Wild Penance

by Sandi Ault

  The names the father had given me were in the stolen book. One of them was the tract by Padre Martínez, I remembered that. But for the life of me, I could not remember the other name. I tried to remember it as I sat there, staring at nothing, twisting at the ends of my hair with my finger, unable to think of anything else for the moment. Or perhaps not wanting to think of anything else, grateful for the distraction.

  Finally I got up and took my mug and the cloth towel to the sink and set them on the counter beside it. On the table was the paper towel I had taken off of the door. I held it up and read again the curious summons from Bennie. What did “Woman down” mean? I would have to find out tomorrow.

  8

  Bennie

  I woke the next morning with a plan. I was going to start over on my book, do it all again. And this time, make copies of everything.

  I brewed some coffee while I took a shower, then sat at my table and ate a bowl of cereal while I made a list of things to do that day before starting my night ride duty. I packed my backpack with items I would need. The first thing on my to-do list was to go see Bennie.

  The red dirt parking lot in front of the Golden Gecko was deeply rutted from the snowmelt. As I rode the dips, I jounced and jostled in my seat. A row of five pickups lined the front part of the building near the door. The pink and blue neon Open sign buzzed in the one small window, and the plain plastered face of the adobe building basked in the bright morning sunlight. The only other sign was a big carved wooden gecko mounted on a post by the road. It had once been painted all over with gold enamel, but the paint had peeled and flaked off in patches, making the place’s namesake look more like a spotted salamander.

  When I opened the car door, I felt the sting of clear, cold air on my face, and the bright sun hurt my eyes. I squinted and got out, narrowly missing a puddle of red clay and icy water. The smell of grilled chorizo, onions, and peppers wafted from the groaning grease fan on the roof. I walked toward the entry and heard the faint sound of a jukebox.

  When I pulled open the heavy door, the sound grew louder and I made out the harmonies of Los Lonely Boys serenading through the speakers. Inside, the Gecko was like a dark cave. I stopped to let my eyes adjust until I could see more than the neon beer signs over the bar. The aroma of warm tortillas and breakfast burritos mixed with the sour smell of last night’s stale beer in the closed room.

  On the left was the black, yawning mouth of the empty, unlit stage. In front of it, in disorderly rows, stood tiny tables with chairs upturned on them. Built in the late 1950s, the Golden Gecko was a famous nightclub in its heyday. Film crews maintained an almost constant presence in northern New Mexico then, unable to supply enough westerns to meet the seemingly insatiable demand. The Gecko, conveniently located on a two-lane blacktop near several scenic film locations, served as a watering hole and recreational outlet for the casts and crews and attracted brand-name celebrities as both entertainment and clientele. But in the sixties, the glamour of westerns began to wane, and with it, the Golden Gecko. Since then, the place had been alternately closed and opened for long periods of time, resurrecting and then dying in a variety of incarnations: a strip club, a dinner theater, even an exercise and dance studio. The Gecko was now open in a dual role: as a restaurant through the week and as a club featuring rock and country bands on the weekend.

  A group of men, mostly Anglos, were sitting at the tables in the right half of the room, talking loudly among themselves, guffawing over something one of them had said. They turned to look at me when I came in, and a little wave of sniggering and elbowing erupted as I felt their eyes scanning my figure. There is something about dark places that makes some men forget that they have daughters or sisters or mothers. Or manners.

  I walked across to the counter. I could feel grit under my boots from all the mud the breakfast crowd had tracked in. White diner plates stained orange from red chili shared the tables with wadded-up napkins and plastic soda cups. The men were now silent, all eyes on me. I nodded as I came close. One of them nodded back.

  There was no one behind the bar. I heard dishes clatter in the kitchen, so I stepped around the end of the counter and went on back. A man leaned over the grill, spritzing it with a spray bottle then swabbing it with a rag, sending up a hissing cloud of chlorine-scented steam each time the spray hit the hot metal plate. He turned and picked up a stack of dirty plates from the island counter in the center of the kitchen and headed across the room to the dishwasher.

  He hadn’t seen me, so I moved a step farther into the kitchen. When he turned around to get more dishes, he gave a start, stopping in his tracks, his eyes opening wide with surprise. “¡Ay, señorita!” In a thick Hispanic accent, he said, “I didn’t see you come in. You surprised me.”

  “Sorry. I was just looking for Bennie.”

  “Bennie went to the trailer in the back to get something.” He picked up the next stack of plates, turned away, and started rinsing and stacking them in the rack of the dishwasher.

  I stood for a moment wondering what to do next-wait here or go out front and sit with the sharks. The man stole a worried glance over his shoulder at me and seemed embarrassed when I returned the look. There was something unnerving about his surreptitious peeking.

  He was a large man with a barrel-shaped torso. He looked like he had done time in the ring: his nose was wide and flattened, and his lower lip was bisected by a badly healed scar. His forehead also bore a scar over one brow and to the side of one eye. He looked over his shoulder again, and when he saw that I was still there, he turned to address me directly, wiping his hands on his apron. “Señorita, what are you doing here?”

  “I told you. I need to talk to Bennie.”

  “You should wait out there.” He gave me a stern look as he pointed back through the doorway into the main room.

  As if to help me make up my mind, I heard chairs scraping on the floor and tables jostling as the crowd out front broke up and left. I turned and walked through the kitchen doorway back into the dark club. The jukebox was silent now, all the customers gone. I headed around the counter and was going toward a table to sit down when, from the kitchen, I heard the sound of a door opening and then slamming shut again.

  A small figure shuffled steadily along behind the bar and then around the counter. “Who’s that?” she called, holding her hand like a visor above her eyes, as if to shield them from the almost nonexistent light.

  “Hi, Bennie.”

  “Jamaica! Is that you?” She hurried to hug me. She was tiny, not five feet tall, yet strong and wiry. She felt like a child in my embrace.

  “Lord, kiddo, I’m so glad you came. I really need your help. My office is a mess; let’s talk out here. Do you want something to eat? Let me get you a breakfast burrito.” She started to go back behind the counter. “Did you meet Manny?”

  “No, I’m okay. I already had breakfast.”

  “Manny’s our new dishwasher.” She came back and pulled out the chair opposite me at the table. “I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t shown up, especially for this weekend. He just wandered in here last night, asking for me by name, didn’t seem to know exactly what he was looking for-I don’t think he’s too bright. But I told him about the big event this weekend and how bad I needed a dishwasher. I offered him a job, and he took it, right on the spot. He just started this morning. Sit down.” She waved a hand over the table. She yelled toward the kitchen, “Manny, we got dirty dishes out here.”

  I took my coat off, then my hat, ran my fingers through my flattened bangs, placed my stuff on a chair, and sat down in the one beside it.

  “I was just thinking about you the other day. It seems like it’s been forever since you came by. Then, this thing happened. Kiddo, I really need your help.”

  “What’s going on? What’s this ‘Woman down’ thing?”

  “I’m desperate. I really need you to do something for me. I need someone who is in good shape.”

  “In good shape?”

/>   “It’s for a good cause. It’s for the wildlife rehab center.”

  As we were talking, Manny shuffled out and started clearing the tables. He picked up several of the dishes in his hands and started back toward the kitchen.

  “Manny, honey, bring a tub,” Bennie said. “You can get them all in one trip that way.” She turned back to me. “Now, where was I?”

  “What’s for a good cause?”

  “Oh, right. We need to raise money. Fast. We’ve just had so many critters to take care of, our expenses have doubled over the past two years. We need to build on; we can’t keep working out of that tiny little building.”

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “We’re doing a fund-raiser. It’s all set, we’re ready to go, and then one of the girls that was part of it has sprained her ankle. I need you to take her place.”

  “Take her place at what? What does it entail?”

  Manny reappeared with a large gray plastic tub and a wet rag. He loaded all the dishes and plastic cups from one table into the tub, then washed the tabletop with the rag.

  “It’s a fashion show,” Bennie said. “We have a dozen girls, and we’re bringing in a great band, Ailsa Ten and the Decade-they’re from Colorado, one of the best bands in the Southwest. And we have the director of the Taos Community Theater choreographing the show.”

  “A fashion show? Me?”

  “I wouldn’t ask, kiddo, but I’m desperate. We were good to go until we lost one of our girls. We have to have someone take her place.”

  I gave a little snort. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to do that. Unless you let me model outdoor gear.”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” Bennie pursed her lips and dipped her chin. “It’s a lingerie fashion show.”

  “A what?”

  Having cleared the rest of the tables, Manny moved the tub to the counter and started washing the stainless steel countertop.

  “Look, nobody around here is going to pay good money to see girls wearing high fashion. This is New Mexico, for goodness’ sake! We know we’ll pack the house with a show that has good-looking women modeling lingerie. It’s a sure bet we’ll make a lot of money for the rehab center.”

  I put my hands on the table and started to get up. “Sorry, Bennie. I just got put on a team assignment with the Forest Service. I’m doing night rides, starting tonight.”

  “Are you working Saturday night?”

  I stood up and reached for my hat. “No. But I’m not the modeling kind. I don’t want to strut around in lingerie in front of a bunch of slobbering men. Sorry.”

  Bennie stood up, too. “Look, Jamaica, I’m desperate. Please? I’m not asking for me; it’s for the wildlife center.”

  I put my hat on, then lifted my coat. “I’ll make a donation. I left my bag in the car, but I’ll go get it and write you a check.”

  Bennie put a hand on my arm. “Look, kiddo, remember that time you had me come out and trap that family of skunks that got under your cabin so you wouldn’t have to kill them? I hauled those stinkers all the way to Tres Piedras to release them in that watershed area for you. Anyone else would have poisoned them or trapped and killed them.”

  I held my coat in midair. “I remember. And I’m grateful. I told you, I’ll make a donation.”

  Bennie still held her hand on my arm. “And I also helped you with that bear when Game and Fish was going to have it shot,” she said.

  I let out a sigh. Bennie had retired from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish two years ago. But in the time before that, she and I had worked closely to preserve wildlife habitat on BLM land. We had shared a handful of wildlife rescues-either injured animals or orphaned young. Our most daring endeavor was when we managed to trap a bear who had been shot in the leg and transport it in a cage in the back of a pickup truck to the wildlife rehabilitation center in Española. This was a clandestine endeavor, as the director of Game and Fish had declared the bear unsalvageable and ordered it shot. I was the one who persuaded Bennie to risk losing her job to help save the animal. Bennie now served at the wildlife center on the board of directors as well as working nearly full-time as a volunteer. Running the Golden Gecko was an investment for her, but her heart still belonged to wildlife.

  “You’ll only need to rehearse once, just a quick run-through on Saturday morning,” she said, knowing she had called in a debt I would have to pay.

  I gave a little grunt of surrender. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to prance around in a nightie in front of a crowd.”

  She winked. “I couldn’t believe it when you asked me to haul a bear down the highway from north of Taos all the way to Española in a pickup truck. That’s a hard thing to do without attracting attention, you know.”

  9

  Agua Azuela

  My next stop was Agua Azuela, a scattering of old adobes tucked into a crevice carved between two mountains by a bubbling stream, which the Hispanic residents referred to as the río. In the village center, an ancient-looking church, poor and sad, struggled out of the lower slope of the mountain. Farther up in the hills, newer homes built by Anglos perched on lofty precipices with panoramic views. Their owners did not have to concern themselves with protection from Comanche and Apache raiders, as the original inhabitants of Agua Azuela did. The early settlers here needed to be within quick running distance of the well-fortified churchyard wall in case of attack, and so this was the sole basis for the original design of the community. There were no streets other than the one-lane dirt road that ran through the narrow canyon right up to the church. Rutted dirt drives fed off the main road back into the folds of terrain where the houses nestled. An old wooden bridge spanning the rio rumbled whenever one of the residents drove over it. An abundance of large gray-white cottonwoods and red willows lined the blue-green water for which Agua Azuela was named.

  I aimed my Jeep toward the home of a friend of mine. Regan Daniels lived right on the rio in a beautiful adobe with a wall of south-facing windows. I left my Jeep at the bottom of her drive and walked up the hill to a corral-style gate. Her silver Toyota was in the open-front garage there. Neatly stacked cords of firewood stretched from the corral to the house, and an old nag stood catatonic in a patch of brush beyond a fence. I walked up a path to the kitchen entrance, grabbed the leather loop on the bottom of the old iron bell that hung beside the door, and gave it a hard shake. The sharp clanging pierced the quiet day. I shuffled my feet, looked in through the sidelight at the elegant terra-cotta tile on Regan’s cocina floor, the intricate carving on her handmade cabinets. No answer. I walked around the house and looked farther up the path toward the barn. Its doors were closed. Still higher up, beyond the barn, at the casita Regan rented to bed-and-breakfast guests, I saw a mud-covered green Land Rover with California plates. I knocked loudly on the French doors at the back of Regan’s house. No answer still. I could see the cool, dark living room within. No one in sight.

  Knowing Regan was a little hard of hearing, I wanted to open a door and call to her, but somehow I knew that would not be well received. I sensed that she hoped no one would notice this infirmity. In her youth, Regan had been a dancer and even performed her way around the world doing USO tours. She had done a smattering of bit parts on television and ended up a long career as a dancer in summer stock musicals. She had retired here because she was born and raised in northern New Mexico, and she appeared to have plenty of money, from what I could see. Her beautiful home was by far the largest and most distinctive in the old part of Agua Azuela, and perhaps even among most of the newer homes in the surrounding mountains. She had told me that her house overlooking the rio was once a morada, where the Penitentes held rituals in the old days.

  This was, in fact, how I came to meet Regan. Her land abutted BLM acreage, and I had occasion to patrol this area once last fall when I discovered a nearly abandoned old Penitente cemetery, or campo santo, as they are called-which means “field of saints.” The graves were scattered along a fla
t shelf of open ground about a hundred yards below the canyon rim, just above Regan’s land. The view of this unique landform was blocked from below by boulders and stands of scrub piñon and juniper.

  When I first happened onto the cemetery, I recognized Penitente features in the headstones and other markers. And one of the graves had an exceptional marker: a massive, weathered wooden cross, crude and simple, its base piled with great stones. The upright stand of the cross had split; shards had broken away in such a way that it was partly hollowed out just above the base. Above the transverse beam, a relief of glyphs had been carved in the surface of the wood, but these had eroded so much that they were impossible to make out. A stipe-such as that on which the crucified’s feet would either rest or to which they would be nailed-was affixed to the cross; however, it had gone askew and was positioned almost vertically. In the center of this cross, a broken crucifix, the large ceremonial kind-perhaps ten inches in height, ornately cast in metal and with trefoil ends-had been screwed to the cross, the two pieces at angles to emphasize the break between them. On a flat stone in front of the rood, a small bunch of wildflowers, recently placed and barely wilted, marked the shrine.

  I took a small notebook from my pocket and made a quick sketch and a few written comments, jotting a note to come back and do a more detailed drawing later. I was studying the shrine, thinking how lucky I was to have found it, when I heard a deep, husky voice calling, “Hey! You there!” I stood up and looked around. Coming up the slope from below was a tall, lean, white-haired woman, obviously quite agile. She was wearing a long oatmeal cotton sweater. Her khaki pants were tucked haphazardly into big, sloppy work boots caked with dried mud, which looked as if they had been hastily pulled on and not tied. The tongues of these monsters flapped against her pant legs when she walked. I waited, and as she came near, I could see her tan, deeply lined face and dark eyes, which were looking at me the way a raven might regard a hawk who had just invaded her nest.