The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  “What was it?”

  “She dug up a baby.”

  They sat and watched a crow light on a limb then fly away. After a while, Mister went back inside the house, and the next day he awoke in the chill hours of the morning to dig and press seeds into the earth.

  In the wedding photo, Abuela wore the same clothes she had been buried in and stood stoically beside the unsmiling groom who was a pockmarked version of Teo with the same big teeth and the addition of a thin mustache. A few months later, she showed up in another black and white photo, a faded square with wavy edges, holding the infant Teo.

  Mister liked the color photograph the best. Cisco Cisneros had taken it that summer when Chief showed up on their doorstep and decided that Abuela needed a man in her life. Before Abuela could shoo him away, Chief enlisted Cisco’s help to set up an automatic sprinkler system that made her garden grow like crazy. In the photo, Abuela and Chief stood in the middle of a row of bright yellow sunflowers that grew as tall as trees. Already Chief had grown fat on her cooking; his beard flowed thick and white beneath his broad grin. Beside him, in her work boots and overalls, with her brown face half hidden by the shadow of a big straw hat, Ignacia Vigil Romero, age fifty, looked no bigger than a child.

  Mister was eight years old that summer, and he worried sometimes that Abuela and Chief might be having sex. Before Chief came along, Abuela had no use for flowers. Beans, corn, peppers, squash—these were respectable life forms. Unlike the hooker primrose or devil’s lettuce, vegetables did an honest day’s work. Abuela grew them on a rectangle of hard dirt treated with aged chicken shit and her personal compost recipe: onion skins, egg shells, coffee grounds, carrot tops, potato peels, apple cores, corncobs, and corn husks—all turned into a crumbly black gold. “Who wants to do all this work just to look at something pretty?” she’d ask, and Mister would shake his head, not knowing.

  Secretly, he’d always admired the big crazy suns that grew over the adobe wall around Tomás’s house. Those sunflowers seemed to lean over the wall and call out, ¡Hola! Then one day, his art teacher showed the class a really bad painting of sunflowers by a guy named Van Gogh.

  To get their attention, she told them how the artist had cut off his ear and mailed it to his cabrona. The class went wild.

  “That sounds like an anger management issue. How come he wasn’t kicking it through his art?”

  “Maybe he was tired a listn’ to her chit.”

  “I’d shit a cold purple Twinkie if homeboy sent me that.”

  “Boo-yaaka!”

  “Artists are bitchcakes anyway.”

  “My brother’s girlfriend? She used to cut herself.”

  “Wha she send him?”

  “He was circling the drain.”

  “Miss? Did he paint any pictures?”

  “Miss? Miss. Did they get back together?”

  Mental illness, the teacher explained, can happen to anyone.

  Those were the nastiest, ugliest, meanest sunflowers Mister had ever seen. They weren’t flowers at all. They were basilisk eyes. No matter how much he hated those evil sunflowers, he couldn’t stop looking at them. Van Gogh Pendejo.

  That year, it was hard for Mister to work in the garden. When it was time to gather the sunflower seeds Abuela would roast with salt and store in jars, he worked as fast as he could and kept his eyes half shut in case he saw pollination. Abuela had told him horror stories of flower pollination.

  When a bumblebee visited milkweed, his legs got stuck in her gluey pollen, tearing off as he tried to fly away. Flowers lied, faking nectar when they didn’t have it or coloring it bright yellow to make it look better than it was. And the orchids! There was one around here, growing by the stream. That slut would lure a moth into her pretty blossom and trap him there in a maze of chutes and cages. If the exhausted bee managed to find his way out, she shot him with a disc of pollen that stuck to his eye.

  Sex, Mister came to understand, was an ugly business. It was in his best interest to avoid females unless he wanted to go blind and have his legs ripped off. He couldn’t imagine why Abuela wanted to get involved in it, so he refused to listen to Tomás when the matter came up.

  “¿Vas a ver a tu papá?” Tomás asked one night when he was sleeping over at Mister’s house. Señora Mondragón had a new boyfriend with a bad temper, so Tomás frequently slept over, head to toe with Mister in the narrow bed.

  “Chief be my papá?” Mister laughed big and hollow. “Did you, like, flush your brain down the toilet?”

  “No,” said Tomás. “You did.”

  Through the wall, they heard the springs creak as Chief sank onto Abuela’s bed. After a minute, they heard him sigh and say, “You’re good lookin’, for your age, Ignacia.”

  “They’re gonna get gross,” whispered Tomás.

  “I wish I could say the same for you,” said Abuela.

  “You could if you lied like I do,” said Chief, and then Mister began to sing very loudly.

  In the graduation picture that Tomás had snapped last year, Abuela sat slack in a wheelchair looking pale and gaunt between Mister and Rocky in their black robes. Staring at the thick folds of Rocky’s robe in the photo, Mister tried to remember the dress she had worn. He liked to imagine a tight one that shimmered like water over the swell of her breasts, the curve of her narrow hip, and her long, flat feet. “My frog feet,” she called them, because the second and third toes were webbed. Rocky was salutatorian of the class. Tomás had dropped out the previous spring when Rocky broke up with him.

  Tomás read her note aloud one afternoon when he and Mister were sprawled on the back porch of the Mercado de Milagros with a six-pack of beer.

  “Listen to this chit,” said Tomás, “and tell me what you think.”

  “She’s just a girl,” said Mister, trying not to sound happy about the breakup. The sky was bright blue with a soft, sweet spring breeeze, and the chickens were scratching around the dirty patches of snow in the yard, looking for worms. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw a naked woman.

  “No, man, listen,” said Tomás, and he began to read.

  Things You Have to Do if You Want to Hook Up with Me Again.

  1. Cut your toenails.

  2. Quit drinking.

  3. Go back to school.

  4. Foreplay.

  5. Quit trying to kill people just because they’re different from you.

  “I don’t know, vato,” said Mister as a hen came clacking through the crumbling adobe wall. “Maybe you should finish school.” In Mister’s mind, Rocky was perfect in every way except for her choice of boyfriend. He had nothing against Tomás; they were blood brothers after all, but ever since he first laid eyes on her—when she walked into Mr. Cisneros’s geology class three years before—Mister had loved her.

  That fall, when Raquel O’Brien’s name appeared on a poster announcing the Taos High Poetry Slam, Mister and Tomás showed up early to help Ms. Martinez, the language arts teacher, push chairs against the cafeteria walls.

  “Well, this is certainly uncharacteristic,” she said, pushing her orange reading glasses up on her head and stepping back to get a better look at her two worst students. They both acted surprised when she told them that the new girl from Santa Fe was going to read.

  “We were in the hood,” said Tomás.

  “So we rolled up,” added Mister. He wore a black leather jacket from the Second Chances Thrift Store that Abuela gave him last Christmas. Although it was hot in the building, he kept the jacket zipped to his collar because the lining was ripped. When the room was full, and the overhead lights were cut, they leaned against the wall with their pants sagging around their hips and reviewed each poem.

  “Boo, hiss, yawn,” said Tomás. “My dog can write better than that.”

  “He poured the borin into that one,” agreed Mister as he scanned the dim room for a flash of red hair.

  Then, suddenly, she was striding up on the makeshift stage in pink cowboy boots.

  “My na
me is Rocky,” she said, cracking her gum into the mike. “I came to your land of enchantment from Goose Creek, South Carolina.” In the colored Christmas lights that had been draped around the podium, her cheeks and shoulders sparkled with some kind of makeup glitter. “Don’t even talk to me about Santa Fe!”

  Someone yelled, “Sí señorita!”

  “This beat is called ‘Song of My Stinkin Self and How I Got Better.’ If you’ve ever read Walt Whitman, it’s like, a takeoff. Whatever.”

  “Gum,” hissed Ms. Martinez, and Rocky spit it straight out. Then she began to read.

  In Goose Creek, SC, I carried an invisible electric fence around my person at all times. When the board of education cracked across my butt, I disintegrated into millions of subatomic particles that floated around the room like germs infecting everyone with malice and later collected into a cloud of the highly dangerous and powerful radioactive material that was me.

  “Poor thing can’t read c-a-t,” I heard the teacher say with a sad shake of her head. “Piss-poor plasma.” I was familiar with piss-poor, but plasma required a dictionary, and so my education began.

  Afterward, in the parking lot, Mister couldn’t think what to say to her. He couldn’t tell if her poem was any good or not, but it woke him up. It made his brain awake and electric with something not quite thought. He wondered how the words came to her and what it would be like to fuck a girl with short hair. She had some kind of gold flecks in her eyes. He wondered how she felt, being finished—if he was full because she was empty. It seemed like they knew each other now, almost like they were married, making it impossible for him to meet her.

  “That shit was straight up,” said Tomás. “You wanna hang out sometime?”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Both of them took her on the first date, and since she had the car, she drove.

  “How can you get a driver’s license if you’re just fourteen?” asked Tomás.

  “Who needs a license?”

  “Alrightoz,” he said. “You da baller.”

  The Hoochie Mobile, as she called it, was a 1978 red Chevette. One end of the bumper was held up with string and duct tape, and the rearview mirror was missing. Someone had stenciled the yellow and black warning emblem for radioactive material on the hood. Her dad had won it in the parking lot of the casino with the flip of a quarter—tails.

  Looking back on it, Mister could see that Tomás had been one step ahead of him at every turn. He’d come up with the plan—to hunt for crystals with a map he’d copped off Mr. Cisneros, and he had the foresight to bring Yolanda along. Everybody knows that a guy can’t sit in the backseat with his little sister. So Mister was stuck in the back with a perfumed twelve-year-old in a purple boob toob while Tomás got to throw his arm over the seat and tell Rocky where to turn.

  To Rocky’s delight, Tomás found a staurolite crystal—it wasn’t too hard since he’d brought it with him. Mister saw the outline of the rock in his shirt pocket when they were climbing out of an arroyo and Tomás turned around with his arms spread to demonstrate the size of a mountain lion he claimed to have seen on this trail.

  Mister didn’t say anything. He knew it was no good to want things, but he hadn’t been able to resist thinking about what he would buy if he found that expensive rock. First, an Impala with good cold air—he’d pimp it out with twenty-two-inch dubs and an Infinity Gold system. He’d buy a washer and dryer for Abuela and some soap on a rope for Chief. Tomás would get the black Stetson he was always trying on at the Trading Post. For Rocky—he didn’t know her that well yet, but maybe a houseboat and a pet leopard; they could sail around the world. But first, they would go out and pop hundies all over town.

  “Ohmygod!” Rocky cried when Tomás bent over and picked up the staurolite crystal that fell out of his pocket. “Look! Tomás found the Tears of Christ!”

  “Ya tengo una,” Tomás said proudly, and allowed her to hug him.

  She’s no genius, thought Mister, but his heart ached.

  That night, with a bottle of strawberry wine taken from Ramona’s store, the boys met under the Milagro Creek Bridge and got drunk.

  “You know how I know Rocky wants me?” said Tomás, turning up the bottle.

  “She don’t want you,” said Mister. His tongue was thick and heavy and he kept forgetting that there wasn’t a worm at the bottom of the bottle. When a car passed overhead, pebbles scattered through the cracks in the bridge, and a cloud of dust settled around them.

  “Sí,” said Tomás. “Did you see the way she stood with her legs apart when I showed her the Tears of Christ? She let me smell her.”

  “Dogs do that, not girls.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “She’s okay,” Mister said with a shrug. “Where did you get the rock?

  “I gotta tell ya man,” said Tomás, leaning in close with his boozy breath. “I gotta tell ya what that cabrón Cisneros did to me.”

  “Get outa my grill, stanko.”

  “You asked.”

  “Never mind. You’re drunk.”

  “I’m drunk? You, hombre, are drunk.”

  “Bueno. We are drunk.” To keep from puking, Mister held on to the post and tried to focus on the carvings, TM + RO, SUCK MY DICK, CHINGA TU MADRE, a pair of balloon tits, and a cross.

  “Ese, I gotta tell ya something.”

  “Tomás, you gonna wake up in the morning and wish to fuck you had shut up.”

  “There was no kissing or chit like that.”

  “You want me to knock you out so you’ll shut up?” Mister picked up the bottle. “It’s for your own good, man,” he said, thunking the bottle against Tomás’s thick skull.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  “¡Fuera!” said Tomás as he threw a handful of pebbles at the chickens. “Scram!” Then he bent forward to pry some gravel out of the torn sole of his boot and mumbled, “The list is too damn long. One, maybe two improvements I could see. I mean, nobody’s perfect.”

  Mister finished his beer and looked at him—the big Mondragón head springing with dirty black curls, the shadow of a beard, red eyes. He hadn’t showered for at least a week and who knew how long he’d been drinking.

  “You got no future hanging around the barrio.”

  “Fuck that,” said Tomás.

  From the kitchen, Ramona called, “Come eat la cena! ¡Fríjoles con carne!”

  Without moving, Tomás yelled, “Sí, Mamá!” Behind his back, a shadow flickered past the screen door.

  “I got a future, Mister. We’ve both got a future. You know my cousin Bones? He needs a couple of river guides for his rafting gig this summer. You can make good tips on the river if the chicas like you.”

  “What’s not to like?”

  “I was talking about you, man. You work with us. What the hell does she mean by foreplay, anyway?”

  “You know, vato, getting her caliente. You don’t do that?”

  “Fuck off, man. You sound like her.”

  “You boys,” said Yolanda in a low voice, pressing her face against the screen. “You boys quit dicking the dog and come in here.” The hook clicked into the eye of the latch.

  “Prostitot!” cried Tomás, leaping to his feet. “Did you hear her, Mamá?” He shook the locked door, pounding, and with a sudden grunt, jerked it off the hinges. Mister heard a slap and a scream and turned his head to see hair flying.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Then it was the summer of 1999, and Mister and Tomás were working the Rio Grande for Cousin Bones. Bones was a lanky fellow with a gold tooth who believed that the best way to learn a job was to do it.

  “When we start spinning around the drain,” he said as he pushed their raft off the bank, “I’m gonna yell, ‘River left, river right.’ If you get sucked down, just let go. Don’t struggle with this bitch. Most of the time, La Llorona will spit you back up.”

  Mister squinted to see past the edge of their pool, to the
foaming gush beyond, and his stomach sank to his knees.

  “Let me give you the menu, then we’ll drop,” said Bones. “First we’re going to hit the dicey little S-turn slot con consecuencias. You’ll get your ears wet and pop up in the Hell Hole. A six-foot boof spanks you to the middle of a seam created by recirculation from a large boulder that lies river center. Say a prayer. If you snap out of the seam in one piece, run left of center into a slot between the sieve of cierta muerte on the left, which by the way is where all the water goes, and a broach rock to the right. This is where the current wraps your duckie around a rock. I’ll fish you out if I have to, but be careful; these duckies can pop. You’ll see the carnage of shredded rafts on Yellow Banks. There’s a cavern in that rapid—the Room of Doom. Don’t go in there. After that, we’ve got some twos and threes, which will let you rest up for Dead Car.”

  “Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Tomás, and Mister gripped his paddle and dug while Bones yelled, “Forward left! Forward right! Feel the love, vatos!”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  When he was sober, Tomás could paddle. After the first four or five runs with Bones, he was popping vertical and pirouetting in boat-and-paddler spins, sometimes on purpose. He did an atomic launch from a twenty-foot ledge, and maneuvered the death ferry from river left to river right in the upper box.

  Mister found his charm in the lower box where he made good tips telling Abuela’s stories to the tourists.

  “’Cause you’re such a cute lil Indian,” Tomás said, chucking him under the chin.

  “Have you heard of the Black Christ?” Mister asked a group of anthropology students from Berkeley. “Nuestro Señor de Esquípulas,” he said slowly, balancing the raft as they leaned forward to hear how the Christians built the Santuario de Chimayó in honor of Christ’s twin.