by Alisa Valdes
“You think you’re so smart,” Missy said to Kelsey.
“Only idiots think they’re smart,” replied Kelsey. “I am painfully aware of how little I know. This means I’m actually smart.”
“Thanks for the lunch,” I said, quickly clearing my place and Kelsey’s. “We won’t be too late.”
“Curfew,” said my father, his face still pink from embarrassment. “Be home by ten.”
“Good riddance,” muttered Missy.
“Bye,” I replied. Kelsey looped her arm in mine, and off we skipped with great irony, as girls of a certain age will do, to the front coat closet, suppressing giggles all the way. In moments like these, I have found, it is always helpful to have a best friend who understands you. With that, you can do anything. At least you feel like you can do anything.
The afternoon was cold, sharp, and clear, 29 degrees Fahrenheit, with birds that sang cheerfully in the piñóns and junipers, in spite of what I imagined were their frozen toes and empty bellies. I spent entirely too much time feeling sorry for animals. It was crippling, emotionally, after a while, but it was my nature.
“Poor things,” I told Kelsey, as I pressed the locks of the Land Rover open with my key fob.
“Empathy will be your downfall,” she replied. “Toughen up, girl.”
In we went. With Kelsey fiddling with the stereo, attaching her iPod to it, I drove us to the Santa Fe Baking company, where I got a breakfast burrito - egg yolks! cheese! fried potatoes! food you couldn’t get at my dad’s! - and a hot cup of flavored coffee for the drive to Golden.
That’s right. Golden.
It was Kelsey’s idea of an adventurous afternoon. We had no intention of going to the movies, and every intention of finding “the farm” where Demetrio lived, just to see what it was like. In those days, we were young enough to think such recklessness was innocent fun, and though I pretended to feel annoyed by her insistence on “locating your vato soul mate,” I found the prospect of seeing him again very energizing. It was a gut-level reaction I had to the thought of Demetrio, and hadn’t the plumber told me to trust my gut? And, hey, who knew guts better than plumbers, right?
I drove through Santa Fe, then South along Interstate 25 to the turnoff for Highway 14, with Kelsey munching on her own breakfast of a sesame bagel with vegan cream cheese and a hot green tea, whose diuretic effect she said she offset with the extra-large bottle of water in her lap. Kelsey, who had been enduring some pimple problems, swore by massive quantities of water - for clear skin, clear mind, etc. Her beloved indie rock was blasting, and the heater too. I felt free, adventurous, and a little bit unlike my usual careful self.
The day was glorious, the sky a shocking shade of turquoise, the mountains a deep shade of bluish purple, stubbled all across by short, puffy piñón trees and juniper bushes. The plains were pure white from snow, pocked by determined squat trees and an occasional house or boulder. The road twisted and curved through valleys and frozen meadows, through tiny towns that I usually only saw in the darkening evening of Fridays and Sundays. I loved this part of the world with a terrible ache. It was alive, in its own way; it spoke to something deep within me. My family had lived in this area for eight generations of my father’s side, and seven generations of my mother’s side, and at times like this I felt that they spoke to me.
The visibility, as usual in this high desert part of the world, seemed endless - except to the distant north, where the clouds had begun to billow along the horizon, dark gray masses. The storms was far enough away that I wouldn’t ordinarily be worried, but storms and I weren’t the best of friends anymore. I made a mental note to keep my eye on it.
We crested the last of several large, gentle snowy hills. The idyllic towns of Cerrillos and then Madrid appeared below us, one after the other, in dormant but fertile valleys nestled into rolling hills at the base of the Sandia mountain range. The towns were both run down the middle with streams, along whose banks tall Cottonwoods reached barren brown branches to the sky. Sketches of smoke rose from the chimneys of the small, colorfully stuccoed adobe houses that seemed stuck like decayed butter mints to the foothills. Snow blanketed the farms and fields like fine white frosting.
I wove the Land Rover south, past these villages, and finally, slowed down as we reached Golden. I turned off the highway at the hill with the church on the top, because that was the spot where I’d seen Demetrio disappear in a flurry of lights, and seemed as good a starting point as any in the ghost town.
“This is it,” I told her, parking the Land Rover in the small, empty dirt lot of the church, which was high on a hill and overlooked the entire village.
“Let’s get to it,” said Kelsey, opening her door with enthusiasm, and hopping down with a stretch of her arms, catlike. Fearless.
I got out with a little more caution, suddenly nervous and apprehensive. What if he didn’t want us here? What if he was in the middle of drug running, or knifing someone to death, or whatever it was that gang members did? On TV, gangs were always shown in cities, but here in New Mexico, as my sociology-major politician mother had often told me, the barrios were rural, far from the city centers. Poverty lived at the edges in New Mexico, and drug problems and violence flourished amid the most bucolic scenery on earth.
The church, which was tiny and seemed sculpted of caramel candy with its soft adobe corners and lazily drooping walls, occupied the middle section of a small field atop a hill. All was contained within a chain link fence whose gate was padlocked shut. A large adobe cross dominated the top of the structure, a chalky geometric white against the blue sky. A small hand-painted wooden sign hung askew from the gate, informing people that mass would be held at 10 a.m. in English and 4 p.m. in Spanish on Sundays. In front of the church was a old, small cemetery, as was the case with most of the older churches built by the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries here. The graveyard had a hastily shoveled, icy sidewalk down the center, leading to the door of the church. It was eerie. In the old days, apparently, they’d given the dead a much more prominent place in the life of the villagers; these days we preferred to separate them from the rest of us, to pretend they did not exist.
The chain link and wooden pickets of the patchwork church fence near the cemetery was woven through with colorful ribbons and more of those gaudy plastic flowers, American flags, teddy bears, and whatever else relatives had left for the dead. People here had not forgotten their deceased loved ones.
`There was something comforting and creepy about this cemetery, something safe that I could not explain or even name; it was like being held as a child by a protective and loving parent. That was exactly how I felt there at that moment. When I mentioned all of this, Kelsey said she had the same sense, as though no harm could come to us here.
“And I’m a Jewish atheist,” she reminded me. “Which is saying a lot.”
“Contradiction in terms,” I said. “You can’t be both religious and an atheist.”
“No. But you can simultaneously be culturally Jewish and irreligious,” she said. “If you don’t know this, you’ve obviously never been to New York or seen a single rerun of Seinfeld.”
We set off across the pebbly parking lot, toward the small rise where I’d last seen Demetrio. There were few houses scattered around, along a small dirt road that led South. None of them looked like a farm.
“This is where he was when it happened,” I said, wondering secretly if I were making mountains of molehills, the way we’d done when we were younger and given to séances at slumber parties. Sometimes, I realized, it was far too easy to scare yourself.
“Let’s go,” said Kelsey, walking authoritatively toward the first house, down the road, swinging her half-full water bottle the way Little Red Riding Hood must have swung the basket. Reluctantly, I followed her, and moments later stood next to her as she banged her fist against the splintered wooden door of a house that seemed to have been made by sticking pieces of other houses together haphazardly. A young woman in jeans and a tank to
p answered, smoking and holding a filthy baby on her hip. She looked at us with cruel, cold eyes.
“Is Demetrio Vigil here?” asked Kelsey. “We’re friends of his.”
“Who?” asked the woman, who, as it happens, was missing a few teeth. Kelsey repeated herself, but the woman clearly had no idea what she was talking about, and let us know this in colorful language she had no business using in front of a baby.
We repeated this scene, more or less the same way, three other times, walking at least half a mile, to no avail. No one here had heard of Demetrio, or, if they had, they referred us to the old man I’d already met and said he was the only Demetrio Vigil they’d heard of.
“This is weird,” said Kelsey. “You’re sure he said he lived here?”
“Positive.”
“On a farm?”
“On a farm. With strict homeschool parents who don’t let him out after dark.”
We walked on, passing several ruins of adobe buildings, nothing more than crumbled walls with stiff dead yellow hulls of weeds poking up through the snow where the floors had once been. Something stirred in one of these ruins, and stopped me. I grabbed Kelsey’s arm, and waited. Moments later, a very tall, very skinny man appeared from behind the building, in jeans and a plaid woolen jacket, walking three dogs off-leash. He glowered at us through his thick eyebrows, and seemed fixated on me in particular. The dogs took their cue from him, and sat still.
“Hello, sir,” said Kelsey, with a wave that was far too enthusiastic for the circumstances. I felt eerily like I’d seen this man before, but I couldn’t place where.
“No trespassing,” he grumbled, pointing to a sign near the road. “Stay out of here, get away. You’re not welcome here.” He glared at me. “Especially you.”
“No problem,” said Kelsey, emboldened by his nastiness as she often was in the face of unreasonable rudeness. “You’re in luck. We’ve limited our visits today to houses with roofs.”
The man grumbled, and turned back in the direction he’d come from, shooting a nasty, even hateful, look at me over his shoulder.
“Nice neighborhood,” deadpanned Kelsey after he’d disappeared.
“Let’s go back,” I said, thoroughly creeped out. “This wasn’t a very good idea.”
“There’s one more house left,” she said. “Then we’ll go.”
The house in question was a decrepit singlewide trailer, about a quarter mile down the road. In spite of the freezing temperature, we decided to give it a try.
When we got there, I hesitated. The yard was full of trash and a skinny, frozen Pit bull was chained to a makeshift doghouse that was inadequate for this cold. I felt sorry for it, but also afraid of it as it lunged at us, growling and barking. Next to the house several rusty old cars crumbled in various states of decay, while a chop-shop looking Ford Bronco with Old English lettering in the back window seemed to have been lowered several inches and covered in glittery green paint. Gangstermobile. All around us were old and new aluminum cans, with bullet holes in them, presumably from someone target-practicing out here.
“Let’s just go,” I told Kelsey, as a sick feeling came over me. I did not like this place. At all. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, watching the animal as it snarled at us, nose wrinkling back horribly to reveal dripping fangs. “Look.” She pointed. “The chain stops it right there. We can walk around the side. He can’t get us.”
“Still, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, urgently, as Kelsey lifted the latch on the broken fence and opened the rusty gate, brave and, I thought, stupid. This place was so obviously not inhabited by people who might buy Girl Scout cookies I was baffled that she didn’t see it. “Kelsey, don’t. Let’s just go.”
She ignored me.
“I’m staying here,” I called. “You’re not being smart.”
“Fine,” she called back, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Wimp.”
I watched in horror as she barely skirted the furious animal, grinning at her own agility, and climbed the rickety wooden steps up to the dented metal door of the ramshackle structure. She knocked, as though she were simply out selling Girl Scout cookies.
After a moment, the door opened, and a middle-aged man with a bandana worn low over his eyes, and wearing a white tank top and plaid pajama pants on looked out. He had long, stringy hair, and an ugly face scarred from acne and maybe a knife wound. His small, hateful eyes were bloodshot, and his unsteady, lewd smile told me he was probably high. The door opened a little wider, and two others very much like him appeared on each side of the man.
They all bore the same exact tattoos Demetrio had on his neck, on their own necks.
The acid in my stomach churned from fear, and I fought the urge to run. Kelsey, however, seemed not to realize she was in the presence of gang members, and carried on, cocking her blonde head cutely to the side, and speaking with her hands. The men watched her with serious, unclean looks upon their faces, amused by her but also as though they were trying to decide what horrible deed, exactly, they could do to her.
I couldn’t hear the words they exchanged, because of the barking of the dog. I didn’t like the looks of the guys, who, the longer she talked, stared more and more openly at Kelsey in a lustful sort of way, gripping their private parts. The lead one with the stringy hair seemed at one point to invite her in, tilting a beer bottle at her as incentive. She, thankfully, did not try to see the best in him as she had done with Demetrio, and declined. As she turned to go back down the stairs, the stringy-haired vato launched his empty bottle at the dog, striking it.
“Shut the hell up,” he called to it. The dog yelped, and cowered, and my heart broke for it. These men were evil.
Kelsey stared straight ahead, at me, a look of carefully controlled fear on her face, which seemed drained of blood.
“So?” I asked, when she reached me.
“Let’s walk,” she said, hurrying down the road the way we’d come. In all the years I’d known Kelsey, I had never seen her so nervous.
I followed her, and caught up to her. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.” She appeared to be trembling.
“Kelsey. What did they say?”
“They were very high,” she said.
“I thought so.”
“You could smell it. Disgusting. But I don’t think we should take anything they said too seriously.”
“Fine, but what did they say?”
She stared straight ahead, and took a deep breath. “The skinny one with the long hair said Demetrio Vigil is a dead faggot.”
“What?”
“Those were his exact words. Actually, he said ‘it’s a good thing that fucker is a dead faggot, or I’d kill him myself, just like I do to people who piss me off by interrupting my day asking about traitors.’ And then he made sure I saw the gun in his waistband.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He was packing heat, girl. Serious gun.”
“Oh my God,” I said, grabbing her arm and linking mine in it.
“I’ve never met a murderer, Maria, so I don’t know what they’re like, but I’m guessing they’re something like that guy.”
“You think?”
“He had crazy eyes. I did not like him at all.”
“Maybe you’ll listen to me now and stop with all your sheltered ‘we are the world’ crap.”
“Please don’t lecture me.”
“But I told you not to go up there!”
“I realize that. And when you stop gloating maybe you can focus on how we can get the hell out of here before those dudes rape and kill us.”
I turned to look back. “We’re okay. They’re not following us or anything.”
“Let’s just get out of here.”
“Well, think about this. That guy, he’s obviously a liar,” I said. “Because we’ve seen Demetrio, and unless that guy killed him in the last few hours, he’s very much alive and well.”
&nb
sp; “I know. But still. It’s not every day a guy looks you in the eye and tells you he wants to kill someone, and then shows you his gun.”
“Maybe he was just trying to scare you.”
“Probably,” she said. “And guess what? He did a really good job. I think we need to get as far from here as quickly as we can.”
We hurried on, and soon arrived back at the Land Rover. I was about to get in when I noticed a piece of paper underneath one of the windshield wiper blades. I grabbed it, and unfolded it.
Maria. Come in the church. D.V.
“Hey,” I called to Kelsey, as she waited for me to unlock her door. “Look at this.”
Still shaken, she hurried over, looking around nervously. She read the note, and looked at me briefly before we both turned our eyes to the church. The gate, which had been padlocked before, stood open now.
“This is freakin’ weird,” she said, hugging herself.
“Do you believe me now?” I asked. “You and my mom think I’m going crazy, but I’m not. I am telling you. There’s something really weird going on here.”
“I believe you,” she said. “But I think we should go home. If he’s one of them, this could be a setup.”
I realized, depressingly, that she was probably right.
“Let’s go, then,” I said.
But when I turned to open the door to the Land Rover, Demetrio was standing in front of it, blocking my way. I hadn’t heard him approach, or seen him, and all I could do was gasp before he grabbed me by the wrists, and pushed me up against the car.
♦
“Hey, mamita,” he said, smooth as silk, as though we often ran into each other in the church parking lot. “‘sup?”
“What are you doing?”
“How did he get there?” asked Kelsey, and I could see in her eyes the same panic that now washed through me head to toe. She looked as though she was weighing her odds if she attacked him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told us in a hushed voice, his eyes looking around wildly in a paranoid way. “I’m not going to hurt you, but you have to stay quiet.”
