Curse the Names (6 page)

“What’d you say your name was?”

“James.”

“You know Red’s in Española?”

“Sure,
Best Food in Town
.”

He did not smile. “Meet me at the bar at lunchtime, alone.”

Sunshine turned his back on me and returned to the kitchen, sliding the order window shut.

I stood up to leave and saw that the waitress had made herself scarce. All I had was a twenty and it was definitely time to go, although where to I didn’t know. She ended up with a generous tip.

There would be six hours—the full morning
—
until the rendezvous at Red’s. I could play a few rounds at Towa Golf Resort, but my hand ached, the morning was already sweltering, and after the encounter with Sunshine my nerves were shot.

I killed a little time at a coffee shop called the Red Door and checked out my finances on the phone. It made me feel pretty good to look at the 100k I had socked away, all in a money market fund that back-ended my checking and savings accounts. I could have put some of it in stocks, but fuck that after 2008.

I stopped at Saints & Sinners but it wouldn’t open until noon—goddamn Sunday blue laws. Fortunately, there was a guy behind the store who waved me over to his trailer. He sold me a couple of Jim Beam minis at a hefty mark-up.

I downed the Jim Beams in the parking lot of Lowe’s and wandered around for a while inside the homeimprovement warehouse. The bland prerecorded lady chanting
Assistance needed in the glass aisle
over and over was a perfect soundtrack for the seventh circle of hell.

I got back in the Spider, scanned the parking lot, took out the Altoids tin, and lit a joint.

I decided to drive up to Chimayó. Still three hours to kill. I thought it would be cool to visit the Santuario, no ordinary church but a “sanctuary” that, thanks to the magic dirt that comes out of a hole, draws millions of Christians a year—many who literally make the pilgrimage on hands and knees.

I parked a hundred yards up the highway from a church plaza choked with beat-up Continentals parked willy-nilly on the packed earth. I bowed my way into the chapel, tapping my shoulders and forehead in an effort to blend in. I wasn’t looking for a revelation. The chapel just seemed like a nice, cool place to kill some time.

Behold the altar, the cross, the alcove off to the left wherein emerged the miraculous mud, walls featuring all the braces, crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs that the beneficiaries had left behind.

I read a retablo:

Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked.

Beside it, incongruous among the orthopedic wares, hung a blue tennis racket. What had this devotee been cured of?

The priest was nowhere to be found, but a crazy old lady came up to me with her evil eye and said, “Maldito!” She made a cross over herself three times quickly as if to cleanse herself of me. “Get you-self a sanador, que te cante unos labados.”

I got out of there quick, driving back to the state highway and down to Española.

R
ed’s. Red’s restaurant-lounge. Red’s with the drive-up window attached:
Fairview Liquor Store & Bar, Dispenser Lic. #0331.

Red’s with the big neon sign flashing
Reds
and the cheap little lighted marquee that reads,
BEST FOOD IN TOWN
, a claim that cannot possibly be true, but nobody begrudges Red bragging rights to running the toughest food joint in town. A tough town.

Step down five steps between two dark doors.
Sauza’s 2.75 cuz it’s happy hour.

Sexy posters and paintings above the bar. I sat beneath a seminude brunette wearing only a sheer blue veil that draped loosely from her forearms and stretched taut over her ass. There was also a thrilling pencil drawing of Angelina Jolie, but beside her the cartoonish blonde surrounded by classic cars was not sexy at all.

Sunshine arrived and ordered a Manhattan. The only thing calling itself scotch at Red’s was Johnnie Walker, so I scanned the bourbons instead and chose Maker’s Mark. The restaurant crowded up around us and our drinks came.

Sunshine snorted back his Manhattan and popped the cherry in his mouth. “Can I get another one of these?” he called to the bartender. When he leaned into me I got a heavy whiff of marijuana smoke on his greasy flowerprint shirt. “How the fuck did you get out there to the Johnson house? What the fuck were you doing way the fuck out in Ledoux?”

I wasn’t sure how to say it without sounding like an asshole. “Chasing some tail.”

The moment I said it I regretted it. Here I was confessing to a burnt-out hippie something I wouldn’t want my wife to find out. Of course, he would never have a way of telling her, but I regretted letting him in on my secret all the same.

“Bullshit.”

“I thought this girl was coming on to me. She said she and her friends partied out there.”

“Did she show up?”

“No.” I decided it would be best to change course.

“Look, there’s someone I know who I believe might be a mutual acquaintance. Name’s Mel Woburn. He told me you lived there. I would just like to find out what it was like, and then I’ll never bother you again.”

Sunshine, Shorn, Harold—whatever—looked at me with a beery eye. “The hippies never owned the place, but we added the log room and built the portal. Bad shit happened around that place. Mel probably told you. Even regular shit would spin out of control.”

“What kind of regular shit?”

Sunshine looked at me vacantly for a moment, then his fresh drink came and he became reanimated. “Mel mentioned Ritchie Motherfucker, right?”

“Yup.”

“Him and his old lady slept in the last room, the furthest adobe from the log room. Did you look in there?”

“The last room was padlocked.”

Sunshine nodded effusively, hit his drink. “The day Ritchie fell off a horse he said,
I’m okay.
A minor fracture, right? Just lay up in bed for a while. But a week later he was dead of sepsis. He didn’t want to go to no doctor. Said,
I’m treating it with goldenseal.
Ritchie and his fucking goldenseal!”

Red’s was starting to serve lunch. Big plates heaped with steaming steaks kept coming out of the kitchen. Sunshine grabbed a passing waitress by her bicep, subduing her. A strange glaze came over her eyes; she knew a lifetime of abusive men and how to keep them at bay by behaving docile.

“Can you get me one of those lunch specials, honey?” Sunshine said.

She said, “Coming right up.”

Sunshine drank deeply and we ordered him another. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked at me. We were drinking lunch together, and I was buying. Sing for my meal, said his expression. The Manhattans started making their magic, and Sunshine let me have it.

“That gangrene moved fucking fast,” he said, “and the fever made Ritchie incoherent. We finally decided we had to get him down to Mora, and we loaded him in the station wagon, but the rains were so bad it took us all day. By the time we got to the hospital it was too late. He was dead.

“The admitting nurse said she’d do us a favor, save us fifty bucks by shredding up the file and un-admitting him, but then it would be up to us to remove the body and contact the county coroner.
Remove the body?
This was Ritchie! Just the other day we were riding horses together. But that’s where it was at and so we did what we had to do. We put the seats down in the back of the station wagon and drove him back out to the Johnson house.

“It took a long time to get him to burn, a lot of gasoline, and he stunk like hell, that hairy bastard! Shit, we should have had the girls shave him, but it was too late, he was already smoldering up, so we poured on more gasoline and sent the girls for more sticks. It was a good thing we sent them away because of what happened next.”

“What?”

“He got up.”

“
What?
”

“Ritchie: dead Ritchie. Got up right there. One of those nerve things you read about, but it went on and on. He was running around the yard, hit some bushes and set them on fire and just kept going.

“I looked at Little Joe and we both had these awful faces. Do we tackle him or what? Run away? Little Joe went for the hose. Ritchie finally fell to the ground and started rolling around, groaning. I got pretty close but then I shrank back at what I saw: Ritchie’s face, his expression of torture and melting beard and charred skin, but it was Ritchie’s face, and he was looking at me in anguish, Ritchie, his feet already in hell.”

“What did you do?”

Sunshine’s plate came. He carved off a forkful of steak, talking over the chewing. “We had to shoot him.”

“Jesus …”

“Then Little Joe hit him with a jet from the hose and Ritchie curled up just like a dead bug. God, that was awful, that smell, and the vomit, mine and Little Joe’s. The girls came back screaming
What happened?
before they saw it and vomited too. After that, we couldn’t get him lighted again.”

Sunshine pitched another forkful of steak into his mouth.

“The weird shit started long before the hippies ever got there. Back in the 1800s Johnson’s son killed his mom and sisters, and then he hanged himself—the whole fucking family except for old man Johnson.” He threw back the last of his drink and stood. “I got to take a piss.”

The bill came and I pulled out my wallet. I handed the waitress my check card.

Out in the blazing parking lot, I asked him, “How long did the hippies live there?”

Climbing into his Volkswagen van, Sunshine said, “Place finally shut down in ’74. Last I heard some bikers set up a lab in the end room and made meth.”

Something clicked at that instant. The place had been a meth lab. I had read an article on how motel rooms have to be stripped of all furniture and sometimes even re-Sheetrocked after they’ve been contaminated with meth-making chemicals.

I sat in the Spider and considered my options. I was already down in the valley. I could make it over the mountains in about two hours. The afternoon was wide open.

What was it about the Johnson house that kept calling me back? At first I just wanted to see. What did I expect to see? I wanted to see it in daytime. It had taken away my camera, my computer, but it had given me a story.

After the laptop, I should have just let it go. The crash of the Mac might have been a blessing in disguise: begin with a clean slate, and not only that, begin with a new slate, a different slate.

I took out the Altoids tin, lit a joint, and set out north on 68 toward Mora.

O
n the Fourth of July I had sped hornily to my goal without taking an account of my surroundings, but now I made note of all the towns along the way.

Española: a woman from Spain once ran the only tavern here, an outpost on the Camino Real halfway between Taos and Santa Fe.

Alcalde: “the mayor,” the first occupation of the Spanish empire on future U.S. soil. I avoided the package store at Marcy Garcia’s Club Lumina, suicide for a white boy like me, but stopped for a beer at the Shamrock in Velarde.

Embudo: the funnel between these foothills of the Sangre de Cristo. I navigated the curves of the canyon with a twenty-four-ounce Chelada between my knees, turning right at the winery.

In Dixon, La Chiripada, a stroke of good fortune: an
Open
sign on Sunday! I stopped for a tasting. The son of the founders hit my glass hard: reds, whites, a brandyfortified wine. I left braced for the winding road into the mountains.

Peñasco: “the rocky place,” where I ditched the empty Chelada can at the drive-in trash barrel.

Through Sipapu, the Swiss village, and over the pass.

Mora: depending on whom you asked, it could be a patronymic, but there was also a legend of a French trapper hunting pelts along the river, who came upon a dead man facedown on the shore. He was a young man and, other than being dead, appeared to be in good health. There had been no signs of struggle, no injuries whatsoever on the body. The trapper dug the unfortunate man a shallow grave in the sand of the riverbank and forsook that place in a hurry, leaving it with a designation,
L’eau de mort
, that lingers two hundred years later. Mora.

At the Mustang I paid at the pump and took a piss inside. I thought about another Chelada, but I needed to wake up a little for the drive into Ledoux, so got myself a hot coffee instead.

I wanted to find the dirt road direct to the house so I wouldn’t have to climb the hill from Morphy Lake. I drove for more than an hour before spotting the sign for Aplanado.

It looked almost like a driveway, unmarked, but at the turn it skirted between two fenced properties and up the back of a wooded slope. It was one of those roads that had never been planned and so from its origins had remained neglected.

I met no other vehicles or people on the narrow onetrack. Barely broad enough for a single car, Aplanado would never be widened, paved, or even so much as graded. There were too many gnarly old trees and boulders on either side.

A little more than a mile into the woods, the road came out of the trees and the valley opened up: the distant peaks, their age-beaten granite faces reminding me of the harsh winters that punish the green valley at eight thousand feet.

The hump of a culvert, a bend in the road, and I passed the gate I had hopped over on the Fourth of July. I had to drive the dirt road another quarter-mile to find a spot wide enough to turn the Spider back around.

I pulled off into the tall grass at the edge of the property line. When I cut the engine there was only the din of crickets and grasshoppers. I checked my phone: no service.

I walked to the gate. At the end of the drive hung a rusted metal sign I hadn’t seen in the dark, a cedar shingle nailed eight feet up in a tree, the Spanish lettering painted in decorative script. It said something like,
For the favor of not trespassing, we will not have to shoot you.

I had the feeling that there was nobody else alive in the wide valley. There was no other house, not a sign of life, not even a distant buzz of chainsaw in the hot afternoon.