The Bone Fire: A Mystery (21 page)

Gil woke up at 7:30
A.M.
, when he felt Susan roll out of bed next to him. He heard her running the water in the bathroom; she came back out and opened the bedroom curtains.

The sunshine cut a bright knife of light across the bed and onto Gil’s face. He sighed and sat up. “What are you doing up? It’s only seven thirty on a Saturday morning,” he said.

“We have to be at the pet parade by nine,” she said as she went out into the hallway. He heard her waking the girls. Gil couldn’t remember if he and Susan had talked about going to the pet parade. It was the one part of fiesta they never missed. Last year they had watched from the curb, but Gil had only seen a few minutes of it before he was called off to investigate a hit-and-run.

Susan came back into the room and started getting her clothes together.

“So what’s the plan?” he asked, trying to keep the question vague. He still couldn’t remember discussing
anything about the parade with her and wanted to avoid any sharp looks of disappointment when she realized he’d forgotten. He knew he’d be given one anyway when he told her he couldn’t go because of the case.

“Me and the girls are going over to my sister’s house to meet up with them, and then we’re going downtown,” she said as she tried to decide between a red and blue blouse.

“Oh,” he said, slightly puzzled. Susan clearly had never assumed he was going to go. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved.

“I saw your mom and Aunt Yolanda downtown yesterday,” Susan said.

Gil mumbled some sort of response as he got out of bed and went into the bathroom. He shaved and got a breakfast of cold Cheerios and milk as the girls swirled happily around him, chatting with Susan.

“Honey,” Susan said to him as she packed up bottles of water and sunscreen, “don’t forget to go by that house in Eldorado on your way to your mom’s.”

They were gone in a whirlwind of good-byes and smiles. He listened to Susan’s car backing out of the driveway. He listened to the quiet house for a moment before getting into his own car and pulling away from the house.

Gil drove to Eldorado, looking at the stairstep homes that were cozied up to the interstate. Ten years ago, Santa Fe wasn’t even visible from 1-25. Now houses—all painted in the same species of beige—were fighting for space. The only variation in style was a red sloped roof here and there sticking out against the otherwise flat-topped homes.

Gil took the Eldorado exit and kept an eye out for the right street to turn on. There were long views of the Jemez, Ortiz, and Sandia mountains, but the Sangre de Cristos, the ones that dominated the view of Santa Fe, were hidden behind pyramid-shaped foothills. The biggest landmark that Gil had used all his life to orient himself in his hometown wasn’t visible from here.

He turned down a dirt road, which was one of the ways Eldorado kept its country feel, and pulled up in front of a house with a
FOR SALE
sign. One of the draws of Eldorado was that there were no
yards to tend to. The developers had left the wild desert alone and placed the homes among the cholla cactus and rabbit brush. There also were no fences, and the nearest neighbor was four house lengths away, leaving plenty of elbow room. Their old neighborhood had been built fifty years ago, when homes were built within ten feet of each other with a fence in between.

Even though homes in Eldorado were isolated, the community was governed by strict codes. The area was a haven for Anglo artists from back east, who brought with them the mentality of gated communities. They passed covenants and held lots of meetings about errant neighbors. Gil had heard of one man who had put up a playground set for his kids, but the slide was yellow, a color that was forbidden because it was “too distracting” to the neighbors. The man was forced to paint it forest green to make it—and his family—blend in. Gil was New Mexico born, and such intrusiveness by neighbors was completely unfamiliar to him. He wasn’t sure he would handle it well. He had never told Susan his impression, not wanting to squash her dream.

There was another problem with Eldorado that Gil had never mentioned to Susan, but to him it was not a minor point—they would probably be one of the few Hispanic families in the town. Where they lived now, the mix was about 70 percent native New Mexico Hispanic and 30 percent Indian or Anglo. Here the mix was 95 percent Anglo and 5 percent a mix of other races.

Gil’s grandfather, when he was alive, would have seen it as the only issue. He, like some other Hispanic descendants of the conquistadores, had thought of himself as white. They were European, his grandpa argued, just as white as any German or French person, and because their ancestors had spent most of the last four hundred years isolated from the rest of the world, they were the only ones of their kind. They were a special brand of white. A better brand. He had tried to drill this point into Gil in his authoritative voice, which he had polished over the years he sat on the bench as First District Court Judge Gilbert Nazario Estevan Montoya. Gil’s namesake. A man who saw himself as the upholder of everything Castilian. The Judge would see a life in Eldorado as turning their back on their heritage.

Gil never bought into the Judge’s own style of bigotry. Even so, he did admit that it would bother him if Therese and Joy went to a school where they would be considered a minority.

Gil walked around the house. It was a one-story with a small courtyard enclosed by a low curved wall. He peered in a few windows, into the interior with its new wood floors and Mexican tile. The house seemed fine. He would tell Susan to set up a time for a tour with the Realtor.

Gil got back in the car and headed to his mother’s house, which was farther down the highway. He went south, toward Galisteo. Telephone poles made a low line of crosses along the road. The old wooden poles had glass transformers that shone blue and green in the sun. A red-tailed hawk was perched on a
DO NOT PASS
sign.

Gil drove into Galisteo, past the dirt cliffs leading to the arroyo. He turned off the highway and onto Avenida de Montoya, going slowly over the dirt and gravel road. Gil turned onto a smaller road, and drove past the Old House, which had been the family hacienda since the king of Spain granted it to them. The house was now mostly fallen down, its half-standing adobe walls looking forlorn. Gil parked in front of the new house, which had been built in the 1920s, and got out of the car. Instead of going into the house, though, he walked down toward the Galisteo River a few yards away. The river, which had been too wide to jump across when he was a kid, was now just a stream.

Gil walked close to the water’s edge and up the side of the embankment. He pushed through a small path in the brush and came to a wire fence. He walked along the fence, checking the posts to make sure they were sturdy. One of the neighbor’s goats had wandered onto their property last week, and Gil was still trying to determine how it had made it through the fence. The posts looked solid. A random goat was no real problem, but Gil wanted to be able to tell his mother that he checked the fence.

He walked back to the house and opened the front door, calling, “Mom, I’m here.”

She was in the kitchen pulling a pan of carne adovada out of the oven.

“Hi, hito,” she said, and she put the pan on the counter to cool. “How are you?”

“Fine, Mom,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. He checked his watch as he sat down at the table. It was 8:40
A.M.
He would have to get going in a minute if he wanted to meet Joe at the station at nine as promised.

His mom put a bowl out and scooped some carne adovada out for him. He didn’t have time to eat, but he also knew it was useless to protest. Plus, his mother made the best carne adovada in the world.

He put a forkful in his mouth. The tender pork was infused with the slow burn of chile and garlic that hit the back of a throat. This was not the wildfire heat of green chile, but the ceaseless low fire of roasted red. The meat fell apart against his tongue, almost melting.

Carne adovada was a simple thing: pork, red chile sauce, garlic, and oregano. What made the difference was the cook. His mother never rushed it. She took a full two days to make it. She started by roasting her own chile instead of using chile powder, like Aunt Yolanda, and she didn’t bother with cumin, which she dismissed as inauthentic since the spice wasn’t found in New Mexico.

Gil put another forkful in his mouth. He did a few quick calculations in his head as he watched his mom move around the kitchen. Carne adovada takes four hours to cook. She must have been up since 5:00
A.M.
if she was just taking it out of the oven now. Gil didn’t say anything, though. His mother took such pride in her cooking he didn’t want to scold her for being dedicated.

“Did you have fun with Aunt Yolanda yesterday?” he asked her as he took another bite.

“Oh, yes,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Did you check on the fence?” she asked.

“Yes, mom,” Gil said, laughing slightly. He knew she would ask that. “It’s fine.”

“I just don’t know how that goat got over here,” she said in a tsk-ing voice.

“Hey, mom, what time is Elena getting here for the party?” His younger sister, who worked as a lawyer for the state attorney’s office in Albuquerque, was supposed to play chauffeur for their mom.

“I think she said she’d be here at one,” she said, still moving around the kitchen. Never sitting still.

Gil got up and pulled open one of the kitchen drawers. He took out a small blue canvas bag and said, “Okay, Mom, let’s do this.”

She finally stopped moving and sat down at the table, resting her left arm on the tabletop and extending her index finger. This was why he came over to his mother’s house as much as possible—to check her blood sugar level.

Diabetes was a problem that hit native New Mexicans hard, both Hispanic and Indian. More than 17 percent of the adult population had it. His mother was just one of them. He only wished she would stay more on top of it.

Gil opened the bag and took out an alcohol pad. He wiped the side of her index finger with it and then pulled out a small glucose machine. He set up a test strip and then asked, “Ready?” She nodded, and he pricked her finger with a sharp lancet.

“Oooch,” she said. “That stings.” It always hurt her. No matter how often he checked her BGL. He held the machine up to her finger, waiting for a drop of blood to fall onto the test strip. They sat still like that, frozen. Waiting for the blood. The machine beeped when it had enough blood and they waited again until the digital display read 70. It was a little low.

“Mom, have you eaten yet?” he asked.

“I’ll have something later,” she said.

If he had time, he’d sit with her to make sure she ate. As it was, he’d be pushing it.

“Mom, you have to have something to eat soon,” he said. “I mean within the next hour.”

“Okay, hito,” she said as she transferred some of the adovada into plastic containers.

Gil watched her for another moment before carefully storing the number in the machine’s history and kissing her good-bye. As he headed out the door, he said, “Have fun at the party.”

Lucy looked at her watch—8:30
A.M.
She sat at a table at the Santa Fe Baking Company waiting for the waiter to deliver her breakfast
burrito with extra green chile. The headache she had meant that she needed chile today. In Santa Fe, whenever you were hungover or sick—with anything from a cold to cancer—someone inevitably told you to eat green chile. Scientists all over the world studied its effects. The most recent report said if green chile was painted on the hull of a boat, barnacles wouldn’t attach themselves to it. Such is the power of green chile.

She also was waiting for Del to get back from the bathroom. She had called him last night after talking to Gil. She and Del had been doing this every so often for the past few months. He was a recycled boyfriend. She was conserving energy by taking to bed a man she already knew well instead of investing her precious natural resources in a new relationship.

They would pretend that he was coming over in the middle of the night to watch a movie, but that had quickly become code for hookup sex. Last night, they had made an effort to watch part of
Superbad
. From there things got hazy. She was sure she had offered to make margaritas at some point, but she was also positive she didn’t know how to make margaritas. They had woken up together in bed, twined in sheets that had wrapped around them during the previous night’s action.

Lucy glanced at the nearby community bulletin board, trying to read the flyers pinned to it. They mostly advertised the same types of alternative healing as the one at Denny’s. One flyer caught her eye. It was bright blue and said in bold black letters:
THE MEDITATION OF RELEASE
. Lucy thought of the prayer—actually, more of a plea—that she had put in Zozobra. The flyer went on to say, “So often in our lives we have old habits that hold us back. Meditation is one of the few methods that has been scientifically proven not only to reduce stress but also to help people overcome bad behaviors. We are a group of nurses who get together for the health benefits of this practice. Please join us for a class on Sunday, where we will teach you the basics of meditation with the promise that there will be no chanting.” Lucy smiled when she read the last line. She thought for a second about going to the class, but her attention became quickly refocused on the waiter delivering her breakfast burrito. She barely looked up
when Del came back from the bathroom, but did manage to snuffle an acknowledgment to him.

He said, “Thanks for waiting,” as she smiled up at him. “So what have you been up to?” he asked. “I feel bad that we didn’t get a chance to catch up last night.”

She started laughing and said, “Yeah, I bet.”

“Whose car was in the driveway?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, remembering that Nathan’s car was at her house. “Now there’s a story to make you laugh.” She told Del about Nathan and the money, taking pride that he laughed in all the right places. That meant she had told the story right. For some reason she had taken to telling Del about her one-night stands and making them into a sort of comedic routine. Her love life as a punch line. She wondered how that had gotten started—and why she kept doing it.