Inside, Ogden and his mother were approached by Manny. Manny looked like a loud person. He was a big man in bright clothes, shiny shoes, with long strides and large gestures. But when he opened his mouth, the softest, almost sweet, voice came out. It wasn’t feminine, but it was easy on the ear.
“Hello, Deputy, Mrs. Walker,” he said. He prided himself on knowing the name of anyone who had ever bought anything from him.
“Hello, Manny,” Eva said. “I need an air conditioner. A good one that can run day and night.”
Ogden let his mother wander off with Manny. He would stay out of it, let her make her decision, then carry it home and install it and drive it back when she didn’t like it. Manny was honest and his shop was the only show in town. They could have driven down to Santa Fe, but they didn’t and wouldn’t. Ogden browsed the shelves of hand tools. He stopped and admired all of the saws, daydreamed about making cabinet furniture some day.
“Hey, Ogden.”
Ogden turned around to find Leon Newton, the county clerk. He was a tall, pale white man with an endearing comb-over. “Hello, Leon.”
“Looking at saws?”
“Yes. What brings you in here?”
“Nails. Need nails. I own a house. I always need nails.”
Ogden nodded.
“Anything interesting going on down at the sheriff’s office?”
Ogden shook his head. He picked up a Japanese handsaw.
“That’s beautiful,” Leon said.
“It is.”
“I heard you’re looking for a young woman.”
“You heard that?”
“The girl’s cousin told me,” Leon said. “She was in my office a little while ago. I love her accent.”
“What was she doing in your office?”
“Looking at maps. She said she thought the most detailed maps would be in my office. She was right, of course. She’s smart. I pointed her to the giant one. You know, the big one on the wall opposite the counter. She looked at it for a good long time.”
“She ask to see anything else?”
“Like what?”
Ogden shrugged.
“No, she just looked at the map.” Leon looked at the saw still in Ogden’s hands. “I work with wood, you know. When I’m not trying to hold my house together with nails. I build cabinets. When I need them anyway. Measure twice and cut once, that’s my rule. Still, it doesn’t always work. You like to work with your hands, Deputy?”
“When I get a chance.”
“I think I’m going to build myself a gazebo. A place to sit and watch the sun go down. That’s a big project, but I think I can do it.”
Ogden smiled. “That’s great, Leon. Listen, I’ve got to find my mother.”
“Tell her I said hello.”
“I’ll do that.”
As they drove home Ogden’s mother said, “Manny says this one has plenty of BTUs.”
“That’s a good thing. You wouldn’t want to have too few BTUs,” Ogden said.
“Laugh if you want, sonny, but I know where you’ll be on hot August nights.”
“Nursing my hernia at your house.”
“It’s a little big.”
Ogden nodded in agreement.
“You don’t have to set it up tonight,” she said.
“No, I don’t mind. It’s easier to do it all at once.”
“Suit yourself, but I thought you might like to go out or something.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll go out.”
Ogden installed the machine and switched it on. After a few seconds of tepid air, the stream came out ice cold. “Well, this ought to do it.”
“Thanks.”
“Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go out.”
“That’s why you’re single, because you’re a smartass.”
“And who do you think I got that from?”
Ogden lived in a place where many, if not most, people still smoked and though there was no smoking allowed inside any restaurant, it only took fifteen nonsmoking smokers to make a place reek of cigarettes. It was this fact that he used to talk himself out of driving all the way home to get cleaned up before dropping in at the Blue Corn Café. He walked in and was called to the bar by his friends Rick and Manny. They had been the friends his father warned him to steer clear of when he was a teenager. They nearly got him killed the night before he left for the marines.
Manny and Rick had met Ogden at this very restaurant, the Blue Corn, to try to get him drunk before he took the train to California and Camp Pendleton. They’d failed to get him intoxicated, but they managed to persuade him to drive them north to Questa for a surprise. As he slid to a stop on the gravel yard outside a crummy barn, Ogden had a bad feeling. There were many cars and pickups already there.
“What is this?” Ogden asked. Then he saw a brown and white pit bull standing, barking in the bed of a truck. “Is this a dogfight?” He kicked the gravel. “Jesus Christ! You know I hate shit like this.”
“You gotta see it once,” Manny or Rick said.
“That’s not true,” Ogden said. He was arguing with them as they stood at the tall barn doors. “That’s just not true.” Behind Manny, Ogden caught glimpse of a brindle dog tearing into the side of a white dog. He turned away at the sight of blood and marched back toward his father’s old Jeep Cherokee. He ignored his friends’ pleas for him to come back, then their voices were gone and he knew they’d moved inside. As he passed by the brown and white dog in the back of the pickup, he found he just couldn’t leave her there. He untied the end of the rope attaching her to the truck and led her to his own car, put her in, and drove away. It was all quite surreal as he skidded onto the dirt road, the dog panting and staring forward through the windshield. He understood that he had taken the dog because he was trying to save it from fighting, he understood his act to be theft, yet he didn’t know what he was doing with it or what he was going to do with it. As he skated down the washboard road to the highway he began to grasp the full gravity of his moment of idiocy. This animal belonged to someone, an objectionable someone certainly, possibly a dangerous someone. He drove into Plata and under the lights of the gas station at the flashing signal at the north edge of town. He wanted to consider his options while he pumped his gas, but he could think of none. Then a Ford LTD station wagon filled with a family and a collie pulled up to the pump beside him. The pit bull went wild, barking and throwing himself into the closed passenger-side window, trying to get at and probably eat the collie. The children in the station wagon screamed and cried. The parents stared holes through Ogden as he crawled in behind the wheel and drove away. He was terrified of the dog himself, especially now, but the beast’s attention was focused away from him and so he could drive. As soon as the collie was removed from view, the pit bull became quiet, eerily quiet, staring once again out the front window. He drove all over, afraid of the dog and afraid the dog’s owner would find him. He spotted the car of a state trooper outside a dingy restaurant in Arroyo Hondo and did the only thing he could think of to he tied the dog to the door handle of the trooper’s car and drove away.
Ogden now looked at his so-called friends at the bar and said, “I hate both of you.”
“What’d we do?” Rick asked.
Ogden wondered what he was doing in the tavern at all. He could never last more than an hour, if that long. Just chatting briefly with Manny and Rick made him feel exhausted.
“Warren and his wife are over there,” Manny said.
Ogden looked and saw his fellow deputy sitting at a table at the window. He walked over. “This is what I like to see,” he said.