The Ghost of Milagro Creek Read online

  In the unswept dirt yard, the ladies in their black dresses settled like a flock of crows to take in the disaster that followed the wake of Abuela’s death. The house, a squat adobe with thick mud walls, was still standing, but the garden sat vacant, and the empty clothesline drooped between two trees. Sometime during Abuela’s illness, Mister had carried her good chair outside and set it in front of his televisions—the smaller one was stacked on top of the larger, broken one. Already, the chair’s red velvet had begun to fade to a mottled pink.

  “What a dompe!” said Zarita, shaking her head. “Look at all this yonque in the yard.” With the toe of her patent-leather pump, she nudged an empty beer can under the chair.

  “Abuela was like a mother to Mister,” said Dolores. “He’s dying of a broken heart.”

  “You know that in the end she lost her bowel function,” said Ramona. “He had to hold her up on the seat.”

  “That ALS is bad,” said Zarita. “It’s like a curse, you know.”

  Dolores glanced suspiciously at the shuttered house and then asked in a low whisper, “Do you think it was that witch, Jorupa?”

  Zarita laughed loudly.

  “No,” said Ramona. “It was Jorupa’s basilisk. You know, that creature with the body of a chicken and the head of a lizard?”

  “I think it’s the other way around,” said Zarita. “Body of a lizard and head of a chicken.”

  “Well, anyway, if you look it in the eye, you turn to stone.”

  “She was paralyzed all right,” said Ramona. “I came over here one day and found her flat on her belly, inching her way to the door. She had fallen out of her chair, and Mister was off somewhere.”

  “My brother-in-law had a basilisk in his basement,” said Dolores. “It ate all the potatoes.”

  “Someone needs to knock on the door,” said Zarita.

  They lingered for a few minutes in a nervous huddle, but then Mister stepped out on the porch, and they went to him.

  Once inside the casa, the women got down to business. They unpacked their baskets: a chipped dish with bubbling enchiladas seeping around the tinfoil, fresh tamales wrapped in paper towels, a platter of foot-long tortas. Someone brought the traditional chilorio dish: red chile sauce with potatoes, pork, and garlic. They unloaded liter bottles of soda, bags of cookies and chips, paper napkins. Dolores carried a jumbo package of toilet paper into the bathroom.

  “Muchas gracias,” said Mister. His own hands hung loosely by his sides, and when he spoke, his voice sounded thick and strange to his ears, but the women stepped around him as if he were a small child. “Where do you want this potted geranium,hijito?” asked Ramona. She smelled of wine and onions. “I’m going to mopear the floor. Listen to my feet stick to it.”

  The women filled the narrow rooms, trapping Mister between their swaying hips, pressing him against fleshy bosoms, talking with wide, painted mouths. The smell of their mingled perfumes filled his nostrils until he could taste it on the back of his tongue. Already, the house was losing the clean, hard scent of Abuela. He went to his room and lay on the cot so they wouldn’t try to strip the sheets that smelled of lye and sage.

  Through the closed door he listened to the rise and fall of their voices, the click of their heels on the tile floors—living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. When Abuela washed the dishes, she only used trickles of water, but Dolores opened the faucet and let the water rush on and on, like a long sob. On the other side of his wall, Ramona swished the toilet, and in the living room, Zarita swung her broom against the cobwebs that hung in the heavy wooden vigas of the low ceiling.

  When they spoke of Abuela, they lowered their voices. In a hoarse whisper, Ramona asked Zarita if she had put shoes on the corpse. “I guess it wouldn’t matter since they shut the bottom half of the casket,” she said.

  “I was going to use an old pair of Lucinda’s,” Zarita confessed. “But she pitched a fit, that little pendejo. So I bought a pair at Second Chances. You wait, she’ll come by the shop next week and want me to do her hair for her. Those shoes were two sizes too small and worn at the heel. She said, “Mamá, I don’t want a skeleton to wear my shoes!”

  “Girls are funny at that age,” said Dolores with a sympathetic frown. In her opinion, it was better to have an abusive husband and a gay son than a teenage daughter.

  “I know one thing,” said Ramona, giving the mop a fierce squeeze. “I’m glad that Rocky left town. I told Tomás he don’t need that gringo girl. He needs a nice Latina. Somebody who can cook for him.

  “I heard she went to the monastery,” said Zarita, and there was an awkward silence.

  “If she’s knocked up, why does it have to be him?”

  “Nobody knows anything about it,” said Dolores.

  “She’ll ruin those monks,” said Ramona. “And the nuns too. Dios ve todo.”

  “Sí,” agreed Dolores. “God sees all.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Beneath his pillow, Mister felt the hard lumps of two handguns—identical 9mm Glocks. He’d been hanging around the police station since he was a kid, and yesterday he’d found Ernesto’s key under the stack of Playboys in his bottom desk drawer—where it had always been. The guns were already loaded, fifteen rounds apiece.

  “Mister!” called Dolores, rapping softly on his closed bedroom door. “Vamos. We want to say good-bye.” He opened the door and stood before her, a head taller, shuffling his feet like a child. “Poor boy,” she moaned as she reached up to press her damp face against his cheek and hold him in her soft arms while he stood wooden. The others crowded in the doorway, murmuring sympathies as they squeezed him and brushed their waxy lips against his cheeks.

  “Remember: you reheat the enchiladas at three hundred and fifty …”

  “She’s gone to a better place.”

  “Paradiso.”

  “Keep the foil on or the cheese will burn.”

  “If you feel solo …”

  “You want your hair cut, come by the shop …”

  “… praying for you.”

  “Me gusta su ponytail.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said I would give him a free haircut.”

  “I put the mop on the porch to let it dry.”

  Then they were gone.

  Evening—

  When the priest drove his Land Rover into the yard, a white moon sat on the crest of Taos Mountain. In that clear light, the square mud house with the blue shutters and a red string of chili ristras hanging beside the window looked clean and new. Mister stood in the doorway, naked from the waist up, black hair down, more Indian than not.

  “Buenas noches,” said Padre Pettit, stepping out of the car.

  “Hi.”

  That door, thought the priest. He remembered when Ignacia’s son Teodoro had fashioned it from a discarded billboard before he ran off to California and became Ted. It bore the faded image of a woman’s hand, pale and delicate, holding a match to a man’s cigarette.

  “May I come in for a few moments?”

  “¿Por qué?” asked Mister sullenly.

  “They will speak Spanish when you speak English,” the Right Reverend Monsignor Horshak had informed him back in Wisconsin. “And English when you speak Spanish.”

  “Which one should I speak?” asked the young priest.

  “The opposite one,” said the Right Reverend.

  “I’d like to pray with you, Mister,” Padre Pettit said tiredly. He had run himself ragged during the vigil, trying to maintain decorum while keeping the mourners from hacking off Abuela’s hair and dropping goodness-knows-what into the casket. “For your grandmother’s soul.”

  “She didn’t like you,” said Mister.

  “I know.”

  In the twenty years that Manny Pettit had lived and worked in northern New Mexico, he had never met a parishioner as difficult as Ignacia Romero. He knew, for instance, that she asked him to bless her candles on Candlemas in the firm belief that he was perform
ing magic. She had confused the religious ritual with some pagan rite to make her garden grow, and no amount of patient explanation would change her mind.

  “I am a Catholic priest,” he told her more than once, “not a shaman.” The worst part was that she didn’t think he was a very good shaman.

  “Entre,” said Mister finally, and they went into the house.

  “You’re a darn good housekeeper for a bachelor,” said the padre, noting the spotless floor and the freshly plumped pillows in the living room. “I could use you over at my place.” No matter where he tried to look in the narrow room, his gaze returned to Abuela’s altar. The upside-down chicken crate, covered with a piece of buckskin quilled in blue and white beads, faced the east wall. Around a clay pot of water, she had arranged the tools of her brujería: an incense burner—sahumador, they called it, an eagle feather, and a palm-sized bag of holy dirt from Santuario de Chimayó. Except for the feather and an assortment of silver charms they called milagros, it wasn’t much different from the altar in the church.

  “Oh, she can’t be a witch,” Padre Pettit had said to a concerned parishioner. “She painted her shutters blue to keep out witches!” The joke fell flat.

  Mister waved toward a small couch covered with a blanket, but both men remained standing.

  “How old are you?” asked the padre.

  “Diecinueve,” said Mister.

  “Nineteen years old,” said Padre Pettit, shaking his head. “It probably doesn’t feel like it right now, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  Mister stared blankly at the wall.

  “I know how hard this must be for you,” said the padre, pulling a pamphlet—“Losing a Loved One”—from his breast coat pocket. He held it out for a moment, but Mister did not unfold his arms, so he set it on the coffee table. “Shall we pray?”

  “Tú oras,” said Mister.

  “What?”

  “You pray. I’ll watch.”

  “Okay, then. All right. Bueno.”

  Padre Pettit crossed himself and then, with popping knees, knelt on the cold tile floor. He found himself facing the pagan altar, but he didn’t want to turn away from it with Mister watching.

  “The danger out there,” the Right Reverend had warned him, “is that you will fall into their beliefs. They have a lot of imagination. I’m not saying they’re not good people. But they mix things up. Higgedly-piggedly. It’s a lack of discrimination. At first, it will jump right out at you—sun gods, saints dressed up like dolls, peyote buttons, nudity. Then you get used to it. You want to be politically correct and all that. Okay, then. After a while, you start to see it how they see it. When that happens, it’s time to leave.”

  Padre Pettit thought the old man was indulging his own fancies until he saw the very thing happen to Padre Jones in Española. One day, while visiting Jones’s parish, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, he had remarked that smoking was an addiction, like alcoholism, a disease that blotted out the sunlight of the spirit. Padre Jones, who had recently spent considerable time at the San Juan Pueblo, agreed with him one hundred percent—even though, he admitted, he was chained to the damn things himself. This did not disturb Padre Pettit because a man of God is, after all, a man. It was the remark Jones made at the door that bothered him.

  He put on his hat and said, “If it weren’t for the Little People, I could kick these coffin nails once and for all.”

  “Maybe he means the Indians,” Horshak replied, when Manny e-mailed this story. Padre Jones did not mean the Indians. He was referring to extremely small humanoids, ranging in height from four to six inches, who stole cigarettes. Padre Pettit did not give these details to the Right Reverend, who would have tried to turn the whole thing into a joke until he could find a replacement for the Taos post.

  “Réquiem ætérnam dona ei,” he prayed, facing the altar with his eyes closed. “Dómine; et lux perpétua lúceat ei. Requiéscat in pace. Amen.”

  He stood up too fast, and the room spun. Whoa there, he told himself, blinking in the sudden light.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Long after the moon had sunk into the cold black night, Tomás appeared. He stood slant in the doorway, backlit by the bulb on the porch, a big guy with the Mondragón face: Spanish eyes, wide cheekbones, and thick red lips. His mouth hung loose from drinking, and there was blood on his shirt. Your shadow is here, Abuela used to say.

  “Whasup, vato!” he called into the silent house. “What smells so good? Is that my dinner?”

  “Close the foquin door.”

  “Okay, okay.” Tomás squatted down on the stool to pull off his cowboy boots. They were new—white with black stitching.

  “How’s the party in town?”

  “Borin. But the chicas—chit! I met this one una real baby.”

  “¿Dónde está ella?”

  “How the hell do I know where she is?”

  “Al menos your eyes feasted,” said Mister, turning toward the kitchen to check on the enchiladas he was reheating in the oven.

  “Ese, I’m sorry I missed Abuela’s vigil.”

  At the kitchen door, with his back turned to Tomás, Mister said, “I didn’t go.”

  “I heard your papá was there.”

  “That californiano.”

  “He’s looking for you.”

  “Not looking real hard.”

  “Ese, something is burning in there!”

  “It’s the cheese,” said Mister, but he stayed in the doorway.

  “I don’t like to look at dead people,” said Tomás. “You know? Or I would have gone.”

  “The ladies brought food over here today. Your mom came.”

  “Yeah, that smells like her enchiladas burning.”

  “Smells like it.”

  “Do you think Abuela is mad at us?”

  “She’s dead, Tomás.”

  Once, when Mister was a child, waiting at the WIC office with Abuela, Mister had opened a National Geographic to the photograph of a dead boy about his age. Dark men and women surrounded the boy, who was blond, being carried in a silver coffin painted with pink flowers. Beside his head, there was a toy truck and a Mickey Mouse doll. The truck had a dent in it. He looked like an angel with his soft white hair and folded hands, surrounded by men with sunken eyes and scraggly beards and women with their faces all wadded up. His lips were turning dark, and the gums were already black. You could see the bruises.

  Abuela said it wasn’t a real boy. She said it was a boy in a movie.

  “But this is National Geographic,” Mister said. “They tell the truth.”

  The boy looked kind of green and kind of yellow and kind of plastic. He was definitely dead. Mister had seen a dead dog. Once you saw dead, you knew dead.

  “It happened a long time ago,” she said, but he could see this year’s date on the cover, beside her wrinkled hand.

  Suddenly, she snapped the magazine shut.

  Her eyes were open but closed, and he could see that she was seeing the boy, the truck, the doll. The black lips.

  That night in bed she held him close. Usually, she slept with her back to him, saying, “Be still. Go to sleep. One more sound, and you’re on the couch.”

  But this night she kept putting her hand on his chest, waiting for his next breath. Once, she pressed her face into the back of his neck and said, “Gracias a Dios.”

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  In the flickering light of the kitchen, Mister and Tomás sat at the wooden table drinking vodka from plastic cups while they scraped black cheese from the enchiladas.

  “Abuela was always asking me to replace that ceiling light,” said Mister. “It’s one of those fluorescent tubes.”

  “You could just tighten it. Usually you don’t have to replace it.”

  “It’s too late now,” said Mister. He tore open a bag of Oreos and took a bite of one. The cookie tasted like a chunk of clay. He remembered the way Rocky used to eat them, licking out the cre
am with her pink tongue, passing the chocolate disks to him and Tomás, one for each.

  “Go find her,” Abuela said when he told her that Rocky had left town.

  “Not my woman, not my problem,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “About what we talked about,” asked Tomás, picking up the vodka bottle. “Do you still want to do it?”

  “I’m doing it,” said Mister. “You don’t have to.”

  “Man, I told you I’m not going to let you murk yourself. That is eternal time in hell. Didn’t I already tell you that?” He drained his drink, gagging at the last gulp.

  They stared into their empty cups while the fluorescent light flickered. Mister picked up the cat saltshaker and turned it in his hands. It was missing one ear. He didn’t know what had happened to the matching dog pepper shaker. Life was hell, not Padre Pettit’s red-hot hell, but a long, cold, gray one of failure and disappointment and boredom.

  “I got your back, vato,” said Tomás. “You know, some weird shit went down with Rocky …”

  “Don’t talk about her. Don’t even say her name.”

  “She’s been staying at that monastery out in Abiquiu—Christ in the Desert. I was thinking maybe you could go out there, if you didn’t want to, you know …”

  “Shut up!” yelled Mister. He slammed his fist on the table, making the shaker jump.

  Last fall, he’d been drinking at El Taosenio when he got word that Tomás had beaten Rocky up—put her in the hospital. It was the weekend celebration of Día de los Muertos in Taos, and the bar was decorated with skeletons—skeletons in knit caps wearing skis, skeletons riding bikes, and of course, skeletons holding mugs of beer. Outside, the bells in the tower at our Lady of Guadalupe rang every thirty seconds, calling the dead.

  “I guess you heard about Rocky,” said Andy, the bartender. He was a morose man who wore a bedraggled gray feather stuck into the hole on the side of his baseball cap. On Wednesdays, when the Taos News came out, the locals would buy a paper from him even though he delivered snatches of the news with each drink. “Es terrible,” he would begin, shaking his head as he looked over the patron’s shoulder to some place like hell. If someone said, “Have a nice night,” Andy would reply, or “Que Dios te bendiga.”