The Importance of a Piece of Paper

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  In the middle of the night, he was startled awake by the click of a pistol at his right temple. “Get dressed, you sonofabitch, you’re going for a ride!” Pancho’s voice crackled in the dark. He whacked Jaylen with the end of the pistol handle. “To teach you the rules around here.”

  Disoriented, Jaylen couldn’t do anything but get dressed and leave with Pancho in his old truck. They drove out to the west mesa and the three dormant volcanoes, where Pancho had him park at the base. The volcanoes were shallow and looked almost as if a meteorite had created them. They had plenty of moonlight to see by as they climbed up to the rim and went down into the crater. They hadn’t said a word between them the whole time, and not until they were standing face-to-face in the pit did Pancho say to him, “Here’s where I usually target practice. Never thought I’d come here like this. Say your prayers, Jaylen. I’m only paying you back for what you did to cause Zapata’s death.” There were spent rifle cartridges around bullet-riddled rusty cans and old ashen campfires with logs set around them.

  “You’re not serious are you? You’re going to shoot—” One second after getting Pancho’s attention, Jaylen leaped at him and they wrestled on the ground until the gun fired several shots that ripped sharply in the night, ricocheting off the volcanic rocks in the crater. Finally, Pancho rose and stared down at Jaylen, who lay on his back with his hands on his stomach, the shirt bloody around his navel. Pancho walked over to a nearby outcropping and sat down.

  “Was it worth it, Pancho? You’re going to prison for the rest of your life.”

  “Gravedigger, I don’t want you telling me anything.”

  “I love her and she loves me.”

  “She’ll only love the memory of you.”

  “She won’t forgive you, Pancho.”

  “I’m not asking for forgiveness. And besides, it wasn’t about you and her. I had already decided, the night before, that I was going to let it go—what you and her had between you, it was going to be okay with me. Funny how it all works out sometimes. Just when things were going to be fine, because you didn’t want to get your shoes dirty, your nice suit rained on, you leave the gate open!”

  Jaylen saw Pancho’s eyes in the moonlight. They were moist. Pancho wiped his eyes and lay back down on the rocks. Jaylen was about to say something to Pancho when he saw a white ribbon blow up from a rock crevice. The rattlesnake sidled in quick over the flat rock and struck Pancho in the upper arm. Pancho groaned and turned over just as the rattler vanished into a rock spill.

  “Pancho, try to suck the poison out. Get us out of here or we’re both going to die!”

  Pancho gave a pained laugh. “It doesn’t work that way. We’re supposed to die, life sucks, it ain’t worth living.”

  “But if you don’t do something...”

  “We’ll both die, Jaylen, we’ll both die...”

  Shortly after, with the cool night breeze blowing over their faces, both men gently drifted into unconsciousness. They were too far gone to be aware of horse hooves clattering over the rocks, and they were already chilled with the onset of death when Red Wind came upon them. He spoke to Pancho but Pancho didn’t hear him.

  “I heard shooting up here, thought you were target practicing in the moonlight.” He looked at Jaylen’s body on the ground in a soaked bloody shirt and Pancho’s swollen, purple arm. “What did you do, old friend?” Red Wind asked.

  Marisol had a queasy feeling in her stomach that things hadn’t gone so well for the villagers, but a plan was starting to form in her mind to get Adan involved. During the following week of adjournment, on a Monday morning, she drove up to the community center and helped seven of the oldest women in the village into a gray minivan. These women—the midwife, the babysitter, their mother’s three sisters, the wife of the hardware store owner, the neighbor who had cooked and sewn for them after their mother passed away—had all known Adan since he was born. It had been a long time since any of them had gotten out of the village. The women were having a great time—young girls again in spirit, laughing and joking as if they were on a school field trip. During the ride they all took turns recalling comic events they remembered in Adan’s life when he was a child.

  When they reached Adan’s law office in Albuquerque, Marisol ran upstairs to get her brother but the secretary told her he had gone to the spa. They sat in the reception area and waited, unwrapping the tamales, burritos, and biscochitos they had brought to eat. When Adan finally entered the office, he was alarmed at first, then embarrassed, because his colleagues were coming and going and gawking at the old women dressed in old-fashioned country skirts, mended shoes, and head veils eating their burritos.

  He wanted to explain that he worked for a corporate law firm and you couldn’t just come in and demand his time like this, but instead he said nothing and escorted them into his office.

  “There something wrong?” He wrinkled his brow and his eyes paused briefly over each of their faces.

  “Oh no, they just want to talk with you,” Marisol said.

  The women spoke up and reminded him of things he had forgotten. How Ophelia had made his lunch for years, making sure he had cinnamon cookies in his little lunch pail. How Dona Mirabel had darned his clothes and spent weeks picking out cloth and sewing his communion suit and graduation clothes. Senora Trujillo recalled the time Adan had a fever and she had nursed him for days, sleeping in a chair at his bedside, serving him soup mixed with herbs she had gathered herself. The other women remembered all the months and years when they had held bake sales to raise money for his college textbooks and travel expenses for summer seminars in Mexico, and they remembered sending him food every week during his summer jobs. The list of kind but tedious deeds went on and on—which was all to say that now, when they most needed him, he had an obligation to help. They didn’t ask him, they didn’t accuse him or make him feel bad or put him under duress to do something—each simply gave her story with a smile while the rest of the women nodded their assent or frowned and shook their heads in disapproval, remembering very clearly and commenting on how the weather was, what fiestas were being celebrated, who was born or had recently passed away. When finished, they cleaned up after themselves, put on their headscarves, clutched their purses, and sat in silence.

  With deliberate hospitality he embraced each of them and asked them to sit in the waiting area; he needed a word with Marisol.

  He sat back in his red leather captain’s chair and glared at her. “Why? You know I cannot defend you, it’s a conflict of interest.”

  “Who sold the land that was never to be sold?” she asked, then added, “It’s not about that anymore, it’s about the survival of the village. I don’t understand how to fight them, law is confusing, it’s not English or Spanish, it’s a foreign language. And it’s not about you or me anymore, but about all our relatives who came before us, and those who will come after.”

  He stared at her, not conscious of really seeing her, and went over the reasons in his mind for why he couldn’t commit himself to the case. It was true, though, that the law had its own logic, and oftentimes even the worst of criminals were found innocent and those who were innocent were found guilty. In Marisol’s world right and wrong were easy to discern, but the law didn’t hold the same view.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” Marisol said, rising from the chair. She felt sickened and heavy.

  “I’m sorry,” Adan said. “I’m willing to ask another lawyer to help you, but I can’t.”

  “We don’t want another lawyer.” Marisol turned to leave.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said behind her.

  She had the door open, and she looked back at him. “You know what’s right, Adan.” She shut the door quietly behind her and left.

  Marisol returned late in the afternoon and called people for a meeting, and after dinner the community center was packed with more residents than ever before—cowboys, farmers, ranch hands, laborers, homemakers, all milling about discussing the court situation
and the mysterious whereabouts of the land grant papers, some people even attributing their disappearance to the evil work of witches or the dead.

  Marisol stood in front, and when everyone had settled in folding chairs, she announced the bad news: Adan could not represent them. And she added that maybe it was too late anyway; their not being able to locate the land grant papers was really what it all boiled down to.

  Marisol opened the meeting to the floor, and amid the general expressions of worry and men vowing to shoot anyone messing with their land, Adan came through the door, strode to the front of the community center, and set his briefcase down on the folding table.

  “Today my sister came and saw me and I said I couldn’t represent you because of conflict of interest. I want everyone to understand I’m not here to represent you, only to give advice, to explain to you what you’re up against.” He tried to sound positive but his words were flat.

  “You sound like you’re on their side,” a defiant young man up front yelled out.

  “What are you talking about?” asked a man in back with his irrigation galoshes still on.

  “Do you want me to tell you the worst that could happen? The odds of winning the case are not good,” Adan continued.

  The oldest man in the village, Mr. Torrez, stood up leaning on his cane, and asked, “Adan, what can happen if we lose?”

  “You’ll probably have to file individual titles to your land. There’ll be litigation in court... some people will say it’s not your land, you won’t be able to afford lawyers to prove that it is, those with the money will win... Developers will offer you money and some will sell. Land taxes will go up, you won’t be able to afford them. Everything will change...”

  Mr. Torrez started shaking, then clutched his chest, and collapsed. His son Johnny, a stout, brawny cowboy, sitting beside him, immediately carried his father out. Others followed and the gathering in the center dispersed. Adan stood there, feeling the worst he’d ever felt.

  That evening Adan went with Marisol over to the Torrez family’s small house. He and Marisol sat on the porch. They’d been up all night and it was close to dawn. During the night Mr. Torrez had passed away. A lot of people had come to pay their respects and gone, but a lot more were arriving now at daybreak. He greeted each one as they climbed the porch steps. Marisol was sipping a cup of black coffee from one of the ladies inside the house.

  “I tried not to get involved but it’s impossible,” Adan said. “I thought I was beyond all the emotional attachments to this place but something in me stubbornly keeps worrying about their welfare. What’s going to happen to them?”

  “What else can happen,” Marisol said with a sigh. “The thought that Torrez might lose his land killed him.”

  “Marisol, selling it is not the end of the world, it’s the beginning of a new life.”

  They were quiet. The sun crested the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and spread across the valley, illuminating the cottonwoods. Crows and geese flew overhead, sparrows zipped in and out of lilac bushes big as trees, dogs, horses, cows, and sheep shook their heads and scampered and sounded their individual voices for food, workers drove their old pickups down dirt roads, mothers hurried children to the school bus stop, the air was crystalline and pure and the sky blue and the land rich with greenery, flowers, and water.

  “I’m going to the chapel for a while,” Marisol finally said.

  Adan said, “We’re in need of a miracle on this one.”

  Marisol got in her truck and drove down the dirt road that wound around the hills to the small church a few minutes away. She parked outside its gate, opened and closed it, and stood before the grotto of Saint Agnes. Someone had placed fresh yellow flowers in a vase at the base with a prayer card. She said a prayer and entered the old church. She knelt at a side altar, leaning her elbows against the wooden railing that skirted the altar. Banks of votive candles flickered. She’d been there for some time praying when she heard the door creak, but she didn’t bother turning around because she thought it was the priest or one of the old women who came and went throughout the day.

  As she prayed, her mind ranged freely over the past two months, asking the spirits to help her understand it all, pleading with God to lift the weary weight from her heart. She was still in love with Jaylen but she tried to keep him out of her mind. The accident with Pancho’s horse and the subsequent court proceedings had completely thrown her off balance emotionally, and she was swept one way loving him and then the other way hating him. She lit two candles, genuflected, and turned to see Red Wind in the last pew. It startled her, and for a moment she thought he was a ghost summoned by the power of her prayer, invoked by her subconscious, and then as suddenly the spell dissipated when he rose and came toward her.

  “I saw your truck outside,” Red Wind said.

  “Is Pancho with you?”

  “No. He’s at my grandfather’s place, out on the res.”

  They sat under an apple tree on a bench behind the chapel. He told her the story about the shooting, the snakebite, and how he came upon them. In view of them a sheriff’s car pulled up. A deputy in a black and tan uniform looked around. They watched him get out, answer someone at the department on his CB radio, and after a few words drive away.

  “They’re looking for Pancho.”

  Red Wind cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about the court hearings. I’ve got to go, but I’ll come by later, when it’s dark.”

  Marisol went back to the Torrez house and sat on the porch. She heard one of the women inside call to a young man, “Get Papa’s stuff down from the attic, get his good clothes out, we have to dress him for the church viewing tomorrow.”

  The house was packed with mourners weeping and lighting candles and commiserating with Mrs. Torrez, who was busy feeding everyone, going back and forth to the stove and refilling the red chili bowl, bringing more rice and beans and hot tortillas and green chili salsa.

  “What are you going to do about the charges?” Johnny asked Adan.

  Adan was with the men in the backyard standing around a bonfire.

  “I don’t know what we can do,” Adan said.

  Alejandro said, “The judge in Belen could care less about us poor farmers. It’s the ones with money they love. Pancho will stay free until they catch him, then he’ll do his time. He don’t give a shit, he did what he thought was right, and that sonofabitch is lucky to be walking around.”

  They nodded. “We go back to court tomorrow,” Johnny said.

  “There’ll be trouble...” someone said.

  Everyone was quiet, staring into the flames, until Johnny said, “Come on, let’s find Papa’s suit.”

  They went inside, made their way around people in the kitchen, crossed the living room packed with men smoking and sharing memories about Mr. Torrez. They tugged the rope dangling from the hallway ceiling ladder and slid it down, then climbed the stairs into the dusty attic.

  “Can’t believe they kept all this stuff...” Johnny said, opening an old cedar chest. He started to unfold a stack of ancient suits wrapped in plastic. Beside the chest Adan noticed an old leather bag with “Made in Kansas” stamped on it. He unclasped the bronze hinge and rummaged through the contents. Inside he found a bunch of old dentist’s stuff—pliers, picks, molds, dentures. At the bottom was a plastic bag of photographs.

  “Yeah, here’s some pictures of your dad when he was young,” Adan said. He pulled them out and Johnny and Alejandro shouldered up to him. They were sweating as they went through the old black-and-white photos.

  “I didn’t know he went to dental school in Kansas. Didn’t even know he played the sax. Look at him, that’s crazy, he looks cool.” They stared at the photo of Mr. Torrez as a young man in a suit and fedora, holding a saxophone and smiling into the camera. The last photograph they pulled out was a large one and made crackling sounds as they unfolded it. They immediately realized that it wasn’t a photograph but a sheet of yellowing parchment— the original land grant papers, obvio
usly written with a feather quill, but still readable.

  They looked at one another in shock, Adan pointing at the papers and trying to muffle his laughter. But Johnny’s laughter bellowed out and Alejandro’s roared; they pursed their lips, squeezed their eyes shut trying to contain themselves, but they soon fell on each other laughing and holding their sides in pain. They broke out again and again, recovering their composure only long enough to wipe their eyes and point to the papers before erupting into another fit.

  Mr. Pacheco, a dignified older man, yelled up from downstairs to have a little respect. He immediately strode up to the attic, peered into the dimly lit space, and gruffly rebuked them. “Is this the way you mourn the passing of your father, Johnny? You should be ashamed!”

  Johnny tried to restrain himself but managed only to gesture toward the papers and break down again into uncontrollable giggles.

  Mr. Pacheco grasped the papers and carefully held them under the dusty lightbulb. He read them slowly, and gradually his serious brown eyes began to gleam with joy and his eyebrows arched with disbelief. Then he looked up, smiling, and started to laugh. He slapped the three men on the shoulders and then slapped his knee, saying, “Ay caramba!” and roaring with laughter. To the horror of the mourners, all four came downstairs in a state of helpless hysterics. But when they read the papers to the gathering of grievers, the funeral turned into a party.

  From tears to laughter, from sitting solemnly to dancing, the mourners drank and laughed and Mrs. Torrez assured everyone it was quite all right, saying, “He would have loved it.” While the men made runs to the nearest bootlegger for beer, the women started cooking up more food.

  Monday morning, Marisol proudly laid the land grant papers on the judge’s desk. He read them and summarily dismissed the case. She declined the numerous dinner invitations circulating among the people gathered at the courthouse and hurried home because Red Wind had told her he might be coming in today with Pancho and Jaylen. The last time they had talked, he had said that they were recuperating fine but couldn’t be moved yet. Jaylen’s team of lawyers and engineers had no idea of his whereabouts, and when they asked her, she simply said that he might be coming by later and she would tell him to call them. Marisol went home and ate some crackers and peanut butter, and then walked over to Jaylen’s place and looked around. She sat until late in the afternoon watching the river flow south, then she returned home and napped for an hour in the parlor.