Night at the Fiestas: Stories

NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS

FRANCES WAS PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE whose father was not the bus driver. Instead, she told herself, she was a girl alone in the world, journeying to the city. With every gesture, she pictured herself: turning the page of her book, tucking a sweaty lock of hair behind her ear, lifting her chin to gaze out the bus window. Except Frances wasn’t alone, and her father, evidently thinking she’d come along today for his company, kept calling back to her with boisterous cheer over the exertions of the engine.

“Broke down here in ’42, Francy.” He indicated the endless yellow grass, summer-dry and dotted with cows and the occasional splintered shed, and Frances sighed and lowered her book politely to meet his eye in the rearview mirror. “Had a busload of fellows all on their way to training at Fort Bliss. Every day for three years I picked up two, three boys from each town and brung them south.” He chuckled at the memory. “You wouldn’t believe how many ideas twenty ranch boys have about a bus engine.”

Not counting Frances, eleven passengers had boarded early that morning in Raton, many of them also heading to Santa Fe for the Fiestas. Frances’s father had offered each and every one of them a jolly greeting. “Glorious day, isn’t it?” “Got my girl with me.” “Getting off in Santa Fe? So’s my Frances.” Each time a lady boarded — three did — he took her bag and followed her to her seat and stowed it in the net above while she removed her gloves and arranged her purse. Then he stood aside with his bulk pressed into the seats to let other passengers by. Frances had found herself looking away from his sad, obsequious displays of friendliness, embarrassed.

The day of the breakdown must have been a good one for her father; it must have been a thrill to share in the camaraderie with fellows his own age, part of a brotherhood, if only until the gas line or distributor or whatever it was got fixed. Frances pictured him twenty years younger, standing among the uniformed boys, grinning and eager and tongue-tied. Pity and affection welled in her.

Frances hadn’t been born then, but she was aware that the war years must have been hard for him, strangers looking him up and down, wondering why he wasn’t in Europe or the Pacific. Frances had felt the shame herself as a child when kids at school talked about their fathers’ service. They’d traveled to incredible places, those fathers — Japan and Singapore, Italy, England, France — and they had souvenirs in their houses to prove it: flags, medals, a Nazi helmet, a tin windup rabbit found in the pocket of a drowned Jap.

“My dad was a conscientious objector,” Frances had said at school when she was eleven. “We’re pacifists.” She’d shrugged, regretful, smug. “We just don’t believe in fighting.” But she’d had to stop saying that when it got back to her mother, who’d pinched her hard on the upper arm.

“Do you know what it would do to your father to hear you spreading those lies? He isn’t a coward. He has a condition.”

The condition in question was a heart murmur, and, as far as Frances knew, the only ill effect he’d ever suffered was fainting once on the football field in high school. Now, nearly an adult, Frances no longer judged her father for those war years, but it did strike her as darkly amusing that, not trusting his heart to hold out in the army, someone saw fit to put her father in charge of a busload of civilians careening down the highway at fifty miles an hour.

Now, an hour and a half into the trip, the passengers were scattered throughout the baking bus, dozing against the windows or reading newspapers; across the aisle, a stout woman was crocheting something in pink acrylic. Even with the windows lowered, the air blowing through was hot and dry, and Frances was worried about the state of her hair, which she’d tied up in rags last night. She lifted the limp curls off her sweaty neck and shifted in her seat and tried to concentrate on Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The frieze upholstery was scratchy through the cotton lawn of her new dress.

Frances was sixteen years old and twitchy with impatience. If Frances’s life was to be a novel — as Frances fully intended — then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.

She’d spend the weekend with her aunt and cousin in their little stucco house on Marcy Street. Tonight they’d watch the burning of Zozobra, the enormous gape-mouthed effigy of Old Man Gloom, and then walk back to the Plaza for music and dancing that would last all night. And Saturday there’d be the Hysterical Parade and night dances at the La Fonda and the Legion Hall with mariachis imported all the way from Mexico. “We’ll be out until morning,” her cousin Nancy had assured her on the telephone. “We might not even go home then.” Frances believed it. A widow dying to remarry, her aunt Lillian was fun-loving and young-dressing, lax and indulgent of her teenage daughter, which was exactly why it had been such a feat for Frances to convince her mother to let her go.

“Lillian’s got absolute feathers for brains,” her mother had said again last night of her sister-in-law. “If having your husband drop dead before your eyes doesn’t pull you up short, I don’t know what will. Man crazy, the two of them. That girl’s going to end up in trouble, and Lillian will be too busy batting her own eyelashes to notice.”

“Mother,” Frances had said with superhuman forbearance, which was the only way she could bring herself to speak to her mother now. “Nancy’s not going to end up in trouble.” But Frances didn’t actually believe this, which was why Nancy was so appealing to be around, even if she was a year younger and made Frances feel dull and wholesome, an actual country cousin.

Frances was also hoping to see some beatniks and artists, who, Nancy had told her, lived in such unimaginable filth it would make you sick, and they actually liked it, didn’t even try to better themselves. “Ugh,” said Nancy. “A painter rents the shed behind my friend Sally’s neighbor’s house, and he’s so poor he trades his paintings for dog food. Sally says he eats the dog food right alongside the dog.”

Frances had somehow missed these characters in previous visits to the state capital, but apparently they came out in droves for the Fiestas, high on their drugs and flouting conventions left and right. Maybe one of these artists would take her back to his dingy house with the mattress on the floor and ask to paint her. Frances considered herself, like Tess, a vessel of emotion untinctured by experience, and Frances very much wanted to be tinctured.

So in preparation, she’d spent her carefully hoarded babysitting money on a new pink lipstick at Rexler’s and, at Barton’s, this emerald-green dress, with its low, square neck and matching belt. Frances was sorry that she hadn’t been able to afford a discreet weekend valise, too, powder-blue leather stamped to resemble alligator skin, like she’d seen in an ad for face cream in one of her mother’s magazines. Instead, she’d had to pack her clothes in her orange sun-patterned swimming bag, embarrassing and childish and completely inappropriate for this weekend.

“Fancy-Francy, I ever tell you about the time a lady left a baby on the bus?”

Frances tamped down a surge of irritation, closed her book, and gave her father a tight, tolerant smile in the mirror. “You have.”

Of course he had. Twice a day for twenty years he’d driven the same dusty two hundred miles between Raton and Santa Fe, never even stepping off his bus to walk down the faded main streets of the towns he passed through. Every single day, the landscape changing in the same ways: deepening or rippling, shading greener here, flatter there, from high plain to chaparral to woodland plateau and back again, the vistas unbroken except for the occasional herd of antelope or deer or, more rarely, elk. Of course he’d told her about the baby.

“You’re kidding,” said the crocheting woman. “Blessed be.”

“Yep,” her father said with enthusiasm. “She gathered up all her packages and boxes, but left the baby.”

He told it again, how another passenger had discovered the baby fast asleep on the seat when they were only a few miles outside of Maxwell, how he’d slowed the bus, made an excruciating many-pointed turn on the empty blacktop highway, and drove back to the depot in town. They found the woman without much trouble; it was a small town, and the man behind the ticket counter pointed her out, sitting on a bench outside the station, surrounded by her luggage.

Frances could understand wanting to abandon a baby; the mystery was why the woman had only left it on a bus and not in the boondocks where no one would find it. Frances babysat, but just because there were things she needed: beautiful, transformative clothes, a typewriter, a powder-blue valise. Above all, Frances needed to get out of Raton for good. She wanted to go to college, to take her place among the fresh-faced young men and women at UNM, skirt swinging and books clutched to her chest, her face raised to the warm possibility of romance. This weekend was practice for the day when she would board this bus again and never return.

“My God,” said the woman. “She must have been out of her head with worry.”

“Claimed it was a mistake and practically tore that baby from my arms. But I’m not sure she convinced me, wasn’t crying or anything. Who’s to say she didn’t pull the same stunt on some other guy’s route?” Still, the story had a happy ending: “All that, and we arrived in Santa Fe only nine minutes behind schedule.”

It was an excellent story made stupid by his telling: for instance, when he’d told it the first time at dinner, it was the turn that had seemed to interest him most; he’d demonstrated on the tablecloth using his knife as the bus.

Frances looked at her father in the driver’s seat — his round, sloping shoulders, the stubble on the back of his neck. He held the big wheel with both hands as if it were a roasting pan. He used to be a frustrated man, a shouter and a spanker. But he’d mellowed as Frances got older. Now he sought her company with a sort of sodden sentimentality that left her at once touched and galled.

“Shame I can’t go with you,” her father called. “To the Fiestas. It would be nice to see Lillian, spend some time with you girls.”

Frances kept her eyes on her book, pretending not to have heard. The swell of power this gave her was like an electric charge.

“Would you look at that,” he tried again, sweeping his hand across the windshield. “You don’t get views like these from an office, Francy.”

“Daddy, I have to do some reading. For school.” She held her book up to the mirror and sighed dramatically. “I’ll just move back. You two enjoy your conversation.”

“Smart as a whip, my girl,” her father told the crocheting woman, but Frances could hear the hurt in his voice.

She stood, lifted down her bag, and as she did, her dress ripped at the armpit. From her new seat she examined the tear. “Goddamn it,” she muttered, digging in her swimming bag for her cardigan. Up front, her father had fallen silent, his shoulders hunched. He needed to get used to her absence, Frances reasoned, because soon she’d leave for college, and then what would he do? She’d be kind to him when she got off in Santa Fe. She’d tell him she loved him. Frances put on her cardigan, and then, hot, sat back and opened her book.

IN WAGON MOUND, three people boarded. A thin red-cheeked woman in a gray dotted sundress sat across the aisle from Frances, and a man swinging a lunch sack took the seat in front of her. He smiled from under a bristly caterpillar of a mustache. Frances, aware of his eyes on her, looked out the window at the road blurring below. She pictured herself: her slow blush, lashes lowered against her cheek.

“Whew. Hot, isn’t it?” The thin woman lifted off her straw hat, and her hair came with it, loosening from her chignon, then falling around her face in lank, damp strands. She pulled a pencil and a crossword from her purse and set to work.

All the while, Frances examined the man in her peripheral vision. He was sitting sideways, leaning against the window. He craned to see Frances over the backrest. Brown checked suit, agate bolo tie cinched tight under his collar. He was thirty, maybe. His hair was a little long, parted down the middle.

“Hey.” He stretched a narrow hand toward her, flicked her book. “Pretty girls should smile.”

People were always telling Frances to smile; apparently her face in its natural state was pinched and sulky. “Well, you aren’t beautiful,” her mother had said thoughtfully this summer. “But you’re perfectly fine when you smile.” Frances hated the implication that she ought to appear good-natured for someone else’s benefit. Who did this man — some ranch hand in his absurd city best — think he was? Still, he had called her pretty, and that was something. She raised an eyebrow in a way she hoped looked disdainful and queenly. “If I felt like smiling,” she said, “I would.”

He laughed, not unkindly. The man’s breath was damp and garlicky from, Frances imagined, some massive ranch breakfast eaten in a hot kitchen. Greasy yellow eggs, beans, fat sausages splitting their burned skins. The thought was nauseating, and Frances turned her head.

“You don’t make yourself sick, reading like that?”

Frances shook her head. She had absolutely no desire to talk to this man. She would not talk to this man. But her silence hung between them, unmistakable and rude. “No,” she said finally. “I never get carsick.”

“Lucky. I was in the Navy, and I never did get used to the seasickness.”

“Well,” said Frances, “it can’t help, sitting backward like that.” Rude, her mother would call her; Frances preferred spirited.

“What are you reading?”

What could Thomas Hardy possibly mean to him? Frances displayed the cover, feeling superior.

“So you’re a smarty-pants,” said the man. “Huh.”

Frances had begun Tess of the D’Urbervilles that summer with trepidation, and she was proud of herself for making it as far as she had. Even more than the story, Frances enjoyed the image of herself reading this fat book with its forbidding, foreign-sounding title. It was a prop, exactly the book a girl with a powder-blue valise would be reading. And apparently, as a prop it was working.

The fellow lit a cigarette, exhaled, still watching her. “I’m not much for reading. Myself, I’m a painter.”

Frances brightened and set the book in her lap. “Really? What do you paint? Figures?” She blushed.

“Nudes, you mean? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?”

Frances’s blush deepened. She didn’t deny it.

He laughed. “I’d say I’m more of an action painter.” He scratched his mustache with a finger, eyes on her, then took another drag.

Did that mean what she thought it meant? Was Frances being propositioned? He was thinking of her that way, wasn’t he? Certainly he wasn’t talking to the woman across the aisle. And why was that? Because the woman across the aisle was plain and had an entirely untended mustache. Frances ran her finger over her own upper lip, plucked last night in preparation for Santa Fe.

And now Frances wasn’t just a girl going into the world, but a girl whose virtue was being tested. That it might not withstand the test was a thrilling prospect. Frances suddenly felt deeply certain that something momentous would happen this weekend. Not with this fellow, though he really wasn’t bad-looking, despite his breath, and it was possible that the breath was just a result of his devil-may-care artistic lifestyle. Too many reefers, maybe.

Men in Raton utterly overlooked Frances. Only two boys had ever asked her on dates, both pitiful specimens still awaiting their growth spurts. And now what Frances had always suspected was true: She did have sex appeal. Under her bodice the life throbbed quick and warm.

Frances couldn’t wait to tell Nancy. Nancy was involved in endless drama with bevies of boys, while Frances, with her modest clothes and overprotective mother, had to play the supporting role to her younger cousin, probing for details, shaking her head in scandalized admiration, offering advice on matters she had absolutely no personal experience with. At least Frances lived in Raton; Nancy didn’t know how little she knew.

“Are you going to the Fiestas?” She smiled in a way she hoped was coy. “You must be, dressed like that.” Handsome, she probably should have said, but it really was a terrible suit.

“You’ll be there?” His green eyes — lovely eyes, now that she was looking — were bright and amused. Was he laughing at her? “Are you asking me out? Maybe you’d like to get a drink with me.”

Frances straightened her sweater; she wanted to remove it, show off her arms, but was aware of the hole in her dress. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Who knew she had it in her, this sauciness!

“You should be careful.” The painter twisted to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray, and Frances noted that his nails were clean. She would have thought he’d have paint around his cuticles. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” Frances retorted.

The painter shook his head, bemused, and faced front. Frances kept waiting for him to turn back — he’d spoken to her first, after all — and once she nearly said something, but he bundled his jacket for a pillow and fell asleep against the window.

For the rest of the ride Frances went over the interaction, and she didn’t forget her pique until they entered Santa Fe. As they approached downtown, the traffic thickened and tangled; at every street, it seemed, they stopped for crowds of happy pedestrians to cross. The passengers watched from the windows, and laughter and shouts rose above the rumble of the vehicles. Frances’s spirits soared.

When they pulled up in front of the bus depot on Water Street, the painter stood before they’d even stopped and reached for his canvas bag. Then he leaned over her and squinted out Frances’s window, as if scanning the crowded sidewalk for the person who’d come to pick him up. Frances braced herself for the smell of his breath, and then it came. “Little whore,” he said in her ear, so softly she wondered if she’d imagined it, and before she’d even lifted her gaze to him, he was moving quickly down the aisle, stepping off the bus.

Frances flushed and for what felt like a long time couldn’t move. Had anyone heard? But they were all disembarking now, straightening hats and shirt collars. Up at the front of the bus, her father was shaking hands and tipping his hat, helping the woman with the crochet down the steps.

Frances took a deep breath to compose herself. That painter was nothing, no one. He probably wasn’t even a painter. She could see him on the sidewalk. He’d bought a paper from the newsstand by the depot and was paging through it. Go away, go away, go away, thought Frances. She would not budge from this bus until he’d disappeared down the street.

Heart pounding, she arranged her purse and her swimming bag on her shoulders, straightened her cardigan.

“Enjoy the Fiestas,” said the thin woman, setting her hat back on her head.

It was then that Frances noticed he’d left his lunch sack on his seat. Suddenly she was filled with rage at this man who’d had the gall to speak to her in the first place, to tell her to smile and then to insult her when she did. She would step off the bus, call to him, smiling and sunny—“Sir, your lunch!”—wave the paper sack over her head, make as if to hand it to him. And then, when he reached for it — shamed by her kindness — Frances would open her hand, drop it in the street, and grind his sandwich under her heel.

She leaned over the seat, snatched the sack. She was so angry she was trembling.

When Frances looked inside, there was no sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, no apple or jelly jar of milk, no food at all. Inside the bag was a fat stack of bills.

She walked stiffly down the aisle and submitted to her father’s kiss goodbye. She flushed, hot and ashamed, as if her father somehow knew what she’d done, knew what the painter had called her.

“Be safe, Francy. Be good.” He pulled her in for an extra hug, and Frances, with the paper sack stuffed in her purse, responded, “Of course.”

Then Frances was down the bus steps and into the arms of Nancy and Aunt Lillian, who shrieked and clung and jabbered at her. They each took an arm and waved gaily with their free hands as her father’s bus pulled into the Water Street traffic, then dragged her along the crowded sidewalk between them. “The Plaza’s already full!” cried Nancy. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“She’s been beside herself all day,” said Aunt Lillian. Behind her, the painter was still reading the paper. Every once in a while he scanned the street.

“Wait,” said Frances, stopping. “I’d like to drop my things at your house.”

“We can’t go home!” said Nancy. “Everything’s already started. Plus, I’m starving. The Elks Club is selling hot dogs and Frito pies!”

Frances felt she was walking strangely. Her purse was barely heavier, but it had tipped her off-balance and her gait was self-conscious and labored. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

The bus depot restroom was vile, the floor wet around the toilet and dirty with footprints. Ordinarily, Frances would have hovered over a toilet like this, and even then only in an emergency. Today, though, she sat right down.

One hundred and forty dollars. An enormous amount of money, all in ones and fives and tens. Nearly what her father was paid every two weeks, more than she could hope to make in a year of babysitting. Enough to fund her escape.

Strange that he should keep it in a paper sack. Perhaps he’d just sold a painting or had intended to buy something, something illicit that required a discreet handoff. Drugs, stolen goods. She wondered if the painter was still outside, waiting to twist her arm and throw her onto the sidewalk and wrench her purse away.

Someone knocked on the bathroom door, and Frances sat still. The person knocked again. If she were the kind of girl to cry, she might now. But why? She’d had a tremendous stroke of luck. She was glad she had the money, glad she’d taken it. She needed it. He owed it to her, calling her what he had.

Frances smoothed the bills and slipped them into her wallet. But the stack was too fat and the wallet wouldn’t close. Also, she’d be a draw for criminals with that kind of cash spilling out. So she removed all but twenty dollars, folded the rest of the money back into the sack and stuffed it into the bottom of her swimming bag.

The thought — the foolish, embarrassing thought — crossed her mind that maybe the man was an angel, but that was idiotic, something her mother would say. Frances was now pretty certain the man wasn’t even a painter. His nails were one clue. And if he were a painter, what would he be doing in Wagon Mound? No one lived in Wagon Mound. And no one kept money in paper bags. More likely the man was a grifter who’d come to Santa Fe to spend his ill-gotten gains and cheat others. Unless he really was just a hardworking ranch hand and Frances was now holding his entire life’s savings. But no: if there’s one thing she knew, it was that even before he’d opened his mouth, there’d been something sleazy about the man, something underhanded and insinuating.

When Frances emerged from the depot into the sunlight, the painter was gone. She smiled at Nancy and Aunt Lillian, slung her purse over one shoulder, swimming bag over the other. “I’m starving,” she said.

THE PLAZA WAS SWARMED with people and packed with booths, everything buzzing and festive. Banners rippled in the hot breeze, and the grass was sun-dappled through the tall cottonwoods. The costumes! There, drinking a Coke on the bleachers was the Fiesta Queen in her frothy white lace, her mantilla and high comb, surrounded by her court. And there, Don Diego de Vargas with his crested helmet and cape. Conquistadors and Mexicans and bandidos, Indians, nuns, cowboys. Fringed vests and enormous sombreros, Spanish shawls and elaborate headdresses. Several people wore lush Navajo velvet, big blouses for the men, long skirts for the women. Frances most admired the fiesta dresses, though, silver-trimmed gauzy cotton the color of ice cream: pink, turquoise, green, yellow. She would buy one herself, she decided.

A large white-haired man came up behind Aunt Lillian and lifted her off her feet. “George!” she cried, and he kissed her on the mouth. When he set her down, Aunt Lillian patted her updo, and Frances thought of her mother’s verdict: featherbrained.

Aunt Lillian’s friend George was a cowboy, complete with leather chaps and lasso. “In real life I’m a banker.” He pulled his card from his pocket and gave it to Frances. Then, back in character, he roped Nancy and pulled her to him. “Git along little dogie.”

“Get off!” Nancy yelled. She wriggled free of the rope and threw it back at him, then yanked Frances away and marched her across the crowded grass. Behind them Aunt Lillian laughed.

“I hate him,” Nancy said. “He’s always ogling me.”

Well, of course he was, Frances thought. Everyone was always ogling Nancy, and Nancy intended that they should. Look at her today, for instance. Her soft light hair, low-cut dress, silver rickrack glinting in the sun, the long strand of turquoise beads caught in her cleavage. So like Nancy to make herself look that way and then complain when people noticed. Frances squared her shoulders and touched her own hair; her curls had fallen completely. So what? If she cared about those things, she’d get her hair done professionally at the beauty shop. She could afford it.

As they walked the periphery of the Plaza, Frances looked in every window for a valise. No luck. The money stuffed in her bag seemed such an obvious presence, banging at her side. It marked her, and Frances couldn’t believe people weren’t staring. It would almost be a relief to spend it, to transform it into clothes her size, items that reflected who she was. But it wasn’t to be spent, not yet, anyway. She pictured herself at college, opening a new notebook in the hum of a full lecture hall.

“Banker,” spat Nancy. “Ha. Works in a bank, more like. He’s a creep. I really don’t know what she sees in him.”

Frances shrugged. “Well, she’s always been a little man crazy.”

She paused to look in the plate-glass window of the Trading Post. Several kids about eleven or twelve also clustered on the sidewalk, peering in. There, surrounded by tooled-leather saddles and woven blankets, a Navajo girl in traditional velvet skirts stood stock-still, an enormous silver belt in her frozen outstretched hands.

“She is real,” insisted a boy. “She blinked. There!”

The Navajo girl was remarkably good, stone-faced and flat-eyed.

The kids started banging the glass. “There! She did it again!” A few made faces and wagged their tongues.

“She’s probably going to marry him,” said Nancy bleakly. “I’ll probably have to live in the same damn house with him.”

At the Elks’ booth, they ordered cold Cokes and Frito pies. Frances rifled through the bills in her wallet, but Nancy wasn’t even paying attention.

“My treat,” said Frances.

Nancy shrugged. “I won’t say no.”

They ate sitting on the back of a park bench, feet on the seat. It felt good to put down her swimming bag. Her dress was dark with sweat where the strap had pressed against her.

“God, it’s hot,” said Frances. She couldn’t stand it a minute longer. She took off her cardigan and clamped her armpit shut.

“I know.” Nancy licked chile from the heel of her hand. “What’re you doing wearing a sweater, anyway?”

“I met someone on the bus,” Frances said. “A painter. And not like your friend Sally’s painter with the dog food. This guy is famous. He has shows in Paris and London, all over.”

“So?” said Nancy, still sulking.

“So? So he’s rich.” Frances couldn’t have been more indignant if she’d been telling the truth. “And he asked me to dine with him tonight.”

“To dine? What is he, an aristocrat?” But Nancy was looking Frances up and down, impressed.

“Of course I told him I couldn’t. He must be nearly thirty. Still, it’s never fun disappointing someone like that.”

“Nancy!” somebody called, and Nancy brightened. Suddenly they were flanked by boys. They introduced themselves politely to Frances, and one even asked what Raton was like, but soon they turned back to her cousin. They jostled each other and joked about people Frances didn’t know, and Nancy sat glowing in their midst.

For a while Frances made a point of smiling and nodding along, but that got old, and no one was looking at her anyway. She felt unbearably dull. Two of the boys started slapping at each other, and one boy put the other in a headlock, all for the benefit of Nancy. What was it about boys? Frances thought angrily. Couldn’t they keep still for a minute?

“So? Isn’t Mike a doll?” Nancy asked when they’d gone.

Frances put her hand on her cousin’s arm. “Just be careful, okay? I’d hate to see you getting into trouble.”

Nancy snorted. “You should talk, with your middle-aged painter. Anyway, you have a hole in your armpit.”

“BURN HIM! BURN HIM! BURN HIM!” The crowd was chanting, and Frances chanted along, but self-consciously. Her own voice seemed flattened, droning in her ear.

It was night at Fort Marcy Park, and the baseball field was crowded with cars and trucks, spread blankets, abandoned picnics. Zozobra, the looming white marionette, bellowed as the flames climbed his gown. His face, with its scowling eyes and gaping mouth, flickered orange against the black sky; when he swayed, sparks rained down over the crowd. Above, fireworks whistled and exploded.

Nancy had Frances by the wrist and was dragging her through the press of people at the barricade. Here the bonfire’s heat was a solid, smothering presence, pulsing under her skin like a sunburn. The sweaty seams of her dress were tight and chafing. Frances held tight to her purse and her swimming bag.

“They said they’d be here!” called Nancy. “Would you hurry?” She was looking for her friends, the boys from the Plaza among them, but Frances couldn’t imagine how they’d ever find anyone in this mass of people. The air was weighted with the smell of gunpowder and sweat and toxic, chemical smoke.

Zozobra bawled, arms flailing uselessly, body rooted in the flames. The people’s excitement seemed sadistic, medieval. Frances had a sudden vision of the painter stepping from the flames like Satan to collect his due, and the thought made her sweat still more.

“Can’t we just watch from back there?” asked Frances, but Nancy didn’t hear her over Zozobra’s moans.

When the flames reached Zozobra’s face, the crowd cheered. His head was stuffed with paper, records of divorce proceedings and legal wrangling and failed exams and paid-off mortgage documents. And now all those troubles were being burned away. It seemed these people really felt released, but Frances kept glancing all about, her shoulders aching under the strap of her bag. Zozobra thrashed and wailed in anguish, shaking off flaming paper that drifted around him.

In no time at all, Zozobra collapsed with a cascade of sparks, gloom defeated once again, and the cheer of “Viva la Fiesta!” rose from the crowd. You could already hear the music from the Plaza, rousing and joyful. Everyone streamed through the streets to join it.

The crowd in the Plaza was even louder and denser than in the park, people spinning and writhing to the mariachi band playing from the lit bandstand. The dark crush was thrilling and terrifying, unlike anything Frances had ever experienced. Nancy whirled, laughing, sipped from an open bottle of beer handed to her. She handed it to Frances, and no sooner had Frances taken a sip than another bottle was passed to her.

They hadn’t found Nancy’s friends, but it hardly mattered; everyone was friends on the Plaza. The gaiety swirled about them, but though Frances tried, she simply couldn’t find her way into it. She danced and laughed, but her rhythm was off, her voice false and harsh. She gulped the beer until she felt the disembodied sensation of drunkenness, but the feeling only made her less a part of the crowd, untouchable and remote.

She tried to spin a story about one of the boys from earlier — the one in the leather vest, say — who couldn’t get her out of his mind, who’d been looking for her all night, waiting to lift her chin, but the scenario was hollow and unsatisfying.

Maybe if Frances had a costume she’d be feeling it all more. She wished she had a Spanish shawl, black embroidered with red and gold chrysanthemums. She wished she could buy something — anything — now. What a joke, to have all this money in the middle of Santa Fe and nowhere to spend it. Mostly, Frances wanted to put her bag down. But it was still strapped to her, cumbersome, banging into everyone every time she moved.

Next to her a fight broke out, two sweaty men lunging at each other, their teeth bared, their rage clumsy and grunting. Frances gaped, but Nancy just rolled her eyes and pushed her deeper into the crowd.

By one in the morning, the bands had changed. Drunk men commanded Frances to dance! Dance! “Why so gloomy?” one asked and flicked her nose.

Nancy’s dress had slipped off her shoulder, exposing a dingy bra strap. She weaved among the men, pinching one on the bottom. He retaliated by squeezing her breast. Another reached for Frances’s breast, but she batted his hand away.

“S’okay,” he said. “Not much there anyway.”

Those men, their hands were everywhere, and Nancy couldn’t stop laughing. Laughing with abandon, Frances thought. She was so envious it hurt.

Someone grabbed her upper arm and spun her around. “If it isn’t Smarty-Pants.”

The painter. Frances gasped. But he didn’t strike her and he didn’t throw her to the ground to be crushed. He was dancing, feet stomping, fingers snapping. “Enjoying yourself, I see.”

He was drunk, unfocused in the eyes, slack around the mouth. His shirt was unbuttoned, his bolo tie gone. At his sweat-glazed temples, his hair was curling. Frances’s hand tightened on the strap of her bag.

“And you?” she shouted over the noise. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“More now.” He swigged from his bottle, held it aloft. “To the kindness of strangers.”

Could he know? He couldn’t possibly. All those people on and off a bus; any number of people could have taken the sack. It might have remained on the bus, to be discovered by someone in Las Vegas or Watrous or Springer. Her father might have picked it up during a trash sweep, and, knowing him, thrown it away without looking inside. The fact was that Frances would have overlooked the sack if she hadn’t been so angry. Little whore. But angry wasn’t quite the word. She was shocked, yes. Hurt. Embarrassed.

And also — strangely — released. She stood a little straighter and swung her bag by the strap, and for the first time in hours her smile didn’t feel forced. All around her people were fighting and kissing and dancing wildly. The music soared and slipped under her skin. Her feet found the beat.

Perhaps the painter had left the money for Frances intentionally. Perhaps he’d known she’d see the bag; it was a test, and by taking the money, she was admitting she was what he’d called her. In taking it she’d sullied herself, and he knew it and was laughing at her.

If that was the case, if he’d spent the whole night looking for her, this was a game she could play. She took his sweaty hand and danced toward him, swaying her hips, her purse and bag knocking against her.

“Here,” he said, lifting the strap of her swimming bag. “Take a load off. Makes dancing more fun.”

“No,” said Frances, jerking back, ready to claw and scream and bite if need be. Then she smiled. “I’m fine, thank you.” He slid his arm around her waist, and Frances felt a glorious sensation of free fall.

Nancy appeared at her elbow. “Who’s your friend, France?” She stuck her hand out, mock formal. “Nancy. Frances’s cousin.” Nancy stumbled over the s’s and tried again more deliberately. “Frances’s.” She was drunker than Frances had thought.

The painter released Frances to shake her cousin’s hand. “Charmed,” he said and brought it to his lips.

“So you’re the painter. Frances said you were incredible.”

He grinned at Frances, a wide, knowing grin. “I am incredible. Not to be believed.”

Nancy laughed, and Frances did her best to mirror her cousin, to look like a high school girl cheerfully celebrating 268 years since de Vargas’s retaking of Santa Fe. Nancy lost her balance and started to stumble. The painter caught her and didn’t take his hand off her elbow after she’d steadied. He winked at Frances, and just like that the music drained out of her.

Under the west portico, some kind of commotion. A man on horseback pumped his arms, then nudged the horse forward and into the Plaza Bar, ducking as he passed through the door. Catcalls, cheers, and a moment later, man and horse backed out; whooping, calling patrons spilled after him.

The band struck up “La Cucaracha” for the third time that night, and the crowd sang along, mumbling and braying through the lyrics.

The painter grabbed Frances’s wrist. “I think you owe me a drink. You and your cousin both.”

“No, thank you. We can’t.” Frances detached herself and took her cousin’s hand, intending to draw her into the crowd and away from the painter, but Nancy shook her off.

“She doesn’t talk to boys,” said Nancy, laughing. “They terrify her.”

“Not me,” said the painter. “I don’t terrify you, do I? This afternoon I didn’t terrify you a bit.” He turned to Nancy, whose elbow he was still holding. “She’s not really so hopeless. We had a terrific conversation all the way from Wagon Mound. I told Frances all about my painting.”

“Tell me,” said Nancy, canting her head in the way she thought was sexy and probably was. “What do you paint?”

He regarded her, thumbing his mustache. “All kinds of things. Portraits, for one — especially of beautiful women.” He smiled. “I get paid a lot of money for my portraits. Isn’t that right, Frances?” His smile vanished.

“We need to go, Nancy,” she said, but her cousin ignored her.

“And you have shows in Paris and London?”

The painter laughed, returning his attention to Nancy. “Oh, yes. I’m always on the lookout for models.”

“I bet you are,” said Nancy, laughing. “I bet you look high and low for pretty girls. But I’m listening.”

It would have been so easy now to say, “I found something of yours,” to hand over the lunch bag and slip into the crowds with Nancy, but Frances said nothing. Really, there was no question of giving back the money. It was already a part of her, or not of her, but of the Frances she was becoming. Already the money had transformed into Frances’s future: her next year and her year after that, and all the years that would take her away from the tongue-tied, stiff-legged person she was now.

When the painter leaned in to say something to Nancy, Frances broke away and pushed through the crowd toward the bus depot. She weaved around people, forcing her way through their laughs and protests. At the edge of the Plaza she turned, expecting to see the painter at her heels, but the crowd was oblivious, caught in its own net of drunkenness.

She ran, her heels catching on the uneven sidewalk, dodging a group of men with painted faces and massive feathered headdresses. They called to her with war whoops, but she didn’t stop until she reached the depot.

There Frances waited, but her father’s bus didn’t come. Of course not; he was fast asleep now, at home in Raton. He wouldn’t even wake up for another four hours, and it wouldn’t be until noon tomorrow — today — that he’d pull in at the depot. Still, a part of her thought he’d somehow know she was waiting for him, or that fate would intervene with a breakdown or a baby left behind, anything to disrupt his route and send him back. She thought of her father’s jabber on the bus and her irritation, then remembered that she hadn’t told him she loved him. Her eyes welled.

She could hear the music from the Plaza. That pounding, tireless mariachi cheer! A group of revelers passed noisily on the sidewalk, and Frances braced herself to fight them off if need be. No one looked her way.

For the first time it felt like September; the air had that chill. Frances tightened her cardigan and rifled through her swimming bag again. But there was nothing warm there, nothing she needed, just some clean underwear, her short summer nightgown, another flimsy sundress. Nothing else except the money. She began to count it again. It was all there, minus two Frito pies. She shoved it back into the paper bag, feeling sick.

Frances opened her book, but it was too dark. She could barely see the words, couldn’t have followed the story anyway. Frances would not think about Nancy and the painter. She would not think of what he was doing to her cousin — her younger cousin, a child she ought to be watching out for. She wouldn’t think of them on the mattress in his dingy one-room shed, Nancy stretched out lush and pink, waiting to be painted. As he moved toward her, the painter would tell Nancy how beautiful she was, even though he didn’t have to, not now that he had paid for her. Poor Nancy would close her eyes and listen. Frances could almost smell his breath as he leaned in. Nancy, who didn’t understand how the world worked, who didn’t understand that people could be cruel, would believe everything he said.

As if conjured, the painter appeared at the top of Water Street, and Frances’s heart stilled. He was walking slowly toward her, head bent as if absorbed in thought. He seemed to have lost his jacket now, too. A beer bottle swung between his fingers.

Even if he lifted his head, from this distance he might miss Frances sitting on her bench in the shadows, his paper bag in her lap. He wouldn’t see her until he passed directly in front of her. She wondered if the painter, too, had been drawn to the bus station by the promise of return, if he, too, was counting the hours until he could head back north, though he’d be leaving without his bolo tie, without his jacket, without his money. He rubbed his arms, seeming to feel the cold.

The street was empty now but for the two of them, the painter at the top of the block, Frances waiting like his bride. As he approached, she clung to the sack, her heart sloshing in her chest. If he looked up, he’d see her. Frances imagined the scene: the dark windows of the depot, the framed schedules, and a young girl, defenseless on her bench. Except that she wasn’t defenseless; she was solid and powerful and rich. Frances held still, her grip cold on the bag. As he neared, his progress intolerably slow, the hairs on her bare legs lifted. Surely he saw her. Twenty feet, ten. Now if she reached out from the shadows she could almost touch him, and then, like a breath, he was beyond her.

Frances rose, the sack still in her hand. She stepped from the shadows into the center of the sidewalk, under the yellow streetlight. There she stood, bereft and disbelieving, watching the painter’s unsteady progress away from her. Past the newsstand, the stationer’s, the pharmacy, and then he turned the corner and was gone. On the Plaza, the music suddenly stopped, and in the pause between the music and the cheers, the endless night settled across her shoulders.