The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  “And do you … do your people believe that?” asked a girl who wore a gold chain around her slender ankle.

  “Oh yes,” said Mister. “The church is built on holy ground, on the place where the twin war gods, the sons of the sun, once fought a giant and saved the world.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked as she brushed her blonde hair off her shoulder. She was very pretty but not as beautiful as Rocky.

  “Well, you see,” said Mister, mentally adding up his tip, “a man was once driving his oxen to the field with his daughter, who heard a bell ringing under the ground. When he started digging, he found a figure of Santo Niño.”

  “Who?”

  “Santo Niño de Atocha,” he said, smiling at her.

  “When you’re heading toward a rapid,” Bones had told him, “Look for the V. Imagine yourself going straight between a woman’s legs.”

  Mister liked the way the river made him think—one step ahead and no further.

  Every afternoon, he emptied his pockets on Abuela’s bedside table, rolling out the greenbacks for her to see, lifting her withered hand to touch them. “I-I tham soo p-proud ov you,” she said with her wasted tongue.

  Nobody really knew what caused ALS, or what body part it would strike next, so friends brought all kinds of milagros—arms, legs, knees, hands, hearts, lungs, and kidneys. Cisco brought a tiny computer so scientists could find a cure. None of it helps, thought Mister, checking the bruise on her forehead. She refused to let him hold her arm when she walked, and when she lost her balance she toppled like a wooden plank, always falling away from him. When she was lying down, her body twitched. Her legs jumped under the blanket; her arms jerked—fasciculations, the doctor called them. “In layman’s terms,” he said, “her nerves are zapping out like blown fuses because her cells have been coded to kill and then self-destruct.”

  “Change the message,” said Mister.

  “If only we could,” said the doctor.

  Sometimes Mister lay awake at night imagining how he might go into Abuela’s body and change the message. He saw himself swimming through branching rivers of veins, a tiny, swift messenger. Stop Killing. Live. He told people that he took the job as a river guide so he could afford to hire a home health aide, but the truth was he couldn’t stand to watch her die.

  In July, when Tomás went up to Questa to run the northern section of the Rio Grande gorge with Bones, Mister walked over to the Taos public library where Rocky was working that summer. On the way he practiced asking her out for a date.

  “Anywhere you want to go,” he’d say, patting the fat wallet in his back pocket.

  When he stepped into the cool, dark library he was hit by the smell of lemon wax and old books, and sweat began to dampen his armpits. Rocky was at the checkout counter in a yellow dress, reading a book. When she looked up, she pushed her hair behind one ear and waved.

  Once, three years ago, he’d seen her naked. He was down at the creek, smoking a doobie, when he heard a scuffle under the bridge. Stepping carefully over the mossy rocks on the thin soles of his worn sneakers, he got close enough to make out the shadows under the bridge. It was Tomás and Rocky, and they were naked.

  Their skin was luminous in the falling light of dusk, their eyes bright with whiskey. Behind her, dark enough to be her shadow, Tomás reached out his arm and pulled her close, sniffing her smooth, pale neck. “You smell like ass,” he said, and they laughed as they stumbled apart. Her breasts were small and taut, but they trembled when she laughed. Her hair slanted across her face like a curtain.

  “My name is Marionette,” she said with a giggle, and her wrists rose in the air as if attached by strings. The hard cut of Tomás’s body made him appear solid behind her delicate and continuous curve, like the sky behind the moon. Carefully placing one foot on the next slick stone, Mister crept close enough to see the Christmas-red polish on her toes, which were almost imperceptibly webbed together.

  Back home we call them Devil Paws, she had said once, with a sly grin. When she lifted one knee, her white flank moved like wax. There was a dimple high on the left cheek of her ass, one brief indention on that creamy mound, as if someone had taken a lick of her. For a moment, she hung suspended with the last rays of sunlight stippling through the bridge planks and across her bare skin. Then the unseen puppeteer jerked her head around.

  “Mister!” she cried. Her face flushed crimson, and then, turning her back to hide her breasts, she brushed a strand of hair behind one ear and said, “We were just kidding.”

  Mister took one step, toward her or away from her—he didn’t know—and slipped off the rock, falling facedown into the creek.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said, leaning against the counter. “Whasup?”

  “Work,” she said, pushing her book aside. He read the upside-down title, Death Comes for the Archbishop. “I’m writing a novel too.”

  “About me?”

  “Yeah, right. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I was going to apply to college, but you know.” She shrugged. “How is Abuela?”

  “Not good. She fell out of her chair the other day while Dolores was at the store. I came home and found her on the floor.”

  “Where was Chief?”

  “He had to to take a little trip.”

  “Again? Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “So, whasup?”

  “Nothing. I broke it off with Tomás. For good this time.”

  “Excuse me,” said a customer, pushing a stroller up to the counter. She was movie-star skinny and wore the even, fake tan of the wealthy; the diamond on her ring seemed to weigh her small hand down. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but …” She smiled at Mister—friendly but not too friendly—the way rich women did sometimes. “Where are the cookbooks? I need a recipe for tofu smoothies.”

  “Have you tried Moosewood?” asked Rocky, tapping the keyboard with her short pink nails.

  The skinny lady said, yadda yadda yadda, and Rocky said something back. Mister tried to imagine her with a big rock on her finger. Mrs. Raquel O’Brien. Somebody. She could pull it off. She could live large if bozos like Tomás and himself would get out of her way. She had a fucking future! Hell, if she stayed in the library long enough, she’d probably read every single book. Yes, he decided finally, the best thing he could do for Rocky was walk out of here and never come back. Then, out of the blue, his mouth opened, and he said, “Hey. Do you want to go somewhere? On a date?” He hadn’t even waited for skinny britches to leave. Both women looked at him, and he added feebly, “With me?”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  They went to the Santa Ana Day Corn Dance at Taos Pueblo. For a while, they stood in the hot sun, choking on the dust stirred up by the young girls dancing in their stiff dresses, waving new ears of corn. The crowd was thick with tourists trying to snap pictures without getting caught and pueblo residents selling cheap jewelry at jacked up prices.

  A young punk from the pueblo was telling a couple in matching sun visors that the oldest buildings were constructed between 1000 and 1450 AD. When the tourists gave him fifteen dollars for the whole spiel, he began to recite in monotone, “The early Spanish explorers believed that this pueblo was one of the fabled golden cities of Cibola …”

  “This is a sad story,” said Mister. “Let’s go somewhere else.” He opened the heavy carved door of the St. Jerome Chapel and seeing that it was empty, pulled her into the cool, dark church. They stood for a moment in the foyer with their arms around each other.

  “Do you see red spots?” she asked. “I always do when I come in from the sunlight.”

  “I always see stars when I’m with you,” he said.

  “I’m serious!”

  “So am I.” His hand felt so right on the small of her back—as if it were made for him. Maybe she was his other half; maybe the jealous gods had once split them apart.

  “The United States Army ble
w up the old chapel,” said Rocky. “Didn’t they? There were people in it. Is that the story he was going to tell?”

  “Yes,” said Mister. “Most of them died. Don’t ever die.” He kissed her, lightly at first, and then hard. Sweat ran down his temples and onto their lips, and still he pressed her closer to him. “I have always loved you,” he said, and in the gloom around them, he could feel the gaze of the despairing santos.

  After that, Mister knew that something bad would happen. God might forgive him for making out with Rocky in a church—after all, he created women—but Tomás would hate him for it. He hadn’t prayed in years, but he prayed that night. He lit a candle for Abuela and prayed that she would not die because of his sin. In the morning, when he tiptoed into her room and she turned her head and spat, he knew it was too good to be true.

  A week later, when Mister and Tomás were taking a group of duckies through the Wave Train, a woman’s leg emerged, pinned between two rocks. The bobbing leg, swollen and slicked with an efflorescent brine, made him think of jumping trout. Paddling closer, they saw the rest of the body. A red Styrofoam cup was caught in a tangle of algae that clung to one foot. Long blonde hair swirled around her waxen, yellow face. Her left eye was missing, and her mouth had turned black, but one silver earring remained in her ear.

  “Dig!” Tomás cried. “Dig! Dig! Dig!”

  Mister’s arm shot into the water. His ears drummed. The man beside him, Bob or Bill, was saying, “Holy God. Oh Jesus. Oh Christ. Fuck.”

  She was naked but not beautiful, jammed in the broach like a log.

  At the takeout, a man who had insisted on wearing his Seiko watch whipped a cell phone out of his dry bag and tried to call 911.

  “There’s no goddamned reception!” he screamed. “Why doesn’t somebody build a fucking tower out here?”

  Bones hiked up to the road and flagged a kid on a bike.

  Yap yap yap, went the gringos, pushing buttons on their dead phones. They huddled together, as if what killed her would come after them.

  Three days later, Mister went down a hydraulic in the Taos Box.

  “Wait until the Maytag swirls you out,” Bones always said. “Don’t fight it.” And Mister had imagined how he would relax his muscles and float to the surface, but the cold water shocked him. His arms and legs went numb, and it took him a minute to realize that his sandal was wedged in a strainer—a root or a net, he couldn’t tell which. At first he tried to wriggle out of the sandal, but the force of the hydraulic jammed his foot into the straps, and the shoe was wedged tight. No matter what he did or how hard he tried, he could not rise to the surface of the water.

  He knew then how Abuela felt when she could not move her leg to take a step or raise her arm to catch a fall. He knew how her brain was exhausted from trying to think of a way out. He knew how she did not want to die. She would die when her lungs failed, the doctor said, and now, with the water wrapped so tightly around him, he could feel his own lungs rolling out flat. His head began to stretch out like a balloon, and he finally recognized what was squeezing him—it wasn’t the hydraulic; it was the long, wild hair of La Llorona. Down and around he went, down to the darkest place in the river where she waited with her song,

  La Llorona is weeping,

  La Llorona is seeking.

  Come little child,

  Come home.

  Ten minutes later, when Mister regained consciousness on the bank of the river, he learned that Tomás had dived in with a knife in his mouth and cut the sandal free from an entanglement of fishing line. For the most part it was all a blur, but sometimes he thought he remembered rising to the surface in Tomás’s grip—the slam of their hearts against each other and the keening sorrow of love.

  6

  Maundy Thursday

  April 12, 2001 (evening)

  Twin War Gods

  Walking to Milagro Creek, Mister turned up the collar of his jacket and slipped his hands over the guns in his pockets, one on each side. A few stars flickered in the cold, black sky. He made out the broken handle of the Big Dipper and tried to find Leo, but the melting snow on his eyelashes blurred his vision.

  Yesterday at the hospital when he had held Abuela’s feet while the nurse clipped her brittle, yellow toenails, he felt how light her bones had become—hollow, like the bones of birds. When he sat beside her on the hospital bed, he lifted her arm and tried to put it across his shoulders. Her hand, stuck all over with needles under pieces of flesh-colored tape, rose alongside an attached blue tube as the hospital gown unfolded like a paper wing across her sharp shoulder blades. Already, she was shedding her body, preparing for flight. Her hand rested on his shoulder like a cool, dry feather.

  The next day, she was dead. He had never known it was possible to feel this much pain. No blood, nothing broken, no fever. He had no words for it.

  “Hola,” called Tomás from the bridge. He was leaning against the railing in the gray coat that was too small for him, wearing his new cowboy boots. For some reason, he had combed his hair. “Whadup?”

  “Nada,” said Mister. A dry stalk of chamisa poked through the ice in the creek. Something stirred in the shadows: a muskrat maybe. He knew that he could turn around now, and Tomás would never mention it. “I didn’t write a note,” he said. “Y tú?”

  “Nah. I’d misspell it or some shit like that. People would say, what a dumb fuck! Can’t even murk himself.”

  Tomás lit a cigarette, and Mister carefully set the guns out on the rail between them. In the orange glow of the cigarette, the shiny black limbs of the old cottonwood stretched toward them. Here and there, a green bud glistened. Leaning against the bridge rail, Mister stared into the dark pool of water below. I-ay ill-way I-day ith-way ou-yay, he thought. This is crazy.

  Watching the smoke curl between Tomás’s thick fingers, he could not imagine him dead. The blank face, still hands, no one inside. Tomás looked at his watch, but neither one of them lifted a gun. Mister’s legs had begun to shake.

  “You know what I was trying to say last night about Rocky,” said Tomás. “That wasn’t just the booze talking. She loved you.”

  “It don’t matter no more.”

  “Yeah, but I just wanted you to know.” He tapped his watch. “Ready?”

  “Espera,” said Mister. He had left things undone: a light burning in the bathroom, an unpaid water bill, the semester he’d begun at UNM–Taos. He’d made a small down payment on a Jeep with 114,000 miles and a new tire. Who would eat the chilorio, the tamales, and the rest of the enchiladas?

  “¿Qué?”

  “Now?”

  “What’s to hang around for?”

  “Nothing, man.”

  “You shaking, ese.”

  “It’s fucking cold!”

  They laughed nervously.

  “You loving life or something?” said Tomás. “I can do it myself.” He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and Mister froze.

  “Te amo,” said Tomás, and then he laughed and set the timer on his watch.

  Mister wanted to say wait a minute, but he forgot the words. Five minutes seems too long, Tomás had said last night, but you have to allow for mistakes.

  Tomás put his left hand on Mister’s right shoulder, and Mister did the same. Face to face, they put their guns in each other’s mouths the way they had practiced the night before.

  The barrel stuck to Mister’s dry lips. Breathing through his nose, his fingers cramped on the gun, and his legs wobbled. He looked into Tomás’s eyes. Mi Dios, he prayed. His ears roared with the crashing waves of his own blood, and then his finger jerked once and for all.

  7

  My Garden

  1990

  Squash Blossom

  In my later years, I ended up with a man-friend. No one around Taos thought it was a good match, and I wasn’t crazy about him myself, but these things happen. Chief originated from East Texas where he was a pig farmer called Layton Scroggins.

  “Chief of what?” I asked when the
big, balding old man showed up on my doorstep one spring morning.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “That’s just what God calls me.”

  I looked him over: Indian eyes, stringy gray ponytail hanging below his butt, all covered in a fine layer of red dust. I had planted my potatoes and carrots at sunrise that morning, so I was in the house long before the afternoon dust storm hit us, but it had been a doozy. I was still licking grit out of my teeth.

  “You’ll have to have your vehicle towed,” I told him. “You can’t leave it here.”

  “Y’all aren’t the friendliest folk up here in the mountains.”

  “We like ourselves mean,” I said. He had that hungry look. “Buenas tardes,” I said, brushing the flour off my hands before I crossed my arms over my chest. There had been just enough dough left over from the tortillas to make up some fry bread for Mister’s after-school snack, and Dolores would be slinging the bus around any minute.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “you must be Ignacia Vigil, the one they call Abuela.” I didn’t say anything, so he went on. “Folks tell me you have a special gift from the Creator. I respect that. So I was wondering if you might help me with a little problem I’m having.”

  Here it comes, I thought. A barren wife, a brainless son, an aunt who can’t keep her dinner down; impotence, flatulence, incontinence; the stomachache, the headache, the heartache. My customers had one thing in common — empty pockets.

  “Dios le bendiga,” he would say. “Here is all I can give you right now, but I will pay you more later, I promise.” He would ask God to bless me. His Tin Lizzie would sit in my yard for days, weeks, maybe a month while I fed him, and here at the end of winter, there wasn’t much on the kitchen shelves besides dust.

  “I’ll call a tow truck for you,” I said, heading back into the house, but just then I saw the bus rolling across the horizon in a big orange cloud of dust. It looked like one of the red fireballs Abuela Leonora had described to me. I’d seen the green ones — they rolled in from Los Alamos every time a scientist blew his nose — but the red ones streaked in from the north, and they were rare. When you see a red fireball, you know a bad witch is burning, and for the rest of the day, only good things happen.