Raptor Page 22

  “Still driving the shitmobile,” he said.

  “Pleasure to see you, too, Tim.”

  “Your car’s a junker, darlin’, but you know I love you and I always will.” He opened his arms wide and I walked in. “Pretty as ever,” he whispered in my ear.

  “Not that pretty,” I replied. We separated and I took a good look at him. “You’re not looking so bad yourself.” His curly brown hair was turning gray, but his belly had stopped hanging over his belt buckle and his cheeks were less ruddy than they’d once been. His eyes still had the startled expression of a baby taking its first good look at the world, but they were clear. On the wagon again. He was an outrageous drunk, not much different sober, an Irishman, and that was compounded by having grown up in Mexico where his father worked. I told him once that I thought the Irish were Britain’s Mexicans. “You’ve got a point, darlin’,” he said. “Only the Brits swallowed up our culture, language and all, and that will never happen to the Mexicans. They’re the ones who will be doin’ the swallowin’.”

  He took my arm. “No more drinking, no more smoking. I’m livin’ the sober life now. Come with me, take a walk on the tame side.”

  “Where?”

  “The cemetery. Jamie wants the dog in and she’s up there digging up bones—not the dead’s, ones she buried. Foxy?” he yelled. The dog didn’t answer.

  I have a weakness for old cemeteries, and Dolendo’s is one of the best. It’s filled with wooden crosses and crooked tombstones telling stories of the prematurely stricken and the miraculous survivors. Take the Ortiz family. In the 1800s Margarita lived to be 25, Pablito 7 and Josecito 5, but Jose made it to 1929 and 101. The bad news is that sooner or later you’re going to end up just like them, but it helps to know so many have gone first. A couple of Foxy Lady’s buddies who had been headed toward the cemetery hadn’t made it. We found their bodies, decaying lumps on the ground, noses pointed toward the gate. “Even the dogs are dying to get in,” said Tim.

  “Did you bring me up here just to say that?” I asked.

  “You know me too well, darlin’,” he replied.

  “Not that well,” I said, because when it comes to somebody else’s husband I’ve learned there’s always a far side to them you’ll never know.

  There was a flurry of dirt behind a tombstone. “Foxy,” Tim yelled. “Get your ass on over here.” She peered out at us, a red mutt with a long tail whose nose was covered with dirt. “Damn bitch,” muttered Tim. “Come over here or I’ll sic the hawk on you.” Foxy gave her tail a shake and went on digging.

  “The hawk? Aren’t you promising more than you can deliver?”

  “Not necessarily. The neighbors lost their cat to a hawk. When they moved here from California, the cat, an expensive Persian, refused to go outside and it had always liked being out before. After a couple of years in the place, they finally coaxed it through the door. It climbed the wall, and a hawk swooped down, picked it up in its talons and carried it away. When it runs out of cats, Foxy, you’ll be next.” He went behind the tombstone and pulled Foxy out, and we began walking back to the house.

  “Is that why you’re leaving Dolendo, afraid of the hawk?”

  “No, we’re leaving because my messenger-service business went under and Jamie was offered a job in Columbus teaching pottery.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I haven’t made my mind up yet, but I’ll tell you one thing.” He waved his arm around the cemetery then swung it toward the long view. It was a place that raised the big questions. “I’m tired of living in the middle of a fucking religious experience. We’ve got the house rented for a year. Maybe we’ll come back, maybe we won’t. Wait ’til you see what Jamie’s done to the place.”

  “Put in some more windows?” I’d been at the Malones’ one New Year’s Day bored stupid by the groans and grunts of television football when Jamie decided she wanted a new window in the bathroom. She picked up a sledgehammer and smashed a hole in the wall. You can do that with adobe.

  Tim laughed. “A whole lot more than that.” He pushed Foxy Lady toward his front door and just before we got there he said, “Lonnie’s here; she wants to see you.”

  Jamie was waiting for us behind the heavy wooden door. “Stay in the house, Foxy,” she said. The dog grinned, wagged her tail and disappeared inside.

  You wonder sometimes what keeps two people together. A week of it could be compared to a short flight on a commuter line; twenty years would be a voyage to Neptune to me. When I see Jamie, though, it makes some sense. She’s a tall woman, Tim’s size. They used to wear each other’s clothes, maybe they still did. She has large brown eyes and wears her hair hanging down her back, the kind of hair that falls into place and ends in a straight line. She’s a woman who pays attention to the small things and in the middle of a party worries about her dog, a woman who keeps her head when everybody else is losing theirs, a woman who would hold her marriage together no matter what the cost, but maybe for her the cost wasn’t that great. It seemed to be her nature to be a partner and a rock.

  “Good to see you, Neil.” She gave me a hug.

  “You, too, Jamie.”

  “What do you think of the house?”

  It used to be one large room and when the two of them needed psychic space, they imagined more. “I’m going into the den now,” Tim would say when he wanted to write. “Okay,” Jamie’d reply and go on ignoring him. From what I could see over and around the guests, they’d added some rooms, more windows, beams (called vigas around here) in the ceiling, a kiva fireplace, smooth pastel walls, Mexican tiles in the kitchen, a polished wood floor. Dolendo dirt-floor poverty had turned into Santa Fe style. Jamie was in her stocking feet, probably to protect the new floors. She eyed my running shoes suspiciously but she didn’t make me take them off. “It’s a change, all right,” I said. “Did you do all this yourself?”

  “Not exactly, I contracted it out, but that was a job, too.” Expensive, besides. I wondered, briefly, how the Malones, one potter and one failed messenger-service operator and poet, had paid for it. They’d been broke as long as I’d known them.

  “Now that you’ve made it so beautiful, aren’t you sad to leave?”

  “No,” said Jamie.

  Tim had wandered off among his Hispanic neighbors. Some of them were playing down-home music—a fiddle, a guitar, an accordion—that blended well with the sound of Hispanics speaking English. Native Spanish speakers have a way of singing the English language and rounding off its corners, but Anglos put angles in Spanish where they’ve never been.

  Jamie and I squeezed into the kitchen, my mind on some ice for the Cuervo Gold I’d brought. A table was covered on one side with bowls of posole, chile, chips, beans, a pot of chile con queso, on the other with bean sprout salad, tabouli, sesame noodles, whole-grain bread. A New Age woman was leaning against the dishwasher talking, a tall woman with a silver voice wearing a silver dress. She had a thick black mane parted down the middle with silver streaks that framed her face. Her eyes were turquoise blue. Her dress was made of some kind of thin, pale fabric, with a zigzag ankle-length hem, embroidered everywhere with lightning bolts of silver sequins, a dress you’d notice in a crowd. It was what they call wearable art in Santa Fe and only Hollywood actresses, rich Texans and expensive psychics could afford it, Santa Fe being one place in America where psychics make more money than lawyers. A psychic or an actress, I figured when the woman spoke, because a Texan’s voice has more oil in it than silver.

  “The center of Uranus is ice cold,” I heard her say.

  “That’s Ci,” said Jamie, “the psychic. You have to have at least one at a party around here.”

  The only way to get to the refrigerator was to press between C (or was it Sea?) and her audience. “Excuse us.” Jamie interrupted the monologue and introduced me since I was six inches away from the woman’s nose. “Ci, this is Neil Hamel.”

  “Neil?” she asked.

  “N-e-i-l,” I spelled it out. />
  “The man’s name. I like it. Short, simple, expressive of the Martian nature, the masculine, take-charge side. Most women have chosen names more aligned with Venus, but a name like Neil … now that makes a statement. What do you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Of course.” She smiled.

  “And I didn’t choose my name; I inherited it from my uncle, Neil Hamel, who was with the Tenth Mountain Division in World War II,” I said.

  “Named after the warrior uncle. Mars is the god of war, you know. I see something Martian about you, a very strong element or a weak one masquerading as strong. Mars does that sometimes. In the larger scheme we all choose our own names just as we all choose our parents and the moment when we incarnate.”

  I was about to choose a nice, cold tequila if I could find some ice. “Excuse me, Sea…” I began inching past.

  “Ci is short for Cielo. It means…”

  “I know what cielo means.”

  “Sky. In Spanish.”

  “Bedspread, too,” I said. Jamie had gotten waylaid by a guest, and I was on my own when it came to finding the ice. There wasn’t any. No ice bucket, and the trays in the freezer had been emptied before I got there. A large pot was brewing coffee. Some bottles of lemon-lime seltzer, raspberry ginger ale and white zinfandel in a clear bottle littered the Mexican-tiled counter—soda or disguised as same. I remembered when it used to be white chablis in a green bottle or clear liquor in a clear bottle. The only colored drinks were the ones the Mexicans drank out of plastic bags. I poured some Cuervo Gold into a paper cup. A guy with blond Rastafarian ringlets and an embroidered Guatemalan shirt was helping himself to a coffee.

  “Decaf,” he said, filling a Styrofoam cup.

  “Tequila,” said I.

  “You still drinking that stuff?” He shook his head.

  “You still wearing those shirts?” I asked. Guatemalan shirts had disappeared a decade ago from most places, but in pockets of northern New Mexico they still dressed like hippies, even though they drank like yuppies.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” the guy asked.

  “Albuquerque,” I said.

  “Albuquerque, jeez.” He shook his blond Rasta curls. “I’ve never understood how anyone can live there. “

  I was rescued from this dead-end conversation by an arm around my shoulder, a face full of blond hair.

  “Neil.”

  “Lonnie.”

  “Good to see you again.”

  “How have you been?”

  “Great.”

  “You look wonderful.”

  “So do you.”

  Actually, Lonnie looked worn out, but she always had, it was part of her appeal. Her hair was thin and frizzy and she bleached it almost beyond repair. She had a soft, voluptuous body that was always on the verge of turning to fat, but hadn’t yet. Fair-haired and delicate when she was on, frowzy when she wasn’t, she was often pretty, always vulnerable, the kind of woman men love, leave and love all over again.

  “The steps you take in this life set up the karma for the next one,” Ci said … loudly.

  “Is that what you call psychic babble?” I asked Lonnie, leading her to the far side of the kitchen where the kind of stove with burners that are part of the counter filled the spot where once an ancient wood stove had been.

  Lonnie laughed. “She babbles for bucks. Ci’s hot stuff right now. The psychic of the moment. What do you think of her hair?”

  “On her I like it.”

  “Sometimes I think I’ll let my hair go gray when the time comes,” Lonnie sighed. “It doesn’t look so bad if you’ve got a young face.” Lonnie had the face of a young woman older than her years or an older woman who still looks young. Somehow the fine age lines didn’t fit, which happens sometimes to fair and thin-skinned women. “Ci washes her hair in Perrier.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “It gives it body, she says.”

  “What’s her act?”

  “She used to be an astrologer. Now she takes people into their next incarnation, forward life progression, she calls it. It’s an amazing experience, Neil. You ought to try it sometime.”

  “I’ve got enough problems in this life, thanks.”

  “What you do in this one determines what will happen in the next, Ci says.”

  “A futuristic Shirley MacLaine. Does that mean it’s okay to have an affair with a married man in this lifetime if you plan to suffer for it in the next?”

  “Shirley MacLaine stiffed me. Did I ever tell you that? When I was a bartender at La Posada. I waited on her all night and she took off without leaving me one thin dime.”

  That had been Lonnie’s life, rotten jobs, no tips, and bad men, too. “What are you doing these days to support yourself?” I asked. In the time I’d known her she’d been a bartender, a landscape artist, a real estate agent, a messenger for Tim’s Helio Courier Messenger Service—a typical career in Santa Fe, where there are fifty applicants for every crummy job. Most people who follow that path are trying to be artists or artisans. As far as I knew, Lonnie had just been following a man.

  “I’m the manager of the Sangre de Cristo Health Club.”

  “The Blood of Christ Health Club?”

  “That’s it.” She poured herself some white zinfandel.

  The top buttons of Lonnie’s shirt had come undone. Pinned to the shirt was a “no” button with a red line drawn across the word UGLY. I’d seen Lonnie look better, but even at her worst, she wasn’t ugly.

  “Why the button?” I asked.

  “I’m on the Committee to Stop the Ugly Building,” she replied. “First Associates wants to put up a truly hideous office building on Paloma. It’ll be the tallest, largest, ugliest building in Santa Fe. It will fill the whole block, hide the view, dominate and ruin the entire downtown area.” A cause. Lonnie had been involved in them as long as I’d known her. She’d been unable to ban the bomb, save the whales, the dolphins or the baby seals either. The Vietnam war ended finally, however, I’d give her some credit for that.

  “Are there any tenants lined up for this building?” I asked.

  “The Zia Bank has the ground floor and the Santa Fe branch of your old law firm, Lovell, Cruse, Vigil and Roberts, has the two top floors.”

  They’d be the first to arrive on the doorstep of something ugly.

  “You could help us by talking to them, Neil.” The wine in her paper cup masqueraded as pink soda and that’s how Lonnie was drinking it. She poured herself some more.

  “Believe me. I’m the last person Lovell, Cruse, Vigil and Roberts would listen to. You did say the architect for this Ugly Building is First Associates?”

  “Rick himself. Doesn’t it make you sick?”

  Rick First was an architect Lonnie had been involved with off and on ever since I’d known them both in San Miguel de Allende. They’d been married for a few years but that didn’t bring them together. Then they got divorced and that hadn’t torn them apart.

  “What does Rick think about this?” I pointed to the UGLY button.

  “He’s pissed. It’s over between us, Neil.” She spun the wine around in her cup.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “No. This time it’s really over. He has someone else.”

  I’d heard that before, too.

  “This one’s a real estate developer from Texas with megabucks who’s helping to finance the Ugly Building. Giving Rick a chance to make a name for himself. Can you believe it? Rick with a shark-faced real estate developer? Christ. Her name is Marci Coyle, Marci with an i—like I said, she’s from Texas.” Lonnie’s lips puckered when she mouthed the name as if her zinfandel had been made with sour cherries. “Rick’s gotten as greedy as everyone else these days.”

  Always one to keep up with the times. In the extended sixties when I knew him—better than I should have, I’ll admit it—Rick First was a dope-smoking hippie, more interested in drugs and sex than money or architecture. I could s
ee the appeal to a guy like that of a rich and powerful woman. I could also see the appeal of a Lonnie who’d always be down there for him to fall on. A Marci Coyle, on the other hand, might expect a return on her investment.

  “Darlins.” Tim was filling up at the decaf machine.

  “Timito.” I called him by his San Miguel nickname.

  “Timber,” said Lonnie, leaning sideways until she fell on him.

  “Neil, come on over here.” Tim squeezed me against his other side. “Sandwiched between two of my favorite women, right where I want to be.”

  “If we’re the white bread, then what does that make you?” I asked.

  “The meat. I’ll be the meat in your sandwich any day.”

  “Baloney,” said Lonnie. “Baloney, Maloney.”

  “Lonnie, Lonnie, Lonnie.” Tim pulled her tight. “I’m the man your mother warned you about.”

  “Don’t you wish,” she said.

  Jamie wasn’t visible, but if she had been, she probably would have ignored us. No one is as flirtatious as a safely married man. I’d always thought Tim carried on like this because he was anchored and married. Lonnie, who was neither, leaned on him hard. It was a risk for Tim to be on the wagon at a party, but risk taking is the luxury of people with something to lose. The steps Lonnie took that might seem risky to some had always looked to me like a grab at security.

  I was ready for another Cuervo Gold, so I peeled Tim’s arm off and searched the kitchen counter, pushing aside empty, nonreturnable soda bottles, seltzer bottles and Styrofoam cups with the dregs of decaf in the bottom. “God damn it,” I said, “somebody took my bottle.”

  “Now darlin’, why would anybody do that,” Tim asked, “when nobody drinks spirits anymore in Dolendo?”

  “You mean they don’t drink their own.”

  “Have a decaf,” said Tim.

  “I never drink that stuff. How can you be sure it’s real? At least when you drink tequila you know you’ll be asleep at three in the morning.”