Santa Fe Noir

Buried Treasure by Kevin Atkinson

Santa Fe National Forest

I like my job. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I don’t mind being out there. Santa Fe National Forest, about 100,000 acres scattered across the mountains of northern New Mexico, with some choice skiing, hunting, and the most beautiful sunsets on the planet. Not a bad place to spend your days, but I hate getting these sorts of calls. The ones with, you know, the bodies?

It was around seven twenty in the morning when my radio crackled, and Alicia’s voice came over. She’s been a dispatcher with me for six years now. “Andy, you copy?”

“Apodaca here, I copy,” I said back, trying to edge the truck over a rut in the road.

“Hey, firewatch twelve reports lights at Porvenir Campground. Mind checking it out?”

“On it,” I told her, and clicked the radio back down. There was probably a solid five minutes before I could get turned around and back to the main forest road and head north toward El Porvenir. It’s a small campground by Beaver Creek, decent fishing if we have enough snow in the snowpack. This is most of my job, honestly, going out to remind campers who got a little too drunk last night that they still need to put out their fires. If I’m lucky they’ll be a little embarrassed and move on. The real annoying ones are those who get belligerent like I’ve never killed a weekend getting shitfaced in the woods and couldn’t possibly relate.

I pulled my truck up to the campsite; there was a gray Toyota parked there already. I got out of the truck and stretched, trying to ease my back a little bit. I’m a big guy all around, but I’m not in the best shape anymore, and driving a government pickup with busted shocks wasn’t doing my back any favors. The car was nice, real nice, with Utah plates, and some driving dust around the tires.

It was spring here, but there was something about the campground that felt off as I walked over. There’s a tension the morning after a frost, and it felt stronger than normal. There was the campfire, almost all embers by now, contained in the fire ring. The tent that was pitched here had collapsed on itself, and there was a backpack and a couple jugs of water around the fire. I looked around and gave a small call: “Hello! Forest Service here! Come on out. I just wanna have a word.”

Nothing.

I tried to listen. In chilled air, sound feels like it travels farther, but really your ear is just focused on getting ahold of any little thing out there: bugs crawling in the leaves, wind whistling through the trees... that was all here, but I didn’t hear any footsteps or breathing. Nothing human. A crow, somewhere far above me, fluttered from tree to tree. Okay, fine, I’ll walk around. If they abandoned their car, it was gonna be a long, chilly walk back to civilization.

It took me about ten minutes of circling the campsite before I found the body. The crow gave a couple of short caws and flew off, heavy wings echoing across the forest as far as I could hear. Between that and the long shadows that cut between me and the body, the day had taken a turn for the Fucked.

He was about my age, maybe a bit older, white, in camping clothes that he probably hadn’t looked at for more than a minute before buying at REI. The brown insulated jacket was too thin, I could see that. If he’d been near his campfire, he’d probably have been fine, but we’re at almost eight thousand feet out here. Temperatures can drop like crazy at night. He was still wearing hiking boots that had mud caked along the grooves of the sole, but other than that they looked too spotless and sterile to be used.

I went back to my truck and called it in. After Alicia confirmed that she was getting help out my way, I snapped on my nitrile gloves, headed back, and tried not to get too near the body. I didn’t see blood anywhere. Maybe the guy had a heart condition and hadn’t prepped for the elevation. I didn’t bother to check for a pulse; the skin was that gray color bodies turn when left alone for a while. Also, I’m not a forensics guy, and touching the body would piss them off when they got here.

Probably I should have stopped there, but I have a curiosity problem, so I kept looking around. I figured the guy had a midlife crisis, decided to do some hiking and all of that after divorcing the wife, thought he had a handle on the rugged lifestyle, and didn’t prep enough. It’s sad, but stories like this are more common than people think. I haven’t exactly come across a lot of bodies in the forest, but, you know, it happens. It took some careful stepping around, but I was able to look into the backpack, and that’s when things settled into place.

There was a change of clothes, the plastic maps they sell down at the ranger station, and a copy of Where Glory Waits by Eric Katzenberg. Shit. A treasure hunter.

You know about Eric Katzenberg? Born in Florida, inherited a bunch of real estate money, lost a lot of it in the stock market, and went to jail for three years in the nineties for running a pyramid scheme. After he got out, he moved to New Mexico and bought a bunch of recently released federal property, old homestead stuff, down by Clovis. Ever since then, he’d been shoving his way into the amateur archaeologist scene, complete with a website where he sold artifacts that he discovered on his property.

Then he published his memoir. Most people would have skipped it, except the last chapter of the book held a sketch of a site with three aspen trees, a big boulder in the middle, and a creek running through it. The boulder has an X sketched on it, and in this chapter, Katzenberg claims to have buried a box of gold and silver worth $1.5 million — somewhere north of Santa Fe. And just like that, his book sold out, and we started getting a lot more activity in the forest. It’s not really a bad thing, but you get a lot of folks who haven’t been hiking in thirty years suddenly passing out as they rummage off the trails looking for these three trees. It was a real nuisance for a few years, before things slowed down.

This copy of the book was worn, and the owner had scribbled notes in the margins throughout. It looked like the book in the Evil Dead movies, although printed in paperback. The only page in the whole book that was pristine was the page with the infamous sketch. Most of the things scribbled on the page were this guy’s thoughts, or references to other pages, but the last thing written in the book was an address on Canyon Road.

I put the book back in the bag and hefted it. It seemed a little heavier than it looked, so I dug into the bottom of it, and felt my hand brush cold metal. I grimaced as I pulled back his change of clothes and saw a 9mm Glock at the bottom of the pack. At that point, I heard an engine coming up the road, and looked over to see the medevac crew out of Pecos coming for the body.

They cleaned him up, did their forensic analysis, and hauled him into the ambulance to get him down to the morgue. They told me the gun was loaded, and I let one of them pull out his wallet and hand me his ID; better if they mess something up moving the body than if I do. The ID read, Charles Redmond, and he was apparently from Blanding, Utah.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I said under the deepening shade of the trees. “Rough luck.”

Of course, I was done being out in the field for the day. Normally I’d put on some music and drive back to the ranger station, but this time, in silence, I hit the highway and headed toward Santa Fe. It felt good to get out of the forest and under the sun for a little bit. He wasn’t the first body I’d found out here, but it had been awhile, and most times we were actively looking for one. Stumbling across the guy, about my age, stiff and blue in the face. . well, it wasn’t exactly how I wanted my week to start. I slugged some more coffee, and spent the next thirty-five minutes trying not to think about dying in the forest.

I was headed into the main office. I had paperwork to hand in and sign off on, a report to fill out, and it was often easier to do that in the city itself. Besides, their coffee’s nicer than the pot we’ve had since the seventies in the Pecos ranger station. After I got my paperwork, I sat down in the break room and started to work on the report. My curiosity got the better of me after a couple of minutes, though. It happens. I get an idea on loop in my head, and there’s not much I can do other than scratch that itch. So I pulled out my phone and spent a few minutes searching for that address on Canyon Road.

It pulled up an old listing on a realty website — $2.8 million price tag — but it had apparently been sold. The realty website was last updated in 2015, though there was a website that listed it as the address for Heron Ridge Dealers, an online Indian artwork and artifacts operation... run by Mary O’Shaughnessy née Katzenberg.

The treasure-planter’s sister was in the body’s book. That was weird. Weird enough that I stuck the report in my mailbox and grabbed my keys to go for a drive.

Technically speaking, I was supposed to leave it alone and wait for a cop to take over the investigation, but I knew this wasn’t going to get a lot of attention. Old dude dies in the woods. Unless they found out that the body was poisoned or something, they were going to write it off and not pursue anything, no matter how much I pestered them about it. I figured it was worth at least checking to see if this woman knew anything before handing it over.

Canyon Road starts right off of Paseo de Peralta, and it’s as ritzy as you get in Santa Fe. Most of the lower road is lined with the kind of modern-art galleries that sell a few million worth of art a year. People say Santa Fe is the second best city for art, but they usually leave out the “for its size” part of that ranking. In any case, that’s where a lot of the city’s money comes from. If you go farther north, there are some homes up there that are the most expensive in the city limits. Some are historic, some are glitzed up, but all of them have the feel of rustic hospitality, combined with more money than I’d made in twenty-nine years.

I parked my truck down the road where I’d be able to get it out when I was done here, and hoofed it up to the address. There was a flagstone path that led up the hill to the house; it wasn’t big, but the stucco on the wall at the outside was impeccably maintained, and the garden path to the door was lush and green, despite the fact that we hadn’t had rain in three weeks. Standing in between two vines that crawled up the wall and pressed in over me, I knocked on the door.

It opened on a woman in her midfifties, in a tight blue tank top and yoga pants. Her hair was held in a slightly messy bun, her skin well-tanned, and she was very clearly in the middle of a workout.

Part of me wanted to suck in my gut, but man, it was too late. I’m not exactly a cougar hunter, but she looked damn good. I put on my best “Officer of the Law” voice. “Mrs. O’Shaughnessy?”

“That’s me. Are you with the police?” she asked, head cocked to one side, evaluating me. She knew I wasn’t, but I do have a badge.

“Forest Service, ma’am,” I said, “may I come in? I have a few questions about a Mr. Charles Redmond.”

She stared at me as I tried to read her face. She clearly recognized the name, yet she took a second to think before saying, “Sure, come on in,” and turning and walking away. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“A coffee would be nice, if you have it,” I said, following her inside. The walls were perfectly white, sealed, with rugs hanging in strategic locations. They made the eye follow into the spacious living room, where a series of dusty pots, baskets, and a glass case with fragments and arrowheads stood against the far wall.

She turned and gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, tea is all I have. Most of my clients prefer it, it settles the nerves.” She hit the switch on an electric kettle next to a selection of bags with bright colors and a few small steel pitchers; various creams, I presumed.

“That’s fine then,” I said. “So, about Mr. Redmond, did you know him?”

“Briefly. He was a fan of my brother’s work,” she said, making her own mug of tea.

I stood next to the case, trying not to stare at her, so I opted to stare at the case instead. It was neatly organized and curated, with small plaques explaining each item: Diné pottery, arrowheads found at the Katzenberg property in Clovis, etc. Each artifact looked to be the sort of thing that could fetch several thousand at the right auction — maybe more. It wasn’t my field.

“Have you seen him recently?” I continued.

She turned, the mug steaming in her hands, and leaned back against the shelving unit, her green eyes studying me, her face serious. “He was here a few days ago. Annoying, really; he was interrogating me regarding the treasure. What was in it, how it was buried, did Eric ever mention anything to me...”

“You must get those sorts of questions a lot,” I said, taking out a notepad to write down important details.

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, less now,” she said, “but it’s always a topic of conversation. I generally just tell people that Eric didn’t confide anything in me, unfortunately.” She sipped from her tea, and smiled. “Have you drank much tea in your life, Mr...?”

“Apodaca. And not really. I’m more of a coffee guy.”

“Fair trade?” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she was asking about the coffee.

“Folgers,” I replied, trying to get back on course.

“Oh my God, you have to stop. It’s impossible, the way they treat their workers. Pennies a day, in conditions that would disgust you. I can’t imagine choosing to support such an unethical company.” Her voice was hard and tight, and I could tell she was legitimately offended.

“I’ll keep that in mind. Did Mr. Redmond say anything to you about looking for the treasure?”

“Oh, it was all he could talk about! He was going on and on about some breakthrough he’d had, and he wanted verification. I couldn’t give it to him, of course.”

There was an awkward pause as I tried to figure out what to ask her next. It felt stupid to have driven an hour and change to come in and ask very basic questions. “So... business has been good?” I pointed at the case.

She smiled, apparently happy to talk about her work. “Well, it’s been profitable, and I like to think that I’m doing some good with my success. Twenty-five percent of our proceeds go to the O’Shaughnessy grants program, where we fund indigenous history programs in the public schools.”

“How do you get all of these?” I asked, that curiosity catching up with me. “They couldn’t all come from the Katzenberg property...”

“Well, some do. More than you’d expect, actually, it’s been quite the boon for poor Eric. The rest are donations from old collectors, or sold, or purchased at auction. We’ve had some good luck the last few years.”

“And that’s the sort of thing that’s in the Katzenberg treasure?”

“That’s not particularly amusing, Mr. Apodaca,” she said, although she couldn’t help smiling, “but yes. According to Eric, it’s a collection of artifacts similar to these, with the addition of some old family heirlooms.” She grimaced. “Father had some old Spanish doubloons, and Eric had some replicas cast as well, which would only be worth the gold content. He loved the idea of people seeing actual coins in the chest.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Why are you asking me these questions?” She finished her cup of tea. “I’m afraid I do have appointments and need to clean up a bit before they arrive.” She gestured to the spotless seating area.

I’d probably get in trouble for it, but decided to go with the truth: “Mr. Redmond was found dead in the forest this morning, and he had a copy of your brother’s book with your address in it. I thought I should check and see if he’d mentioned anything to you.”

She nodded, her face a little sad. “I was worried you were going to say that. He seemed to be struggling to keep his breath, and when he said that he was going into the woods... well, I warned him that he should spend another few days acclimating before trying anything. It’s so important to take care of yourself as you age, and it was clear he hadn’t.”

I thought about the paunch that Redmond had around his stomach, and how it was smaller than my own. “Yeah,” I muttered. “Listen, here’s my card; if you think of anything, feel free to call. Thanks for your time.”

“Of course.”

I walked to the door, but she said something to my back as I opened it: “You don’t think it’s out there, do you? You think my brother’s a liar?”

I had to sigh. I’d been asked this question (minus the liar part) more times than I cared to count. “Ma’am, I think the only way to keep people from finding treasure is if there’s no treasure out there.”

I spent the rest of the day finishing the report, and going through Redmond’s copy of Where Glory Waits. Most of it was references that might be clues to the location of the treasure. Apparently Redmond was quite the amateur archaeologist. He talked about other digs he’d done, and things he found, but his notes rambled, as if he didn’t really know what he was talking about. He mentioned arrowheads that belonged to the Anasazi or Clovis culture, but up in Utah? He went on about his bitch of an ex-wife — his words, not mine — and had a lot of questions about “F-ton,” which seemed kind of panicked. There were doodles and notes, and he had a weird habit of circling some of his page numbers and squaring others.

The book messed me up, to be honest. I’d never bothered to sit down and read it, but here was Katzenberg painting himself as some kind of heroic man of the west, yet he’d never really lived here. You live on a compound with forty acres around you, and who can say that you actually know any of the people you’re making money off? Moreover, with the notes that Redmond had written in here... Redmond had worshipped the guy. Talked a lot of trash about the idiots who didn’t see things like he did, who didn’t see the value in the arrowheads and the pots... Well, Mary O’Shaughnessy did. Hell, she saw so much value in them, she made a couple million a year on them.

That’s probably why I drove off into the forest that night. I was thinking a lot, and wanted to get a little air. The whole damn thing had messed me up and so I headed out to El Porvenir. Maybe doing a little nighttime vigil would help me think it through. The camp was closed, of course, but it’s not like the tape could keep me out and, according to my voice mail, the forensics crew had finished their sweep earlier.

Which was why I felt goose bumps rise on my arms when I pulled up. There were three pickups there, two sort of older and beat up, one more pristine. Also, Redmond’s window had been smashed in. I called in to Alicia that we had some people breaking the tape at the site, and slipped the latch on my holster. She might think it was weird I was out there at that hour, but I’d blow it off somehow.

“What the hell is going on out here?” I muttered as I opened my door carefully, my lights off. I didn’t want to startle anyone, so I rolled down my window and tried to listen. I could see flashlights swinging around in the trees out near where Redmond had been found. My gun was in my hand as I approached, and my Maglite in the other, although it was off. I figured I’d get close, listen in, and then startle them off.

They were a crew of kids. Not little kids but, you know, guys in their twenties. They were wearing jackets to deal with the cold, though you could see that some of them were wearing very little underneath, and they all looked pretty grubby. It was hard to get a good view of them, but one of them was standing still while the others were hunched over, searching around the campsite and the trees in the grove.

“There’s nothing fucking here,” one of them said, frustrated. It was dark, but I could see that he was skinny, almost skin and bones, and he scratched at his face as he spoke. Aw shit, I thought, meth heads.

There were four of them looking around, while the fifth one stood there on his phone, texting someone, the blue light illuminating his face as he stared intensely down at it. His fingers were flying over the screen. “It’s gotta be here somewhere! They said he hid it in the forest, and this is where he died. It’s gotta be here!”

“Probably stashed it in a fuckin bank or some shit,” one of the other ones muttered, a woman. Something shifted near me, and I had to glance over to the left, making sure it wasn’t some meth head sneaking up on me. It was a jackrabbit, holding still, its nose twitching and its breathing heavy.

I let out a small breath of relief. That’s when the rock cracked across the right side of my face.

One of them didn’t have a flashlight. He’d been hiding in the woods, I guess, keeping a lookout for, well, someone like me. The world went white for a second as I hit the ground, and my gun scattered out of my hands. With the sound of a scuffle, the meth heads started to panic, hollering and clumping up in the clearing. The one with the rock kicked me in the side, before crawling on top of me and lifting the rock over his head. He wasn’t huge, though his eyes were wide and blank.

I reached for my gun, but couldn’t get it in time. Instead I pressed the button on my Maglite and swung the beam up into the kid’s face.

He was missing some teeth. He hissed, the light blinding him. I swung my Maglite up again and clocked him in the face, getting him off me.

“Nick, what the fuck is going on?”

“Forest Service, get down on the ground!” I barked, a little more thickly than I liked, reaching around for my gun as Nick moaned on the ground, holding his face. I fired it into the air.

Unfortunately, this didn’t get them down on the ground; instead, they booked it toward their cars. I could hear their engines going by the time I staggered up and cursed, grabbing Nick. At least one of them wouldn’t get away.

A few hours later, I was discharged from the hospital and got a ride to my sister Dolores’s place. She works for the state, and has a house in Santa Fe. My side hurt as I walked, and I had a bandage over my head. The scalp had bled like a stuck pig. The doctors said I wasn’t concussed, which was a blessing. I still dropped into sleep like a cliff rock into the Coyote Creek.

The next morning, late, I woke to a call from my boss telling me to check my e-mail. The cops had gotten an autopsy done on Redmond, and they wanted some insight. When I read through the report, Dolores’s coffee in hand, things clicked together, and I knew I had to get moving — and quick. I grabbed the book out of my truck; Alicia had been nice enough to send two other rangers to grab it for me. I sat down at the table and flipped around, making notes on a pink Post-It. The circled page numbers. The squared page numbers. Circles latitude, squares longitude. GPS coordinates. Redmond hadn’t been out looking for the Katzenberg treasure — he’d been burying treasure of his own.

It can take awhile to get something like this done officially, so I called it in to the other law enforcement officials in the field to go out and see if they could find anything at those coordinates. Then I went off to talk to Mary O’Shaughnessy.

When I pulled up in front of the $2 million house, she was getting into a black Audi, a leather satchel in the front seat.

“Going for a trip, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy?” I asked, getting out of my truck. I still had my bandage on and didn’t look or feel great.

“Mr. Apodaca!” She forced a smile. “I was thinking of visiting Eric, after our conversation yesterday...”

“Without your buddy Nick? Did they mention to you that we grabbed him?” I said. Not subtle, maybe, but my head hurt, and I was ready to get this weird-ass situation done.

“I don’t know...”

“Come off it, O’Shaughnessy,” I said, trying not to let too much anger show. “You had some contacts of yours go out looking for something at Redmond’s death site last night. Meth heads, probably the sort of people who come out of Farmington, cutting petroglyphs out of the Bisti Badlands, so you can sell them out of your collection? But Redmond had something you wanted, something he wasn’t selling to you... but he gave you a look, a tease. And here you are, all the money you’d ever want, and he’s keeping something from you. And it made you mad, so maybe your Farmington boys drop by his hotel to make a suggestion. That spooks him, and he runs off to the forest. That’s where you met up with him again.”

Mary was hard to read when she was in her own gallery with her tea and cream. Now, she was almost shaking as I laid out my story.

“That’s the last thing I can’t figure out. Why’d he meet with you again? Did you tell him you had the cash? Or did you offer him the Katzenberg treasure?”

Her lip was trembling. “Mr. Apodaca, I don’t know what—”

“Regardless of how you did it, you got close, and in the cold, you offered him some tea. The toxicology report noted the presence of Doxylamine succinate in Redmond’s bloodstream. I happen to know that one by heart; I use sleeping pills sometimes and that was one that I’d had to stop because my job puts me at high elevations. Did you mean to kill him, Mary? Or was that just a happy side effect?”

Her eyes blazed at me, suddenly, and I thought about the movies. This was where the gumshoe gets shot, right, or there’s some sort of dramatic confession. Instead, she just said, “Well, I’ve never been so insulted. Really, the nerve! Accusing me of drugging some lunatic? You’ll hear from my lawyer tomorrow, Mr. Apodaca, and I hope you’ve enjoyed your career, because I’m sure you won’t have a job this time next week.”

“Your wheels are a little dirty, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Same kinda red dirt out at El Porvenir. ”

She turned and went to get into her car, and that’s when she saw the cop car down the road.

“As a federal official, I do have to make reports to local authorities regarding investigations. You understand,” I said, as the officer walked over, a pair of handcuffs in hand.

That was three days ago. I hear she’s already out on bail. Apparently the FBI has some questions regarding how she acquired some of her rarer items, so that has complicated things for her at least, but Katzenberg is already on the warpath about how things have “been handled.” I’m off the case, since I’m not a cop, but I’ll probably have to testify, if that’s worth anything.

As for the Redmond treasure, the boys brought it to me to look at. It was an arrowhead and, according to the notes Redmond had in his book, he thought it was a Clovis-era artifact. The last auction for one of those guys hit $138,000, so it wasn’t nothing he got killed over.

I took the arrowhead down to my buddy Laura at the Indian arts college. She’s out of the Tesuque Pueblo, but majored in anthropology before taking up sculpture. She’s one of the experts in identifying archaeological artifacts in New Mexico, according to the Internet. News to me; my sister met her at a party awhile back, they’re pretty close.

Anyways, I knocked on her door and walked into her office. She’s a little younger than me, with long black hair. She was dressed nice, in a gray suit jacket and sensible pants and shoes. She looked up and gasped; I guess the bandage on the head shocked her a little bit. “Holy shit, Andy!” she let out, which made me smile. It was pretty funny to catch her off guard this time.

It took a bit of explaining to finish the whole story for her. I guess it must have been pretty interesting, because she made me wait while she ran out and brought back two Styrofoam cups of coffee. At the end of it, I pulled out the plastic baggie with the arrowhead in it and gave it to her. She huffed a little at it being handled this way, but put on her own gloves and took it out, giving it a thorough examination. She even used a magnifying glass. I didn’t know those were a real thing.

At the end, though, she grimaced. “Andy, I hate to say it, but this is a fake,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s a pretty good one, but the chipping is a little too regular along this edge, and it’s worn with patterns reminiscent of a small buffing tool... We’d have to do some radiometric dating to be positive, but yeah, I don’t think it’s legitimate. Sorry.” She frowned slightly.

I knew the feeling. I thought about Charles Redmond, dying in the cold out at the campground. Did he know? Was he the forger, or was he just some guy stuck with something he and everyone else thought was going to make him rich? Did he think he’d stumbled on the stuff dreams are made of?

“So what now?” she asked, after I’d apparently let the silence sit too long.

“FBI takes over. Probably nothing happens to O’Shaughnessy. She’s got a lot of money for lawyers. Katzenberg’s sure to sell a lot more books.”

“No, Andy,” she said, still frowning. “What about you now?”

I thought about my answer long and hard. “I think,” I said, curious about how things would turn out, and especially when the meth heads would show up, “that I’m gonna take a nap.”

Nightshade by Ariel Gore

Santa Fe Railyard

She stood behind her table at the farmers market holding a rose-colored heirloom tomato in her clean hands like a beloved.

I licked my lips, savored the cold breeze on my cheeks.

“You must be Juliet,” she said softly.

And I gotta say, this was a fantasy so wholesome I’d never allowed myself anything like it: I mean, she grew tomatoes with those clean hands.

“I am,” I whispered, trying to match her cadence. “I’m Juliet.”

Her cheeks dimpled, just a little, when she smiled. “Try a slice?”

I wanted to see her fingernails pierce the skin of that tomato, but I knew she was too careful for that. “I’d love to try a slice.”

She lowered her gaze to my tits. “I’m Molly,” she said.

Have I only been out of prison forty-eight hours?

Molly set the whole tomato on a live-edged cutting board and she knifed through it, letting the juice and seeds gush onto her hand. “I noticed from your paperwork that you don’t have any gardening experience,” she said, “but I appreciated where you said you’d make up for it with passion.”

My chest felt tingly.

Molly tilted her cutting board toward me and I took a slice between my thumb and index fingers, brought it to my lips.

I can make up for it with passion, all right.

Molly didn’t ask me why I’d skipped the prison gardening program. It would have been a valid question. I knew girls who dreaded parole they were so into that goddamn organic program.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I’d have said if she’d asked.

Truth is, dirt reminded me of burial. Reminded me of San Lorenzo Park and the Willamette River. I needed to put all that behind me now.

Molly didn’t ask me what I did with my time inside instead of the gardening, either. I liked that she didn’t need to pry, but I wanted to tell Molly things about my life. Is that weird? You ever want to tell somebody all about yourself? Give them some reason to think you’re special?

I read a lot of Murakami in prison, that’s what I would have told her if she’d asked. The truth. I had this idea to start telling the truth more often. Murakami. And I went to the pagan women’s circle on Friday afternoons. Maybe nothing you’d ever get invited to give a TED Talk about, but it was a life.

I liked the way anything could happen in a Murakami novel: fish fall from the sky, a psychic hooker starts calling you out of the blue, you find your lost cat. All this crazy shit could happen and in the end it was like nothing happened. You go on with your life. You look up at the sky.

I liked the way the witch lady who ran the pagan group made you feel that way too — only different. Her name was Star. When she first introduced herself, I thought she said Scar. I said, “Scar? That’s kind of tough.”

“No,” she laughed. “Star. But you can call me Scar if you want to.”

We were both sitting on plastic chairs with steel legs bolted to the floor. It’s like you’re always in an airport but you can’t go anywhere.

“And you are?” She hesitated for my answer.

I said the first thing that popped into my head: “Juliet.” Then I worried that sounded stupid.

Scar had to know what name I was in there under, I realized that. But I like a girl who understands that not everybody wants to be called by the name they’re in under. She had a hole in her nostril where a nose ring should go, but no nose ring. She said she was a witch, had a PhD in witchcraft or something because I guess you can get those now? Like, it’s late-stage feminism or something since I’ve been inside. Anyway, on Fridays we sat on those plastic chairs with steel legs bolted and sometimes I was the only one there besides Scar and sometimes a few other girls, and either way, Scar would lead us in these meditations, instructing us to visualize roots coming out of our feet. Like actual plant roots, right? She said, “Visualization is the most powerful tool I’ve ever found to reclaim my own agency.”

And I liked the sound of that. I had some agency I wanted to reclaim. Yes, I did. So I showed up in that fluorescent-lit room every Friday afternoon and I imagined roots coming out of my feet.

Sometimes I asked myself, Where does magical thinking end and schizophrenia begin? But I never did have an answer for that, so I put the question out of my mind.

Scar said, “Do you have a mantra, Juliet?”

And I didn’t want to not have a mantra so I made one up right then and there. I said, “Yeah, I got a mantra. It goes, Outta here outta here outta here.”

Scar’s teeth stuck out when she grinned. “I like that,” she said, “and I want to invite you to take it further. What if you imagined the life you desire, not just the escape?”

And that right there was pretty much a revelation. I’d never imagined anything but escape. Still, I didn’t exactly know where or how to start. Imagine the life you desire, I told myself, but I didn’t listen. I visualized roots and I chanted silently, Outta here outta here outta here.

Mostly I did that on Friday afternoons with Scar, but this one night, it’s Thursday, right? And I’m as alone as I ever got in there and I’m reading Murakami and fish are falling from the sky and psychic hookers start calling out of the blue and you just know he’s about to find his lost cat and I’m thinking, I could write a book as good as this, easy, and I get this idea to start visualizing roots, just like Scar taught us. So, the roots are growing out of my feet like bunions. They’re clawing out through the skin of my soles and then through my mattress and down through the bottom of my bunk and into the cement and my roots penetrate the ground and that’s when I realized I can tunnel down with my roots, right? I’m getting crazy into this visualization and I’m sure I’m gonna open my eyes and I’ll have tunneled right out and into Our Table Co-op to buy myself a bag of squash, and I’m picturing everything — vivid, like outta here — but when I open my eyes I’m still in my cell. And that’s when I think, Well, shit. Scar’s bullshit doesn’t work.

But the next day it’s Friday, so I show up at the pagan group, trying to decide whether to tell Scar I think her visualization doesn’t work, and I’m the only one there, which honestly isn’t that unusual, and out of the blue like a call from a psychic hooker, Scar says she has a lead on this work-release program in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And usually they just take women from the gardening program, right? But Scar’s got a lead like she knows someone, like it’s just a matter of paperwork. And I say, “Scar, that’s the craziest thing because last night I was doing the root visualization and I thought for sure I’d tunneled outta here with my pagan Jedi mind power and then I opened my eyes and I accepted failure and now today I come in here and you’re maybe handing me this tunnel out?”

And Scar says, “You know what, Juliet? That’s the difference between crazy and magic. Crazy doesn’t leave room for doubt. Magic always leaves a little room for doubt. And coincidence.”

I closed my eyes and I saw a coyote and a cactus and from there it’s just paperwork and interviews with this officer Jim I’ve never met before and more paperwork and a cold van in the dead of night and a Greyhound station like I’m a free woman. And I don’t want to go down through California ’cause I don’t wanna have to worry about memories, so I head inland.

You ever think about how many places there are out there? Well, for one thing there’s plenty of Eastern Oregon. There’s a little bit of Idaho out there. And let me tell you, there’s a whole lot of Utah. And then if you cross the border into Colorado, even just a few miles, you can buy marijuana like it’s just a cigarette or a candy bar. I keep reminding myself to do like Scar said, just believe in the energy. The energy’s gonna take me where I need to be when I need to be there. And then next thing I’m here. In the desert. And it is fucking cold.

Like, I thought I was coming to the goddamn desert and they were gonna have cactuses and palm trees, but apparently I was visualizing Arizona. Or some LA movie set that passed for Arizona. Not to complain. I check into the Motel 6 because they’re the closest place to the railyard that’ll take my voucher. I mean, you ever just go outside in the dark and listen?

The first night I stepped outside on my own watch and just listened and I knew I was outta there. I said to myself, I am never gonna take the sound of the night for granted again. But you know what happened? I swear, it was like the very next night and colder than a walk-in freezer and already I could give a shit about the sound of the night. You get used to upgrades in life a lot quicker than you get used to downgrades. I’ve learned that much.

All this to say, Santa Fe was definitely an upgrade.

The dry air smelled musty and fresh at the same time, like green chile on charcoal.

Molly picked up another slice of the tomato and I closed my eyes and opened my mouth and let her feed it to me and I said to myself, Don’t lick her fingers, and for once in my life I listened.

The tomato tasted tart and earthy, like blood.

“You like?” Molly whispered.

“It’s incredible,” I whispered back.

She smiled and made her cheeks dimple again. “Our tomatoes win all the awards year round. Anyone can grow a tomato in summertime, Juliet, but I’m the only one yielding orbs like this in the middle of winter.” Molly stroked one of her orbs. “I love them so much,” she whispered. “Sometimes it hurts my heart to imagine them being eaten.”

Looking at all the tomatoes in her basket, I wanted to know her secret, but I needed to pace myself. She hadn’t asked me too many questions. I wouldn’t ask too many, either.

Molly blushed, just a little.

Did she blush?

She said, “Well, Juliet, you can start by focusing your passion and packing the rest of the boxes out of the truck... gently. The regulars flood in right at eight a.m. and clean us out.”

I glanced up at the sign behind her: The Tomato Guru.

Yes, I believe I can make a clean start here.

As I set down the last box of tomatoes, Molly says, “Juliet? Do you want to know my secret?” like she psychically knew I wanted to ask.

And I do. I want to know all her secrets.

And she whispers even though no one else is around, she says, “My secret is my compost.” And she nods to this plastic box full of dirt she’s got, and she says, “Put your hands in it, Juliet.”

And I sink my hands into her dirt and I try not to think of the bodies I’ve buried.

She says, “Juliet?”

And I say, “Yes, Molly?”

And she says, “Women’s prisons? Are they as hot as they seem on TV?”

And I can’t help but blush at that. Because the answer is no. At least not for me. But I want her to associate me with things she thinks are hot, so I say, “Oh yeah.”

Twelve hours later I’m moving into the little brown-and-white travel trailer behind the greenhouses in Molly’s backyard off Baca Street. Compost piles line the back fence and Molly points to a red-painted shed in the far corner before the coyote fence and she tells me the composting toilet’s in there and I nod, all casual, like that’s not the most disgusting thing I have ever heard in my life, because, not to sound like a gun-jumper or anything, but I think things might be getting kind of serious between me and Molly. I mean, nothing’s happened, but I wonder what it would look like to visualize it. I wonder what that would lead to.

So it’s weird the next day when I open the door to her greenhouse and she’s got her back to me and I guess she’s on the phone because I swear I hear her say, “They’re prisoners, Jim. They’re not people.” And I step back real fast when I hear that. I close the door. And I wait a beat and then another beat, watching her through the glass until she clicks her phone off, and then I open the door — more dramatically this time — and I announce myself with a “Hey!”

And Molly says, “Hey, Juliet,” like everything’s fine and normal-like, so I decide maybe I misheard her, right? They’re prisoners, Jim. They’re not people. What would that even mean?

And that’s when it occurs to me that maybe this work-release thing isn’t on the up-and-up. And I think, But I visualized it. Like I’ve just got to trust the magic, and then I remember that I really didn’t visualize anything but roots and outta here.

And I try to remember what happened to the women I knew who were actually in the gardening program, and I gotta say, I don’t remember any work-release program in Santa Fe. I think work-release means you gotta go back inside at night or check in with your officer every now and again, and nobody said anything like that to me when they were hustling me out of there like it was some kinda heist.

And I look at Molly and I think, I could kill her. There’s no doubt about that in my mind. But I probably misheard her.

I could make her love me.

She looks at me almost shyly. She says, “Don’t you want to try a tomato, Juliet?”

And I want to try one very badly.

She holds the whole tomato up in her clean hand. She says, “It’s a Juliet.”

And I take it from her gently. It’s very soft. I press it into my mouth, and bite down.

She says, “Juliets are my favorite.”

That night in my trailer, I had a candle and I was trying to write. I wanted to write something like really fucking deep, you know? Like I wanted people to get me and maybe think I was special. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the people I’d killed. And how everything would have been fine if they’d have just shut the fuck up. Some nights I get caught up on the past, and on all the places I’ve had to leave, but that night as soon as my thoughts started spinning, they slowed down.

I didn’t feel so anxious.

The smell of tomatoes and compost held me.

Are Juliets really her favorite?

Outside my trailer window, it had started to snow. I opened my flimsy metal door and stepped out into the cold and upgraded night.

I looked to the darkened windows of Molly’s house.

A cat leaped down from a low roof, ran ahead, and then turned back to me in the moonlight. I wanted fish to fall from the sky, but the snow felt like a fair substitute.

At the back of Molly’s yard, I pressed my hands into her compost, and I swear I had the worst Holy shit, I am hallucinating with all of my senses moment right then, because it was a goddamn fucking human arm.

I know what cold skin feels like.

I know what a goddamn human arm feels like. A decomposing fucking arm.

I buried it deeper, rushed to the next compost heap like a crazy person, and I started digging.

I uncovered a whole body — unrecognizable, but all of it.

Then just a skull.

I kept tunneling down and it was historical trauma and bones, flesh becoming roots.

And I gotta get outta here.

When I finally tunnel up, I’m at the bar at Tomasita’s waiting for my carne adovada and I’m nursing a Negro Modelo and this old man with a gray beard and a Panama hat offers to buy me a drink. I’m writing. He interrupts my writing to offer me the drink, right? And he says, “Do you know this used to be the old Santa Fe train station? Built in 1904. Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Called it the Chili Line.” And that’s pretty fucking obvious with the brick walls and brick arches. And normally I’d say, Listen, pal, you can take your drink and shove it up your ass, but I’m still trying to be a better person — or a person who does right even if she’s thinking wrong. The old man wants to know what I’m writing — like poetry or fiction or memoir or what? He says, “I want to write. I could write a book someday. But everybody’s got to die first.” And he laughs at that.

And right then the bartender puts the beer in front of me and right then, too, it occurs to me that maybe that’s why I kill people. Or why I killed people — past tense.

So I could write.

I mean, is that fucked up?

Maybe everybody’s gotta be dead, like the old man says.

You ever strangle somebody just to get them to shut the fuck up?

And it occurs to me that I miss the hell out of Scar.

I wonder what she’d say if I told her that — that I realized maybe I killed people so I could make art. So I could write.

And it occurs to me maybe that’s what Molly’s doing. Is she gonna kill me and compost me? Like maybe she doesn’t see it as immoral any more than I do. She does it for the tomatoes. Like she’s got a higher calling.

I bet Scar would get that, even if she thought it was fucked up.

Should I kill Molly first?

My order comes, garnished with shredded iceberg lettuce and pale pink diced tomatoes.

Maybe she would be right to compost me. Turn me into an heirloom she can hold in her clean hands.

You know, I once said to her, “Scar, I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I’m pretty sure the bad thing inside me isn’t gonna get any better.”

And I swear she didn’t even blink at that. I think she got that.

And she didn’t even seem to think it was that big of a deal.

She said, “Juliet?” She said, “You don’t have to be right in your heart to act right — any more than you had to be wrong in your heart to act wrong.”

And that kind of blew my mind.

She said, “I want you to entertain the possibility that good and bad are a false binary.”

And that right there seriously blew my mind.

Like everything is crime and everything is punishment.

And suddenly it hits me like a call from a psychic hooker that maybe Scar is in on this whole prisoner-to-compost thing.

And that right there completed the blowing of my mind.

Visualize roots, my ass.

Maybe I just need a little bit of goddamn peace.

As I leave the bar, a train is pulling out of the depot. I stand in the gravel parking lot a long time, just looking up at the stars. I never been to a place with so many goddamn stars.

Behind the Tortilla Curtain by Barbara Robidoux

Southside

Ramona is a dreamer. She has recurrent dreams that often foretell the future. As a child she foresaw the death of her father when he wrapped his pickup around a tall pine tree on his way back from a fishing trip to Pecos. She asked to go with him but her father liked to fish alone in Holy Ghost Canyon. As much as Ramona and her brother Tony had begged to go, he insisted, “No, this one’s for me.” Another fisherman came upon the wreck but it was too late. Her father was dead.

Now sideways snow with 50 mph winds. Ramona knows better than to take the treacherous road to town but, stubborn as she is, she heads out anyway. It’s the third day of the blizzard and she’s been housebound too long. Cabin fever has her pacing and, anyway, she has laundry to do. She pulls a woolen peacoat on over her red flannel shirt and jeans, covers her head with a black beret, and walks out into the storm. Her ’88 Chevy coughs and sputters but miraculously starts. Once Ramona hits the road, she drives slowly to town.

At the intersection of Cerrillos and Airport Road, she turns left and passes behind the “tortilla curtain” and into the Mexican part of town. Everything you could ever want or need waits at the Chamisa Center, a one-block stretch of stores: Lil’ Dragon Pizza, Subway, La Cocina de Doña Clara, Dollar Mart, the Bridal Boutique, Nail Time, Boost Mobile, a Mexican grocery store, and several places to get checks cashed. Ramona is in heaven. At the end of the block: a Laundromat.

Ramona’s got a bag of dirty laundry in the backseat, so she hits the Laundromat first.

Hot air blasts her face when she opens the door; it feels good against the cold. She needs change so she drops her laundry near a washer and walks to the back and approaches a round, middle-aged Mexican lady who is glued to a small color TV set on the counter. It’s telenovela time: Abrázame Muy Fuerte has the woman totally absorbed.

“Excuse me,” Ramona says politely, “could I get some change?”

“Un minuto,” the fat lady whispers, not taking her eyes off the TV screen.

Ramona waits, wondering how long until a commercial might break the woman’s trance. She thinks maybe she should just go next door to the pizzeria, order something to go, and get her own change. Pizza is her favorite comfort food and she’s hungry.

Tension mounts on the television screen. A very handsome but irate young man — naked to the waist — points a pistol at a beautiful young woman (presumably his girlfriend). She begs him to “cálmate” but he shouts what sounds like obscenities at her. Ramona is not fluent in Spanish but she does understand “puta.”

The fat lady changemaker refuses to make change.

Ramona puts her clothes in a washer and is about to walk over to the pizzeria when she notices a young man with a long braid two washers down from hers.

The man removes layers of clothing. He takes off a filthy jean jacket with a skull and crossbones appliqued on the back and shoves it into the machine. Then he takes off a black Harley Davidson T-shirt and throws that in. Next he peels off his black turtleneck jersey and in it goes.

Ramona is transfixed. She can’t take her eyes off the guy.

On his very white chest, he’s got a tattoo of the Virgen of Guadalupe, roses included. The Virgen vibrates in all her splendor as the young man strips. Now he unzips his worn and dirty blue jeans and in they go. This guy is down to his boxers and white socks. He looks like he’s considering removing his socks, but decides against it.

The floor of the Laundromat is cold.

The man feels Ramona’s eyes on him and looks her way. “What?”

“Oh, I need some change,” Ramona tells him as she walks toward the door.

At Lil’ Dragon, Ramona orders a small pepperoni pizza, pays, and gets her change. “I’ll be right back,” she tells the pizza guy, and walks back to the Laundromat to start her wash. Very convenient to have a pizzeria next to a Laundromat, she thinks. She expects to see the half-naked guy with the long braid standing by his washer when she gets back, but he has disappeared.

Back for the pizza, she decides to eat it there. The booths are clean and comfortable — much better than eating in the Laundromat. The pizza is good — hot, spicy, and greasy, with a soft crust. Ramona thinks this might be a good place to work. Maybe she’d get free pizza too. Her unemployment is about to run out and she’ll need a job. But not now.

It’s snowing again, softening the sharp edges of this small city. Ramona returns to the Laundromat to dry her clothes. The place is now filled with young Latino women and children. Good thing the stripper left, she thinks. The kids run around playing games. The mothers wash and dry and fold, wash and dry and fold. I never want to go there, Ramona tells herself. She drops quarters into a dryer and takes a seat by the window. She’s leafing through the Rio Grande Sun when her cell phone rings. It’s her mother calling.

“Hello, Mom.”

“Mija, where are you?”

“I’m at the Laundromat.”

“In town?”

“Yeah, just a few blocks away from you.”

“Can you come over, mija? I need your help.”

“Okay, Mom, but my clothes just went in the dryer.”

“When they are done, then.”

“Okay.” Ramona hangs up.

She wonders what kind of help her mother needs. She could have called her brother Tony. Why me? She waits for the clothes to dry then stuffs them back into her laundry bag. I’ll fold them later, she tells herself. Tony’s a coward. Maybe their mother needs something only Ramona can manage.

Her mother lives alone in a trailer at the Cottonwood Village Mobile Home Park off Agua Fria. After Ramona’s dad died in the car wreck when Ramona was twelve, her mother never remarried. Just had a series of boyfriends. Some were good and she let them live with her; others were bad, like her most recent “old man.” Juan’s a mean drunk. One night when he was drinking, he busted up the trailer. He threw furniture around and broke an antique clock that had belonged to Ramona’s grandmother. He said he’d burn the place down. He tried to attack Ramona’s mother, but she threatened to cut his balls off with a kitchen knife and he backed off.

Her mom is a tough cookie. She called the cops and they hauled Juan’s ass off to jail. Turns out he was in the country illegally and so they deported him back to Mexico.

So Ramona knows it’s not Juan her mother needs help with.

Snow keeps falling. They don’t plow the roads on the Southside. It’s the Eastside and downtown where the rich people live that this city takes care of — forget the people behind the tortilla curtain.

Ramona pulls her Chevy into her mother’s driveway. So much snow, she thinks she might get stuck here for the night. She slides to a stop, feeling the ice under the snow.

The stairs leading to her mother’s double-wide are ice-covered and slippery. She opens the door and walks in, then stops to take off her snow boots. The smell of beans and chile lures her into the kitchen where she finds her mother making tortillas. Even though she isn’t hungry after her pizza, her mouth waters.

Ramona walks over to greet her mother and gives her a quick hug. Must be Friday, she thinks. Her mother’s long gray hair is damp and smells of rosemary. Like clockwork, her mother always washes her hair on Fridays. In a room adjoining the kitchen, a fire blazes in the fireplace and the smell of piñon and cedar draws her in. The fire’s heat feels good on her cold hands and feet.

Ramona grew up in this trailer. She remembers how much her dad loved the fireplace. He’d go to the mountains and cut wood every fall. Most times, the whole family piled into his old Ford pickup to go with him. Her mom packed homemade tortillas, fried chicken, and beans. Ramona’s dad had special places where he cut his wood and everyone was sworn to secrecy. He’d find dead pine and piñon and his chainsaw would take them down then cut them into fireplace-sized logs. Tony, Ramona, and their mom loaded the wood into the bed of the truck. Now that he’s gone, Ramona’s mother has to buy firewood.

“Where’d you get this wood?” Ramona eyes the split wood on either side of the fireplace.

“Oh, from los Martinez up on Acequia Madre. They give me a good deal and the wood is nice and dry this year.”

“So what’s up, Mom? You said you needed help.”

“I’m almost done with these tortillas; then we’ll talk, mija.”

Ramona pulls her chair closer to the fire. Cedar pops and crackles — the fire’s soothing song. After a few minutes, her mother pulls up a chair next to her. They sit warming by the fire for a long time. Ramona hasn’t visited her mother in a few weeks. She hasn’t watched her mother lose her glow as her olive skin begins to gray. She hasn’t noticed her mother losing weight. She hasn’t seen the blood seeping from her.

Ramona faces her mother now and suddenly sees the changes. All at once, like a flower that’s been hit by frost, her vibrant mother is fading.

“I’m dying, mija, and I need you to help me through it.”

Outside, the blizzard is passing, but an arctic cold bears down from the mountains and freezes the land. Nothing moves. Everything is held in place. No snow melts, but the indomitable New Mexican sunshine returns.

Ramona’s mother reluctantly tells the story of her progressing illness. At first she had thought it was a flu that had taken her energy. “You know I’m never sick,” she says. “Strong as a mule. But everything changed and I was tired all of the time. Then the bleeding started. Just a little at first, so I ignored it. But it got worse and I finally called Dr. Maez. She told me to come right in and that I shouldn’t be bleeding after ten years of menopause. So I went for the tests and now they want to operate, then maybe radiation or chemo.”

Ramona feels fear enter her bones. She tastes the bitterness of grief. She tries to swallow, but can’t. Instead, she goes to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. But the grief won’t leave. Her mother, her rock, the anchor that held her close in every storm, will maybe leave her. She can’t shake the terrible taste of terror.

Ramona returns to the fire and sits at her mother’s knees. She lays her head in her mother’s lap and lets her run her fingers through her long hair. Maybe her mother can comb away the terrors that tangle in her thoughts. Ramona is overcome by the terrible desire to weep. And she does.

Ramona spends two days and nights with her mother, then she needs to clear her head. They have talked it all out: the visit to the doctor, the diagnosis, the blood work results, even alternatives to surgery. Now it all needs to settle in. Ramona needs to absorb her mother’s words: “Mija, I am dying.”

Ramona drives into the sun, and when she approaches a hairpin turn in the road, she thinks: I’m dying too; everyone’s dying after all. Maybe her mother is overreacting. But Ramona knows by the sight of her mother that she is sick. Maybe it won’t be fatal, though, maybe she got an STD from that no-good asshole Juan. Who knows? Maybe she should be tested for HIV. But Ramona knows that’s her head talking. In her gut, she knows her mother is very, very sick.

She has a feeling that her mother is leaving her and she can do nothing to stop it. Nothing is a word Ramona rarely uses. She’s always found a way to do something. Even in the worst times of her life, doing nothing was never an option.

The sun feels good on Ramona’s face; it warms her but more than that it gives her energy. She knows she could never live without it. She drives out of town along the winding road to the little adobe house she’s rented. A willow is growing in the roadside ditch. Leafless now, it will soon turn a vibrant red. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk hunts along the acequia, which runs parallel to the road. Generations back, this area was cultivated by Hispanic farmers who used the water from the acequia for irrigation. Now the ditch rarely carries water. The city holds it back for the rich side of town.

Weeks pass and Ramona’s mother does not get better. She gets worse. Ramona decides to move back into the trailer to take care of her.

The first night she sleeps at her mother’s trailer, the old dreams return. She was afraid this would happen, but ignored her fears in the face of her mother’s need.

She dreams of that asshole Juan sucking the life from her mother like a vampire.

Everyone knew Ramona was a dreamer, but she was always too afraid to tell anyone about her premonitions. When she moved out of her mother’s trailer as a teenager, the dreams stopped. Now that she has returned, the dreams have returned too.

She sees red-tailed hawks soaring above the Caja del Rio.

Ramona still needs to find a job, at least part time. So when she sees the Help Wanted sign at Jumbo Wash, she decides to apply.

It’s a busy morning at the Laundromat. All the washers are occupied with the dirty clothes of the neighborhood. The air is thick with the sounds of Spanish and English married out of necessity into Spanglish. As she enters, Ramona notices two women leaning over a newspaper folded on top of a washer. They’re involved in a highly agitated conversation regarding the news.

“That Chavez hombre es loco.” The first woman points to a mug shot of a middle-aged man on the front page of the paper.

“Sí, he thought he could get away with murder. Maybe alla en Mexico but not here en el norte, no way,” the second woman responds.

Ramona wonders if it’s true that it’s harder to get away with murder some places.

“Mira, look at this!” The first woman points to the newspaper. “It says he’s trying to get off because his lawyer says he’s bipolo and he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Chingado, el Chavez shot his girlfriend in cold blood, sin verguenza.”

“And she was the mother of his son, pobrecita, she didn’t have a chance.”

“Ay, we mujeres don’t ever have a chance. La chota don’t care, especially when it’s a Mexican woman.”

Ramona thinks they are right to feel oppressed. She walks to the back of the Laundromat where the so-called “office” is located. She wants to fill out a job application, but two women block her way in the aisle of washers. Kids are running everywhere and others hang on their mothers’ legs. All eyes watch two other women.

Lola Chavez and Rosa Martinez are fighting over an empty washer. Lola put her hands and her laundry basket on the washer first, but Rosa had been eyeing it. She was wheeling her laundry in one of those wire baskets on wheels when Lola snatched the washer. So Rosa continued wheeling and ran right over Lola’s left foot. The women stand face to face now, and Lola’s foot hurts.

“¡Carajo!” Lola yells. “Are you trying to cripple me?”

Rosa, her dark eyes like poison arrows, looks straight at Lola and laughs. That’s all it takes. Lola’s on Rosa like a hawk on a rabbit. She slaps her hard across the face. She is not a pendeja. She has to fight for what is hers. She grabs Rosa’s long black hair and drags her toward the door.

At that point, Maria Lopez pulls out her cell and dials 911. It takes the cops awhile, and the two women are outside in the parking lot, still fighting and spitting, when the chota get there.

Ramona needs a job, but she decides to look around, find someplace less rowdy. She walks out the door into the parking lot.

“Hey!”

Ramona turns to face the guy with the Guadalupe tattoo who stripped in the Laundromat a couple weeks ago.

He smiles at her. “Why’d you disappear the other night?”

“Disappear? I just did my wash and went home. You look different with your clothes on.” Ramona steps back and eyeballs the guy.

“What’s your name?”

“Ramona. Yours?”

“I’m Tino, as in Valentino.”

Tino is flaco, as Ramona’s mother would say — skinny. She watches him walk toward her and wonders if he does drugs. His long black braid trails him. He sports a thin mustache and a goatee. She might not have recognized him if he hadn’t called out to her. He walks with a slight limp, something she wouldn’t have noticed at the Laundromat, where he just stood in front of his washer and stripped. He wears tight jeans, a black hoodie, and pointed-toe cowboy boots with a high shine.

He steps toward Ramona and extends his hand. “I’m happy to see you again. Can we have lunch?”

Ramona takes a step back. “Not today, gotta get home to my mom, she’s sick.”

“Well, okay, then can I have your phone number?”

“Okay.” Ramona rattles off the digits and Tino enters them into his cell phone.

“Want mine?” he asks.

“Later.” Ramona gets in her car and drives away. En route to her mother’s trailer, Ramona remembers last night’s dream. In it, that slimebag Juan has come back from Mexico. After he was deported, he just spent the night in a motel and the next day walked back across the Arizona border. “Oh shit!” Ramona mutters aloud.

The trailer is warm and smells of beans and tortillas. A note scrawled on a Post-it stuck to the kitchen counter just says, Taking a nap. Mom.

Okay, I’ll be quiet, Ramona thinks as she helps herself to a bowl of beans and pours herself a cup of coffee. Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about Mom. When’s her next doctor’s appointment?

Ramona walks into the living room and checks to see if there’s firewood. She opens the glass doors of the fireplace to build a bed of newspapers and kindling and notices three cigarette butts, no filters, on the bricks of the fireplace floor. My mother doesn’t smoke, she tells herself. She lights the fire and sits quietly as the cedar and piñon warm her.

In a few minutes, Ramona’s mother joins her by the fire. “Feels good, the warmth of the wood.” Her mother sighs.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Mom. How’re you feeling?”

“Not bad today, just tired, mija. I’ve been thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“Like, what will happen when I’m gone.” She pulls her chair closer to the fire.

“Don’t think like that, Mom. You aren’t going anyplace, you’re going to get better.” Ramona adds another log to the fire.

“Well, I want you to know where I keep the guns.”

“What guns?”

“Your father’s pistola and his deer rifle. You never know when you might need to protect yourself. They’re right over there in the broom closet. The pistola is loaded.” She points to the broom closet.

“Protect? Protect from who?” Ramona clears her throat.

“It’s not like it used to be around here when you were growing up. We hardly ever locked our doors. But now I lock the doors sometimes even when I’m home. It’s different.”

Ramona listens and remembers the old days growing up when the Southside was considered the countryside. Open lots everywhere, even corn and bean fields. Now that open land has been turned into developments of Centex homes and apartment buildings.

Ramona’s cell phone rings. She doesn’t recognize the number but answers anyhow.

“Hi, Ramona, it’s Tino. Remember me, the Laundromat stripper?”

“Oh yeah, what’s up?”

“Want to have lunch tomorrow, my treat?”

“Okay. Where?”

“How about the Plaza Café Southside?”

“Perfect. I’ve been meaning to stop by there to see if they’re hiring.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there around eleven thirty before the lunch rush.”

“Who was that?” Ramona’s mother asks.

“Oh, just some guy I met in the Laundromat,” Ramona chuckles.

At the Plaza Café Southside, Ramona finds Tino in a booth.

When he sees her, he stands up and waves. “How’s it goin?” he asks.

“Goin.” She slides into the booth.

“Hungry?” Tino asks.

“Starving. I want a stack of blue corn piñon pancakes and a side of bacon.”

“Got it.” Tino waves to the waitress to take their order, then looks back at Ramona. “So what’s up?”

“Oh, my mother is sick. I’m just worried about her.”

“Sick with what?”

“Cancer.”

Tino lowers his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, just when she kicks some slimebag boyfriend out of her life, she finds out she’s sick.” Ramona can’t shake the image of Juan sucking the life from her mother.

Tino sips his coffee.

“Yeah, and now I’m afraid he’s back. He’s Mexican, got deported, but you know how those guys just turn around and walk back across the border the next day.”

“How do you know he’s back?”

“I found three fresh cigarette butts of his in our fireplace when I made a fire last night. My mom doesn’t smoke.” Ramona is close to tears, but when the waitress presents her with her pancakes, she perks up.

Tino picks up his green-chile cheeseburger and takes a big bite.

“So how long you been in Santa Fe?” Ramona asks.

“All my life. You?”

“Same, born and raised, Santafesiño all the way. Funny, I’ve never seen you around before the Laundromat.”

“Oh, I went away to the Marines right after high school. Then Afghanistan. Deployed three times, that’s how I got this limp.” Tino taps his left thigh. “But I’m okay now. Got a disability check. I live with my mom too.”

“How’s the burger?”

“Excellent!” Tino offers a thumbs-up.

The café fills with lunch customers and the noise level rises. Ramona and Tino finish their food.

“Let’s get out of here.” Tino motions to the door. “I’ll pay up.”

In the parking lot, they make small talk. Ramona thanks him for lunch and he tells her he’ll call. “Maybe we can take in a movie. I hear there are some dope films at Regal 14 now.”

“Okay. Call me.” Ramona gets in her car and leaves Tino standing in the parking lot.

Ramona knows that slimebag is in the house as soon as she walks in. She breathes him with her first breath. She doesn’t see him or hear his voice but she smells him as she walks into her mother’s kitchen. She sees his half-empty plate on the kitchen table. Beans half eaten, a piece of tortilla left with the rice. Salsa jar left open.

“Where is he?” Ramona demands.

“Who, mija?”

Ramona points with her chin at the beans and rice. “Him! That asshole.”

“I’m eatin’ that food, mija, what are you talkin’ about? There’s no one here but me and you.” Her mother sits at the table and starts eating the food.

“How can you eat his food and lie to me? I know he’s here.” Ramona walks to the broom closet where her mother keeps her father’s guns.

“I’ll kill the bastard.” She pushes past her mother, who stands up to stop her.

“Mija, no. I’ll call the cops, they’ll take him away.”

“That doesn’t work! He just comes back.” Ramona stares at her mother. “Look at you.” She points to her mother’s neck. “That bastard’s been sucking on you again. You have the hickeys to prove it.” Ramona will not be stopped. Her mother asked her to take care of her and she will take care of her. She holds the pistol and remembers her mother told her it was loaded. No need to find bullets. Her father taught her how to handle the gun when she was a little girl. They used to target practice together in the Caja del Rio.

By now Ramona’s mother is crying, desperate to keep her daughter from shooting Juan.

“Come out! You son of a bitch!” Ramona yells toward the pantry just off the kitchen. She pulls open the pantry door and sees Juan crouched under a shelf of canned tomatoes, gallon jars of rice and beans. He holds a twenty-pound bag of flour to hide his face.

“Get up, you bastard!” Ramona points the gun at him.

“No! Don’t shoot. Your mother loves me and she’s not sick. We just made love.”

“You son of a bitch!” Ramona screams. “Go to hell where you belong!” She points the gun at Juan and fires three rounds.

Juan lies dead on the pantry floor, white flour covering his face. The blood from his chest wounds mixes with the flour, creating a pink paste encasing him.

“Oh my god, mija, you killed him!” Ramona’s mother pulls Juan’s still-warm body out of the pantry to the kitchen floor. “Now what?”

Caja del Rio is an 84,000-acre expanse of volcanic plateau five miles from Ramona’s mother’s trailer. Two abandoned thirteenth-century pueblos lie within the Caja. It’s an area of piñon and juniper, big sagebush and chamisas. The roads in and out of the Caja are rough dirt roads not well maintained by the Bureau of Land Management or the US Forest Service, which oversee them.

Ancient petroglyphs carved into basalt cliffs and outcroppings watch what occurs in the Caja. It’s home to coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and grazing cattle. Nopales turn red in the January sun.

In Tino’s battered Ford pickup, Ramona and he take Juan’s bloodied body, shrouded in an old blue tarp, up into the Caja.

They drive to the edge of a steep cliff and push the body off into a deep ravine.

Two red-tailed hawks soar overhead. Ramona looks out over the Caja where the sky is more than half the world. One-hundred-year-old junipers dot the red earth.

“I wonder if we really do return to the stars when we die.” Ramona remembers her father telling her stories of the Milky Way and how in death we live there again. Will even that bastard Juan make that journey?

She steps back from the edge of the cliff. “I never thought I’d turn out to be a murderer.” She faces Tino, and thinks about the first time she saw him, stripping at the Laundromat before she even knew her mother was sick.

“You had to do it,” Tino says. “That’s it.” He wipes his hands on his jeans. “Let’s get out of here.”

Me and Say Dog by James Reich

Santa Fe Plaza

Against the mountains, a vast wave of blood broke and receded. Through the waxy aspens and bristling pines, over the crenels and ragged tracks, shucking the soil and switchbacks, it fell like a robe of red from the reclining rocks — Sangre de Cristo, the blood of Christ — beneath it all, Kuapoga — Santa Fe — where Tséh Dog drinks her martinis at Hotel La Fonda. I sit next to her at the bar. We come here all the time, like a dare, some affront, a double-dare. With the jut of her jaw and the wicked scrawl of her pomaded hair, her leather jacket, cuffed pants, and motorcycle boots, she is photogenic in her Brando drag. In the hotel it is permanent dusk, an antique light drips through the bar. We become flies in amber. The counter is curved, a scimitar shape. Beyond the square tables, margaritas, and menus, the bar is open to the arcade that rims the hotel, a series of fragrant tourist traps selling silver and leather, haute couture cowboy duds, pottery. There are crocodile-skin bags in striplit terrariums. Turquoise stares back from locked cabinets. Behind us, the sometime open-air restaurant with its central fountain hums and flashes — mole and squash blossom, poblanos and corn. The conversations are loud. It sounds like Texas.

“I think this is the hotel,” Tséh Dog says, brandishing a ratty paperback, “from this book.” The book is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. “This is the hotel ahead of the ‘savage reservation.’ That’s what they call it. Big men hunting from helicopters.” She sips her drink, and pushes the book into her back pocket where the spine suffers. “I got us a room,” she says, and there are no choices. Her smile is crooked. “Let’s see if it has perfume faucets, like in the novel.”

Rainbows caught in lemon bubbles — eyelashes — some bright glycerin reef, or a glossy discotheque, popping dreams glittering around Billy’s asshole, a shiny penny encircled with soap. He was a dishwasher, and the hotel where we did this has been covered over with another. So it is with dreams. So it was with Billy. The last hotel is low in the rosy sediment, where the subterranean parking lot gouges like a gray goldmine. Everyone loves Billy, in the way that crows love their scarecrow. You know the sepia smut of his photograph, the stupid eyes, his rabbit teeth. I like to come to the new hotel and pretend. The scent of his groin like raw lamb, he shrugs through the furniture like a civet cat, drifts up through the floor. What was Garrett thinking with this feral boy?

We wake and it’s not yet midnight, so go downstairs and walk the few yards to the plaza where the drivers of a pair of unmuffled lowriders, both sixties Impalas, one violet the other grasshopper green, are doing their slo-mo Ben Hur past the muted yellow windows of the Palace of the Governors — wolf-whistles — deferential applause — no one wins — and this is where the Indians sit in the day, surrounded by tourists who must look uncomfortably down upon them to see their jewelry laid out on black sheets. Tséh Dog doesn’t sit on Indian row anymore. She struts and poses for photographs and tips. But mostly she’s a pickpocket. Moonlight slips through the plaza’s broad trees, strobes in the wind. Briefly, she engages with a man dressed in a quilted jacket, seated on a park bench, returns empty-handed. We’re sitting on the stone steps of the bandstand, watching the past ripple across the facades of the expensive stores, where once there was a drugstore, a firing squad... Tséh Dog regards the gray light falling on the obelisk, To the heroes who have fallen in various battles with — Indians in the Territory of New Mexico. The word savage was removed in 1974. She thinks of Huxley and his shining helicopters, of nerve gas falling on wolves, pueblos strafed by machine guns, and she thinks of American Spirit and Hollywood, motorcycles and buffalo. Tséh Dog wants a Manhattan, so we go back.

The rugged, sandy-haired man in the bar says he’s an astronaut. He is spending one night at La Fonda, and a night at the Sierra Grande Lodge down in Truth or Consequences, three hours south, before he is shuttled to the spaceport on the Jornada del Muerto. “Then what?” Tséh Dog asks. Mars, he tells her. The Agency’s colonization project, he explains. She’s imagining becoming an outlaw on another planet, a planet blushing with promise, taking a dune buggy, a motorcycle, or a horse over the ancient curves of red sand. How old are you? he asks, and Tséh Dog says, “Old enough,” and presses a cherry between her lips. He hooks it out with his tongue. Something goes wrong in the elevator to the floor where the room is, and when the guillotine doors open the astronaut is dead. “Get up,” Tséh Dog insists, puts a motorcycle boot into his ribs. “Get up!” She is certain now, satisfied. The astronaut, a shriveled heap of plaid and denim, is still and silent, stiffening in the gaping doorway.

He’s the third. In the hotel room, he is arranged on the bed, and Tséh Dog stands over him, pulling a crease out of the blanket with its Navajo pattern. She is cool-nerved, contemptuous of the body, thumbing shut the eyes. She pulls his room key from his jeans, and $312 from his new snakeskin-embossed wallet. It has a receipt in it from one of the arcade stores off the lobby. His cell phone rings, and Tséh Dog rejects the call, thumbing that shut also. In the night, long before dawn, we’ll use rope to saddle him up into the Sangre de Cristos — pinion — piñon — the astronaut will ride up there into the pines like the corpse of El Cid into battle. So much Christendom... Charlton Heston played Ben Hur and El Cid in the movies. “And Moses, and the astronaut Taylor in Planet of the Apes,” Tséh Dog says. “He also played a rancher who hired Billy the Kid. And he played Andrew Jackson.” That’s something. His room is on the same floor. We make it with his key. There’s a suitcase from the Agency and a packet of American Spirits, and a silver vinyl wash bag in the bathroom, but that’s it. These things we take. The sandy-haired astronaut waits for us. Tséh Dog lies down next to him while I go through the suitcase and count the cigarettes. I’ll show the stuff to Tséh Dog when she wakes up, in a few hours — rosary — book — silver flight suit, like the others... When the hotel is quiet, we will carry him with our shoulders like a crucified man pretending to be merely an alcoholic. Tséh Dog dreams of Billy riding on the red dunes, the plumes and plummets of their ghosts. I think of the fear and disgust rippling like heat haze through mission control as another astronaut goes missing. I open my eyes and the corpse is still there on the bed.

At another time, in slanted monochrome, Martin Richter would have been a Pinkerton man. Now he is an Agency man, paramilitary police for the Mars program, gaunt and moonlit, pulling on the dog end of his cigarette before striding toward his helicopter. It waits on the Kirtland tarmac, tense as a crouched grasshopper, a Huey UH-1, its skids pulsing and bracing outside the hangar. Lights blink on its green shell. It emits a high-pitched screaming over its rhythmic chop, before this becomes a thick percussive drone. The pilot works dispassionately through his checks as Richter climbs into the passenger compartment behind him, pulling his comm-link headset on, and crossing the belts over his flight suit. “Get us up.” It should have been reported hours ago, when the biometric link ran flat, when he didn’t answer his cell, or when they couldn’t reach surveillance. A local cop found the watcher on the plaza, bloody quilting seeping from his jacket, around the horny grip of a bone knife. The thirty minutes to Santa Fe will pass slowly enough for him to slow his pulse, slipping it inside and under the rapid beat of the blades. Momentarily, he imagines himself on Mars, less vulnerable than these missing astronauts. There’s a blank space in his consciousness where his wife and children might be. It would not be hard to leave. Martin Richter studies his phone for a moment, before addressing the pilot. “He’s not at the hotel anymore. He’s moving.”

When we leave La Fonda, the plaza is taped off close to the obelisk. Yellow plastic flaps between the trees, sectioning the space where men scan their forensic grid for evidence. The body has been removed. Though the cops are engrossed, Tséh Dog works the throttle tenderly, and turns her black Thunderbird onto East Palace Avenue toward Paseo de Peralta. We pass the adobe-colored Basilica of Saint Francis of whom it is said that he pitied the wolf, and loved wild flowers, the vivid animals, and haunched mountains. The ropes hold the astronaut upright on the motorcycle, lashed around Tséh Dog’s leather back, his rigorous arms pointing at the road, his head encased, embalmed in a glittering silver helmet. She accelerates toward a high abstraction in the mountain, chiseled by old rain and old lightning. The road is empty and the sky is full, the dark scattered with mica. The astronaut lolls slightly, like a sailor bound to his wheel, or Ahab on the whale, as the asphalt switches and undulates closer to the summit, and the toe of her left boot works the gears. His ghost shivers under the weight of his skin, the gravity of the speeding motorcycle. When the time comes, Tséh Dog will stop, unfasten the knots across her chest, and disentangle the astronaut from the cycle. Heavy with himself, he will be carried into the pines as a deer is carried, up the ragged slope, under the canopy of the forest. Soon, we will stand together in the grove in the mountains where the others are. The way is difficult. She sweats in the darkness. Two bodies, strips of blackened flesh hanging from grids of bone, cavities chewed from their torsos, are propped against the rock when she brings the astronaut there, one in the remains of his gray flight suit, one in bloodstained jeans and a denim shirt. She places the third, wearing his helmet, between them. The originals have been desecrated by animals, decomposed. They face west. The moon exposes them. Here are the decaying orbits of the archangels. Here is the decline of the overmen. Theirs is the madness that makes ours, these hopeful men. Tséh Dog appears oblivious to their state, accepting them, as she puts her weird trinity together. Whatever this is, it is her own. It has no past in her ancestors. There is quiet fury in it, a waste of courage. It is sad to observe. The hollows of bough and bone exchange absurdity and sorrow. She cocks her head subtly, listening.

Like Say Dog? I had said, and she’d nodded that this was close enough. I don’t know how many years ago I met Tséh Dog. She recognized me at Hotel La Fonda one night, the place that sits like a ziggurat upon the crushed labyrinth of the old hotel, The Exchange, where I washed dishes. I heard her call my name. “Billy,” she said, noting my shade crossing the bar, and I was brought up like a man called out on the street. My ghost is like shattered glass — some in Mesilla — Silver City — Fort Sumner — and she had one of me to scry with. She calls me Coyote, Fox-Boy, Rabbit, other things. Tséh Dog may be the future, earthbound, resistant to astronauts, protector of emptiness. “There’s a chopper coming.” She reaches into the leg pocket of the first corpse’s flight suit.

If the others had subcutaneous trackers, we wouldn’t have lost them. Yet, did it give the third a false sense of security, as if the Agency was a god to watch over him? Martin Richter studied his screen, the blue blip movement without biosignal. They were close, but both things could not be true, he thought. Perhaps the chip was damaged, reporting movement randomly, without cause, while the astronaut lay sleeping at the hotel; or perhaps he was moving, playing the tourist oblivious to the fact that his life signs were flat. Now, Richter felt a thin flush of embarrassment — better to have instructed the pilot to take him to the hotel first, to rule out catastrophe before assuming it? Now they were low over the pines, skimming the flanks of the Sangre de Cristos, closing in on a sparking microdot, their searchlight probing out ahead and below them, vicious white against the darkness. Taking the rifle from its rack, he opens the side door to a gale of freezing air, and the deafening beat of the rotors. “There!” The spotlight falls on the dead astronauts, a glitter-ball light blooming from the silver helmet of the third. The men seem to have spilled from space. The pilot’s voice squelches over the comm-link, and the Huey jolts like a startled horse, as his shock translates through the stick. Richter fires at the figure standing over the bodies. He hears the bullet ricochet from the rock. Struggling to aim again, he calls to the pilot, “Gas, now!” He sees her clearly for a moment. The hunting rifle feels good in his shoulder, riddled with cool rage. The pilot hovers the chopper over the scene. Like shooting the wolf that took your lamb, Richter tells himself. He fires again, and pulls on a mask as the spectral plume drifts below, but is taken by the wind, away from the grove with its terrible shrine. “Keep us still... Keep us—”

Tséh Dog curls her shoulder under another shot from the helicopter, like a boxer turning under a punch, raising the pistol she took from the flight-suited dead like an uppercut, fluid and fierce. She fires off-center from the spotlight, second-guessing the pilot. The second shot paints the cockpit with his larynx and milky studs of jawbone and tooth that drip down the curved glass. The chopper pitches and howls in the moonlight, the beam of the searchlight swiping over the deep trees, moving away, before it enters a terminal tilt and dives forward, as if into unconsciousness. The rotors are ripped from the fuselage and the tail breaks like a wishbone in the shredding boughs. Birds lift into the night. There are no flames. Soon there is silence. And we ride back to La Fonda.

The astronaut’s possessions are in our room, like relics of the future. Tséh Dog doesn’t think the Agency will send anyone here, not with one of their choppers lost up in the Sangres. Somehow, they knew we had taken him there. They will discover their crashed helicopter. Certainly, then, they will discover their dead astronauts arranged in the grove. The terror of it will hold them at bay for a time. The story will not get out, unless Tséh Dog tells it. We sleep like the dead, awaken shimmering with rude promise. “We should go down there,” she says, “to the spaceport.” I look at her funny. “Go to Mars in their place,” she suggests. I’m not certain that she is kidding me. For the present, we ride the elevator down to get breakfast in the old Placita, now La Plazuela, the hotel dining room with its fountain. Her chromium reflection suggests that she is thinking about the third astronaut. How she killed him, I don’t know. “Come on, Coyote. I’m hungry.” The future is visible, like a movie, readable for those with eyes to see it.

After breakfast we walk the plaza; now the yellow police tape and forensics crew are gone. The sun is bright over the mountains. The air is crystalline, sharp with altitude. Tséh Dog has a hip flask of mezcal, and the taco carts are out. Gradually, slow in the glamour of our time, we turn the quadrants onto Indian row, where the vendors are out, cramped on their blankets and folding stools, with their silver, clay, and turquoise on black sheets before them. A sunburned child with a plastic raygun shoots sparks at the Indians from across the street. Tséh Dog combs her pompadour and gets five dollars from the parents for posing as a villain. Afterward, she curls her lip in disgust, but she does have the mother’s wristwatch. It can be sold in a few days. The day goes like that. Later, we watch a Native kid skateboarding on the bandstand. The kid rumbles and scrapes in radical circles, and there are tears in Tséh Dog’s eyes. She’s happy. She has the bonfire taste of the mezcal in her mouth, and she’s thinking about the ritual in the mountains. I can feel it. The pines redden at the close of day.

At La Fonda, there’s a Western swing band playing in the arcade bar, and the tourists are dancing like rhinestone cowboys and their booted cowgirls, so we take the elevator to the Bell Tower, to drink in the open air over the streets. It’s quiet and the evening is glassy with stars. Lifting her martini, she points out the constellations as they emerge — Bear, Spider God, Elk Skin, Coyote, Two Dogs. Tséh Dog speaks: “Why do we do this? James Dean asks Bud before the chickie run in stolen cars toward the bluffs. Why do we do this? the boy asks his father under the spokes of the sundance tree where the hooks hang. Why do we do this? Jesus asks his father from the bloodstained cross. You’ve gotta do something, Bud says, and is crucified in his car. So say the fathers, but that’s not it. Marlon Brando says, What’ve you got? Is it our fate to dash ourselves against the sky, to interrupt the stars with craziness?” I don’t know what to say to her. By now she is soft and melancholy with the alcohol. She is out on some bough of self, and it bends under her weight. There is her gravity. There is the earth’s gravity. There is Mars, and dead astronauts. She is on the rim of a red crater in being. Finally she says, “Fuck it. Let’s go down and dance with the cowboys.”

Unknown, I pass through the thick bodies as they two-step. They think it’s the warp of their drinks working on them. No, that shiver is a ghost through your flesh, insisting, Yes, yes, I’m here. A guitar string twangs. The hi-hat ticks. The air is heavy with perfume, as if it runs from the faucets of the rooms. These people make me nervous, and soon I’m waiting at the edge, beneath the surface. Alone, Tséh Dog grooves and ruts between them, and a little space forms. But they can’t get far from her. No one gets far, that’s what I’ve learned since 1881. That’s what it is to haunt and be haunted. A shadow is never merely a shadow, you can ask Pat Garrett. When the band takes a break, I sit beside Tséh Dog at the bar. She is panting. Sipping from her martini, she pulls out one of the relics of the third astronaut. Her smile is crooked. “I think this is the hotel,” Tséh Dog says, brandishing a ratty paperback, “from this book.”