Wild Penance

10

In Santa Fe, I stopped at a gas station to use the pay phone. “Father Ignacio Medina, please,” I requested.

There was a long silence. I was about to repeat what I had just said when the woman at the St. Catherine Indian School-the same one who always told me that the father couldn’t take my calls-finally responded in typical fashion. “Father Medina is not available right now. May I take a message?”

“Yes, this is Jamaica Wild. You know, I’m the one who used to call almost every week?”

“Yes, Miss Wild, I remember that. Would you like me to leave a number?”

“I just want to ask the padre one quick question. It won’t take more than thirty seconds. If he’s there, can you tell him that?” I wanted to get the name the father had given me, the one I’d written in my book and couldn’t remember now.

Another long pause. “I am sorry, Miss Wild. I would be happy to take down your number and if I see him, I will give him the message.”

“I can’t leave a number. I don’t have a phone. I’m just in town for an hour or so and I really need to talk to him. Isn’t there somewhere I could reach him?”

“Wait just one minute, please.” I could tell she’d covered up the mouthpiece of the receiver; I heard her muffled voice as she spoke with someone else, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She came back on the line. “I am sorry. Father Medina is not available at this time. I will tell him that you called.” There was a quick click as she hung up the phone.

Since I couldn’t reach Father Ignacio, I went to the library to look for the tract by Padre Martínez. I found several references to it in other works, but no copies in the system, as I had feared. I asked the librarian for direction.

After making a few search attempts on her computer database, she said, “Let me make a call. I know someone who works at the archives for the archdiocese. I’ll find out if he knows anyplace you can look.”

I browsed impatiently through the section on New Mexico history and found two books I wanted to take home to study.

The librarian signaled for me to come back to the desk. “My friend didn’t have any idea where to find a copy. I’m sorry.”

“But he didn’t dispute its existence?”

“No, he didn’t. I know that some say that tract is just a legend. But I think it is likely that all the copies of it have been lost over time. You see, Padre Martínez and a friend operated the first printing press in New Mexico. The first book published in this state was a cuaderno, a schoolbook that Martínez wrote for the school he ran in Taos next to the church. He probably published other booklets as well. He was known for his political and religious writings at the time. But the tract you are looking for is not something I have ever seen. And if my friend at the archdiocese hasn’t seen it either, I doubt if there are any copies around anymore.”

Frustrated, I shoved the books I wanted across the counter and put my library card on top. She took the card and swiped it in the reader, then said, “Just a minute. There’s a problem with your card.”

“What do you mean, a problem?” Before I could get it out, she disappeared into one of the offices behind the counter and was on the phone again. I searched my memory for any stray books I might have forgotten to return, any unpaid fines I might have on my account. Nada.

A few minutes later, she reappeared. “I don’t know what the problem was; I couldn’t find any reason for a hold on your card. I cleared it.” She zipped the scanner over my books and pushed them across the counter at me. “There you go!”

I threw the books onto the passenger seat of my Jeep and backed out of my parking space, looking over my shoulder. Down at the end of the lane, perhaps five or six car-lengths back, a late-model Lexus sedan idled, not a typical vehicle for these parts. The car was one of those noncolors somewhere between metallic fish scale and wet sandstone. Through its smoked windshield, I could just make out the silhouette of the driver, his elbow bent as he pressed a cell phone to his ear.

“Everyone has to be on the phone all the time these days,” I muttered, as I put my Jeep in drive and proceeded toward the exit. Living and working in remote and mountainous terrain as I did, a cell phone wouldn’t even work most of the time. The world was changing in ways that I didn’t understand.

The drive from Santa Fe to Taos journeys through dramatically varied terrain. At one end, the Santa Fe Mountains rise up to the northeast and the City Different nestles in a seven-thousand-foot-high navel. From there, foothills roll away to the west as piñon- and juniper-covered slopes crowned with adobe palaces give way to red earth, purple mesas, and arid moonscapes marked by strange rock outcrop-pings formed centuries ago by spurts of planetary heartburn. Here, the highway travels through Tesuque, Nambé, and Pojoaque pueblos, and the descent into the Rio Grande Valley starts to level off. Wherever reservations meet the road, Indian gambling casinos sprout from the desert landscape-ranging from utilitarian temporary constructions to a mammoth casino-centered golf resort. And away to the west, high atop a precipice at the edge of the Jemez Mountains, Los Alamos stands like an android sentry, visible from as far as a hundred miles away in the clean, clear air of the cerulean New Mexico sky.

As I drove past the turnoff to Los Alamos, I glanced in the rearview mirror and realized that the car about a quarter of a mile behind me had been there for some time. I couldn’t make out what kind it was because the bright sun reflected off its hood like a mirror, but its shape was new looking, low profile, a light color, I thought.

I sped into Española, slowed enough to get through it without legal intervention, and then put the pedal down again across the flat land between Española and Velarde. I watched as the car behind me sped and slowed, too, always keeping the same distance between us.

In Velarde, where the road climbed a shelf overlooking the cultivated orchards of the bottomland and the river itself, the route began to twine and curl as it wound along parallel to the Rio Grande. The sky narrowed between towering bluffs armored with chiseled sheets of stone. In the twisting turns, I lost sight of the car behind me.

The canyon widened at Embudo and through the village of Rinconada. Chile ristras dangled from the low shed roof of a roadside fruit stand. Hand-painted signs along the road offered up a diverse menu of cultural charm: a taxidermist, home art galleries, a massage therapist, a winery, and bed-and-breakfasts. I kept checking the mirror and the shiny shadow car was always behind me in the distance, disappearing as I went around the curves and bends, reappearing on the straight stretches.

At Pilar, the Rio Grande and the road straight through to Taos kissed and parted, and a little county road followed the river, while the highway climbed hard and fast through the mountains. I pulled over at this junction and backed my Jeep in behind a little hut that served as a rafting company in the summer, making sure the nose of my car was all the way behind the structure, out of sight. I pulled out my field glasses and got ready.

In less than a minute, the tail sped past but the car was going too fast for me to read the plate. It was a Lexus, the same model and color as the one I’d seen in the library parking lot in Santa Fe.