The Other Side of Death

by Judith Van GIeson

  “I was hoping you’d show up,” I said.

  Anna’s mouth puckered with distaste like she’d found something sour in the yogurt she was eating. “You know him?” she asked.

  “We’ve met.”

  The bone man’s hand reached out to take the door away from me. “Your secretary here don’t want me around.”

  “It’s a mistake,” I said. “Don’t leave. I need to talk to you.” Damn you, Anna, I thought, glaring in her direction.

  “She thinks maybe I got AIDS or somethin’.”

  “Come on into my office. We can talk there.”

  “I only came here because of Pete Vigil.”

  “I know.”

  “I just got one thing to say to you anyway.” Anna watched this exchange silently, her spoon suspended in the yogurt container.

  “What’s that?”

  “Guide Line.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s it. Go out there this afternoon and you might find what you’re lookin’ for, if you’re still lookin’. But me, I’m outta here.” His hand grabbed the door, pulled it open and slammed it on his way out.

  “God damn it, Anna,” I said. “Why weren’t you civil to him? He has some information for me about Lonnie’s death.”

  “Him? He’s a bum.”

  “Bums see a lot, hear a lot. They make good observers, because nobody notices them.” I heard the ugly truck’s engine catch and rev up. The tailpipe rattled and coughed and, like he’d said, he was out of here. “He’s not a bum, anyway. He works.”

  “Yeah? What does he do?”

  “He deals in bones—antlers, skulls—at the flea market. People buy them for decoration, to make chandeliers and stuff.”

  “Were you gonna take your fee in bones?” she asked, finishing up the yogurt and throwing the empty carton at the trash.

  “I wasn’t going to represent him. He just came here to give me some information, that’s all.”

  “Guide Line? Doesn’t sound like much.”

  “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

  I went into my office, shut the door and looked up Guide Line in the phone book. It was a tattoo parlor way out on Central SW, formerly known as Route 66. Probably on Nine Mile Hill where the seedy motels with dirty videos are. Nine Mile Hill sounds like the name of a battle to me, a battle with heavy casualties that nobody won. I was going out there this afternoon. I had other plans for this evening.

  I sat at my desk drawing on a yellow legal pad. Yellow paper was one more depredation inflicted by attorneys on the embattled environment; we’d have to start buying white soon for recycling. As I drew Vs on my pad I thought about means, motive, opportunity, evidence, what I knew, what I didn’t. If Lonnie had been killed in the ways Robert Fitch suggested, everybody I’d talked to had the means—their fingers or the missing sleeping bag—and, considering the unverifiability of their alibis, they all had the opportunity, too. There were the usual motives, greed, revenge, jealousy, sex, but did any of the suspects have the heart full of malice necessary to commit cold-blooded murder? Of course there might not have been a murder. Lonnie’s death could have been an accident, or a reckless or wanton act, a psychic or sexual experiment, say, that went too far, although the crime scene didn’t show carelessness. It showed nothing with the possible exception of cold calculation. I considered evidence next, evidence only I had seen: a pattern of Vs on the stoop, a toilet seat left up, the signs possibly of a careless or emotional person. There were three crimes to consider: robbery, rape, murder. Intending to find out how many criminals, I picked up the telephone and dialed Jamie Malone. Maybe Tim hadn’t been lying when he told me he didn’t come to Lonnie’s that night, but Jamie’d never been asked. I said I wanted to meet her at 7½ Miranda after work. She agreed, hesitated briefly and said, “I’m sorry, Neil, I should have called you.”

  Even though I spent the afternoon pushing papers around my desk I still felt like I’d been making left-hand turns all day into traffic. At four I went out to Nine Mile Hill to make some real-life turns. I said good-bye to Anna and told her to hold down the fort, which in my mind meant be civil to anyone who came in. She answered “yeah” like she might have gotten the message. The temperature had gone up to eighty-five and I left the windows in the legger down, drove out Lead and cut over to Tingley Drive. The water in the lagoon next to the Rio Grande was turquoise blue for some reason and sparkled in the sun. Usually it had the color and effervescence of mud. OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, the writing on my side-view mirror said, but the trucks here cruised so slowly they’d never catch up to me. Guys were fishing in the lagoon or standing on the banks admiring each other’s cars, boom boxes and tattoos. I turned left at The Beach apartment complex, one of the more successful architectural statements around, got on Central, crossed the river and began to climb Nine Mile Hill. At the top there’s a sign that says DANGEROUS CROSSWINDS and a spectacular view of the Duke City and the elephants resting behind it. Albuquerque isn’t like one of those coastal cities that’s part of a sprawl from Washington, D.C., to Maine. It’s an inland, Western city; it begins, it ends and from Nine Mile Hill you can see it happening. There is city and beyond that nothing. On the way up I passed a billboard that said YOUR HIGH SCHOOL QUARTERBACK IS LEARNING NEW SIGNALS IN THE NAVY. A body shop displayed a dazzling yellow truck with orange flames licking the hood. The golden oldie station on the radio was playing some apocalyptic Doors song. Between the mobile home community and the snake garden I found Guide Line Tattoos in the Motel Nine. I parked the legger in the parking lot and left the windows open an inch so I wouldn’t be stifled by dead air when I got back in. The combination tattoo parlor-motel was low, gray, ugly. It would have been invisible if it weren’t for the large sign out front that advertised tattoos and a room for two for $12.95 with adult videos. The sign had movable letters, but they’d moved the wrong ones because today’s feature was called The Fine Art of Connilingus. “Adult” was a misnomer; I didn’t see any around, only teenage boys. Apparently they came here after school, if they went to school, to get tattooed and do their homework.

  A guy with a prominent belly stood behind the desk. He wore a black cap on his head, probably to cover a bald spot. The hair that hung down from under the cap was grayish brown and stringy. Bare, beefy arms leaned over the counter advertising his artwork. Tattoos he’d gotten in his youth were expanding in middle age: serpents uncoiled, hearts broke, the web around his elbow stretched and tortured the insect trapped inside.

  He watched and waited as I came through the door like maybe he was expecting someone else to share the $12.95. It couldn’t happen very often that anyone came in here and asked for a single. As I probably didn’t intend to get tattooed or watch dirty movies alone, I made him nervous. There was always the possibility that I was an undercover member of a vice squad or the mother of one of the teenage boys. I hate to think that I’ve gotten old enough to be the mother of a teenage boy, but I could be if I’d started early and they do around here.

  “Whatta you want?” he asked.

  “The man who sells bones at the flea market sent me.”

  “Chico.” Someone he knew. That relaxed him a bit.

  “Yeah.” Chico sounded like as good a name as any for the bone man. “I’m Neil Hamel.”

  “Checker Martin.”

  “You and Chico have the same tattoo.”

  He looked at his bruised elbow. “So?”

  “What does the fly in the web mean?”

  “It means I killed a gook.” A rite of passage in some circles.

  “I guess that means Chico killed one, too.”

  “You got it.”

  “Where’d you get tattooed?”

  “Da Nang, but we do ’em here now. Is that why Chico sent you? You want a tattoo?” He grinned.

  “No, I’m looking for a killer.”

  “Yeah? Who got killed?”

  “A woman in Santa Fe.”

  “What was her name?”r />
  “Lonnie Darmer.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No. She was a friend of mine.”

  He sized me up. I guess he didn’t see whatever spelled cop in his mind, because he relaxed a little more, stretched his big arms, cracked his knuckles. “Didn’t know her. Don’t know why Chico thought I did or why he sent you here.”

  “We’re both friends of Pete Vigil’s.”

  “Don’t know him either.”

  “Maybe you’ve tattooed a fly in someone’s web.”

  “And if I did?”

  “You could be sheltering a murderer.”

  “Well, a person who’d get a tattoo like that ain’t the kind of person you’d want to snitch on, now is it? A person who’s killed once might not think too hard about killing again. What goes on in my place is confidential anyway. That’s why people come here.” Checker Martin’s eyes were flat and gray and had pinpoints for pupils. I doubted if there was any soul behind them or if they’d ever been the window to anything, but if so, that window was closed and boarded up now and he wasn’t about to let me peek in. They weren’t the kind of eyes you could bounce your own reflection off of, either. I tried looking into them, came up empty. He took evasive action anyway, slowly taking a toothpick from a box on the counter and slowly sticking it into his mouth. “Besides,” he grinned once the toothpick was firmly implanted, “we get lovers here, not killers.”

  “You get many ‘lovers’ from Santa Fe? And any of them that do business with or buy bones from Chico?”

  “I get ’em from all over. Hell, I don’t ask what they do or where they’re from.”

  A couple of boys wandered in taking a break between shows. “Hey, Checker,” one of them said, “gimme some change for the soda machine.” Too young to drink beer with his porn, the boy was tall and skinny with ripe pimples. He had a kind of unloved, unwashed aura, wore jeans and running shoes, fidgeted nervously while he waited for the change. Checker got up to get it. “Getting fat, Checker,” the boy said. “Real fat.”

  “Son, when you got a stretch limo, you gotta build a garage to fit over it.” The boy laughed, Checker laughed back.

  I decided to watch today’s feature to see if it had anything to tell me about this place and why I’d been sent here. Checker took my $12.95 and led me to a room where a sleazy red spread covered a bed whose springs had been flattened by the thumps of loveless screwing. There was a bedside table with a cheap lamp and a large TV. That was it for furniture. There wasn’t even any velvet art on the walls. The Fine Art of Connilingus had an interesting beginning—for a porn film. A man and a woman were trying to turn another woman on. The older of the two women faced the camera and explained how. “Listen to the body,” she said, reasonably enough, while she stroked the all too visible younger woman. The guy, who didn’t get the part because he had a big brain, licked his lips, then began to demonstrate what he called “connilingus.” There was a lot of attention lavished on one small section of one woman and she seemed to be getting genuinely turned on, but then a few more women entered the scene and it degenerated—as porn films do—into a group grope with a lot of pointless shifting of positions and faked enthusiasm. It was stupid, laughable or boring depending on your mood—or your age. The Motel Nine had thin walls and I could hear the boys in the next room hooting while I was yawning, laughing as I was getting ready to leave. Maybe it was a question of sex, age and experience, or maybe we weren’t watching the same thing.

  I turned the video off and went out to the desk. “How’d you like it?” asked Checker Martin.

  I shrugged. “Your basic dumb porn. Is that what the boys in the next room are watching?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What is it?”

  “Slasher. You wouldn’t want to see it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It ain’t the kind of video you’d like.”

  “How do you know?”

  He looked at me with his pinpoint eyes. “You saying you want to see it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’ll be another $12.95.” I handed over the money. “But don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”

  I went back to the sleazy room and started Slasher way behind the boys beyond the wall so their reactions were still out of sync with mine, but the reactions of boys like that would always be out of sync with mine. Slasher was stupid, but it wasn’t laughable, and I guess you’d have to say it wasn’t boring. It was a video that took a sick and ugly mind to make. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but what I saw was as corrosive as lye burning a hole in my brain and my stomach, too. The odds had changed. In this case it was five men and one lone, naked woman who must have been beyond desperation to perform in this thing—if she was performing. The guys were bikers, she was supposed to be a groupie, I guess. It wasn’t long before they got off their motorcycles and had her out in the woods somewhere. She had black leather cuffs around her wrists, ankles and neck attached to chains that stretched her across the ground. The bikers stood over her, jacked off and pissed on her naked body. They made their mark by carving their initials on her stomach and breasts and it got worse. The woman screamed and bled, the bikers laughed. There are such things as snuff films, where women are supposedly killed on camera. I had no way of knowing if this was one of those or not, but it was realistic enough to make me sick. A woman devalued, debased, defiled—snuffed—for sport. It was the way some people earned a living, and others spent their afternoons.

  I yanked the video out. On my way past I tried the door to the boys’ room, but the door was locked and they didn’t offer to let me in. When I got to the desk I threw the video at Checker Martin. “Hey, don’t blame me. I told you you weren’t gonna like it,” he said.

  “You take money for this shit and from kids, too. I blame you.”

  “I got the right. It’s a free country and I fought to keep it that way.” Checker Martin’s gray eyes did have an expression now—pissed off.

  So was I. “Any sane person has an obligation to have nothing to do with this stuff.”

  “If they see it, then they don’t have to do it.”

  It was an old and piss-poor argument. “Yeah, or they see it and they learn how.”

  ******

  I couldn’t go back to work after that but it wasn’t time to leave for Santa Fe either, so I drove around town thinking that I hadn’t gotten a name but I might have gotten a motive, wondering what kind of a person would tattoo a spiderweb on their arm or watch snuff videos, wondering when sex got mixed up with hatred and violence. Thinking that there must have been a time and place when men and women were in better balance. At the ruins, maybe, five hundred years ago, where the women had their essential roles and the men theirs and whatever enemies they had were not each other. The only records anybody has of that time and place are abstract images scratched on stone, so nobody really knows for sure, but we can imagine and that’s what people do imagine in New Mexico. Surrounded by beauty, it’s not so hard to imagine harmony. When the ruins were inhabited the Anasazi were making the transition from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. As they settled down and began to grow corn, they stopped stalking and being stalked, and pushed danger beyond the circle around the fire. Now that we have the illusion of controlling the environment the boundaries of the circle have expanded, only the enemy has resurfaced within. Man was a hunter for millions of years before he settled down, maybe the imprint is too deep to go away. We also live in a culture where the message is always that you’re not young enough, blond enough, rich enough, thin enough, fit enough, and the only way some people make themselves feel better is to make someone else feel worse. Statistics say there is a murder every twenty-five minutes in this country. Violence is as American as apple pie, predictable as spring, pervasive as pollen; a highly contagious virus, and those whose immune systems have been weakened are all too susceptible. You could blame it on too many people, too little space, but you can’t call New Mexico overcrowded and violence has gotten the upper hand he
re, maybe everywhere. You couldn’t stop it, you couldn’t even move away from it, the best you could hope for was to protect yourself.

  I checked to make sure the LadySmith was still in the glove compartment, turned down Coors Boulevard, cut across Gun Club Road, up Isleta, crossed Rio Bravo onto University and came out behind the airport. There is a spot back there where you go around a curve, come up an incline and suddenly you’re surrounded by dunes. You can’t see anything but sand and sky and a couple of tumbleweeds stuck on the dunes. I go there sometimes when I want to look at nothing.

  I got on the interstate at Gibson, and passed an ornate black and chrome semi. The driver flashed his high beams when he saw I was a woman, alone. I stepped on the gas, put some distance between us, remembering that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. The objects in the mirror were the usual collection of junkers and trucks. I didn’t see any peregrinos in the city limits; they’d all walked further north by now. I did see a billboard that said IF YOU’RE THINKING OF COCAINE, CALL US and an ad for Ron Bell, who also sues uninsured motorists.

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