Again, the leaves rose slightly, almost so slightly that I might have imagined it, except for the rustling sound and the faint trace of purple tails of light trailing the leaves like the sheer wisps of Salome’s veils in ultraslow motion. I kept moving my hand, my pace crawling, the plant still breathing, its scimitar fingers rising… and falling… rising… and falling… I could hear it breathing now: low, erogenous, carnal, quivering, and reverberating a message beyond the comprehension of a mere two-legged being, something about life: sweet-loss-sacred-death-gift-fear-pleasure-pain… not this, more than this… something about harmony: love-joy-holy-all… not this, more than this… something about presence: Now, Only now. Only. One. Not this, more than this… none of this.
May I have my book?
The leaves relaxed. I picked up the book, its cool deerskin cover a living thing in my hand, the eyes of the deer in my mind, deer looking through my eyes, then one with my eyes, the buds of my antlers sprouting in sweet spurts of pain from my head. As I willed the book toward my chest, I kept my pace snail-like, solar, tidal, seasonal, millennial, my arm having swung out into the yucca’s world like a pendulum and now coming back as evenly and as languorously, as calculated and measured as Moon’s slow cycle of death and resurrection as she plods across the night skies from one month to the next.
The yucca was finished with me.
I took the book into my arm and held it next to my chest. No deer there. I felt a sweeping sadness that our interlude-mine and the yucca’s-was over, that I didn’t fully understand what it was relating, that I could never understand.
I turned and went down the slope toward my Jeep, which waited near the arroyo, light-years from where I had just been.
27
By the time I got back down the mountain to the turnout area in front of the church, my Jeep was the only car there. I was feeling too odd to talk with Regan, so I headed toward home. But on the way through Taos, I had another attack of cramping and queasiness, so I stopped by the BLM offices to use the facilities.
There were two notes in my message box. One indicated that Christine Salazar wanted to talk with me. I phoned her from the cubicle in the back where I normally made out my reports.
“You asked me to keep you informed,” Salazar said. “So I wanted to let you know that the body of Father Ignacio Medina, or to be more precise-all that remains of him after the autopsy-has been released to his family.”
“Actually, I just learned that the services are tomorrow in Truchas,” I said, my gut still growling. “Have you heard anything else?” “No. I’m afraid that I’m pretty well out of the loop now because the OMI has released the remains. I’m not going to be a good resource from here on out. Sorry.”
The other note was a pink slip with the name “Mrs. Suazo” and a phone number. I tried calling the number, but a message said the line had been disconnected or was no longer in service. I felt churning in my stomach that may not have derived from Tecolote’s cura. Had Santiago Suazo gone home after our confrontation and taken out his ire over what I had done to him on his poor wife? I hoped not. I tried the number again. Again, I got the “out of service” message.
I walked out to the lobby where Rosa was doodling on her calendar/ desk blotter. Even though I thought it was probably a futile effort, I held the pink slip up and asked Rosa, “Did you take this call?”
Rosa looked at the slip skeptically, then said, “Am I in trouble if I did?”
“No, I just wondered if you remembered anything about the caller, Mrs. Suazo.”
“What about her?”
“How did she sound when she called?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did she seem afraid or worried?”
Rosa took the slip from my hand and studied it, as if the answer were there on the paper. “I don’t think so.” She handed it back to me.
“Did she sound like the matter could be urgent?”
“Oh, wait a minute. I remember her now,” Rosa replied. “No, she didn’t sound like anything was wrong at all. As a matter of fact, she sounded very happy.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Eeeee! Did I forget to write down that she said she wanted to tell you some good news?” Rosa grabbed the pink message slip from me again and studied it. “I guess I didn’t put it on there. I’m sorry.”
On the way to my cabin, a gnawing pain started to work in my stomach. It felt like a dull meat grinder was working its way through my midsection. By the time I was halfway home, I knew Tecolote’s prediction about not being able to ride that night was already true. I stopped at the café on the highway a few miles from my place and used the pay phone to call Roy. I asked him to relay the message to the ranger station in Peñasco so Kerry would know.
When I finally got home, I was doubled over from the pain. I hobbled into my cabin, propped a chair against the door under the doorknob, laid my rifle and pistol on the bed, and collapsed beside them, without removing clothes or boots.
28
As I drove to Father Ignacio’s funeral the next morning, I was more keenly aware than ever of the abundance of small crosses along the roadside that spoke of mortal tragedies. The highways of northern New Mexico are trimmed with ornamental remembrances of death. These memorials are usually composed of a crude wooden crux held upright by a cairn of small stones, and any of several sorts of brilliantly colored adornments: artificial flowers in electric hues, neon fake-flora funeral wreaths, ribbon banners emblazoned with Beloved Son or Love Forever in gold glitter. I have seen rosaries dangle from many of the crosses, sometimes gold chains, and Purple Hearts, Silver Stars, or other military insignia. These shrines are carefully tended. For Nuevo Mexicanos, these places are sacred, full of grief. Unlike other parts of the country, the Land of Enchantment cannot contain its sorrows and losses in neat, tidy parcels of land. Loss is everywhere. La Muerte grins from the shoulders of highways, the intersections of dirt lanes, the cattle guards across county roads.
Driving around a curve where a cluster of crosses marked multiple calamities, I wondered if all this carnage might not be due to the wild landscape that loomed in the darkness, ready to steal back its power from those who would conquer it-on the very roads they’d made to do so. Or perhaps it was due to one of the highest per capita incidences of alcoholism in the fifty United States.
Although I was driving more than eight thousand feet above sea level, I was less than two-thirds as high as the tallest crests of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that scaled onward to the east when I entered the wide alpine mountain valley cradled between the High Road and Trampas Peak. On the western ridge of the basin, the High Road passed through the village of Las Truchas, which means “trout,” so named because of the wealth of these fish in the mountain streams.
Just before arriving at the village, I went by a cemetery overlooking a breathtaking vista of piñon and pine forests as far as the horizon. The graves in this campo santo were embellished with the symbols of the culture. A shiny helmet and the front half of a Harley Davidson Sportster rose, half buried, over a grave, angled toward the sky, ready for the departed to don headgear and gun it hard into the next life, popping a wheelie as he took off. Intricately carved granite crosses were draped with chains, dripping with fuchsia fabric flowers. Statuary of saints and the Blessed Virgin had artificial bouquets of impossible colors at their feet-turquoise, lime green, neon pink, and red, red, red. White picket fences, scrupulously painted and repainted-and others made of chain and poles-staked out turf for the deceased. Hand-carved cottonwood crosses, some of them nameless, others with etched appellations worn smooth by sandblasting winds, tilted blanched and weathered in tenacious weeds.