Santa Fe Noir

The Sandbox Story by Candace Walsh

Eldorado

I work at home, but my office has its own entrance, even its own can. When I bought the place, the office was kitted out like an artist’s studio — easel, palette, the works. I saw a half-finished painting of an adobe wall below one of those iridescent salmon-streaked sunsets, the kind that makes tourists cream their panties. Go ahead, finish the picture. How many people get in car crashes while snapping sunset pictures, I don’t want to know.

I tossed that crap in the trash right after they handed me the keys. I know, I could have left it with the local school. Shoot me.

I had an hour to read the paper before my first client, Sam. I was soon shaking my head about a Good Samaritan — on his way to get married — who got killed helping some jackass without AAA change a tire on I-25.

How often do you accidentally find that you’ve veered onto the shoulder of the interstate when you’re driving somewhere? Never, right? So you’re gonna wait until there’s an El Camino stacked with ratty furniture and boxes, some guy sweating in the sun as he jacks it up, and that’s when you swerve to the right?

My office doorbell went off with the staccato of a vintage telephone. It needs replacing. I did get rid of the cast-iron green-chile door knocker that felt like palming a choad. Why is Sam so early?

I opened the door to a stranger. Cropped hair, windblown, dark. Tanned skin with constellations of dots across her nose and cheeks. A red mouth.

“You’re not Sam,” I said.

“No, I’m Delphine,” the woman said. “Delphine Hathaway.”

Hathaway: you see that name around here. Above the brokerage, the wine shop, and on the nicer mailboxes, on the most tucked-away cul-de-sacs. I’ve only been here a few years, but long enough to know the taxonomy.

The first time I visited Eldorado, I drove out to a dinner party at night. My hosts didn’t warn me that community covenants forbade (among many other things) streetlights, to protect night sky viewing, and that the street signs are affixed to their poles above headlight level. Although I never did find my friends’ house, I found Eldorado.

As I finally pulled over at the end of some dirt road, my headlights pierced the night, pressing their beams against a muscular darkness that pushed back harder. I walked out a few feet before sitting down in sandy dirt. Stars pulsed with an eerie tempo: dots and clusters, arcs and whorls.

When I returned in the daytime, I saw that these sand-colored houses sit on several acres each, oriented toward the sun and away from each other. Piñon trees, gold chamisa, and swarms of cholla cactus dot the land. Prickly pears mound and bristle below their fuchsia blooms. Wild grasses grow every which way: blue grama, sage, galleta. Mountain ranges hug the town; some round like bellies and breasts, others crepuscular, jagged.

The Hathaways bought one of the first houses here in 1972, on what used to be the old Simpson Ranch. They had an Irish amount of children, and all of them went back east to college, got married, and bought houses so tucked away here you could spend years without going down one of the long, groomed dirt roads from which their long, groomed gravel driveways branched. Except Delphine.

I have an ear for stupid gossip like that, overheard at the grocery store when matriarch Bonnie Hathaway was there selling Girl Scout cookies with her glossy, gap-toothed granddaughters.

“And how is Delphine?” asked some woman in ill-advised white capris.

“Delphine is Delphine,” Bonnie sighed with stately resignation. “We got a postcard from Ibiza last month. She’s been teaching flamenco dance on a cruise ship.”

“She was always... different,” White Capris tittered.

Different.

“Are you going to ask me in?” Delphine asked, stepping forward in a fawn-leather Cuban-heeled shoe.

“I don’t know you,” I said, as I opened the screen door.

“Don’t you know who I am?” she vamped with a throaty chuckle. “The black sheep of the Hathaway clan.” She headed toward the black leather Eames lounge chair, trailing tuberose.

“Nope,” I said. “Mine.” I pointed toward the sofa. “So when you’re on the cruise ship,” I asked, “do you always drop by the shrink’s without calling first?”

“The cruise ship,” she said. “Is that what Mother’s telling people these days?”

“What’s the truth?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “For that, I’ll have to pay you a pretty penny.” She smiled with a squint. “I will lose my mind staying here. I already know that. But I can delay it with a therapist. One I can walk to. Who doesn’t know my family. Which narrows it down to you.”

“You don’t drive?”

“I’d like to see you three times a week,” she said. “I’ll pay cash. Tomorrow at eleven works for me.”

I looked at my book, furrowing my brow as if I were trying to spot an empty slot in a sea of clients. But she was halfway out the door. A moment later, a car rumbled out of my driveway. I walked outside and watched the low, sun-sucking, gray-primed Trans Am drive too fast toward Impulveda Road, dust plume behind it like a squirrel tail. A family of quails skittered across the dirt road in their wake. Someone else was behind the wheel.

I had enough time before Sam’s scheduled arrival to indulge in two guilty pleasures: a breakfast beer and NabeWatch Eldorado, the local message board where people posted:

“I had another platypus dream,” Sam said. He had so many platypus dreams that I’d gone to the trouble of looking up platypus animal medicine. I also had no therapy chemistry with Sam — really, I should have referred him to someone else, but I needed the money — so drew from the animal medicine suggestions when I came up blank.

“Tell me about it.”

“I was with my ex-wife. We were making love.” He stiffened. “Why did you cringe?”

Damn it.

“You thought I cringed,” I said impassively. “Let’s stay with your dream.”

“So I was making love to her, but instead of putting my penis inside her vagina” — oh dear God, neutral neutral neutral — “I consummated the act by licking her clavicle.”

Platypus females nurse their babies from mammary patches on their skin; they don’t have teats. They also pee, poop, lay eggs, and have reproductive sex with the same hole, the cloaca. As opposed to recreational platypus sex? I stifled a smirk.

“But I couldn’t make her come, and my mouth began to ache. I went to get a glass of water and when I came back, she had turned into a platypus.”

“How did you know she hadn’t been replaced with a platypus?”

“It had her distinctive birthmark,” he said, “near its... cloaca.”

If the platypus is your totem...

“Sam, in the next week, I’d like you to redirect yourself, when you find yourself ruminating, to the present moment. Come back with a few things you’ve noticed within this mindfulness practice that make you uncomfortable.”

After Sam left, I headed to the hardware store to buy a new doorbell. I noticed the gray Trans Am parked beyond the blacktop in packed dirt. My pulse quickened as I wondered if I’d bump into Delphine, and whether she’d want to say hello or pretend she didn’t know me, something I tell clients I’m fine with. It still feels kind of shitty.

The store managed to recreate the dinge and chockablock of a Norman Rockwell — level hole-in-the-wall, but not picturesquely. Sometimes it took a few minutes to get help, because of the lip-smacking pleasure the two bearded old codgers behind the counter reveled in while jawing with each other. It was as if they were recording a podcast. One memorable topic: Eldorado’s status as an enduring Black Death incubator.

“One thing people don’t realize about the guy who died from the bubonic plague here is that he and his wife kept a pack rat as a pet. The official story is that they left their bathrobes out overnight by the hot tub, and that animals infected their robes. But I know friends of theirs who said that they adopted this pack rat, slept with it, dressed it up in costumes, crazy shit like that.”

Pack rats have a habit of arranging dried dog poop logs and other detritus into pretty designs. I wondered if the pack rat decorated the inside of the victim’s house this way.

Today a new guy approached me right away. He reminded me of my brother. Shaved head, pointed beard. His sinewy arms, exposed to the shoulder, jumped with crude tattoos.

“Hi, I’m Todd,” he said, grinning. A couple of gray teeth, a couple of metal ones. After I got braces, my brother appreciated how much more it hurt when he punched me in the mouth. I ran my tongue against the crosshatched inside of my lower lip.

Toothless, the platypus uses gravel to masticate its food.

I told him I was looking for a new doorbell.

“Great! You’ve got your battery-operated, your hardwired, and these Internet gizmos. Or you could go the gong route.” He held up a metal disk suspended from string, and struck it with a little mallet, loosing a deep, undulating timbre. “That’s what she said,” he called out, threw his head back, and laughed.

Delphine took off her trench coat and tossed it beside her on the couch, sat down. Her cream-and-black spectator pumps caught my attention like a toss of dominoes, and I raised my eyes to hers, conscious not to rain glances on her body. Still, I noticed: black wool slacks, pellucid silk blouse.

“Can I vape in here?” she asked.

“It’s better if you don’t,” I said. “It can be a barrier to delving into your feelings.”

“You think?” She kept it in her hand, rolled it across her palm. “How ever will I satisfy my oral fixation?”

I took a deep, grounding breath.

“I ran into someone at the supermarket yesterday. Jacob,” she said. “We went to preschool together here. Jacob was bigger than all of us then. The one whose name all the parents said with a roll of the eyes and a sigh.”

Like my brother.

“I was the smallest kid in the school. One day I got to play with ‘the coveted’” — here she raised her fingers in scare quotes — “red shovel. Jacob grabbed it and tried to pull it away from me. I didn’t let go. He pulled me. Across the sandbox. Over the wooden edge. Over the grass and gravel.”

She exhaled.

“By the time the teachers noticed, I had bloody scrapes all over my legs. It ruined my favorite gingham romper... it had plastic ladybug buttons. Mother threw it out after that day. The teachers made Jacob help them wipe down my scrapes with peroxide and bandage me up. After that, Jacob followed me around like a puppy. He gave me half his snack, put away my blocks.” She laughed. “Imagine. I bossed him around like a tiny fairy queen.”

It must have come naturally. She was a Hathaway.

“But after two days I got bored of him, and I told him to leave me alone.”

I felt a pang for Jacob. “How do you feel about it now?” I asked.

She looked down, smoothed her pants over her knees. I could not see her eyes.

“He got his revenge,” she said. “Eventually.”

If you never went to its one bar, you’d imagine Eldorado to be the way it looks from the outside: clean-cut retirees, families with school-age children, the occasional hippie woman with a truly impressive garden and a pack of rescue dogs. If Eldorado were a body, a healthy, rugged body wearing Tom’s of Maine deodorant, the bar would be its navel. Filled with lint and sweat and dead skin cells, a pungent odor, nooks and crannies, hairy around its perimeter.

The only thing that bar had going for it was that the manager usually hired lesbians to bartend. I still miss Josie. She leavened the tavern’s funk with her swagger, the twinkle in her hazel eyes. Before she moved back to Sacramento, we could expect the occasional free beer to slide into our progression of pints along with impromptu slam-style erotic poetry snippets. It says a lot that I still think of her so fondly, given that a few weeks after Josie left, my girlfriend Rose followed that dreadlocked, freckled, gap-toothed siren to the City of Trees. I didn’t see it coming. Maybe the erotic poetry should have tipped me off.

The platypus bill contains electrosensors that guide it to its prey.

I still go there sometimes, when it’s almost empty and almost quiet and I can claim a corner of the sofa and work on my session notes. My ears snag winsome lines from quiet conversations. I’m just an old chunk of coal. Maybe I’ll be a diamond soon. I hope before I die. But most of the time, people are drunk, loud, grimy. Farmers and ranchers drive ten or more miles to kick it without having to shower and change like they would in Santa Fe. They talk with the shaky recent divorcée with the nerve jumping around in her left eyelid, or the grimly proud Los Alamos scientist with the old Spanish family name, or the tall, courtly horseman who you’ll later recognize on the documentary series about weird shit in the USA, episode topic: gay rodeos.

But if people are spilling out onto the front patio, if half the barstools are taken, if someone ordered pizzas, fuzzy-faced denizens will be rooting for the wrong team on the TV, and I just keep driving.

“I told you about Edward, who helped me study for my CPA exam,” said Karen, my client who most needs to take a turn in a movie about moms behaving badly.

I nodded. She’d been guiltily titillated by his math-nerd passion, how nice he smelled, his penchant for suits and ties in this denim land.

“When my daughter needed a math tutor, I thought of Edward. And part of it was that I wanted to see him again. You know, I’m happy with my husband.”

I’d been a therapist long enough to know that didn’t matter.

“I knew he was good, and I’d vetted him myself.”

“Your daughter’s...” I looked down at my file.

“Fifteen. Her grades did go up.” Her eyes welled with tears. She hesitated. “I read in the paper this morning that he was arrested because he’d been having sex with not one, but two different fourteen-year-old girls.”

I handed her the tissue box.

“How could I not know? How could I have felt so safe with him? How could I have liked him? I thought I was a good judge of character.”

“Is your daughter—”

“Fine. Nothing happened. I think she might be a little insulted that he didn’t put the moves on her.” She barked a laugh. “I told her that she was too old for him.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Ancient,” she said. “I primped for him. He must have looked at me and seen Minnie Pearl.”

“But you were around the same age. What upsets you about it the most?”

“She formed a relationship, however innocent, with Edward, because of me. I don’t trust myself anymore.”

The female platypus holds her incubating eggs against her body with her tail.

I glanced at the clock. Delphine was my next client. Time for my summing-up bromide.

“The thing that stands out to me, apart from this sordid business, is how the infatuation with Edward used to make you feel. Where else can you find that in your life?”

Delphine breezed in, smelling of lily of the valley.

“Last time you were here, you mentioned that Jacob got even with you somehow. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Oh, that,” Delphine said. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s try.”

She kicked off her red crushed-velvet ballet flats and tucked her feet beneath her. Her hair fell across her cheek, shielding her eyes. I saw her take a steadying breath, as if she were waiting in the wings to perform. The late-morning light slipped through the heavy wooden blinds, casting stripes across her white boatneck sweater.

Then she cried out in pain.

“What’s wrong?”

“Leg cramp.” She bent over her knees. “Leg cramp. Help me.”

She tried to pull her feet out from under her.

I grasped her calf, and gently unbent her knee. She wiggled her hips to release the other ankle, grunting softly.

“Punch it,” she said.

“What?”

“My calf muscle. To stop the cramping. I can’t...”

I formed a fist, tapped her spasming muscle.

“No, goddamnit, hard.” She arched her back. “It’s going up my leg!”

I lifted her foot to my shoulder and whacked her calf muscle once, twice.

Delphine went soft with relief, her leg sliding down the front of me. She sat up, smoothed her hair. “I should go,” she said.

“Stay,” I said. I sat down and crossed my legs, which released a surprising, silent peal of pleasure. “That was one of the most intense cases of resistance I’ve ever noticed in a client. You were about to tell me about Jacob.”

She rolled her eyes, paused. “When we were in high school, Jacob and I bumped into each other. He seemed friendly. I hadn’t seen him in years — we went to different schools — but I had just passed my road test. My friends couldn’t celebrate with me until that night. I was itching for something to do. He invited me over. I thought his parents would be home, or his sister, but the house was empty. He offered me a beer and I accepted it. We went out to the back patio. He pulled out two pills.

“Valium? he asked. They looked different, but he told me one was generic. I popped it. When the pill hit, I felt a delicious calm descend. We just stared at the clouds. Then a ladybug landed on my wrist and it tickled. When I tried to raise my arm, I couldn’t. So I tried to wiggle my toes. I could do that, just a little bit.

“Have more beer, Jacob said, holding up the can. I tried to raise my other hand. I couldn’t move that either. He smiled and made a sound — ding — like a kitchen timer going off. And he stood over me, taking off my clothes while I watched, straining against my stilled body. I told him to stop. He just kept going. When he was raping me, he said, You want me to leave you alone now? And I told him yes, and he said, Say it. That’s when he came, when I said it.”

She raked the tissue across her eyes with trembling fingers. “I can’t help thinking that if I’d said no to the pill, which had to be an animal tranquilizer, I would have been okay.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Delphine.”

“I was so fucking stupid. I had no reason to trust him.”

“We often learn these lessons the hard way. That doesn’t make you stupid.”

“And now...” She bent over, her shoulders convulsing.

I wanted so badly to place my hand on her arm, to soothe her. Some therapists did, some didn’t. But after our innocent yet intense physical interaction earlier, it seemed innocuous enough.

I placed my hand on her shoulder.

She looked at me, tears streaming. “He just moved in next door to my parents’ house! I have to move. Either out of Eldorado or back to Europe.”

Her words licked through me like a flame. I would miss her so.

“What’s holding you here?”

“You.” She smiled crookedly.

A plume of warmth filled my aching chest.

“I want to get over this. I’ve never told anyone about Jacob before. I have only told the sandbox story.”

“The sandbox story shows how tenacious you are. You’re still that strong and determined.”

She looked up at me through damp eyelashes. “A friend of mine wants me to take over his lease, because he can’t afford the rent. But I have to do it tomorrow. My parents won’t be home then. I’ve never told them what happened, and they would just blame me if I did.”

“So it’s always been a secret between you.”

“Yeah, I left pretty quickly after that to go to Simon’s Rock, at Bard, where you can start college as a high school student.”

“Didn’t they find that to be odd?”

“My mother went there, so not really. I thought I could always come home again. But I never felt comfortable here after that. So when my best friend from college’s father fell in love with me, I traveled the world with him. When we broke up a few years later, one of his clients picked me up. It’s been like that ever since. Except it appears I’m aging out of this line of work. And I’m tired of it. I want to fall in love with someone real. Is it too late?”

“No,” I said vehemently.

She nodded. “But I need your help.”

“My help?” To fall in love? My heart juddered.

“I know this is ridiculous, you’re my therapist, but I don’t know who else to ask. My friend has to work. Will you rent a U-Haul truck for me? I can give you all of the money. I just don’t have a license. I can hire laborers, my friend knows some.”

“That’s a tough one, Delphine. You’re asking me to cross a therapist/client boundary.”

She looked crestfallen.

I thought of picking up the truck, entering the Hathaway compound, being useful. Delphine offering me a cold beer at the end of a long day. A stupid rule could keep Delphine trapped near Jacob. He could strike again. She could disappear from the Hathaway house, Eldorado, my practice, and my life.

“Then again, not helping you, knowing what I know about Jacob, seems even worse. Why don’t you have a driver’s license?”

“After the... you know, the thing with Jacob, everything seemed overwhelming. I never followed up with the paperwork.”

We made plans to meet at the hardware store the following morning at eight.

The next morning, I showed up in my best yard-work clothes. Todd of the pointed beard walked us out to the U-Haul cluster. Delphine’s clogs clonked against the macadam.

“That one,” Delphine said, pointing to a fifteen-footer.

I gave him my driver’s license.

He looked at Delphine’s credit card and my license and shook his bald head. “The credit card’s gotta match the driver’s license name.”

“Oh!” she said.

He stuck his pen in his mouth and worked it like a cigar. “Yeah, you know, we just gotta have these rules because people have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves, and it’s not fair but life ain’t fair, and these rules are here to protect all of us even if it isn’t always the most convenient thing...”

Unable to bear his pompous bloviating for one more second, I handed him my credit card. “Delphine, you can reimburse me. Not a problem.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, and threw her arms around me. I gave her back a horridly proper psychologist pat, when I wanted to pull her even closer. Then I noticed Todd leering at us. He ran his stubby fingertips over his chest and cackled.

“Little Todd wants a hug too,” he said.

Delphine and I jumped apart. She turned toward the truck as I mutely signed the rental form, cheeks burning.

I slid my license and credit card back into my wallet and wondered, as we climbed into the truck that smelled of stale farts and coffee, how she’d gotten to the hardware store. Maybe she walked. I should have offered to give her a ride.

Delphine seemed somber as we carried boxes into the truck. The laborers handled her furniture. But the truck soon proved bigger than the job required. I was going to mention it, but she beat me to it.

“I’m pretty spatially challenged for a dancer,” she said. “We could have gotten away with the next size down.”

She told me her new place was down a long dirt road on the other side of 285. Most homes there were of the mobile variety, with appliances rusting out front, and adobe shacks with none of the grace of the houses of Eldorado. I suddenly appreciated the numerous covenants that ruled that land.

Delphine directed me to stop at a tall ranch gate crowned with an iron longhorn design. She hopped out, fiddled with the lock, and swung the gate wide open. I drove through, followed by the laborers in their ancient pickup truck, onto a rutted road. Horses grazed, alfalfa swayed.

After about a mile, she pointed to a tidy log cabin with a front porch.

“It used to be a ranch-hand cabin.”

We parked and carried the first load of boxes inside. Two old wooden built-in bunk beds barnacled the far wall. A small kitchen, potbellied stove, a flagstone floor.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

As I trudged back and forth with Delphine’s things in my arms, I felt a contentment I barely remembered. In sessions, I helped people, but I did it while sitting still. This was therapy too.

I wouldn’t tell my supervisor about it, because he was hidebound to traditional rules. Even if he did understand, he really couldn’t say so.

I swept out the truck and closed it up.

“If you leave now,” Delphine said, “you won’t get charged for another hour.”

“Are you sure you don’t want help unpacking?” I asked. “I don’t care about the money.”

“I care about the money. I insist on paying you back. You’ve done too much as it is.”

“Okay,” I said, deflated. I nodded to her, and she nodded back. “You have cell phone service out here? And the door has a lock?”

“The door has a lock, and if all else fails, there’s always this.” She lifted her jeans cuff, flashing a mother-of-pearl-handled gun strapped to her ankle.

The male platypus has a venomous spur in his right leg.

She kissed her fingertips and placed them against my cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

In the truck’s mirror, a few yards down the road, I saw the red lipstick her fingertips had imparted. I raised my finger to the smear and rubbed it, then drew it roughly back and forth across my lips.

Todd walked the perimeter of the truck and shined a flashlight around the inside. It reminded me of the time that I rented a car from the Santa Fe airport, and they charged me for a broken windshield even though I had returned it undamaged.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

While I waited, I took photos of the unscathed outside of the truck, and the cab.

At the bar, the conditions were good. Just a few people smoking illegally on the front patio, most of the barstools free, quiet conversations among friends, and on TV, two of my favorite sports teams mopping the floor with their opponents. After a couple of hours, I was too drunk to care about the people spilling out onto the front patio, all of the barstools taken by people eating pizzas, fuzzy-faced denizens rooting for the wrong team on the TV. I remember dancing to AC/DC at some point, with other revelers. But after that, I went dark.

I don’t remember how I got home. I woke up in my moving clothes, smelling of smoke and stale beer. My car was in the driveway, parked askew. The driver’s-side mirror dangled from a wire, and I wondered which whimsically painted Eldorado mailbox I had clipped.

Wallet: check. All contents accounted for, except for the cash. I’d have to see how much I abused my debit card by looking online, but not yet. I’d make a big, slutty, greasy breakfast first, take a bath, smoke some weed, and watch old movies for the rest of the day.

Delphine didn’t show up for her Monday appointment. Then again, she didn’t have a car and she lived in the middle of nowhere. At a quarter past the hour, the new doorbell rang. Bing-bong. Silly of me to assume so fast. She’d made it.

I opened the door to two strangers. Dressed in blue.

“I’m Officer Valdez and this is Officer French. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Come on in,” I answered. “Please, sit down.”

“Did you rent a U-Haul truck Saturday?”

“Yes, to help my friend — um, client — move.”

My stuttering did not escape them.

“Well, that same U-Haul truck was involved in a robbery early yesterday morning, about four a.m. Right here in Eldorado, at the jewelry shop.”

“There must be some misunderstanding,” I said. “I returned it Saturday.”

“According to the hardware store, you did not. They reported it as stolen at around five p.m.”

“What happened?”

The cops looked at each other. Valdez nodded to French.

“An individual backed into the front of the jewelry shop with the truck, breaking the window,” French monotoned. “The jeweler reported $100,000 worth of gold jewelry stolen. Todd Lapidus reported the truck stolen, and you’re the last one who rented it.”

“That guy,” I said. “He checked the truck back in himself.”

“Do you have an alibi?” Valdez asked.

I was at the bar! What a relief. Those new best friends whose names I couldn’t remember would vouch for me. But then there was my blackout. The cops would have a lot easier time pinning something on me if they knew about it.

“No. I live alone.” Goddamn Josie the erotic slam poet. Thanks for stealing my alibi along with my girlfriend. “You should probably speak with my attorney,” I said. “Just to be prudent.” I rifled through my Rolodex and handed them her card.

“Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll be in touch.”

Todd. He stole the jewelry, but tried to frame me. Just my luck to be the one he decided to nail. Delphine was my only client that day. Delphine. I hoped she was okay. I called her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. I’d drive over and check on her before I called my lawyer.

About three-quarters of the way down her road, I realized that the gate would be locked. I couldn’t make a U-turn on the narrow road, so I steered into the next driveway. I saw a flash of telltale orange behind the neighboring house. It looked like a U-Haul truck.

I began to back out of the driveway, braking when I heard an approaching car. The gray-primed Trans Am rumbled by. In my rearview mirror, I glimpsed Delphine’s profile framed by the passenger window, wind lifting her hair from the side of her face like a bird’s wing, flash of gold at her ear.

The car turned into the next driveway and parked in the back. I parked my car behind a low cluster of piñon trees, and crept through the bushes and trees between the two hovels. I saw Delphine pull a burlap sack from the car, heard her curse as a small rain of mannequin hands spilled onto the ground. The driver’s door opened, and out stepped Todd.

Todd.

He laughed, picked up a plaster hand, rubbed it against his chest. “Oh yeah,” he said.

She took the hand from him and tossed it in the bag, then put her own hand on his chest. They kissed. I thought of his gray and metal teeth.

“Tonight, Joe will drive the truck out to his junkyard in Chupadero and blow it up,” he said. “When he’s done, it’ll blend right in with the rest of those fucked-up carcasses. Get it? Car-casses...” He guffawed. My brother had that stupid sense of humor too. And yeah, we had the same taste in women.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and clicked on the camera app, noting that the last photos I took were of the U-Haul truck as I returned it. Relief. I had proof. I snapped more photos of Todd and Delphine near the truck.

I was almost to my car when my phone rang. Loudly.

“Hey, what the fuck?” Todd yelled.

It continued as I broke into a run and slid into my car, dropping the keys on the floor after I hit the lock button. My hands scrambled blindly for those keys as Todd’s meat hooks slapped against the windshield. Delphine ran up behind him, gun in hand. I rammed the key in the ignition and floored the gas pedal, knocking Todd into the ditch. As I hugged the curve, a bullet took out my right-side mirror. It would only be a matter of time before Todd’s Trans Am caught up to my old shitbox Corolla. I turned left on 285, and blazed through a yellow light at the Vista Grande intersection, going 85 in a 50.

Delphine knew where I lived. I couldn’t go home. Was she even a Hathaway? Was her name really Delphine?

Sirens. I saw a cop car’s blazing cherry in my rearview mirror. Thank God.

“You again,” Officer Valdez said, perhaps unnerved by my thank-you-savior smile. “Do you know how many people get killed at that intersection? We were getting ready to arrest you anyway. This saves us the trouble.”

“Please do,” I said. “Put me in your squad car, fast, and then look at these photos on my phone.” I pointed to the cell on the passenger seat.

As I stepped out of the car, I heard the Trans Am in the distance. It crossed 285 and kept going. Were they thinking they’d head me off on my way home?

I sat in the back of the squad car, handcuffed, while Valdez completed mysterious and prolonged tasks on his tablet. The minutes ticked by.

I looked out the back window, saw Valdez lob my phone into the tall grasses. What the...

A giant truck hauling hundreds of hay bales barreled toward us, from the look of it fixing to blow the 285/Vista Grande light. That’s the problem with that intersection — trucks fresh off the interstate off-ramp don’t start slowing down in time, and then they can’t stop, and some mildly distracted driver in a Saab or a Subaru hits the gas when their light turns green.

Todd must have braked too late. The car slid under the truck, tires squealing. Its roof lodged against the bottom, as the truck’s back wheels punched through its side.

I take little comfort in knowing that it was Todd’s side the wheels chewed up and spit out, as seconds later, flames engulfed his corroded whip. They licked around the top and set the hay ablaze, torching the stacked golden bricks. Thick dark smoke billowed upward into the sky. Miles away, people wondered which forest was on fire. As everyone else looked up, my eyes stayed trained downward through the back window of the squad car, toward the crumpled and blackened Trans Am, hoping that Delphine’s end was as merciful as she deserved. Strike that. As merciful as her tenacity was strong.

Later, most people agreed that the conflagration helped paint the sky with one of the most beautiful sunsets anyone could recall.

Platypus venom is nonlethal to humans. However, those punctured will find any kind of subsequent pain to be more intense for months to come.

All Eyes by Katie Johnson

Aspen Vista

The feeling that you’re being watched is a common one. How often is it comforting?

Having grown up in a claustrophobic major city on the West Coast, I was relieved, as a young adult, to call Santa Fe home — a small city with miles of desert in every direction. As a child, I’d dreamed of Salvador Dalí dreamscapes. Now I lived in one. A perfect escapist fantasy. The people in Santa Fe were introverted, and if you wanted to get away from the adobe buildings that never rose above three stories (to preserve the view of the mountains), all you had to do was drive twenty minutes and you’d be in desert so desolate, it’d take months to find your body.

Surrounding the city were the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Spanish for the Blood of Christ. Watch one sunset and you’ll know why they named them that. The way the massive clouds, like parade floats, turn hot pink, reflecting crimson red on the mountains below, while the whole city turns gold. Callie and I watched a lot of sunsets against those mountains, never realizing how blood-soaked they really were.

Santa Fe is full of paradoxes — the high desert is like that. In any direction you can escape into vast desert, nothing but your body and junipers and piñons against the horizon. But if you go into the mountains — there is a whole kingdom of trees, peaks, and valleys in which to hide or get lost. If you crave the exposure of the desert, it is there ready to hold you like a heart on a platter. But if you want to be swallowed up for good, the mountains wait, ready to consume you in their dark folds.

“Danny? Danny, I think I’m lost. I need you to come into the woods and find me.”

I’d been getting calls like that for weeks from Callie’s phone. I thought about calling the police the first time it happened, but I wrote it off as an acid flashback or some lucid dream. I don’t know why I kept picking up, maybe I was hoping she’d say something different, or just say goodbye. But she kept calling me into the woods. Acid flashbacks don’t last this long. I hadn’t gone to Aspen Vista since they found Callie’s body up there in the fall.

Callie used to roll down the windows and let her hair curl on the wind as I zoomed up the winding mountain roads. Many trails etch off from the main road, but Aspen Vista was our favorite. Thirty minutes from the plaza — Santa Fe warps space like that. Some call it a vortex. One moment you’re in the center of downtown, half an hour later you’re walking on a dirt forest path, damp leaves underfoot, and all the aspens watching.

They found her body during the most beautiful time of year. In the fall, the aspen leaves turn bright yellow. The forest is gold and the paths seem littered with coins. Who says money doesn’t grow on trees? But I would hardly call the aspens trees now; they watch with their eyes like people.

The last time we went up there began like any other. It was the end of summer. We veered off the main path to sneak away into a section of forest littered with huts. We’d come here with a blanket to make love or get high. The aspens are so skinny that with a little help you can pile the dead trunks into conical teepees. Who knows who started these things. College kids, or witches — it’s all the same in this city. Among armies of trees and green grass, these huts inhabit the side of the mountain. The deeper you go into the woods, the more impressive the huts become, like real homes with thick walls and nearby campfires.

“This one is my house!” Callie gestured to a hut with a beautiful view of the opposing peak — a sea of pines and aspens, the wind swimming through them like an invisible entity.

“It’s a fine one, babe.” I cracked open a beer, handed it to her, and sat on a log in front of the hut’s opening, an imaginary porch.

“Can’t you see waking up to this view every morning?” Her smile was like the sunrise — sacred and intangible.

“Say the word, and we’ll be bums, babe. I’ve got a cold sleeping bag and warm beer. Let’s be homeless together.”

I joked about hopping trains or living out of a car, but I never meant it. And anyway, our parents had put too much into our college tuitions for us to throw it all away and quit our paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyles. Callie leaned in to kiss me. Most days she was round-freckled cheeks and optimism. Other days she was tired. Not tired like I’ve ever been exhausted — from a long day of making coffee for strangers. Tired in the way that buildings and cars and a life that circles without a destination makes you tired.

“It would be so much simpler — if we just lived in the woods. It’s all wrong, Danny. This idea of civilization is wrong. The cities and the minimum wage and the technology, it’s not how we’re meant to live. They think it’s progress, their organized governments and electricity, but we never should have left the woods.” Callie stood and grabbed the white trunk of an aspen in her palm. “This... this is what’s real. The woods are the real world.”

I could see her eyes glistening with tears. She looked away and hugged the aspen, its black eyes rubbing against her belly. When Callie got tired she cried often. And I couldn’t fix it, not with beer, or weed, or my love. I stared out at the sea of pines and aspens, my hand over my mouth, as Callie sobbed into the nearby tree.

Sometimes I’d think, Why do I have to love this crazy bitch so much?

Later, when they found her body, littered with leaves like gold coins inside the farthest hut, I thought, Why didn’t I stay with her?

Twenty minutes passed and Callie was still crying against that same damn tree.

I got up, walked off to have a smoke. When I came back, I pulled at her arm, said, “Callie, let’s go. Let’s go back to my place, I’ll make you spaghetti. Come on.”

Without saying anything, she bundled up the blanket we’d brought, and followed me through the forest to the main path. We stepped over fallen trees, and walked passed trunks with carved names and dates. The aspens followed us with their numerous eyes. Their green leaves fluttered, waving after us. The sun began to set and the curtain of trees looked like a veil. A shadowy golden world, so separate from the homes and businesses at the bottom of the mountain.

Halfway to the main path, Callie stopped.

“Come on, babe. The sun is going down.” I always had a feeling about those woods at night. Like we shouldn’t be there past dark, like it wasn’t wise. “Callie, come on!”

But she just stood, looking behind us at the trees we’d left.

“They want me to stay, Danny. They said it’s okay.”

“Who, babe?”

“The aspens, Danny. I can see it in their eyes.”

“Honey, you know that sounds crazy, right?”

“It’s the spirits of the woods. Every forest has them. They said it’s okay if I sleep here tonight.”

“I’m not letting you sleep out here alone.” I stepped toward her.

“Then don’t. Stay with us.”

I looked to my left, at a tree with a face. Under two of the aspen eyes, someone had carved a jagged smile.

“Neither of us are staying here. You don’t even have a tent, or food. Let’s go home, and we’ll plan to go camping soon, I promise.”

“I don’t want to go camping, Danny. I want to stay.”

“Babe...”

“Do you ever think that if you stand in the same place long enough, the trees will believe you’re one of them?”

I grabbed Callie by her arm, my fingers digging into her tighter than I’d ever gripped anyone. I dragged her behind me like a child, both of us tripping over dead trunks, and slipping on loose granite. She obeyed, fussing, for a few steps, before shoving me with her whole body, toppling me over. I smacked the side of my face on the base of an aspen, and the bark of its eye scraped my cheek. My face hot, and in pain, I yelled at her, “Fine, you want be a fucking tree! Grow roots and live here! I’m going back to town where people live and breathe!”

“The trees breathe—”

“You crazy bitch, look at me, I’m bleeding!”

Callie looked at my cheek with eyes like round leaves. She pointed to the tree I’d fallen against. Red sap leaked from the center of its eyes. “The trees bleed too.”

The calls only came at night.

“Danny? I lost the trail. I thought I knew where it was, but I got turned around somehow. Danny, I need you to come get me, please.” I never said anything back. Your parents don’t teach you as a kid not to talk to ghosts, but somehow you know it’s just something not to do.

Of course I went back for her after our fight. But after I left her in the woods that night, I let her be for a week or two. Then I started getting worried. I assumed she just needed to be up there. She’d be resourceful. Maybe she hitched a ride back home the next day and didn’t want to talk to me. I figured we shouldn’t talk for a while, and truth be told, I didn’t want to talk to her. Yet after two weeks, with no word, I tried to call her, just to make sure she was okay. But her phone was dead, kept going to voice mail. After checking in with her parents and other close friends to no avail, I went back to the woods.

I found the blanket. That’s when I filed the missing person report. A search party was sent out. They say the first forty-eight hours after a person goes missing are the most important. And if she went missing that night, or the day after, then I’d left her missing for a good 336 hours.

I could have walked that whole section of the woods before calling the authorities, but something in me knew. I didn’t want to find her body, not alone, so I filed the report, let the rangers find it for me in the last hut at the end of the peak. This one was built with special care. Most of the huts lean against a living pine, which acts as a center beam, but this one was built so well it didn’t need a pine on which to lean. The dead aspens crisscrossed each other, like a perfect thatched teepee. The walls were so thick you couldn’t see through them. A perfect home.

The dogs smelled her first. The rangers called me over. Wind blew through the trees, and gold leaves fell on my head. Someone had built a tunnel out of small dead trunks to form an extended entrance to this hut. I watched a ranger get on his hands and knees, and disappear into the wooden tunnel. Indistinguishable runes were etched into the small dead sticks at the threshold.

As the ranger disappeared, I followed him in. Others in the search party objected, but the sound of the wind through the aspens’ branches muted their voices into whispers.

The earth was pliant and damp beneath my palms. Grass didn’t grow in this tunnel — as if it had been tread many times. The musk of rot overpowered the scent of earth. After a few feet of crawling, the tunnel opened into the hut. The ranger and I stood above her body. Only small beams of light penetrated the hut’s thick walls, glinting on portions of Callie’s stiff face, illuminating the many gold leaves scattered over her corpse. The hut’s walls seemed to close in, the layers and layers of dead aspens, which crowded around her body, and us. The air was thin and dense at the same time. One of those impossible paradoxes that has to exist because it can’t possibly be. A small beam of light shone on Callie’s open eyes. I followed her gaze, up the aspen trunks. Their dark eyes looked back at me accusingly.

Disorientation and lack of food and water was what the medical investigator wrote in the report. But the last hut isn’t even that far from the Aspen Vista trail. You can walk there and back in an hour. And the section of woods hosting these huts drops off into valleys, forming it into a neat triangle. If Callie got to the last hut, or even one of them, how could she not find the trail a half hour hike away?

She left me alone for a week after the funeral. But then she started calling. My phone ringing every evening, sometimes four times a night. Her voice crackling and distant through sounds of the wind. I wanted to believe it was sleep paralysis or the aftereffects of drug use, but when your deceased loved one calls you this fucking often, and you were at the funeral, and you know her phone is long gone and disconnected, and every day is a shallow shadow of the life you had since finding her body, well, you start to take these calls seriously.

“Danny? Danny, I miss you. I’m here, and I think I’m close to the path, but I’m not sure. Can you bring a flashlight? I know I fucked up, and I’m sorry. Please, just come get me. For the love of Christ, I need you to get me out of these woods. Please. I love you.”

Holding the phone to my cheek, I began to cry into the receiver. She wouldn’t let me mourn. She just wouldn’t let me let her die.

“I love you too, babe. I’ll be there soon.”

It was so damn cold, my long-sleeve shirt and heavy winter jacket couldn’t keep the dry wind from cutting into my bones. As I walked up the trail in the dark, the wind scratched at my face like precise little claws. I pulled my scarf tight around my mouth as I trudged up the snowy path. The aspens loomed over me, leafless and naked. When I got to the turn in the trail where the mountain stretches into the section of huts, I took a deep breath. I raised my flashlight higher, stepped off the trail, and headed into the woods where we’d found Callie.

Hiking in snow, my muscles stiffened, and my body grew heavy. I descended down the slope of the mountain, deeper and deeper. My calves burned, and the light I carried shook as my limbs tremored. The aspens grew denser as I maneuvered between their skeletal bodies. I came to the hut that Callie had called her “home.” I looked out at the view from our make-believe porch, facing the opposing peak. The treetops were covered in snow. The wind hit my face too aggressively for me to register the view, or anything, as beautiful.

I looked behind me, into the doorway of the hut. I thought of going inside to rest, to cry, to gather myself from the abrasive wind, and maybe just let Callie’s death hit me for a moment as real, but as I looked, the darkness seemed to move within.

I didn’t feel afraid. I watched it for a moment, though I didn’t raise my flashlight to it. The shadows seemed to curl in on themselves. They looked... cozy.

I decided not to disturb them, whatever they were — these hallucinations that felt familiar, like friends I hadn’t seen for a very long time. I continued on. Through snow, and over fallen trunks, past the aspen with a carved smile. I stopped and gave it a wink. I thought maybe its smile grew, and I laughed at the trunk. I looked down at my boots. A sob choked in my throat, and a few tears rolled down my cheek, hot, then turned into cold trails where they’d slid.

“I miss her so much, you know?” I said to the face. “I didn’t mean to — you know? I didn’t mean for this — damn!” My teeth grinding against each other, I stared hard at the face in the tree. Its trunk was blunt white, the eyes dark, but somehow soft.

I began to sob, and stumbled toward it. I dropped the flashlight, wrapped my arms around the aspen, and pressed my face into its smooth bark. I held onto it tight, a poor substitute for holding her, but the only one I had. These trees were the only ones to witness my utter breakdown, to support me as I processed her death. My sobs built, then crescendoed, and as they diminished into heavy breaths, I pulled away from the aspen, keeping my open palms at its sides and my forehead pressed against its eyes.

The wind died down. The woods maintained an eerie silence, emphasized by the snow, like the silence of many people holding their tongues. I looked up at the aspen. Red sap leaked from the corners of its eyes. I chuckled, then kept walking.

I didn’t pick up the flashlight. I decided the light from the sliver of moon reflecting off the snow was enough. I stepped over fallen trunks without looking at them, as if I knew where each part of the forest was placed. I walked and walked. I passed hut after hut. An hour must have passed, then another, and another. The section of forest I knew so well in the day didn’t seem to have an end to it now. But I felt, in some way, that I knew it better than before. The darkness folded in on itself, the aspens tripled and multiplied. Their eyes followed. I never grew tired. The night fragmented and stretched. Their eyes anticipated. I was no longer cold.

I came to the last hut, but I knew it wasn’t the last. It was the first, and forever. My future and past. I kneeled at the entrance, drew in a breath. I fingered the small dead trunks that formed the threshold. The aspens held their breath. The wood held a carved heart. Within the jagged lines of the heart, Callie + Danny.

All eyes drew on me. I knew I was not alone. And I felt comfort. They held me in their vision. I crawled into the tunnel. All eyes watched as I disappeared.

The Cask of Los Alamos by Cornelia Read

Los Alamos

As the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread, a second column, narrower than the first, rose and flattened into a mushroom shape, thus providing the atomic age with a visual image that has become imprinted on the human consciousness as a symbol of power and awesome destruction.

—“The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb,” atomicarchive.com

The thousand injuries of Richard Feynman I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

You will understand that I never so much as insinuated a threat. No, my vengeance would be played as the most patient of games, precluding even the faintest perfume of risk.

Feynman should suffer; I would not.

Equally, it was imperative he understand both that his slighting of me had precipitated this result, and that I was the sole author — indeed, the virtuoso — of his final comeuppance.

I therefore gave him no reason to doubt my friendship. I continued to clasp his hand with patrician bonhomie should we chance to meet, to exude amusement whenever subjected to his ceaseless onslaught of tics, prinks, and pranks. I refused to allow the merest glimmer of my distaste to show, whether he was breaking into locked file cabinets, “improving” upon the carefully sequenced cards as they coursed through the IBM machines, or shouting down Niels Bohr.

He saw me as merely a lesser chum amid the tittering audience he garnered with such compulsion, a negligible layer in the dull impasto against which he believed his own strokes of wit and genius might glitter by uplifted contrast.

The man had no inkling that my chuckles were ever more sincere, arising as they now did from my increasingly detailed and heartwarming plans for his imminent demise.

The fatal day, Monday, July 16, 1945, began as nearly any other in our part of New Mexico. There was the same chill of predawn as we rose in darkness from our plebeian bunks in various raw Quonset huts, or the old dormitories of the boys’ school that had once graced this plateau.

I will say our usual chatter over the shared sinks was muted, and few if any seemed interested in breaking the night’s fast.

There was good reason for this. I’d scheduled my private fête for Dickie Boy to coincide with the first test of our “gadget”: Trinity, that grand instrument du mort toward the parturition of which we’d all labored during every conscious moment for the last four years.

The powers that be had ferried our plutonium core to the test site in an army sedan on Thursday, July 12, 1945.

One minute into Friday the thirteenth, the nonnuclear components had followed, to be assembled over the course of that day at the old McDonald ranch house.

By five p.m. on the fifteenth, the device was complete, awaiting detonation at the apex of a one-hundred-foot steel tower.

We’d begun moving onto the buses at two a.m. on the sixteenth, shuffling through frigid lashings of rain. The test was slated to commence at four a.m., but soon the gossip began, mutterings from seat to high-backed seat on every bus:

Oppenheimer will ignore the rain...

No, he’ll postpone while the skies clear.

Groves will call a halt to the proceedings to ensure the hoped-for blast can be filmed for the government, and posterity...

Chadwick will insist we go forward on schedule...

I ignored this pointless chatter, wiping away the condensation to peer out my rearmost seat’s window.

I’d made sure of a place for myself aboard the very bus to which Feynman had been assigned. But though I had full view of my fellow passengers, I couldn’t locate his absurdly large head atop that scrawny body anywhere between my seat and that of the vehicle’s army-issue driver.

I well knew I could not inquire of my seatmates whether they had any clue as to the smirking jester’s whereabouts. They must not link the pair of us in any memory of the splendid and awe-filled day sure to come.

The bus’s engine rumbled alive, making droplets of rain skitter faster down the window glass.

And then, pelting toward us, came Feynman at last. He sprinted through the rain like an awkwardly malnourished cricket, waving his skinny arms as he clambered onto our bus, just as the driver grasped the chrome handle to clap its hinged doors shut.

“About time, Dick!” yelled some wag from the front seats.

“Wouldn’t’ve missed it for the world,” replied my nemesis, his nasal Borough-of-Queens honk forcing that final word to rhyme with soiled.

Feynman’s lovely wife Arline had died of tuberculosis only one month earlier, yet he seemed to have a grin or a joke ready for every man he passed while slouching down the aisle.

I’d heard that his MIT professors had begged Princeton to take him on as a graduate student despite the all-too-necessary quotas, writing that their prodigy “isn’t like other Jews.”

In that they were correct: he was worse.

Thankfully, I was a Yale man myself, and so had not had to suffer the displeasure of his company until we’d been marooned together here by the war effort.

Small mercies.

Feynman continued down the aisle, until at last he stood, hunched and dripping wet, directly before me.

“How’s it going, Thurston old pal?” he asked, looking me in the eye with his typical horrid leer.

Too late, I realized that the only unclaimed seat was the one beside my own.

“Dick!” I stuck out my hand, grinning for all I was worth. “All’s well that ends well, eh?”

Our group was dropped off exactly twenty miles out from the blast site.

I’d climbed up behind the wheel of an empty old army truck, hoping for a better view. The radios were on the fritz, so we had little idea when, or even whether, the test might be conducted.

Finally, I heard a crackle from the set a few feet away, nestled against the rib cage of an NCO who was lying facedown on the ground with his arms crossed over his helmet.

A distant voice broke through the static, intoning “...twenty seconds...”

I put on the pair of dark glasses I’d been issued to protect my eyes from the flash.

At that moment, Feynman leaped up onto the bench seat beside me. The man was a veritable leech, shoving me over with a sharp elbow and then sliding in even closer.

“Don’t be an idiot, Thirsty,” he cackled, lips smacking. “The only thing that can hurt your eyes is ultraviolet light. The windshield’ll block that.”

And just as he’d finished uttering those boastful words, the flash came.

Despite his bravado, Feynman flinched and ducked his head below the dashboard, screwing his eyes shut before muttering, “That’s not it, that’s the afterimage...” He sat up straight once more, jostling me.

Not to be outdone, I removed my own glasses.

The white light changed to yellow, then to orange.

Clouds formed and disappeared again.

Compression and expansion.

The ball of orange grew, rising and billowing. Its edges turned black, and soon we could see that it was a ball of smoke, flashing inside with lightning as it became ever larger.

This went on for sixty seconds... seventy... eighty... and at a minute and a half the shock wave finally reached us: the heart-stopping BOOOOOM, followed by an unearthly, thunderous rumble.

“What’s that?” asked some journalist fellow, standing just outside the truck.

Feynman snorted, amused. “That was The Bomb.”

I glanced at my watch. Five thirty-one a.m., with the second hand just passing thirty.

What remained of the day was pandemonium, and well-earned.

We’d done it! All of us!

The years of labor, the horrid meals and the never-enough sleep, the thin mattresses on creaking wire! We’d overcome all exhaustion, dismay, and discouragement to produce this glorious feat, this magnificent engine which would now save the lives of tens of thousands of Our Boys in the Pacific.

The detonation of Trinity had rekindled us all, pumped the lifeblood of esprit de corps back into every last resident of Los Alamos.

We couldn’t congratulate one another heartily enough. Army men danced drunken jigs with physicists. Comely secretaries do-si-doed with apple-cheeked calculator girls. Chemists clapped engineers on the back and were nearly knocked down by their brethren’s returned clouts of joyous camaraderie.

Even Oppenheimer, who had lately come to resemble a wraithlike mere shadow of his former mere shadow, was pink in the face and light on his feet, head thrown back with laughter every time I glanced his way.

It was pure carnival as the high-desert night came on, the sizzle and spark of Eros ignited by the Promethean gift of Thanatos we had just bestowed to all the world beyond our gates.

And I was undoubtedly the calmest man for miles around.

Never doubt that I toasted and boasted with the rest of the fellows, the very picture of a hail fellow well met. But I savored the knowledge of how vastly my evening’s denouement would eclipse our communal high spirits, in the afterglow of Trinity’s climax.

My pleasure lacked but one ingredient to ring down the curtain: Feynman himself.

Pretending to swig from yet another proffered fifth of rationed rotgut, I spotted my prey at long last.

He sat cross-legged on the hood of a jeep, pounding away on his bongo drums like a cheap wind-up tin monkey. I shuddered when I drew close enough to realize he was shoeless, the soles of his feet encrusted with filth.

“A good evening to you, sir!” I cried out, giving him the benefit of my broadest grin.

He turned toward me, the rictus of his own smile rendered even more sinister by the nearest bonfire’s shifting flames.

“Thirsty!” Feynman’s bongo-playing ceased. “That was something today, huh?”

“It certainly was something, all right!” I nodded in idiotic concurrence. “It certainly was!”

“Want a drink?” Feynman produced a steel flask from some unseen pocket.

“Damn right I do, pal.” I reached for it and unscrewed the cap.

I put the neck to my lips and tilted my head back, taking a real gulp to put him at ease. The harsh liquor made me cough and sputter.

“Not the quality you’re used to, I suppose,” he said, lifting a pinky finger while pretending to sip daintily from an invisible cup of tea.

“Whatever the hell you poured into this thing,” I replied, handing it back, “tastes like God’s own liquefied shit.”

My unexpected profanity made him guffaw.

I could tell, then, just how very drunk he was, and I was ready to take my chance.

Turning the flask upside down, I poured the rest of his revolting lighter fluid onto the hard-packed ground.

“Just a cotton-picking minute, there!” Feynman leaped down off the jeep, lurching to grab at his now-emptied vessel.

“You don’t need to drink this crap, old pal,” I said, presenting it to him with a grand flourish. I threw an arm across his upper back. “I’ve got something far more special to share with you. Been saving it up for just such a celebratory occasion...”

The vile little troll had the audacity to wink at me. “You don’t say!”

“Shhh! Mum’s the word...” I leaned in, my lips close to his ear. “You were my partner in crime today. Let’s down the reward all by our lonesomes.”

He laughed again, leaning into my armpit. “Guess you’re earning that nickname, Thirsty.”

“Well, what the hell, Dick. We both know you’ve been the real genius of this entire operation from the get-go...”

The man literally giggled, emitting the sort of high-pitched, grating feminine squeals I hadn’t heard since being forced to attend dancing school as a child.

I rapped a knuckle gently against the side of his forehead. “If this old noggin doesn’t deserve to be toasted with the finest of seventy-five-year-old whiskeys,” I whispered, “well, then, I don’t know what does, after today’s performance!”

I had him hooked then, reeling him in with the sort of finesse I usually reserved for killing large salmon on Restigouche River.

He growled into my ear, wetting it with flecks of spittle, “Got a bottle hidden under your bunk?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, old man!” I whispered back, gesturing at the crowds around us with my free arm. “Leave my cask of grandfather’s single malt within reach of this pack of thieves?”

“Cask?”

“I’m sure you’ve seen one in the funny papers,” I said. “A little wooden barrel, the equivalent of six bottles, and all for us!”

“Lead on, Mac... Duffy.” Feynman belched, tugging at my sleeve.

I decided to return his wink, with interest. “At your service, mon frère.”

I switched a dim flashlight on, once we were beyond the sightline of our fellow revelers. By this point I knew I could count on Feynman’s inebriation to get him good and lost in the dark as I circled and wove the pair of us around endless spindly pines and piles of rock.

In the utter boredom we’d all endured during our spare moments, nearly every one of us had explored the old Indian caves surrounding our workaday environs.

The cave I’d chosen was a small one, of very little interest.

For my purposes, it had the advantage of a shallow alcove to the rear, just out of sight of the main entrance. Most grown men could only just squeeze into this through a narrow split in the rock. There was no true egress out the back wall — just a far skinnier crack that only the most malnourished of children might have wriggled through, though it did allow a slight zephyr to blow in, occasionally, from beyond the cave itself.

I desired that Feynman should die, but would never voluntarily grant him the satisfaction of rapid suffocation.

When he began to complain of the distance we’d traveled, I produced a flask of my own. It was filled to the brim with a pint of the same fine Scotch whiskey I’d promised him.

He took a gulp and mellowed considerably.

I patted him on the back. “Good, isn’t it?”

Feynman raised the flask toward me. “Here’s to your generosity, old pal,” he said, before taking another hearty swig.

I took it to raise toward him in turn. “And to your long life, my friend.”

“The hell are we?”

“Almost there.” I handed the flask back. “Drink up.”

He laughed, taking my direction to heart.

“Lots more where that came from,” I assured him. “And we’re so very close...”

I left the flask with him, knowing he’d drink himself even more insensible.

“Ah!” I cried. “We’ve reached the promised land!”

I played the flashlight quickly across the cave’s entrance, then bowed him inside.

Once I’d stepped in behind him, I reached for an actual pitch-covered torch I’d constructed, lighting it up with my Zippo.

The warmth of its flickering light seemed only to inflame his thirst.

“Where is it?” he demanded, weaving. “Where’s a whiskey at?”

I jammed my flambeau into a crotch of rock and pointed toward the curve in the cave wall. “Why, just back there, old buddy, old pal. Right around that corner.”

He almost tripped over the large heap of bones at the center of the cave’s floor: ribs and jaws of smallish animals, mostly.

“Yale man?” asked Feynman, eyeing the pile before he looked up at me with reddened eyes.

I sighed. “Bulldog, Bulldog.”

“Skull and Bones!” he shrieked, laughing, his voice echoing loudly in our tiny crypt.

“Now, now,” I said, waggling a finger at him, “you won’t catch me out with that old saw! Go get your whiskey, man! You’ve earned it!”

He lurched around the corner and readied himself to slip through the crack in the rock beyond, just as I clocked him across the back of the head with the shovel I’d secreted beneath all those little skeletons.

Feynman dropped like a rucksack of bricks.

I worked him into the alcove and wrapped the chain inside twice around his waist, then pulled it even tighter and padlocked both ends to the heavy grommet I’d cemented into the rock wall several months earlier.

I spun the lock’s dial, then made sure it was well up behind his back, though I doubted he’d come to before I’d finished my night’s happy toil.

After withdrawing, satisfied, from his tiny new domicile, I raked all those little bones off my neatly piled stack of bricks and mixed myself up a good sloppy pail of mortar.

I laid the first course in the crack of his cell, then the second. Third, fourth, fifth... the work went well and I didn’t hear a peep out of him, save his occasional rasping breath.

As I placed the eighth row’s first brick, I heard him moan.

I smiled, reaching for another brick. Three narrow courses to go, and he’d be sealed in for good!

“Whaddaya...” he said, his voice no more than a croak. “Thirsty?”

“Why, hello there, Feynman,” I answered with great cheer.

I heard the chains rattle against stone. He must have been trying to stand up.

“What gives?” he asked.

“I’m tucking you in for the night, old sport — a nice long rest.”

The chains clanked again, but he said nothing more for a moment.

I loaded up another brick with a slap of mortar from my trowel.

Then, of all things, Feynman began to laugh. Hearty, joyful laughter — I might go so far as to say the man guffawed.

“Oh, you’ve done it, Thurston!” he said, wheezing a bit before he began to chortle again. “You’ve played the best joke of all! Damn it, I thought I was the master, but haven’t you just gone and kicked my sorry ass with superior wit!”

“Now that you mention it, I will indeed have the last laugh, Feynman.”

“Won’t the boys crack up when they hear, back at the mess hall!”

“Funny,” I said, “I don’t think they’ll hear a thing.”

I was about to place the very last brick when he began keening, screaming at the top of his lungs, rattling the chains and wrestling against them with all his might, by the sound of it.

I knew well that no sound carried back to our so-called bit of civilization from this carefully chosen spot, so I began to scream along with him: yelling, baying, howling at full tilt.

And then I took my own turn at laughing, louder and louder, my glee echoing back from every stone, every last brick.

I had never felt such joy, such sheer and utter happiness, in all my days.

I laughed until I could barely breathe, and was about to double over when I heard Feynman’s voice behind me.

“Go fuck yourself, Thurston,” he said calmly.

He cracked me in the back of the skull with my own shovel before I could so much as turn my head in response.

I’d awakened to find myself trussed in chains, lying on my side along the ground, ankles bound to my wrists behind my back.

He’d rebuilt two-thirds of my wall.

“There’s a good fellow, Feynman,” I said. “All in fun, what?”

I tried to laugh but we both knew he wasn’t to be jollied out of putting his own finishing touches on my cherished blueprint of vengeance.

He stopped for only a moment then, leaning over his neat masonry to look me dead in the eye. “Should you ever get to use a padlock again,” he said, “which I must admit I doubt highly, you may want to change the combination from its factory setting.”

“For God’s sake, man...”

“25-10-25,” he muttered, rolling his eyes. “What a moron.”

It’s rather dark in here, now that Feynman’s placed the final brick.

Fiat lux.

The Homeless Detective by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Cerrillos Road

Camo beer. Camo beer. Falling asleep on the streets was hard. Passing out a helluva lot easier. Five Camos in a pack. Three to knock him out. Two waitin’ for him in the morning, ’cept on mornings when he couldn’t make it back home. Back home was euphemistic. Back home was a ramshackle box trailer in an empty tract near the city dump.

Leo Malley had convinced himself five years ago: He wasn’t a human being no more. He was a bum. Difference was no less than between house cats and alley cats. Human beings lived at known addresses. Human beings relied on street signs, the fire department, or the cops. He learned from his lessons panhandling well enough to appreciate that house cats believed his stripe solely deserved leftovers. He wasn’t terribly impressed with dem goddamn house cats — whether they shared their small morsels of tuna. Okay, he liked the gals that worked at the Wendy’s burger joint. Connie always handed him a free coffee. Finishing it, maybe he could have a shot at reorganizing himself.

He lifted his shaky hand, the skin prematurely flabby and spotted. Leo looked like he hadn’t bathed sometimes, whether or not he showered at the Interfaith Community Shelter. He was a body of shakes.

A cold front had surreptitiously hit Santa Fe the night before. He limped this morning; his socks must have swollen three sizes larger. Lucky he had a couple of Camos. His Camo pain medicines helped him bicycle to town. He couldn’t find a reason to still bike to the park where truckers picked up migrant laborers. He rarely secured money panhandling, surly as he looked holding his Help Me sign. He should head over to the joint where the “good people of Santa Fe” served the homeless.

Got my coffee. Grab me some food.

Five in a pack.

I wanna see what nuclear war looks like.

Freaky. The racing thoughts began drum-drum-drumming in the back of his skull, like timpanis. The crush of confused thoughts began when Connie shouted, “Hey Leo, want another coffee?” And slipped Leo a newspaper alongside it.

His eyes fell on a headline describing United States military tensions with North Korea. “US and Korea Escalate Nuclear Arsenal Conflict.” Thoughts began running amok. Cramming his limited space for 20/20 foresight. Leo’s brain. Like a light switch. On again. Off again. Sometimes his smallest thoughts barely permeated his verbal consciousness, while his frustrated mind ran the gamut of brutal associations. It took that kind of insistent repetition to cut through his psychological welter sometimes.

He thought: Nothing. Nothing to live for no way. I would like to see a nuclear blast. Hope Korea drops the bomb. Be a motherfucker. People with limbs frayed. People with skin falling off, like slabs of meat and flesh in the butcher shop. People goddamn glowing green. Zombies. Radioactive sewer rats. Probably resembled the lives of homeless sewer rats all the world over.

Memories haloed Leo’s skull by then, sometimes sort of happy.

Memory was a disingenuous pastime; sure, sometimes he thought maybe everybody’s memories dematerialized to tears and fears, like a balancing act in the long run. He had seen plenty of both back when he lived in regular houses. Back until his late forties, he had been a truck driver. He had been a cabman. Picked up whores. Picked up druggies. Picked up Muhammad Ali one time. Picked up Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen was a short guy. Whiny. Whined about his motel room, his food, his fans.

Bruce Springsteen. Narcissistic little bastard.

These days, Leo welcomed a catastrophe. He had spent half of his life drinking too heavily, Lord knows, still managing at the edges of the rental world. Since then. The same song. The same pictures played in his dreams, churning alongside his daylight frustrations. Lucky he was a big guy. Kept moving. Kept living. Problem though was when he slept, or lightly dozed, he started twitching. He noticed that about the others. Most times when he saw a bunch of alley cats passed out, or sleeping, they were twitching in their sleep. Like him.

The problem with memory was that he always returned to the worst. He returned to the question of whether the hypothetical holocausts in the newspapers resembled the conflagration he personally witnessed, or erstwhile lived. Trapped in a house fire. Five years ago. So what if he could have died? Forget about that past life. Ya mangy alley cat. Keep living like a zombie. Burned-out.

Tough luck.

Paula shouted, “Hey Leo, want a coffee to go?” He limped to his bicycle. Leo got irony. Maybe he only got irony; sometimes every blah blah blah in his head sounded like sarcasm. And he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he remembered he officially got listed on the homeless statistics a few years back when the half-decent apartment he lived inside burned to the ground. A wayward life. A few drunken decades. A house fire. “Hey, be careful,” he heard as he hit the curb.

He realized, before he’d bicycled halfway to the Interfaith Community Shelter, that he’d begun the morning badly. The house fire was a ticket to panic. He couldn’t handle rehashing the memory without believing his vascular system imploded inside his rib cage. He might hit his zero/void, the point where he blanked out. Hey, stupid, stupid, he thought, why can’t ya forget to start remembering?

It may have already begun. The street traffic surrounded him like swarms of locusts. The cars blazed like flashlights inside a pinball machine. He bounced here, there, and back and forth, a pinball surrounded by sounds, brrnnngs. The flippers whacked him. Again. Again. They whacked. They hurt him like salt to his wounds. And like a wound that was too painful to touch, he couldn’t remember much without retreating to the safety of knowing he could never live like the house cats again.

Doubted it. He zero/voided too often. He blanked. The blankness where his fragile self-identity broke into a thousand reflections. But he couldn’t bring himself to look at one of them, the edges singed by chiaroscuro reflections of himself going up in smoke. He was belligerent, unresponsive, or unpredictable when he was stuck inside it.

The bell rang when Leo entered Kelly Liquor Barn, fingering two dollars in his pocket. “Hey, how about I buy one beer in a five-pack? Come on. I’ve been a good customer. When all the other bums see me buying here, they buy too. Call me the Pied Piper, right?”

The Kelly clerk straightened his shoulders, then arched his eyebrows, making Leo wait while he helped other customers. The average bum couldn’t wait patiently three minutes, so Leo beat the odds, unfolding his Santa Fe New Mexican. Remember the headline: “US and Korea Escalate Nuclear Arsenal Conflict.” Coupons. Advertising. A local news story on water-rights disputes.

The subsequent story involved a cold case. A cold case? Sounded to him like a frozen-dinner package. Leo paused to glance impatiently at the store clerk, while he impatiently skimmed the newspaper. And?

He had a hard time following the text. The photo was conventional. The cold case suspect (roughly answering to Leo’s size, age, and height statistics) was a mangy white guy. Second-class citizen. Reported to have been homeless for stretches in the 1990s. He had been incarcerated in 2003. And? He escaped in 2011.

So was this news, or old news?

The next paragraph clarified that the escapee might be involved in several recent homicides. Police investigations saw signature evidence fitting a pattern. Circumstantial evidence led the police to investigate the possibility the suspect was behind the recent deaths of Lisa Marie Bennett by fisticuffs and strangulation, and the death of Marie-Jose Jaramillo by bludgeoning and strangulation. He is considered violent so the police ask that people do not approach him if they do see him.

Leaving Kelly Liquor Barn, Leo squatted on the steps, his hands still stuck in his pockets. No luck scoring a Camo. His hands slowly ungripped, and reached for the newspaper stuffed inside his armpits. Yep, he wanted to read the article again. He couldn’t say why he recorded the victims’ names, Lisa Marie Bennett, Marie-Jose Jaramillo. The suspected cold case killer’s name slipped his mind.

Leo visited the Santa Fe Interfaith Community Shelter twice a week.

The real name for the shelter was Pete’s Place, by the way. Leo visited when he needed basic necessities. He grabbed a shower. Swallowed a hot lunch. He never spent the night. Tensions lingered whenever he ran into that short guy, the in-house manager. The in-house manager, Schroeder, still shot him nervous looks. Funny, back when he was a cabbie, Leo remembered believing Santa Fe didn’t look like a town with many indigents. Santa Fe belonged to cultural sophisticates. But there were indeed a few poor places — barrios — on the outskirts of this fancy town for folks with second homes and favorite pets.

The building that housed the shelter had formerly been a pet store. Local citizens of this “cultural mecca” had shown their humanitarianism — their truly “impeccable refinement” — and converted the pet shop into storage space for humans beings.

Alley cats still called the shelter by the former pet store name, Pete’s Place. Yep, per usual, Leo got the irony.

’Cause an animal shelter was an animal shelter

Leo got Pete’s Place better than he got the designation shelter. Somebody was always ready to steal your bike, skim your small change. The guests included: Dope fiends. Alcohol fiends. Clowns with all kinds of maniac lunacy. Me. Me included. ’Cause sometimes I pull crap like the incident with Schroeder.

Needing a drink, Leo cut a path behind the Allsup’s; blankets and bottles littered the asphalt nooks. He checked the empties. No luck. Then he spotted Kasey and MaryAnn — a couple of sewer rats so addled and addicted they wore tatters — doing what alley cats do. Howling, while nursing Smirnoff vodka.

Leo thought, I could ask for a shot, or stick around, wait for them to start carping.

Soon enough, Kasey accused MaryAnn of seeing somebody.

MaryAnn spat, “You jerk.”

Leo played dumb. Okay, he added fuel to the fire, and disingenuously mentioned he thought she knew so-and-so, or he thought he’d seen her hanging at such-and-such. Misery loves company.

Alley cats drew blood.

Kasey reeled back and swung.

MaryAnn sobbed, caterwauled.

While they screamed, Leo nonchalantly fingered the bottle; snagged it; stuck it in his backpack. He didn’t see any point in wasting it. He biked away. Telling himself he needed it, he really needed extra alcohol before he entered Pete’s Place.

Planning on paying Kasey and MaryAnn back or something? You’re a sorry excuse — his bad conscience began picking at him. He biked to a marginal grassy area; he ducked low beneath a fence, sulking, hiding.

The Smirnoff vodka was hot on his tongue. Rather than making him slow down, the firewater sting encouraged him to gulp. And gulp. He accidentally dropped his Santa Fe New Mexican. Wiping it, he stained the newspaper worse. Too bad, because he wanted to reread the Santa Fe killings story. A homeless killer, huh? Leo wondered: Is he still on the streets? The next vodka shots began stinging in an unpleasant way. He flashed back to how his sores stung, his skin pores ached for weeks following the house fire. The house fire. Still can’t stand remembering it. He climbed on his bike; within minutes, nearing Pete’s Place, Schroeder’s name popped back into his mind. The in-house manager there still blamed him because his stay at the shelter had been a big unapologetic disaster. Forget about it. Screw it. Never apologize. Never apologize to them. Big Deal, he thought.

Big deal, huh. Things could be a bit easier. If at least ya stayed at the shelter. What happened?

Pete Place’s in-house manager, Schroeder, was a fidgety, slightly bowlegged little guy. His slightly condescending smile consumed his body. He dissolved into his twin-peaked lips. The bums who knew the score liked to claim he received $200,000 a year for marginally feeding the homeless. His manner was vaguely priestly, so his nickname was Saint Peter. Nightly, he welcomed the shelter rats. Meeting them at the end of the corridor, right before they entered heaven, he reminded the filthy masses that getting into Pete’s Place had protocols, rules, regulations. First of all: put your personal items, small change, keys (keys?) down here. Leo still heard his tiny, wheezing voice:

Please empty your pockets, please place your belongings in the tray.

Please turn around.

Do you have any drugs, or knives, or concealed weapons on you?

Is that everything? Your items will be returned to you after we see them.

Saint Peter explained the preliminary frisks, when challenged. Policy required it for “clients” and “residents” planning to stay overnight. Funny, when the late-night legions gathered, smelling worse than a bucket of worms, then the big iron entryway opened, and then the crowd filed inside one by one, the brightness inside the corridor making it feel like ascending into heavenly light. The bottom line remained that every night guest performed Schroeder’s instructions: Empty your pockets. Spread your arms. Hands up. Arms out. Pull up your shirt. Let’s see your waistline. Guys, let’s get this done. Saint Peter would stretch his purgatorial hands. It got done.

Leo began feeling crowded, flinching inside his clothes. He couldn’t stand Schroeder’s hands, nor the way his face appeared out of the nowhere wearing a smile so wan it self-imploded like Silly Putty. And he couldn’t sleep in the shelter bunk beds, other bums in the room. The communal bedding brought back memories of his weeks hospitalized, weeks he couldn’t stop coughing, and then nights recuperating in a motel that some medical program subsidized before he hit Pete’s Place where each evening Schroeder jangled a little metal tray. He survived. But his feelings hardened. He weathered it, bridging the gap between fear, fantasy, and the zero/void.

Don’t be a crybaby, he told himself; but he was the same Leo Malley who blanked. He was the same Leo Malley who zero/voided. The ledge creeping closer, closer. The zero/void wasn’t a place of complete unconsciousness. The zero/void was like a film watched in a stormy theater where the projector frequently jammed; sections were omitted; the final showing resembled a camera obscura viewing.

No, he told himself, less convincingly. No couldn’t stymie something from happening. The hands became snakes; tiny serpents; cinematic adversaries. He believed, maybe on a blind, tactile level, he believed on that evening that Schroeder’s fingers brushed him someplace questionable. He shoved back, shouting, “Can I get a special shower? Are you trying to pull a rabbit out of my pants or something?” He stuffed his shirttails back inside his jeans.

Personnel filed inside. “Get the cops,” somebody cried, like the way they spur dogs to sic ’em, sic ’em. In Leo’s state of mind, it looked like three-dimensional shadows and murky shapes wearing Santa Fe Interfaith Community Shelter name tags surrounded him.

He brayed, “I’m calling this bs. Where you touched me is out of line, motherfucker!” He hoped the sound waves dispersed the threatening shadows. And although he was a sad, sad, paranoid piece of work, while he zero/voided in his semiconsciousness he appreciated getting a chance to assume a chest-thumping fight stance, while he spewed “bullshit” and “faggot” right in the faces of the house cats. He spun until his energy tapped. He woke up sunken and limp, like a wrung towel; his arm hung in a blood-pressure cuff.

Schroeder insisted to the Pete’s Place personnel — “This man has to go.”

Other people argued. Vis-à-vis his medical records. A notation following the house fire. Post-traumatic stress. Stress which could lead to personal-space issues.

Schroeder shot back that he was fine with Leo applying for Social Security disability because the staff could help him with the applications; nevertheless, faggot and crude language wasn’t—

Leo lost the next few sentences. He heard a heavy, heavy sigh, a protracted pause, sensed a signature moment, and by hook, or crook, the staff let him stay. One more night. Didn’t matter anyway. His bad conscience caught up with him, Ya blew it. ’Cept if ya apologize, wrestling with his zero/void angels. He wasn’t arguing that he shouldn’t apologize. He couldn’t. He couldn’t apologize because the house fire, and the cops and the hands; the hands; the hands inside the zero/void contrived to steal his last vestiges, the vestiges of his memories. And scraps

Things got better.

Leo happened to find an abandoned trailer near the city dump. He didn’t have to worry about personal space out there, except when the cops showed up — rainbow-colored lights freaking him out because officialdom had to know who was squatting. He avoided strangers. He biked to Pete’s Place twice a week, and said, Hello, cruel, cruel world. And consumed hot snacks. And news. And newspapers. Today’s news. A premonition. Somebody was going to ask him about the headline. Lisa Marie Bennett, or Marie-Jose Jaramillo. Headline: “Killings in Santa Fe.”

Leo Malley snapped out of his reverie, back into the moment.

Pete’s Place. Big crowd. Outside: Bums shoeless, sockless. Belongings crammed in shopping carts. Inside: Alley cat heaven. Feed me. Feed us.

“No bread,” Leo sullenly told the server.

The wrinkly faced woman’s demeanor epitomized the same-old-tired-same-old. She neither had much of an individualized face nor recognized individual faces. Proof: Missus Wrinkly Face responded by staring right at him sans comprehension.

She piled his plate with extra bread.

Leo sarcastically flashed a thumbs-up.

Mrs. Wrinkly Face responded belatedly, looking peeved.

The blackboard read:

Food was memory. The good ones. The crappy ones. Hot tamales. Mashed potatoes. Vegetables assorted. Bread. Day-old bread. Chef’s salad. Lunch: a beet salad and a bologna sandwich. Funny spaghetti combinations. Spaghetti with turkey. Spaghetti with ham. Corn beef. Enchiladas. Guacamole. Chicken legs. Bisque and pork ’n’ beans. Straight out the cans. Good. Bad. Crap. A stingy church group strictly served chef’s salads. Loaves sans fishes. Bums pretended it was okay. Remember that Giggles liked to say: “Santa Fe food is mush. Santa Fe style: sweet, sour, and sordid. Try swilling it all without getting sick.” Remember the lunch when a volunteer group served filet mignon? Gotta love it. Hope springs eternal.

“Did I eat all that? Don’t remember. I suck it down,” he grumbled, when Giggles finished her recitation of past meals.

He noticed that the woman across from him at the shelter table weighed maybe three hundred pounds. Blind. Near-blind. Handicapped. Homeless. She dipped her Sloppy Joe into her chocolate ice cream, then spilled her water cup into her broccoli salad. She swallowed without hesitating.

Giggles meanwhile shuffled her bare feet in and out of her goofy slippers, her bottoms still her pink pajamas from a night spent at the shelter.

“Do I mutter? This is what I got when I said, No bread.”

“Guess she didn’t hear you,” Giggles replied, pointing at his plate. She cupped her ear. “Watcha say?” She studied his plate colors: the blues, the greens, the juices bleeding into themselves.

In Leo’s mind images flashed: blue police car lights.

“Least at the county jail they give you plates with dividers,” a particularly well-dressed man with an accent argued.

“He’s Total Texas,” Giggles shot back, pointing at his cowboy hat.

The Texan smiled, tipping it.

Leo heard an edge in her voice. Funny, sometimes. Like Giggles’s humor. Nobody knew her real name. She slept at the shelter because she somehow knew a way to keep a penknife wrapped inside her favorite blanket.

Other voices swarmed the tables: President knows what he’s doing. He’s gonna screw Korea. It’s like when two mad dogs face off. There won’t be any World War III. Tall tales. Rumors. Lost-my-car-title blues. All I regret about my last stint is that my daughter died. A stroke. I dunno. I think they might have took her out just to hurt me again. Seems they’ll do anything to hurt prisoners

Hey. My lease is up this month. The real reason I’m splitting is it’s past time to join up with cousin. My cousin? Remember. He’s in a militia in Oregon—

It’s a crock.

Listen. Not to Giggles. Giggles snarling. Is he hot shit in Texas?

Listen. He didn’t escape from prison. He escaped while he was on work detail.

Right under their noses. Part of what this manhunt is about is they’re embarrassed.

Next. Helicopters. Manhunts.

Leo remembered he still had the latest Santa Fe New Mexican. Stained: foodstuff all over the front-page photo. Greens, blues, ketchup. Colors of police sirens and, yeech, blood. He waited to hear the victims’ names. Lisa Marie Bennett. Or Marie-Jose Jaramillo. When he stood, he got up to stuff the Santa Fe New Mexican in the trash.

Red alert.

Schroeder approached. Since Leo didn’t want to engage, he split toward the exit. Bums bowed and blanketed in tableau along the walkways resembled a refugee camp. He heard rain. Storm rumblings. Nobody who changed shirts, shoes, and socks sparingly appreciated rain. The murkiness oozed lava lamp — like into the shadowless horizon. He backtracked. He spoke inexpressively to the lunch-line server: “Can I have a second plate?”

“Pardon me. Everybody gets two plates. You’ve already had your two.”

In the background he heard Giggles snapping that she wasn’t a cigarette bank. Bums and winos should scalp smokes at the Santa Fe Cigar Shop.

“This is my second plate.”

“I’ve seen you in line twice. I’ll have to ask Schroeder if we can let someone have three plates.”

“Don’t ask Schroeder nothing. Okay. Okay?”

The lunch-line lady signaled Schroeder.

Leo began walking toward the exit. Shadows filled the distance. And he knew what all the bums were thinking: How hard, how bad. Then he realized the soiled newspaper was still in his hands. He folded the paper at a point that cut the suspect’s eyes, while he lifted the garbage top.

Giggles at that precise moment asked him to see his New Mexican. “Crazy shit,” she said. “I knew her,” she added, less ambiguously, since the other headline threatened nuclear war.

“Lisa Marie Bennett?”

“No.”

Names stuck in his head. “Marie-Jose Jaramillo?”

“How’s everything going? How are we feeling?” Schroeder asked.

“No trouble here.” Giggles intuited that Leo didn’t want to answer.

Schroeder recorded infractions.

“Wait a sec. Should you be here? Didn’t I say you were on suspension?”

“That was way, way back,” Leo mumbled.

“Oh. It’s you. Leo. You’re not on suspension.”

Leo drawled his words out: “Good. Everybody talks. Nobody listens.”

“Who did you think he was?” Giggles piped in.

Schroeder was conciliatory. “I’m listening. Seriously. Where do you stay? How have you been?”

Giggles pointed at the photo in the Santa Fe New Mexican. “That guy who broke loose?”

“The killer. He’ll do it again. Sometime.” Schroeder smiled, shrugged. Befuddled.

Leo thought: Gimme. And snatched the newspaper away. “I gotta use it for toilet paper.” He tossed his hand like a salt pinch over his shoulder. He reread the section that stated the cops had reasons to believe—

Faces: while reading he saw prematurely wrinkled faces — faces regardless of chronological ages withered inside balls of flesh to the point that physical ailments and psychological tics appeared interchangeably sourceless. The bad skin. The cracked stare. Stringy, scraggly, silvery hair camouflaging a profile. Looks like me, sure. Photo looked like every white homeless guy who badly needed a shave.

He thought: Me. Him. Just like the lady got me confused with somebody else. He finger-drummed the newspaper photo. Wondered about it. Wouldn’t I be a wonder boy with a mirror and a comb?

Been too long. Been too long.

Think happy thoughts. Flowers. Pastels. Big blooms. Day that me and Giggles panhandled. Giggles had the idea that selling some trinkets would be sweetest; when she returned thirty minutes later she pushed a shopping cart full of floral arrangements.

Q: How in the hell did she get them? The blooms?

A: Giggles — she of course giggled her rejoinder — rummaged the bins where they dumped the flowers after burying the stiffs.

That’s bs.

Nope. Cute, right? Or irony. Or irony?

He had to pee. And shit. Port-o-lets outside. He wrested the handle. Oh, there she was, Giggles sat on the Port-o-let toilet hole, shooting up.

Before leaving, he remembered images, sounds, sensations from his hours at Pete’s Place: Giggles shooting up on the toilet; heat, heat on his tongue; the storm raising up New Mexico dust; a woman crying, crying that she’d lost everything. Crying until he couldn’t take it anymore. Crying until her sobs blurred with the rain: a perfect musical accompaniment. Rain, after all, was the sound of disappointment.

He waited too long before he started biking back to the trailer. His mistake was uncapping the Smirnoff. That vodka burned a hole in his shoes, worse than the holes in his memory. He finally began pedaling, pedaling harder, like he believed his velocity could retrieve the hours lost. A big downpour whistled his way. It surreptitiously caught him — he couldn’t say by surprise given that he had taken a measured risk. Say: It hit. Like a feint. Like a fist. It sang its refrain of—

Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment.

His disappointment with himself, his bottle, or Giggles, her needle. He veered into the parking lot at Santa Fe Place mall, hung around beneath the walkway awnings, watching the storm transforming Southside Santa Fe into a vacant window. Picturing his “home” leaking. New leaks every big storm. Picturing Giggles’s habit. He preferred not having to see it. He still imagined he could “get with” her. He suffered stupid dreams like that involving the few women (scratch, last human beings) he regularly communicated with.

Hey Leo. Paupers. Addicts. Lost souls. Ain’t they your people?

Yeah. Alley cats were his people. The problem remained. The answers lay wrapped inside nuances as subtle as the rain — and hushed voices — because Leo rarely heard simple answers without hearing the contrariness wrapped inside them. The problem remained that his people stank. They couldn’t help it. They stank perennially. It was bearable by himself, or maybe with two or three tired, woozy, and drunken others. But when they were crowded together in shelter spaces like at Pete’s Place, the stink escalated beyond nausea. Rain, sludge, and rot worsened it.

They stank. They raged.

They raged because they’d been kicked out of homes; kicked out of apartments; kicked out of overpriced Motel 6s. They raged because they’d gone too long feeling threatened, solitary, going hungry, and then when they collected nickels and dimes they were still obstinately criticized; still hassled by business owners who controlled where they could and couldn’t sit or sleep, and if they stuck around they got cuffed by the cops. They raged because at the shelter — in lieu of housing assistance, or small sums — they were given clothes, lots of hand-me-down coats, shawls, slacks; hey, somebody found a silk shirt inside the Pete’s Place clothes donation closet. Then without other assistance they were told to do something — get a life — get a job — but the miscellany was invariably soiled; the personnel had forgotten how little good a new shirt had done them pursuing their own dreams.

Identify the strains: multiple, or simultaneous, voices of sympathy, cynicism and irony. Like listening to the counselors at Pete’s Place proposing plans, services, options. They spoke with voices within voices — like suspiciously multivoiced instruments — and as you listened you repeatedly heard the words forms, applications, time lines, like sticks and stones battering within the windiness of storm and possibility. Chance, really. Listen, listen to contrapuntal rain voices: lullaby and lament told you what you should expect. Personal embarrassment. Failure. Grief.

Before he hit the road, he remembered. He unzipped his backpack. He pulled out a plastic throw-over. Remember where you got that parka? From the clothes closet at Pete’s Place? That ain’t helped you none, Mr. Prick? The point remained that the counselors at Pete’s couldn’t acknowledge the futility of goddamn everything. Homeless cats already with nothin’ should expect no less than...

Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment.

Traffic began looking scary, so he set his teeth to the wind, and he couldn’t stop when the Santa Fe New Mexican in his pocket billowed; the pages separated hitting the ground. He briefly tendered the thought of retrieving them as they tumbled windily away. He didn’t need them to prove his point. The social workers dealt with facsimiles. Pitying the homeless. The mental illnesses. The addictions. The self-destructive behaviors. Nobody hoped to name the fuel to the fire. Rage. Homeless killer. Big deal. The real deal was homelessness, helplessness, and rage. He skidded.

He stymied the worst that could happen by flinging his foot down like an anchor. Thinking hurt. Thoughts like these exhausted him. Damn. If the homeless rage ever cut loose, could be a bloodbath. He muckily regrouped. But before he wobbled less than a mile — like a pilot in the mountains regaining his perspective above the view — he slipped again. The difficulty was partially the darkness, partially the rage that consumed him, past exhaustion. He lay watching his bike wheel spin, water filling his socks. He didn’t recognize the first street sign: the second: the area: the neighborhood. Details missed the mark. He had no idea how long he had been oblivious, or biking the wrong way.

Damn residential neighborhoods.

Never been a problem in the past. He had the knack; he could fall asleep anywhere.

He huddled inside a stark alley facing a wall mural; winged angels; horny devils; a knight hoisting a sword; he couldn’t tell for the life of him whether the mural was religious, facetious, or pornographic. So, the psycho had been homeless, huh, Leo’s last thought, before blankness. He startled awake. He reconsidered: never lie down beneath angels and demons.

Spanish music wafted in the dark. Realized he was in the barrio somewhere. What happened? Rage wouldn’t answer. He wasn’t sure how he had ended up lost in the city where he used to hustle rides. He dreamed he was a taxi man again. The car radio kept playing the same song, “Fire and Rain,” over and over. And wasn’t this an irony? He’d been trapped in a house fire — how long ago now? — and since then he lived mostly in a leaky trailer. Get it? Oh, I’ve seen fire / And I’ve seen rain. And fire. And rain.

Bugs. Creepy crawlers sidled his clothes; his skin pores had begun itching like a virus spread over him. He shuffled, slow as Sisyphus. His rock was homelessness, drunkenness, rage; they dissipated; they left behind lethargy. He walked his bike across the street to the less residential area. Fast food palaces, convenience stores, and garbage dumpsters promised safety. He stumbled on a metal post. Past nights, he might have tied a string between the drive-in sign and his bike, so that somebody approaching with bad intentions carelessly tripped up. He was too tired, so he curled up. Worming, so to speak, becoming wormier, wormier, until he reached a place colder in his bones than his wet clothes. Then Giggles appeared, her apparition. An avatar. She pulled up her sleeve. He expected to see her needle marks; but instead she kept haranguing, Something is wrong, Leo. Wake up, Leo. Something is really, really wrong; and, at first, he wasn’t sure whether he was hallucinating when a Honda pulled directly across from him; headlights illuminating the interior faces; a woman in the passenger seat screamed.

Bright lights. An open mouth. A flash of tongue. A smear of red lipstick. A scream.

Leo’s mind rehearsed the elements before he rearranged them into patterns. From this point on, he could barely distinguish what he saw or heard. In the place where he went sounds became pictures; pictures screamed and choked.

Screams became unfathomable distances.

Followed by a tall, trampish man distinguished by a hairy mane who vaguely resembled Leo — ten years past — a woman scrambled from the beige car.

The objects described in the headlines. Did he see them? Or hear them? The blunt instruments. The knife. A broken shoe skittered across the sidewalk. Did he see it? Did the sounds create the pictures? Or the images redouble the sounds?

The woman lay strewn; the man had begun kicking her. The darkness leavened nearest the dead, dying, or damaged body.

Leo must have looked once. Or twice. Long enough to see the killer pull a set of cable wires. Darted a glance long enough to know not to look in that direction again.

Like a nightmare. Seventy-five percent of Americans have nightmares in bed. This guy Leo Malley can have ’em anywhere.

Terror. Moans. Silence. He had heard Spanish music all night. Then suddenly silence descended like a knife, and the aftermath was a dissipated revel. A beat party scene. Dreams were fragmented. His worst bad dreams invariably repeated. He relived them twice over, so he waited for the violence he had witnessed to replay. Distance, perspective, and contingent reality kept going. The forward-moving clock hands kept going. Like the Honda, riding on the brakes, rolling slowly, slowly away.

He climbed on his bike. He followed, pretending to be someplace else. Anyplace else. Pretending he was panhandling roses. And he made seventy-five cents. And Giggles made eight bucks. And he made three bucks. And Giggles made $23.68. And he scored forty-one dollars. Get real. He never scored forty-one dollars. He washed out. Giggles maxed out at sixty-five bucks. Leo Malley sold two roses. Net earnings. Net economic worth: $3.85. Wake up, Leo, he thought. The neighborhood was like a great big room that he could close his eyes inside, believing, with ease, all his problems, his helplessness, his homelessness, was stuff he could straighten out in the morning. The Honda rumbled, paused, swerved.

It swerved into the dead-end alley, wriggled, like a snake entering a hole. Leo paused at the very tip of the turning place, remembering the alley was blind. “I ain’t gonna look,” he muttered, like the moment in a dream when you promise yourself you won’t look. You won’t descend the staircase. You won’t enter the cellar. You won’t risk turning the corner. Nobody keeps the promise.

Nobody.

He saw the killer in tableau beneath the mural phantasmagoria.

He’s bigger than me, Leo thought, studying him from the back. He’s got a decade on me. Stands straighter than me. He’s a big mossy tree. There was a mantra Leo used in past times when he needed to steel his nerves. There were times on the streets when the fear maximized: fear of strangers and gangs, fear of cops and business owners. His mantra was, Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. And occasionally varying Fuck with self-deprecations. Leo Malley, white trash, $3.85 man. Then varying those with raw epithets. Bitch. Wets. Cunts. Niggers. Fuck. Fuck. Bitch. Wets. Cunts. Niggers. Bitch. Wets. Cunts. Niggers. It wasn’t a particularly noble mantra. Shameless. He couldn’t mean the killer. Or why couldn’t he? The fact that they were both white guys sharpened the edge. The repetition over and over in his head convinced him he was colder, less human, less vulnerable — since he was a crestfallen white guy, maybe he liked that type of language. He wasn’t even sure whether he directed the disgusting epithets at himself. A distinct zip added insult to injury. A fly unzippering. He heard a sharp zip and a plunky trickle. The instant he heard the killer pissing, Leo picked up his bike. He charged.

He slammed the big mossy tree against the mural.

And slammed.

The big mossy tree crumpled.

The fallen big mossy tree moaned, weakly writhing on the ground. This way, that way, looking for anything, Leo recognized the habits of a compulsive hoarder. The Honda was crammed with bags, clothes, detritus. Leo began rummaging. Pulling stuff out of bags. Disgorging the automobile. A handful of objects he grazed inside the Honda were bloodstained. Clothes. Socks. Toolkits. Hammers. Rivets. Pipes. Gloves. Cable ties. Cable ties provided a way to bind the suspect’s hands and feet. Get outta here, fast, faster. He realized his bicycle spokes were crushed anyway. He paused long enough to loop new knots, like a child playing Cat’s Cradle. He redoubled the cords, finished the job, beginning to see the angels and demonic imagery — the derelict presences — on the mural wall were living, sentient, huh, realizing he was hallucinating, or spinning, confusing past, present, and future Armageddons, or he had been zero/voiding since this morning, Lord knows since when.

Yep, he always told Giggles, I get irony. The irony that he had not gone looking for the cops since he was nine years old. The irony that he left the killer tied up beneath satanic devils; yet the minute he left the scene he believed he stepped inside illustrated phantasmagorias: looking for the blue-capped creatures that frightened him no less than angels and devils.

Nuclear war? Naw. Funny, though, the long and the short of it is. Armageddon. Has. Come.

His tongue raw in his mouth, his mouth bruised. And where am I? And how come my arms hang bloodless? My wrists sting, like I’m handcuffed? How much time has passed? None. Hours. Think back: think back to leaving the dead-end alley. Nearly sleepwalking. Nearing familiar Santa Fe, he laid the bicycle down. The bike frame was broken, bent at a sharp angle; the spokes network mangled. He leaned on the spokes with his elbows. The spokes softly pinged, pinged, while he pressured them back into alignment. He still couldn’t walk the bicycle much faster.

He had something to tell the cops. Damn straight. He had already begun disbelieving it. The story was factual: the imagery coloring his thoughts was semifactitious. But he seized phrases, Dead body. Hope she isn’t dead, then, The killer is in the alley. A flashlight sprung on him, like a sword drawn slantways from the scabbard. At first, in his head, he heard the ping ping, like a Pavlovian bell. Then he heard Reginald Prescott. Prescott was one of the policemen who occasionally visited the city dump. Step away from the curb.

“Oh, you,” Prescott said. He sounded disappointed, gesturing Leo away from the bike. Same guy that dropped by Leo’s campsite. Per usual, Prescott wouldn’t leave till he nudged the hibernating bear. “Had to be sure. You look like him. Go home. What am I saying — home? Say something.”

Before Leo finished answering, Prescott interrupted: “Something I should know about? What happened to your bicycle? Go back to the dump. The trash can, where you stay. Like Oscar the Grouch.”

Leo paid less and less attention to Prescott, barely listening — even when the man snickered — because when he tilted his head a certain way he heard ping ping; the sound when he slammed the bicycle; the sound when he laid the bicycle flat. Ping ping, like a triggering bell.

I don’t look like him so much, up close. And he’s down. And the ping ping sound was right after the killer hit the wall. That’s where I recognized the sound. I kinda think I know where he’s tied up. Need help. Need help retracing my steps. It got scary right afterward when them pictures on the mural started moving, looked like they was moving, lucky I tied him down. Leo believed he sensibly appended the right details; maybe he unspun the whole fucking story, like unwinding a ball of thread. Or maybe not.

Prescott frowned, gawked, and pursed his lips like an administrator. Looking vexed, he raised his palm, spat, then looked away. “Lotta nerve. Lotta nerve, Leo—”

“It’s none of your business when we’re gonna catch him. You got a lot of nerve asking me all of this. And you already see there’s a police sweep in progress.”

Prescott glanced at Leo reprovingly. “But maybe that’s none of your business neither. Don’t insult police work again.” He began nodding his head stupidly, and he wouldn’t leave until Leo copycatted the gesture, and began wagging in agreement. “Comprende? No comprende? Scram.”

A police sweep? An unusually high number of police vehicles on the street? Definitely. Roadblocks. Cops checking civilian vans. Leo approached; red and blue lights spinning like shadowy genies escaping a million bottles.

“Sir. You have obviously been drinking. You either go someplace and have a coffee or I’m going to have to pull you in. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

An officer looking up from another driver’s license inspection, “Sir! Is there something that you want? Need?” Leo got scared, stumbled away.

Slouching to his knees, too enervated to bother himself over the consequences, he stationed himself at the doorstep of the only diner left open this hour. Three police cars meanwhile ran up and down the Cerrillos neighborhood. Lotta cops in the wrong location, Leo mused, so drowsily that the thought mattered less than that the patrons entering and exiting Denny’s politely sidestepped him. First piece of luck all day. He had raged all day long. Raged when he read the Santa Fe New Mexican. Raged when he read about the killer. Raged when he repeated his mantra. Raged until he couldn’t — he had to let the bile seep out of him. Couldn’t do anything about killers. They strike. They strike again. Killers kill. Drinkers drink. Just fall asleep here. ’Cause least people have the courtesy to sidestep me. Two of ’em. Blue devils. “It’s the fucking level of unprofessionalism,” one complained, entering Denny’s.

The other cop stopped, tapped his shoe. “This is not the place to sleep.”

A black cop gazed down at him. “Especially not tonight.” He sounded like he had something special in mind. “Get it? You must have noticed the sweep? Have you seen anything unusual?”

Say: I tackled the killer. And I tried to tell ya fellow officers. Can’t talk with all the bullhorns and sirens.

Say: And I feel ashamed looking at ya, officer. I don’t want to tell ya the crazy thoughts I was thinking.

He prattled, maybe he sounded like a baby with stones in his mouth, maybe he raised his voice when he sounded slurpy in his own ears. He couldn’t stop himself, still blathering while the shoes disappeared, seconds gone.

Leaving Leo babbling to thin air. Huh? The black cop returned. He held several pamphlets. The first pamphlets in the stack ubiquitously read, Help for the needy, or, Social Resources. The next set extolled church and Christianity with titles like, The Lord Provides. The black cop insisted, “Get off the street,” intended in a different sort of way than the others.

Thanks. Thanks for your concern. Thanks for Jesus. Presences nudged him left, then right. Gently rocking waves, leading him, leading him along until the thought broke through: Rage. I just got rage. But I ain’t him. Me. Him. Me. Him. Nothing else matters. But at least the killer wasn’t me. They might not know that. They gotta understand it wasn’t me.

Leo lumbered directly toward the blue, the red lights, converging at the street meridian. Everything shape-shifted. Cops, human figures emerged from the bulbous glow. A cop car tapped him, swinging open; he kicked back, like an emotional yo-yo.

The angriest cop, billy club in hand, stepped out of his car, still fuming, before he swung into Leo’s mouth and belly like he was swinging a golf club.

And where was he? And who was speaking? Leo moaned lying facedown, handcuffed, pretty much welcoming the zero/void. Officer Prescott at last had something significant to say — “Let’s drop the assaulting-an-officer charge, okay? Can you speed up, please? He’s about to get sick back there.”

The other cop in the front seat grumbled, hearing Leo retching up.

Prescott turned to the backseat and grumbled, “Damn, Leo. Sorry about this. Sorry this happened. But we’re jittery tonight. You better sleep it off in the cell. We’re looking for a real killer out here.”

Officer Prescott may have been right. Maybe the county jail was the place to recover. The rainstorm was a precursor to two days of somber weather. Leo spent his brief jail stint lulled by the pitter-patter, sleeping in a warm, dry place, listening to the rain without hearing the old refrain: Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment.

He didn’t bother pleading his case; his stomach panged. When he signed his release papers on the third day (guess the cops really had dropped the assaulting-an-officer charges), the jail officials at the desk handed him a list of fees and sums he owed the county — fees he would have to pay before he could have his bike returned. He thumbed a ride “home.”

He recognized within a few hours that he was still sick. The hurt sustained layers down; down in the pit of his stomach where the billy club sucker-punched him. He took to his natty cot. Lying hours face upward. Dieted on bottled water and canned tuna. Nothing else left at the trailer. Not even a Camo.

He dreamed the same scenes, over and over. He revisited the house fire, less hysterically, in particular the moment which he usually couldn’t stand revisiting when he put his hands over his eyes and (pretty bravely) leaped through the blazing door. He really did it. The dream paired with imagery of the killer? But had that really happened? Pictures of binding/rebinding the Santa Fe killer but good. Brave, too, he supposed, assuming the imagery was real.

It wasn’t worth believing in it. It wasn’t worth revisiting his zero/voids. Leo Malley. $3.85 man. It sort of wasn’t worth believing in himself.

He dreamed he told Giggles the whole story, before she collapsed into giggles. Or congealed like a pillar of salt. In any case, in his memorable moments, seconds, split seconds, he remembered his mantra, Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Racial epithet. Racial epithet. And, rolling over, feeling self-disgust, he realized none of it could have happened anyway.

The next morning, he felt strong enough to hitchhike. Hey Giggles, hey Paula at Wendy’s, starting to miss me yet? Who misses me?

Making his way into Santa Fe, he was halfway to the interior. A newspaper bin. Lo, behold. Sure, he prevaricated when he told Paula and Connie at Wendy’s that he had gotten into a fight, sort of the truth. Connie slipped him a coffee and a Santa Fe New Mexican.

“We don’t really know what happened,” read the official quote.

Leo thought: Who? How? Where?

The police detective hypothesized, “Maybe he had a partner. Maybe they had an argument; something led to a falling out. But who knows? Maybe there’s a civilian hero out there.”

So, Leo liked the sound of it, The police detective, and the phrase played in his mind, The police detective, The homeless detective, The police detective, The homeless detective, The homeless crime solver, like he was a house cat in an office with Private Eye on his door tag. His secret weapon was — Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Racial epithet. Racial epithet. What kind of crime solver am I? What kind of human being am I? What kind of human being am I not? He felt doubtful. He felt awkward. Ha, maybe I shouldn’t feel so scummy. ’Cause it worked, and the killer was a white guy, anyway. He felt unheroic.

That night, back in his trailer, he zero/voided, and as the sickness, the strangeness, and the surreptitiousness of it all caught up with him, Leo Malley began laughing, laughter that pierced the dark, laughter that resembled breaking into midnight song. Disbelief ceded to astonishment. Astonishment ceded to ridiculousness. Lucky that he was going to be okay, by the sardonic laws of the heroic survival of the alcoholic fitless. Very, very lucky that his best gal at Wendy’s slipped him twenty bucks. Lying bedded, he opened his palm in the darkness, and deftly unhooked a painkiller from his five-pack. The popped can went psssst. Camo beer. Camo beer.

Sos Sex by Hida Viloria

Casa Alegre

The place is silent as I walk through the open barbed-wire gate, down the driveway toward the new-looking Big Wheel I’ve seen sitting, unmoved, at least a dozen times from the safety of my passing car. It, and the toys beside it, seem like they were dropped by playing children unaware that they would never be returning to put them away. Or by someone who wanted to give the impression that kids live in the house. After weeks of watching it during daylight hours I’d still never seen any sign of kids. Or of anyone, for that matter.

I step as quickly and quietly as possible toward the back of the property. I made sure to park my car down the block, out of sight of the house, in case they have surveillance cameras. I’d also put on the long blond wig I bought as a disguise a few blocks before turning down the street and parking.

I’m 5'3" and skinny, which makes me little by American guy standards. I figure between that and the wig, as long as I keep my head down I’ll look like a long-haired white guy (instead of a Latino guy with a short black fade) or possibly even a white girl. Which is good because if what I think is going on here really is, I definitely don’t want the sick fuckers knowing who I am.

It all started with Erica. Well, to be fair, it was winter that started me down this path. I’d been looking for an escape from the lethargy that had descended upon me with the falling of the leaves. My motivation, my very life force, seemed buried, like the earth, and I’d sunken so deep into my subconscious that speaking to anyone other than my dog had become difficult.

Somehow driving made it better. It made me feel like I was going somewhere. Even though I was literally just spinning in circles, needlessly burning precious fossil fuels like a fucking moron.

Every morning I woke up to the Santa Fe sunshine and another promise of productivity. I had my morning coffee and toke to motivate the mind, and then whipped out the ol’ laptop. Hell, sometimes I’d even bring it with me somewhere to make me feel like I was really working.

Most Monday mornings I’d end up at Betterday Coffee, the closest café to me. I’d plant myself with my laptop, notebook, breakfast burrito, and visions of lining up a week’s worth of work. Over the years, I’d inadvertently learned enough carpentry to convince people I knew shit. That, along with my Dartmouth degree and my small size — ideal for getting into tight crawl spaces — had made it easy for me to find a steady flow of fairly well-paying work as a property appraiser.

It’s not the worst job in the world, but it’s nothing to write home about either, and it slows down drastically in the winter. So I often found myself distracted by one of my online addictions or the clientele. The Betterday crowd typically consisted of a surprising number of ethnically diverse, model-looking millennials among mostly retired, white, former hippies. Young and old, modern meets rustic — like Brooklyn hipsters practicing animal husbandry.

About a month ago, I was there hoping to feel inspired about follow-up e-mails and scheduling, but found myself immersed, instead, in real estate listings. They’re one of my aforementioned online addictions, along with camper vans and tiny houses. That day’s distraction: a reasonably priced three-bedroom, two bath on Hopi Road, with an open house.

I love open house days in Santa Fe because it’s easy to hit a bunch of them. The city’s actually not that small geographically speaking, clocking in around the same size as Manhattan, the stomping ground of my twenties and early thirties, but its population is tiny by comparison — just.12 percent of Manhattan’s 1.66 million.

What you lose in anonymity you gain in the ability to get anywhere you want to go in twenty minutes or less.

The lack of traffic and gigantic sky had lured me back to the City Different six months ago. Five months later I met Erica at the Tuesday afternoon open house on Hopi Road.

I wasn’t really interested in buying the house — didn’t even have the money yet — but I was interested in her the moment I saw her. She was the definition of svelte in tight black Prince-style pants that flared a bit at the bottom and a black, semi-see-through lace top that showed off her long, lean figure. Her face resembled what a pretty female Cheshire cat might look like, with a wide smile, mischievous to the point of making one momentarily wary.

It was her sharp green eyes that most intrigued me. When she fixed them on me I got the strong impression she knew things. Mysterious things that evade most folks’ perception.

I sensed this for a second and then it was gone, replaced by real estate banter. How long the place had been listed, what the owners were hoping to get for it, why it hadn’t sold yet. That one was easy enough to answer. The layout was bizarre, including a grand staircase leading to a basement (a rarity in the Southwest), with two tiny, windowless rooms entirely carpeted from floor to ceiling.

Outside, there were decks off the dining room and master bedroom, but they were both covered with thin, worn Astroturf. The yard was barren, with a very well-secured dog run in one corner — and, in the other, a concrete storage shed so short it looked like it had been made for little people. The padlock on the door was unlocked so Erica and I peered in. It was empty, and just tall enough to sit up or crawl around in.

“Guess that’s the gnome hovel,” I said to Erica, and she laughed.

We agreed it was weird and started to walk away when the graffiti visible directly above the shed, painted on the concrete wall of the taller shed on the neighbors’ side of the fence, caught my eye. I walked back to make out the lettering.

SOS, it said, then below it, Sex and ME_ _. I couldn’t make out the last two letters.

Whaaat?

“Oh my god, why does it say SOS and Sex on there?” I asked, no longer laughing. “That’s so creepy! Do you think somebody was trying to let someone know about what was going on inside that shed?”

“Or the shed its spray-painted on?” Erica added.

I stepped on a rock to peer over the fence. There were two more sheds toward the other end of the neighbors’ yard that looked like small houses, except the windows were all barred up and the doors were chained shut with thick padlocks. The shed directly in front of me, with the graffiti on it, had a small window facing me that had been barred up with some kind of industrial metal grate. As I looked closer, I could see a dim light on inside behind the ratty curtain covering the window.

I dropped down quickly, a cold sensation suddenly running through my body. I’d been too afraid to scooch up higher to get a better look inside that window. Too afraid of what I might see. Or of getting seen by whoever was involved with whatever was going on back there.

I described it all to Erica and we were so freaked out that we hightailed it out of there. Then, with her following me, we drove around the block to get a look at the house on the other side of the fence. Unlike the quaint red-brown stucco houses on the block, with their nicely manicured or overgrown desert yards, this one was a newer manufactured model placed on a concrete covered front “yard” surrounded by an unusually tall chain-link fence with a big Beware of Dog sign mounted on it.

Oddly, given the sign, the gate to the driveway was wide open, and children’s toys were strewn carelessly in front of the garage at the end of it. The storage sheds I’d just seen were completely obstructed from view by the house and garage.

Something about it seemed off, just like the house behind it. Enough that we decided to report it to the police upon parting ways. They’d called us each back to report that everything seemed fine. They’d gone over and spoken with the next-door neighbors, who’d said an elderly couple lived in the house and they’d never noticed anything unusual.

“Fine my ass,” I’d said to Erica over a Manhattan at Tonic a few days later.

“Yeah, I guess we knew they weren’t going to be able to go in there without a warrant or anything.” She tucked her hair behind her ear.

“I know, but I’m still glad we called it in. Maybe if something else happens it’ll give them enough to check it out. Honestly, maybe it’s just me, but I got a really bad feeling from that place.”

“Me too,” Erica said, “and actually, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to freak you out even more that day, but there was this house my company listed a few months ago, a foreclosure on Camino Monica...”

“...a total fixer in Barrio la Canada, like three months ago? I remember that one.”

“Yeah, that was it — when my coworkers first went to see it, they found all this weird, creepy shit in the basement. They showed me pictures they took.”

“Another basement?”

“Right? And there was stuff spray-painted on the bedroom walls, like, Satan Lives Here, and a picture of a scary face saying, God can’t hear you crying. And it gets worse...” She paused for a second. “In that basement, there were a bunch of old metal cots with handcuffs on them. Like they’d been keeping people locked up down there. It was horrible.”

I felt my stomach drop the same way it had when I’d heard a news report about a sex-trafficking bust in Albuquerque. Apparently they’d found a bunch of mostly Native American preteen girls locked up in dog cages in various Motel 6 rooms. They’d been sold who knows how many times a day for sex before the bust.

It’s something most people I know don’t think about, or like to think about, but it happens everywhere. Sex trafficking is one of the largest growing “industries” in the world, and Native women make up about 40 percent of the victims despite being just a fraction of the population. I know all this because my own mother’s twin sister, my Aunt Lupita, was kidnapped when they were ten and never seen again.

Their parents, my grandparents, had immigrated recently from Chile and were working heavy hours, so the girls had gone to the park one afternoon together, unsupervised. Lupita never returned after heading off to the public restroom.

The authorities suspected sex trafficking, and told my grandparents as much, so I’d grown up hearing about it. Hearing my mother’s fearful warnings to my little sister about “bad men,” and never going places by herself. I, in turn, was assigned her chaperone and told to protect her.

Despite all that, my awareness of this dark side of existence had, for the most part, faded conveniently into the background once I’d gotten out into the world on my own. Until now.

“Holy fucking shit,” I said, “it sounds like the house was being used for sex trafficking. That shit is real.”

I told her about the recent bust in Albuquerque, and my Aunt Lupita, as we gulped down the rest of our Manhattans. We talked about how fucked up it is that this shit goes on everywhere, right under people’s noses, because people want to believe it’s not happening. But even gleaming, tech-wealthy San Francisco is known to be one of the biggest sex-trafficking hubs in the world.

“Well, if the cops won’t do anything, I guess I’m just gonna have to scope it out myself,” I said to Erica before calling it a night.

Which is why I’m sneaking down this driveway right now after a couple of weeks of driving by at different hours, on the lookout for anything I can use to get the cops to go over there again.

I make it past the toys and around to the back of the house, out of view from the street. I take a second to catch my breath. I wait another to see if anyone has noticed my trespassing.

The house feels deserted. There’s no sounds at all other than the singing of the birds in the trees. So I turn to the sheds in the backyard. The first in my line of sight are the two that look like little houses.

I head over to the first, stand by the front door as silently as humanly possible, and lean my ear in to listen for sounds of human life. Nothing. So I walk around to the side and try to peer in the window, but I can’t see a thing behind the thick dark cloth on the other side.

I repeat my motions with the second shed, with the same results. This leaves only the concrete shed in the back corner. The one that had the light on inside.

I don’t scare easily but I’m aware of my heart racing and pounding in my chest as I approach it. I stop for a second and reconsider. I’ve come this far unspotted, unhurt, and, most importantly, un-traumatized. Maybe I should cut my losses and leave now.

But I keep seeing SOS Sex in my mind. The place those words were scrawled on is right in front of me, and it might’ve just been teenagers being stupid, but it might not. I have to find out, because if it’s as bad as I suspect it might be, I need to do something.

I walk over toward the concrete shed. It’s about six feet by eight feet and there are no visible windows from this side except a small one in the rusty metal door. I walk over to the door and stop. I steady myself and wait for several minutes, listening intently. I remember that I might want a picture of what I see, and take my cell phone out of my pocket to be ready. Then I take a very deep breath, turn to face the window, and I look in.

The light’s still on but it’s dim and the window is dirty so it’s a hard to make out anything at first. As my eyes begin adjusting, I see a small wooden chair next to a plastic folding table covered with alcohol bottles and other crap, and across from them: a metal cot.

My heart skips a beat. I quickly look away and glance around me to make sure no one’s there. I look over the fence at the house for sale on the other side. No one. I pull up camera mode on my phone and look back in.

The cot has a thin mattress and old pillow on it, and wait... there’s something hanging from the metal frame. I squint, forcing my eyes to adjust further to make out the shape. It’s a pair of handcuffs.

Holy shit.

I start backing away from the door reflexively but remember that I should take a picture to show the cops. I head reluctantly back to the door, point, zoom, press, then make for the back of the house without checking to make sure it came out okay.

I stop for a second to catch my breath before heading back down the driveway to the sidewalk. I look at the picture. You can’t see them at first but when I zoom it in there they are: handcuffs on a metal cot.

I make it to my car and drive away, heart still racing. I don’t know what feels weirder: what I saw, or the fact that it was right there, in this cute family-friendly neighborhood named, ironically, Casa Alegre. The minute I’m out of there, on Agua Fria, I pull over, take off the wig, and call Erica.

“Do you think we’ve stumbled upon some sick sex ring run by the same people at the house in Barrio la Canada?” I ask her over a sunset margarita at La Choza that night.

“Well,” she nods, “they certainly have some similarities.”

I drink enough to ensure that my head is spinning for some reason other than my messed-up discovery and the thoughts it has elicited, and Erica drives me home. Next day I wake up earlier than usual, as often happens when I’ve gone to bed piss drunk. The sun’s just started rising but I take a Lyft over to my car.

I turn it on and find myself instinctively driving back to Casa Alegre. I’ve never driven by this early, I realize. I might see something new. I turn onto the street and park a few doors down, with a good view of the house.

I light up a cigarette to buffer me from this seediness, and have just exhaled my first disgusting six a.m. drag when I see a black Escalade with tinted windows pull into the house’s driveway. I slide down my seat a bit. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen any activity at the place.

The driver, a man, and the passenger, a woman, get out and head straight to the backyard with their heads down before I can get a good look at them. I suck my cigarette down in record time, sitting here wondering what’s going on. I see them heading out carrying heavy-looking duffel bags as I’m about to snub it out. The woman drops hers when she opens the car door. There’s a sound of clunking metal.

“Fuck!” I hear her mutter as she bends over to pick up the bag.

She leans out away from the car for a moment and I notice that she’s sporting the longest French braid I’ve ever seen. It’s so thick and long that it looks like a horse’s tail, or mane, if it were braided, and the hair’s laced with so much gray that it looks dusty. The woman’s skin is aged and caramel-colored and her wrinkle-bordered eyes are dark brown and round.

She looks like a horse, I think. A mean, old, weathered horse.

Just then I feel my phone vibrate. I slink down farther into my seat to take a look. It’s my mother.

The horse woman closes her door and the car backs out immediately and speeds down the block. I answer the phone.

“You should see my garden, Marcos, it’s beautiful,” my mother launches in.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m still half asleep or because this kind of stuff, sadly, makes me think of her, but I tell her the whole story. At some point midway it hits me.

“Fuck, I didn’t get a picture of the license plate number!” I yell into the phone, “Damn it!”

“That’s fine, Marcos, it’s okay, don’t worry,” my mother reassures me. “You shouldn’t get this involved in all this stuff anyway. These are probably very bad people, and Santa Fe is a small city.”

The Escalade is long gone by the time I get to the part about the horse woman, and when I do I hear her gasp a little on the other end.

“A long French braid?” she asks, sounding startled.

“Yeah, like really, unusually long. Why?”

“There was a girl that went to school with my sister and me who everyone thought was weird,” my mom begins. “She almost never spoke and she looked nervous or sad most of the time. After my sister had been missing for a while and it looked like she might not be coming back, the school held a service for her, and the girl came with her mother.

“At some point I broke down sobbing, and when I looked up, her mother was staring right at me. You’d think she’d look sad or concerned or something, but no. It was the weirdest look on her face and I never forgot it — or her — because she had the longest French braid I’d ever seen.”

“Oh my God. Are you saying you think—”

“I don’t think,” my mother cuts me off, “I know: that woman has to be one of the monsters who kidnapped my sister.”

She hangs up before I can respond. I try back and it just rings. I leave her a message to call me back and drive home. When I get there I try her again and it goes straight to voice mail.

“Hello?” Erica answers, sounding a little sleepy.

“I’m so sorry to bother you but you’re not going to believe this.”

I relay the events quickly.

“So I’m worried about my mom,” I say, wrapping it up. “She’s not calling me back. I’m gonna head over to her place.”

“Okay, but wait, wait — I may know something about how to find the woman with the French braid.”

“What? How?”

“I remember an ex of mine from years ago and his buddies joking around about a woman they knew from work and, I think, if I’m remembering correctly, it had something to do with her having a French braid...”

“Oh my God, try to remember!”

“They used to joke about her braid being so long and thick that she used it to auto-erotically asphyxiate the men she slept with.”

“Where did they work? Do you remember?”

“Fuck!” Erica shouts. “I can’t! But I think I can get ahold of my ex and I bet he would remember.”

“Okay, awesome, thanks. I’ll check in with you later,” I say. I pull onto my mom’s block.

She’s not home and I bet I know just where she is: looking for the horse woman. She’d been saying to my sister and me for years, once we were grown and out of the house, that if she ever found el puta madre que me quitó a mi hermana, she’d rip his penis off with her own hands and choke him with it as he stood there screaming.

She isn’t the kind of person who typically says anything like that — she is a lady, as she always says. So I kind of believe her. And I don’t want her to take the fall on account of those scumbags.

I want to do it. Do it for Aunt Lupita, and my grandparents, and my mom. Do it before my mom does so she won’t spend the rest of her days locked up, away from her beloved garden.

Me, I don’t have a garden. I don’t have shit, come to think of it. Nothing that amounts to much anyway. I’ll make the world a better place by offing these scumbags and spend the rest of my days reading in the prison library.

My phone rings. It’s Erica.

“So I messaged him and he actually remembered her name!” she shouts.

“Oh my God.”

“And get this,” she continues, “I looked her up on the city records and I’ve got an address for her.”

“That’s amazing! I’ll be at your office in like five.”

Erica is kind of crazy, I guess, because she decides to go with me to check out that address and make sure my mother doesn’t somehow beat me to it.

“Fuck, I’m out of cigarettes,” I lament as we get into my car. “This shit’s so fucking gruesome, smoking just seems to kind of go along with it these days.”

“Well, do you want to stop at Owl’s Liquors and get some?”

“No, it’ll waste time.”

“No,” Erica suddenly announces as we near the turnoff on Agua Fria, squeezing my arm, “I want to stop at Owl’s. We have to stop.”

I look at her and she pierces me with those eyes. I miss the turn and pull into the Owl’s Liquors parking lot a block later. I’m about to get out to get that pack when we hear screaming.

“It’s all your fucking fault!” a man’s voice is yelling. “If you’d have just gone to the store and bought some fucking paint and covered that shit up, like I told you to, none of this shit would be happening.”

Erica and I look over to where the shouting is coming from. There she is, in the far corner of the parking lot: French braid.

My take on Erica was more spot-on than I’d even suspected — she knows things. I look back at her, shocked.

I slide my hand into my jacket pocket. My pocketknife is there, as expected. I’d grabbed it before running out to meet Erica.

“Sure, blame it on me,” French Braid yells back at the guy, “that’s been your plan all along, right?”

They’re standing in the empty back corner of the large parking lot, away from the entrance to Owl’s Liquors, by the same Escalade I saw in the driveway this morning.

“...blackmail me after I found out your game and didn’t turn you in,” she continues shouting, “get me to do all your dirty work setting things up so you could always pin it on me if the shit went down!”

“That’s bullshit!” he screams, but it sounds like he’s lying, even to me.

I look at Erica. We watch him storm off into the store. French Braid, in turn, gets into the Escalade and screeches out of the parking lot.

It’s dark now. This is my chance. To avenge my Aunt Lupita and all our family’s suffering. To make sure this asshole can’t handcuff anyone ever again. To finally do something with my life.

I reach into my coat pocket and feel the hefty pocketknife, which I’ve never seen used the way I’m going to except in the movies. I undo the lock feature. The guy comes out and heads toward where the Escalade was, mutters something under his breath, then lights up a smoke.

“The minute I get out of this car,” I say to Erica, “drive away and don’t look back. Drive home. I’ll get my car from you later.”

“What?” I hear her say as I open the door.

“I mean it,” I hiss.

“Hey, you got a smoke, man?” I say, walking toward the guy. “I’ll pay you for it.”

“Um,” he says, looking over at me, “sure, okay.”

He reaches into his pack. I reach into my pocket.

Three minutes later, he’s slumping to the ground and I’m walking away, out of the parking lot onto Hickox Street. I pull some paper towels and a small bottle I’d filled with rubbing alcohol out of my other pocket and douse and clean the knife off as discreetly as possible as I go.

I walk several blocks to Tune-Up Café and walk inside. As I wait in line, I pull out my phone and check my e-mail. I order an Angry Orchard Hard Cider and find a seat on the outdoor patio. Someone wants an appraisal tomorrow at two; I press Accept, see a confirmation e-mail pop up.

I see a text come in from my mom: Por fin, justicia por Lupita.

I down my cider and order another.