The Other Side of Death Page 12

  In the jewelry section a woman was trying on a silver ring. “It’s Navajo,” the seller—who wasn’t—said. The buyer had decided against it, but was having trouble getting the ring off her finger. “If it doesn’t come off, we take the finger,” said the Anglo vendor. “If the finger doesn’t come off, we take the hand. If the hand doesn’t come off, we take the arm. If the arm…”

  I walked past the clocks with pictures of bleeding Jesuses painted on them, past a guy playing a guitar and foot-powered drum singing early Bob Dylan and a booth selling baby avocados—twelve for a dollar. “Hey, Ma,” a Hispanic girl yelled at her mother. “Those avocados are big as your eyeballs.” When I got to bones I found Pete Vigil sitting on an aluminum chair behind a blanket with several sets of elk antlers spread across it, wide, white antlers with prongs that reached for the sky. King was not with him.

  “Good morning, my friend,” Pete said.

  “Hello,” I replied. “How you doing?”

  “Good. And you?”

  “Okay. Where’s King today?”

  “I can’t bring him here. He’s too macho, he fights with all the other dogs. You want to buy an elk horn? For you it will only be forty dollars.”

  “They’re kind of large. How would I get it home?”

  “They fold up. I’ll show you.” He showed me a joint in the middle where the horns could be folded together.

  “What would I do with it?”

  “Put it over your fireplace. This is a good one here. It has twelve prongs. Every year they lose the horns and in the spring the velvet comes back. I can give you this one for thirty-five dollars.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “I have a lot of things on my mantel already.”

  “A picture of your boyfriend?”

  “Yup.”

  “When we get married you’ll have to take him down.”

  “I’m getting kind of used to him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Pete Vigil sighed. “I wanted you all to myself. The man you want to see is at the end of the aisle here on the left. Just tell him I sent you.”

  “I will. Thanks a lot.”

  “Come back and tell me what he says.”

  “Okay,” I answered. Pete Vigil was a charming man, but an old man who’d mastered the skills lonely old people have for grabbing your attention and holding it. I hoped the bone man wouldn’t be a wasted effort, a fiction Pete had created to bring some adventure to his life.

  The bone man’s specialty was antlers and skulls. He had a lot of them and they were spread over a large blanket, white skulls with gaping black holes in the middle of the forehead and where the eyes had been. Some had been painted with blue or red designs. Some had horns attached, some seemed to be horses or cattle, the kind of cattle you come across in the national forest that are put out to graze in the spring and get rounded up in the fall but don’t always make it back.

  He was a medium-size Anglo about my age. His dark hair was pulled into two ponytails and wrapped in leather thongs. He wore a T-shirt and leaned against a rotting brown pickup that would be a sure bet in the Taos ugly truck contest. Some feathers tied onto the door handle and the antenna flapped in the breeze. He faced west like a dog with his nose to the wind so all I could see was profile. I waited for him to turn around, looked at the bones, sent a telepathic message that I was there. When that didn’t work, I said, “Excuse me.”

  He pulled himself away from the truck and ambled over. As he turned toward me I could see that his T-shirt had a map of a once-familiar stain of a country on it. SOUTHEAST ASIA WAR GAMES, the shirt said, 1959-1975. SECOND PLACE. “You into bones?” he asked me.

  “At the moment,” I said. “Where do you get all these skulls from anyway?”

  “I find them, people sell them to me. Why do you want to know?”

  Why indeed? Was I expecting him to say he killed animals just to get their bones? “Just curious, I guess. Who buys them?”

  “Anybody and everybody.”

  “What do they do with them?”

  “Hang ’em on the walls, make chandeliers, makes no difference to me. And you? You lookin’ or buyin’?” He pulled a toothpick out of his jeans pocket.

  “Neither. Pete Vigil sent me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He put the toothpick between his teeth and began to chew. “His son was my buddy in Nam.”

  “So he said.”

  “I’m workin’ on it, I hang out, hear things. Give me your number, and I’ll call if I get something definite.”

  I handed him one of my lawyer’s cards and he took it with his left hand and stuck it in the pocket of his jeans. “This case is very important to me,” I said. “I need all the help I can get. I’m representing the victim’s family and I’m not getting any cooperation from the police.”

  “There when you don’t want ’em, not there when you do,” he said.

  “The sooner you could call me, the better.”

  “Hey, I said I’ll do what I can.” As he bent over to rearrange a skull, I saw a dark spot around his elbow that resembled a bruise but turned out to be a spiderweb tattoo with an insect trapped in it.

  “That’s an interesting tattoo. A spiderweb, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What’s the insect?”

  “A fly that got caught in the web.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “The fly?”

  “The tattoo.”

  “Why? You want one?” He looked me over from top to bottom, side to side, looking for the right spot, maybe, to place a tattoo.

  “Just curious.”

  “I got mine in Da Nang, but you can get ’em here now.”

  “Well, thanks for your help.”

  “Yeah.” He walked away, leaned against the pickup and turned his nose back to the wind. I returned to Pete Vigil, who was sitting in his aluminum chair resting his head in his hands like he’d fallen asleep.

  “Wake up, Pete,” I said.

  He started, but smiled when he saw me. “How did you make out?”

  “Well, he didn’t reveal anything, but said he’d call me.”

  “He won’t tell you much, but he won’t tell you wrong either. You didn’t buy any bones from him, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. I’ve been thinking about it. I can let you have this antler here for thirty dollars. That’s a real bargain for twelve prongs.”

  “I’ll think it over,” I said. “Thanks, Pete.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” he replied.

  I went out through the jewelry section. The woman who had been trying to get the silver ring off had succeeded and the Anglo jeweler was trying to sell it to someone else. “That one’s Hopi,” he said. Navajo one minute, Hopi the next. I went back to the parking lot and tried to find my car, which was like looking for one of those cows in the fall that had been let loose in the national forest in spring. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t driving a beat-up old and ugly orange Rabbit any longer, but a new white Ford just like everybody else. I didn’t remember what row it was in, only that it was at the far end of the lot. There were a lot of white Fords at that end of the lot and a number of them had false plates on the front that said RICH FORD if they didn’t say EL JEFE or DOREEN. “God damn it,” I told myself. “You’ve got better things to do than look for a stupid car,” but that’s what I was doing, walking up one aisle and down the next, looking for a white Ford that my key would fit in because I didn’t have any other way to identify it. It made a good case for tying a feather to the antenna or hanging a pair of signature fuzzy dice from the mirror. A jet flew overhead and left a squiggly trail in the sky, a low rider cruised by with something chrome and glittery spinning inside the wheel rims, a pickup passed me with a license plate that had a purple heart on it and a bumper sticker that said VIETNAM … The rest was in Navajo.

  Eventually I found a lock that fit my key and promised myself that from now on I would make a note of where I left the legger. I went home and
took a nap, and when I woke up made chile willies for the Kid. It’s a mixture of salsa, blue corn tortillas and cheese, his favorite meal of the ones I make. He brought the Tecate and the limes.

  “Kid,” I asked him over dinner at my coffee table. “Are you going to be getting the part for el conejo soon? A white car in a parking lot is like a deer in the woods. You can’t find it.”

  “The guy promised me just a few more days, Chiquita. The white car’s not so bad.”

  “You’d look good in it, Kid. I don’t.”

  “How do you look?”

  “Like a lawyer on white bread.”

  “You are a lawyer.”

  “Maybe, but who wants to look like one?” There was a red rose on the mantel, picante food and the Kid at the coffee table, me in the middle.

  The Kid shrugged. “You can’t drive an old car forever, Chiquita. Maybe it’s time to get a new one.”

  “I can’t afford it.”

  "El conejo will cost you a lot of money, if you keep it. When they get old it's one thing after another."

  “I know. Listen, Kid, I want to ask you something. Do you think I’m bland? I went to the flea market today and everybody there looked a lot more interesting than me.”

  “Bland? What does that mean?”

  “It means a boring white person with no tribe, no history, no family, no color.”

  “You, Chiquita? Bland? Tienes pelotas.” That means “you have balls,” it’s one of those idioms that translate literally from one language to another. “You are independent, brave.”

  The trouble with being brave and independent is that you can’t be colorful, too. It’s fun to dress up in tribal costume when you’re with your tribe, but it’s crazy to attract attention when you’re out there on the firing line alone.

  “To me you are … you are very…” The Kid picked up his Tecate, sipped, thought.

  What? I wondered. Bitter, smart-ass?

  “American,” he said.

  12

  ON MONDAY MORNING I called Bunny Darmer in Roswell. She’d been patient, but it had been four days since I’d agreed to represent her and I knew she’d want to hear what had been accomplished. I was relieved technology hadn’t gotten to the point yet where you have to look at who you’re talking to. I wasn’t eager to enter Bunny’s kitchen or bedroom and see her slumped over the phone in her old bathrobe with her hair matted gold and gray.

  “I was hoping you’d call today,” she said in a flat, quiet voice. “If you didn’t I was going to call you.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “It’s not getting any better.”

  “I’m sorry.” I couldn’t really know what Bunny felt, but what could be worse than losing a child? It had to be a whole other dimension of pain, the outer edge of the pain envelope. I imagined it might be something like living in the far north in the fall when the days get shorter and the nights longer and you’re moving toward the solstice, the point where you’re submerged in night. If you live through it, spring will come. But until you’ve been there, you can’t imagine how dark it will be and once you’re in the depths, it’s hard to believe it will ever get brighter. The only way to find out what you can endure is to endure it. That’s what Bunny had to look forward to.

  “She has clothes here in her closet,” she said. “I go in there and I look at them and I think, she will never wear that shirt, she will never wear that sweater, she’ll never wear any of them ever again.”

  “I have a sweater of hers that I borrowed. Would you like it back?” Bunny hadn’t mentioned her daughter’s name and I found that I couldn’t say it either, as if naming her violated some primitive and sacred taboo.

  “No, you keep it. Who have you talked to so far?” she asked.

  “Rick; his fiancée and backer Marci Coyle; and Jorge Mondragon, who approved the building.” It wasn’t really a lawyer’s role to be conducting an investigation, but that’s what I’d been doing. “Nobody’s admitting to anything.”

  “What about the police, did you talk to them?”

  “Yes, but first I saw a friend of mine who used to be a medical investigator. He told me it’s possible she could have been murdered with no signs.”

  “How?”

  “Smothered,” I said and left it at that.

  “And did you tell Railback?”

  “Yes, and I took him the knob from the sleeping bag that I found, too. He still doesn’t think there was any crime.”

  “That … that …” I could have filled in the blanks for her easily. Shit. Prick. Son of a bitch. “Rat,” she said. If I hadn’t given her hope, I’d given her anger—at least it would get her through the day. If it would make her feel better to blame him, like Railback himself had said, so be it. “He can just close his file and say it’s over. But it will never be over for us. Never. She was our only child. When you only have one your whole life revolves around her and what she will do.”

  “Believe me, she’d have done a lot by stopping the building. I’ve seen the model and it is ugly. But people are still campaigning against it, and I hope they’ll succeed. Fortunately Railback’s not our last alternative. I talked to Dennis Quinlan, the district attorney, and he’s going to look into it.”

  “Good. It sounds like you’ve been busy.”

  I had been when you stopped to think about it. “I want to talk to Lonnie’s friend Ci next.”

  “Keep me informed, please.”

  “I will,” I said.

  ******

  Monday afternoon found me on the lonesome highway for another visit to Rick. Good Friday was only four days away and the peregrinos were starting out, with a couple of miles behind them and eighty or ninety to go, men usually, alone or in pairs, ordinary, dumpy and out-of-shape guys carrying day packs and water jugs, walking briskly along the shoulder of the interstate while the cars and the semis whizzed by. They were headed for the sanctuary at Chimayo to dip into the chapel’s healing earth, give thanks and/or ask for forgiveness. Religion is taken seriously in northern New Mexico; the more difficult the journey, the greater the reward. Except for the highway overpasses there’s not a patch of shade on the interstate, and at five thousand to seventy-five hundred feet the sun doesn’t let you forget it. Some peregrinos wore hats, some wrapped their heads in scarves desert style, some were bareheaded. It was a little after one, the sun was close to midheaven, their shadows were lumps of darkness at their heels. A lot of the peregrinos were probably atoning for a year of wife and/or substance abuse, but you had to admire the effort.

  I got to Santa Fe a little early for my appointment with Rick, so I stopped at the De Vargas Mall to get a midafternoon sugar fix. At Albertson’s I had to wait on a long line to pay for a solitary bag of M&Ms. I usually don’t go grocery shopping in the afternoon, and I’d forgotten that it takes all afternoon to do it. People who are free in the daytime are a different breed than the working class. There are a lot of them in Santa Fe, writers, maybe, artists, as well as the ungainfully unemployed. Albertson’s, on the cutting edge of supermarket technology, had installed a new checkout system, a robot under the counter who announced what you had bought and how much it cost in flight-attendant voice. “Bananas, forty cents a pound,” it droned, “coffee, four ninety-eight, OBs, five ten, Preparation H, five-fifty.” It was enough to send you back to work.

  So were the guys hanging around the parking lot. I’d made a note of where I’d left the car this time and went right to it, keys in hand, which is a good place for them. A couple of men were leaning on a nearby ugly truck. I was aware of their presence, but I don’t look too closely at idle men in parking lots. I know what they’re going to look like anyway. Those are the kind of guys who consider a casual look an invitation and eye contact a signed deal. The kind who will insult you, rape you (mentally if not physically) and never hike to Chimayo to apologize.

  “You got big tits,” said one of them as I stuck the key in the lock.

  “You’ve got a big mouth,” I foolishl
y replied.

  “I got a big pecker, too.”

  “Why don’t you put it where your mouth is?”

  “I’d like to put it in your…”

  I got in, slammed the door, turned the radio loud, put my foot to the floor and burned rubber getting out of there.

  It didn’t put me in the best mood for meeting Rick in his territorial office. He was sitting behind his desk with his gray hair in place, his expression under control. His hair had once been long, black and curly, but even then he wore it tied back in a ponytail. His eyes had always been speckled blue and evasive. “My old friend Neil,” he smiled tightly, indicating he was still pissed at me for insulting his building, but if I’d told him then and there (falsely) that I was sorry, that I regretted deeply having insulted him, that, even after all these years, I remembered him as a wonderful, magical lover, he would have forgiven me. Not only that, he probably would have suggested we go off somewhere and do it again. That’s the kind of guy he was, as enslaved to the chase and to women—or his concept of himself in relationship to women—as individual women were to him. “What do you want?” he asked in a voice that was just expressionless enough to allow any possibility.

  “How well do you know Jorge Mondragon?” I asked.

  “For Christ’s sake, Neil, forget about it. Lonnie self-destructed, nobody murdered her, nobody paid Jorge Mondragon off. Not me, not Marci, not anybody. She told me you’d been at the house asking questions. What’s this obsession with playing amateur dick? You bored with being a lawyer? You need the Darmers’ money or just feeling guilty because you were the one who let Lonnie go off alone and stoned?”