Sunshine arrived and ordered a Manhattan. The only thing calling itself scotch at Red’s was Johnnie Walker, so I scanned the bourbons instead and chose Maker’s Mark. The restaurant crowded up around us and our drinks came.
Sunshine snorted back his Manhattan and popped the cherry in his mouth. “Can I get another one of these?” he called to the bartender. When he leaned into me I got a heavy whiff of marijuana smoke on his greasy flowerprint shirt. “How the fuck did you get out there to the Johnson house? What the fuck were you doing way the fuck out in Ledoux?”
I wasn’t sure how to say it without sounding like an asshole. “Chasing some tail.”
The moment I said it I regretted it. Here I was confessing to a burnt-out hippie something I wouldn’t want my wife to find out. Of course, he would never have a way of telling her, but I regretted letting him in on my secret all the same.
“Bullshit.”
“I thought this girl was coming on to me. She said she and her friends partied out there.”
“Did she show up?”
“No.” I decided it would be best to change course.
“Look, there’s someone I know who I believe might be a mutual acquaintance. Name’s Mel Woburn. He told me you lived there. I would just like to find out what it was like, and then I’ll never bother you again.”
Sunshine, Shorn, Harold—whatever—looked at me with a beery eye. “The hippies never owned the place, but we added the log room and built the portal. Bad shit happened around that place. Mel probably told you. Even regular shit would spin out of control.”
“What kind of regular shit?”
Sunshine looked at me vacantly for a moment, then his fresh drink came and he became reanimated. “Mel mentioned Ritchie Motherfucker, right?”
“Yup.”
“Him and his old lady slept in the last room, the furthest adobe from the log room. Did you look in there?”
“The last room was padlocked.”
Sunshine nodded effusively, hit his drink. “The day Ritchie fell off a horse he said, I’m okay. A minor fracture, right? Just lay up in bed for a while. But a week later he was dead of sepsis. He didn’t want to go to no doctor. Said, I’m treating it with goldenseal. Ritchie and his fucking goldenseal!”
Red’s was starting to serve lunch. Big plates heaped with steaming steaks kept coming out of the kitchen. Sunshine grabbed a passing waitress by her bicep, subduing her. A strange glaze came over her eyes; she knew a lifetime of abusive men and how to keep them at bay by behaving docile.
“Can you get me one of those lunch specials, honey?” Sunshine said.
She said, “Coming right up.”
Sunshine drank deeply and we ordered him another. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked at me. We were drinking lunch together, and I was buying. Sing for my meal, said his expression. The Manhattans started making their magic, and Sunshine let me have it.
“That gangrene moved fucking fast,” he said, “and the fever made Ritchie incoherent. We finally decided we had to get him down to Mora, and we loaded him in the station wagon, but the rains were so bad it took us all day. By the time we got to the hospital it was too late. He was dead.
“The admitting nurse said she’d do us a favor, save us fifty bucks by shredding up the file and un-admitting him, but then it would be up to us to remove the body and contact the county coroner. Remove the body? This was Ritchie! Just the other day we were riding horses together. But that’s where it was at and so we did what we had to do. We put the seats down in the back of the station wagon and drove him back out to the Johnson house.
“It took a long time to get him to burn, a lot of gasoline, and he stunk like hell, that hairy bastard! Shit, we should have had the girls shave him, but it was too late, he was already smoldering up, so we poured on more gasoline and sent the girls for more sticks. It was a good thing we sent them away because of what happened next.”
“What?”
“He got up.”
“What? ”
“Ritchie: dead Ritchie. Got up right there. One of those nerve things you read about, but it went on and on. He was running around the yard, hit some bushes and set them on fire and just kept going.
“I looked at Little Joe and we both had these awful faces. Do we tackle him or what? Run away? Little Joe went for the hose. Ritchie finally fell to the ground and started rolling around, groaning. I got pretty close but then I shrank back at what I saw: Ritchie’s face, his expression of torture and melting beard and charred skin, but it was Ritchie’s face, and he was looking at me in anguish, Ritchie, his feet already in hell.”
“What did you do?”
Sunshine’s plate came. He carved off a forkful of steak, talking over the chewing. “We had to shoot him.”
“Jesus …”
“Then Little Joe hit him with a jet from the hose and Ritchie curled up just like a dead bug. God, that was awful, that smell, and the vomit, mine and Little Joe’s. The girls came back screaming What happened? before they saw it and vomited too. After that, we couldn’t get him lighted again.”
Sunshine pitched another forkful of steak into his mouth.
“The weird shit started long before the hippies ever got there. Back in the 1800s Johnson’s son killed his mom and sisters, and then he hanged himself—the whole fucking family except for old man Johnson.” He threw back the last of his drink and stood. “I got to take a piss.”
The bill came and I pulled out my wallet. I handed the waitress my check card.
Out in the blazing parking lot, I asked him, “How long did the hippies live there?”
Climbing into his Volkswagen van, Sunshine said, “Place finally shut down in ’74. Last I heard some bikers set up a lab in the end room and made meth.”
Something clicked at that instant. The place had been a meth lab. I had read an article on how motel rooms have to be stripped of all furniture and sometimes even re-Sheetrocked after they’ve been contaminated with meth-making chemicals.
I sat in the Spider and considered my options. I was already down in the valley. I could make it over the mountains in about two hours. The afternoon was wide open.
What was it about the Johnson house that kept calling me back? At first I just wanted to see. What did I expect to see? I wanted to see it in daytime. It had taken away my camera, my computer, but it had given me a story.
After the laptop, I should have just let it go. The crash of the Mac might have been a blessing in disguise: begin with a clean slate, and not only that, begin with a new slate, a different slate.
I took out the Altoids tin, lit a joint, and set out north on 68 toward Mora.
On the Fourth of July I had sped hornily to my goal without taking an account of my surroundings, but now I made note of all the towns along the way.
Española: a woman from Spain once ran the only tavern here, an outpost on the Camino Real halfway between Taos and Santa Fe.
Alcalde: “the mayor,” the first occupation of the Spanish empire on future U.S. soil. I avoided the package store at Marcy Garcia’s Club Lumina, suicide for a white boy like me, but stopped for a beer at the Shamrock in Velarde.
Embudo: the funnel between these foothills of the Sangre de Cristo. I navigated the curves of the canyon with a twenty-four-ounce Chelada between my knees, turning right at the winery.
In Dixon, La Chiripada, a stroke of good fortune: an Open sign on Sunday! I stopped for a tasting. The son of the founders hit my glass hard: reds, whites, a brandyfortified wine. I left braced for the winding road into the mountains.
Peñasco: “the rocky place,” where I ditched the empty Chelada can at the drive-in trash barrel.
Through Sipapu, the Swiss village, and over the pass.
Mora: depending on whom you asked, it could be a patronymic, but there was also a legend of a French trapper hunting pelts along the river, who came upon a dead man facedown on the shore. He was a young man and, other than being dead, appeared to be in good health. There had been
no signs of struggle, no injuries whatsoever on the body. The trapper dug the unfortunate man a shallow grave in the sand of the riverbank and forsook that place in a hurry, leaving it with a designation, L’eau de mort, that lingers two hundred years later. Mora.
At the Mustang I paid at the pump and took a piss inside. I thought about another Chelada, but I needed to wake up a little for the drive into Ledoux, so got myself a hot coffee instead.
I wanted to find the dirt road direct to the house so I wouldn’t have to climb the hill from Morphy Lake. I drove for more than an hour before spotting the sign for Aplanado.
It looked almost like a driveway, unmarked, but at the turn it skirted between two fenced properties and up the back of a wooded slope. It was one of those roads that had never been planned and so from its origins had remained neglected.
I met no other vehicles or people on the narrow onetrack. Barely broad enough for a single car, Aplanado would never be widened, paved, or even so much as graded. There were too many gnarly old trees and boulders on either side.
A little more than a mile into the woods, the road came out of the trees and the valley opened up: the distant peaks, their age-beaten granite faces reminding me of the harsh winters that punish the green valley at eight thousand feet.
The hump of a culvert, a bend in the road, and I passed the gate I had hopped over on the Fourth of July. I had to drive the dirt road another quarter-mile to find a spot wide enough to turn the Spider back around.
I pulled off into the tall grass at the edge of the property line. When I cut the engine there was only the din of crickets and grasshoppers. I checked my phone: no service.
I walked to the gate. At the end of the drive hung a rusted metal sign I hadn’t seen in the dark, a cedar shingle nailed eight feet up in a tree, the Spanish lettering painted in decorative script. It said something like, For the favor of not trespassing, we will not have to shoot you.
I had the feeling that there was nobody else alive in the wide valley. There was no other house, not a sign of life, not even a distant buzz of chainsaw in the hot afternoon.
Now that I had invested the energy in coming back, I felt there was something at stake. I would hear anyone coming. I climbed over the gate.
I approached slowly around the side of the house. Six posts on a wooden portal.
I looked around in the bushes but I didn’t find Oppie’s bag of bones. Maybe some other dog had dragged them off.
I stepped onto the portal and stood in the black doorway. Bad shit had happened here.
When my eyes adjusted I stepped inside onto the trash-strewn floor. Who had been the last occupants? Why had they left in such a hurry? The ruin of the mattress was there in the first room. What would make me lie down on that filthy bed? Nothing.
When I crossed the threshold and walked out in the middle of the floor, over my shoulder came a loud squeaking like the sound of an old bicycle.
I stood stiffly in place. What am I doing? This isn’t a game. I’m trespassing. Someone might take this seriously, some insane or homeless person. Just because a house is abandoned doesn’t mean that it’s unoccupied.
I was ready to look over my shoulder and see a deranged old hippie or angry Hispanic twirling a rusty chain crank, ready to hit me with it, but when I turned the room was empty except for the trash on the floor.
The squeaking abruptly stopped, and the interval of silence allowed me to briefly collect my senses. I took a step and the sound came again from the ceiling. I saw a clod of mud and straw suspended from a viga in the center of the room.
I stepped closer. The sound hadn’t been squeaking; it was chirping.
I stood under the nest, holding my hand up to block the light from the entrance. Three little beaks peeked out: three blind baby swallows. When I passed in front of the window, my shadow fell over the mouth of the nest and the chicks thought their mother was home.
I felt penetrated by exhaustion, a narcotic fatigue. The sunlight and sound of grasshoppers flooded in every window, suffusing the room with soporific warmth.
The laptop, the camera, Kitty’s cruelty—none of it bothered me now. I felt good. It was such a quiet valley, such a dozy afternoon. I had not slept more than a couple of hours each of the past three nights.
I lay on the floor to rest my eyes.
* * *
In the dream my father showed up—my father as he was at forty, when I was still a boy, before he went to Fair Oaks.
I heard myself speak. What are you doing here?
I kept coming here too. I couldn’t help it. One taste and I was hooked.
That’s impossible. You never in your life got out of the Northeast. For the last five years you never left Fair Oaks. Whatever remains of you lies in St. Theresa’s Catholic Cemetery along the cold clays of the Passaic.
He gave me a loving smile and said, We all come here eventually. That’s why it feels so familiar. But when you go in the last room and try telling anyone about what you saw, they shut you up, they call you crazy, they try to lock you up. They can’t face it.
My father kneeled and placed a hand on the back of my head, gently stroking my hair like he used to in the night when I was a little boy. Then something made him look over my shoulder. Here comes, he said. My father exited the dream, and when I turned and peered through the window, I saw a great cloud of ash and smoke rising over the mountains.
I woke in a panic. From the darkness beneath a broken plank of flooring, a pair of rodent eyes stared at me.
I scrambled to my hands and knees. The mouse disappeared beneath the house. Jesus, Oberhelm, what has become of you? You are a wreck sprawled on the floor of a dirty old house.
Out the window I could see the beautiful mountains, the tops of the pines glowing green-gold in the afternoon sun. No smoke.
I had to get out of there. The trill of a cricket stuck in the room with me drowned out all other sound.
I looked at the padlocked door. Before I left, I wanted to see in that last room.
I headed out to the Spider and reached under the seat for the tire iron, and then I went back in the house to the padlocked door.
I slipped the tire iron in the gap behind the hinge that held the lock in place. I leaned on it a little and the hinge snapped off, splintering the rotten doorframe.
When I opened the door, cold air sucked me in with a gasp. The one window to the outside had been bricked up. The only light inside came in with me. There were three plain mud walls and one covered with paper; otherwise there was only a rustic table where someone had left a book. Bound in black vellum: the Bible.
I flicked my lighter and flipped through the pages. On the back I found an inscription in black ink: Draw on the power of these mouldering pages to finishe what we started.
Nice word choice. They’d gotten the feel right: moldering meant rotting, and spelling it with the extra vowel made it sound even mealier: mould. Like mold in your mouth. And “finish” with an e? Like olde Englishe?
What had made someone write this in the back of the Bible? Hard to tell what it meant. I left it on the table where I’d found it.
I looked at the wall that was papered, pages torn from a magazine stuck to the crumbling plaster.
I flicked my lighter again and saw something familiar in the typeface, the layout: high-quality photos and plenty of white space to set off the meager sustenance of the story. The words looked familiar.
That’s when I saw. A thing in the lettering drew my eyes.
Those are my words. I wrote those stories. They are pages torn from Surge. My name stands out at the top of every page.
I pulled into the Mustang parking lot and bought a four-pack of Kahlua Mudslides. Then I got back in the car, shook up a Mudslide, and opened it. I sat in the Spider and drank.
The taste of the sugar and milk solids gave my heart a lift, and then easing the jitters came the Kahlua and the vodka. Was it really even vodka? I checked the label:
Contains Real Vodka! I felt better al
ready.
Why would my articles be on the wall of that house?
I removed the other three Mudslides from the carton, turned the cardboard inside out, and found a pen in the glove compartment to work my way through the names and associations.
Sunshine
didn’t know me before today
doesn’t want anything to do with the house
Mel Woburn
weak connection with the house
six years pot dealer
Blood tech
got me out there in the first place
didn’t show up
I had left the pages hanging on the wall, part afraid to touch them, part afraid of what would happen in my head if I admitted I was afraid to leave them there. It would be an acknowledgment that I suspected this had been deliberate, something depraved.
Two Mudslides down and I started to relax. Copies of Surge, bundles of them, get dumped all over northern New Mexico like so many Thrifty Nickels. Someone just tore a few up and tacked those pages to the ugly mud wall to cover it. Ridiculous to think of it as anything more than a coincidence. I live over the mountain in Los Alamos—just drive away.
Ready to get back on the road, I opened another Mudslide and pulled out of the Mustang parking lot.
When I got back to Los Alamos it was going on dark, and I found a note Kitty had written in the kitchen. Where the fuck have you been??? At the top of the stairs, the bedroom door was closed. I listened. Oppie did not get up and I did not bother going in.
I went down to my study, rolled a joint, and woke up the PC.
Googling Mora and Johnson massacre got me nothing, and New Mexico plus Johnson House yielded thousands of hits, but nothing on the first page more relevant than the newspaper headline, Johnson: House Stays on Schedule.
Curse the Names Page 5
