When we leave La Fonda, the plaza is taped off close to the obelisk. Yellow plastic flaps between the trees, sectioning the space where men scan their forensic grid for evidence. The body has been removed. Though the cops are engrossed, Tséh Dog works the throttle tenderly, and turns her black Thunderbird onto East Palace Avenue toward Paseo de Peralta. We pass the adobe-colored Basilica of Saint Francis of whom it is said that he pitied the wolf, and loved wild flowers, the vivid animals, and haunched mountains. The ropes hold the astronaut upright on the motorcycle, lashed around Tséh Dog’s leather back, his rigorous arms pointing at the road, his head encased, embalmed in a glittering silver helmet. She accelerates toward a high abstraction in the mountain, chiseled by old rain and old lightning. The road is empty and the sky is full, the dark scattered with mica. The astronaut lolls slightly, like a sailor bound to his wheel, or Ahab on the whale, as the asphalt switches and undulates closer to the summit, and the toe of her left boot works the gears. His ghost shivers under the weight of his skin, the gravity of the speeding motorcycle. When the time comes, Tséh Dog will stop, unfasten the knots across her chest, and disentangle the astronaut from the cycle. Heavy with himself, he will be carried into the pines as a deer is carried, up the ragged slope, under the canopy of the forest. Soon, we will stand together in the grove in the mountains where the others are. The way is difficult. She sweats in the darkness. Two bodies, strips of blackened flesh hanging from grids of bone, cavities chewed from their torsos, are propped against the rock when she brings the astronaut there, one in the remains of his gray flight suit, one in bloodstained jeans and a denim shirt. She places the third, wearing his helmet, between them. The originals have been desecrated by animals, decomposed. They face west. The moon exposes them. Here are the decaying orbits of the archangels. Here is the decline of the overmen. Theirs is the madness that makes ours, these hopeful men. Tséh Dog appears oblivious to their state, accepting them, as she puts her weird trinity together. Whatever this is, it is her own. It has no past in her ancestors. There is quiet fury in it, a waste of courage. It is sad to observe. The hollows of bough and bone exchange absurdity and sorrow. She cocks her head subtly, listening.
Like Say Dog? I had said, and she’d nodded that this was close enough. I don’t know how many years ago I met Tséh Dog. She recognized me at Hotel La Fonda one night, the place that sits like a ziggurat upon the crushed labyrinth of the old hotel, The Exchange, where I washed dishes. I heard her call my name. “Billy,” she said, noting my shade crossing the bar, and I was brought up like a man called out on the street. My ghost is like shattered glass — some in Mesilla — Silver City — Fort Sumner — and she had one of me to scry with. She calls me Coyote, Fox-Boy, Rabbit, other things. Tséh Dog may be the future, earthbound, resistant to astronauts, protector of emptiness. “There’s a chopper coming.” She reaches into the leg pocket of the first corpse’s flight suit.
If the others had subcutaneous trackers, we wouldn’t have lost them. Yet, did it give the third a false sense of security, as if the Agency was a god to watch over him? Martin Richter studied his screen, the blue blip movement without biosignal. They were close, but both things could not be true, he thought. Perhaps the chip was damaged, reporting movement randomly, without cause, while the astronaut lay sleeping at the hotel; or perhaps he was moving, playing the tourist oblivious to the fact that his life signs were flat. Now, Richter felt a thin flush of embarrassment — better to have instructed the pilot to take him to the hotel first, to rule out catastrophe before assuming it? Now they were low over the pines, skimming the flanks of the Sangre de Cristos, closing in on a sparking microdot, their searchlight probing out ahead and below them, vicious white against the darkness. Taking the rifle from its rack, he opens the side door to a gale of freezing air, and the deafening beat of the rotors. “There!” The spotlight falls on the dead astronauts, a glitter-ball light blooming from the silver helmet of the third. The men seem to have spilled from space. The pilot’s voice squelches over the comm-link, and the Huey jolts like a startled horse, as his shock translates through the stick. Richter fires at the figure standing over the bodies. He hears the bullet ricochet from the rock. Struggling to aim again, he calls to the pilot, “Gas, now!” He sees her clearly for a moment. The hunting rifle feels good in his shoulder, riddled with cool rage. The pilot hovers the chopper over the scene. Like shooting the wolf that took your lamb, Richter tells himself. He fires again, and pulls on a mask as the spectral plume drifts below, but is taken by the wind, away from the grove with its terrible shrine. “Keep us still... Keep us—”
Tséh Dog curls her shoulder under another shot from the helicopter, like a boxer turning under a punch, raising the pistol she took from the flight-suited dead like an uppercut, fluid and fierce. She fires off-center from the spotlight, second-guessing the pilot. The second shot paints the cockpit with his larynx and milky studs of jawbone and tooth that drip down the curved glass. The chopper pitches and howls in the moonlight, the beam of the searchlight swiping over the deep trees, moving away, before it enters a terminal tilt and dives forward, as if into unconsciousness. The rotors are ripped from the fuselage and the tail breaks like a wishbone in the shredding boughs. Birds lift into the night. There are no flames. Soon there is silence. And we ride back to La Fonda.
The astronaut’s possessions are in our room, like relics of the future. Tséh Dog doesn’t think the Agency will send anyone here, not with one of their choppers lost up in the Sangres. Somehow, they knew we had taken him there. They will discover their crashed helicopter. Certainly, then, they will discover their dead astronauts arranged in the grove. The terror of it will hold them at bay for a time. The story will not get out, unless Tséh Dog tells it. We sleep like the dead, awaken shimmering with rude promise. “We should go down there,” she says, “to the spaceport.” I look at her funny. “Go to Mars in their place,” she suggests. I’m not certain that she is kidding me. For the present, we ride the elevator down to get breakfast in the old Placita, now La Plazuela, the hotel dining room with its fountain. Her chromium reflection suggests that she is thinking about the third astronaut. How she killed him, I don’t know. “Come on, Coyote. I’m hungry.” The future is visible, like a movie, readable for those with eyes to see it.
After breakfast we walk the plaza; now the yellow police tape and forensics crew are gone. The sun is bright over the mountains. The air is crystalline, sharp with altitude. Tséh Dog has a hip flask of mezcal, and the taco carts are out. Gradually, slow in the glamour of our time, we turn the quadrants onto Indian row, where the vendors are out, cramped on their blankets and folding stools, with their silver, clay, and turquoise on black sheets before them. A sunburned child with a plastic raygun shoots sparks at the Indians from across the street. Tséh Dog combs her pompadour and gets five dollars from the parents for posing as a villain. Afterward, she curls her lip in disgust, but she does have the mother’s wristwatch. It can be sold in a few days. The day goes like that. Later, we watch a Native kid skateboarding on the bandstand. The kid rumbles and scrapes in radical circles, and there are tears in Tséh Dog’s eyes. She’s happy. She has the bonfire taste of the mezcal in her mouth, and she’s thinking about the ritual in the mountains. I can feel it. The pines redden at the close of day.