Wild Penance

15

The Suazo residence might have been a nice place at one time, but it cried out with the pain of neglect as we drove up the dirt drive. The adobe face on the house was cracked and water had seeped in, causing some of the bricks to melt. In previous summers, vines had grown up the wall on the north side, and now their skeletons looked like bony fingers clutching at the structure as if to pull it back into the earth. A pack of lean and sickly dogs ran up to boast territorial rights to the property, their barks turning to pleas for attention and squeals of complaint about their sordid lives as we walked among them toward the door of the house.

A large picture window had fogged up between its panes of glass-the compressed gas barrier that had promised good insulation now almost totally obscuring any view. Over the window hung a faded sheet, and the fabric moved at one side and then swung back into place. A place beside the front step had been repeatedly used to empty the cat litter, and the acrid ammonia smell of cat urine was the only welcome besides that of the dogs.

Kerry opened a listing aluminum storm door with no glass in the bottom and banged on the peeling wood door. He removed his hat and began shuffling his hands around the outside of the brim, turning the hat just slightly with each new hand grip. I looked at him in profile and felt a warm flood of attraction. The door opened.

A rake-thin, middle-aged Anglo woman peered timidly around the edge. Her coarse gray-brown hair tried to escape from a sad bun at the back of her neck. Her face was blotchy and red against the pale white of her neck and shoulders. The one eye we could see was swollen and moist, as if she had been crying.

“Mrs. Suazo?” I asked.

“He ain’t home,” she said, matter-of-factly, anticipating my next question.

“Do you know where we might find your husband?” Kerry said in a gentle voice.

“He’s probably somewhere drunk.” She clutched a tissue to her nose as her eyes watered over with tears.

“Where does he do his drinking, ma’am?” Kerry pressed.

“If it’s not with someone else’s wife, it’s usually at that biker joint down in Española.” Her voice cracked with anger and frustration as she cried. “I just don’t care anymore, and I’m not protecting him.” The door fell open a little wider now, and we could see that one eye was bruised and blue, the side of her face swollen. She might have been pretty at one time, but the years since her youth had not been kind or easy ones. There was a delicacy to her features, as if she once had been becomingly childlike, perhaps even baby faced. I could imagine that her slight frame had seemed willowy or sprightly then, instead of empty and used up, as it did now.

“What has happened here, Mrs. Suazo?” I asked.

“He’s gone clear around the bend this time, and I can’t even tell you what it is. It ain’t this”-she pointed to her black eye-“he’s done this plenty of times, usually when he’s drunk, which is most of the time. This time it’s different. There’s something going on.” She used the tissue to blow her nose, making loud honking sounds.

Kerry and I exchanged glances while she did this, and then waited until she was finished.

“What makes you say there’s something going on, Mrs. Suazo?” I asked.

She looked past us into the yard, as if she were speaking to the trees. “He says he’s really struck it rich, that this time, he’s really hit pay dirt. He has, too. I looked in his pocket when he was asleep. He had him two rolls of twenties in there-each one was as big around as my arm!” She held up a thin, bony wrist. “I don’t know where he got that, and I have a feeling I don’t want to know. I should have never come out here with him! I shouldn’t never have left my family! I have had nothing but trouble since the day I met him, and it just keeps getting worse. My family ain’t even speaking to me now, on account of he’s ripped them off, too, just like everyone from here to Santa Fe. I don’t have a friend in this world thanks to him. I can’t even go home!” She began sobbing now in earnest.

I looked at Kerry. It was awkward here-her tucked half behind the door, us standing on the portal. Uninvited, and without any jurisdiction, we were tentatively holding the ground between inside and out by virtue of the aluminum storm door resting against Kerry’s left shoulder.

“Mrs. Suazo,” I tendered, “could we come in for a minute?”

“There ain’t no need of you to come in here, and I’m ashamed of the way we live anyway. I already done told you everything. I don’t know where he got the money. That there is the most money I ever saw him carry, and I know he didn’t get it from selling no wood. I should have never left east Texas. I had a good job at the oil refinery there. I can’t even find work here, except as a maid during the ski season, and that’s been terrible this year on account of the snow not coming until late. And then, he leaves me here without no car about half the time. I can’t keep a job like that. Even when I do make money, he takes it all and drinks it all up. I just don’t have nothing. He makes sure I don’t have nothing. That way, I can’t leave.”

“Is there someone we can call, or would you like us to take you someplace? There’s a shelter in Taos,” I said, my voice as tender as I could make it.

“No. I don’t want to be with nobody, I don’t want to talk to nobody, and I don’t want no help from nobody. I’m sorry to complain like I did.”

I pulled out a business card and handed it to her. “If you change your mind, just call me.”

She took the card gingerly and pulled it in to her chest.

Kerry looked at me. He raised his eyebrows and held them there for a moment, his forehead wrinkling, his face asking me What now? He turned to the woman. “Mrs. Suazo, is there somewhere we might find your husband? Besides that bar in Española? Maybe someplace he hangs out here in Taos?”

“He ain’t here. That’s all I know. And when he has money, he ain’t hardly never here. And when he don’t have money, he ain’t worth being around, because his mood’s so foul.” A little anger was creeping into her voice, and she was sounding less pathetic now, and more resigned.

“Mrs. Suazo.” Kerry spoke very gently. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I’d tell you to run over him,” she said, her voice growing increasingly bitter, “but he ain’t got no life insurance, and I’d just have to pay for someone to bury him.” She snickered at her own black humor. “No, I reckon I’ve got myself into a real mess, and can’t no one help me but myself. Thank you, though. Thanks a lot.” She pushed the door shut softly, and I had a feeling that more doors than that one had just closed for Mrs. Santiago Suazo.