We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  Eyes slightly unfocused, Santiago exhaled heavily while wiping his forehead with the heel of one hand. He wasn’t aggravated, not even disappointed anymore. Some part of him felt the tingling sensation of failure, but it was so minute that he hardly acknowledged it. Now was not a time to contemplate failure. Now was a time to be done with it and move on.

  Santiago bent over the lip of the trunk and stuffed his large hands beneath the armpits of the body. The carcass was of a nude young woman, seven days dead, and soggy and heavy on the bottom where her remaining bodily fluids had come to settle. Such was the way with dehydration. Brittle skin, sunken eyes, soggy underside. The reek of urine and feces so strong from the trunk, it made Santiago’s eyes water, and he worked quickly to hoist the body from the trunk and let it spill to the rocky earth. The body was not heavy, but even the solitary act of lifting seemed to wear him out. He removed a small bladder bag from his belt loop, popped the cap, and delicately sipped some water. It felt good and cold and clean. He poured some into his cupped left hand, then proceeded to dampen his brow and the sweaty nape of his neck. Some water ran down his shirt collar, chilling him.

  Displeased with the smell of the trunk, Santiago quickly slammed it shut. The sound seemed to echo out over the canyon and across the valley like a gunshot. Looking down at the pallid, emaciated ruin at his feet, still vaguely female even in such a state, he was again prodded by that dull, throbbing sense of failure.

  Is it me? he couldn’t help but wonder. It was not the first time. Do none of them take because of me?

  Her breasts had flattened to her chest, the nipples like two graying dimples of flesh. The abrupt mound of her pubis, sparsely peppered with fine black hairs, reminded him of the kudzu and the underbrush that made up the floor of Chama River Canyon. Her legs clamped together in a fetal stiffness, his eyes running over the twisted and bony knobs of her knees, Santiago was suddenly and frighteningly overcome by the urge to separate those legs, force them apart, and resume the act once again—one last time—if only to regain some sort of personal composure, some sense of self-gratification and accomplishment. Had he failed again? And how long until he proved useless and the car—

  No. He wouldn’t think about that. Anyway, there was work to do.

  Retrieving his tools from the Comet’s back seat, Pablo Santiago carried them to a remote tract of land further down the canyon ridge. Here, the ground was mostly rock and sand, difficult and tedious for digging, but devoid of any foliage that might appear suspicious if uprooted. He knew this land well, had grown up knowing it, and recognized each individual sandstone flat like a man recognizes old friends in a photograph. He knew the slope of the valley, the stonier parts of the earth. He also knew where the other bodies were buried, all those pretty girls, and was careful to weave around these sacred places when walking to a fresh spot.

  He selected an undisturbed spot of land and dug a shallow grave. The sun was hot on his back while he worked and his mind was occupied with the sound of the rushing river in the canyon below. A portage straight to the heart of the Rio Grande, Pablo Santiago was quietly enraptured by the unmitigated freedom of the river, immune from obligation and unconstrained by a lack of duty. Unlike the sedentary Comet, the river could be anywhere in the world given enough time. Anywhere. The notion fascinated Santiago, and several times he paused during his dig to lean on the carved wooden handle of his shovel and contemplate the enormity of such a thing.

  It was getting on dusk when he returned to the Comet for the woman’s body. Propping it over one immense shoulder, Santiago carried the corpse easily to the fresh hole in the earth. He could feel the presence of the car boring into his back as he laid the woman’s body into the hole. While he filled the hole with dirt he was aware of the wind whistling and sighing through the rust-holes along the vehicle’s chassis.

  We are getting close now, he promised the Comet. I can feel how close we are getting. It is only a matter of time. We must be patient. It will work out.

  He filled in the grave and raked over the disturbed soil. Then, with the tools slung over his shoulder, he hiked back to the car.

  The driver’s side door stood open. He did not remember leaving it open, but that didn’t matter. With the Comet, such things were not unusual. Carefully, he replaced his tools in the Comet’s back seat, then—after a long pause—slid into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut.

  He sat in silence, staring at the filth-covered windshield. He had been doing this for many months now, and still he was not quite used to it. Had he discovered the car one afternoon while driving his truck down the main highway? No; it was impossible to see the car from the highway, particularly in the summer when the forestry was in bloom. Had he spotted it one evening while fishing near El Vado Lake Dam? No; the car was hidden from sight at such a distance. One would require the eyes of a hawk. So he could not remember how he had found the car, but he could guess that he was probably drawn to it somehow, beckoned, summoned, called to it. Somehow. And he had come.

  He sat behind the Comet’s steering wheel for a long time. The interior smelled like urine and blood and dirt and mildew. At times, in the stillness of the car, his mind dredged up the sounds of all the pretty girls he’d struggled with in the back seat. He’d lost count of the bodies, each one a failure, each one unworthy. Or was he unworthy? Was his seed unworthy?

  No, he told himself. I was chosen. How could I be unworthy if I was chosen?

  But perhaps the car made a mistake...

  “God does not make mistakes,” he said aloud. His voice sounded thick and deep in the confines of the car and he did not like it.

  Through the filthy windshield he watched the sun set behind the dark brown crags. His eyelids felt lazy and he wanted to sleep. But work was not done. There would be no sleep until work—

  A low, electrical hum filled the car. Santiago could both feel and hear it. He gripped the four-spoked steering wheel with two hands and squeezed tight. He could feel the current—faint but undeniably there—tracing up his arms. The dash lights flickered, flickered, glowed, and the radio dial bled an eerie green light onto Santiago’s lap. Static hissed from the radio. Santiago watched as the dial spun on its own, the vertical red pin sliding left and right and left again as if attempting to locate a signal. The static grew louder, rattling the ancient speakers. Santiago could feel the current in his teeth now, his back teeth and the bones of his skull.

  “Are you angry, Lord?” Santiago half-whispered, his eyes locked on the illuminated radio dial. “Do not be angry.” The car’s shaking caused his voice to vibrate. “She was not the right one. I will find the right one. I need more time.”

  The shhh-shhh of static.

  “How many?” Santiago asked.

  Shhh-shhh.

  “That many? Already?” Had he really gone through six women in all this time? He’d lost count, but he hadn’t thought the number was so high. It bothered him to think he’d failed so frequently.

  “There will be more,” he promised the car. “It is summer. There are always more.”

  The static grew louder.

  “Tonight?” Santiago said. “I think...”

  The dashboard lights flickered and the radio dial spun wildly.

  “All right,” promised Pablo Santiago, “I will find one tonight.” Then, as an afterthought: “But it is getting muy risky. Soon, there will be many people asking many questions. Too many girls, the police will surely start looking at me. It is only a matter of time.”

  The car shuddered, the dashboard lights flickered. The radio grew louder and louder until it crested, then died completely. The flickering lights went out. The car was once again silent and still.

  Pablo Santiago’s god was a 1962 Mercury Comet.

  * * *

  It was dark when Santiago returned to the Monastery of Christ abbey deep in the canyon. He pulled his pickup truck down a rocky path, got out, and headed directly to the casa del rio where he was employed as groundskeeper for the retrea
t’s guesthouses. In his small one-room shack, Santiago washed his face and drank a tall glass of water. The water was good and cold. There was some frozen river trout in an ice chest. He considered broiling some fish but decided he was not hungry. Instead, he pulled on a weather-worn anorak, crept out of the shack, and used a set of keys to gain entrance to the main lobby of the guesthouse. Here, he moved quietly down the hall and slipped through an access door that communicated with a large, darkened room. It was here that the inner-workings of the guesthouse had been in operation before the monastery changed over to solar power.

  There were some tools here, and some items in unlabeled mason jars on shelves. Pablo Santiago went directly to a crowbar hanging from a pegboard, pulled it down, and carried it back into the guesthouse lobby.

  There were many rooms here. From behind a number of doors he could hear the shrill din of laughter, unintentionally disrespectful to the cenobitic life of the Benedictine monks. These were tourists, were visitors, were people who paid their money to stay at the monastery and go fishing and hiking and canoeing. Los intrusos, many of the locals called them. There were many small villages throughout Chama River Canyon comprised of several generations of Hispanic immigrants. These were people who had worked the land and had lived off it since their forefathers crossed the Mexican border. There were many girls there, ripe enough for Santiago and his god, but none of his victims ever came from these villages, and not out of any sense of heritage or pride or respect but—simply—out of concern that he would be caught too quickly. It was easier to forget about strangers when they disappeared.

  Using another key, Santiago gained access to one of these rooms. They were small rooms, with a bed and a single window beside the bed, an adjoining bathroom, a closet for hanging clothing, a dresser opposite the bed, and a mirror on the wall above the dresser. Also, a hand-carved wooden cross on the wall. Modest yet expensive rooms.

  There was a suitcase on the bed but no one in the room. Still carrying the crowbar, Santiago slid open the closet door and stepped inside. Behind him, he pulled the door closed but not all the way, allowing a vertical sliver of space through which he could keep an eye on the room.

  They are out looking for mountain lion, Pablo Santiago thought as he sat Indian-style on the carpeted floor of the closet. And why not? They come here from big cities and pay good money to see them. It is not as if they see mountain lion every day.

  Pulling up the hood of the anorak, Pablo Santiago waited. He had patience much like the mountain lion.

  * * *

  What do you know?

  Sound. And opening his eyes he was aware he’d fallen asleep. Or almost. But it did not take him any time to recall his surroundings: on the closet floor in one of the guestrooms. The noise that had woken him: the sound of the guestroom door opening. Also, the gay sound of drunken laughter.

  These tourists, Santiago thought, peeking through the space in the closet door, all they know to do is drink. Litter and spend their money and drink-drink-drink. Los borrachos!

  Two figures moved past the closet. Lights were turned on. More laughter. A man and a woman. He tried to see the woman but he could not see her face. She moved too quickly. The man, though—he was young and handsome and, Santiago thought, very white. As he sat crouched in their closet, he could hear bits and pieces of their conversation...

  “I’ve never seen so much food,” the very white man said. “And all the wine! Have you ever seen such wine?”

  “I didn’t think it would be this way at all,” said the woman. Santiago still could not see her. “I didn’t want to come but now I’m glad we’re here.”

  Si, Santiago thought, as am I.

  “It is beautiful here,” the woman continued. She moved across the room and went to the suitcase on the bed. Santiago could see her back. She was tall and slender with a petite waist and long, dark hair. Wringing the crowbar between his hands, he could feel the crotch of his dungarees tightening.

  “Beautiful,” the man agreed, “but very dusty. It’s on all my clothes.”

  “You complain,” said the woman.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s perfect. Go and shower and then I’ll shower.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” the man said. “It is perfect.” And he disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

  From where he sat, perched and anxious as if on a ledge, Pablo Santiago watched the woman cross the room and advance toward the mirror above the dresser. In her maneuvering, he caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass. She was very beautiful.

  Weren’t they all? he thought, watching her. Weren’t they all pretty girls?

  The woman began fixing her hair in the mirror. The sound of running water could be heard from the bathroom. Then the man’s low, baritone singing. This made the woman smile at her reflection. She removed her blouse and unhooked her bra, tossing the articles onto the bed. Her breasts were small and neat and pink. Santiago watched as she moved again to the suitcase, rummaged around for something, then went over to the single window beside the bed and pushed it open a few inches. Santiago heard the click of a lighter and saw a spark. The woman lit what appeared to be a joint, gave it three quick sucks, then exhaled through the open window.

  Breathing heavy, Santiago managed to stand in the cramped closet space. Holding the crowbar in one hand, the seat of his dungarees pulling tighter and tighter, he slid open the closet door. It made no sound; groundskeeper Santiago was meticulous about oiling all hinges and tracks. He moved across the carpet slowly, familiar enough to avoid every groaning floorboard, listening to the soundtrack of the very white man singing in the shower. A few paces behind the woman, his shadow not yet on the wall beside her own (he was very conscious of this), Santiago felt that same sense of drive overtake him, quite similar to the feeling that rushed through his body when he had to pull his failures from the Comet’s trunk...and very nearly the same as how he felt when overtaking them in the Comet’s back seat...

  But no—he was thinking too much ahead of himself and that was bad. To think ahead was to pay little attention to the present. And after six failures, as the Comet had reminded him, he could afford no more—

  The woman sensed him, turned around, and stared for what must have been less than a second. Yet it seemed like an eternity, as it always did, and Pablo Santiago was able to examine the split ends of her hair, the broken blood vessels in her sclera, the knobs of gooseflesh that had broken out along her body, and the erect state of her nipples. And he sensed a scream rising up her throat—but not of fear, merely of surprise, of utter ridiculous and absurd surprise—and he raised the crowbar and brought it down across the upper right side of her head. It stunned her, rocked her head back on her neck, but did not knock her out. It did kill the scream, killing it even before it came, like an abortion. One hand went back and slapped a palm against the wall while her other hand dropped the joint on the bedspread. Before striking the woman again, Santiago carefully picked the joint off the bedspread and pinched the cherry dead, as to not start a fire. Too many fires had devastated the land over the years, and they all began very small and very harmless.

  “What do you know, mi paramour?” Santiago whispered, and struck the woman a second time. This time, she went down.

  Santiago wasted no time gathering the woman’s supine body from the bedspread and arranging her over one shoulder as if she were a small Christmas tree and he a lumberjack. Still listening to the singing man in the shower, Santiago crossed the room, opened the door, and looked up and down the hallway. It was empty, but he need not walk the length of it; rather, he darted into a second doorway that connected with a long corridor used only in case of fires. The woman was very light on his shoulder as he hurried along and he thought that she was perfect, that she would be the one, and there would be no failure this time. God would be pleased.

  At the end of the hallway, Santiago pushed through the exit and out into the freezing night. It is a misconce
ption that nighttime in the desert is mild and pleasant. If Pablo Santiago had a quarter for every story he heard about someone freezing to death in the desert, he would be a very rich man.

  Crossing the rocky tarmac with the woman over his shoulder, her skin now cold to the touch in the frigid night air, Santiago hurried around a copse of pines and headed without pause to his pickup parked outside his tiny shack. There, he quickly wrapped the woman’s body in a piece of tarpaulin, tied it, and eased her down in the bed of the truck. Crawling behind the steering wheel, he then turned over the engine, pulled the transmission into reverse, and rolled slowly backward down the gravel drive. Only once he was back on the main highway that overlooked the canyon did he begin to relax. It could have taken him an hour or fifteen minutes to wrap the woman in the tarp—he could not remember. And was she number six or seven? Or was he just getting confused with the seven days he had to wait before opening the trunk again? Damn it, his mind was going on him. Old age creeping, the dirty devil.

  The drive to the canyon ridge where the car sat waiting was lonely. Above, the moon was full and pearl-colored. The road below was bumpy and could prove treacherous at night. Many times Santiago had not seen a jagged rock or mule deer carcass in the dark and had blown a tire. Now, he rationalized, would be a poor time for flats.

  Once he reached the clearing, Santiago drove the pickup right up to the ridge of the canyon. Outside, the sky was dense with stars. Santiago went directly to the truck bed and quickly unraveled the tarpaulin from the woman’s body. As the cold night air struck the woman’s bare chest, she began to stir and moan and flutter her eyes. She was bleeding badly from the gash at the side of her head. Santiago hoisted her from the bed and carried her in his arms to the silent and brooding Mercury Comet. It looked smarter in the dark, the car, as if it had set aside all pretenses and fakery used to manipulate Santiago in the daylight. Now, in the dark, there was no need for such formalities. In the dark, things were what they were.