by Sandi Ault
When I finally got back outside, I spotted an older, oversized rusted red truck with a pipe gate across the back blocking the very end of the lot where I had parked. I felt a twinge of worry, realizing that I had been so preoccupied with the news from Coronel’s call that I had left the doors unlocked and Mountain inside the Jeep. I picked up my pace and started to sprint toward the pickup, sensing a danger I couldn’t yet see.
As I raced past car after car, I saw that the bed of the truck contained a huge cage, and an animal was slumped in the floor of it. “Mountain!” I cried out as I realized it was my beloved wolf companion, locked up in a big crate. A tall man climbed into the driver’s seat and I was sure it was Lor Talgren, though I had only seen him from behind. There weren’t that many long, lanky, fair-haired men in rural northern New Mexico, and only one who was out to do harm to my wolf. The truck started to nose out onto the highway and I still had several cars to get past before I was there. I accelerated my pace, yelling at the top of my voice, “Mountain! Mountain! Help! Somebody, help! That man is stealing Mountain!” As I grew closer, I could see the bright orange feathered trip of a tranquilizer dart lodged in the wolf’s shoulder. He lay unconscious in the cage.
The truck’s tires squealed as Talgren pulled onto the road, narrowly missing an approaching car. I ran faster, gaining on the truck, avoiding the oncoming vehicle as it swerved onto the shoulder. The tailgate was only a few feet ahead of me. I churned my legs up and down as fast as they would go. My chest felt like it was going to burst; the fear and the cold made my lungs burn like they were on fire. “Stop the truck! Mountain!” I screamed. “Stop! Help! Mountain!” I threw out my left arm and lunged, barely connecting with three fingers of my hand to the pipe gate across the rear of the truck bed. I clung on and kept running, but Talgren accelerated. My feet failed to keep up and I tripped, my legs were dragging, the road tearing at my jeans and boots, but I kept my fist grasped around the gate and reached with the other arm and hooked my right hand on the lower rung of it. Talgren yelled out the open window as he drove, “Goddamn whore! Let go!” He gunned the motor and I felt searing pain in my right calf as the asphalt tore at the skin and flesh of my dragging legs. I tried to twist and let the backs of my boots take more of it, but suddenly, the truck lurched to a stop in the middle of the road, and the side of my face rammed into the end of the truck bed. Before I could get my feet under me, Lor Talgren rushed around the side of the truck with a long black flashlight held high like a club. I was struggling to get my footing, my fingers still locked around the rails of the rear gate as if they were melted into the metal when Talgren drew back like a batter at the plate and drove the length of the flashlight into my side so violently that he knocked me to the ground. I felt my stomach contract and heave. My head spun. I couldn’t get my breath, and then Talgren’s boot came at my midsection so fast that I saw a blur of muddy brown leather and grit, and then nothing more as I was sucked into blackness.
When I came to, the ground was spinning and I felt such pain in my midsection that I rolled slightly to one side and a stream of bitter bile erupted from my throat and out of my mouth. I could not hold my head up and I felt warm acid run down the side of my face and onto the road.
“The ambulance is coming,” someone said. “Here comes the sheriff. Hold on.”
“Mountain,” I gasped, then heaved again. “He took my Mountain.”
☽
At the clinic in Embudo, the doctor used tweezers for what seemed like an hour to pick rocks, grit, and bits of my ripped up jeans from the wounds and then bandaged the contusions on my legs. My mid-section was starting to purple with bruising where the tip of Talgren’s boot had struck. “Just to be sure there are no serious injuries we couldn’t see on your ex-ray, I’d recommend a transport to the hospital in Albuquerque for observation—at least for a few hours,” she said. “This clinic will be closed for the night soon, and if something comes up or you have too much pain and need something stronger, we won’t be here for you until morning.”
“I have to find Mountain,” I said. “I’m not going to a hospital, or anywhere else, until I find my wolf.”
“Well, I can give you some tablets for pain, but you shouldn’t drive while taking them. Someone will have to get you home. The ex-ray was negative for any new breaks, but you have one rib that looks like it’s mended from a previous injury. Have you had a cracked rib before?”
I nodded. I’d taken a beating the previous winter and been kicked in the same place, which could be why it hurt so badly this time.
The doctor went on: “Those lacerations on your legs need to be kept clean and re-dressed daily; that kind of lesion is prone to infection. I can prescribe some oral antibiotics and an ointment. I used a numbing agent when I cleaned the wounds, and you already had some pain medication in your IV drip, but both of these areas—your mid-section and your legs—are going to start hurting again soon, and when they do, you’re going to need that pain medication. So if you won’t change your mind and let me arrange for a transport to the hospital, then call and get yourself a ride home and I’ll go write you a scrip.”
I sat upright and swung my legs over the side of the table, and felt tremendous pain in the center of my torso when I did. About the time I was considering how I would manage to stand, Deputy Sheriff Jerry Padilla came in the door of the exam room and said, “I need to talk to you before you get up.”
It gave me a good reason to remain seated while I tried to get the room to stop whirling.
He told me that customers at the Bear’s Paw had seen the confrontation between me and Lor Talgren and called 911. A sheriff’s deputy and an ambulance were dispatched at once, and fortunately, one of the people lunching there had been an EMT, who tended to me with ice packs on my belly and dish towels around my bleeding legs until the paramedics arrived. She had insisted they not move me until the ambulance arrived, so volunteers directed traffic around me until it came. Several of the patrons of the café were locals who recognized Lor Talgren and his truck and gave this information to the deputy on the scene. A sheriff’s car was dispatched to Talgren’s place, but neither he nor the truck he’d been driving were there. They had put out a warrant and were searching for the man.
“Mountain?” I asked, “did they find him?”
Padilla shook his head. “We all know…everyone knows that wolf is your buddy. But he wasn’t there. We’ll keep looking. But we did find something at Talgren’s place that’s going to make sure he goes away for a long time when we do get him.”
I was gripped with terror from the news that they didn’t find Mountain. I didn’t care what the deputies had found.
“He had a meth lab going in the vat room of that old winery. When we find Lor Talgren, he’s going down bigtime, and not just on theft of your animal and assault and battery, but on federal drug charges of use, manufacture, and sale. Let’s see,” he pretended to count on his fingers. “That will mean he won’t see daylight for decades.”
I began to sob, and every time I drew in air, my midsection hurt more. “Mountain,” I cried. “You have got to help me find Mountain!”
☽
Padilla must have talked with the doctor while I was getting dressed, because he only grudgingly agreed to give me a ride back to my Jeep, and he harped at me all the way about how they would find Talgren and I should check myself into the hospital and get better. When we got to the Bear’s Paw, I thanked him for the ride and struggled to get out of the cruiser’s passenger seat. Padilla came around to help me. “I don’t feel right about this,” he said, holding me by one arm as he escorted me to my Jeep. “You aren’t in any shape to drive. And unless you moved from out there west of Taos, you got a long ways to go before you get home tonight.”
“I’m staying up here…at a friend’s. It’s just right down the highway, before you get to the Mountain Mission. I’ll be okay.”
He held out my handgun in its holster. “The paramedics said one of the folks on the road gave this
to them, that you’d been wearing it and it came off when…they turned it in to me. You put it in the glove box and lock it up, okay?”
“Okay.” I bent down to swing sideways into the car and felt like I might pass out. So I backed into the seat using both my arms on the sides of the Jeep’s door frame, wincing as I lifted my bandaged legs into the car. I set the gun in its holster on the passenger seat, but I wasn’t about to lean sideways to reach across to the glove box.
“Tell me you’ll go straight to where you’re staying and no place else,” Padilla said, bending down to look me right in the face.
I looked right back at him. “If that’s what you need me to say.”
“Goddamnit, Jamaica, I’ll call Roy and have him order you directly to go home and get in bed.”
“I’m not working for Roy this week. You want me to go rest, then find Mountain, Jerry. You find him. I mean it.”
“We got every available deputy on it.”
“Now push my door closed for me, will you? It hurts too much for me to lean over and pull.”
I waited for Padilla to pull away in the Ford Explorer, working hard to stifle what I knew was inevitable. As soon as he was gone, I scrambled out of the Jeep again, crying out with the pain in my legs and my stomach, took two steps, then doubled over with nausea. I drew in a breath, bent over and heaved again, bringing up nothing but agony. The IV’s pain medication was beginning to wear off. I had the bottle of pills to take home but I knew not to drive while taking them. Besides, I couldn’t risk taking one now; I needed to keep my head clear. I knew who could help me with both the physical anguish and possibly even with finding Mountain, too, and as soon as I could muster the strength to get back behind the wheel, I intended to go see her.
☽
I arrived at the village of Agua Azuela at almost the same hour as when I had come the day before. As I always did, I parked my Jeep at the bottom of the hill, behind the wall of the compound that surrounded the village church, an ancient adobe structure that had been built by the conquerors from Spain who settled there in the 1500’s, and whose descendants lived there still. Normally, the church—surrounded by its large wall-enclosed yard—sat empty between the services for mass on Sundays. Those were only sparsely attended by a handful of faithful; there was no priest to administer the sacrament. The rituals were instead presided over by members of the Penitentes, a dwindling secret brotherhood who practiced the ancient rituals of self-mortification and mock crucifixion and the procession of Christ dragging his cross to the campo santo during the season of Easter. But on this late Thursday afternoon in early January, the church yard was uncharacteristically bustling with villagers scurrying in and out of the big, thick-walled structure. Perhaps they were preparing for a wedding on Saturday. I worked my way out of the vehicle and then started up the goat path toward Esperanza’s casita, clutching at my gut, where a dull pain throbbed with every step I took. It was nearing dusk and the sky was coloring up, clouds massing in the west reflecting a reddish cast to the light as the sun sank toward the horizon.
I had to stop several times before I made it to the top of the steep path. My mid-section ached, and my calf muscles burned. I felt woozy and off-balance, and I hoped Tecolote would have a salve or a tea that would heal my middle and the wounds on my legs, perhaps even something to help clear the fog in my head from the residue of the drugs I’d been given at the clinic.
When I finally rounded the top of the hill, I gasped, then shuddered, and my mind suddenly vitrified into a mix of fear and wonder at the scene before me. The vast rumpled cape of now-blood-red clouds had spread itself across the sky behind the bruja’s casita, the sun an angry scarlet orb at the center, the air pulsing with rubescence. On the roof of the adobe hut, along the railing of the corral, on top of the outhouse, on the tall stems of choya, atop the soft feathery mounds of sage, on every bare spot in the yard, and on every brush and shrub surrounding her home, ravens—dozens and dozens of ravens—had convened. They waited in silence as I approached. In the eerie crimson glow, they all seemed to be watching me with great curiosity. I walked up the trail to the portal, and three of the birds fluttered off of the porch rail and into the yard. They did not cry out or bark in protest as ravens almost always do, but instead held a numinous, noiseless vigil. As I edged toward the open door of Esperanza’s house, those in my path puffed their neck feathers and scuttled to either side, complaining with little soundless huffs, ticks and flits that I could see but not hear. I felt like I had wandered into a surreal silent film. At the doorway, I looked inside, and a gigantic raven stood on the table where I always shared tea, often a meal, and always curious conversations with the old curandera. This bird was as big as a great horned owl, and as black and shiny as tar.
Commanding my attention, the raven danced from one foot to the other on the table top, lifting its wings and puffing up the feathers of its chest to make itself seem even larger, as it would when challenged by a rival for some prize it had scavenged and had no intention to share.
“Tecolote?” I called loudly, stepping one foot through the doorway. The room was cold, semi-dark, empty of life, save the black feathered conqueror who had claimed it as his territory now.
“Ka-ka!” The big raven answered and spread its wings wide, but it did not lift off of the table. Before it, on the scarred wooden plane, lay the hand-stitched deerskin pillow I had made for Tecolote and given her one year for Christmas. Nesting in the center of it was a tied piece of cloth, no bigger than a tea bag. I reached forward to pick this up and measured my movements so as not to stimulate an attack from the big black bird. The raven watched me carefully, but did not move. I plucked up the pouch and held it high to look at it, then sniff it. As I inhaled its musky fragrance, I felt a slight lessening of my pain. I knew Tecolote had left this remedy expressly for me since she had placed it on the pillow I had made for her.
All at once, all the ravens began to cry: “Ka-ka! Ka-ka! Ka-ka!” The sound was almost deafening. They flew from the roof into the yard, from the yard up to the roof, from the fence into the brush and back down to the ground again, the air filled with a cloud of moving black objects screaming over and over again, “ka-ka!” They seemed to be saying: “She’s gone!”
38: Lockup
As I pulled onto the High Road, I worked to crank the wheel with my left arm alone and spare my right side, because it hurt each time I tried to employ the arm or the muscles on that side of my torso. The new BLM phone chimed and I punched the hands-free button on the wheel to answer it. “Agent Wild,” I croaked, unable to mask the agony in my voice.
“We got him,” Jerry Padilla’s voice said through the speakers. “We found Talgren.”
A jolt of new energy streaked through me. “Is Mountain with him? Where are they?”
“Hold on there, now. Just hold on. The wolf wasn’t with him. We pulled him over in his truck and we got him down in lockup.”
“I’m coming. I’ll be right there.”
“No, wait. Just wait a second. I’ll come get you. I’ll come and pick you up where you’re staying and I’ll take you there.”
“We have to make him tell us where Mountain is. There’s no time…”
“I will get you there just as fast as you could go yourself, if not faster. I’ll run hot with the lights flashing and we can take it over the speed limit as far as it’s safe to go. I’m just north of the ranger station in Peñasco right now. So where did you say you’re staying along the High Road?”
“Meet me at the Bear’s Paw in ten minutes,” I said, and I clicked the button to disconnect.
At the county lockup, Padilla walked me through the gate where Lor Talgren stood shaking in the corner of a cell. “He’s got the DTs,” Padilla said. “Tweaking bad for a fix.”
As pathetic as the big man looked, I felt no sympathy or compassion for him, but I had promised myself to keep calm and try to get the information I so desperately needed, so I intended to be polite. “Lor?”
H
e looked up and across the cell at me, his teeth chattering. His eyes were red-rimmed and his lips fluttered uncontrollably.
“Please tell me what you’ve done with Mountain.”
He looked at me and managed a wobbling sneer, but he could not hold his lips in place and so gave it up and looked down at his arms, which were crossed tightly over his chest. His right hand pulled at the skin around his left elbow as if there was something alien attached to it that needed to be removed.
“I’m sorry about your dog,” I said. “I’m sorry the bat infected it with rabies. I’m so sorry you lost him. But my wolf shouldn’t have to suffer for what the bat did. Please tell me where he is so I can go get him.”
He looked up at me again, a crazed look in his eyes, his mouth still working, his chin now shifting from side to side as his teeth continued to clack and chatter. “You did it. Not some bat. You did it. You had them come get my dog and they put him down. Now you have to pay for what you did.”
I felt tears well up and threaten to spill, but I somehow managed to keep my composure. “Okay, I’ve paid. You beat me with that big flashlight, you kicked me in the stomach and you drug me behind your truck. What else? It’s not Mountain’s fault your dog got rabies. Tell me where he is.”
Lor flew across the cell at an astonishing speed and with such force that I jumped back, slamming my shoulder into Jerry Padilla’s chest and stepping on the toe of his boot with my right heel. He caught me by the backs of my upper arms and set me right again. “Talgren, tell us what you did with the wolf and I’ll consider speaking up for you at your trial.”