The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  “Female trouble,” said Mister.

  Fausto laughed. “Sí,” he said. “Sí señor.”

  Mister looked out the dusty window. Painted rock, people called the sandstone out here. Every layer of earth was a different color—pale pink or green or orange—the shades of Easter eggs he and Abuela used to paint with vinegar and dye. It was too much to look at; Mister leaned back and tiredly closed his eyes.

  “The Echo Amphitheater is a good place to sleep,” said Fausto, “if the echo don’t spook you too much.”

  “Bueno,” said Mister. “How far is the monastery from here?”

  “It’s just up the road; you take the Forest Service Road 151, but you don’t want to go there tonight. That’s a thirteen-mile climb, and you won’t catch a ride. The amphitheater is a good place to camp. Just don’t talk to yourself unless you want the rocks to answer. Some people get freaked out, you know. It’s about five miles north of Ghost Ranch, where I’m stopping. You got a blanket or something?”

  “Left it at my girlfriend’s place,” mumbled Mister.

  “Compadre, you’re going to freeze your aguacates off.”

  “Maybe you wanna get rid of this old blanket,” Mister suggested, running his hand over the threadbare seat cover.

  “This one that my grandmother gave me before she died?”

  “Well, it’s nice and everything, except for that big hole. You got rats in here?”

  “Yeah, the same rat that chewed up the seat cover.” When he pulled over to the side of the road, he swept the blanket toward Mister and tossed him a bottle of water. “Muy buena suerte, hombre.”

  “Fausto fausto fausto,” Mister said to himself as he walked down the empty road with the blanket rolled under one arm. Fausto meant lucky in Spanish.

  He recognized the hollowed-out hunk of sandstone before he found the small wooden sign, half-hidden by weeds in the empty lot: ECHO AMPHITHEATER. It was half the size of a football field with high walls on three sides. When he entered, the orange ball of sun had dropped below the peaks and was rolling along the rim. A single red line stained the west wall, as if a bucket of paint had tipped over the edge. Hematite, Mr. Cisneros had called that rock stain—the rusty red dust of Mars.

  “¡Buenos días!” Mister called out, and the rock answered, “Buenos buenos días días!”

  All around him, the last dregs of color were leaving the sky. In those final coppery rays of light, he gathered a pile of sticks and lit them with the lighter he had taken from Frank at María’s Taqueria. He drank some of Fausto’s water and poked around a juniper bush, but it was too early for berries.

  Chewing on a twig, he leaned back on his heels with the blanket pulled around his shoulders and tried to think what to do. He had had no plan when he jumped off the roof of the police station in the morning. Instinct told him to run. The idea of going to the monastery hadn’t occurred to him until he saw the police on the road to Chimayó. What if Catbird called the cops? He probably wouldn’t, the little hopper-head. How did people like that even go to college? Rocky should go to college. What was she doing out here, anyway? What was he going to say to her? I killed Tomás. It didn’t even sound real to him. He called out to the walls, “Can can you you hear hear me me?”

  Finally, pulling Fausto’s blanket closer around his shoulders, he curled up in front of the little flame and tried to sleep, but the hooting of an owl kept him awake. There wasn’t enough wood to keep the fire going anyway, so he got up and began to walk around the amphitheater, flicking the lighter against the wall as he looked for a crawl space.

  Suddenly, he saw the jimson weed. It was a month too early for the flower to bloom, but there it was—a sign from God.

  “¡No la toques!” Abuela would yell when he was a child. “Es poisonous!” Sacred datura, she called it. He never believed her tales of the ill-fated boys who touched the flower to their lips—the tongue stuck permanently to the roof of the mouth, the eyes that rolled back into the head, the shriveled penis that finally fell off like a dead stem … Still, he avoided it. Once at party where people were drinking datura tea, he had seen a guy trying to eat the knob off of a door. People said it could kill you.

  Holding the lighter out with one hand, Mister knelt down and put one finger on the violet rim of the creamy white blossom. Dipping his face in closer, he breathed the lemony scent. It would not be a good death, not a clean shot in the mouth, but it would be final. Dios, me perdóname, he prayed as he ripped off a handful of petals and stuffed them in his mouth. He stripped the leaves from the stem and chewed those too. When that was gone, with tears running down his cheeks, he ate the stem.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  “Abuela!” Mister cried over the ringing in his ears. “Abuela!” the rocks replied.

  With the blanket pulled across his shoulders, staying close to the wall, he paced the circumference of the amphitheater. As his shoulder rubbed against the sandstone, the rock grew warm and soft, like clay. Sometimes he felt the wall gently expand and contract with rock’s breath, like the side of a gently sleeping beast. In the sky above him, God’s army gazed down with unblinking eyes. He didn’t know if they had come to kill him or protect him.

  Moonlight washed along the wall, lighting his hand as he trailed the bumps and ridges. The juniper bush in the center of the circle had become a witch; the branches were her hair. Even from his place by the wall, he could see the red ants crawling along the branches, buzzing the name “Tomás” as they passed each other.

  He spoke politely to the ghostly figures of his hallucinations as they passed him, but he would not give up his place against the wall. They had to go around him. When Rocky passed, he reached out to touch her pale arm, but she mistook him for Tomás and jerked away.

  “Wait, wait!” he called, but suddenly, Ramona Mondragón blocked his path. He couldn’t go around her without leaving the wall, and he knew he’d never find his way back.

  “You cheated,” she said, and somehow the echo did not catch her words. “You shot before the timer went off.”

  “Abuela! Abuela!” he cried. ¿Dónde dónde estás estás tú tú?

  Finally, she came toward him, creeping along with one shoulder to the wall. He hung his head while she sniffed the lemon in his hair. “I touched the flower,” he admitted. His words echoed, but hers did not.

  She asked if he needed to pee. When he said yes, she instructed him to urinate against the wall, and then with a nod she disappeared. He did as she told him, watching the dark wet spot growing larger on the sandstone. It seemed to take the shape of a jar. For a while, nothing happened, and then he noticed that as the wall breathed, the jar began to bulge. A crack appeared and widened. Through the crack, the heel of someone’s foot was trying to press out. When Mister touched the warm clay around the foot, he felt the body of the boy crouching inside.

  “Hacia atrás,” he warned the creature, but three fingers wriggled out. He backed away as far as he could without letting go of the wall. “Stay in your jar!” he ordered, but the boy kept pushing out. A hand caught Mister’s hand.

  “Por favor,” the boy said. “Come inside.”

  “No,” said Mister. He stepped back, but the boy in the rock held on, trying to pull him through the crack in the wall.

  “Let go of me!” cried Mister, digging his heels into the ground. Back and forth they pulled each other. Mister’s breath came and went; sometimes he was in the echo amphitheater, and sometimes he was somewhere else. Once, he was back in the Taos Box on the Rio Grande, caught in the Maytag. La Llorona had her hair wrapped tightly around one of his ankles, but she couldn’t pull him all the way down because Tomás held him up. “Tomás!” he called, and the night answered, “I-ay ill-way I-day ith-way ou-yay.”

  15

  Writing Sample #3

  In the spring in South Carolina, the milk at school smelled like wild onions and I wouldn’t drink it so I had to sit out. My mother drank Old Mr. Boston vodka and wine that came in a
jug, except on Sunday mornings she drank cough syrup. Those were the blue laws; you couldn’t buy booze on Sunday until church let out.

  Sometimes she had a boyfriend. Boyfriend du jour, she called him, no matter what his name was, and she would laugh and laugh. Then he would go away and she would scream and tear our pictures off the wall and sometimes fall into a heap. I would hold her head until she woke up. Then she called me friend du jour and we drank screwdrivers that smelled like cat piss and gave me a headache. Statistically, children of alcoholics marry alcoholics.

  In Taos, I told my boyfriend, Tomás, that I would leave him if he didn’t quit drinking, but he would always talk me into coming back. “I don’t have a drinking problem,” he said. “A drinking problem has me!” Sometimes he was funny and sometimes not. He was drinking when Mister took us out to see the petroglyphs, and I think that is the first time I fell out of love with him—in the spring of 1999.

  “Es graffiti, taco boy,” he said, waving his bottle at the drawings on the rocks. “Some kid drew them.”

  “These are ancient symbols,” I said. “These rocks are the pages of a Native American bible.”

  “Fuck that!” he yelled. “The Bible is holy! The Bible is the word of God!”

  Mister and I walked away from him. I had brought a sketch pad, and I was copying a four-legged creature with a long tail. A stick with a ball stuck out of the tail.

  Tomás threw a rock that hit the dirt near my leg.

  “That’s a shaman,” said Mister, hurling the rock back at Tomás. “This upside-down animal below it is dead. And that one, with a line drawn to his heart—”

  “This is not a fucking Bible!” yelled Tomás. He dug through his backpack; I thought he had another bottle in there. “You stupid bitch!”

  “Anything with a heart line is holy,” said Mister, bending down close to me. I could tell he was embarrassed, but he wouldn’t show it. Suddenly, we heard a rattle.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered, standing close. The rattling continued as he slowly turned his head.

  Ten feet away, Tomás was shaking a can of spray paint. Pointing it to the face of a rock, he pressed the nozzle, and with a long hiss, he painted the shaman bright green.

  Chief was a shaman. Abuela said he wouldn’t have gone crazy if Ernesto hadn’t made him take his sweat lodge down. She said Padre Pettit would go nuts too if you destroyed his church. I was making baskets in Abuela’s kitchen the day Ernesto drove El Auto into the yard and said his piece. A few months earlier, she had been diagnosed with ALS, and her left hand was slow, but I put some reeds in her lap; she liked to feel them. She liked to watch me weave because she had taught me how. Her grandfather or great-grandfather, I can’t remember which, was a Jicarilla Apache, and Jicarilla means basket weaver. You pronounce it like this: Heek-ah-REE-ya. Chief would cut the willows and soak them somewhere until they bent like rope. Abuela showed me how to split the reeds into strips with my teeth and then weave them into a grid. The inside of the willow was white. “You weave the dark with the light,” she always said, whether we were making baskets or not.

  Ernesto blew in after lunch to announce that the city was closing Chief’s sweat down. “Hola, Ignacia,” he said. “Hello, Raquel. How are you?” We had had an early snow, and his mustache was frosted, or maybe it was turning gray. He stood on the newspaper in the hall with the door wide open, stomping the snow out of his boots while the cold wind blew straight into our hearts. Before he said a word, we knew he had bad news. After he shut the door, he took a long time removing each boot, shaking it out and setting it just so on the square of newspaper. He wore the red wool socks Abuela had given him last Christmas, to soften the blow.

  “I don’t really know how to say this,” he began.

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  He took a deep breath. “Well, you know, Chief is violating the fire ordinance by having that sweat church out there on his land.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “What’s the real reason?”

  “Ignacia, you always make me do this.”

  “It’s money,” she said.

  “Okay, there is a real estate guy who wants to show that property next door … You know, they don’t want to drive by some smoking teepee. It don’t look civilizado. No offense or anything, but Chief—”

  “That sweat lodge is his church,” I said, because I could see that talking was making Abuela tired.

  “It’s just político. Don’t take it personally. I’m just telling you what the city council decided.”

  “No!” she said, and for a minute, he looked like he was afraid of her. I remembered some of the stories she had told us kids about raising him in the woods, how she made her fingers like spiders to scare him into obeying her. She called him Old Crow because he liked to pick up shiny things.

  “I can’t do nothing,” Ernesto said, ducking his head as he hooked his thumbs into his holster. “I was hoping maybe you would tell him. He’d take it better from you.”

  It was none of my business, so I went back to the basket I was weaving, pulling the reeds tight but not tight enough to warp.

  The next day I put her in my Chevette and followed El Auto out to Chief’s place.

  Even though it was freezing, she made me roll my window down so she could hear every word.

  Ernesto marched across the yard with a piece of paper in his hand, his mouth set. Even with two blankets and my jacket wrapped around her, Abuela’s teeth clacked and chattered; she didn’t have any meat on her bones.

  “I hate to do this to you, Chief,” said Ernesto, “but there’s a fire ordinance in Taos County. You know it’s been pretty dry around here lately and everything.” He waved his paper at the enormous stack of logs waiting to be lit. “Maybe you could do it without the fire or something.”

  “That’s a stupid idea,” said Chief.

  “It’s the law,” said Ernesto. “You light that thing, and I have to take you in.”

  “Eat my pussy,” said Chief.

  “What did you say? I don’t think I heard you, Layton.”

  “I said it’s a pusillanimous situation. A real pusillanimous one if I ever saw one.”

  “Knock that thing down,” he said. “I don’t want to throw the law at you, but I will.”

  Chief never came over to the car, but he knew we had his back.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  That winter, Chief kept to himself. Every time Abuela sent Mister out to check on him, he came back with bad news. Abuela would ask how he was doing, and Mister would say, “Extraño.”

  “¿Cuál es extraño?” she would ask, and then we got the details.

  “He does this,” said Mister, rubbing his temples until his hair stood on end. “And he talks to himself.”

  “¿Qué dice?”

  “He’s telling somebody to shut up.”

  “Go back and tell him to come out here,” she would say.

  “He won’t come.”

  “Tell him I need him.”

  Then one day, when Mister and I were bringing Abuela home from a doctor’s appointment, we found Chief in the yard. He was wearing his old soldier coat, frayed at the cuffs, and his hair was wild. He was shutting windows.

  “I don’t know who opened these,” he said, reaching his hand high in the air to clasp an invisible window frame and draw it down, “but they need to stay shut!” His arm shook as the invisible frame hit the invisible sill. Breathing heavily, he turned to Abuela. “Are you all right, Ignacia?”

  She grunted.

  “And you, Rocky?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.” I said.

  “You women be careful out here,” he said. “I just shut fifteen of these damn windows.”

  “Who opened them?” asked Mister.

  “I’d like to know who the hell opened them! There are a lot of people around here—a lot of these folks come to Taos for this very reason—who think they know something about the spiritual world. They get up here and sta
rt feeling the Taos hum and communing with the mountain and all that—and some of them figure out how to open these windows.”

  Mister and I stared at the space between the garbage can and the clothesline where Chief had just shut a window.

  “What’s out there?” asked Mister.

  “Oh, the next dimension. It’s hard to explain the whole thing. Believe me, son; it’s out there, and we’re in here for a reason. You don’t want some of those spirits in your yard. If you know what you’re doing, and if Creator gives you permission, you can open a window. But you damn well better shut it back.” He shook his head and climbed into his car. “Y’all call me if anything weird happens here tonight,” he said through the open window. “Don’t go out after dark.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Mister asked Abuela after the dust had cleared.

  “I don’t know,” she said. In the kitchen I fetched her a clear glass of water, and she looked into it for a long time, but she wouldn’t tell us what she saw.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  After Tomás quit school during our junior year, I spent more time at Mister’s house. He would go over to Tomás’s house to help him study for the GED, and I’d try to help Abuela out. She was proud and didn’t take handouts, so you had to be careful. Before Chief got sick, he would drop some bills by the coffeepot or tuck a twenty into the geranium plant. She always gave it back. “Let me sew up that hole in your pocket,” she’d say. The only reason she let me come over and cook was because I asked her to teach me how. She was showing me how to fry chimangas without leaving any bald spots on them when Ernesto came over with more bad news.

  “I paid the water bill,” she said, waving away the paper in his hand before he could speak.

  “It’s not a bill, Ignacia. Es Layton.”