If we had returned an hour later, when it was completely dark, or if I hadn’t been so spooked, we would have died. Even so, it took me a while to see what had been done.
A line ran from a small stone cemented to the floor about where the front bumper would be. It ran straight up, through an eye-hook screwed into one of the joists, and then over to a small, curved black package that pointed down toward where the windshield of the car would stop. Another Claymore. You drive in. The bumper hits the line and triggers the mine. It explodes and sends a shower of shrapnel through the windshield. Finis.
I backed out of the garage and locked it, then headed for the house. It wasn’t likely that two devices had been set, but I didn’t take any chances. I checked each room, the refrigerator, the furnace, the crawl space, everything. It took over an hour. When I was done, I checked the Jaguar. Everything but the garage was clear. I waved April in. She was angry at the wait until I told her what was in the garage.
“How are they finding us?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe they followed you here the first time. Maybe they followed us back from Los Angeles. Corvin has resources from his agency contacts. He could either use them or rent talent. Or do the job himself.”
“And if it’s Roy?”
“Roy probably has a good idea where I live from the old days. He knows Walker is in Phoenix. He didn’t know we were going to the Philippines, but he might have figured that out. The only thing is, I can’t see him putting together the attack on Luzon. Not on such short notice.”
“And Sissy?”
“Sissy is a question mark. Maybe we’ll learn something tomorrow.”
We spent the night there. April was nervous. She asked if she could sleep with me. I told her sure. She came to bed wearing Montezuma and stayed on her own side until we fell asleep. When we woke, we were together in the middle of the bed, but that was just an accident.
It was light enough in the morning to tackle the garage. I carried a ladder out and disarmed the Claymore, then carried it up the mountain and disposed of it. The explosion reflected my mood.
April had done the laundry while I took care of that business. When I returned we were repacked and ready to go. I looked at what she had done and added a few things. An AR15, the civilian version of the M16, but modified for full automatic fire, and a .45 automatic. She said nothing when I bagged them and carried them out to the car. We stopped at a pay phone in Bernalillo and made reservations at the La Fonda in Santa Fe, then drove on up.
The room wasn’t ready when we arrived, just under an hour later, so we drove out to the high school and looked through old yearbooks until I found Sissy’s picture with the class of ‘fifty-nine. Juan Cisneros.
He had lettered in track. He hadn’t participated in any clubs or other sports. His ambition had been to drive a corvette and make a million. Like eight out of ten of the boys on the page, he’d worn his hair in a DA. His friends had voted him most likely to marry a movie star. His expression in the senior picture was friendly, but there was a dissatisfied quality to it. That had intensified in the ten years before I met him in Saigon.
I copied out the names of the other members of the track team and we left. The La Fonda was ready for us when we returned. Perhaps because of its age, the rooms there are smaller, more like the rooms in a private house. Everything in them feels antique. They have no balconies. There is no swimming pool. The adobe walls in the older parts of the building are plastered and a foot and a half thick. You get the feeling that your great-grandfather might have slept in the same bed. On the same mattress.
Three of the boys on the track team with Juan Cisneros were listed in the phone book. I gave each of them the same story. We were in ’Nam together in ‘sixty-nine. He told me to look him up if I ever got to Santa Fe. Did they know where he was?
They all told me, as gently as possible and with much hesitation, about his death on his last tour. Something about a helicopter. In one case he was a gunner, but the other two said he was just catching a ride. They all agreed that his death had been heroic. They all told me I should be proud of what he had done, his courage in signing up for all those tours. They had been civilians, of course.
I told them all that I was sorry to hear he hadn’t made it back. I said I wanted to talk to his parents, to tell them how he had been in Vietnam.
They understood that, and they all thought his parents would appreciate hearing from me. But they had moved. No one knew where they were living now.
I got his address when he had been in high school. They all gave the same address. I asked when they had seen him last. No one had seen him after Christmas of ‘sixty-six, when he was home on leave before his first tour. One of them asked if I had talked to Jack Tafoya. “Tafoya? No. Who is he?”
“Jack was Juan’s best friend in school,” he said. “He has his own insurance company now. If anyone knows where the family went, it’ll be Jack.”
I thanked him and hung up, then found Tafoya’s name in the phone book. I made an appointment with him for later that afternoon.
April and I had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant downstairs before walking over to the Gallisteo Street office. Tafoya was about three inches shorter than I, with ten more years on him, and graying temples to prove it. He waved us to a couple of chairs and asked what he could do for us. I gave him the same speech I’d given the others, except that I now knew Cisneros hadn’t made it back.
He developed a sorrowful look when I mentioned Sissy’s name. “The best friend I’ll ever have,” he said. “We did everything together. Chased the girls, got drunk the first time, everything. I even met my wife through him.” He shook his head sadly. “It about killed me when I heard he was dead. I was drunk for a week, man!” He tried to laugh, but it didn’t work.
“How did you hear?”
“His mom called me. She was crying. An officer drove up from Albuquerque just to tell her. She appreciated that. It was nice of the Army to send an officer up. He stayed with her until her neighbor, Mrs. Martinez, came over, and then she called Tony. Juan’s dad. And then she called me. She knew how much I loved him.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Christmas. Just before his first tour. He never came home after that. All those tours, and he never thought about himself. He was a real patriot.”
“Who was Mrs. Martinez?”
“She lived across the street. She grew up with Mrs. Cisneros, I think. They were like sisters. That’s why his mom called her when the officer told her to call someone.”
“Maybe she knows where they moved?”
He shook his head. “I asked her when I found the house empty. She said they just packed up and moved out. That was about two months after Juan was killed.”
“I’d really like to talk to them,” I said. “Can you think of anyone else who might know where they went?”
“No way. If there was anybody, I would have found them. He was close, you know? It really hurt when the family moved out like that. They should have left word. It wasn’t right.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. I motioned to April and we got up to leave. I thanked him for talking to me. He dismissed it and shook my hand. His eyes were moist and he was reaching for a handkerchief as we walked out. On the way back to the hotel, April asked what I thought.
“Two months,” I said, “is about enough time to recover from a leg wound and make it hack to the states.”
“But you don’t think he knew?”
“Tafoya? No. Maybe they were best friends in school, but Cisneros seems to have dropped everybody after he got involved with Roy.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he was ashamed. Or maybe he just grew apart from them. Maybe the war came between them. How the hell should I know?”
She was quiet for a few steps, then suddenly reached over and patted my chest, pressing the monkey under my shirt.
“What’s that about?”
“Just checking,” she said. “Y
ou still have it.”
“If I don’t have it, you will.”
We took a car out to the old address. It was a poor neighborhood but not a bad one. We knocked at the house across the street. It took a long time for the door to open. Mrs. Martinez was a short, bent woman with a head of thick hair just beginning to gray. She looked to be in her early seventies. I introduced myself and began the same story I’d told the others. She started shaking her head before I finished.
“No comprendo. Yo no hablo lngles,” she said.
I started over in halting Spanish.
She shook her head again. “I already told the other man. I don’t know nothing about them,” she said.
“You speak English?”
“I don’t speak nothing. I already told the other man.” She closed the door in our faces.
Back in the car, I sat staring out the windshield. “She knows where they are,” April said.
I nodded.
“Can we make her talk?”
“I don’t want to. She’s an old woman.”
“Then it’s a dead end?” April asked.
“Maybe I’ll think of something tonight. But we aren’t the only ones looking for him. Somebody else thinks he’s alive.”
We had dinner at a restaurant I liked on Rodeo and returned to the hotel early. April tried to talk about how we would find Sissy, but I kept losing my train of thought. Eventually, she gave up and went to bed. I joined her after midnight. The next morning I woke with an idea, a long shot.
After breakfast, we drove out to the cemetery. The headstone said Juan Cisneros, December 25, 1941–July 17, 1971, Staff Sergeant, USA. I hadn’t known he was born on Christmas Day. The grave was not kept up. Of course not. It was empty.
The next stop was the parish. I talked to the priest. His predecessor, Father Steibner, had been there in ‘seventy-one. He was living at a retirement home in Pennsylvania. I got the name of the place and made a long distance call from the hotel.
Steibner remembered the Cisneros family well. He had officiated at the memorial services for Juan. When I asked about Sissy’s parents, he said that they had not told him where they were going. They hadn’t even said goodbye. He still seemed hurt by the memory of that old snub. But he did remember one thing. Mrs. Cisneros had come from a little town up north. Tierra Amarilla. So had her friend, Mrs. Martinez. I was smiling when I hung up. “What is it?”
“The family was from Tierra Amarilla,” I told her.
“I’ve heard that name! Where?”
“In El Paso. While we were tracing those properties, trying to find Roy. One of the companies had holdings up north. In Rio Arriba County. And the county seat is a little town called—”
“Tierra Amarilla!”
I smiled. “Feel like a drive?”
“Yes!”
We checked out and bought a couple of hamburgers for the trip. We took Highway 84 out of town and then followed it north, through Tesuque and then down into the Rio Grande valley to Española. The highway falls steadily from an altitude of seven thousand feet at Santa Fe down to the Rio Grande crossing at Española, then rises as it traces the east side of the Rio Chama to Abiquiu. It crosses the river there and bears west, toward the Continental Divide.
Northern New Mexico is dry, but it is not a desert. This high, the land is rolling hills between mountain ranges. It is covered with scrub oak, juniper, piñon, and small pine trees, separated by grasses. Cattle range freely over the land. The people are of Spanish, Anglo, or Indian descent, and many of the families have been in place for hundreds of years. Thousands, for the Indians.
At Abiquiu Reservoir, Highway 84 turns more northerly and parallels the continental divide, thirty to fifty miles east of it. It cuts through a corner of Carson National Forest and then edges into a vaguely triangular chunk of private land bounded by the national forest on the east and the Jicarilla Apache Reservation on the west. The altitude there climbs steadily, averaging between seven and eight thousand feet, but it frequently pokes above ten. The canyon walls that constrain this part of the highway are frequently barren. Yellow and red cliffs break through the hills on either side of the road.
Between them, however, the canyon floor is covered with taller trees: poplar, oak, and cottonwoods. The soil is rich, and enough water reaches it to nourish the gardens and pastures of the people who live there.
Tierra Amarilla means “Yellow Earth.” The village lies more or less in the center of the triangle. It was settled in the early eighteen hundreds. Today, the population of the whole county is just a little over thirty thousand. It might be possible to find two citizens who didn’t know each other, but it would be a sure bet that they would know at least one person in common. And if their families had been around awhile, they would be related.
We took a cabin at a small lodge that catered to the fishermen who came for the nearby Heron and El Vado reservoirs, or the Chama River and the small streams that feed it. The room was small and primitive. A bed and dresser filled it. There was no television, and I had a feeling that few of the guests spent much time in it. We followed suit. It was only three-thirty, so we asked directions to the courthouse.
The woman who brought us the land records we asked for was in her early fifties. She was friendly and eager to help until she heard the name we were looking for: the Quintana Holding Company. Then she told us that there was no such land holder in the county. I told her to bring the books over anyway. She did it reluctantly, then left the room.
We found the parcel immediately. Four thousand acres. I wrote down the section numbers of the land, and we continued the trace. Quintana Holding had sold out in 1979 to the Lower Chama Investment Company. Two years later, the parcel had been sold to a man named Felix Romero.
We had just found that transaction when the woman returned with a deputy sheriff. He was a brown bear of a man with a broad face and a thick black mustache.
“Can I help you folks?” he asked.
“We’re doing just fine,” I told him. “The lady is taking good care of us.”
He hooked his thumbs into his pistol belt and stepped closer to me. “She says you’re being rude, causing trouble.”
The woman wouldn’t meet our eyes.
“I’m sorry she got that impression. We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
“Maybe you better leave now.”
“We aren’t finished here.”
He shifted his pistol belt self-consciously. “What are you doing?”
I decided there wasn’t much point in hiding anything. It would be hard to make inquiries without attracting attention in any case. “I’m looking for the family of a friend of mine. Some people named Cisneros. They had a son named Juan.”
“Never heard of them,” he said. “Come on. It’s closing time anyway.”
“The sign says the office closes at five,” I pointed out. “It isn’t four-thirty yet.”
“It’s an old sign,” he said. “They’re closing now.”
I put down the book. “Okay. We’ll come back tomorrow. What time do you open?” I asked the woman.
She looked at the deputy.
“Closed tomorrow,” he said.
“A holiday?”
“Think of it that way. What do you want with the Cisneros family?”
“I knew their son. In Vietnam. I just want to talk to them about him.”
“I’ll ask around,” he said. “If there is a family named Cisneros around here, I’ll ask if they want to talk to you. They say no, you’re out of here. Understand me?”
“I understand,” I told him.
“Then go. Now.” He followed us out and stood watching as we drove away.
I found a gas station and filled the tank. I asked the attendant where I could get a USGS map of the county.
“Fishing?” he asked. “A fishing map would be better. I’ve got some inside. Shows all the trout streams and lakes. You want one?”
I told him no, I was thinking about doing some hiking.
He told me to try the park office out at Vado Lake.
It was a twenty-minute drive. The office was closed when we got there. The deputy sheriff’s car picked us up on the way back and followed us to the motel. I turned into the parking lot and he pulled in behind me. His lights began flashing.
I got out and met him between the cars. “I’m beginning to feel unwelcome,” I said.
“Let’s see your license and registration.”
I shrugged and walked back to April’s side of the car. I leaned in and opened the glove compartment and fished around until I found the registration. When I came out, he had his pistol pointed at me.
“Keep your hands where I can see them!” he barked.
“You can see them now, Sheriff.” Two fishermen were standing in the door of the next cabin, watching us. “Everyone can see them.”
He looked around. “You shouldn’t go into a glove compartment like that without telling me. I don’t know what you got in there.”
“My registration,” I held it out to him. I kept my hands in sight and well away from my sides. “That’s where everyone keeps their car registration. You asked for it.”
He ignored that. “And your driver’s license.”
“It’s in my wallet. You want me to get it out?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.”
I took my wallet out carefully and held it toward him.
“Take the license out, please.”
I did so carefully. I almost gave him the new license, the one in the name of Roger Bacon. But I caught myself in time and passed over the Porter license. He carried it and my registration back to his patrol car and got on the radio. A few minutes later, he holstered the pistol and brought the papers back to me.
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