“They have lobos here, you know, in the Rio Grande Zoo,” the Kid said when he’d finished howling. “They had four pups in the spring. You want to go there Sunday to see them?”
“To the zoo? On a Sunday?” Zoos reminded me of my childhood and were not among my favorite places.
“Why not?” he said.
We stayed outside a little longer and watched the storm build. It appeared from where we sat to be moving slowly, a formation of rain marching from high country to low, from Rio Arriba County to Otero, from the Sangre de Cristos to the Soledads, from I-25 to I-10. The lightning came first and fingered the Sandias, stabs of light, white, gold, violet bolts hitting the mountain peaks in an electric dance. In a good summer storm—and this was one—the bolts connect in the atmosphere with horizontal flashes. One powerful surge circled the sky. Once the thunder kicked in, it made car speakers seem irrelevant, puny, monaural. The thunder pounded, the rain came fast and hard. The ground doesn’t absorb rain in this part of the world; it repels it. In fifteen minutes Civic Plaza would be ankle deep in water, the diversion channels built to control flash flooding would be full and churning and some drunk would likely fall in. The rain crossed Tramway, marched down Wyoming. When it hit Montgomery we went inside, closed the windows and got into bed. The cruising cars rolled up their windows or went home, the thunder and lightning headed south, but the rain lingered. The Kid went right to sleep—he always does—and there was nothing to listen to but the sound of much-needed rain. It felt like a night when bad dreams might not get through the rain, when I wouldn’t be reaching for guns in the nightstand or fighting off nightmares of killers like I had been all summer. I went to sleep too.
******
The Kid and I don’t get out together often. We don’t have a social life and a circle of like-minded friends. Usually when we’re together—and that had been every night lately—it’s dinner at my place, then bed. On the nights the Kid worked late playing the accordion, it was just bed. As I’m used to seeing him up close in my living room, deck or bedroom, I forget what he looks like from a distance to the rest of the world. He’s tall, long-legged, skinny as a street dog, with thick black curls. El greñas, the mophead, they say where he comes from. In the winter he fades but in summer his skin has a warm glow and his hair becomes electric. He was holding it in place with a red José Cuervo bandana that he’d folded into a cholo roll. As we walked through the zoo a whole lot of women turned to watch him go. It was enough to make me wonder what I looked like. Had the Kid changed, I asked myself, or did he have some magnetism I’d never noticed before? There was something quick and determined in his walk, the way he held his head, some quality of alertness that attracted attention.
Even without staring women I’ve never been crazy about zoos. They remind me of grammar school with no recess, marriage with no possibility of divorce, a life sentence in a padded cage. I don’t like being on the inside looking out or the outside looking in. I didn’t much like childhood either. Zoos are tough when it’s 70 degrees, worse when it’s 102, but that’s exactly what it happened to be when the Kid and I got there Sunday on a vapor lock of a day, a day when your car had to sit and let the gas fumes settle for a half-hour before it would even think about starting up again. The heat made me want to shear the fur from the llamas, remove the polar bears from their chlorinated pool and get them to an arctic floe, go home and crank up the air conditioner.
The Kid led me through a latticework passageway that the sun had burned into a maze of patterned illusion, past the booths selling Kodak, popcorn and pink cotton candy that looked like fiberglass insulation with sugar, on to the place where the lobos lived. We stood on a rise and watched them through a window in their fence. From a nearby cage some South American condors, black vultures with a long wingspan, humped their wings and watched us watching them. The lobos had a large enclosure, bounded by a high coyote fence and shaded by cottonwoods. They were native New Mexicans until they were eliminated from this state. The heat didn’t bother them. They were shedding their fur in large clumps and they paced the enclosure relentlessly, wearing vegetation to dust. They looked like medium-sized dogs, with white markings around their faces and dogs’ long noses, but they didn’t act doglike; there was something uncompromisingly wild in their pacing and their yellow eyes.
“Mira,” the Kid said. “E1 lobato.”
He pointed toward a mound in the center of the pen, where a pup tugged at an adult caregiver. In a wolf pack only the alpha pair breeds, I knew, but all the wolves participate in raising the young. Three lobos were pacing, the adult and pup stood on the mound, more were resting at the back of the pen in the shade of the cottonwoods, but I couldn’t tell how many. They had a way of slipping in and out of vision even when they were standing still.
“You are lucky,” the Kid said. “People don’t get to see the niños very much.”
“You’ve been here before?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I like to watch the lobos.” Apparently he didn’t mind revisiting childhood, but maybe he hadn’t had one.
A sign beside the pen told the sad history of the lobo, a widespread and efficient predator in the Southwest for 20,000 years, wiped out in only decades by our federal government. Once New Mexico became a ranching state that was the end of the lobo. By the 1950s they’d been shot, dynamited, poisoned into oblivion. The last known New Mexican survivor was trapped and killed in 1965. The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, requiring the government to undo the harm it had done. The lobo was listed in 1976 and in 1982 a recovery plan was approved, but by then the only lobos left were in old Mexico. A few were trapped and brought back here to start a captive breeding program, and now there were a total of thirty known lobos in existence, making them one of the rarest mammals in the world. It would be foolhardy to keep such a limited population in one place, so when pups were old enough to take from their mother, they were transported to other zoos.
I recalled something the sign didn’t say. A few years ago a shipment of pups had been stolen en route from the Rio Grande Zoo to Texas. Now when lobo pups traveled they were escorted by armed guards.
“Do you remember when the pups were stolen?” I asked the Kid.
“I remember.” he said.
“Did they ever find out who did it?”
“No. It was somebody in a truck wearing a motorcycle jacket with a black vizór over the face like—how you say it, Darth Vader?—and a gun.”
“It was a hunting rifle.”
“They were not the only ones stolen. More pups were taken in Arizona. Did you know that?”
“No. Who do you think did it?”
“Who knows, Chiquita?” the Kid shrugged. “People in this country are crazy.”
“They’re not in Mexico?”
“They’re crazy there, too, but people have more here and they can make more trouble.”
“Maybe it was a hunter. The kind of guy who would raise pups to adulthood, set them free and charge his friends $5,000 to come over and shoot them.”
“It could be a rancher,” the Kid said. “They kill lobos.”
“Or someone, maybe, into breeding exotic pets.”
“Or one of your environmental people who wanted to free them. If that happened, it’s better they take them to Mexico. Lobos are safer there.”
“Why?” I asked. “They kill animals in Mexico, too, don’t they?”
“Not where the lobos live. That’s where the Norteños are and everybody else is afraid to go.”
“Who are they?”
“Narcotraficantes.”
“Drug dealers don’t kill wolves?”
The Kid shook his head. “No. The Norteños are simpatico with lobos; they are outlaws, too.”
A little boy about eight years old wearing mirrored sunglasses, holding a cone of cotton candy and looking more like somebody’s plump and pampered darling than an outlaw, walked up to the adjacent window, poked a sticky finger through and pointed it at the wolves.
“Bang, bang,” he said, “you’re dead.”
Enjoy more of Judith Van Gieson’s mysteries as ebooks:
North of the Border: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#1)
Raptor: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#2)
The Other Side of Death: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#3)
The Wolf Path: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#4)
The Lies That Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#5)
Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#6)
Hotshots: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#7)
Ditch Rider: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#8)
The Stolen Blue: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#1)
Vanishing Point: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#2)
Confidence Woman: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#3)
Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#4)
The Shadow of Venus: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#5)
The Other Side of Death Page 21