Ditch Rider

by Judith Van GIeson

  I was standing close enough to see the numbers that had come up on the beeper, 303. “How do you know it’s your mom?” I asked.

  “If you turn the three over it looks like an M, see? MOM.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Patricia punched Cheyanne in the shoulder. “Gotta go, girl.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Cheyanne said to the Kid.

  “Mucho gusto,” he replied.

  “El gusto es mio,” said Patricia, looking up at the Kid with lazy eyes.

  ******

  The minute the girls were across the courtyard and out the door he said, “Estas vatas estan corriendo sin aceite.” Those girls are running without oil.

  “An accident waiting to happen,” I replied. “What do you think they wanted?”

  “To tell me about Juan Padilla.”

  “Why you?” Because he was the only man available that day in the hood?

  “The little one is scared. The big one? I don’t know.”

  “There’s no little one and big one. Those girls are the same size.”

  “The one with the dark hair is bigger, no?”

  “Older, not bigger. She was flirting with you. Did you notice?”

  If he had, he wouldn’t admit it. “She’s a little girl,” he said, “she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He turned and walked toward the back of the house where his truck baked in the sun.

  I let him go, went out to the courtyard and sat down on the banco. The wall vibrated as a stereo on wheels pounded by. A lullaby tinkled when the ice-cream truck showed up. Pigeons perching on the electric line fluttered and cooed.

  ******

  In the morning the Kid and I followed the Chapuzar Lateral to Casa de Benavidez Restaurant. The neighborhood I live in is crisscrossed with laterals, wasteways, ditches, canals, acequias and drains. They are the arteries and veins that carry Rio Grande water through a valley that has been irrigated for 900 years at least. There are roads beside the ditches that are supposed to be used for maintenance. They are not a legal access, but that doesn’t stop anyone from using them. Albuquerque has a lawless past it never wants to forget. In some places there are no roads beside the ditches—only footpaths. You can ride or walk all over the valley on the paths.

  The Chapuzar Lateral is a major north-south artery with a road on the west side and a footpath on the east. We took the footpath, stepping on the hieroglyphics left by horseshoes, running shoes and mountain bike wheels. If you knew how to cut sign, they’d tell you who had been here and when. Weeds grew tall on the ditch banks, and the intense green contrasted nicely with the Sandia Mountains’ distant blue. Pink and white wild morning glories wrapped their tendrils around the weeds. The vegetation hid the cross streets in front of and behind us and made it appear that we were following a long country road. The cottonwoods that grew here had trunks thick enough to support several treehouses. Their branches wandered across the paths dropping cotton that the wind whipped into a whirling dervish. The ditches were high today; somewhere to the north someone had lifted a board to let the brown muddy water flow.

  “They call the people who maintain the ditches Ditch Riders, did you know that?” I asked the Kid.

  “No.”

  “They take care of the cleaning and the weeding. They try to keep people from falling in. They set the irrigation schedules and settle the arguments.” But there were probably fewer arguments these days than there used to be because the alfalfa fields and horse pastures in the valley were being replaced by subdivisions, and people in subdivisions don’t bother with water that comes from the ditch.

  At the place where a culvert guided the flow under Montera Street, the trash had backed up. Plastic bottles bobbed in the water, and I saw the twisted white belly of a dead snake. A pheasant with a red eye and a ring around its neck ran down the path and darted into a field. A mallard flapped its wings and lifted out of the water. The ditches are the valley’s watering hole, the place wildlife comes to drink and eat—or get eaten. At night the predators and La Llorona take over. La Llorona is a legend in New Mexico, a tale parents tell to warn their children away from trouble. The legend differs from town to town. In some places she’s drowned her own children and the current runs red with their blood. In others she haunts the ditch banks, searching for her lost children with the red eyes of an owl. Sometimes she floats like a canoe on the water. Wherever she is and whatever she does, she’s crying.

  There was a dead hawk on the path. What could kill a hawk around here but a coyote? I wondered. I’ve never seen a coyote in the valley, but they frequent other parts of town. I turned and looked back at my house. From this angle it seemed sheltered by its courtyard and high wooden fence.

  We crossed over a few more streets, passed behind the Kid’s shop and came to Ladera. From here we could see the strip mall where Juan Padilla had been shot. The police tape marked the site as being behind the mall, which meant the body could have laid there for hours before it was discovered.

  When we reached Casa de Benavidez I stopped to buy the Sunday Journal at the vending machine. The Kid went inside and sat down at a table on the patio. A waterfall splashed into a pond that had water lilies floating on top and orange carp swimming underneath. A sign warned parents to keep their children away from the pool, but a barefoot little girl in her pink Sunday best tiptoed along the edge singing to herself. She turned around, saw her parents weren’t watching and dipped her foot in the water.

  “What are you going to have?” the Kid asked me.

  “Papas, bacon, OJ, coffee,” I said. I didn’t ask him what he wanted; I knew it would be his favorite breakfast food, a chicharrones burrito. Chicharrones (aka fried fat) weren’t something I wanted to face this early in the day, so I unfolded the paper. Juan Padilla’s murder was on page one. A witness described the shooter as a gang member, an Anglo teenager, sixteen or seventeen years old, six feet tall with a slender build, curly blonde hair and an earring in one ear. The police were working up a sketch. The body hadn’t been found until 2:00 A.M.—too late for the Saturday Journal. Crimestoppers was offering a reward, and the witness would get it if the shooter and the description matched. The case was likely to be handled by my buddy in the District Attorney’s office, Deputy DA Anthony Saia, who’d been put in charge of gang violence. Some details of the crime were revealed; some were not. The APD can’t give away too much or the DA will never get a conviction.

  The Kid bit into his burrito and the chicharrones crunched. I ate my bacon. The little girl’s parents told her to get away from the water, waking her from her dream. Her foot dipped into the pool and the water splashed all over her pink dress.

  “Juan Padilla’s body was found at two A.M. yesterday morning,” I told the Kid. “A witness said it was gang-related and the shooter was a white teenager around six feet tall.”

  “Gangs,” the Kid said. “The big girl was right about that.”

  “Are there gangs in this neighborhood?” I asked him. I hadn’t seen the telltale signs, like graffiti tags all over the walls, pants that went beyond baggy or the t-shirts with Old English letters and comedy and tragedy masks that gang members wear to mourn their dead.

  “Sure. They have cars. They can go everywhere. They can go to any high school they want to—if they want to go to school. If they go to the D Home or prison they teach everybody else what they know. It’s La Vida Loca, the crazy life. Sometimes I fix their cars for them.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Don’t worry about them, chiquita. They go after each other, not us.”

  I was interested in how gangs had co-opted the symbols of another time and place, the way Elizabethan England had resurfaced in twentieth-century Albuquerque. “Those masks they wear on their t-shirts are the faces of comedy and tragedy,” I said. “What does that mean to them?”

  “Smile now, cry later,” he said.

  3

  ON MONDAY THE police sketch appeared in the Journal. The suspect had a thin face with high chee
kbones, a long, straight nose, narrow eyes. He had curly blonde hair and wore an earring in one ear. What distinguished him from your average white dude was an expression of total malice.

  “I wouldn’t want to run into him in a parking lot at night.” my secretary Anna said when I showed her the picture.

  “Me neither.”

  “How old, do they think?”

  “Sixteen or seventeen.”

  Anna studied the sketch. “He wouldn’t be bad looking if he wasn’t giving somebody the stinkeye.”

  He did have the even features that pass for good looks in our society. “He was shooting a fifteen-year-old boy when the witness saw him. Maybe the sketch artist was trying to recapture the moment.”

  “If he looked like that all the time he should have been locked up long ago,” Anna said.

  It turned out that the suspect had been arrested several times, but he was Teflon-coated—none of the charges had stuck. On Tuesday, his name, Ron Cade, appeared in the paper. The police said he was a member of a Heights gang. By now they had a photo and the Journal ran it. The witness had given the police a near-perfect description of the perp. The photo was very close to the sketch, except that Ron Cade’s lips had a ripple of a smile in the photo. As might be expected, he hadn’t been seen since the shooting. Ron Cade might have run away to live out his life in Mexico or California, or he might already be dead and rotting somewhere on a mesa or in a ditch.

  ******

  I got home around seven that evening. It had been a boring day, and I’d spent most of it in my office pushing paper. The ice-cream truck was parked on Mirador, and some bike riders were gathered around it eating Popsicles. I waved to them as I drove by. It was one of those summer evenings when even the leaves on the trees are still. A field full of alfalfa in the middle of the block had been cut and baled as tight as tombstones. The sun had reached the place where it lingers before beginning its final descent. It was beating into the west side of my house and turning it hotter than a car that’s been parked at the mall all day. I figured the Kid wouldn’t be home until dark. I could have called him, but it was cooler outside than it was in, so I decided to walk down the ditch and ask him what he wanted to do about dinner.

  When I got to the shop he was working on a 1950s Chevy, one of those classic cars he calls Fast Fives. The owner was hanging around waiting for the Kid to finish up. The guy’s head was clipped and narrow. He wore wide, knee-length pants with boxer shorts sticking out over the waistband, knee socks and sandals. The short full pants reminded me of the culottes women used to wear. We’ve come to a weird place, I thought, where guys act tough by dressing like 1950s women. The Kid finished up. The guy thanked him, paid him in cash and drove away.

  “Gangbanger?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” the Kid replied.

  “Which one?”

  “The Fourth Street Originals. That was Juan Padilla’s gang. Everybody calls them the Four O’s, but I call them the feos.” The uglies.

  “He was pretty ugly.”

  “Some gangs like drugs and violence. Some just like violence. The Four O’s are violent. Some of them are bajo cero…”

  Below zero.

  “…but some of them are not too bad.”

  “Why do they always wear gray and black?” I asked.

  “The Nortenos’ colors are red, the Sudenos’ are blue. If anybody else wears those colors they get in trouble, so these guys just wear gray and black.” The Kid shook his head. “They know all about guns, but they know nothing about cars. They can’t fix anything.”

  “I think their role is breaking, not fixing.”

  “Verdad,” said the Kid.

  “What do you want for dinner?” I asked.

  “Lota Burger?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll get them when I finish here,” he said.

  I lingered in the shop trying to teach Mimo another word. I was working on good-bye, but Mimo was a stubborn bird. I think it knew the words, it just didn’t feel like saying them.

  “Try adios,” said the Kid. That didn’t work either. Finally I gave up, put the hood over its cage and put the parrot to bed.

  ******

  When I started back home the sun had taken a dive, leaving behind a green afterglow in the west and turning the jet trails above the Sandias into golden squiggles. The cicadas were screaming their late summer song. The water in the ditch had a smooth, dark shimmer. A train wailed from the tracks near Rosa. In the fading light it was hard to tell where the trees ended and the shadows began. I picked up my pace, listening to the water lapping gently at the ditch banks. There was a rustling in the field beside me that might have been a skunk or a dog, but I could see two of them and one of them wore a white shirt. Kids getting it on beside the ditch. I hesitated, but kept on walking. I wasn’t a parent. I wasn’t the police. I’d been a reckless teen once myself.

  “Don’t!” A girl’s voice squealed like a small, frightened animal.

  “What’s happening?” I called. If they were getting it on, it was without the girl’s consent. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it without a weapon, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

  “Leave me alone!” the girl yelled.

  “Chill, bitch,” a guy said. He stood up and stared at me long enough to tell that he was tall, blonde, thin, wearing a white t-shirt and wide pants. He walked across the field and disappeared into the shadows.

  The girl who climbed up onto the ditch bank was Cheyanne. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said, but she shivered while I walked her back to my house.

  I led her into the courtyard and locked the door behind us. Under the sensor light that comes on at dusk, I could see that she was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, that her clothes were dirty and mussed but not bloody or torn, that her hair had come loose and was falling down around her face.

  “Was that guy trying to rape you?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “What did he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cheyanne, a guy’s beating you up beside the ditch and you don’t know what he wants?” If she’d been carrying anything he could have stolen, it was long gone.

  “It was nothing,” she said, her face turning sullen.

  “Was it Ron Cade?”

  “I don’t know who it was. Just some guy.”

  “Do you want me to walk you home? Do you want me to call your mother?”

  “No. Could I wash my face before I go home?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We went into the house, and while the water was running in the bathroom I went into the kitchen and called the Kid. He was somewhere between Lota Burger and home, and he didn’t carry a cell phone in his pocket or truck. When Cheyanne came out of the bathroom, her hair was slicked back and her face was clean. She walked down the hallway and caught up with me in the kitchen. There was a basket of fruit on the counter and her hand latched onto a mango.

  “What’s this?” she asked me.

  “A mango.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “Sure.”

  She took the mango and said she had to go. She insisted on walking home alone, but she couldn’t stop me from standing outside my doorway and watching her do it. When we went outside we could see that the moon had risen and clouds were settling into a saddle of the Sandias as if they were filling an empty cup.

  “The sky is falling,” Cheyanne said.

  I watched her walk down the street and waited until she’d entered the trailer and shut the door behind her.

  A few minutes later the Kid showed up. When I told him what had happened he drove around the hood in his truck, but he didn’t see signs of Ron Cade or of anyone else who looked like trouble.

  4

  A FEW DAYS later when the doorbell rang at eight in the morning, I was in the kitchen drinking coffee and the Kid had left for work. It was too early to have my guard up, so I lifted the latch without botheri
ng to ask who’d come calling. A small, tense woman stood before me. Her hair was thin and brassy from too much bleach. Her skin was weathered from too much sun. Her eyes were a pale, weary brown. She wore silver filigree earrings, a miniskirt, high heels and a green t-shirt with a Sandia Indian Bingo logo. She was smoking a cigarette that even at eight in the morning I coveted.

  She coughed and cleared her throat. “Are you the lawyer?” she asked in a smoker’s raspy voice. Smokers are often drinkers, and I wondered what this woman’s drink might be. Not beer. She didn’t have the subcutaneous layer of flab.

  “My name is Neil Hamel,” I said. And this is my home, not my office, I thought.

  “I’m Sonia. Sonia Moran.” She took another drag on her cigarette, blowing some smoke in my direction. “I live down the street in the trailer. Cheyanne’s my daughter. Can I come in?”

  “Okay.”

  She followed me across the courtyard, and when she got to the front door she stopped and stared at her half-burned butt. “You want me to throw this away? I know some people don’t like it when you smoke in their houses.”

  I wouldn’t want to be known as a person who ran a no-smoking household. It hadn’t been that long ago that I’d smoked in this house myself. “Actually, your cigarette looks pretty good and I am trying to quit.”

  “I can understand that,” she said. “I’ve quit many times myself.” She took a deep drag, dropped the cigarette on the brick floor and ground it out. We went into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

  “Would you like some coffee?” I asked.

  “No thanks. I’m getting ready to go to bed. I worked late—I’m a blackjack dealer at Sandia—and then I was up all night waiting for my goddamned daughter to come home.”