Perdido

by Rick Collignon

“What do you mean, ‘And then what?’”

  “I know you well enough to know that there’s always more,” she said.

  They stared at each other until finally, Will said, “They said the wrong things, Lisa. I never messed with Ray. I asked him some things. I wasn’t rude, and I left when he wanted me to. Suddenly, I’ve got his whole family over here. So this morning I took a drive and found some pictures of the girl.”

  Lisa didn’t say a word for a few seconds. Then she said, “You have pictures? Where did you get these pictures?”

  “Well,” Will said.

  Lisa shook her head. “I don’t think I want to hear any more about this,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about this girl. I don’t want to hear about Lalo and Jimmy. I especially don’t want to hear about what you think. I would like you much better, Will, if you never opened your mouth again.”

  Nine

  WILL LEFT LISA ASLEEP in bed. She was curled up under the sheets with only the top of her head visible. He stood beside the bed for a moment and listened to her breath, a soft sound coming from her mouth when she exhaled. She was resting easy now, but at night sometimes she would move around the bed as if being chased. Other times, he’d wake with different parts of her strewn across his body, or she’d be fetaled up where the wall met the bed, so far away from him it was as if he were sleeping alone. He watched her for a little while longer and then went quietly out of the bedroom.

  In the kitchen, he put on a pot of coffee and then opened the front door. Not a breath of air. The sky was a cloudless blue. A day to do anything, Will thought.

  By the time Lisa woke up, he had managed to pick up the empty beer cans and rake up some of the debris around his woodpile. He had cleaned up the kitchen and was drinking a second cup of coffee when Lisa walked into the room. She brushed her hair from her face. “Where’s breakfast?” she asked.

  Will cooked while Lisa sat outside in the sun drinking coffee. He scrambled half a dozen eggs, threw in the leftover chile from the night before, and heated up a couple of tortillas. He took the plates and the coffeepot outside, and they ate without saying much.

  Will got two fishing poles out of the shed behind his house and dug up some worms from the soft dirt along the creek. They walked the stream, fishing the holes without any luck. Will thought maybe he and Lisa were making too much noise or maybe the day was just too warm and the fish were too lazy to give a damn about eating. They walked east for more than a mile, around the base of the foothill and far up the canyon. The brush became thicker and the creek narrowed, running faster over fallen trees and around boulders. The holes were harder to spot, and they had to scramble to get to them, constantly snagging their lines. Lisa hooked a couple of small trout. She unhooked them gently and held them close to her face, looking at them as if they were a disgrace because they were so small. She tossed them both back and watched them sit stunned in the water until they finally darted off, disappearing into some dark hole.

  Sometime after noon, they started back down, fishing the same holes they’d hit earlier. But it was hot now, even in the shade, and Will could feel the sweat sticking to his body. He gave up after a while and watched Lisa. She would stoop down near the water and toss the bait into the creek through the brush and tight limbs of juniper. Nothing was hitting, but it wasn’t so bad, Will thought, just to sit and watch her. She told him she could actually see the fish put their tail ends to the worm and swim away as if they were smarter than she. “I hate fish like that,” she said.

  They got back to the house by midafternoon and drank a beer inside where it was cool. When Will suggested a nap, Lisa smiled and said she needed to run home for a little while, but if he made dinner, maybe, if she wasn’t doing anything else, she’d come back.

  He drove down to the Guadalupe market and picked up two pounds of ground beef, a dozen hamburger buns, and all the relishes he could think of. He bought some ice cream, whipped cream, and strawberries that looked as if they’d been sitting in the cooler for too long. He had flour and eggs at home and thought that it couldn’t be too difficult to bake some kind of cake. He was standing in the check-out line thinking about what a woman would do after being fed such a meal when the girl at the register, the owner’s granddaughter, who must have been all of twelve, told him in a sour tone that he owed her twenty dollars and change. He paid her and left.

  When Will got back to his house, Ray Pacheco’s blue pickup was parked in the drive. Will could see that Ray was sitting alone in the front seat. He pulled up next to Ray and climbed out of the truck with his groceries. Will looked at him over the hood of his truck and nodded. “Ray,” he said.

  Ray gave him a blank stare and said, “Let’s take a drive.” Even on such a warm day, Ray was wearing a light coat with the collar turned up at his neck. He had on the same cap he’d been wearing a few days before. It was cocked back, revealing a line of pale skin on his forehead.

  “A drive where?” Will asked.

  Ray didn’t answer. After a few seconds, Will said, “Let me put these bags inside.” Then he turned and went into the house. He put the things away slowly, glancing out the door every so often. Ray was still sitting motionless in the cab of his truck, staring straight ahead, one arm hanging out the open window. He thought it was probably good that Ray had come here, that maybe they could fix this misunderstanding without threats or insults. Will closed the door to the refrigerator and leaned against it. He could feel his heart beating a little too fast. About the last thing he wanted to do was climb into Ray’s truck and take a ride.

  Will went back outside. He walked up to the truck and asked Ray if he wanted to get out. They could drink a beer.

  “Get in,” Ray said, and for no reason at all, Will did.

  They headed out his drive, taking the road as it circled around the baseball field, which looked empty and overgrown, as if no one ever used it, beer and pop cans lying around. A mile later they hit the highway. Ray turned east toward town. He picked up a pint bottle on the seat between them and held it out to Will. It was half empty.

  “No thanks,” Will said. Ray’s face looked puffed up and heavier than it had a few days ago, the skin dragging down at his eyes. He didn’t look as if he’d slept much. If he had, it hadn’t come easy.

  Ray screwed the lid off the bottle and took a drink. He put the bottle back on the seat, close to his leg. A couple of vehicles passed them coming the other direction. Ray took his hand from the steering wheel and waved. They drove by Felipe’s truck in the middle of town, all three of his kids with him in the cab. Felipe threw up a hand at Ray and then did a double take when he saw Will.

  Ray took the highway north for a quarter mile and pulled into the Guadalupe gas station. He stopped the truck away from the pumps, got out, and went inside, a slight hitch in his walk, his hands in the pockets of his coat. Will watched him dig out his wallet and give Norman Ortiz, the owner, some money. Neither of them said much. They shook hands and nodded, Norman saying loudly enough that Will could hear, “Bueno, Ray. We’re even.” Ray walked out of the station and climbed back into the truck. He took another drink from the pint, put the truck in gear, and drove off again.

  About a mile out of town, Ray swung the truck wide onto the shoulder and turned, heading back the way they had come.

  “You started a big mess,” Ray said, his eyes straight ahead.

  Will reached for the bottle on the seat and unscrewed the cap. It was cheap bourbon, which didn’t matter much to Will one way or the other. He took half a swallow and felt it burn the back of his mouth, corroding its way down his throat. He looked out the side window at an adobe house whose yard was full of chickens, the ground pecked bare. An old woman wearing a faded pink dress and heavy boots stood in the shade under her portal. She watched them drive by and gave a wave.

  Ray moved his eyes toward Will. Will could see a tint of yellow around the pupil. “I hear you got pictures. Out of the old village office. You’re showing them around. Why are you pushing this?
That’s what I want to know.” He put out his hand for the bottle, and Will gave it to him.

  They were back in the center of town, driving slowly, the vehicles behind them passing, each driver flicking up a hand as they went by. It was late Sunday afternoon and hot. Felix’s Café was quiet, the front door propped open. Will couldn’t see in the windows, but he could picture Felix García inside sitting mute in the shadows by the jukebox. Tito’s was a little livelier. There was a group of young guys outside drinking beer on the shaded side of the building. Will didn’t see Jimmy or Lalo or anyone else he knew. The lumberyard was dead to the world, the smell of skunk finally gone, burned out of the air by the sun. The bourbon sat heavy in Will’s stomach.

  “I’m not pushing this, Ray,” he said.

  Ray glanced over at him. “What do you call it?”

  “I don’t know what I call it,” Will said. “This was a story I wanted to know. That’s the reason I went to your house. I wanted to hear more of it. Then all of a sudden, it turned into a big deal. Your nephews come over and threaten me. Push me around. And that’s when I got the pictures.” Will ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand any of this, Ray,” he said. “I swear I don’t.” He dropped his arm to his lap and looked out the windshield, thinking that although what he’d said was true, somehow the words sounded empty, even to himself. And for the first time he realized that not only had this girl been dead for years upon years, but she had no place here. He saw himself in this village asking questions about something no one wanted to talk about or even cared about. He had used Monica and had rummaged through the old village office, and then he had gone to the lumberyard with pictures of this girl as if they were a treasure he had found.

  “Maybe I made a mistake,” Will said.

  “Maybe you did,” Ray said. “You should have thought about that before.” And just like that, Will felt himself grow angry. He smiled a little and thought that in the cab of this truck, there were no words either one of them could say to make things clear.

  Ray turned his head and pointed with his chin past Will out the side window. “That’s where she’s buried,” he said.

  The Guadalupe cemetery sat up on a hill and was fenced in with old cedar posts and sagging barbed wire that was twisted with weeds. It was full of wood crosses that someone always seemed to keep painting white, and planted in the ground everywhere were plastic flowers so bright that the cemetery seemed like a child’s drawing.

  “She’s buried in the northwest corner,” Ray went on. “Up against the fence. Me, Frank Martínez, he’s dead now, and the backhoe operator, Simon Chacón, buried her. I had to talk the priest, back then it was Father Leonardo, into letting us bury her there. He didn’t feel it was right. I told him that maybe the girl was Catholic, and besides, there was nowhere else. He even said some words over her.”

  A narrow road led up the hill to the cemetery. Will couldn’t see much of it from the highway. A few crosses, some splashes of color. He thought for this girl to be buried there seemed as out of place as she’d been hanging from Las Manos Bridge.

  “What was her name?”

  Ray opened his mouth and then closed it. After a few seconds, he said, “I don’t know. I never knew her name. I just buried her, and I made sure the priest came.”

  “You didn’t report any of this to the county or the state or whoever you were supposed to notify, did you?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I saw the pictures. She didn’t look like someone who’d hung herself.”

  Ray kept driving. Past the bridge south of town where the creek crossed the highway, they climbed the grade where the road twisted into the foothills and left Guadalupe behind.

  “I should have burned those damn pictures,” Ray said. “I was a police officer for thirty years. I kept half this village out of trouble. Do you hear me? I don’t have nothing to explain to someone like you. Or anyone else.”

  They went on for a couple more miles. The road flattened out and was hemmed in on both sides by tall piñon. Ray swung off the highway and aimed the truck back toward Guadalupe. Will wondered if they were going to drive back and forth forever. This drive with Ray and the conversation were going in the same direction. Nowhere.

  “I got cancer inside me,” Ray said. “It’s in my bowels. I don’t eat so much no more. It’s hard to take a crap. They say they can cut and rewire me so I can shit in a bag. I told them no.” Ray turned his face toward Will, and maybe for the first time they took a good look at each other. “My wife knows this,” he went on, “and now you.” He looked back at the highway. “I hoped Jimmy could have talked some sense into your head. You been here a long time now, and I thought you’d see what you were risking. But I was wrong.” He went a little heavier on the gas. “You’re just another outsider who comes here and thinks he knows everything.”

  They went back through town, driving faster now. Ray didn’t even bother to return the waves coming from the other vehicles. He drove by the turn that would have taken them to Will’s house. Will thought of Lisa. He thought about strawberries and whipped cream and a cake he wasn’t going to make and then wondered why the thought had even crossed his mind.

  Two miles north of town, Ray pulled off the highway and cut west on a dirt road. He put the truck in second gear, glanced at Will, and reached again for the bottle. He took a long swallow, cutting the alcohol level down to the dregs.

  “Where are we going?” Will asked. “I need to be somewhere soon.”

  “You’ll see,” Ray said, and he dropped his hand to just below his belt. Will watched his fingers push in and out on his stomach, massaging.

  It was a slow, five-mile ride to the river. The road was hard-packed adobe and rutted out badly in places where somebody had tried to drive it wet. Ray swung the truck off the road and up on the side when the ruts got too deep, driving over sagebrush.

  “The doctor told me maybe a year, but maybe not that long,” Ray said. The ruts pulled at the wheels. Ray jerked the steering wheel to the right and leveled out the truck. “They could give me pills if the pain gets too bad. I could check into the VA hospital in Albuquerque. That’s what the rest of my life is going to be.”

  Will stared ahead out the windshield. He could see the dark rim of the gorge now. “What are we doing out here, Ray?”

  Ray picked up the pint and drained it, then tossed the bottle out the open window. His fingers went back to his stomach. The truck limped along in first gear, and the breeze coming into the cab brought dust along with it.

  “I did what was right with that girl,” he said. “Me and Frank took her down from that bridge and gave her a decent burial.” He leaned his body a bit toward Will. “She was dead already. You hear what I’m saying? You think I could breathe life into this girl again?”

  “What about her family?”

  “If she cared about her family, she wouldn’t have been here.”

  Will turned and looked at Ray. “That’s a thing to say,” he said. “What about the ones who put her up there?”

  “I don’t know who put her up there,” Ray said.

  “That’s what happened though. Isn’t it?”

  Ray was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “It don’t matter no more.”

  They came to the edge of the gorge, and Ray turned off the truck. The gorge was far too deep to see the river, and stretching away from them in all directions was just the flatness of the valley. Will could see the vertical rock walls opposite them where the earth had split to cradle the river. Swallows darted out of the shadows. A hawk glided far to the west with its wings outstretched. The wind was blowing harder out here. Will could hear it through the sagebrush, that and the ticking of the engine.

  “This was good country once,” Ray said. “It never gave you much, but it never took nothing away from you neither.” He pushed open the door and climbed out. The wind grabbed at his hat and he pulled it down low on his forehead. “Venga,” he said.

  Will got ou
t of the truck and followed Ray to the rim of the gorge. Will could see the river snaking itself along hundreds of feet below him, the water brown and murky, the level low now because most of the snowmelt was over. The gorge cut through the earth north and south as far as he could see.

  “My father kept sheep on the other side,” Ray said. “When I was a boy, my brother and me would spend summers out here. We’d go back to Guadalupe in October for school. We kept the coyotes away from the lambs. Four hundred sheep we had, and I never forgot what it was like to wake up early in the morning and see them scattered out through this valley. We’d lamb them in March, and in April, before the river got too high, we’d help our father bring them here to graze. I wouldn’t see my father for two months, and then he’d come to the village when school was out and bring us back out here with him. My mother would come out every two weeks or so and bring us food and sweet candies and whiskey for my father.” He turned and looked at Will. “That’s the way it used to be.”

  Will looked across the river. The sun was arching down now, the sky hazy with dust. The color of the sage and the thin grass was a pale green. Ray moved away from him a few yards. He bent over and picked something up.

  “Obsidian,” Ray said. “For arrowheads.” He stood up and turned around so that he was facing Will. He made a grunting noise, then put his hand in his coat pocket and took out a revolver. It was big in his hand and shone dully as though it had just been oiled. It’s his police revolver, Will thought. He’s still got it after all these years. Ray tapped the gun gently against his thigh and looked down at it as if he were embarrassed that Will had seen it. “I forget your name,” Ray said.

  Will felt his mouth open and close, and then he didn’t bother with it. Something gave way in the joints of his knees, and he took a small step to balance himself. The wind gusted and took off Ray’s hat. It danced away, finally snagging in the sage. Ray’s hair was flattened with crease lines where his hat had pressed against his scalp. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly “You should have listened,” he said. “I guess we both made a big mistake.”