The entry of the house was a long hallway with plastered white walls, a basket of magazines, among them Wellspring and those free newspapers you could find at Whole Foods. The light switch didn’t work. There were pictures on the walls of Buddha, Jesus, and several of those Hindu gods with all the arms. To the left was a room with a big wooden table and six chairs, three of them knocked over. On top of the table were brochures advertising spiritual retreats. The large kiva-style fireplace was full of ashes. A stack of yoga mats and cushions sat on the floor.
The kitchen reminded Juniper of those books of unexplained mysteries she’d loved when she was a kid. Stories of ships abandoned at sea, tables set, a meal in progress, and no one could explain what became of the missing crew or why. She wondered if there had been something similar going on here, because draped over one chair was a down jacket, and on the plates at the table there were the remains of a breakfast. A round loaf of bread looked chewed on one end. If the dog hadn’t gotten to it, mice had. And where were the people?
“Hello!” she called. “Anybody home?”
Out the sliding glass door behind the house was a canvas-covered dome-like structure, and when Chico saw it, he said, “Sweat lodge. This is one of those New Age places. You know what I mean, like a spa, but for meditations and retreats. Probably they went broke, put it up for sale, and some realtor showing the property left the door open.”
Juniper said, “I’d believe that if the indoors wasn’t in such a mess. Who puts their house on the market and leaves dirty dishes on the table? Maybe somebody homeless came in here and camped. Let’s go check the bedrooms.”
Chico stopped her in the kitchen. “I’ll check them. You go back outside to find the horse.”
“Shouldn’t we stay together?”
“You’ll be fine.”
He reminded her of her dad right then, being all protective. If Daddy Joe knew where she was and what she was doing, he’d blow a gasket. Back outside, she hoped the property was abandoned, not some kind of mass-suicide scene with dead bodies that had Kool-Aid stains on their mouths. What if some madman sneaked up on her with a knife? Or strangled her with a piece of piano wire? Listen to yourself, she said. Where in the heck is someone going to get a piano wire out here? Stop watching The Sopranos. Her heart hammered. She made the kiss-kiss noise she used to make in California when she wanted the horses to come to the fence. No more whinnying at all. The dog stuck by her, happy-go-lucky, her curly tail in the air, as if now that Juniper was here she’d be getting regular meals again. “Don’t worry,” she told her as they walked toward two hoop greenhouses that hadn’t been visible from the road. “I won’t leave you here.”
The hoop houses were amazingly tall. Even Chico would feel small in here. There was a heating system, lines for drip irrigation, and a worktable covered with envelopes, vermiculite, and spilled seeds. She’d made sure to call “Hello?” before she opened the door, but once she was inside, she had to stop and look around. There were so many plants that it couldn’t just be some hippie family’s greenhouse. This was a professional setup, designed to grow vegetables through the winter. Maybe at one time they’d sold crops at farmer’s markets, or to restaurants, but not now. Everything—winter root vegetables, forced carrots, tomato plants—was dead, blackened from freezing and starved for water. The best temperature-regulation and watering systems weren’t any good if they were turned off. Someone had shut things off and then left, in a hurry. She half-expected to find a marijuana crop, but if there had been one, they’d taken it with them. She exited the hoop house and went to the barn. A torn sack of spilled feed lay on its side, probably the dog’s attempt to feed herself, but there were green bales of hay stacked high, and horse tack. Just no horse.
Chico made sure to warn her when he came walking her way, “It’s only me, don’t panic. The bedrooms were empty, but they’re set up like hotel rooms. Maybe this place was a B and B.”
Then Juniper shushed him. “Listen,” she said. “I’m positive I heard a horse. If we follow the sound, maybe we can find him.”
“It might be easier to just follow the tracks,” Chico said, and pointed. The corral gate was open, and right there in the snow were hoof prints leading back toward Pueblo Pottery. Two sets, two horses. They set off following, the brown dog by their side. Eventually they caught sight of the horses ahead of them. A woman was riding one, ponying the other horse alongside.
“Hello?” Juniper called.
The woman rider stopped. The bay she was riding turned around as she faced them. The chestnut horse whinnied. “Hey,” she said. “Who are you and what are you doing with Laurel’s dog?”
“Saving her from starvation,” Juniper said. “What are you doing with that horse?”
“Juniper,” Chico said. “Calm down.” He smiled at the woman on horseback. “Are you Louella Cata?” Chico said.
“What if I am?”
“We’re the UNM students who made the appointment to interview you. We arrived a little early and you weren’t home, so we took a walk. We saw the front door open and thought maybe someone needed help, so we climbed over the fence.”
Meanwhile, Juniper had caught up to the horses and when she saw the ribs showing on the chestnut horse, she got mad all over again. “There’s hay in the barn,” she said. “Why isn’t anyone feeding these animals?”
The woman on horseback waited for Juniper to finish being angry. “Yes, I’m Louella. The horse I’m riding is mine. The chestnut belongs to freaks that live at the Farm. A bunch of selfish assholes, if you ask me, because it looks like they cleared out and left the animals behind to die. It doesn’t make any sense. Laurel wouldn’t have left her dog behind for anything. I’ve spent half the morning moving the surviving hens to my barn. A couple of them won’t make it, but the others stand a good chance.”
“Who’s Laurel?” Chico asked.
Louella Cata looked down at him. “Well, she used to live there. A week or so ago her daughter got real sick and my brother gave her a ride into town. I don’t get it, because Laurel took great care of the animals. She’d feed my horse whenever I had to be away. She loves Brown Horse as much as she does her daughter. After three nights of listening to that mare whinny all night and Curly howling, I thought I better go check on things, you know? When I saw how it was, I decided I’d put the horse in my barn until Laurel or Seth or one of the freaks return. Listen, I don’t know about you two, but I’m freezing my tits off out here. Does one of you want to ride the mare back to my barn? Becoming a human Popsicle wasn’t on my day planner. “
Though it had been a couple of years since Juniper had ridden, she climbed right up onto the mare’s bare back. She took the halter rope from Louella, quickly fashioned it into a rein, and then she reached down to scratch the mare’s neck. “Hey, little brown horse. You’re all right,” she soothed. “I’ll buck those hay bales over here as soon as we get you settled. You’ll be all right.”
She didn’t even think of how insane all this might look to Chico. The feeling of a warm animal beneath her and the tart smell of horse sweat had transported her back in time to riding with Glory through the oak groves in California. Until then, she hadn’t understood what it meant to love a horse, to actually consider its needs more than its existing for your entertainment.
“You guys go on ahead,” Chico said. “I’ll catch up.”
Louella and Juniper cued the horses into a trot, and Juniper felt her face break into a smile. The feel of the warm body beneath her was familiar and a painful reminder that she hadn’t ridden a horse since moving to New Mexico. At some point she was going to have to find a place to ride.
Once they got to the barn, the women quickly dismounted and took the horses into the barn. Louella flaked off a large portion of hay and divided it between the horses. When she reached a scoop into a bag of grain, Juniper said, “Careful. If she eats too much too quickly, she could colic or founder.”
Louella looked at her sideways. “You some kind of horse wh
isperer like Laurel?”
“Not at all. When I lived in California, my mom had horses. I don’t know a lot else, but I do know how to feed a horse, and what will make them sick.”
“Well, isn’t that a relief,” Louella said.
Up close, Juniper could see that the woman wasn’t all that much older than she was. “Why?”
“Because most people pretend they know everything about horses, and when you put them on one, they break their neck. Come on, let’s go inside where it’s warmer. I’ll make some coffee. I hope your boyfriend doesn’t freeze to death.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
Louella laughed. “Are you sure about that? Looks like he wants to be.”
Juniper dismissed the comment without a word. What was the point? This Louella hadn’t seen Chico in the classroom. Not for the first time did she imagine him in the Little House on the Prairie days; he would have been the male equivalent of a strict schoolmaster, his lunch consisting of a cold potato and a dipperful of river water. What did you do when you were born two hundred years too late? You taught at a university.
They walked through the back door of the mobile home, and once inside, Juniper felt like Alice through the looking glass. Though the outside of the home looked totally ghetto and in need of repair, the inside was surprisingly orderly, with worn furniture and threadbare rugs. Every surface was immaculate. One side of the mobile home was a pottery studio, with shelves of equipment and clay stains on the floorboards. On another set of shelves were probably fifty micaceous pots of varying size. The other side of the trailer was the living area. In the center of the room was a kitchen with ancient stovepipe running up the wall and outward, linoleum so old it had no recognizable pattern anymore, and a rickety old metal table that looked like it was once used for holding merchandise at a craft fair. Around it stood four mismatched chairs with vinyl upholstery, most of them ripped and leaking stuffing, but Juniper would bet on it they were clean enough to eat off.
“It’s not the Ritz,” Louella said, and went to the sink to fill an aluminum kettle. “Sit down wherever you like.”
Near the front door was the head of a massive elk, its triumphant rack two feet across, with marble-glass eyes that were stilled for all time. The only thing that saved it from being the saddest thing Juniper had seen in quite some time was the turquoise-and-silver squash-blossom necklace draped over one antler and the pink cowboy hat on the other.
Chico came indoors, knocking the snow from his boots before stepping in. He gestured to the front door. “Juniper, give me your keys and I’ll bring the equipment in.”
“See what I mean?” Louella said, and laughed.
Juniper’s face burned as she turned to Louella and gave her a frown that said back off. “I’ll help you, Chico. It’s stuff for your interview, Louella. Be right back.”
When they opened the front door, there sat the dog, tail wagging, as if to say, Did you forget about me? “Can I let the dog in?” Juniper asked.
Louella laughed. “Sure. I’ll get her a bowl of water. When Laurel comes over to throw pots, Curly always comes along. Go on, Curly, you know where the dog bed is.”
The dog barked once at the elk head, then trotted across the room for a stack of old horse blankets. “She always does that,” Louella said, getting cups down from the cupboard. “Curly lets you know what’s on her mind.”
Chico insisted on carrying in the photography equipment and the recording stuff. Juniper grabbed both their backpacks. At the last minute, she decided to bring in the bag of food she’d brought. After the strange introduction, it was a friendly gesture. Maybe it would patch up any leftover weirdness. She nestled the bubble-wrapped pot in her right arm and waited for Chico to set down the equipment before opening the door for her. No way was she going to drop that pot. “Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Look at all this food,” Louella said. “Thank you for bringing it to me. I like this brand of almonds. Not too much salt on them. I have to watch my salt and my sugar both.”
Juniper thought, Oh well. I can go shopping later. They ate at the table, Louella filling their cups with coffee every time they drank more than an inch. After they were finished, Chico cleared the plates and Juniper set up her equipment. She tested the microphone, shot some test footage, played it back to make sure everything was working. After a million little adjustments, she pulled out a conventional notebook and two mechanical pencils, because Dr. Carey had told them never to rely on technical equipment. Besides, there’ll always be something the tape missed, some word or phrase you meant to write down later, but you’ll forget it. Daddy Joe had told her that crime scenes were like that, too, that the smallest thing could sometimes make the difference between a case that got solved and one that went cold. For a moment, she thought of Casey, the cops and FBI and jillions of people who’d looked but failed to find one good lead.
“So what do you want to talk to me about?” Louella said.
Though she’d been preparing for this interview all quarter, Juniper was sick-to-her-stomach nervous. She’d gone over it in her head hundreds of times and had her interview questions memorized so she wouldn’t sound like an idiot reading a script. Of course, she’d planned to be armed with the cultural center’s information, too, but so far this day had turned out entirely wrong. She was afraid that her voice would come out strangled or that she’d develop instantaneous laryngitis. She cleared her throat. “Thank you for agreeing to allow me, I mean us, to interview you. I’ve spent the last quarter studying Pueblo pottery, and meeting you will bring it all to life in a way textbooks can’t.”
Louella looked at her, waiting.
“Okay,” Juniper said. “I guess my first question is about your mentors, or your inspirations? Where did they come from? What made you want to be a potter?”
Louella smiled at her. “Why are you so nervous?”
“I’m not nervous.”
Louella laughed. “Yeah, you are. I have a suggestion. Why don’t you throw those prepared questions out the window and let’s just talk some woman talk, all right?”
Juniper didn’t dare look at Chico. He was either sitting there racking up the points to subtract from her project, or he was arming himself with reasons why Dr. Carey should refuse her admission to any more grad-level classes. “Sure,” she said, though she was anything but. “That sounds good.”
Louella laughed again. “What a day, huh? Chickens, horses, and now you two. Those idiots on the Farm, now there’s a story. I could tell you a lot about them that ought to be in a police file, but I know you want to talk to me, so maybe later.” She got up and walked to the other side of the room, picked through the finished pots until she found the one she was looking for, and then came back and set it on the table, a lopsided bowl that had obvious flaws. “This is the pot,” she said.
“Which pot is that?”
“My first. The one my grandma taught me to make. I used to go stay with her when my mom couldn’t be there. I was always jumping on the backs of my grandpa’s draft horses, riding them without bridles, and man, that used to be so much fun. Then I fell off and broke my ankle, and imagine a wild kid not even being able to go outside. You ever break a bone?”
“Yes.” Juniper thought of her own broken ankle, four years ago, when she’d tried to kill herself. The bones had to be surgically pinned, and there were casts for weeks and months of physical therapy. If Aunt Halle hadn’t sat with her most days, she would have lost her mind. Of course, Caddy had gone missing, too, and looking for her it wasn’t just the knowledge that it was Juniper’s fault that destroyed her, it was missing the dog that’d become her best friend. She tamped the memory down as far as she could, but it was like opening a jar of marshmallow spread in high-altitude Santa Fe, increasing in volume faster than you could contain it.
“So one day Grandma is at the end of her rope with me, and she hands me some red clay, and says, ‘Here, make something other than noise for a change
.’ She showed me how to coil, stack, and pinch. Pretty soon I didn’t want to do anything but the clay. So that spring, Grandma said if I wanted to do things right, I had to learn it from the ground up. By that I mean she showed me where to dig out the clay, and how to process it. It’s a spiritual act, you know. We thank Mother Earth for letting us have some of her precious self.”
“I’ve watched Felipe Ortega’s videos,” Juniper said. “He says digging up the clay is kind of a sexual act, but holy.”
Louella laughed. “You’re pretty brave for a white girl, aren’t you? Nobody outside the tribe ever wants to talk about that.”
“I don’t mind,” Juniper said. “I think it makes sense if you cherish the earth.”
Louella placed the pot in Juniper’s hands. “What do you feel when you’re holding it?”
“Well, it feels cool, I guess, and round. Not smooth but not rough, either. It feels important to me.”
“Why?”
“Because you told me it’s your first pot.” In the background she heard Chico cross his legs, and the dog scratching. “What’s it feel like to you?”
Louella took it back. “I don’t feel any of those things. I feel my grandma’s hands on mine, and remember how her house smelled like masa all the time, because she made her own tortillas. And I hear the TV. She kept it on morning to bedtime. ‘It’s nice to have company,’ she always said, like TV was the one thing keeping her from being lonely.”
“But if you were there, too,” Juniper said, “how could she be lonely?”
Louella cocked her head sideways, the same way she had looked at Juniper in the barn with the horses. “Man, here you are in college and you don’t get how she was lonesome? Stop thinking with your brain, girl. What’s your heart tell you?”
Finding Casey: A Novel Page 23