by Sandi Ault
When we first started out from my cabin in rural northern New Mexico, I had queried the two agents in the front about why they had come for me and where we were going. “You’ll be briefed when we get to Kirtland,” was all Coronel would say.
As we sped through the black landscape that flashed by outside, the blue-lit interior of the car with its big navigation screen made me think of a small ship traveling through deep space. I tried to sleep away what I knew would be a long, silent drive—wishing I could return to the dream I had been enjoying when these two bozos had so rudely interrupted me. Once, I almost dropped back into that dream, the smell of my lover’s neck, the warmth of his chest as I lay against it, listening to his heartbeat…his heartbeat! That was what had awakened me when I had been fast asleep in my bed, dreaming—when Kerry’s heartbeat suddenly sped up and got so loud that I feared his chest would burst open…and then the door flew back against the cabin wall. Now I realized that the sound of his pounding heart must have been Agent Coronel knocking.
I slumped against the cold glass of the car window, missing Kerry. He had left only two days ago to resume his forest supervisor assignment in Washington State, a job which had separated us for a year. Even though I knew he was gone, that dream had felt as real to me as the precious time we’d just spent together in my cabin with Mountain. I could have stayed in that dream forever. And so, as I huddled in the back of the car with my four-legged best friend, trying not to give into fear and confusion, I calmed myself with the memory of those wonderful days with Kerry.
☽
When we drew to a stop on the tarmac of the airfield that Kirtland Air Force Base shared with the Albuquerque Sunport, the clock on the dash read 3:05 a.m. I peered out the window and saw two large metal buildings, brightly lit and marked with the distinctive star-and-stripes symbol used by the Air Force. Coronel got out and opened the car door for me, and I unfolded myself and stood upright. Mountain scrambled out after me and I grabbed for the lead I had snapped onto his collar before we left home. I looked across the top of the car toward the runway and saw a big blue and white plane; the lettering that ran nearly the whole length of its side read: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
Two men stood guard at the bottom of the airstairs. Coronel and his pal went to meet them. They gestured at me and then at Mountain. There was an animated discussion, and then one of the sentries darted up the stairs and was gone for only a few seconds before he came back, wearing a stern frown but nodding his head. Coronel came back toward me. “I had a tough time convincing those guys that you weren’t going anywhere without your wolf. Come on. Bring him.”
I stared at the plane. My feet had turned to concrete. “Agent Coronel, what am I doing here?”
“You’re about to meet the president-elect of the United States,” he said. “You and Mountain.” He waved a hand forward. “Follow me.”
The ordeal of getting a wolf to climb the airstairs would have made great comedy if we hadn’t been repeatedly reminded of the urgency of the timeline. I’d had to sweet-talk and near-drag Mountain while two clearly nervous Secret Service agents formed a wall behind him so he couldn’t retreat. Unsure of what he might do, they had reluctantly followed my directions and moved steadily upward behind him, funneling him into the door of the plane. Once onboard, I loosened the grip I held on his lead, and Mountain suddenly broke away, making a mad dash down the wide aisle. He bolted into the nearest open door, where he proceeded to rush behind the desk and then huddle beneath the surprised occupant of the office chair.
“Well, hello there!” President-elect Maria Clarissa Vargas looked down at this unruly visitor. She reached out her hands and picked up Mountain’s muzzle and looked directly into his face as she spoke to him. “Was that scary for you, to board this big plane?” Her voice took on the tenderness one might use when speaking to a small child, and she ruffled his mane and stroked his neck vigorously. “Well, you’re very brave, and I want you to know that everyone is excited about having you as our guest.”
Mountain trembled, his ears back, eyes wide. He turned his head, still in her grip, and peered over the top of the desk to find me, and when he did, he looked relieved, but only slightly.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ve never seen him go up to a stranger like that, much less allow one to pet him! He'll shed all over you. Mountain, come over here, baby. It’s okay.” I said, patting my thigh. The wolf didn’t move.
“I’m sorry, too, to have to summon you here in the middle of the night.” The president-elect released her hold on Mountain and he half-scrambled around the desk. “They told me that you refused to come without your wolf. He seems tame enough. I really like him.” She stood up. “As you might imagine, my every move is scrutinized and we had to do some maneuvering to keep this meeting off the press’s radar. I’m due in Los Angeles later this morning, so I’m going to have to be brief.” She nodded at Mountain. “What can we do to help put him at ease?”
“Believe it or not, it’s better if we just ignore him. He’s not like a dog, so a lot of affection and attention keeps him worked up. If I could sit, he might relax a little. And while we talk, it will be best if we don’t make any sudden moves.”
“I’ll ignore him, then. But I think it’s safe to say that the crew will be disappointed that we can’t make a big fuss and let everyone meet him. I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve had a wolf onboard a plane in the presidential fleet.” She gestured toward one of the chairs opposite her desk. “Have a seat. Can we get you anything—you or Mountain?”
“I’d love a cup of coffee.” I lowered myself into the chair and then patted the floor in front of me, hoping the wolf would take the hint and come lie down. “Mountain probably needs a drink of water.”
Vargas picked up a phone. “Coffee and a bowl of water, please.”
Mountain stood in front of me while I continued to pat the floor but he did not lie down; he was too afraid for that. Instead, he maneuvered around and took a position standing on his front legs while he pressed his haunches onto my knees until he was virtually sitting on my lap. I shook my head. We must have looked ridiculous.
Maria Vargas moved slowly around in front of her desk, as Mountain tried to settle himself into this ludicrous position. A young man came in with a tray of coffee with cream and sugar, a small plate of biscotti, a white china bowl with a blue and gold presidential seal imprinted in the bottom of it, and a carafe of water. I poured Mountain a drink and he moved from my lap and stood again as he slurped from the bowl. I poured him some more and lowered the dish to the carpeted floor, and the wolf obliged me by lying down to finish his drink.
When Mountain had settled, I sat upright again.
Vargas held out a cup of coffee that she had poured for me. “Do you take anything in it? Cream? Sugar?”
“A little cream, please,” I said, and reached to accept the proffered cup. “Thank you so much.”
“I would love to ask you a thousand questions about him, but let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?” Vargas took a perch on the front of her desk, lowered her head and stroked one eyebrow repeatedly. “I had a roommate in college,” she began. “She was my best friend, and also my maid of honor when I married my late husband. Do you know who it is that I’m talking about?”
I shook my head. “No. I'm sorry.”
“Well, she is very well known in certain circles. She is the current Poet Laureate of the United States of America. Her name is Adoria Ximena Abasolo. Now do you know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes. She won the Nobel Prize.”
“She did. And a Pulitzer and many other awards. And she was commissioned to write the traditional poetry offering for my upcoming inauguration. She and I had discussed the elements of this poem in some detail, first on the phone, and then in a series of emails. And last week, she sent me a draft to review, but what she sent was incomplete—a little crazy, to tell the truth—and it bore no relevance to the
ceremony it was supposedly written for.” She got up and walked around to the working side of her desk and opened a drawer.
The moment she moved, Mountain jumped up. I hastily threw my left arm around his neck and soothed him, holding tight to his lead with my right hand. “Shhhh…” I whispered into his neck. “It’s okay.”
Ms. Vargas drew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the drawer and set them on the desk. She took a deep breath and then took her hand away. She walked around to the front of the desk and resumed her perch. I noticed dark circles under her eyes. “I quit smoking five years ago,” she said. “Now I find myself struggling with it as if I had never stopped.”
I waited for her to go on, still stroking Mountain gently on one side. He sat his rump down on top of my left boot and pressed into the front of my leg.
“You see, we think something has happened to Adoria Abasolo. Her participation in the inauguration ceremony was very important to me. Not only is she my oldest and dearest friend, she is the first Latina Poet Laureate. And I will be the first Latina president, a single woman now, a progressive woman with ideas of my own. It has been a long and difficult battle to arrive at this milestone.
“I ran for the presidency on a platform of real change—changes that will end practices that are harmful to the environment, that will bring equality to women and minorities. There are very powerful people who don’t want these kinds of changes. Some are making a lot of money off of fossil fuels, many more benefit from keeping minorities from prospering; they don’t want to see a woman—especially a Latina—in a position of this much power. They would love to see me embarrassed—or better, defeated in some way. I won the election, but I have no illusions about having the support of congress or their controlling allies.” She stopped and looked at me, clasping her hands together tightly. President-elect Vargas looked tired, as tired as I felt. “I want to know what has happened to Adoria because I fear she may have been harmed.”
I widened my eyes and waited, intrigued.
She did not go on but instead looked at me expectantly.
“I guess I don’t understand what all this has to do with me.”
“You have ties to Tanoah Pueblo. You're the liaison to the tribe for the BLM. The last time Adoria wrote to me with that partial draft I mentioned, she said she was going to some kind of ceremony at the pueblo and would finish the poem the next day. No one has seen her since. We tried to find out about the event, but the reservation is observing some kind of silence…”
“Quiet time—kind of like a spiritual retreat from the modern world. It’s not literally a time of silence, it’s more about honoring the old ways. They have a lot of kiva doings going on right now.”
“Kiva doings?” She wrinkled her brow. “I won’t ask, only because we don’t have the time. An agent in my detail tried to investigate discreetly, and the tribe started a ruckus that threatened to bring the media in. We don’t want the press…well, we want to keep them out of this as long as we can. So I want you to make some inquiries. Will you do that?”
I shook my head no. “I can’t…it’s considered rude to ask questions.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Tanoah people consider it rude to ask a direct question. I can’t make inquiries. Even if I tried, it would not be successful. It would shut down all conversation.”
Maria Vargas's face reddened. Clearly agitated by my refusal, she went back around the desk, placed a cigarette between her lips, and struck the lighter. It flared as she held it in front of her, but she did not light up. Instead, she returned both items to the desk top, and sat down in the high-backed chair behind her. “I have no way of knowing what has happened to Adoria, but there are more reasons to be concerned that she is missing than simply because she is my friend. Here’s one example: she is an American citizen, but she was born in Brazil, and the United States is in the middle of some important negotiations with Brazil’s government right now regarding reducing their reliance on fossil fuels. I don’t know if her disappearance has something to do with that. I just don’t know what has happened to her or why.”
“But surely the Secret Service or the FBI…I mean, you have all the means at your disposal…”
“No, I don’t—not yet. Right now, all I have is my Secret Service Security Detail, just a handful of people. Two of them who are loyal to me and were with me through the campaign are working on this. But that reservation is evidently some kind of a black hole for them. Even if I were already in office, Tanoah Pueblo is a sovereign nation, so we have no authority. If Adoria is there, we have no way of finding out quietly. I need someone on the inside. Miss Wild, I am asking you to do this as a personal favor to me. Will you help me find my longtime friend?”
I realized my mouth was open and my head was still shaking ever-so-slightly back and forth. My body was saying a firm no, there is no way, I can’t do it, I shouldn’t even try, but I could not find a way to voice it to the woman who was about to become president of the United States of America.
Vargas did not wait for me to answer. “You seem pretty capable to me. You found a way to get a wolf onboard a presidential plane in the Air Force’s Special Air Mission fleet. You can find a way to get onto Tanoah Pueblo and find out what happened to Adoria Abasolo.” She picked up a folder from the desk and looked me directly in the eye. “One more thing, Miss Wild. I need you to keep this conversation strictly between us. An agent with my Secret Service detail will get you started. No one else is to know that I asked you to do this.” She handed the folder across the desk. “This is all we have: there’s some background, the latest intelligence reports we have on Adoria, and copies of the most recent emails between her and me. There’s also copies of some things they found on her desk, and a few poems she was working on. You’ll see, as time goes on, that her writing became strange, almost cryptic. We discovered that she was scrawling odd notes on everything, on the side of a utility invoice, on store receipts and even on a twenty dollar bill.”
I took the folder and began to page through it. I read a few lines of a poem:
I turn my body inside out
and from the bottom of my belly the moon speaks.
I empty myself in continuous conversation with the world
that is no longer a world
and I am no longer in it.
“Merge with me,” the moon whispers,
and I vanish!
“Wow,” I said.
“I know,” Vargas replied, nodding her head. “She sounds like she’s become some kind of a wild mystic.”
3: The Ancients
It was around eight in the morning when I arrived at the home of my medicine teacher at Tanoah Pueblo. When I got out of my Jeep in front of her house, I smelled smoke from Momma Anna’s woodstove, the sweet-sharp, sap-rich scent of burning piñon wood. As I walked up the path, I bent low to avoid the bare limbs of the sprawling apple tree that guarded her entry, then pounded with the butt of my fist on the wood door. Mountain waited anxiously beside me as a small filament of drool escaped his lip and stretched impossibly long, almost reaching the packed dirt beneath the brush arbor that shaded the front of the old adobe home. The wolf salivated because he knew he was in for a treat: our hostess would almost certainly give him a chunk of venison or bison out of a stew she might have cooking on the stove. This was the way she welcomed everyone—she fed them the moment they arrived.
My medicine teacher opened the door wrapped in a Pendleton blanket. Beneath her long dress and apron, she wore her traditional white deerskin moccasins billowed in soft folds from knee to ankle. This handmade footwear was kept for ceremony and for Quiet Time, in keeping with the old ways, when no one wore a heeled shoe in the Pueblo. “Come in, I feed them.” She nodded her head toward the only bedroom in her small house. “You talk them now. I give this wolf breakfast.”
By them, Momma Anna was referring to her ancestors. During Quiet Time, the ancient ones were said to gather and move about the village as if they had n
ever left. They would appear behind you when you were cutting firewood, or even join you in the outhouse when you were emptying your bladder. They expected to be fed, to be referred to as if they were present, and to be included in all your activities. Some stories shared at winter’s Quiet Time gatherings told of incidents when a grandparent or great uncle would join a man in bed with his wife and try to participate in their lovemaking. These tales brought shouts of laughter and also instilled a little fear in the youth who might be considering a secret assignation.
Under the window in Momma Anna’s bedroom stood a makeshift altar. A spread of filled plates lined up before tokens representing the departed, a framed photograph or ceremonial object from each ancestor. On the floor a folded horse blanket waited, and I knelt on this and dipped my chin in a perfunctory show of respect. “Hi. How are you guys?” All the candles flickered at once, with a whoosh, and the curtains rustled. A few years ago, I might have assumed that Momma Anna’s old adobe house was just drafty. But by now, I had witnessed enough strange events at the pueblo, and in the company of Momma Anna elsewhere, that I had come to believe that things weren’t always as black and white as they seemed. I assumed a more reverent attitude. “Greetings, grandparents, aunties and uncles,” I said, “and blessings to all of you.” It was the custom not to invoke the names of the dead, so I was careful not to directly address those members of the family I had known—Grandma Bird and Grandpa Nazario, who were Anna’s parents, and Yellow Hawk, her brother, whose tragic suicide I had witnessed firsthand. “I am honored to be in your presence,” I said, looking across the plates of buttery fried eggs atop posole in red chile, thick wedges of pueblo bread, slices of fried apples, and venison stew. “I am so happy we will be seeing one another again during this time. Enjoy your meal.” I stood and bowed my head again, then went into the kitchen where Momma Anna was adding wood to her cook stove and Mountain was furiously licking at an empty plastic bowl that he held between his paws.