As I approached the polo field I saw the lineup of trailers and trucks facing it. The red trailer I’d seen on the interstate was stuck between a shiny black rig and a dusty brown one. There were enough trailers to make me believe a tournament was in progress. There happened to be a lull in the proceedings, and horses were being walked around to dry off their sweat. People strolled the field, kicking the divots back in place. I parked the Nissan inconspicuously at the far edge of the field beyond the horse trailers, where a lot of people might think it belonged. On the edge of this crowd was where I preferred to be anyway. Someone honked a horn, indicating that a new chukker was ready to begin. The divot kickers walked off the field and leaned on their cars or sat in folding chairs with cervezas in their hands. I hung my purse over my shoulder, got out of the Nissan and sat on the hood.
The horses and riders came back onto the field, eight of each, four on a team. The men on one team wore white pants, red T-shirts and helmets. The men on the other wore white pants, navy-blue T-shirts and helmets. The horses had wraps on their legs to match the players’ shirts. Both teams were all male and the same mix of two overweight middle-aged white guys and two skinny young dark guys, the money and the skill, nobody I recognized. The white guys had chin bars on their helmets. The other guys didn’t.
The horses and riders thundered down to my end of the field, sounding like hard rain on a tight drum. Mallets were lifted and swung, and occasionally they connected. When they didn’t, there was a lot of swearing in English and Spanish: shit, mierda; fuck, boludo; asshole, maricón. The horses turned and galloped back. Someone whacked the ball hard, and a goal got scored at the far goalpost. It was a long field, and all I could see from where I stood were rumps and mallets. I couldn’t tell whether the person who scored was a dark guy or a white guy. Whoever, score one for the blues. The fans honked their horns and cheered.
The players lined up. A referee placed the ball in the middle of the field and started the game again. Horseflesh and humans pressed against one another, jockeying for position. A dark guy in a red shirt broke loose and whacked the ball toward my end of the field. He and his horse caught up to it with a clear shot at the goal. He seemed to have a centaur’s communication with his horse—each end knowing exactly what the other end was doing. It was an exhibition of power, skill, animal coordination and high-speed maneuvering that could be exciting or threatening, depending upon your point of view. Superior physical specimens tend to be one or the other. I jumped off the Nissan and stood beside it to watch better. The player brought his mallet back, poised to even the score. “Leave it,” a voice behind him yelled. The first rider spun around, brought his horse to a stop and lowered his mallet when he saw where the voice was coming from. Mr. Leave It galloped up. He was wearing the red T-shirt of his teammate, and beneath it the folds on his belly bounced. He looked like a fat white colonial on a quick brown horse, a horse that seemed way too small for him. Even I could see that he didn’t have the strength and coordination of the other guy. He raised his mallet, swung, hit the ball sideways with a dull thud. A red shirt blocked a blue shirt, and there was still no one between him and the goal. The ball dribbled across the grass and rolled in. The rider who had (technically) scored rode up the field, proud as a conquistador, waving his mallet triumphantly while the horns honked. He was the one who had the money to pay someone younger, fitter and poorer to win his games; he got to claim the victory.
The rider who gave up the goal galloped by me. Veins bulged like barbed wire in his bare arms. The expression on his face was a snarl; he’d been hired to play a game he loved but hadn’t been allowed to do it right. He looked as if he wished the other guy a lifetime of quick stops in a western saddle. He leaned across his horse and spat a wad at the field. “Mierda,” he swore.
The players got into position; the referee put the ball in play again. A foul was called, and the rumps lined up to give the fouled player a fair shot. Everyone’s eyes were on the far end of the field, except for two that were focused on the small of my back, watching the pistol that jabbed into me.
“Movete,” a man’s voice ordered in Argentine Spanish. Move it. He grabbed the shoulder strap of my purse and yanked it from my arm.
“Where?” I replied.
“Allá.” He directed me away from my car, toward a horse trailer. As he turned me around, I got a good look at him. He was medium tall and skinny, with wiry black hair. I’d seen him before, but only at a distance or behind a mask. Up close I could see he had an assassin’s cold, unblinking, milky green eyes and the lizard skin of Manuel Noriega. He also had a limp.
“What do you want from me anyway?” I asked, although I suspected I already knew.
“Callate,” he said, pushing me toward the rig, which would block us from view. No one was looking this way; they were either watching the match or playing in it. Another goal got scored. Horns blew and people yelled, but the spectators might as well have been in Tucumcari for all the good they were doing me. My options were to wait for the cheering to stop and scream or to keep my mouth shut and keep on walking. If I screamed, there was the remote possibility he’d take his gun, run away and disappear from my life forever. There was also the possibility he’d shoot to stop, and once he did it wouldn’t make a lot of difference to me whether he disappeared or not. He didn’t strike me as a person who cared much about my health or had a lot to lose. I walked.
The rig was long, dusty and black. When we passed the cab, he threw my purse in through an open window. Then he nudged me toward the far end and prodded me up the ramp. The door was open; I felt a blast of hot air and smelled the ripe odor of horse sweat and manure. The trailer had been sitting too long in the sun. I balked. This was not a place where I wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon or the rest of my life, which could be the same thing. He pushed me forward. I stuck my leg out and kicked his shin, knocking him off balance, but instead of falling sideways off the ramp, as I’d hoped, he fell forward, pushing us both facedown into the trailer. My face landed in a mound of hay, but underneath I felt the hard metal floor. He landed on top of me. I tried to push him off, but he had the leverage, and he used it to press me down. Stuck between him and a hard place, I bucked and kicked. He grabbed my left arm and twisted it behind me until I thought he would yank it loose. To stop myself from crying out I bit my lip, drawing blood. The pain of my lip diverted me from the pain in my shoulder. He got to his knees and hit me on the side of the head with his handgun for good measure. Stars spun, and I saw whirling moons and pink lightning.
He climbed off me, crossed the trailer, which was about as wide as a horse is long, and sat down with his knees up and the gun pointing at me. He happened to be sitting on a pile of hay, but that didn’t stop him from lighting a cigarette. I wanted that cigarette almost as much as I wanted my freedom, but I didn’t ask. He had too much power over me already; I wasn’t going to let my nicotine need give him any more. I sat up and for a moment saw two heads, four knees, two guns and a whole lot of lizards, but then my vision cleared and I saw it was just him and his 9-mm semiautomatic, capable of blowing a hole through me, a couple of horses and the trailer too. “What do you want?” I asked. “Money?” I rubbed my fingers together in the universal gesture of greed.
His conversation was limited. “Callate,” he said.
And that’s how we spent the rest of the polo match. My head throbbed, and I got hotter and thirstier by the minute. Just to break the monotony I tried periodically to make conversation.
“Who are we waiting for?”
“When am I going to get out of here?”
“What do you want anyway?”
“Can I take a leak?”
All of it met with silence. He didn’t say a word, just stared at me with eyes as still and clouded as stagnant water. Either he didn’t speak my language or he’d already shot his conversational wad. My instinct was to speak only English to him. Although my Spanish isn’t perfect, I can usually make myself understood and get the poi
nt of what is being said, but I preferred that he didn’t know that. We seemed to be waiting for someone. Chances were that person was a native Spanish speaker, and it would be better if the two of them thought I didn’t understand them. The polo match continued without us. Eventually I heard the sounds of victory, then the sounds of cars driving away, and finally hooves approaching the trailer and clomping up the ramp. The door burst open, and I was temporarily blinded by the daylight that flooded in through the opening. The hay dust filled the light with the luminescence of the finger of God in a Renaissance painting. The person and horse standing in the doorway were a chiaroscuro of black silhouette against golden light, but the beauty of the picture was wasted on me. He stepped into the trailer, pulling his horse behind him. “Hola, Manolo,” he said to my captor.
“Qué tal, Jorge?” the captor replied.
“So you got her,” he said in English for my benefit. His English was clear, but his voice was raspy. “Qué bueno!”
Now that Jorge had stepped out of the sun and I got a good look at him, I realized that I’d seen him before too—at Albuquerque International, waiting on line behind me. He was holding a short, sharp whip in his hand. His hair was slicked back and his clothes were skin-tight. His white polo pants and red T-shirt were too clean to have seen much action. He hadn’t played while I was watching anyway; I’d have noticed. I ranked him somewhere between the player who should have scored the goal and Manolo in the pecking order. He didn’t have the player’s aristocratic good looks and powerful build, but he was fitter and better-looking than Manolo. Maybe he hired Manolo to do his dirty work—but when he flashed a malevolent white smile at me, I saw this was a guy who’d be happy to do his own dirty work.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
He handed the horse over to Manolo. The animal had already been dried off and had his saddle removed. Rope was hanging in loops beneath the tiny windows the horses got to peek out through. Manolo tied the horse to a loop with the rope attached to his bridle. “What do you want?” Jorge asked, tapping the whip against his riding boot.
“To get out of here.”
Manolo had finished tying up the horse, and Jorge told him in Spanish to get the rest of them. “So sorry,” he said to me, “but I can’t do that. You want to know what happened to Niki Falcón, right?” He flicked the whip by me with a quick, casting motion. “I am going to help you find out.” The good news was that meant he didn’t intend to kill me immediately.
Manolo brought another horse to the door. “Put Cinco next to Arturo,” Jorge ordered in Spanish.
“They don’t like each other,” Manolo said. “They will fight.”
“Exactamente,” replied Jorge.
Manolo brought more horses in and tied them up where he was told. The horses weren’t happy with their trailer mates, and they bit and kicked at each other. Jorge ordered Manolo to muzzle the rowdier ones so they wouldn’t take chunks out of each other’s hide. They were too valuable to be marked with bite marks, he said. As the trailer filled up with horses, there was less and less room for me, and I slid down into the corner near the door to get away from the kicking hooves.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“You have too many questions,” Jorge said. “I think we will have to keep you quiet. You hold her,” he told Manolo in Spanish. His sentences were punctuated by the thumps of hooves hitting the aluminum walls of the trailer.
I tried to squirm away from Manolo, but there was no place to go, with a metal wall behind me, kicking horses on one side, a flicking whip on the other. The whip struck like a small, nasty viper, taking a nick out of my cheek and driving me toward Manolo. He was skinny but strong, and my arm hurt from being yanked nearly out of its socket. He pulled my arms behind me and held them there while Jorge used some horse rope to tie my hands together tight. Jorge picked a black rag off the floor, a rag that had probably been used to wipe sweat from horses, and while Manolo held me in place and I squirmed, he stuffed the rag into my mouth and tied it behind my head.
“You talk too much,” he said.
They brought in two more horses and tied them in place. The van was full to capacity now, and there was no place for me but pressed into the corner next to a horse they called Ernesto, one of the gentler ones that didn’t get muzzled. “Adiós,” Jorge said, slamming the door shut behind himself and his minion.
One of them started up the truck and drove away from the polo field with a heavy foot. This wasn’t the first time I’d cursed Santa Fe’s bumpy dirt roads, but I swear better when I’m not chewing on a filthy rag. It was the first time taking the bumps felt like a matter of life and death. I’ve ridden in cars with no shocks before, but this ride entered another dimension. The trailer took the bumps like a porpoise. One end went down, the other end went up, and we hit another bump and started a new cycle before we’d even finished the first one. The trailer swung from side to side too. I lurched and looked for something to grab onto. The only grip handy was the rope looped around the bale of hay that Ernesto was chewing on. I edged toward it. Ernesto snorted and whinnied, showing big yellow teeth, but he let me approach. To reach the bale with my hands tied behind me I had to bend forward and grab it from behind. It would have been uncomfortable even if my left arm weren’t an adventure in pain.
Maybe the horses had been on the losing team; they were not in a good mood when they entered the trailer. Being tied up next to their rivals and getting flung around didn’t improve their dispositions any. Their tails swished at flies. Cinco nipped at Arturo, Arturo kicked back. They lunged at each other and tried to bite, but they couldn’t because their heads were tied and muzzled. That frustrated them even more, and they whinnied inside the muzzles and kicked out. Their kicks hit the side of the trailer with a sharp thwang. If this pissed-off horsepower had been harnessed, we wouldn’t have needed gasoline to get us to wherever we were going. There was a certain amount of methane gas being emitted that could have been useful too.
On the downhill side of the bumps I got pulled forward, going uphill I got yanked back. I wedged my fingers under the baling rope and held on. With one part of my brain I listened to Ernesto chew. With another I tried to keep track of where we were going. Sooner or later we would reach the interstate, and I wanted to observe which direction we turned when we did. We went up an incline that I thought I recognized as the access to the bridge across the river in La Cienega. That was good because it pressed me into my corner, but when we went back down and took a curve the trailer swung wide; I fell forward, clutched at the rope but lost my grip. I rolled onto my side when I landed and slid across the floor like grease on a hot pan. I didn’t like horses much before this experience; I like them less now. I was running a gauntlet of hooves and shit. Arturo dropped a load of steaming manure. Cinco let loose with an angry kick. I saw his hoof coming at my face with slow-motion clarity, the way things move when you’re in deep trouble. I could see the shoe on the hoof, the nails in the shoe. I also saw my head bursting open like a watermelon and my thoughts falling out in black seeds. I screamed, but it didn’t do any good. My scream hit a wall—the rag—and doubled back on me the way rotten food does. I continued my headfirst slide. Cinco’s hoof flew over my head, missing my brain by half an inch, and slammed into the wall with the sharp sound of metal hitting metal. I hit the far end of the trailer with a thunk of my own. For the moment I was safe. There was another bale of hay at this side of the trailer, which no one was chewing on. I was able to grab it and hold myself in place.
The road leveled off and smoothed out, meaning we were approaching the interstate. The trailer climbed an incline. We turned onto I-25 heading south toward Albuquerque or Socorro or Argentina. The smoother ride of the interstate quieted the horses. Maybe they’d realized they couldn’t do any harm to their rivals with their muzzles on. I put my energy into figuring out where we were going. It was difficult to keep track of time when every second felt like a minute and every minute an hour and a bale of h
ay was my mooring. I observed the labored climb up La Bajada, the free-fall going down, and I noticed later when the trailer slowed down. The concrete divider at Algodones, I figured. I noticed the lane changes of increasing traffic when we passed the divider and approached the Duke City. Then the van jerked to a stop, turned right and headed west.
25
ONCE WE LEFT the interstate, the horses got restless again, more so with every turn in the road or change in its surface from pavement to dirt. They swatted their tails, jerked their heads and danced in place. Their desire to be on the move reminded me of the way rental horses take off when you turn back to the stable or a dog heads for the door when he notices you’re packing your bags. It seems you’re crossing a species barrier of communication, but all it really means is that the animals are watching and listening and picking up on the clues that matter to them. The horses knew they were going home. The turns we’d made were taking us in the direction of Corrales or the North Valley. Was it our final destination, I wondered, or just a place to drop off the horses? A lot of people in the valley kept horses—they kept llamas and chickens and potbellied pigs too—but nobody I knew.
The trailer jerked to a stop. I heard footsteps on the ramp; the door opened. I was hoping to see a new face, the owner of the trailer, maybe, the power behind the crime, but all I got was Manolo and Jorge, two guys who cared a lot about the horses and not a bit about me.
“Where are you?” Jorge called out in singsong English, feigning surprise, as if he were playing hide-and-seek. He knew I was inside: there was no way out; what he didn’t know was whether I was dead or alive or had been kicked somewhere in between. It didn’t make much difference to him. “Did you kick her, Ernesto?” he asked. He bent down, peered between the horses’ legs and saw me scrunched up in the far corner. “She is still alive. She must be very smart or very lucky. Being smart, that’s good, but luck—luck runs out. Still curious?” he asked me.
The Lies that Bind Page 21
