The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  “Why is the cow sideways?”

  “He is moving up.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means you’re growing up.”

  As we made our way over the scrabble and onto the smooth boulders, I showed him other symbols—suns, staffs, shields, and gourds. There were centipedes and red ants, antelope and deer. He laughed at the women with their legs spread and the men with impossibly large penises, and he traced the crosses with his finger.

  “What does it mean?” he would asked, and I would say, “It depends.” An upside-down man can mean a dead man, or a spirit. You have to look at the carvings around it, and the shape of the rock itself. “Everything is connected to everything else,” I told him.

  “I’m bored,” he said, kicking a rock.

  Near the top of the first boulder, I brushed some twigs away and found what I was looking for. “Look,” I said. “Here’s the story of the water-jar boy. Do you see the Kokopelli playing their flutes beside this woman?” I showed him the next scene, where the men were walking away from her.

  “Go away, stanko!” he said with a grin. “What’s she doing over here? Is she pooping? Ha ha.”

  “No. She makes a clay pot. See that line going up between her legs? That’s mud. That’s her mother beside her—the big bird. Then she squats down to have a baby, but see, it has no arms or legs. It’s a water jar.”

  “What’s the squiggle?”

  “It means time is passing. Now the baby has grown into a big water jar. He asks his abuelo, this man here, to take him hunting, but the grandfather says, you can’t hunt with no arms and legs! Then the mama cries because her son is a water jar and not a boy. Maybe she feels guilty; no sé. Then the boy rolls down this hill, and smack, the jar breaks. You see this foot sticking out of the circle? Now the boy is going home with rabbits on his back. He has gone hunting, and he is a man, so he asks his mother, ‘¿Quién es mi padre?’ Do you know this story, Mister? Everyone knows this story.”

  “I used to know it.” He looked up the hill, wanting to climb, but I kept talking.

  “She won’t tell him about his dad. He keeps asking. Finally, she says, I never went with boys.”

  “Are we almost done?”

  “Listen. You’ve heard of la purísima concepción, right?”

  Mister dragged the tip of his light saber along a sandy crevice of the rock, drawing a line between us.

  “The boy goes off to the arroyo to look for his father, and he sees a snake. This coil means two things: snake and water. He asks the snake, ‘¿Eres tú mi papá?’ The snake looks at him, to scare him. ‘You are my father,’ says the boy, and the snake turns into a man. You know this story, Mister. Who is his mother?”

  “His mother is the mud.”

  “His mother is the Virgen María.”

  Mister studied the drawing for another minute, then moved away and said quietly into his palm, “Obi-Wan Kenobi, this is Luke Skywalker. Do you read me?”

  Then he knelt down where he thought I couldn’t see him and carved his initials into the side of the rock, M.R.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  We hit a dust storm on the way home. Pebbles pinged the sides of the car as the wind spun a golden shower of sand around us. Even with the windows closed tight, we breathed in dust and grit.

  The bad storm didn’t hit until we were home and had the rabbit simmering in a pot with yams and blackberries. When I picked it up from the side of the road, I’d wrapped it carefully in the baby wipes Zarita always put in El Auto, so there wasn’t any mess in Ernesto’s trunk. Through the kitchen window, Mister and I watched the dust settle in a yellow sky. For just a moment, the earth held its breath.

  Then a piece of hail struck the roof like a rock, and at once the rest came clattering down, faster and faster, drumming over our heads. A sheet of rain slapped the window-panes until they shuddered. In the yard, streams of brown water joined to become a growing river. Oh, my arthritis!

  Full of pins and needles, I hobbled outside to tie the old curtains over the plants, to protect them from the hail, but Mister knew what to do, and he ran ahead. After we had fastened the makeshift roof to the bean poles on the four corners of the garden, he dashed inside to shut the damper on the kiva. We stuffed rags under the door, to keep the rain from washing in, and then we were done. “Look, Abuela,” he said, pressing his face against the kitchen window. “The apricot tree is dancing!”

  We watched the boughs dip and wave as the tree whipped around like the long black hair of women at a deer dance. It was a beautiful sight, with the limbs shaking off the lacy white blooms and the lightning flashing all around. Each time the thunder cracked, Mister leaned into my arms. I pressed my face into his hair, smelling our sage soap, his boy smell, and a trace of the acacia. I let a strike of lightning run right through us, from me to him and back again, without harm, but the next flash hit the apricot tree with an electric green sizzle. Oh Great Spirit, Great Friend, Mahaya, I prayed as I saw the future unfold, give us strength.

  It happened the way it did back in 1988 when I left my body in the kitchen and traveled down to Milagro Creek where Mister and Tomás were becoming blood brothers, but this time I traveled to the future.

  We were down at the creek again, but under the bridge this time, and it was the year 1999. I had been diagnosed with amniotrophic lateral sclerosis and had two to three years to live. Already, my left hand was going out on me, and I could no longer whistle, but that night I was young and healthy. Somehow, again, I had entered into Mister’s body. He was seventeen now and drunk off the bottle of Four Roses bourbon that Tomás had bought.

  “Why do you have to kill Cisco,” Mister was saying. “Why can’t you just beat him up?”

  “Why?” Tomás yelled, waving his chain saw in the air. “Why? Because he is a fudgepacker, that’s why! He is corrupting our youth, man! A goddamned faggot is fucking our perpin youth!”

  “Whatever,” said Mister. “I’m going to drink these four little roses at the bottom of this bottle. These are mine.”

  “You don’t expect me to stay in a school with a corrupting influence for a teacher, do you?” asked Tomás, who was having trouble standing but still had a good grip on the saw.

  “You won’t go back,” said Mister, but his words were lost over the drone of the blade as it cut through the first support beam of the bridge. Tomás worked alone for a while, then Mister stumbled over to help him. Somehow the blade’s deep bite into the solid oak held us steady. Tomás repeated the plan over and over. He had asked Cisco to meet him here for a “date” at midnight. He had asked him specifically to drive over the Milagro Creek Bridge and meet him on the other side.

  We drank and sawed and sawed and drank. For a long time there was nothing around us but the steady buzz of the saw. Then there was another sound. It was coming and going, Cisco’s new Dodge Ram with dual rear wheels and a stack exhaust. Tomás went away somewhere. Then he came back. Tomás was sawing the second support beam—almost, but not quite, in half. The sound of Cisco’s truck went away and came back. The sawing went away and came back. The truck was coming and coming and coming. When the headlights hit, we staggered up to the road, waving our arms. “Stop!” we yelled, but it was too late. Tomás spun into a blur of red roses, and the bridge fell, taking us with it. There was something Mister wanted to say, but the water put out the words.

  When I returned to my old body, standing at the window in my kitchen that summer of 1990, the storm was over. Mister and I ate our stew, said our prayers, and went to bed.

  In the morning, my garden was hella fine, as Mister would say. Overnight, the sunflowers shot up into trees with big yellow blooms. When the wind blew, they looked like ladies in straw hats bending every which way. Until that summer, I had never cared for flowers, but I suddenly I saw them everywhere—purple asters, acacias, hooker’s evening primrose, and in the ditches, like something thrown away—snakeweed blooming in golden globes. Everywhere you looke
d, God had splashed color on the earth, and at the end of the day in that summer of 1990, more often than not, the jealous sky would paint one of those sunsets that make people stop whatever they are doing and just look.

  8

  Police report

  In the Matter of the Mondragón Fatality

  Headless

  1. I am Sheriff Bryan Tafoya of the Taos County Sheriff’s Department, station 292, located in Taos, New Mexico.

  2. I am making this statement in response to the telephone call generated by my deputy, Officer Vigil, on April 13, 2001, at 0304.

  3. I was in Santa Fe, visiting my mother over the Easter weekend.

  4. At 0417, Officer Vigil reported an incident at an unspecified address (the Milagro Creek Bridge) in Pilar, New Mexico. Tomás Mondragón was fatally wounded. “Probably by a gun,” relayed Officer Vigil over the telephone.

  5. Officer Vigil reported that a witness to the event, Mister Romero, approached him at the sheriff’s office at 0253. Mister Romero stated that he had walked the 4.6 miles from Pilar to station 292. Romero stated, “I killed Tomás. I blew his head off.” Officer Vigil advised him to seek the counsel of a lawyer before issuing further statements. Romero continued to supply him with information leading to his immediate arrest.

  6. Procedure 19A was followed. At 0513, the suspect was placed in a holding cell at Station 292. He did not resist arrest. Deputy Officer Vigil performed the pat down and itemized the following evidence on form 12932D:

  A. One driver’s license, expired

  B. $4.13

  C. One opened package of spearmint gum

  7. At 0628, Deputy Officer Vigil noted that the prisoner was unable to dress himself in the orange uniform, as per regulation, owing to the fact that all of the uniforms were dirty. He referred to form D on report 189, stating that state property article 57 (the washing machine) was broke. I was not contacted at this time. Standard procedure dictates that in the case of machine malfunctions and circumstantial delays (Easter Weekend), the officer-on-duty smell the uniform in question and make a judgment call. Officer Vigil performed this standard procedure and has declared in writing (see enclosed form 0198) that it stank.

  8. At 0843, Vigil abandoned protocol and allowed the prisoner, in civilian clothing, to leave his cell. At 0857, the suspect was invited by Deputy Officer Vigil to climb up on the roof and look for a hole.

  9. At 1145, Deputy Officer Vigil’s wife entered the building. He followed her. An argument of a personal nature ensued. At 1350, the deputy observed that Mister Romero no longer inhabited the premises.

  10. The hole referenced in paragraph 8 of this report was 4.75 inches in diameter, and according to report 198, did not present structural damage to the roof. According to Officer Vigil, immediate examination of the hole was of utmost urgency because an owl was suspected of using it to gain access to the building. Against the recommendation of myself, Deputy Vigil has enclosed three copies of an addendum to this report in which he argues that the owl he sighted in the building was the ghost of his late sister, Ignacia Vigil Romero. He felt that she was a threat to the safety of some or all of the persons on the premises. Deputy Officer Vigil was unable to remember if he moved the ladder after placing the prisoner on the roof of the jail. The roof is at a distance of approximately ten feet from the ground, so it don’t matter if he did.

  9

  Congratulations, Raquel O’Brien!

  Cross

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  WRITING SAMPLE #2

  You all are probably a bunch of crooks and not even reading this but I have a story to tell, and when you’re a pregnant red-headed Baptist at a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico, you don’t really need to call any more attention to yourself. Besides, we practice the rule of silence.

  All we do around here is pray. I am always standing up when everyone else is kneeling and vice versa, but the nuns say I’ll get the hang of it. Up down, up down, you never get a chance to nod off. At Mount Zion Baptist in Goose Creek, South Carolina, I’ve slept through whole sermons, waking up just in time to belt out the last verse of “A Closer Walk with Thee.” The Baptists only have a couple of ready-made prayers, but the Catholics have hundreds, maybe thousands. They never make anything up.

  The first time I really prayed to God was with a man named Chief in a sweat lodge in Taos, New Mexico. I don’t know if he is really a shaman or even part Indian like he says or just plain crazy. If I told you some of the crazy things he’s done you wouldn’t hear how great he is at praying so I won’t. When he does a sweat lodge he makes it hot. I mean really hot! You fry like a piece of bacon in there if you aren’t praying for somebody besides yourself. We sat in a tight circle around glowing rocks that hissed every time he poured water on them, and I prayed.

  I prayed for my aunt Snoopy back in Goose Creek who had a funny way of talking and said she loved me so much she would eat me up and keep me safe inside forever. When my mother dropped me off Snoopy had to peel me screaming off the screen door, and she said hush-it Joe when my uncle said she may look like a movie star, but she don’t want her own kid. You hush she said. Lord thank you for this little girl, she said. Now my twosome is a three-and-a-half-some. She was loved even by the horses and dogs and pigs and chickens and mice and the garden and the grapevine and the field of tobacco.

  I prayed for the horses, for the one I called mine who was up in age and spooked by men. She came to the fence when she saw me coming with a bucket of Omaline balanced on the handlebars of my banana seat bike. Sometimes I carried a kitten in my mouth. Aunt Snoopy had more animals than Noah. Sometimes I brought that mare back with me—it’s funny I can’t remember her name—and tied her to the swing set in the backyard, and then I sat with her until past dinner time and got up in the middle of the night to check on her. In the morning I’d take her back to the pasture. Sometimes I hid behind the wet-smelling stacks of green hay and jumped out to scare the horses because of the beauty of them running and stomping their fear into the air. Sometimes they would get mad and chase me, and once I realized I had not been killed I would laugh and laugh, and later Snoopy would say thank the Lord you are alive another day, child. Praise the Lord. May he abide with you.

  At mass Father Roland stands behind the altar in front of the red cliff you can see like there isn’t any glass at all. On the Mary side of the church, the nuns chant,

  Out of the fire, pure soul so bright, alleluia,

  Out of the darkness, into the light, alleluia.

  Then he monks answer back from the Joseph side,

  Out of the mire, man made of earth, alleluia

  Back to the Father who gave us birth.

  In the back pew, I close my eyes. Sometime it takes a while to get to the empty space in my mind, and sometimes the darkness falls all of a sudden, like a flock of blackbirds settling in the yard. If they have small white spots, they’re starlings. They roost there on the ground for ten or fifteen seconds. There are hundreds of them—more than you can count because they’re so quick and small, and they make a huge racket. They all rise together—all of a sudden. It looks like a black blanket lifting off the ground. Once they’re up in the sky, they separate into black dots across the sky.

  One day I hiked up the red cliff. You are supposed to tell someone before you go because a young man died out there. He is buried in front of the chapel, and every year his sister from Santa Fe comes to visit his grave. It’s easy to climb except for the rocks where you have to stretch to reach the next step; you shouldn’t look down. At the top there are tons of birds. When I got up there, I lay back with my eyes closed and just listened. I heard the puny teet of the bushtit and the raspy chick a dee dee dee of the chicka
dee. A Steller’s jay was going shaq shaq shaq and something sang cheery-up cheery-me and cheeter-ee and seeeee. It was all going on at the same time but separate, like the music in a symphony.

  At the symphony in Albuquerque, I sat between Tomás and Mister who were going to drop acid. We were all wearing black, and I had my hair up in a bun. Tomás kept sticking his finger in the middle, but Mister tried not to brush up against it, and he let me read the program in a hushed voice because he knew I felt like a lady. “Concerto number two in F Major,” I whispered. I tried to bleat out the name Bach the way our music appreciation teacher, Mr. Cisneros, did—“Baaa.”

  At first I didn’t think the musicians were any good. The piano player hit a few chords, then stood up to scoot the bench closer to the keys. One violinist played while the other one tightened his strings. The guy on the big bass looked like he was dancing with a fat woman, occasionally scratching her back with the bow. Someone hit a wrong note.

  Suddenly, the conductor came on stage and bowed—a Chinese guy in a tight black suit. People were clapping like crazy, and he was listening to them clap. I could feel him listening. He was like the opposite of an instrument—sucking sound in instead of playing it out. Even from way way back in the student section, I could see this guy’s face; I could almost see straight through to his powerful, polished, perfect brain. Everything about the man was in tune. Everybody was clapping and clapping, but when he turned his back to us, there was dead silence.

  For a moment, he didn’t move. Then he whipped out his stick and held it in the air. Suddenly he slashed his baton like a sword and set the whole place jamming—trumpet squawking, flute slipping in and out, notes ruffling up and down the keyboard. The man was playing the hands that played! He felt what they felt, he shook with it. His jacket strained at the center seam, pulling at the armholes until the long black tails parted and fell back and swept open again. His head bobbed.