The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  Mister whispered, “God damn!” He unfolded his gum wrapper, looked at the tab of acid, then wadded it up and let it drop to the floor.

  Beside us, Tomás was tying his shoelaces into an elaborate knot.

  I thought about that concert when I was up on the cliff at the monastery, listening to the birds tweet and whistle and trill. I felt those notes playing through me the way I felt Bach’s notes, only better, and I started to think there might be a god with a baton, straining at the seams to listen.

  10

  Good Friday

  April 13, 2001 (morning)

  Weeping Eye

  From the roof of the jail in Taos, Mister Romero watched the street. It was Holy Week, and since dawn, pilgrims had passed beneath him on the way to Chimayó. He had been to the Santuario de Chimayó, first in a wagon pulled by his grandmother, with a nutmeg seed in his pocket to prevent susto and a seashell to hold. Later, when his legs were stronger, he plodded along beside her with a staff, singing,

  ¡Bendito, bendito!

  ¡Bendito sea Dios!

  Los ángeles cantan

  Y alaban a Dios.

  When he was fifteen, he had carried his first cross, rough-hewn cedar that blistered his shoulder. After that he stopped going. “You pray for me,” he said to Abuela with a sarcastic twist of his lips. He watched her hobble down the road with Jesus’s suffering face printed on the shawl draped across her back. She always brought back the holy earth. Sometimes, when he had an exam at school, or needed a part-time job, he could taste the pinch of dirt she dipped in his coffee when he wasn’t looking.

  It is not the earth, insisted the priest at the santuario. Not the earth! It is the faith in God and Jesus that brings the miracles! All the same, he handed out plastic sandwich bags to the pilgrims who knelt on the dirt floor to scoop tierra santa. Exvotos lined the adobe wall behind him: crutches, braids of hair, and eyeglasses of healed Christians. Milagros of petition and thanks covered the windowsill, glinting silver in the sunlight.

  On the street in front of the jail, an old man shuffled by carrying a santo of the Niño de Atocha. The wooden saint wore a big plastic garland of pink and red roses.

  A few heads turned when Mister jumped from the roof and joined the pilgrimage, but they merely registered his presence—a guy in a blue T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots—and went on. “Breathe,” a voice whispered in his head. “Respira.” A small wooden shutter opened in a courtyard wall, and the face of a child appeared. For a while, a dog followed him. Up ahead, a girl with long bare arms laughed.

  In a dark hour of the morning, Ernesto had stood by the cot in Mister’s cell, shaking him out of a loose sleep. They had both slept in their clothes: Mister on the cot in jeans and a black T-shirt, still wearing the boots he had taken off Tomás’s feet after he shot him; the deputy in his rumpled uniform on the chair in his office.

  “Wake up,” said Ernesto. Mister thought he would give him something to eat—maybe a breakfast burrito from McDonald’s, a cup of coffee. Under the buzzing fluorescent light, Ernesto looked white. “She came over here,” he said.

  “¿Qué?”

  “Ignacia estaba aquí!” When Ernesto sat on the edge of the bed, the bolted aluminum frame rattled with his trembling. “I knew she’d do this to me. I just knew it.”

  “You had a dream,” said Mister. His ears buzzed along with the light, and he spoke too loudly, trying to drown out the noise in his head.

  “It wasn’t no dream. Those yellow eyes shined down on me like two flashlights. Woke me up. You know I don’t believe in that woo woo, but it was her. Ignacia turned herself into an owl, no shit. I told Popolo last week that we had a hole in the roof; the mice have had the run of this place. I didn’t know it was big enough for a bird, but owls can make themselves small. Hell, a bruja can do anything. I don’t know why she even needed a hole.”

  Suddenly he looked at Mister’s boots. “Did you take those before or after you shot him?”

  “After.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Mister stared across the cell at the urinal. A hive of bees droned in his ears. He felt the vibration of the Glock in his jaw, in his teeth. Bang, kick, you’re dead. He shook his head to skake out the noise.

  “It would go better for you, sobrino, if you were crazy. Legally speaking. Jesus, what a mess. I’m not going to ask you why you did it—the less I know, the better. Mi Dios. Was it the girl? You don’t have to tell me. You said too much already. Let’s get up on the roof and find that hole. I made some coffee.” At the cell door, he turned and looked again at the boots on Mister’s feet. He ran a hand through the brush of soft white bristles on his square head. “Do you pray, hijito?”

  “No,” said Mister. “Not anymore.”

  “Maybe you should pick it up again,” said Ernesto, and he went to look for the ladder.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Don’t run, Mister told himself in the street. When a car passed, Mister shortened his stride and fell into step with the old man, ducking his face in the bright flowers of the Niño’s garland. He was careful not to look back at the jail. Around him, the free world sparkled: a brilliant blue sky, red rock, the smell of piñon and sage. The pilgrims’ footsteps crunched rhythmically on the gravel road, and a voice sang out,

  ¡Bendito, bendito!

  ¡Bendito sea Dios!

  The old man carrying the the Niño prayed aloud as he walked: “Our Father, Lord of Chimayó, Wind of the North; Our Father, Lord of Esquípulas, Wind of the South, we come with heart in hand, hear our prayers.” A car door slammed, and Mister jumped, but it was not a cop. Tomás’s boots were a size too small, and after walking a few blocks, he felt a blister forming on his heel.

  When the man had finished his prayer, he looked at Mister with his bleary eyes and spoke. “My wife has pancreatic cancer. The doctors got most of it out, but not all of it. I made a promise to God—to make this romero if he helps her out.”

  “Dios bendiga a su esposa,” said Mister, eyeing a boy ahead of him with a sandwich. The hunger pangs came and went, but his legs were beginning to wobble.

  “Sí,” the man said, watching his face closely. He went on to tell about her diagnosis and the medications she took. He described the breakfast he had fixed for her: chorizo and eggs with half an English muffin, and how she had vomited. He discussed her bowel movements, her brother-in-law, and the cat that lived under the roof. A smoky blue film covered his dark eyes, and he bent forward with the weight of his wooden santo. “Do you know the story of the Holy Child of Atocha, Santo Niño, the patron saint of travelers and prisoners?”

  “Yes, I know,” said Mister, but the man told him anyway.

  “A long time ago, when the Moors invaded the Spanish village of Atocha—that’s where my great-great-grandmother came from—they imprisoned the Christians, and this child showed up carrying a basket of food and a gourd of water. Every day, he fed the prisoners, but he never ran out of food. He kept giving them water, but he never ran out. He was Jesus—you see—in disguise. He still runs around helping prisoners today. He goes all over the place. He wears out his shoes; that’s why the women bring him new ones.”

  “Sí, sí,” said Mister shifting his weight to keep the new blister from rubbing against the boot. Beneath the plastic ring of flowers, the Child of Atocha, with a lace collar and a chipped nose, bobbed in the man’s thin arms like a doll. “El Santo Niño se ve heavy,” Mister said. “Let me carry it for you.” He wanted to bring the flowers up higher, to cover his face, but the viejo ignored him.

  “When I was a POW in Korea,” he said, “My mother went to Chimayó and prayed to the Holy Child. That very night, the Santo Niño de Atocha came into the cell where they locked us up. Two of us saw his face. Outside, a dog snapped his chain. He never came back. That dog would tear your head off. ¿Usted va a Chimayó?”

  Mister thought about the walk—Taos, Pilar, Embudo, Española, Chimayó—forty miles of blisters. Maybe he could s
ell the boots—or trade them for lunch. A car rumbled behind them, but there was no siren. After they passed Kit Carson Pizza, at the bottom of the hill, the traffic thinned out to an occasional Jeep.

  They walked in the long purple shadow of Taos Mountain, a scattered band of sinners trudging a high, crooked road. Soft white clouds rolled in the blue sky. Rocky was always talking about the blue sky in New Mexico.

  “What color is the sky in South Carolina?” he asked her once.

  “White,” she said. “Whitish.”

  Beside the road, a prairie dog, nose twitching in fear, paused for a split second before dropping into an elaborate matrix of holes.

  The echo of the gunshot continued to ring in Mister’s ears. It sounded like gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. Now he knew how Tomás felt about his baby sister’s death. I didn’t give her the goddamned button to swallow, he’d say with his jaws clenched, eyes blazing. Gnaw, gnaw. But Mister did. He did it, and his head was going to explode just like Tomás’s.

  “I killed my friend,” he said over the terrible gnawing buzz.

  The old man nodded.

  “No sé qué pasó. Do you think I meant to kill him? Am I a murderer? Estábamos in agreement. I truly don’t know. Pero Tomás no haló the trigger. Why! Estábamos de acuerdo! Why I didn’t put the gun to my head? Yo no sé. A murderer has a debt to society, but I’d rather lie in a grave than sit in a cell.”

  “Sí, sí,” said the man. “I understand.”

  “Yo prometo a Dios y la Virgen María. I will never touch a gun again! Nunca! Not even for whatever circumstances or whatever reason!” He looked into the wrinkled old face of the man and choked back a sob. “So help me God,” he said quietly.

  “It’s true,” said the man. “You can’t trust those old water heaters. I put a new valve on mine last month.”

  Deaf as a white cat.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  At the Taos city limits, as Mister followed the pilgrims across the broken stretch of road that curved around Pilar, he paused to look into the shaded windows of Mercado de Milagros. Come and get me, he thought. Shoot me. But the door stayed shut. Was Ramona in there? Yolanda? It seemed like everybody was dead.

  The harder he chased the memory of last night, the faster it ran away from him, but when he tried to forget it, the details edged back like rats around a barrel of corn. He didn’t remember taking the boots. They were too small; he could feel three blisters rubbing against the new leather. His last meal had been with Tomás—Ramona’s enchiladas, and he was starving now.

  In Embudo, he smelled the chickens roasting before he saw the sign in Embudo: MARÍA’S TAQUERÍA. He knew the place from the road; a faded blue shack with a lean-to built on one side to shade a couple of rickety tables. After patting his empty pockets a second time, he sidled around to the back of the building and looked through the screen door into the dark, steamy kitchen. Over the clatter of dishes, a woman shouted in ferocious Spanish, “You want catsup with that, you gotta ask for it, okay? Next time, you ask, I’ll get it. I’m busy!” A thick braid swung against her fat bottom as she slapped her hand on the counter and yelled, “Next!” The odor of fresh tortillas mixed with the savory smell of the meat made his knees weak.

  A few minutes later, a lanky boy in a greasy apron stepped outside. Pulling a cigarette from behind his ear, he glanced at Mister and then looked away.

  “You got any work?” asked Mister. “I’m in need of a lunch.”

  The boy lit his cigarette, inhaled, and shrugged. “It’s María’s place,” he said, waving vaguely toward the screen door. “She’s my mom.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Mister, looking him in the eye.

  “What you got?”

  “Real hungry.”

  Mister was elbow deep in suds before Maria spotted him.

  “Frank!” she shouted at the boy. “¿Quién es éste? You hiring people behind my back? I got no money for dat chit, you lazy pendejo!”

  “Chillax Mamá. Éste es Señor. He’s hungry.”

  “Buenos días, señora,” said Mister. His mouth had watered the whole time he was scraping plates, but he held on. Wiping her face with the back of her arm, María stepped closer to him.

  “What do you want?”

  Someone at the counter window requested salsa picante.

  “¡Un minuto!” yelled María, without turning her head.

  Mister tried to play it cool. Don’t want it too much, Abuela used to tell him when they were crouched in the blackbrush hunting rabbits. Animals smell that, and it gives them the advantage. He looked back into María’s round face—tight jaw, thin lips, a deep crease on her forehead. She was looking past him to the pile of crusty pots and pans, the overflowing trash can, the clotheslines of unfilled orders on sheets of yellow paper.

  “Frank,” she said. “Give me something. I’ve got a migraine.”

  “No tengo nada, Mamá.”

  “Un valium. Something. Don’t give him no café viejo. Make a fresh pot. ¡Dios mio! What you got for my headache?”

  “I got one left.”

  “¿Qué es?”

  “Loracet.”

  At that moment, a man called out, “Hey there, good-looking, give me five soft tacos with no lettuce and a lot of fries.” Smiling over her shoulder, María tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Then she remembered the intruder.

  “Okay,” she said, waving her hand as if Mister were a fly in her face. “You wash, you eat.”

  The dishes came for another hour and seven minutes. Mister was so hungry he could have licked each plate clean.

  When the lunch crowd began to disappear, María made fresh tortillas for the three of them, dipping her palm in the bowl of flour and rubbing it clockwise into a lump of dough.

  “It’s hot as hell in here,” she said, wiping her face. “What’s his name, Frank?”

  “No sé, Mamá.”

  “What’s your name, Mister?”

  “Mister.”

  “Su nombre, Señor?”

  “Mi nombre es Señor.”

  “Okay, so don’t tell me your name. Go outside and eat. It’s too hot in here.” She waved through the open door to a table under a budding plum tree.

  Outside, under the shade of the tree, Mister rolled the carne guisada into a hot tortilla and took a bite under the steady gaze of a dog chained to its slender trunk. When he bit into the tortilla, saliva dripped from the dog’s mouth. Up on the hill, a man began to saw. The sawing went in and out of his ears and into his bones, gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. For the first time since he had pulled the trigger, he saw the picture of it. A head blows up just like a pumpkin. He put his hands over his ears.

  “I didn’t know his name was Señor,” María would later tell the police. “I thought he was being smart with me. What did he look like? Mixed: español, indio, negro, gringo, who knows. Black hair and light-colored eyes, blue or green. He limped a little. Scar on his forehead? I don’t remember. He was a handsome boy. Muy guapo.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  When Mister had cleaned his plate, Frank brought the coffee.

  “¿Fumas?” asked Frank, taking a lighter from his pocket. María tossed something to the dog and walked up the hill to the house.

  “No, gracias,” said Mister, and thought about saying, How ’bout loaning me a ten spot, ese? He had only asked a stranger for money one time, when he was six years old.

  He and Abuela were in the Super Save, and he had asked for a Hershey’s chocolate bar. Abuela said no. She was counting money out of the cracked red leather purse where she kept her coins and a tight wad of bills, and she didn’t even look at him, didn’t even consider his request. It was the way she ignored him, more than the fact of her refusal, that made his cheeks burn.

  Suddenly, a dollar bill floated before his eyes. “Here you go,” said a hearty voice, and Mister looked up into the pale, smooth face of a tourist. You knew they were tourists because their clothes matched. “It’s
okay,” the man’s wife said to Abuela, who had put her hand on her hip. “Larry just likes kids.”

  “No,” said Abuela.

  The man should have put the dollar back into his wallet then, but he didn’t. “Larry,” said the wife, “Put it back. They don’t want it.” She smiled an apology to Abuela, but Abuela turned her back. Mister put the dollar in his pocket and walked out of the store. When Abuela came out, he took one of her bags and swung it in one hand while he ate the dollar bill with the other. Walking in step with her, he brought the bill to his mouth, tore off a small bite with his teeth, and chewed the paper loudly until it was wet enough to swallow. As he ate the money, he thought of all the hands that had touched it and how no one would ever touch it again.

  “Frank!” María yelled from an open window of the house. “¡Ven a casa! Your brother needs help fixing this computer. He can’t get no connection con el barrio virtual!”

  “En un minuto, I’m coming!”

  After Frank left, Mister pocketed the lighter he had left on the table and carried his plate back inside the empty taquería. He opened the shoe box on the shelf and looked at the money. She had counted it aloud. “Dos cientos diecisiete dólares treinta y dos centavos.”

  “I killed a man,” he said aloud in the empty room.

  Still, he couldn’t take the money.

  Grabbing a knife from the hook on the wall, he leaned over the trash can and chopped off his hair. Then he walked to the edge of the road, where a few scattered pilgrims still trudged south, and waited. When he touched the cool, naked nape of his neck, he felt a shiver of excitement. It was hard to imagine that he had ever wanted anything but freedom.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  When a car appeared over the hill, Mister fought the urge to run and held out his thumb. The old Buick, plastered with bumper stickers, braked in a cloud of dust. VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS. STOP HONKING, I’M MASTURBATING. NAMASTE.