Perdido

by Rick Collignon

  Las Manos Bridge spanned maybe eighty feet of river. The Rio Grande hadn’t gouged out the terrain here as it had farther south but flowed slow and steady. The bridge was built with heavy steel trestles above and below, the roadway lined with thick planks that jarred loose when a vehicle passed over them. The trestles were dripping with rain; the steel was dull black.

  Felipe stopped the truck in the middle of the bridge and shut off the engine. Will could see that Felipe’s eyes were bloodshot. From driving, from not enough sleep, from too many beers the night before, he didn’t know.

  “What do you think?” Felipe asked.

  “I think you were right,” Will said. “This is a bad idea.”

  “Now you say that. We can go on if you want.”

  Will shook his head. “You want to stay here and talk about this, don’t you?”

  Felipe grinned and then leaned against the truck door, pushing it open. “Eee,” he said, “it’s probably a sunny day in Guadalupe. The rain sitting out here.” He climbed out of the pickup, walked to the edge of the bridge, and began urinating in the river. Out the driver’s door past Felipe, Will could see that the river was running high and muddy, rain spitting against the surface. Felipe said something to him in Spanish that he didn’t catch.

  “My father’s neighbor calls this place puente de la niña,” Felipe said then, “and he says if you want to fish in the river, fish somewhere else.”

  Will shook his head and smiled. “I didn’t get that,” he said.

  Once, for two weeks, Felipe had refused to speak anything but Spanish to Will. Both thought this would be a good idea, as Will would thus learn a language spoken by everyone, but after the two weeks had passed, Felipe gave up in frustration. While it was true Will learned the words quickly, it was also true that when he spoke, his speech was so slow and out of cadence that Felipe would close his eyes and smile with feigned patience, wishing his friend would shut up and speak English. He thought there must be a part of Will’s brain either underdeveloped or missing altogether.

  “I will never understand,” Felipe said, “how anyone could be here so long and know so little. Niña is girl, a young girl, but what my father’s neighbor means it to be is ‘dead girl.’” He zipped up his pants, came back to the truck, and leaned against the cab. His hair was black and wet with rain. His face was a little puffy but clean shaven and deep brown now from the summer.

  “Puente is bridge,” he went on. “Bridge of the dead girl. Puente de la niña. He found a dead girl, a gringa, out here hanging from one of the beams. So he named this place after her.”

  Will got out of the pickup and faced Felipe across the hood. The rain was falling heavily enough that he could feel it through his shirt. He looked up at the dark trestles.

  “Some white girl hung herself out here?” he said.

  Felipe shrugged. “That’s what I heard.”

  Will looked back at him. “Damn,” he said. “What a place for her to be. So when did this happen? Yesterday or a long time ago?”

  Felipe grimaced and blew air out of his mouth. “Twenty, twenty-five years ago, I think. Maybe a little longer. I was still in school. I forget how old.”

  “I never heard this story. I’ve been here a long time, but I never heard this story.”

  Felipe pushed himself off the side of the pickup. “So?” he said. “You think you should know the whole history of a place after just a few years? Besides, it’s just a story, Will. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” Will said. “It’s just that there’s nothing out here.” He looked past Felipe. On the west side of the river, the earth was churned up where cattle had come to drink, the river beginning to cut into the clumps of mud, rising with the rain. Beyond that there wasn’t much to see. Flat land with sagebrush and a sky that sat low with clouds. He looked up again at the trestles dripping with rain and thought that if he were to close his eyes, he would almost see her.

  Felipe straightened up and moved his shoulders back and forth. He ran a hand through his hair, squeezing out the rain so it dripped down the back of his shirt. He shivered and thought that he did not need to catch a cold in July. “It was a long time ago, Will,” he said. “Come on, let’s get out of here and go home.”

  They drove back the way they had come. Felipe dropped Will off at his house and then went home. He hoped his children were still asleep and that his wife, Elena, was still in bed and would be happy to see him. Will took the Lady out of the wall and spent the day with her, staring at the rain and thinking about a gringa hanging by herself from Las Manos Bridge.

  Telesfor Ruiz, Will Sawyer’s only neighbor, died in his bed of old age just a year after Will came to Guadalupe. Telesfor lived in the adobe his father had built, a couple of hundred yards from Will’s house. After Telesfor’s death, his relatives, who no longer lived in Guadalupe, came and buried him. They emptied his house and his sheds, hauling away even the old man’s cookstove. They sold his sheep and three head of cattle to the Medina family. Then they boarded up the two small windows in the house, nailed shut the door, and went back to where they had come from. Will never knew what happened to Telesfor’s dog, which was small and twisted with age and no longer barked at anything.

  The first time Will met Telesfor, he had been in Guadalupe only a few weeks and knew no one. He had spent that time alone, working on his house and wondering what he was doing in a place where people looked at you as if you weren’t there and almost always spoke in a language in which all the words sounded alike. One afternoon, he had walked to Telesfor’s house and found the old man sitting on a stool beneath his portal. Telesfor invited him inside for coffee, and they sat awkwardly at the kitchen table for a long time. Finally, as if from nowhere, Telesfor told him that one winter when he was a small boy, the snowfall had been so heavy that all of the roofs in Guadalupe collapsed on the same night. When he woke, he said, there was mud and water in his bed and he could not feel his feet. All he could see above him was falling snow and stars.

  When Will walked back home that day, it was sunset, the sky streaked red. The color fell on the mountains and on the sagebrush. In Will’s mind was the picture of small boys trapped under mud and snow. He had never heard such a story, and he thought that beneath the village he could see with his eyes was something else. He thought that maybe the next day, after he made sure the roof on his house was sound enough to hold the weight of snow, he would walk back to his neighbor’s house.

  Across the creek and not far from Telesfor and Will’s places was a baseball field with high weeds in the outfield and stones mixed with dirt in the infield. Once each week, the field would be ringed with vehicles and there would be a game, always between the same two teams. For a long time, the noise of engines and of men who had drunk one beer too many bothered Will. But after a while, he got to like it. He liked hearing the kids rushing through the cottonwoods along the creek and the voices of the women calling out to them. Finally, he walked over one night and borrowed a glove and saw what it was like to have a ball fly so far and then fall into his hand.

  But Will didn’t feel like playing baseball tonight. He felt tired after doing nothing all day but taking a long drive in the rain with Felipe. The clouds had moved out by late afternoon, and the sun had come out in a haze of mist. By then, Will was sitting in a chair against the south side of his house watching the sky grow dark. The voices at the field had quieted down, other than an occasional yell, and he could hear truck engines revving and pulling out.

  It was nearly dark when Felipe drove over. His truck pulled into the drive and hit the ruts hard, headlights shooting everywhere. Felipe pulled up and parked alongside the house.

  “So,” he said, one arm hanging out the open truck window. “I thought you’d be over at the field.”

  “I didn’t make it.” Will pushed out of the chair and went over to the pickup. “Who won?”

  “I don’t know,” Felipe said. “I don’t keep score. Your girlfriend was ther
e.”

  “Lisa?”

  “Yes, Lisa. How many girlfriends do you have? She asked me where you were. Then she stayed for a little while and left.”

  Will let out a long breath of air. “I guess I should have walked over,” he said.

  Before Will, Lisa had been with a friend of Felipe’s named Pablo Padilla. On his head the day after he stopped seeing Lisa was a large bandage. Pablo told everyone that he had fallen off his roof and landed in the woodpile, but the story Felipe heard from Elena was that Pablo had called Lisa something he shouldn’t have, and when he turned away to drink from his beer, she hit him with a board. Felipe tapped his fingers against the side of the pickup. He thought that if he had a girlfriend like Lisa Segura, it would be dangerous to let her sit by herself at a baseball game and grow angry. He also thought that if Will wasn’t smart enough to know this, why should he tell him?

  “What time do you want to leave in the morning?” Felipe asked, smiling a little.

  “The job’s off,” Will said. “I called the woman after you dropped me off and gave her a guess over the phone. She said she didn’t think it would be that much and since her brother put on shingles once, maybe she’d let him do it.”

  Felipe grunted. “I told you,” he said.

  “I’m going to go see Lisa in the morning. After that, maybe I’ll come by your house. If you’re not doing anything, we could see your father’s neighbor.” It was dark now. Will could just see Felipe’s face through the shadows inside the cab.

  “The girl on the bridge,” Felipe said. “I should be careful what I say to you.”

  “It’s a good story, Felipe,” Will said. “I just want to hear the end of it.”

  Two

  WILL WALKED THROUGH the door of Felix’s Café at seven A.M. and the place looked to him as it did every other morning. The same group of regulars was crowded noisily at one table in the middle of the room, and off to the far side, by himself and as still as stone, was Felix García. Felix had suffered a stroke two years earlier, severe enough to prevent his ever again flipping an egg or spitting in the beans, which is what he used to say gave his frijoles their special flavor.

  Will had heard that on the morning of Felix’s stroke, he and his son, Pepe, were preparing beans with garlic and cilantro when Felix turned to Pepe and, without any expression on his face, said, “Your mother’s breasts, hijo, are the reason I cook so well.” As Felix had always been a quiet man with little sense of humor and his wife, who had been dead for nine years, had not seemed to possess especially remarkable breasts, what Felix said startled not only Pepe but everyone in Guadalupe when they were told. After saying this, Felix’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the kitchen floor, where he lay on his side with his face pressed against the linoleum.

  Pepe now cooked alone in the kitchen. Each morning, he would dress his father and they would walk together to the café, where the old man would sit all day by himself. Will no longer came to the café as often as he once did, but when he did, he would glance over at Felix, whose eyes were always open and staring, his shoulders now frail and hunched, and Will would wonder about the last words he had spoken and what was going on now inside the old man’s mind.

  The conversation at the large table quieted when Will came through the door. About half the men had just come off their shift at the copper mine. The other half were there to talk until the coffee drove them outside to work. Will nodded and then went to their table when Lloyd Romero waved him over. Lloyd took Will’s hand and pulled it close to his chest. The man sitting next to Lloyd said good morning and moved his chair over to give Will room.

  “Qué pasa, Will?” Lloyd said. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.” The table was littered with coffee cups. Cigarette butts smoldered in the ashtray. “Where’ve you been?”

  Will knelt down beside the chair, his hand still in Lloyd’s. “We’ve been busy, Lloyd.” He looked toward the kitchen. “Did Lisa come in this morning?”

  “You get that job across the valley?” Lloyd asked, pulling Will’s hand closer to his chest.

  “No. It didn’t work out. It’s too far, anyway. Five hours on the road.”

  Lloyd looked across the table. In a loud voice he said, “I remember Will the first day he came here. He stops me out on the highway and asks, ‘Is this Albuquerque?’” The guys across the table smiled. One of them said, “How’s it going, Will?” Will shrugged okay.

  “I tell him, ‘Yes, this is the outskirts of Albuquerque,’” Lloyd went on, “’the rest of the city is over the hill.’” Lloyd looked back at Will and squeezed his hand. “You remember, no?”

  “Yes, Lloyd,” Will said and smiled. “I remember.”

  What he remembered was driving down the highway nearly twenty years ago and running into Lloyd Romero at a gas station. When he asked how far it was to the next town, Lloyd told him to get his ass out of here, that Guadalupe didn’t want people like him around. A couple of miles down the road, the engine in Will’s truck blew. He had sat on the side of the highway wondering what to do next until finally he walked back to Guadalupe. Eighteen years later, he was still in this village and had come to think he would never leave.

  “You know, Lloyd,” Will said, pulling his hand free and standing up, “you haven’t changed since that first day we met.”

  Lloyd laughed and put his hand on Will’s arm. “You’re okay, Will, you know. Come by my house later. We’ll drink a few beers.” He scraped his chair back and stood up, rattling off a string of Spanish Will didn’t understand. The men at the table laughed and then gathered up their cigarettes and hats. They threw some coins on the table, nodded good-bye to Will, and headed out the door.

  Will sat down at a table by the window. The sun had not yet risen above the mountains. He looked out on the highway and, beyond that, on most of the village of Guadalupe. The town sat in a small valley, the road rimming it on the west and the Sangre de Cristo mountains to the east. Houses and sheds and old corrals were scattered throughout, and fields of alfalfa were everywhere. The creek ran thick with juniper and cottonwoods through the center of the valley. Smaller ditches branched off it that fed water to the fields. Up close to the foothills, he could make out the flat ground of the baseball field, but the trees just beyond grew too tall for Will to see his house. The town was quiet. There was no breeze to stir up the dust, not much traffic on the highway.

  Will heard the kitchen door swing open, and when he looked over he saw Lisa. She was wearing blue jeans and a white blouse tied at the waist instead of tucked in. She began cleaning up the mess at the center table.

  “We’re closed,” she said.

  “Lisa,” Will said, “I didn’t know you’d be at the field. You should have driven over.”

  She straightened up, a dishrag in her hand. Will could see skin between her shirt and her jeans. “Shit you didn’t,” she said, pointing the dishrag at him. “I see you there every week. You think I don’t have better things to do than sit and smile at a bunch of borrachos with baseball mitts?” She glared at him and then bent over and wiped some more at the table.

  Will lit a cigarette. He thought it was good that everyone had left the café. He knew Lisa was not one to be quiet even in a crowd. “Come on,” he said. “Sit down. We’ll drink some coffee.”

  Lisa didn’t answer. She was throwing cups into a plastic container as if they were made of steel. She gave a final swipe at the table and kicked the chairs back in place. Then she straightened up and stared at Will. “Who needs it?” she said and turned and went back into the kitchen.

  Will smoked most of his cigarette before she came back out with a pot of coffee and two cups. She sat down across from him, filled both cups, and slid the pot off to the side.

  “I mean it, Will,” she said, leaning toward him. “It makes me crazy. All my life I watched my mother. Cooking and cleaning forever. Raising children by herself with my father always gone. And even when he was home, none of us wanted him there. So don’t even
think this is just a little thing.” She leaned back in her chair and picked up her cup, cradling it in her hands. She smiled. “If you do it again, Will, I’ll have Mundo shoot you.”

  Will had met Lisa in the middle of January, the past winter. He had asked her how it was that in a place so small he had never seen her before, and she told him it was just his bad luck. She and her family had lived in Guadalupe forever, and she was not one to hide herself. She told him that she had one brother and that his given name was Joaquin, but everyone in Guadalupe called him Mundo. Will knew who her brother was, and he also knew that he was someone to stay away from. He had heard the stories about Mundo. About the fights that would always start for no reason. The time Mundo had shot at someone for talking wrong and the bullet had ricocheted off a car bumper and struck Mundo in the shoulder. The untold number of truck accidents from which Mundo would crawl away, abandoning the vehicle, and walk back home to Guadalupe. Will had run into him a few times in the years he’d lived here. Even before Will began seeing Lisa, he had always felt a meanness in the air about her brother and also a madness that made Will feel that anything could happen and whatever it was would be unpleasant. He didn’t say anything to Lisa when she told him who her brother was. He couldn’t see Mundo in her face or in the way she moved. But he had come to find something in her that she shared with her brother, a part that looked at the world one way, and if it was askew, it didn’t matter.

  It was snowing the morning Will met Lisa, and the roads had not been plowed. He was driving and came across her as she walked home from the café. No one was out but the two of them. He slowed the truck alongside her and rolled down the window to ask if she wanted a ride. Without looking at him, she said, “I know you.”