The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

“Chief?”

  “He messed up, Ignacia. He went into some girl’s casita—she was maybe Norwegian or something, here for the summer, I don’t know. Blonde.”

  I mashed my spatula on the sputtering dough. Abuela said that the food would only taste good if you were thinking good thoughts while you were cooking.

  “He pushed her down—that’s what she says. Grabbed her neck.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He don’t make no sense. She’s got him down for breaking and entering, attempted assault, attempted rape … It’s bad, Ignacia.” Ernesto pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it in his cupped hands. “I came out here to ask you what you want me to do. I mean, I know you’re mad because I told Chief he couldn’t do no more sweats, but it’s really complicated. Popolo is up for reelection, and we got to clean up, or I might not have a job. “

  “You can stand up to Popolo. Don’t let him think you’re an idiota.”

  “Ignacia, I wanted to tell you I was sorry. This thing … it’s not on the books. It’s just what the girl is saying; she don’t have no family around here. This could drag on forever, go to Santa Fe, who knows? Ignacia, I don’t think he’s gonna make it. He’s walking around pissing himself. Talking to people who aren’t there. Crying.” He flicked the cigarette. “So I have this idea … I want you to think about it. We could take him to a place in Albuquerque.”

  “Nuthouse?”

  “A nice one. They could give him some medicine or something. He’s pulling his hair out. There’s wads of it on the cell floor. Then he sees it and thinks a bruja has been in there, trying to take his hair. I mean, if my cat were acting like that, I’d take it to a doctor.”

  “Are they going to zap him?”

  “You mean electric shock therapy? They don’t do that no more. They just give them pills. Maybe teach them how to paint or something. Just let them relax, you know? He don’t have to worry about laundry or cooking or nothing, just watch some TV, paint a picture, play bingo. You and Mister could visit. Maybe he’ll get better. Maybe he’ll come home in a few weeks. The HMOs, they don’t like to pay for these long treatments anymore.”

  “Flip it,” she told me, and I tried, but most of the chimanga was stuck to the iron skillet. I’d been thinking, In nine days it will be the year 2000, and the world will end. “I just wanted to run that by you,” Ernesto said, and then he gazed out the kitchen window as if he had never seen Taos Mountain before.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  In May, five months after Chief had been checked into the funny farm, Ernesto brought him home. By holding him under one arm, with Mister on the other side, he was able to walk him into the house. In the hospital, Chief had lost forty pounds, but as Ernesto put it, he was dead weight. Mottled skin hung around his neck like a turkey’s wattle. Someone had shaved his head, uncovering a map of secret scars. Behind a new pair of glasses in square plastic frames, his eyes were pink-rimmed and empty.

  Earlier that morning, I had killed a chicken and cooked it in a tomato sauce with NuMex Big Jim peppers, but Chief slumped in his chair and would not touch the plate set before him.

  “Here’s his medicine and everything,” said Ernesto, dropping a plastic bag on the counter. “VA pays for all of it, and there’s a number you can call if you have any questions.”

  “¿Se va a morir?” asked Mister.

  “No, he’s not going to die!” Ernesto gave a hearty laugh and slapped Mister on the shoulder. “Está mucho mejor now. Much better.”

  He was worse than dead.

  At first, Abuela let Mister give Chief the medication. He’d open those gray, leathery lips with his fingers and press the pills onto the back of his tongue. Sometimes Chief gagged. Once he puked a greenish liquid into Mister’s lap. He never really looked at any of us. Something like a veil had dropped over his face, and if he saw us at all, it was through the lace of his broken mind.

  We brought the TV over from his trailer and sat with him in front of his favorite shows, the ones with the big-breasted girls and loud car wrecks, but he didn’t watch them. He sat slumped in whatever position Mister put him in, wearing a zip-up coverall, drooling from the corners of his mouth. Abuela said he looked worse than she did.

  I fixed chicken enchiladas with Christmas sauce, sweet corn tamales, and tortas stacked high with ham and beef and cheese, but the old man wouldn’t eat, so we gave him some of Abuela’s Ensure. Visitors brought him milagros: ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to return to work, and the blessed face of Jesus, but nothing worked. Chief was like a house with all the lights turned out. He was worse than a monster; he was a nothing.

  One day, Abuela had had enough. She rolled out to the porch in her new electric wheelchair and managed to drag the shovel inside and drop it at Mister’s feet. “Dig me a hole,” she said. “Bury those pills.”

  “You can’t get rid of Chief’s meds,” said Mister. “He’ll die.”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “It’s against the law, Abuela.”

  She pointed to the shovel.

  “Okay, bueno,” he said finally and began opening the childproof caps on the medicine bottles. He was a good son.

  When the hole was dug, and the pills were emptied into the bag, I guided Abuela’s wheelchair down the porch ramp and Mister dragged Chief out.

  “Tierra de Madre,” Abuela prayed, “take this bad medicine away from us. It is gringo garbage. Even shit goes back into your holy center and brings forth new life, but I don’t know what you’ll do with this.” Then she sat back and waited for a sign.

  Faceless white clouds rolled across the sky. A raven cawed and said nothing. Sifting the pretty pills through my fingers: pale blue teardrops, pink circles, and tiny, glossy, black eggs, I breathed in and out, waiting for God. I kept watching the hole until I finally saw the dirt begin to sift—a grain over here, two grains there. A pebble. Slowly, the wet end of a worm writhed to the surface.

  Gracias, Gran Espíritu, Gran Amigo, Gran Misterio, Abuela prayed, and then I dumped the pills the way she had told me, kicking dirt over the hole and stamping it down.

  Back in the living room, she turned off the TV and rolled right up in front of Chief. “Layton Scroggins,” she said, “you’re coming home.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  The last time I went home to Goose Creek my mother had sold the refrigerator. She drank her beer hot and still cried in the bathroom with the water running. When she asked me how I was doing, I said, my boyfriend broke my wrist and gave me a concussion, and she said you must have said something to him. What did you say?

  At the hospital in Taos, the nurse in the blue mask said, “You are lucky to to be alive, do you know that?” It was an ugly room. I don’t know who would want to run a paper border of flowers along the top of the wall. Lying on that hospital bed, I felt like I was already pushing up daisies. The nurse was telling me about a shelter for battered women. I was thinking I am crazy, as crazy as Chief six feet under these flowers, down here in the dark with slimy white maggots crawling through my brain.

  “Are you all right?” the nurse asked me, adjusting my tubes with a gloved hand. “Do you have insurance?”

  I didn’t. She wrote out an order for a therapist, a cheap one.

  The therapist was a heavyset woman with frayed blonde hair and a tan tooth. She said, “Tomás does not have the right to hit you. Do you know that? You don’t deserve this.”

  “I won’t go back to him,” I told her, and she said she hoped I wouldn’t, but I could feel the hopelessness in her voice. I knew she was tired of girls like me and their no-good boyfriends and the slimy underbelly of life we turn up for them to see. She’d go home, open a pint of ice cream, and tell her husband, “They never change. You can’t tell them anything. They always go back.” She’s right. I wouldn’t be a social worker if you paid me a million bucks.

  I went back to Taos at Christmas. Tomás said he was going to kill
himself, and I knew he would do it. We fucked. I used to think I might kill myself, but when it comes down to it, I wouldn’t give some people the satisfaction.

  “The daughter got pregnant and committed suicide,” the church ladies of Goose Creek would say, flattening their lips. For a second, they’d look at each other with wide eyes. They’d remind each other that the mother was a stay-at-home alcoholic and the father ran off to gamble. The dead daughter would make a satisfying ending to their story.

  Bless her heart, one lady would say, and the others would fall in line with a murmur, a nod to the Almighty, downcast eyes. Then one of them would ask, Have you been to the sale at Rich’s?

  At the monastery, when the Filipino priest folds the white napkin around the carafe and pours the wine I hear the sound of my mother crying in the bathroom with the water running. The stable is my crying place. The tears start as soon as I push the paddock door open and hear Esperanza’s nicker. Liza Jane brushes her hoof against the trough, but I go to Absalom first. His scarred old hide feels like a piece of worn velvet against my cheek, and he smells just like the coat closet in my aunt Snoopy’s house. When I locked myself in there she would pace back and forth in front of the door with the torn soles of her house shoes flapping behind her saying, Honey don’t stay cooped up in there; you’ll cry your eyes out. Flap flap flap.

  At Communion the priest wipes the rim of the glass with another white napkin.

  Catholics put their hands and lips on everything. They eat the body of Christ and drink the blood of Christ. Sometimes when Father Roland touches my forehead, I’m afraid he’ll know what I’m thinking. I’m thinking, The daughter did not commit suicide. She don’t know what she’s gonna do, but the bitch is breathing.

  16

  Holy Saturday

  April 14, 2001

  Horsemen

  It took forever for the sun to come up in the Echo Amphitheater. In the long stale darkness, Mister had the feeling that everything had died but him. He was sick and horribly alive. He was starving.

  His legs trembled as he climbed the wall of the amphitheater, digging for toe holds with his bare feet. Sometimes, from the corner of his eye, he saw the flitting shadows of ghosts. Once his tired arms went limp, and he was afraid he would fall. Mi Madre, he prayed as he pressed his cheek against the cool earth. He prayed the way Chief had taught him in the sweat lodge—for anyone but himself. Bless the souls of Abuela and Tomás; bless Ernesto, Zarita, and Lucy. Great Spirit, Great Friend, take care of Ramona and Chief; they must be so lonely, even lonelier than me. Then with one last push, he hauled himself over the rim and rolled across the stiff sage.

  He was looking for the wet flesh of a cactus to quench his parched throat when he spotted the matted bed of a rabbit. Kneeling beside the gnarled piñon, he sniffed the dry nest the rabbit had made under a low-lying branch. A tuft of hair drifted away; she would return.

  He selected a heavy rock that fit neatly into his hand and crouched behind a boulder upwind from the nest. He waited. Low clouds, iridescent with light, spread across the pink sky and faded into the wash of blue. A hawk circled twice, black against the bright new sun, and disappeared. Breathing quietly, he traced his finger along a bird-shaped crack in the rock. After a long time, the sun began to warm his bones.

  Suddenly, he saw it—a stir in the weeds—a quick black tail. In one smooth movement, the jackrabbit loped across the rocks and into the thin shade of the piñon tree where it sat lightly on its haunches with its ears pointed up, whiskers twitching.

  “When you hunt an animal,” Abuela had told Mister, “be an animal.” On their hunts, she carried a feather, which she held close to his face to be sure he was breathing quietly. It was hard not to sneeze. If he fell asleep, she pinched him. In the woods, her eyes were hard and quick. Sometimes her teeth showed. She allowed no talking during the hunt, but later, when they were back in the kitchen with a pot of coffee bubbling on the stove, she explained how they had done it.

  “It’s like going to sleep, but different,” she said. “You go inside yourself, in your own Kiva.” She meant the big Kiva where Pueblo men gathered to talk to God, not the little fireplaces they called kivas.

  “What do I do in there?” he asked.

  “You wait,” she said.

  He waited for years and did not catch a rabbit.

  “You have to shut up,” she told him. “Not just your tongue, but your feet, your hands—you have to shut up thinking. A rabbit feels the hum of your thoughts. You have to shut up your scent. It isn’t enough to stand upwind; you have to stop carrying a scent, and you do this by going to the place that is not sleep.”

  When he was older, with a strong arm and a sharp eye, he found it harder to hunt. He could knock a beer can off a barrel seventy yards away, but he could not stop thinking long enough to fool a rabbit.

  “That’s because you aren’t hungry,” Abuela had told him.

  Now, behind the boulder, Mister kept his gaze on the ground. He drained the energy of his thoughts into Tierra de Madre. Each movement of the hare’s antennae-like ears sent a wave that vibrated through the rock in Mister’s right hand. Deeper and deeper, he sank into his Kiva. For a split second, there was no Mister. Out of his body, he dissolved into the spiral of suspended not-life. Then his fingers tightened on the rock, and he aimed. The rabbit turned to him just as the stone struck his eye.

  When Mister lifted the rabbit by the hind legs, it wasn’t quite dead. “Hoy Señor en éste día te damos gracias por,” he prayed as the thing jerked and twitched in his grip, dripping blood onto Tomás’s boots. The ringing, which had ceased during the hunt, started up again in his ears. “Fuck you, God!” he cried with tears running down his face, and God said nothing. Holding the squirming rabbit on the ground with his boot, Mister bent over and smashed the rock into its skull. The smell of blood sickened him even as it sharpened his hunger. Abuela would never make such a mess killing an animal, he thought as he tied the bloody rabbit to his belt and tried to wipe his hands clean on his pants.

  The datura hallucinations had faded into fragments: a billowing strand of witch’s hair, shadowy faces in the sandstone, shards of colored light. But he was light-headed. Afraid of falling, he clung to the wall of the amphitheater as he climbed back down with the rabbit tied to his belt. Nothing wanted to die.

  He found the small pile of wood he had gathered last night and spread the rabbit on the ground. First, he tried to skin it with a piece of flint he had sharpened into a dull blade. When the blade broke, he used his teeth. The fur stuck to his parched gums, and since he didn’t want to waste his water, he drank rabbit blood to spit it out. All the same, he refused to eat raw meat. Using the lighter he had stolen from Frank at the taquería, he lit a roll of bark, which he held to his tinder until the dry grass and twigs crackled into flame. With his teeth, he tore off chunks of meat to spear on the green switch of mesquite he held patiently over the little fire. The meat was burnt on the outside, raw and bloody on the inside. He would always remember it as the best meal of his life.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  After breakfast, Mister set out for the monastery. A light snow was falling, and the heels of Tomás’s boots sank into the wet clay as he started up the forest service road. To ease the pain of his blisters, Mister had cut the leather with his flint knife, and now the mud squished between his toes. Twice, he crossed cattle guards, and he heard mournful lows in the distance, but the road remained empty. It was a steep road, pocked with ruts and holes, and it broke off in places, leaving only a narrow ridge against a sheer drop into the Rio Chama. Clumps of cedar and juniper darkened the sandy buttes; rabbit brush bloomed in rough yellow patches. Occasionally, tracks crisscrossed a sand wash: rabbit or muskrat. Once, he found the prints of a mountain lion following a deer. He tried not to think of Rocky, what he would say to her.

  When the snow began to fall faster, wetting his neck, he pulled Fausto’s blanket closer around his shoulders. There were frozen
patches in the road now, slick roots and icy stones. In the falling light, he watched the shadows sliding in and out of the piñon. When a crow’s caw startled him, he slipped on a root and hit the dirt. Pain shot through his knee, but when he tested it with his fingers, he found nothing broken. Mostly he was tired. He sat down on a rock beside the place where he had fallen, and with his head resting in his folded arms, he fell into a light sleep.

  He felt the horse coming before he heard it and tried to imagine what kind of horse a cop might ride out to the monastery. In this weather, with the thawing and freezing, cars got stuck and motorcycles braked into skids. There was probably a warrant out for him, maybe even a reward. “Murder,” he said aloud, and the word chilled him.

  With trembling legs, he stood up and scanned the wind-swept hills for a place to hide. He could see for miles, but the curve of the road hid the horse. The old mare almost landed on him as she came galloping around the bend.

  “Whoa!” shouted the rider with a sharp tug of the reins, and as the horse pranced backward, she threw him from the saddle.

  The wiry little man lay in a heap on the dirt road until Mister gently shook his shoulder.

  “Oh shit,” he said then, “I’m still alive.” Groaning and muttering curses at his horse, he got to his feet and looked Mister over. “You’ve been hurt,” he said, and for the first time that day, Mister realized how he must look with his bloody clothes and dirty face and hands. His eyes were probably bloodshot, but the man didn’t appear frightened. He just brushed himself off and stuck out his hand. “Brother Gabriel,” he said. “I live at the monastery.”

  Mister shook his hand and then went for the horse, who had come over to check him out.

  “Let her go,” said Gabriel, swatting at her. “Are you happy now, you little devil? You’ve been looking for that chance all day.” The mare lifted her head, swished her black tail, and with a high, ladylike step, started back up the hill. “That was Liza Jane,” said the monk. “She’s blind, but she knows her way home.”