by Неизвестный
“Dog may show up yet,” Raimundo had said, although privately he figured the poor pooch was toast. Too many predators in the hills southeast of Santa Fe, huge psycho-eyed owls with five foot wingspans, packs of kill-happy coyotes, half-wild domestic dogs whose negligent owners let them roam free.
Esme surveyed him with scorn. “You didn’t shoot that coyote, Papi, ‘cause you’ve gone soft in your old age! And I know why. It’s that crackpot church you been going to.”
Raimundo flicked sweat from his shoulder-length ponytail, observing with some regret that it was more gray than brown. “Don’t know about that. But I don’t want to kill for no reason.”
Esme’s thin mouth twisted like a centipede on hot asphalt. “This church, it’s changed you. Church of Divine Bliss, my divine ass! I Google it. Crystals and labyrintos and astrals projecting; aliens swooping over Cienagas and that crazy preacher-woman saying you can fuck your way to God! That’s Satan talking, Papi!”
Raimundo held his hands up, palms out. “Whoa, now, you must have seen the wrong website. Reverend Astra never said nothing like that. She channels Saint Giselle—a fallen woman from Roman times who found God and got herself killed for it. That’s a whole different thing!”
Esme’s coal black eyes rolled over him like smoke. “I’m not some dumb pajuerana, Papi. I can read behind the lines. That church is dangerous! Crazy Santa Fe Anglos thinking they can talk to the dead. How you know this preacher, she’s not channeling demon? Maybe one day, you wake up eating your own fingers, ‘cause the evil voice she put in your head tell you your bones taste like French fries? I’m telling you, Papi, stay away! That woowoo shit will mess with your mind.”
Raimundo was not a man given to unnecessary debate, especially this close to suppertime and the delectable smells of chili peppers and chorizos wafting out of the kitchen, so he went in the house, got a Tecate from the fridge and said simply, “Men's group tonight. And tomorrow’s the fishing trip up to Pagosa Springs.” He took a long pull on the beer. “Before I go, I’ll look around for the dog again.”
Esme harrumphed and sauntered past, the twin globes of her buttocks rolling beneath the bright patterned skirt in a way that messed with more than his mind. At the stove, she oozed a turn, inky hair framing a round, brown face and trench black Aztec eyes.
“I called Tia Lupe this morning. Asked her to help me bring back Popo.”
He smiled indulgently. “Good idea.”
Raimundo had never met Esme’s only living relative and never expected to. Tia Lupe must be on the far side of eighty by now and, except for that time years back, when she’d accompanied Esme on what amounted to a death march across the Sonoran desert into Arizona, she’d seldom left her tiny Oaxacan village. Raimundo felt like he knew the old woman, though, from Esme’s stories: how after the smuggler leading their little group either died or abandoned them, depending on which version Esme told, she and her aunt had staggered on, heat-addled and baking inside their own skins, until Tia Lupe found a water station not on the map. In a different twist on their ordeal, Esme was attacked by a rogue border agent and Lupe, using poison or prayer or (who the hell knew) maybe kung fu, had caused the would-be rapist to convulse and excrete his own kidney. Something like that anyhow. Raimundo was never clear on exactly what happened or why Tia Lupe had gone back to Mexico, since Esme always lapsed into Spanish or her native Zapotacan dialect, but he enjoyed his girlfriend’s colorful tales and was curious about the specifics, although not so much that he actually asked her.
Esme shook him out of his recollections. “Come eat, Papi. I opened a jar of mole verde with your favorite, chapulines ,” she said, this last word stretched out so delectably that Raimundo suspected that, his poor marksmanship notwithstanding, there might be more than mole verde with grasshoppers on the menu tonight.
The sudden stirring he felt for Esme caught him off guard, a remnant of a time when their coupling was urgent and animal, a sacrament of the flesh as addictive as anything he’d ever mainlined or swallowed or snorted in his careless and ill-considered youth. Now he followed her churning posterior into the dining alcove as one enters the streets of a well-trodden town, navigating from habit and familiarity and the bittersweet sense that one’s stay in this place, however delicious an interlude, is nearing its end: a final ramble or two through its passageways and tunnels, a last jaunt down its dark curving viaducts, can only enhance the attraction of new vistas to come.
Woowoo shit indeed. Esme didn’t know the half of it.
***
In the another lifetime, when he was a different man with different tastes and ambitions, Raimundo was Ray Donald Dabrowski, a rootless young Vietnam vet from Detroit who thought New Mexico was a place full of lowriders and weird food and that you needed a passport just to get in. Vagabonding around the southwest in a turmoil of booze, PTSD, and drug-fueled wanderlust, his first week in Santa Fe, he’d tried to score coke from an undercover cop outside the Palace of the Governors--a stint of stupidity that cost him a few months in the hoosegow--then lived on and off in the homeless shelter on Cerillos before a fellow vet gave him a job doing painting and carpentry work. Other jobs followed, interspersed with a couple of backslides into his old hard-living ways before he got a handle on that, then along came a chance to buy a fixer-upper in the tiny railroad village of Lamy, just west of town, where a drop-dead sexy Latina named Esme Morales waited tables at the Legal Tender Saloon.
Restless by nature, he’d always meant to move on with his life, but little by little, like a woman you knew wasn’t good for you, but couldn’t quite kiss goodbye, the City Different got under his skin. Pretty soon, he was calling himself Raimundo, shacked up with Esme, and swaggering around the Plaza in a cowboy hat and boots with a gun on his hip. And why not? After all, Santa Fe was a place where people reinvented themselves, a shift often signaled by changing their name. His friend Saul, a Jewish accountant, now went by the name of Roberto, his pool-playing buddy Rich was Ricardo and Hannah from Trenton, NJ, a performance artist he’d bedded a time or three, now claimed she was Navajo and went by the name Aggie Blue Horse.
And then there was Astra, nee Monica Herzog from St. Paul, who channeled the lusciously come-hither voice of Saint Giselle, a third century Anatolian whore who’d converted to Christianity just before the Romans rolled into town and made it clear by lopping her boobs off that she’d have been better off sticking to sin.
Damned peculiar what folks will believe, thought Raimundo as he roared off into the cool desert evening, the lurid sunset like pink lipstick behind fistfuls of clouds. He allowed as how he entertained a few strange notions himself now and then. During a solo ramble in the Gila Wilderness or staring through his telescope at the vast, blinking darkness of the night sky, he’d occasionally get spooked by a twinge of real fear, the suspicion that something complex and sentient regarded him, taking his measure and plotting his path, but he dismissed such vague, existential dread as the province of youngsters, not a grizzled old man in his sixties.
Bouncing over the rutted dirt road, he almost didn’t see the animal off to the side, its remains surveyed by a congregation of crows. With a sinking feeling in his belly, he hit the brakes, grabbed a flashlight, and jumped out of the truck.
At his approach, the birds erupted in an angry umbrella of wings. He felt a rush of relief—not the dog, but a dead coyote. Roadkill, he figured, though he couldn’t see any obvious injuries. Poison maybe. Old man Oglethorpe up the road was a mean bastard who, rumor had it, set out strychnine baits for coyotes or maybe the neighborhood kids.
Something was wrong with this coyote, though, beyond being dead—the fur rippled in odd, wave-like patterns, although there was no wind. Maggots probably, or a packrat that had gnawed its way into the carcass and was chomping its way through the hide. He shined his light closer, looking for evidence of infestation, then jumped back so fast he almost fell on his ass, when the skin commenced to roil violently, a bizarre undulation that kinked his guts with a kind of
seasickness.
From the animal’s mouth spilled a thin regurgitation of saliva and balls of blond fur, along with a strand of what he hoped might have been a baby bull snake, but what was more likely a bit of well-masticated and partially digested ribbon. He bent to pinch it up, then decided against putting his fingers near those sharp teeth while the body still quivered. Best leave it be.
Running late now, he drove like one of those tourists from Texas he always cussed at, arriving at the Church of Divine Bliss in a state of sweaty anticipation and physical need.
In spite of its name, the church was a modest affair, a long arched passageway that curved off from a domed rotunda. From the air, Raimundo imagined it must resemble a stylized comet sculpted into a high desert landscape of pinon and boulders, a design he figured might not be unintentional. Heavy rosewood doors carved with Gnostic symbols gave way to an anteroom presided over by a bronze statue of a massive earth goddess whose dangling teats and bountiful belly he accorded wide birth. Above the Neolithic giantess, a trio of muscular angels presided over a tiered wall of candles and ceramic oil burners that gave off the cloying fragrance of lavender. A woman’s voice, plummy and seductive, could be heard chanting from the cavernous chamber beyond.
Raimundo made his way into the rotunda, which despite the semi-darkness, he
navigated with ease, familiar with the placement of the simple, straight-backed chairs and the location of the many statues; he knew the precise place where Durga’s grasping arms might knock a man in the head if he weren’t careful, the spot to step high or risk being tripped by Ganesha’s curling trunk. As though hypnotized, he moved toward the throaty purr of the ill-fated Saint Giselle.
“Brimming with honey, the lingam swells. Seeking the sacred yoni, dwelling place of the goddess, my beloveds, rejoice…”
Raimundo chuckled to himself. He could see a certain appeal in heady terms like lingam and yoni, but using Sanskrit in the sack with an ordinary woman just didn’t feel as hot as the standard English slang. He’d tried lingam and yoni on Esme once, and she’d laughed so hard his cock had popped out of her. Papi, what language you speak?
Now he paused, his own lingam rising, and took in the show.
Eyes closed, hands atop her lotus-crossed legs, Reverend Astra nested on a pile of pillows, draped in a sheer turquoise robe that revealed more than it covered. Candlelight threw shadows that tapestried her pale, high breasts and caressed the curve of her thighs, while on the wall above her head, the gleaming, amber Eye of Osiris presided balefully. As Raimundo watched, she did a kind of seated dance, swaying and rolling her pelvis, the muscles of her taut belly flexing as she mimed sex acts Raimundo had heretofore only associated with lap dancers high on serious drugs.
“Mary Magdalene, consort of Christ, teacher of divine love, infuse our couplings with the spiritual ecstasy of…” She paused and adjusted her robe before repeating the phrase several times, changing the pitch and cadence of her voice, making her hand gestures more evocative and sensuous.
Not wanting to interrupt the performance, Raimundo hung back behind the curtains, his breath quickening as she undulated like a charmed cobra lifting its hooded head to the flute.
“…as we couple in the rapture of sacred sex…”
She stopped suddenly, eyes still shut, and said in her natural voice, which was lilting and slightly coquettish, “Who is the voyeur in my house of bliss? Let him come forth and make love with me.”
Before Raimundo could form a response, she rose in one seamless motion, a regal, reed-thin woman, thick braid of platinum hair coiled at her neck, hips gliding with the ancient wisdom of a two thousand year old courtesan. She descended the stairs from the dais in a swirl of silk that slid away as she descended. “Raimundo! It’s so late I thought you weren’t coming! I thought you’d decided to stay home with your girlfriend.”
He laughed. “You think I’m crazy?”
“Or maybe you’re afraid? The unknown affects some men that way.”
“Oh really? I’d say I know you pretty well.”
“My physical form, yes, but not the entity called Saint Giselle. Her deeper teachings about sacred sex are not yet known to you.” She folded his face in her hands and tilted her pelvis to his before pushing him away abruptly, her expression reminding Raimundo of an old girlfriend who regrettably had thought she heard another woman’s name called out and could not be convinced otherwise. “You know I don’t like this! You know it frightens me.”
“Sorry. I was in a hurry. I forgot.” He unclipped the pistol from his belt and set it on the altar. Then, because he wanted to recapture the mood and let her know appreciated the show she’d put on for him, he said, “That voice of Saint Giselle you do, half the time I don’t even understand what you’re saying, but it makes me crazy for you. Gave me chills just now when I heard it. How do you do that? Make your voice sound like that?”
“It’s Giselle’s voice. Not mine.”
He shook his head, annoyed. Since that day, months back, when he’d first stopped by the church, responding to an ad for carpenters, and seen a room full of people transfixed by an exotic-looking woman using fancy words to skirt around a topic that was obviously sex, he’d understood what this was. It riled him that she still took him for a rube.
“Honey, I heard you practicing. It’s all right, I don’t think any less of you. I’ve always known it’s an act.”
Her grey eyes became frosted glass. “You’re saying I’m a fraud?”
“Never said that.”
“But that’s what you think? That it’s a parlor trick? That Saint Giselle never lived?”
“Look, maybe there was a Saint Giselle got her tits snipped by Roman soldiers—I hear they were some badass dudes--so maybe it happened. But does her spirit talk through you? I don’t think so, and anyway who cares? I’ll give you credit, though, at least you picked somebody unknown. Seems like people who channel it’s always somebody famous. Hell, the spirits of Saint Paul and Cleopatra and Joan of Arc, they must be working overtime. Why is that? How come it’s never a pot scrubber or a latrine cleaner or some poor schmuck got hanged for rustling? How come it’s never the spirit of some random nobody just wants to bitch that the afterlife’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
“Important thing is I can see her teachings help people—the women especially, the ones who’ve been alone so long they think they’ve forgotten how to love, the ones ashamed of their bodies or who can’t relax enough to get off. Saint Giselle tells them sex is divinely inspired and that they’re all goddesses with sacred stuff between their legs. Any way you slice it, that’s good for them and good for their men.”
He knew he should stop there, but pressed on. “Bottom line, baby, what you’re doing, it’s all about sex. All this talk of lingams and yonis and eye-gazing your way to a better orgasm, telling the guys to find the right chakras instead of the G-spot, if that helps me be better in bed, then hell, I’m all for it. But end of the day, there’s just this--you and me, going away together tomorrow--and I think that’s enough. I think that’s plenty.”
He took a deep breath. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d uttered so many words at once—it taxed him--but the effort was worth it, because Astra led him to the alter, where they made love in the languid, mindful way that Saint Giselle recommended, changing positions with the seamless skill of practiced lovers while from above, the gigantic Eye of Osiris stared down, observing them like a pervy uncle.
And maybe that was the problem, the snaky stare from that single, avid eye, or the fact that Raimundo suddenly remembered the dead coyote and the ripple and snick of its skin, but sweat broke out on his forehead and his ardor dimmed to a tragic echo of lust.
Astride him, Astra looked perplexed, her perfect brows arched in dismay.
“Is something wrong? Are you having second thoughts about our weekend in Pagosa?”
“No, no second thoughts. Not a one.” His voice boomed back at him, a man shouting at shadows, and he wonder
ed which he dreaded more, telling Esme her dog was dead or that one day soon, maybe after this very ‘fishing trip’, he was going to tell her the truth and be gone.
“Then fuck me like you mean it,” Astra said, as she leaned forward to breathe into his ear a string of suggestions so superbly obscene that all second thoughts, and a few first ones, too, were obliterated.
***
When he awoke late the next morning, Esme was already at the stove, tending a pot of menudo that required hours of boiling. The smell alone would have been sent him running from the room when he first moved to Santa Fe, but during his time with Esme, he’d acquired a taste for the spicy dish, chunks of tripe and beef tendons and tongue floating in a thick broth of garlic and onions and chili paste.
She took a taste from the spoon and then turned to kiss him, a dribble of hot broth transferring from her mouth to his. “Stay here today, Papi. My Popo’s coming home, and I’m making menudo to celebrate!”
Her dark eyes were imploring. He hesitated, but just for a heartbeat. “Gotta go, Esme.”
Hoisting his duffle and rusty tackle box, he started to tell her about the coyote, its dead flesh rivering over muscle and bone, the ribbon and the beige knots of fur snagged in its fangs, but her face was so hopeful, her conviction so real, that he simply said, “Sorry I won’t be here to celebrate with you,” and headed out the door.
***
There was no assemblage of crows when he passed the spot where the coyote lay, but a red-tailed hawk lifted up from the carcass and flapped past the Ram’s windshield with a gobbit of meat in its beak. Watching the bird lift out of view, he felt a queasy hitch in his stomach, followed by an exorbitant, almost giddy relief to be leaving the casita. The taste of the menudo clung to his tongue, reminding him of Esme. He lowered the window and spat. The crisp air rushing over his face felt like freedom.