Curse the Names

by Robert Arellano

  What if I looked up the owner in county files? Resources sucked online, and even if I made the special trip to Mora it might not lead to anything worthwhile. There were thousands of absentee owners in these valleys.

  Sometimes it was because the grandparents willed the house to kids or grandkids they never saw in Albuquerque, and Albuquerque changed people. They might say, Oh, I’ve got a beautiful patch of land up in Mora County I’m going to retire on and farm someday. But someday never came because the SUVs, the Cottonwood Mall, and the fast food on Central Avenue was the way they really wanted to live.

  Sometimes it was because the titular owner was someone up the valley in a McMansion who wanted a pristine view of an old adobe without any junk cars on it and without any redneck renter shooting guns and running four-wheelers.

  Sometimes the entitled were distant relatives of the former owners, heirs who barely knew they owned a place in the middle of nowhere—sometimes they didn’t know they owned a place at all.

  I got on LexisNexis and the Lab’s username and password autofilled. Straight to WorldCat, search entries containing Johnson and Mora and New Mexico, and limit results by publication date before 1900. I got a hit with full text online: Mora marriages, births & deaths: Book no. 1, February 4, 1856, to December 1875; authors: Padilla y Baca, Luis Gilberto.

  I searched the text for Johnson, and there he was on Aplanado Road: J. Johnson. In 1860 he married Maria Montoya. She gave birth to children listed in the registry as male, 1861; fem., 1865; fem., 1872.

  The deaths of the mother, the son, and the two girls were all recorded as 1874. That would have made the son only thirteen years old.

  There was no death recorded for Mr. Johnson, at least not by 1875. I searched again to see if I could find a Book no. 2, but I got No documents found matching your request.

  Book no. 1 was the only volume available online.

  Could a thirteen-year-old have done something like that? Maybe the contemporaneous deaths had been caused by disease.

  OCLC FirstSearch. Votre session est terminée.

  The sky was lightening in the east. Shivering under the effect of the Mudslides and the bourbon, I lay down on the living room couch.

  My nightmare did not begin right away. It came on gradually like a virus. Maybe if I looked closely I would have seen that milder symptoms had already set in. Or maybe if I had never gone back to the house, the nightmare would never have started in the first place.

  It happened more than a hundred winters ago, when the snow got above the roofline. The month of January 1874, the average temperature 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The high 21 degrees, and the lowest recorded -23. The snow down in the valley had measured 84 inches. It’s hard to imagine what the snowdrifts of Ledoux had made of a baseline seven feet of snow.

  You come to this valley to farm. The land is good and cheap for a homesteader, and if the Spanish people didn’t understand you, all the better that they should leave you alone. Idle associations and casual conversations lead to blasphemous speech, sinful ruminations, and evil actions. It is good when you arrive with your family in the spring and good to work hard and be outside all day in the summer. Just gathering wood goes on hours after dark on moonlit nights, and you come home so exhausted there is barely energy for the meal and Bible study before the onset of a sleep like death. Then, with the first light of dawn and the rooster’s strangled cry, back to work.

  Autumn brings the harvest and opportunities to instill with prayer and instruction the knowledge that rewards are not from our labor alone but for the glory of God. The more His favor was upon us, the more we needed to pray. Sometimes for hours in the dark, and if one is caught dropping off, you have a willow switch with which to administer penance to the flesh that God might spare their souls.

  Winter is all that you did not foresee. The days are too cold to work the earth. There is only so much wood to split. And the nights are long, and even with prayer petitioning blessings in the spring there are still many idle hours to fill between sleep. The Spanish families fill them with card games, marble tournaments, and telling legends from their wicked folklore—idolatries, blasphemies. You will not let your children fall into such corruption. If you had been able to look at it clearly—if your brother in town had been able to see you—you might have realized that which torments you is not the soul and the spirit, but a variant of cabin fever. Instead, you enforce a code of silence among family in the winter. You do not believe in idle talk. The only book you keep in the house is the Bible. Deciding that speech is the inception of vice, you forbid speaking altogether.

  You impose a strict code of silence among your wife and three children—a son, a young daughter, and a baby girl. You had better eat right in the Johnson house, because even a rumble of the stomach adds up against you on the way to a beating. The house becomes a tomb. No sniffling, hiccupping, or sighing. You catch a cold, you go out to the barn to cough.

  The wind ducts in from the chimney, and it howls down to the floor in the corner where the boy sleeps with the dusty blanket his mother knit for him from churro wool. He looks up at the mica pane that serves as the family’s only window—covered with snow.

  It is one room, no portal. Although the isolation makes days terrible, the nights are still worse: fourteen-hour stretches of pitch darkness beside tepid coals. You forbid burning wood at night when the mother isn’t cooking and everyone has their cobijas. The boy can hear his brother and sister breathing, but they cannot steal glances to console each other. These fleeting glimpses of humanity are all that keep him from slipping into the trap of forgetting that he is not your slave, that the world is not his father’s dominion. This is what you want them to believe. This is how you control them.

  You stand up and look at the son. You have to milk the heifer, and you communicate as much by picking up the bucket and shovel before going to the door and putting on your high boots. Her udders are swollen, and soon this will make her sick.

  You have to clear the path of snow out the front door. The last snow blocked the slab of micaceous rock that served as the one window. The weight of it caused the roof to collapse in places.

  It is like digging out fresh. You use the milk bucket to carry loads of snow to the end of the path where the small barn has a low portal in front of the door.

  The son takes turns shoveling.

  58 steps to the barn door. The howling wind.

  You look at your son, thirteen years old, so he knows what has to be done. Your look says: You take care of the family.

  The first to go was the mother, a shrewd choice on the son’s part as she was the only one who might have overcome him. It took a lot of swings as he got used to wielding the heavy ax-head at this angle, when before he brought it over his head to split logs on a charred stump. Her hands were hacked to pieces by the time he delivered the crushing blow to her cranium. Just like splitting wood. And then he went to his sister who waited in the door. Only the baby succeeded in letting out a scream.

  You get back and find it. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The baby rests in the mother’s arms, both of them bloody. Your daughter is there, her fingers strewn on the floor. The stumps that remain on the wrists are black and swollen. One overhead blow had cleaved her skull. You look up at your son, look up at the viga with the knot. Counting from the door, the boy had hanged himself from the third one.

  You sit in the room with them. Nobody farting or sniffing. Nobody’s lungs drawing a breath and nobody’s blood coursing through veins. It is finally quiet. You think of the last thing you said. You take care of the family.

  Monday, July 8

  I stood at the bathroom mirror, my hand throbbing. Kitty called groggily from bed: “Drop Oppie at Salon des Chiens.” It was the first thing she had said to me since we got back from camping, and I understood what she was talking about. Oppie’s fur was still full of burrs and goat heads from the camping trip.

  I unloaded my golf bag while Oppie jumped playfully in and out of the tru
nk. “Down, boy!” When I lay the towel out on the passenger seat of the Spider, he hopped in and curled up like a little gentleman, careful to keep his claws away from the leather back.

  I took off Oppie’s house collar, the nice phrase Kitty used to describe the shocker, and put on the travel collar. When I would open the garage door, Oppie would sometimes bolt after a jogger, but with a little jolt from the invisible fence system, he’d pull up short of the sidewalk.

  It was a bright summer morning on the Hill. I pulled the Spider out of the garage and made the drive to Trinity. The bank clock flashed 7:45 / 80°. Jesus!

  I put the top down on the Spider with the switch. Hundreds of people were already downtown driving their big cars and walking on wide, clean sidewalks. “Wait here,” I told Oppie, ducking into Starbucks.

  The same faces as always greeted me from behind the counter: hard-working people from the valley who got up in the dark and took buses or drove from fifty miles away to prepare the food for the people who live on the Hill.

  I crowded up to the counter amongst those they served, well-dressed people with healthy-looking skin and serene smiles that hinted at substantial assets. We were taking advantage of the time before work to get our morning sweets, little treats that would make the day go by. This was the demographic that had weathered the recent recession without need for concern, most of them millionaires who can’t and aren’t allowed to explain what it is they work on, who don’t want to know my name, just good morning, nice day, see you tomorrow, for the next thirty-five years or so.

  While the sun beat in through the windows of the café on a scorching summer morning, I had a brief flash of satisfaction. These are your subjects: the sources of your profiles, puff pieces you pen for Surge, but also subjects of your rule, because don’t you, in ways that matter to many of them more than who is head of the DOE or even president, determine their destinies, frame their fates, and tell their stories in the place that most counts—this insular community of scientists?

  I walked back out to the Spider and gave Oppie the cheese from my breakfast panini. He gulped it down before knowing what hit him.

  At eight o’clock I pulled into the parking lot at Le Salon des Chiens and put Oppie on the leash. In the reception area I overheard a woman tell the girl at the counter, “Harvey said, No kids, my career is our kid, so he got me this dog.” There was no irony in the woman’s voice, a Prozac vacancy to her eyes, and no apologies for the little blue coat on her pet.

  Kitty, too, was becoming like this. I would hear her on the phone with friends: You’re never going to believe what Oppie did today.

  I handed the leash to the grooming assistant. “All right, Op. Your mom will be here by ten.”

  When I got to the Lab, the closest parking space I could find was about a half-mile from my office. I would get in my ten to twenty minutes of aerobic exercise today. I took my briefcase and my skinny latte.

  In the foyer I put my hand on the ID screen and the door opened to the offices of Surge. It had excessive security for an employee magazine that published nothing other than fluff, but my building had once housed a classified division, and palm-reader screens were SOP for the Lab.

  I said good morning to Golz and asked how her long weekend was.

  “Not as long as yours,” she accurately observed. “MQR for you.”

  Golz is sexy in a skinny, spinsterish (even though she is supposedly married) sort of way. I remember coming in sweating for the interview because I hadn’t known it was going to be such a hike from the parking lot. The way Golz studied me across the conference table, large enough to seat eight without elbows touching, I could tell I was a finalist. I had tasted salt on my lips, along with the word salary, but I would not say it. That time would come. The office was air-conditioned, but not the kind that throws you into shivers. It was just Golz in her red wool, Hillary-wannabe skirt suit and me in my coat and tie around a big conference table. What was Golz wondering about me? I knew: can this guy deliver decent copy, keep his nose clean, preserve reasonably chemical-free blood, and not fall from grace with the added factor of classification, clearance, and keeping an eye out for breaches that was known organizationally as SAP?

  Security Awareness Protocol, they call it, and everyone who works for the Lab has to follow SAP. Like everyone else on the Hill, I have gone through the training, and like everyone I have been subjected to clandestine checkups at stores, the supermarket, restaurants—these are little tests SAP gives you, from a stylish dinner party where you realize a guest is baiting everyone to ask him about his division, to a clever rendering of the clueless fellow at the home-improvement store asking, Excuse me, do you happen to know what kind of parts I need to make a detonator?

  If I was always a little scornful of the goons at SAP, it’s not because I thought their jobs weren’t important. It was their lack of style that bugged me: a weak broth of McCarthyist paranoia and patriotic posturing. Why couldn’t they get a real writer on their staff to add some flair to their reports and memoranda? The answer was self-evident: a talented writer would have to lobotomize himself just to get in the door. It was all about FOUO and an aesthetic they had probably ripped off from a Renaissance fair. Their logo was actually a purple dragon!

  I went into my office, logged on to my cleared computer, and checked my inbox. Besides writing profiles for the print version of Surge, I reworked SAP’s jumbled press releases, translating them into standard English for the Surge feed, and Golz had e-mailed me an MQR—mandatory quarterly reminder—for SAP’s online schedule of espionage-awareness classes:

  SAP Week at the Laboratory is geared to raise awareness or instruct employees on counterintelligence and counterterrorism with a series of talks or seminars that instruct employees on what to guard against when traveling abroad, and the basics of counterintelligence and how you can be targeted by people unless you are aware of the possibilities.And other classes on electronic spying and terrorism.

  What a train wreck! I loved the juxtaposition of that first run-on sentence with the last fragment, vagaries like talks or seminars, and that pearl of passive-voice construction: how you can be targeted by people.

  I couldn’t complain. The fact that national-security wonks can’t write kept me well fed. To make it tweetable, I turned the copy into haiku. I typed:

  Traveling abroad?

  Unless you learn how spies think,

  they could target you.

  Take a SAP Week class

  in online espionage

  or terrorism.

  Chuckling (always chuckling) privately (always privately), And for this you get 125k and bennies, I bounced the revised MQR brief back to Golz and asked her to declassify it so I could post it to the feed.

  Although I had my own login and password with complete publishing rights on the blog, Communications Protocol insisted on this precaution as a CYA, and I always sent even the most basic post to Golz for declassification.

  Golz was my favorite kind of editor: she who does not write. She never changes what you write, but she ultimately has to answer for what gets written.

  Within minutes Golz replied with a Declassify, and the post went out.

  Besides proofing the blog and keeping it readable, I wrote four or five short features a month on retired scientists’ hobbies and recreational interests for the glossy print edition of Surge. My copy workload added up to about 1,500 words a week. That left a lot of time between profiles for scenic drives and rounds of golf.

  Profile struck me as an apt word for these pieces, designed to show only one side of the subjects’ faces. Klein grows gigantic green chile in his backyard vegetable garden. Saporov catches a prize-winning trout at Abiquiu Lake.

  What they did at their jobs I couldn’t ask. “Get a feel for your subjects,” said Golz, “light features. Nothing classified.” If during Q&A I got too close to the bone of what one of my subjects was actually working on, I’d get the L.A. glaze and faraway eyes.

  A few of them might
admit to being physicists, but I wasn’t even allowed to ask specialty—e.g., theoretical or particle physics? That’s life in Los Alamos. That’s security awareness. That’s SAP. And Surge, with its slick production and trendy design, was just a vanity sheet to stroke the scientists’ egos.

  The print run was in the thousands, but we didn’t have to sell advertising. It didn’t matter whether anyone off the Hill read Surge. The intended audience wasn’t necessarily even other employees at the Lab. The real target was the subject of the profile himself.

  Golz and I never spoke openly about it, but we both knew my job and the role of Surge was to placate all of the pseudofamous geezers with a feature spread, if not a cover, before they were too old or too dead. If you write about them in their little rag in their artificial world on the Hill, maybe they won’t go around looking for attention in the real world of journalism, the world of conspiracy theorists, spies, and identity thieves.

  My subjects wanted to see their stories in print. I want people to know my name, they thought as much as anyone else with their talents, but I can’t talk to anybody outside my division about what I really do. Nobody can know what I’m really known for, so out of necessity I cultivate an odd hobby, a decoy accomplishment, a small masterwork of gardening, gadgetry, or gizmo collecting, in order to get a bit of print recognition in my lifetime.

  I put the finishing touches on a profile of a famous physicist, eighty-nine-year-old Barney Marcosi, and his interest in fly-fishing. We had spoken about his fly collection. The August issue was about to get put to bed, and I wrote three one-sentence captions for the photos Golz had chosen to accompany the profile.

  I jotted a few shorthand notes for the questions I would ask my 10:30 subject, and then I got on my computer and searched the collection at the Lab’s library for Mora, New Mexico. Nothing, but that wasn’t surprising. The Lab’s library is pure science, a “National Research” library on physics and aeronautics.