The Bisti Business

by Don Travis

  Gene yelled for me to wait for him as he strode briskly across Civic Plaza. “You always talk to statues?” He was a little breathless after running to beat the light change at the intersection. A stocky Hispanic with regular, pleasant features that seem vaguely Polynesian, Gene always appeared slightly frazzled, a consequence of dealing with the Albuquerque Police Department, a wife, and five kids on a daily basis.

  I accepted both his hand and his ribbing. “Every time. Get some of my best answers from them.”

  “I keep expecting one of the rookies to arrest the kid.” He motioned to the bronze of a teenager with a skateboard.

  We entered the La Posada by the north entrance and stepped into another world. The interior was done in Spanish Territorial with aged wood copings, corbels highlighted in scarlet and turquoise, and heavily carved lintels. Nichos, small shelves in the white plastered walls, held carved wooden santos and ornate Mexican tinwork. This hotel had once been part of the Hilton chain—Conrad’s first in New Mexico, as a matter of fact—but had been recently sold, yet again, and was scheduled for a makeover in the near future.

  Gene and I selected a heavy oak table stained ebony by the passage of time, and claimed a pair of sturdy straight-backed chairs padded in green and gold. We spent a few minutes bringing one another up to date on our lives.

  After making a brunch of the restaurant’s éclairs and a wedge of superb lemon meringue pie dribbled with chocolate, Gene was through chitchatting. “Okay, so what do you want?”

  “What makes you think I want something? Can’t I call a pal without having an ulterior motive?”

  “No.”

  I pretended to think for a moment. “Okay then, I’ve got a client looking for his missing son and the kid’s traveling companion.” In less than two minutes, I’d briefed him on the situation.

  “So they’re like that, huh?” He wiggled his hand back and forth, a gesture that was supposed to convey something. Gene knew me too well to be sensitive about my sexual orientation.

  “You mean are they gay? Yeah, I’d say so.”

  “And you want to get in their hotel room.”

  “Seems a logical place to start since one of their fathers hired me to represent the family.”

  “These two, they’re emancipated, right? Adults.”

  “Both are twenty-one, according to Alfano.”

  “Hmm. Alfano gonna file a missing person’s report?”

  “He will if you think it’ll help.”

  “Naw. We’ve got enough to do without looking for a couple of kids who’ve run off to play hanky-panky. But if they strayed across the border into Arizona, they might be cooling their heels in some county sheriff’s jail as we speak. They take that shit seriously over there.”

  “Possible, but not likely. They could be in real trouble, Gene. Alfano keeps a tight rein on his boy, and the fact he’s looking for him is troubling.”

  “Maybe the colt got out of the family pasture and is feeling his oats. But okay, have the old man file a report, and I’ll see if I can get us inside the hotel room. Unofficially.”

  I picked up the tab to see what kind of damage Gene had done to my pocketbook. Anthony P. Alfano’s pocketbook, actually.

  Gene caught me peeking at the check. “Come on, you can afford it.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s not my expense, it’s my client’s, and I don’t know how picky he is.”

  Gene Enriquez is a good detective and a smooth talker, at least smooth enough to get us access to the room occupied by—or held in the names of—Orlando Alfano and Dana Norville. There was little to see. The pair had taken their traveling bags with them, leaving behind nothing personal except for two bundles of clothing destined for the laundry, the only sign they intended to return. One set of duds was expensive Abercrombie & Fitch, the other bundle was Gap. It wasn’t hard to figure which clothes belonged to what dude.

  The breast pocket of one shirt held a carefully folded chamber of commerce brochure extolling the virtues of El Moro’s Inscription Rock and the Ice Caves near Grants. A rumpled pair of trousers—the expensive ones—gave up a not-so-neatly folded tourist road map of the state.

  The bell captain remembered the two men asking his advice about the Enchanted Circle in the Taos area. They had specifically asked about white-water rafting along the Taos Box.

  The clerk in the gift shop remembered the pair because, she blushingly admitted, they were both so handsome. Shortly after checking in, they picked up several pamphlets from her, expressing interest in the Turquoise Trail, a fifty-mile National Scenic Byway up Route 14 to Santa Fe studded with quaint, historic villages. Orlando and Dana had been especially curious about Valles Caldera, the thirteen-mile-wide crater of an extinct volcano south of Los Alamos, the Atomic City. Unfortunately, they also asked about Lincoln County and Carlsbad Caverns to the south and east, as well as Mesa Verde and the Bisti badlands in the northwest corner of the state.

  As we drove back downtown, Gene agreed to put out a bulletin on Orlando Alfano’s Porsche, an orange 2008-model Boxster S, California vanity plate LANDO 06. The kid probably got his undergraduate degree that year.

  “A buggy like that’s bound to have a navigational system with a GPS satellite signal,” Gene said.

  “A Magellan 750 Plus. The old man has his attorney contacting the company to get the present coordinates. They’re touchy about giving out such information, and Alfano is bound to have more clout than I do. The way I read this guy, he’ll have everyone from the governor on up calling the company if he can’t buy the data from them.”

  “You do attract a certain type of client, don’t you?”

  CREATED BY JUTOH - PLEASE REGISTER TO REMOVE THIS LINE

  Chapter 3

  WEDNESDAY MORNING found me trailing an aardvark—a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler—as she nosed right and rolled sedately down the off-ramp toward a sprawling truck stop. The silver lettering on the butt end of the trailer promised “Tembro Carpets of North Carolina Are the Best.” I’d followed the big rig for the last few miles on one of the few downhill slopes since climbing Nine Mile Hill out of Albuquerque on the long westward grind to the Continental Divide. We had driven through a summer rainsquall, and his backwash left my Impala’s windshield smeared with gunk.

  I parked in front of a squat adobe building sporting a modest green neon sign reading “Tia Maria’s Cafe—Home Cooking Like Your Grandma’s.” A large gas station with service bays to accommodate big rigs sat across a broad stretch of tarmac. What looked to be a small motel with no more than half a dozen rooms abutted the café on the right.

  While waiting for Alfano or his attorney to come up with the satellite positioning information for the Porsche, I had decided to follow the only decent lead I had. Four names had been scribbled on the back of that wrinkled and tattered state tourist map in Orlando’s laundry. The first three were gay bars and hangouts in Albuquerque. The fourth was simply “Chesty’s!!!” The three exclamation points lent that single word importance.

  There was no place more likely to capture the imagination of two young gay adventurers than Chesty Westey’s Truck Stop on the Continental Divide just off I-40 in western New Mexico. I had experienced the same titillating curiosity about the place in my salad days. Immediately upon hitting the legal age, I had headed due west with pounding heart and high expectations. Frankly, when I arrived, the place scared the living hell out of me. I had heard about eagle bars, and while Chesty’s wasn’t labeled as such, it was nonetheless an out-and-out bear place filled with bikers and truckers. Now, fourteen years later, I experienced the same trepidation at tackling the place, especially to ask a lot of awkward questions.

  I entered the café through a screen door that squeaked just like your grandma’s might have. The floor was plain brown tile. A hand-cranked cash register perched on the near end of a long Formica counter running the length of the left side of the room. Behind the counter was an opening for passing orders and receiving dishes from the kitchen. Half a dozen
tables occupied the center of the room. Six big and exceptionally sturdy booths lined the outer wall where windows allowed patrons a view of what was going on at the truck stop. Three rigs were presently being serviced, including the black Peterbilt I’d followed off the highway.

  I was the only patron at the moment, so I claimed one of the booths and scanned the typed menu, noting the homey dishes: home-cooked pies, home-baked cakes, fresh homemade bread. The heavy, yeasty aroma coming from the kitchen set my stomach to growling. I ordered a bowl of Texas-style chili and a glass of milk as an appetizer and took my chances with a southern trucker’s plate. As soon as the waitress—probably Tia Maria—took my order, managing to call me “honey” and “sugar” at least three times, she retreated behind the counter and yelled to someone on the other side of the wall.

  My attention turned to the outside where a thick man with no recognizable body definition beyond a head, arms, and legs ambled toward the café, looking like a walking six-six oil drum.

  “Tree Trunk!” the woman yelled when the trucker came through the door. “Come in outa the snow.”

  I blinked. This side of the divide probably hadn’t seen snow since last May. Oh, well, truckers and bikers and those who service them have their own language. And her name for the man was more apt than my mental description of him.

  “Auntie,” he roared back. “Been too long since I’ve had a decent meal.”

  “Don’t let your wife hear you say that.”

  They enjoyed a little joshing as he took a seat at a nearby table, ordered, and then spent a minute hand brushing a horseshoe moustache that started thick and blond on his upper lip and finished up thick and red-brown on his chin. The ends were parted by a deep dimple.

  My mission was temporarily forgotten when Maria delivered my appetizer. I was raised on New Mexico chili. “Red or Green?” is the state’s unofficial question, and green was my preference. But occasionally I like to dig into a good Texas dish. Tia Maria’s concoction contained meat ground so finely a toothless octogenarian could handle it without any trouble. A film of grease floated on top. The whole thing smelled so spicy I took a precautionary drink of cold sweet milk to coat my innards before diving in and working my way slowly through the bowl, enjoying the flavor, the aroma, the bite of every delicious spoonful.

  I returned from gastronomic nirvana as the waitress brought the trucker the biggest, rawest Kansas City steak I’d ever seen. Nothing else shared the platter except a heaping pile of mashed potatoes smothered in gravy and some green beans. Poor old Tree Trunk had to make do with that simple fare plus a loaf of dark rye bread and a tub of butter—probably home-churned.

  After Maria—at five six and one seventy-five, the best advertising for her own cooking—finished another short discourse with Tree Trunk, she brought a plate loaded with fried chicken, more of those mouth-watering potatoes, okra, whole kernel corn, and what I took to be spinach but turned out to be collard greens. A tub of salted butter and corn pone sticks completed the meal. When she departed, I slipped the pepper shaker off my table and hid it on the seat beside me.

  “Say, buddy, could I trouble you for some pepper?” I spoke in a low voice so as not to attract the attention of the waitress.

  “Why sure,” the man called Tree Trunk said.

  I thanked him as he handed over a small pepper mill. “I take it from your reception you’re a regular here.”

  “I measure my miles, so I pull in here with enough time to spend the night. The motel ain’t much, but the beds are reinforced, and that’s all I need—besides lots of Maria’s cooking, that is.”

  “Fudge the log book, do you?” I jokingly referred to the time and mileage log the Department of Transportation required of long-distance truckers. If the rules hadn’t changed, they were allowed a ten-hour run for every eight hours of rest.

  A frown told me he’d mistaken my intent. “Pure as the driven snow. Do my ten and go down for my eight. Hold to the posted speed limit. No uppers to keep me awake. No downers to make me sleep. I’m righteous.”

  “Relax, I’m not DOT. Just making conversation.”

  He cocked an eye at me. “That said, what I claimed is just the facts, man.”

  I chewed for a couple of minutes, finding it hard to keep my mind on business when the chicken was so good. Maria even made the collards passable, and I hate the things. “I hear there’s a bar out back.”

  “Yep. Big fucker across the arroyo.”

  “It’s a gay bar?” I tried to make it sound as casual as possible, but addressing that particular subject with a three-hundred-pound trucker raised the hair on the back of my neck.

  “Queer as they come,” he agreed. “I’m heading over soon’s I clean up. But it’s a bear place. Don’t know how you’d fit in.”

  I held up a hand. “Not looking for a companion, just curious. Who runs the show around here?”

  “Chesty Westerfield’s boy, Russell, runs this end since his dad passed on. A big hippo named Sweetie runs the bar.”

  “Friendly?”

  “Friendly as it takes. Mean as she wants.”

  “How about first-timers? She put up with them?”

  “Joint would eventually die if they wasn’t some of them from time to time. If you go over, just look for the biggest, blackest dude in the joint.”

  “Dude?”

  “Yeah, Sweetie’s a he even if he resents the fact.” Tree Trunk glanced out the window. “If you decide to go, you can take the footbridge over the arroyo or drive your car around the west end of the truck stop and take the vehicle bridge.”

  “Thanks.”

  We concentrated on filling our stomachs after that. He cleaned his plate first and went on his way after paying his bill and planting a big kiss on Maria’s cheek. I succumbed to temptation and ordered a slice of dutch apple pie but righteously passed on the dip of ice cream Maria offered.

  That done, I left the car where it was and walked across the footbridge spanning a broad, deep gully to a big, ramshackle adobe with a ten-foot neon sign on the roof modestly proclaiming it “The Continental Divide Bar.” It staggered the imagination to find a real leather and Levi joint out here in the hinterlands of New Spain, but here was Chesty Westey’s notorious sin palace—if you can call a half-acre mud building a palace. They said the Continental gets plenty of uniforms from the Air Force community in Albuquerque and Army boots from Ft. Huachuca over in Arizona, but it was predominately a trucker and biker joint.

  The south parking lot was full of animals, presidents, exotic metals, Swiss auto racers, and American industrialists: Cobras, Mustangs, Lincolns, Mercurys, Chevrolets, and Fords. Towering over them all were the big rigs like Tree Trunk’s long-nosed aardvark. The north lot was given over to two-wheeled chrome hogs, hog wagons, and choppers. There was no orange Porsche Boxster in either lot.

  The atmosphere hit me in the face like a pillow of wet feathers the moment I walked through the door. The air was heavy: smoke-heavy, fart-heavy, beer-heavy, sweat-heavy, with the musk of men on the make permeating everything. After buying a beer, I hauled it around on a tour of the place. The main bar was immense, meandering out of sight in two different directions, one leading to a big patio, the other to a smaller, quieter bar and thence to the back rooms.

  There wasn’t a stranger around, blind or sighted, who couldn’t find the right bathroom in the Continental. A big curved brass penis mounted on the door identified the men’s side, and an embossed plaque in the shape of labia marked the women’s. Apparently everyone used the phallus as a door handle; it was worn thin, making the engorged head appear outlandishly huge.

  The joint undulated like a den of writhing serpents. The clack of billiard balls and thunk of darts and an outclassed, inadequate, old-fashioned jukebox laid down the beat. The talking, laughing, drinking, cussing, spitting customers, and blousy waitresses, almost all of them with bolt-ons, as these people likely called boob jobs, provided a wonderful, discordant rhythm.

  Deciding it was time t
o make my pitch, I claimed a spot at a tiny table opposite a mountainous black man in bib overalls boasting the long, graying beard of an Old Testament patriarch. Tree Trunk had said Sweetie was his handle, but it should have been Sweaty. This guy would have perspired in an icehouse.

  “What’s new, Sweet?” I went for the personal touch and lost my fist in the grip of a gigantic coal-black paw.

  “This ain’t your kinda joint,” he said in a high-pitched voice as effeminate as any swish-queen I’ve ever encountered.

  “How do you know?”

  His big rheumy eyes gave me the once-over. “Honey, you got a waistline, that’s how I know. Look around at these bozos. Ain’t a one of them even remembers where theirs is at.” He paused and read me with shrewd eyes. “’Sides, I been around long enough to know these things.” He leaned forward, bringing the odor of sweat with him. “You might like to play, but these ain’t your playmates.”

  “You’re probably right. But I’m looking for two who are. Okay if I show you a couple of photos?”

  He leaned back, making his reinforced chair creak. “You could be fuzz, but the aura ain’t quite right. You believe in auras?”

  “Oh, yeah. Auras… energy… whatever you want to call them.”

  “Yours is yellow. Goes to green sometimes, but mostly yellow. I’d say that makes you an okay dude except I keep getting a flash of tin. You a cop?”

  “Used to be. I’m private now. And I’m not looking to jam up these two guys. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve got a right to live their own lives.”

  “Amen to that, brother. All right, show me the pictures.” The giant’s eyes lit up when I handed them over. “Oh, them sweethearts.”

  “You know them?”

  “Why? They in trouble?”