by Alisa Valdes
After a triumphant sparring match, Logan removed his mesh mask, and strode over to me, beaming and glowing with sweat.
“What’re you doing here, babe?” he asked me, out of breath, his cheeks glowing pink from healthy exertion. He gave me a humid hug and a peck on the cheek. One amazing thing about Logan was that he never smelled bad, even after working out. He always carried the scent of freshly squeezed limes. I told him dance practice had been canceled, and that I was wasting a little time before heading up to Santa Fe for a couple nights with my dad and then back Sunday for my big dance competition.
“Wish I could come see you compete,” he said, “but I’m heading up to Colorado with my dad. There’s whitetail coming down near Buena Vista, tons of ‘em. Late December’s the best for archery. We’re trying out some crossbows for a big company that wants to endorse me.”
“Stay warm,” I said, not knowing what else one might say under such circumstances. Don’t get too much blood on you? I put the thought of hunting deer with a crossbow out of my mind, because it sickened me just a little. Okay, a lot. My mom’s dad and brothers all hunted, as did my own dad, and mom once told me it was a woman’s duty to ignore certain things men did for the sake of getting along with them. I was doing my best, but did wonder if I’d ever get the hang of ignoring what Kelsey called Logan’s barbarism. I stared at his beautiful face, and wondered how such a good-looking person could have it in him to kill anything.
Logan’s coach whistled for him to come back to practice, so he gave me another quick peck, on the lips this time, and trotted over to his team. I quickly grew bored, and decided to head out. I walked back across campus, admiring the glistening snow again, and loaded myself into the Land Rover for the hour-long drive to Santa Fe. Kelsey had promised to come up to go to the movies with me tomorrow, meaning I wasn’t going to be bored out of my mind babysitting my twin toddler half-sisters while my dad and his new wife went out on the town, as was often the case on my visits. My dad and his wife seemed to think of me as their resident weekend babysitter.
As I left Coronado Prep’s student parking lot I called my mother on the Bluetooth, to let her know I was fine and on my way to my dad’s a little early. She answered in her usual stressed-out voice full of sighing and deep inhales, telling me she was in the middle of an important meeting with the city council and couldn’t talk long.
“Are you taking Buddy to your dad’s?” she asked.
“No. He’s still limping a little from the crash.”
My mom sighed, then complained. “So I have to feed and walk him all weekend.”
“Not the whole weekend. I have my dance competition Sunday, so I’m coming home early,” I said.
“Regardless. He’s your dog. When we got him you agreed to take care of him. I expect you to live up to your responsibilities.”
“Mom, he’s injured. I don’t want to stress him out. Just this once.”
“Fine.” She sounded annoyed. “Call me when you get to your dad’s.”
“Okay.”
“Take the Interstate. I don’t want you on those back roads again. We saw how that ended up. And focus on the road this time.”
“Fine.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up. I felt an incredible sense of isolation, anger and sadness wash over me - a new mix of feelings that left me wanting to punch something, or someone. I didn’t like feeling this way; it didn’t make me proud - but I couldn’t deny it, either. I had a dark, untapped well of anger inside. Hurling a glass at a wall would have felt wonderful just then. I wasn’t generally quick to anger. My emotions seemed to be out of whack completely, ever since the crash. Maybe I had damaged my brain somehow. I didn’t know anymore.
I did know I wouldn’t be following her orders. It was a passive resistance, but one that was all my own. I steered the car West on Academy Boulevard for a few blocks, past the upscale mini-malls and the empty, frozen golf course, fully intending to go to the South on Interstate rather than North. I would take Highway 14 again, in spite of her - or to spite her. Maybe a little of both.
When I got to San Mateo boulevard, Kelsey called me to remind me to call Demetrio to apologize.
“You’re so obsessed with him, maybe you should call him.” I told her. “You want me to set you up or something?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” she said.
“Yes it is.”
“Whatever. Call him. Why are you so snippy?”
“Sorry. My mom pissed me off, blaming me for the accident.”
“I’m sorry. Just ignore her. With parents, that’s often the best approach. Do not make eye contact. Do not feed them. Etcetera.”
I laughed, grateful once more for my best friend’s ability to set the world right whenever it went askew. We made arrangements for her to visit me at my dad’s tomorrow morning, and hung up.
Not quite sure why, I did as she asked, punching the phone number from the scrap paper into my phone’s keypad at a red light near the McDonald’s. The call connected through the Bluetooth, and the ringing noise came through the car’s speakers. My pulse sped up in anticipation of the awkward call, but not for long. Soon, the telltale tones signaling a disconnected number bleated out of the speakers, and I pressed the call off. Dead end.
As I pulled into the Southbound lanes of Interstate 25, a sort of denial came over me, where I knew I was defying my mother’s instructions, but where I didn’t want to think too hard about it. I just kept driving, and told myself it was okay to prefer the East side of the Sandias, where the mountains sloped gradually, and where rainfall allowed for the growth of Ponderosa Pines and Aspens at the higher elevations. The East side, the Albuquerque side, was dry and rugged, more cliffs and cacti than forests. The evergreens of the East side lifted my mood. I cranked my music up, and rolled on, toward the towering, flat-topped purple Sandia Mountain range, until the city of Albuquerque had slipped behind me, and I found myself driving though the mountain cleavage known as Tijeras Canyon. Yep. I was heading once more toward Highway 14. The place where I’d crashed and thought, only one week ago, that I would die. I wasn’t going to let a freak accident - or my mother - make me afraid of this drive. If you weren’t vigilant in life, it could scare you into paralysis. I thought of my mother, so bitter and lonely, scared away from love because of her bad marriage to my dad. That was sort of an accident, wasn’t it? I would not be like her. I wasn’t going to be scared away from taking chances.
I suppose I knew at some level that I intended to drive past the address on the slip of paper, too, just out of curiosity. Kelsey had made me feel guilty enough about how we’d treated Demetrio that I at least wanted to see for myself just what kind of home he came from. Perhaps I’d misjudged him. Somewhere near the town of Cañoncito, driving in the shadow of the mountain but beneath an azure sky, I remembered something Yazzie had said earlier, seemingly off-the-cuff, earlier that day. If you think a thing matters, then it does. Maybe it held true for people, too. If we thought a person mattered, they did; if we thought they didn’t matter, they didn’t. Demetrio had thought I mattered enough to call for help on my behalf, and to find me at the coffee shop to give me my necklace. The least I could do was think he mattered enough for a proper thank-you.
I pulled the Land Rover off the highway, onto the gravel at the San Pedro Overlook, with its cliff-top view of the barren mesa scrubland below, covered in white snow, and I typed the address into the navigation unit on the dashboard of the car. That way, the car could be responsible for me going there, not me. It was starting to get dark, and you just never knew what you might find out here in the middle of nowhere.
I drove on along the twisting narrow road, until I got to the town of Golden, at which point the navigation unit took me off Highway 14 and onto a series of even narrower, and more twisty dirt roads. Soon, I was directed just off a road called Luz Del Cielo, onto a stark and narrow lane where the houses were few and far between. The soothing woman’s voice of the navigation system announced: “You h
ave arrived at your destination.”
♦
It was only now that I realized I didn’t have anything to give him - in the event that I actually found him, that was. I’d meant to maybe have a card, some way to thank him for helping me. Maybe a handshake would have to do, I thought. That’s when I remembered that I had a gift card for $50 worth of free downloads on iTunes, somewhere at the bottom of my backpack. It was a late birthday present from Missy, my dad’s new wife, and even though I liked iTunes as much as the next girl, I didn’t particularly like the home-wrecking usurper that was Missy, so I’d essentially ignored it rather than deal with my emotions. I burrowed through my pack until I found it, buried at the bottom and covered with lint and cracker crumbs. I wiped it off, then slipped it into my jacket pocket.
I exited the Land Rover and set out on booted foot across the frozen, snowy ground, heading for the small, decrepit-looking house. The ground was uneven, so I moved slowly and cautiously. The house was typical for this area, a slightly saggy, nondescript square of pink-beige stucco, capped with a simple pitched tar-shingle roof. As I approached the house, I saw that it bore the same number on the mailbox as the paper in my hand. This was the place. My pulse accelerated again, and I tried to calm down, telling myself - ridiculously, really - that of course it wasn’t dangerous to go looking for a known gang member in the middle of nowhere, alone, at a house with a broken fence and a rusting hull of an old, tireless car in the side yard. The home looked abandoned, except for the wisp of smoke rising from the chimney, and the glow of lights behind the yellowed curtains hung in the smudgy windows.
I approached as quietly as I could, smoothed my hair down a little, and pushed the doorbell with my gloved finger. The button was crusted and sticky, and didn’t seem to have been getting much use, so I removed my glove and knocked hard on the door as well, just in case. I replaced the glove and then stood there, shivering with cold and nerves, for what seemed like five minutes. Though I heard a small dog bark inside, and rustling noises, no one came. I was just about to turn around to leave when the door finally opened a crack, with a stiff, horrible scraping noise. My heart thundered as I peered into the musty darkness within the house.
I hoped to see Demetrio, of course, but I was met instead by a sharp and narrow chin that jutted out from an ancient face, the way chins do when the teeth are missing from the mouth and the lips have caved into the visage. The body upon which the countenance sat was skinny and short, and I was forced to look down to see it. A large nose curled downward toward the chin, both of them housed in a narrow brown face crisscrossed with valleys of wrinkles. Two tiny eyes, filmy with cataracts and the size of hard gray pebbles, perched far back in sunken sockets. A smell of mothballs, stale smoke, hot cooking oil, corn tortillas and insecticide wafted out, making me cough.
“Hello!” I called, trying to sound cheerful in spite of my feeling like a complete and utter fool.
“What do you want?” came the reply, in a hoarse old voice with a trace of a Spanish accent to it. “You selling something, I don’t want none of it.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but I’ve come here hoping to find a young man named Demetrio Vigil. Google said he lived at this address.”
“Who did?”
“Google.”
The door opened a tiny bit more now, and the face stuck itself into the space between us, scowling with a hand cupped to his ear.
“You what, now?” came the gruff, wispy old voice.
I repeated myself, and he opened the door a bit more again, and this time stepped halfway out, sizing me up with a look of guarded mistrust.
“Demetrio Vigil, eh?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ve only recently met him.”
“No, no,” he shook his head and jabbing his own thumb into his chest. “I’m Demetrio Vigil. I don’t know you.”
His jaws worked convulsively, as jaws will do in the absence of teeth. I could see now that he wore dark jeans, cowboy boots, and a red flannel shirt with a bolo tie.
“Oh,” I said. “Then I’m terribly sorry. I’ve made a mistake. I met a young man from Golden last week, who said his name was Demetrio Vigil, and you’re the only such person listed in the white pages.”
“Los white pages,” he repeated, running an antique hand across his scruff of white beard.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Ni modo, hita.”
“Sorry?”
“Are you Hispanic?” he asked me. “You look Hispanic.”
“Does it matter?” I asked, defensively, annoyed that older people always seemed to ask me this while people my own age didn’t care.
He shrugged. “If people think it matters, it matters,” he said. “It didn’t used to matter, now it matters.”
My spine tingled with the words, so similar to the ones Yazzie had spoken earlier. Another coincidence. Or was it? Maybe I’d baited him into saying it. Maybe I was losing my mind. I wondered if perhaps I’d hit my head in the crash, because the world seemed slightly tilted now, emotionally. I’d never been anxious before, but now anxiety seemed to define me.
“I’m Hispanic, yes,” I told him, shaking myself out of the chill. “But I don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t think it matters.”
“This other Demetrio,” he said, his eyes narrowing a tiny bit. “When did you meet him?”
“Just last week. I saw him this morning, too. I wanted to thank him for helping me. I had a crash. It’s a long story. I’ve made a mistake, sir, so sorry. I’ll just go now.”
“No, no,” he said, touching my arm. As he got closer, I smelled alcohol on his breath, and pungent, unpleasant body odor. “I have a grandson who carries my name. Demetrio.”
I gasped a little, and my eyes widened. “Oh? Does he live here?”
The old man shook his head solemnly. “No. Not no more, jovencita. Ya se fue.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Se fue. Se fue,” he repeated, gesticulating angrily, as though saying words I didn’t know, over and over, would somehow make me understand them. “He ain’t here no more. He’s gone. I don’t want no trouble. Don’t be asking me no more questions.”
“Oh, okay. Well, do you know where I might be able to find him?”
The old man frowned, and shook his head solemnly. He took a raw, homemade-looking cigarette out of his pocket and lit it with a match ignited - to my horror - on the zipper of his jeans. He took a long drag, then jabbed the cigarette into the air to punctuate his thoughts.
“My late wife, la loca esa que Dios la bendiga, with all her rosaries and todo eso, she thought good of everybody, she’d tell you exactly where he is. She’d know. But me? I don’t know nothing. I don’t tell you nothing, I don’t tell the police nothing, I don’t tell no one nothing, that’s how I am, I don’t tell nothing because I don’t know nothing. You understand?”
I nodded, realizing now that he probably did know where Demetrio was, but thought he was protecting him from something by refraining from sharing the information with me. I thought of mafia movies, for some reason, and the idea of loyalty to the family. I wondered if this old man were also a gang member.
“Okay,” I said, realizing this was going nowhere. I took the iTunes card out of my pocket, and ripped a little piece off the edge of the photocopy of the folk tale Yazzie gave me earlier. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pen, would you?”
“What for?” He eyed me mistrustfully again.
“I just want to give you my phone number, in case your grandson shows up after I leave.”
“He ain’t showing up no more,” he said wistfully, blowing smoke at me. “But I take your number for me, if I ever get lonely, you come see me.”
I heard him laughing uncleanly as he disappeared back into the house and shut the door. I stood stupidly for a moment, wondering if he were coming back. Just as I was about to leave, however, he returned, with a dull, thick pencil, the kind a child might use in the early years of school. I could hear c
anned laughter coming from a television inside the house. My mom had told me about how huge numbers of people in New Mexico were illiterate, and I wondered if this was one of them. I’d never known any illiterate adults.
I scribbled my cell number on the scrap of paper, along with a note thanking Demetrio for all his help, wrapped it around the gift card, and handed them to the old man.
“Please give this to him, if you see him,” I said.
“I won’t see him,” he said. “But I think taking this is the only way I’m going to get you to go away so I can get back to watching my stories.”
I stood in shock at his rudeness, and watched his smile spread slowly across his face.
“Ay, hita, that’s the problem with you fancy people, you don’t got no humor.” He reached out and squeezed my arm before examining the sky with his milky eyes. “The weather lady, she said more snow coming. Be careful. They’re no good, these roads up here.”
“I realize that,” I said with a shudder, but decided against going into details about my crash with a crazy, drunk old man who clearly enjoyed playing mind games with me. I turned to walk back to the Land Rover.
“Thank you, sir,” I said over my shoulder. “Take care.”
The old man did not return my goodbye before slamming his door shut.
♦
I hurried back to the Land Rover, disappointed and trembling with cold. The sun was low behind the mountains now, and darkness would set in soon. I realized then that I’d allowed myself to become a little hopeful about seeing Demetrio again, and it disturbed me because the hope felt the way it does when you like a guy. Like like him, like that. After talking to Kelsey the attraction I’d felt for Demetrio had surfaced. I was generally pretty good at controlling my emotions, but not now. Now I felt a bubbling in my gut, butterflies, at the thought of seeing him again. It was subtle, of course. This desire hadn’t been conscious, and I’d never betray Logan in any way. Not consciously. Not in real life.