The Lies that Bind (15 page)

“No,” he said without looking up. The light from the window behind me reflected on his bald spot. I peered into it as if it had something to reveal, but all I saw was that I was about to tell a lie.

“I had an old manual that I liked a lot,” I said. “It wasn't worth much, but it had been my father's, and I had a sentimental attachment to it. My boyfriend and I had a fight, and he brought it down here yesterday morning. A Hispanic guy in a wheelchair?”

He dog-eared a corner to mark his place in the book and looked up. “All the typewriters I get go to Santo. He collects them. Made me an offer I couldn't refuse.”

“Why does he collect them?”

“He's a writer.”

“What does he write?”

“Fiction,” the guy said.

“
Do you have any idea where I could find him? I'd like to get that typewriter back.”

“He lives in Coldwater Arroyo.”

“Does he have a phone?”

“Lady, he don't even have a light bulb. You want to find him and his typewriter, you're gonna have to hike in.”

“Okay, so I'll hike,” I said. “What was the offer you couldn't refuse?”

“
Nada
,” he said.

******

The places I don't go to alone are the places where you're all alone until you confront your nemesis. The mantra of a single woman is that it's safer to be alone in a crowd than alone in the alone, on the dubious theory that one's fellow citizens are witnesses who will keep each other in check. Coldwater Arroyo is city-owned property, but that doesn't make it safe. It just gives you someone with deep pockets to sue if you get hurt, or for your relatives to sue if you get killed. It's at the base of the Sandias, close enough to town to attract troublemakers, far enough away for no one else to hear you or them. One deterrent is to make yourself repulsive, and it has been proved that skunk odorant repels men faster than any other. The best a skunk gun can do, however, is buy time, although not enough time to get out of Coldwater Arroyo, unless you're in better shape than I am. Someone who would venture up there in search of trouble might not care what he smelled like, might not smell that good to begin with. Santo could have some unfriendly dogs. Santo could be unfriendly himself and crazy besides. On Sunday I asked the Kid if he'd go with me.

“Okay,” he said.

We found the path to Santo's easily enough; it was marked by hiking boot footprints and dog shit. It followed a sandy arroyo bed where boulders had been dumped by the mountain runoff in its persistent rush to the lowest level. Water is the ultimate bottom-seeker. Higher up the walls of the arroyo were pink rocks that had a hard-earned, exposed-to-the-elements character, like the faces of craggy old men. Lizards scooted across the sand. A jumping cholla jumped some spines in my direction. The brown leaves of scrub oaks hung at the edges of their limbs and gave a death rattle when they fell off. There were places where we had to climb over the boulders to follow the arroyo. Few things in life are more satisfying than climbing rocks, but I wouldn't want to do it every time I went out for a pack of cigarettes. After we'd gone about a mile up the wash, dogs heard us coming and started a loud and cacophonous barking, a once-familiar sound, the background music of every Mexican town and some in New Mexico as well. Either Santo wasn't home or he liked the sound of yapping dogs.

“I don't know about this, Kid,” I said. “They sound mean.”

“
Don't worry, Chiquita.”

“In a setup like this they could be dogs who haven't had their shots.” That was also endemic to every Mexican town. You got bit down there, and it was ten days of shots and pain or the risk of losing your life, which to a Mexican is no big deal.

We kept on walking. Eventually a footpath led out of the arroyo. We followed it around a boulder and over a rise and came upon the dogs. There were about ten of them, and they weren't chained up. They ran to within a few feet of us and stopped, snarling, barking and flashing their fangs. Some were gray, some were brown. Some were small, some were medium-sized. They had ears that stood up or flopped over, long curled tails or no tails at all. They all had the concave stomachs and protruding ribs of street dogs. They were looking for love, food or trouble, depending upon your perspective.

“
Cálmate, perrito
,” the Kid said. He knelt down, extended his hand and spoke softly to the dogs. In a few minutes they had shut up and clustered around him, sharing their fleas, getting scratched behind the ears. If he'd had any food, they would have been eating it out of his hand.

The quieting of the dogs gave me a chance to look around. Santo's yard had been scraped raw by his pets and the elements, except that here and there plastic flowers and pinwheels were in bloom, stuck into the ground on wooden stems. A yellow pinwheel caught the wind, whirred and shivered. A red flower danced on its stick.

Santo's home was tucked into the boulders. It was made out of wood, stone, plastic, old road signs and cardboard held together with hope and spit. It reminded me of the cardboard hovels in Mexico, except that this close to a Mexican city you'd never find just one. The entire hillside would have sprouted shacks and dogs and children. Santo's hovel was surrounded by a bunch of tumbleweeds stuck together by their prickers, nature's own barbed wire fence. “Anybody home?” I called. His wind chimes tinkled back.

“Santo?” No answer, so I made my way through an opening in the tumbleweed fence and went inside. I saw a pile of dirty rags in the corner that resembled a bed. Santo had one chair and several rickety tables made out of planks balanced on rocks or cinder blocks. The tables supported his collection of manual typewriters and candles. He had Olivettis, Royals, Underwoods and candles in all colors, shapes and sizes. Like the guy at Last Chance said, there wasn't a light bulb in sight. Apparently Santo did his writing at night by candlelight. He probably spent his days scrounging for food for himself and the dogs. The typewriters all had white paper sticking out of their platens, the empty canvas, every creative person's challenge. In one sense, Santo had met the challenge—the canvases were not empty, I noticed, as I walked around and inspected the typewriters. Each piece of paper had at least a few lines typed on it. The Olivetti:

Fire
in the drainage ditch

The setting sun

Drips water

From its mouth blood red

The Underwood:

Home is where

You bury your dreams

For the politicians

To bulldoze

If
he'd
ever won a National Endowment grant, we'd be hearing from Jesse Helms. I stopped reading for content and began looking at what I came here for—type: a
p
that was missing part of its tail, an
e
that didn't close. I found them in the Royal sitting on an orange crate, an ancient, elegant machine with the brass keys all lined up in a curved row. I took out my copy of the note that had been found on Justine and compared the two to be sure, the same
e,
the same
p,
the same faded ribbon. I removed the resident poem, put in a blank piece of paper, typed “I knew this was going to happen, but I couldn't prevent it,” took it out, returned the poem. The Xerox I had and this copy were identical, except that the Xerox was on paper that had been in my pocket and gotten creased and folded like a road map. I couldn't prove in court that this was the same typewriter that Emilio Velásquez had taken to Last Chance (unless I could persuade Saia to get a search warrant and dust it for fingerprints), but I believed it. So the note had been typed on Emilio's typewriter. Why did he do it, if he did do it?

The Kid came inside. “Did you find it, Chiquita?”

“I think so. Look.”

“That's it,” he said.

The dogs started barking again but with hope instead of fear, as if their master had come home with the kibble. Not wanting to be caught breaking and entering, the Kid and I left the hovel. We'd gotten as far as the tumbleweed fence when Santo came over the top of the rise and stood there for a minute looking ten feet tall, leaning on a crooked stick, king of his own private mountain. He had on a white cotton dress that came down to his ankles and was tied around the waist with rope. His hiking boots were clunky and caked with dirt. His bulging backpack gave him the rounded shape of Kokopelli, the Anasazi flute player. He carried a bunch of plastic bags stuffed to the max. His hair was arranged in long, dirty-blond dreadlocks with bits of paper and fuzz sticking out. The dogs ran to greet him, and he knelt down
and
patted every one. “Giz,” he said, “and Beau and Jason and Tommie and Polonius.” He reached into a plastic bag and fed them each a snack, crackers and crusts he'd picked up on his rounds. His eyes were an intense pale blue and appeared to be registering the passage of events like tightly wound clocks.

“You from
60 Minutes
?” he asked.

It took me by surprise, I'll admit it. “No. Are you Santo?”

He stood up, shook out his dress and his dreadlocks in a display that made him seem even more voluminous. “You don't recognize me?” he asked.

He did have a seen-once, remembered-forever look, but I hadn't seen it, and I didn't remember. “No,” I said.

“I was in the
Journal
three times and the
Tribune
four. I've been on CBS and NBC. I was interviewed by Tom Rollins. Look.” He went to the place in the yard where the plastic pinwheel was stuck in the ground, still spinning, and he picked up a rock, exposing a hole, an underground safe where he kept his valuables. He pulled out one of those tubes that zap your deposit from the drive-in window to the teller inside the bank, and he opened it up. It was stuffed full of newspaper clippings about the lengths the city had gone to to evict him. I took a look through them. He
had
gotten more than his share of publicity.

“If you're not from
60 Minutes,
where are you from?” he asked, narrowing his ticking eyes.

“Downtown,” I said. “I'm a lawyer.” The Kid said nothing; Santo didn't give him time.

“A lawyer?” Santo recoiled. His skirt swirled, his dreadlocks swung wide, his walking stick vibrated like a dowsing rod on a roll as he pointed it at me. It was the snake-in-the-grass reaction many have to my profession but most try to suppress. Trust a psychotic to reveal a true emotion. The dogs picked up on the vibe and began to growl at me.

“Calm down,” I said. “I didn't come here to sue or evict you. I'm looking for a typewriter that figures in a case I'm working on. The man at Last Chance told me you collect them.”

“My typewriters are poets. They write poems, not laws. See? The poems are in the typewriters, my fingers find the right keys, and we coax them out.” He spun around like a dervish and waved his long fingers in front of my face, trying maybe to coax some poetry out of me. “You won't find
your
laws in
my
typewriters.”

“You could be right. Well, thanks anyway,” I said. What did I care? The type sample I needed was already deep in my pocket.

“How do you like my place?” Santo asked, waving his arms around him in an expansive gesture.

I took a good look. Up close I saw boulders, lizards and high desert cacti. In the far distance I saw Mount Taylor in the west and the Manzanos in the south and beyond that the purple haze. It was too far and too wide to take in without opening the mind's wide-angle lens, the kind of high desert where people
have
historically come to seek wisdom and/or God. It doesn't hurt to remind yourself now and then that we exist on the edge of a vast desert, but I wouldn't want to live there. Home ought to be a sheltered space. I limited my vision to what I knew to be Albuquerque, starting at the bottom, the green valley where the runoff ends up and turns south. The Rio Grande curled like a silver ribbon thrown to the ground by a cavalier goddess. I saw the white slabs of the downtown office buildings, which looked like tombstones in a not-so-distant cemetery or monuments of a once-meaningful religion. Next came the red-tile roofs of the subdivisions. Farther up, the irregular roofs of the Heights architectural statements. Albuquerque is full of zones: life zones, pollen zones, wealth zones. I remembered when the sky used to be bluer. I also remembered when there was no pollution haze, when the Duke City didn't have auto emission standards, or a 98 percent occupancy rate, or the homeless either. Santo had a rich person's view, but he didn't have a rich person's sensibility. He couldn't turn on the VCR and turn off the view. His eyes had been looking too far for too long, and they had started to tick.

“You do have a great view,” I said.

“It's choice,” he replied. “And that's why my choice is to live here, and why my poems are buried all over this arroyo. It's a holy place. This place belongs to me and to God. The city can never evict me, because God's law is in effect up here.”

But man's laws were in effect down there, and they'd send their minions up if they chose to. “I wouldn't count on it,” I said.

His eyes turned crafty. He spread his fingers and twisted them as if he were pulling a trump card out of the air. He smiled and exposed some brownish stumps of broken teeth. “I can play by their laws too. I have lived on this land long enough to make it mine by their law of adverse possession.”

Maybe. But the law of adverse possession applies only to private property, not to property owned by the city. I handed him my card. Real estate, after all, was my profession. “Let me know if you have any problems. Maybe I can help.”

He put the card in the tube with the newspaper articles, stuck it back in the ground, replaced the rock cover, righted the pinwheel, which began to whir and spin.

“Can we go now, Chiquita?” asked the Kid. He'd been more than patient.