Santa Fe Noir

Close Quarters by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Drury Plaza Hotel

Mysticism, of one sort or another, abounds in New Mexico. You’ve got a mountain of it, but since I’ve got a pretty good handle on my way (indigenous) of communing with the spirits, I wasn’t expecting to run smack dab into that mountain recently.

When I’m not writing poetry or burying my head so deep in a novel I wonder what world I’m in, I’m giving lectures, keynoting a conference, running a writing workshop, fishing, hunting, or learning the ABCs on proper and healthy living from my twelve-year-old daughter. (I purposely left out raging at Trumpian Shit Eaters, those loathsome creatures that occupy our cherished democratic nest in DC.)

In this case, I find myself on I-25, driving to Santa Fe to give a keynote at the Santa Fe Drury Plaza Hotel. Didn’t take me long to find.

It was one of those beautiful winter days, and I couldn’t have been feeling any better had you given me Hawaiian dancers and an ounce of cocaine and put me out on an island where I win a lottery ticket every day. No, this was a perfect setting for my soul to join my ancestors and feel that extreme sensation we call... elation? No... nirvana? Maybe, but One With God will suffice in my case for this story.

There I am, I park, the bellman carries in two boxes of my latest books I plan on giving out for free to the graduates. I hit the front desk, check-in goes smoothly. No time for a quick nap (how I wish!). Up to my room to freshen up and then to the ballroom for the talk. I walk in and the kids are everywhere, my eyes travel over the faces and heads of hundreds of beautiful and brilliant DACA students.

They’re typical in all ways except one: they represent the very core of what our democracy means. Most of us are inclined to take our most treasured values for granted — when was the last time you marched for justice? Against police brutality? Environmental justice? Chicanos get beat and jailed every day and most of them are guilty of only one thing: they’re poor, have no money for big-time lawyers (who know how corruption works and can grease its wheels and turn the screws so the wheel of fate turns in their favor — happens every day, we hardly bat an eyelid at it).

They were not all DACA students, but I sure felt honored to be asked to speak by people who fought so hard for the American Dream, and so I gave the best talk of my life, I think. If one is to measure it by the fifteen-minute standing applause they gave me, some leaping up and down whooping as if they were at a rodeo, others whistling and so forth — can’t stand the prim applause of trust-funders, give me the autobahn over the go-cart track any day. After giving away a hundred signed books, I took a group picture, shook hands, and encouraged them to go and enjoy the City Different, see Santa Fe — after all, their ancestors built this city — and continue to maintain it for the pleasure of tourists and the hordes of newcomers.

I skipped the banquet, went right up to my room, looking forward to a good night’s rest. The second I walked in, I felt movement to my right and I looked at the sofa, the area by the wet bar, the fireplace, and attributed my overly sensitive state to exhaustion. My doctor had warned me to slow it down (but whoever listens? If you do, you’re not living).

I wash up in the bathroom and I hear a baby crying in the other room. Again, I go into the entrance room and look around and think the cries are coming from the next room or hallway. I draw the sheets back, grab the remote (I use TV to fall asleep), hit the sack, and before long I’m asleep, when I start hearing and seeing weird stuff in my dreaming and I wake up. I sit up in bed for a bit wondering what is going on and then step to the window and look down at the parking lot and a vague sense comes over me as if I’ve been here before. I hear the crying again and a woman gasping for air and I turn quickly and hurry to the other room and stand in the middle, still as I can, and listen more.

Yes, I hear it again. It’s dark but lit enough to see by the light coming from the other room. I slowly turn and I see her. Them. Man, am I tired, I think, and I run a bath, sink my whole body in until my head is under water, when I hear banging pots and pans in the sink; someone slams a coffee cup down when interrupted in the middle of a sentence; he kicks the chair when she says something dumb; she slams doors and leaves the house. And he yells behind her, “Stop asking me questions when I’m on the phone!”

I surge out of the water, search the bathroom, the other room, the bedroom and parking lot. Has to be the next room or hallways, I think. None of this makes sense — fuck, all that partying in my younger days is finally catching up.

I dry off, put some boxers on, grab a book (Roy’s latest), and read until I fall asleep and hear the faintest murmurs coming from the main room as if a ghost is there. A shadow crosses my bedroom doorway. I get up to adjust the thermostat and find the wall-grill covering on the floor. I hear a pinging and I check the rooms again. On the bathroom counter, decorative glistening pebbles are piled into a pyramid. The mirror is cracked. At different moments, an audible buzzing compresses the space inside and there’s no oxygen and I find it hard to breathe. I hear a woman’s voice whisper my name in the darkness and when I turn to locate the face, the air around my bed makes a sucking sound, as if a presence has slipped away, rattling the glass panes at the window looking out on the parking lot, the panes flung ajar.

I get up to close it (who opened it?) and that’s when I see my grandpa, walking across what was the parking lot but is now an open field. He walks in the dark to the fields to work. From the fields, he goes to the school across the street (the arts academy now) and cleans the classrooms, empties trash cans, and dust-mops the halls. (He dreamed I’d learn to read and write, yet I don’t think he ever believed I’d have dozens of books of poems and be here walking around with other literary types.) I imagine his calloused hands applaud and hear his voice in the lofty pines looming all about. “Eso si mijito, eso si.” That’s right, that’s my boy.

It’s dark in my hotel room and when I lock the window and close the curtains I hear sobbing from the other front room and, when I go to inspect it, I find a woman who looks as if she’s stayed up all night, sitting on the floor, legs spread apart, blood all over her nightgown around her vagina, hair all messed up, wedding photos and letters scattered everywhere on the floor, the air thick with cigarette smoke, a glass of Seagram’s next to an ashtray stuffed with Pall Mall cigarette butts. She doesn’t look up, she just stares at the papers.

The hallucinations must cease. I don’t know what to do. I get in bed and stare into the dark, hoping the room stops spinning, hoping the wooden floor stops shaking, I can feel it all over my body, hoping the footsteps I hear in the main room stop, and in bed I gaze to my right at the glistening frost on the window and see how the moon refracts in a million shards and thorns.

And then I remember: days and nights in close quarters and everywhere — floor, table, on the dirt outside, on the sink counter and stove, in the tub; clammy and sticky, sheets tousled, pillows on the floor, my parents’ parents’ clothes strewn over the house, her flesh constantly touching his, hair and juices and bones and teeth and tongues in his and over hers, cigarette smoke and gin and wine and the cool night air, the dense, earthy smelling, claustrophobic humidity, the howl of barking dogs in the foothills, a quick and violent flapping of owl wings — all of this around me as I feel a connection to this place, this hotel room, merging with it.

It’s my first time hearing my mother and I can’t explain any of it — as if my heart is a seashell and the roar inside is her voice, the sole sane element in my otherwise crazy life, and it grounds me as she rocks me back and forth in her arms, affirming my belief that there is hope beyond the Santa Fe streets, beyond the prairie that surrounds us, beyond the windmills and forest; there’s the possibility of another existence out there, and it strikes me with such clarity and space and truth: this used to be St. Vincent Hospital, and this is the room in which I was born.

Divina: In Which Is Related a Goddess Made Flesh by Ana Castillo

La Fonda on the Plaza Hotel

That evening at La Fonda Hotel, the two weary and wary housemates (one from a long day of court and dealing with clients, the other from just dealing with life) were enjoying appetizers and cocktails. In the case of one, it was a virgin Bloody Mary with a decidedly impoverished stalk of celery leaning against the inside of the glass. The other was having his usual end-of-the-day destresser martini made with both sweet and dry vermouth and garnished with two olives. They were about to order dinner when a young woman of no small stature approached the table.

“Eleven o’clock,” Gordo muttered, his way of giving his cowboy housemate Hawk a signal as to which direction to look. “It’s Project Runway,” he whispered.

As she quickly approached they tried to take in the girl all at once. She was striking at the extremes of imagination — hair like an Olympic torch, piercings, brilliant gaze, and most striking, an outfit that seemed to come out of the wardrobe department for a remake of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The black hair (as black as Hawk’s had once been) was streaked with electric red and cobalt blue, and held at the base by a silk ribbon. The ponytail stood straight up about eight inches high in a swirl (surely by the use of an epoxy-like gel). A copper nose ring and a silver one on her left eyebrow indicated, to Gordo’s mind, a person of certain daring. The lobeless ears were virtual swirls of mother-of-pearl seashells punctuated with various gems. Because of her heritage and her mother’s well-known devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, they might have expected a medal hanging from a chain around her delicate neck. Instead, there was a small tattoo of a black dove right above the jugular.

Hawk gulped. “My God,” he mumbled, standing up to greet the tall girl, “it’s the... g-goddess of death.”

“Whoa,” Gordo said. His housemate — Mr. Cool himself — was stuttering? “No, man,” he whispered from the corner of his mouth, “that’s none other than your long-lost daughter.”

Hawk felt far from cool. He was aware of who the girl was, although he had not expected to see her there. He’d just received a letter from a relative in Mexico informing him of the child who’d been born two decades before. Hawk unglued his gaze and swigged down the martini on the table.

“Hey,” his partner-in-crime protested, not wanting to be responsible for Hawk falling off the wagon.

The lucidity that came from not drinking anymore seemed to have accelerated a latent gift in Hawk, the don of clairvoyance. And right then, in fact, he was seeing something that was either there — or it wasn’t. Behind the girl he beheld the presence of four million warriors — men and women. The number came right to his head. That was how he saw things and got messages, with a certain inexplicable precision.

As a medium, he had learned, you might see something that also spoke to you or was without sound (like now). Sometimes you received audio messages only. A curandera once told him that bad spirits misled people. They spoke to you in your left ear. Good spirits approached your right. Hawk, left-handed and politically left, if anything, objected to the left being associated with evil. He didn’t pay attention to either ear. Instead, he checked with his third eye. (Someone might call it a gut feeling.) The third eye in his gut said the four million Indians were souls waiting for justice for the Conquest.

Another explanation for the vision, Hawk thought, might be what some folks called genetic memory. As an Indian, a Native American, he’d inherited the legacy: the arrival of white people five hundred years before and the travesties they committed remained traumatic. Something about Divina made him believe she related to that history too — not just because of her Mexican heritage vis-à-vis her mamá or even through him. She’d brought those four million souls with her. Had she come to reconnect him to his ancestry?

“Hello, Mr. Whitman,” the girl said, offering a tentative smile. Her red lips seemed to be lacquered porcelain.

Gordo, having been responsible for uniting the pair and keeping the plan to himself, clapped his hands lightly. Then he and the girl gave each other a quick, almost bashful hug. They had only met before by text.

“Hawk will do,” the other said. He was her father but the reality was seeping in very slowly. It hardly seemed appropriate for the strange girl to call him Dad.

“Fine,” she said, “Hawk it is.” She pulled out a chair to sit down and he quickly put up a hand to stop her: “Don’t, please.” Hawk could hardly look at the girl, afraid his eyes would give away what else was present. The four million souls behind her were very still; they seemed to be waiting to see what would transpire between the two.

Gordo, who was unaware of the reason for Hawk’s hesitation, was confused by his friend’s reaction to meeting his long-lost daughter. His morose companion was about to foul up what should have been by anyone’s estimation a gladsome meeting.

“Don’t?” Divina repeated in a melodic voice befitting her beauty. With a deep sigh and with a simple hand gesture, Hawk gave in and invited the girl to join them. Almost instantly, the souls faded. He dared to look at the girl directly for the first time. There she was — María — a near clone of her mother, the love of his life. More unsettling, however, there he was in her too.

Divina turned to Gordo and smiled.

“Ah! Miss Divina!” He kissed her caramel-hued hand. “Goddess of death — pshaw, Hawk,” he said to his friend. “That was just mean to refer to this gorgeous creature so morbidly.”

“I’ve heard worse,” Divina said, nonplussed. She leaned over and gave Hawk a peck on the cheek. “So lovely to meet you, Papá.”

Somewhat shyly, Hawk kissed her cheek too.

The waiter rushed over to set another place and fill a water glass. He handed the girl a menu and stood by until she gave her order.

“I totally get your ambivalence,” the girl said to Hawk. “You know? In meeting up with me. It must’ve been a shock when you heard about me.”

Hawk didn’t respond. It wasn’t ambivalence, he thought, but bewilderment. Beyond her near-mystic presence, the girl was astonishing to look at, to be sure. Divina removed her neo-Victorian, double-breasted satin jacket. A golden sash of sorts emphasized a long torso and a small waist. Her corset showed off overflowing breasts, which both men pretended not to notice. They were relieved when the waiter returned with the soup and they could focus on something else.

Meanwhile, Hawk gathered up his courage to inquire about her mother. Haltingly, he asked, “Where is María Villafuerte?”

Divina arched an eyebrow. The mention of María seemed to change her mood. Her brow furrowed as she looked at one man and then the other. “She left this earth only days after giving birth to me.”

Gordo snuck a quick glance over at Hawk for his reaction. Divina had already told him how she’d been raised by her mother’s family.

Hawk lowered his gaze. How had he not felt María’s departure from this life and always hoped she’d return? When he looked up at Divina, their daughter, they were back — the four million strong.

This time, one stepped forward. His headdress, mostly of quetzal feathers, was spectacular. “We have sent you our daughter,” he said to Hawk. “She has traveled many miles from what was our kingdom to your land, which was once also our place of origin. But she has also traveled across time upon our wishes. Rejoice, Hawk, in this reunion. She has much to share with you and will do so. Open your heart.”

Hawk understood that for the prince or king warrior who had just spoken to him, heart meant his mind too. He gave Divina a sideways look as he took a spoonful of posole. Now he began to recognize her. She was not the goddess of death as he had initially proclaimed. (He might instead have picked up that at the moment that she was a messenger of death — relaying to him María’s passing.)

And while she may well have been his biological offspring, she might have had other reasons to come up to New Mexico — Nuevo México, at one time part of Nueva España — from Mexico City, formerly the Great Empire of Tenochtitlán. Perhaps, as the warrior apparition told him, she had come to relay something very important. It was 2021, exactly five hundred long years since the Conquest of Mexico. Maybe the gods had decided to return. Or at least one of them had, in the form of a steampunk rocker.

Good Lord, he was in for a wild ride.

Hunger by Miriam Sagan

St. Catherine Indian School

Life was just fine for Trevor until it took a bad turn on Tuesday. It was now Wednesday, and he still didn’t know what to do. His older brother had given him a lot of advice about girls, but not about this.

“Avoid crazy girls,” his bro had told him. “All girls are somewhat crazy, but, for example... don’t let stoned girls sit in your car. It’s hard to get them out.” Trevor did not have a car, but he nodded. “Never never fuck a girl who is drunk. Always have...” his brother demonstrated with the foil packet, “a condom. Two or three. Personally, I wouldn’t even fuck a girl who is crying hard. Be careful. A crazy girl may not be your fault, but she IS your problem.”

Trevor nodded like a person who had options about when and who to fuck. It wasn’t a complete disgrace being a virgin at fourteen, the time of his brother’s lecture. But by the time he was fifteen and three months he definitely felt behind the curve. Then, enter Ava. She was small and bosomy, shy but chatty, and unremittingly sarcastic and bossy. As a second brother, Trevor was primed for sarcasm and direct orders. She was also really cute. She’d been kind of mousy in elementary school, and then she went to private school for middle, and something happened. When they met up again at a charter high school they were still vaguely friends, and she was armed with copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and lube and Trevor realized why life was worth living in a way that had nothing to do with magic mushrooms. Everything was fine until yesterday.

“I’m your type,” Ava had told him.

“What’s my type?”

“Short brunette,” she said.

The truth came to him — his type was a pretty girl who liked him. But he didn’t share that. And she wasn’t crazy. She had hypoglycemia and had to be fed regularly — but he’d had guinea pigs. Her mother was a bit spacey and was obsessed with her job at the opera. At first, Trevor, raised by his pioneer stock — type mom, was shocked there were no regular meals at Ava’s. But there also was no parental supervision — and they could just lock the bedroom door.

Ava’s friends were a bit annoying — they cut themselves with X-Acto blades and threw up from eating hash brownies — but they were no worse than anyone else. Until yesterday when one of them lent Ava Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which Ava devoured in a double period of Japanese. And she decided to stop eating. For good.

“I’m not going to eat anymore,” Ava told Trevor.

“You’ve got anorexia?”

“Of course not. It’s just that... food is really disgusting... sausage...”

“So don’t eat sausage. Aren’t you Jewish? Don’t eat pork.”

“Meat is disgusting.”

“So be vegan,” Trevor said.

“You think cabbages don’t have feelings? Trees do! Maybe potatoes...” She looked stricken.

That was yesterday. Today she said she’d skipped dinner last night, and breakfast. Her mom didn’t notice. He saw she ate no lunch.

“I think I’m going to faint,” she said.

And he hoped she would. Then the nurse would know. But she didn’t.

They went to his house after school. But there was nothing to do. His mom was home, so no closed door. Ava wouldn’t eat, so no snacks. Usually he loved that she played video games and Dungeons & Dragons, but neither of them was in the mood.

“Let’s go,” he said. It was starting to feel like spring, but the sun was still going down pretty early.

“Be back by nine, it’s a school night,” his mom called. “And are you kids going to get something for dinner?”

“Yes, yes. Bye, Mom.”

He hopped on his bike, and she on the bar. Was she lighter than yesterday? Was she going to die? He wished he could ask his brother, but his brother had gone to State and this seemed like an in-person question.

He turned off the suburban streets and onto the dirt track. It was overgrown with dry weeds. Some dead cottonwood leaves drifted down. In the distance, at the far edge of the houses, they could hear a weird howling sound.

“Is that a weredog or something?” Ava asked.

“Pit bulls?”

“It doesn’t sound... normal... I bet it’s a weredog with slobbering mouth and burning red eyes...”

“It’s creepy,” he agreed.

They climbed over the chain-link fence, left the bike, and walked the rest of the rutted path. The sun seemed to be sinking quickly, and it was colder.

The ruin of St. Catherine Indian School loomed up before them, familiar and yet foreboding.

“My mom always calls it St. Kate’s,” Ava said. “But we never do. We always use its full name.”

“Out of respect, I guess,” Trevor said.

“Respect for the ghosts?”

“Or, like, the past... It was a school, after all...”

“Full of oppressive nuns. They made the students get up at dawn and do all the chores. That’s how they saved money. They made the students scrub the nun’s floors. On their knees. With wax.” Ava’s expression suggested even the meanest nuns couldn’t get her to do that.

“I’m gong to climb a little, boulder up the wall,” he told her. “Want to come?”

“I’m feeling kinda weak,” Ava said. “I’m going to sit and smoke.”

“Watch out for the ghosts,” Trevor said. Everyone always said that.

“Wretched students snatched from their culture to die of homesickness...” Ava said.

“No one has ever seen them. The ghost is a nun. The Gray Nun.”

“Whatever. I think the ghosts are students. They cut their hair and took little kids away from their families... They hit them if they spoke their own language.” Ava’s eyes filled with tears that might have been due to low blood sugar. She sat on the wall. She clicked her lighter, lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl in the dying sunset. Kicked her sneakers against the masonry. “You don’t care about what happened,” she said. “How would you like it if the government had taken you and your brother away from your mom?”

“I think St. Catherine’s was private,” he said. “Maybe people wanted to come here?”

“I totally doubt it,” Ava said.

Trevor started climbing freehand. He knew the wall well, some grooves and curves familiar to his hands. It was lonely, though. He wished his friends were there — Mateo and Dylan and Jade, who was the best climber of the girls. He could hardly see Ava in the dim light, just the tip of her cigarette.

“Ava!” he shouted.

“What?”

“If you don’t eat, I’m going to let go. Just let go, fall, and die.” Well, maybe not die, but break an ankle. “There is a granola bar in my pack. Eat it. Now.” He wanted to say — Ava, I love you. I’ve loved you since fourth grade. But it sounded too sappy. And besides, he’d hardly noticed her in fourth grade.

“Fuck that,” she said. “I’m going inside.”

They’d all been inside, but rarely, because it was boarded up pretty securely — trespassing was one thing; taking out a piece of a school something else.

But this evening the board wasn’t there, just a gaping hole, and Ava walked in the gloom of the inner courtyard. Some taggers had written WEST SIDE over the door, but other than that it was undisturbed. People said a tagger had died out here, or maybe that was at the electrical transfer station.

The courtyard was open to the sky, and light from the east showed a full moon coming up. Ava clicked her lighter again a few times, but she couldn’t see much, just the arches and masonry and an empty space.

And then the space was no longer empty.

The air felt cold and clammy, and then a young woman stood opposite Ava. She had long black hair down her back, and she was wrapped in a shawl. She was taller than Ava, and a few years older.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m here to help you.”

“Are you, like, a ghost? Of a student?”

The young woman shook her head. “No, I am not like a ghost. I am a spirit. The spirit of the earth. Well, not THE earth. This earth.”

Ava stared at her. The spirit flickered a bit. She seemed to be wearing a necklace of large chunky turquoise stones, then a cross on a chain, and then... impossibly, a Hello Kitty sticker pasted to the base of her throat.

“Okay,” said Ava.

“You need to eat.” The spirit extended both hands toward Ava. She was carrying what looked like a bowl of blue corn posole. It smelled delicious.

“No thank you,” Ava said politely.

“You need to eat. To live.”

“Why live?”

“What would your grandmother say?” the spirit asked.

“She’d tell me, Ava, we don’t know why we were born, but it’s our job to find out. Maybe it’s to do someone else a favor... or to find out what we’re good at. So, choose life, because...”

“Because why?”

Ava shrugged.

“Because it’s difficult,” said the spirit. “Don’t be a coward.”

“I’m not...”

“Then eat. Maybe you’ll live to do me a favor. Save this place from developers and being turned into condos. Make it a park or a garden.”

“Nuh-uh,” said Ava. “You know eating food from the spirit world could be a trap. I’m not in that world, how do I know the food won’t enchant me, take me away, and... like, you know, have you ever seen the Japanese anime Spirited Away? Where the parents turn into pigs from greed? And the girl eats just a tiny bit of spirit food to keep up her strength?”

“I actually don’t go to the movies,” the spirit said. “But that seems like a good idea. Just take a tiny taste.”

Ava leaned forward, stuck her pinky finger into the corn mush, and stuck it in her mouth. It didn’t taste like much but she felt warmth flood her body, starting from her navel. She was hungry, ravenously hungry.

When she looked up, the spirit was gone.

“Trevor!” she shouted, and bolted back toward the opening. She dashed out. Suddenly, a shadow loomed over her and she screamed.

“Ava!” It was Trevor.

She kept screaming.

“Stop screaming. It’s me. Ava, what the fuck? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Trev, I’m just really... really hungry. Can I have that granola bar?”

She wolfed it down, and drained half his water bottle.

“I’m starving,” she said. “Let’s go back. It’s getting creepy out here. Hey, let’s go to Boxcar. They’re still open. I’m going to order green-chile cheese fries and... a ginger ale? Nutella milkshake? Something. Come on. I gotta eat. I’m hypoglycemic.”

Trevor restrained himself from suggesting a healthier choice. She was going to eat! And then... suddenly his heart constricted. One day they’d break up. She’d go to college, and he’d fall for someone else, and this moment that seemed perfect would be gone... gone like the nuns and the sad students and the bones rotting in the little graveyard out back.

He shuddered.

“You’re cold, poor guy. Come on, dude,” Ava said. “Let’s get the bike. And, um, Trevor, have you got... money... for dinner? I don’t have any on me. I’ll pay you back.”

“You never pay me back,” he said.

“That’s true,” she said. “Try not to mind too much.” And she took his hand as they turned toward town in the moonlight.

I Boycott Santa Fe by Tomas Moniz

Rancho Viejo

When my father died — shit, that must’ve been over five years now — I flew from my home in Oakland to Albuquerque with my partner. I had to rent a car to drive to Las Vegas, New Mexico, an hour and half up the highway — but not just any car. Nah, I rented a red convertible Mustang that, when you opened the doors, I kid you not, a galloping horse appeared on the ground. Magical. Mystical. I made my partner watch me open and close the doors over and over, made them lie down on the ground with me taking selfie after selfie with that illuminated galloping horse.

Once we left the lights of Albuquerque behind, my partner placed their hand in my lap and cooed, “It’s such a beautiful night. Look at that moon. Let’s stop in Santa Fe on the way.”

“Absolutely not. I boycott Santa Fe.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. How can you boycott a city?”

I didn’t respond but just drove on. They could tell something was up so they kept eyeballing me like, Don’t make me ask you. They possessed such an unwavering stare, I broke.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s like a joke. My dad said he only went there to pick up work or pick up white women.”

“Um, that’s gross.”

“But sadly true. He met my mom there.”

“Thankfully,” my partner said, and grabbed the hair on the back of my head lovingly and hard. The moon was almost full and this blue light filled the car. Beautiful indeed, but eerie in a way.

I said, “I was born in Santa Fe. My mom lived with a bunch of other women in some collective house. She gave birth to me in the middle of the living room surrounded by her friends, with my dad outside drinking and grilling carne asada.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Not really. She had kicked him out. Told him to leave. But he refused so he set up outside, with a couple of his homies, yelling every now and then to see if I was a boy or girl.”

“That’s kind of adorable. Little did he know, ” they said, and tried to kiss my neck, but failed because the seat belt kind of choked them.

I snickered and said, “It was adorable until my mom had to call the cops on him because the party got outta hand when he found out I was a boy.”

“So you really are from Santa Fe.”

“I guess you can say it’s my hometown.” I stopped talking when I said that: hometown. I hadn’t been back in years. But I’ve always felt a sense of pride about being from New Mexico. Or a sense of longing. Of wanting to be filled with something. Connected, maybe. I remembered my parents’ relationship. It was manic. The fights they had. And the parties. Every memory accompanied by screaming and drinking or laughing and loud music. Just thinking about it, my body tensed, like preparing for a fight, like sensing a threat.

My partner asked, “So I take it your dad’s family doesn’t have a framed poster of O’Keeffe on the wall?”

“Never. I tell people there’s more to New Mexico than Santa Fe and it’s not all pretty flowers and blue skies. It’s actually an ugly, conflicted place. My dad took me to the courthouse that Tijerina raided and occupied in the late sixties.”

“Have no idea who that is, but cool.”

“But we also went to the pueblo in Taos and the Chimayo weaving stores. Honestly, the only time I went to Santa Fe was during the summers I came back here to visit my father in like the early eighties. Every Sunday, we drove to visit my uncle Eddie in the penitentiary just to the south. We’d stop in Santa Fe to buy cigarettes to give the guards. My father had to bribe them so he could see his brother.”

“Shut up. That can’t be true. That’s not how prison works.”

“Spoken like someone who never visited anyone in jail.”

“Ouch, but I can’t argue with that.”

“This is the prison where that riot happened in like 1980. They don’t even know how many people died because it was so overcrowded and chaotic. Thirty-three, according to the state historian, but who knows.”

We drove through the night. I imagined all those deaths, all this history of violence, spreading across the desert. The mesas. The arroyos. The stories of Natives resisting US soldiers, of Chicanos resisting ranchers and hippies, of women resisting machista men, of my father and my mother and all they showed me about loving and hating and surviving.

My partner said, “Okay, I’m totally fine with skipping Santa Fe. I understand. Is the jail still there?”

“It became a tourist attraction for a while. Not that the new maximum-security prison wasn’t there too, on the same grounds as the tourist attraction.”

“People are just sick.” Then they said, “Are you okay talking about your father? I know parents come with such problems.”

“I got no problems.”

They laughed. “Says the person who rented a convertible Mustang to go to a funeral.”

We drove on for about thirty miles until we came to San Felipe Travel Center, which I guess is called the Black Mesa Travel Center now — fancy names for a gas station with a casino and a diner. I always got the pork taco with green chile topped with shredded iceberg lettuce and pale diced tomatoes. But more importantly, the place served the best damn sopapillas anywhere, accompanied by that sticky plastic bear full of honey. I beep-beeped the alarm in this parking lot full of old trucks and beat-up sedans. My partner acted all suspect when we exited the car. I could tell by how they sauntered up to the whooshing sliding glass doors.

We ordered four sopapillas and two tacos. The diner served Pepsi in thirty-two-ounce cups, the red plastic kind, with free refills. The food arrived and we watched each other while we ate the tacos: the green chile hot as fuck, my partner’s light skin flushed red, their eyes watered. Me, I let myself go, let the heat and that burn cause tear after tear to run down my face. I didn’t wipe one away. After, we slathered the sopapillas in golden honey and licked our fingers clean like kids.

When we left, the moon hung high over the desert. Somber. Slightly spooky. Like something might jump out and scare you. I suddenly felt exhausted. Like in all this excitement of coming home and bringing my partner, I forgot that I was here to mourn, to deal with my family, the ghost of my father, all the stuff that haunted me.

My partner said as we approached Santa Fe, “Hey, a place called Rancho Viejo is coming up. It’s on the outskirts of the city so it’s not really like going to Santa Fe. Let’s pull over and take a moonlight walk.”

“You wanna hear something hella creepy?”

“Um. Yes. Of course.”

“A part of me is buried in this area. We can even cruise by the house that’s been built on the site on Bosquecillo Street. My mom made placenta pills with half of the placenta but then she gave the rest to my father, who drove out here and buried it. It was just open desert then.”

“Get the fuck outta here. Why would he do something like that?”

There was, of course, no way to answer that without sounding ridiculous. Instead, I exited the highway and turned left onto Dinosaur Trail Road and drove past a smattering of housing subdivisions and soft, undulating mounds covered in shimmering silvery foliage, maybe big sage or saltbush, I couldn’t tell. The last time I drove on this road, I was with my father. He wanted to fuck with the people who lived in the house. He wanted to knock on the door and ask if they felt it was haunted, if they knew they bought a house that was built on a buried placenta. I refused to stop the car. Told him he was acting crazy. My father called me a fucking pussy and didn’t say a word the rest of the way to Vegas.

I parked across the street from the house.

They said, “What do you want to do?”

I tried to pull my partner’s body to mine but the Mustang’s bucket seats prevented any kind of physical intimacy. I stepped out of car and walked around. I opened the door and saw the illuminated horse appear as if it were racing across the desert sand.

“Holy shit. That’s got to be a sign,” my partner said as they sprinted away from the car into the wide-open space across the other side of the street. I could see their body jumping this way and that. I could hear them calling: “Baby Chino. Come here, baby Chino. Where are you?”

I ran after them, loving the way the earth seemed to grab onto every footstep, pulling me back, pulling me down. When I caught up, we were both huffing air. They looked at me in blue light and breathed heavy and hard. They put their finger to their lips: Shush. I held my breath and closed my eyes and could feel the pounding of my heart, hear the slight rustle of wind moving through the bushes.

My partner whispered, “My little baby Chino, I knew I’d find you.”

They placed their hands on my face. Delicate. Tender.

Something made a noise and we both looked quickly. Then we laughed. We howled. We held hands and jumped up and down. The sand felt warm when I sat and pushed my fingers into it.

“Isn’t this state called the Land of Enchantment?” my partner asked, and made a gesture with their arms like, Look at all this world in front of us.

“It is.”

“I see why. I bet this is the best part of Santa Fe. Perhaps the state. Rancho Viejo. Away from everything. Maybe your father was right to bury the first part of you here. Maybe he did it so that you’d always come home.”

“Or maybe so I could do this,” I said, and pulled them to me. I tasted honey on their lips. I laughed because that’s like the biggest cliché possible: honey lips. As if next, I would come across a running horse or the very spot my father buried the placenta.

They pulled away and said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

I looked out at the world spreading away from us. I remembered the last time I saw my father. I had woken early in the morning to head out on the road. I entered his room while he slept. Already sick inside. Already dying. I didn’t kiss him goodbye. But I placed my hand on his chest. The rattling breath. The slow beating heart. Proof of being alive, of a living body.

“No,” I said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe things can haunt you.”

We walked back to the car because we still had forty-five minutes more to drive, yet I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I clenched my fists as we meandered across the sand. My jaw locked tight. I wanted to grab something, to take control of everything. I realized perhaps the question wasn’t, Do you believe in ghosts or things that can haunt you? Perhaps the question was, How do we get away, how do we free ourselves from something like legacy?

I pushed my partner against the car.

They said, “You look scary. And sexy. But scary.”

“You ever wanted something but don’t know what it is?”

“Every day.”

“You ever get angry enough you want to hurt something?”

They just stared at me. Unflinching, but waiting. Not challenging, just curious. I had that feeling of when you step up to someone too fast and they flinch, that sick feeling of scaring a woman by just being a man. I looked away.

They said, “It’s okay to be full of anger.”

I fell against them. Let myself drop to my knees wanting to be filled with anything other than all of these memories. Without rushing, I undid their belt and unzipped their pants. I took them into my mouth, so warm and soft and squishy. I craved that power to make something so defenseless into something rigid and unyielding, to feel a person become desperately alive. They made sounds guttural and full of surprise and pleasure. I looked up into their face and, to see such desire, let me tell you, it’s like finally seeing the end of something and racing to it screaming: Almost there, almost home!