t listen to me. You don’t listen to anybody. I hope you told them you were crazy for a day and that you came to your senses.”

  “Came to my senses?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  Will picked up his coffee. It had grown cold. He drank it down anyway. “I told them that I didn’t mean to upset their uncle and it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “And then what?”