The Lies that Bind (28 page)

“You talk too much,” he said.

They brought in two more horses and tied them in place. The van was full to capacity now, and there was no place for me but pressed into the corner next to a horse they called Ernesto, one of the gentler ones that didn't get muzzled. “
Adiós
,” Jorge said, slamming the door shut behind himself and his
minion.

One of them started up the truck and drove away from the polo field with a heavy foot. This wasn't the first time I'd cursed Santa Fe's bumpy dirt roads, but I swear better when I'm not chewing on a filthy rag. It
was
the first time taking the bumps felt like a matter of life and death. I've ridden in cars with no shocks before, but this ride entered another dimension. The trailer took the bumps like a porpoise. One end went down, the other end went up, and we hit another bump and started a new cycle before we'd even finished the first one. The trailer swung from side to side too. I lurched and looked for something to grab onto. The only grip handy was the rope looped around the bale of hay that Ernesto was chewing on. I edged toward it. Ernesto snorted and whinnied, showing big yellow teeth, but he let me approach. To reach the bale with my hands tied behind me I had to bend forward and grab it from behind. It would have been uncomfortable even if my left arm weren't an adventure in pain.

Maybe the horses had been on the losing team; they were not in a good mood when they entered the trailer. Being tied up next to their rivals and getting flung around didn't improve their dispositions any. Their tails swished at flies. Cinco nipped at Arturo, Arturo kicked back. They lunged at each other and tried to bite, but they couldn't because their heads were tied and muzzled. That frustrated them even more, and they whinnied inside the muzzles and kicked out. Their kicks hit the side of the trailer with a sharp thwang. If this pissed-off horsepower had been harnessed, we wouldn't have needed gasoline to get us to wherever we were going. There was a certain amount of methane gas being emitted that could have been useful too.

On the downhill side of the bumps I got pulled forward, going uphill I got yanked back. I wedged my fingers under the baling rope and held on. With one part of my brain I listened to Ernesto chew. With another I tried to keep track of where we were going. Sooner or later we would reach the interstate, and I wanted to observe which direction we turned when we did. We went up an incline that I thought I recognized as the access to the bridge across the river in La Cienega. That was good because it pressed me into my corner, but when we went back down and took a curve the trailer swung wide; I fell forward, clutched at the rope but lost my grip. I rolled onto my side when I landed and slid across the floor like grease on a hot pan. I didn't like horses much before this experience; I like them less now. I was running a gauntlet of hooves and shit. Arturo dropped a load of steaming manure. Cinco let loose with an angry kick. I saw his hoof coming at my face with slow-motion clarity, the way things move when you're in deep trouble. I could see the shoe on the hoof, the nails in the shoe. I also saw my head bursting open like a watermelon and my thoughts falling out in black seeds. I screamed, but it didn't do any good. My scream hit a wall—the rag—and doubled back on me the way rotten food does. I continued my headfirst slide. Cinco's hoof flew over my head, missing my brain by half an inch, and slammed into the wall with the sharp sound of metal hitting metal. I hit the far end of the trailer with a thunk of my own. For the
moment
I was safe. There was another bale of hay at this side of the trailer, which no one was chewing on. I was able to grab it and hold myself in place.

The road leveled off and smoothed out, meaning we were approaching the interstate. The trailer climbed an incline. We turned onto I-25 heading south toward Albuquerque or Socorro or Argentina. The smoother ride of the interstate quieted the horses. Maybe they'd realized they couldn't do any harm to their rivals with their muzzles on. I put my energy into figuring out where we were going. It was difficult to keep track of time when every second felt like a minute and every minute an hour and a bale of hay was my mooring. I observed the labored climb up La Bajada, the free-fall going down, and I noticed later when the trailer slowed down. The concrete divider at Algodones, I figured. I noticed the lane changes of increasing traffic when we passed the divider and approached the Duke City. Then the van jerked to a stop, turned right and headed west.

25

O
NCE WE LEFT
the interstate, the horses got restless again, more so with every turn in the road or change in its surface from pavement to dirt. They swatted their tails, jerked their heads and danced in place. Their desire to be on the move reminded me of the way rental horses take off when you turn back to the stable or a dog heads for the door when he notices you're packing your bags. It seems you're crossing a species barrier of communication, but all it really means is that the animals are watching and listening and picking up on the clues that matter to them. The horses knew they were going home. The turns we'd made were taking us in the direction of Corrales or the North Valley. Was it our final destination, I wondered, or just a place to drop off the horses? A lot of people in the valley kept horses—they kept llamas and chickens and potbellied pigs too—but nobody I knew.

The trailer jerked to a stop. I heard footsteps on the ramp; the door opened. I was hoping to see a new face, the owner of the trailer, maybe, the power behind the crime, but all I got was Manolo and Jorge, two guys who cared a lot about the horses and not a bit about me.

“Where are you?” Jorge called out in singsong English, feigning surprise, as if he were playing hide-and-seek. He knew I was inside: there was no way out; what he didn't know was whether I was dead or alive or had been kicked somewhere in between. It didn't make much difference to him. “Did you kick her, Ernesto?” he asked. He bent down, peered between the horses' legs and saw me scrunched up in the far corner. “She is still alive. She must be very smart or very lucky. Being smart, that's good, but luck—luck runs out. Still curious?” he asked me.

“Um,” I mumbled into the rag.

“Well, hold your horses.” He laughed, and his teeth flashed quick and bright as a knife blade. It was a stupid joke, and he had a stupid sense of humor, although you have to have a fairly good command of a language to be able to joke in it. I gave him credit for that.

“So full of curiosity,” he said. He clucked his tongue as though he were talking to a horse. “You asked too many questions, and now you will have to keep your mouth shut.”

They began unloading the horses one by one. Cinco, the biggest and meanest, the king of the machos, snorted, flicked his head and took a last lunge at Arturo before he went out. I waited my turn. There was no guarantee the next place would be any better than this one, but at least it would be a change.

After the last horse clomped down the ramp, Jorge shut the door and padlocked it. “
Adiós
,” he said. I heard the lock close with the terminal click of a cell door slamming on a lifer. “Hey,” I yelled into
my
gag. “Let me out of here.” I kicked the door and got a dull thud in reply. A running shoe doesn't make the same kind of statement as a hoof with a thousand pounds of horseflesh behind it.

“Why are you always so impatient? We will be back when we are ready,” Jorge said.

They weren't ready for several hours. The sky changed from late-afternoon blue to midnight black while I waited. We were in a bosque somewhere. I could see cottonwood trees and the corner of a barn through the horses' tiny windows. I watched the bare arms of the cottonwoods scratch the sky and then disappear into it. I spent the time pacing the trailer, kicking the walls and wishing I had a cigarette. By the time it got dark I'd memorized the confines of the trailer and knew where all the manure piles were. I didn't need light to find my way around, but I still craved it. One of the worst things about being stuck here was the darkness. Like my need for cigarettes, I promised myself that my desire for light was something I wouldn't reveal to my captors; it would give them more power over me. One reason people smoke is that focusing all the intensity of your desire on one reasonably satisfiable craving takes your mind off the other things you need. Thinking about cigarettes (opening the pack, lighting the match, sucking in the smoke, exhaling it) kept me from thinking about life, death, food, water and going to the bathroom. I know cigarettes are death too, but it's a ways down the road and there was a good chance something else was going to get me first. What form would it take? I wondered: a knife, a gun, a kick in the head, the loss of my hands?

I can't sit still for long thinking thoughts like that, with or without cigarettes. I paced from one end of my cell to the other like an animal in a cage, a lion the circus left behind in a boxcar on a siding. I pulled against the rope until my wrists were rubbed raw, but I couldn't loosen the knots, and I couldn't get my gag untied either. The day got darker and colder, and I couldn't even sing or scream to keep myself company. The deepening darkness became an empty canvas like the black velvet people paint pictures of tigers and Elvis Presley on. I had nothing better to do, so I filled up the canvas, and the face I created had the outlaw eyes of Niki Falcón. What had made her kill Jaime Córdova and precipitate this sequence of events? It was an act a lot of women might have considered but few would have committed, even if Jaime Córdova had deserved it. Maybe Niki's bucket had been full of love or hate or recklessness. I imagined what her life would have been like if she'd gotten caught. This trailer was a mountain resort compared to the inner-city hell she'd have gone through. She'd have been confined to a cold, dank cell or a stinking hot one, lucky if she had a hole to piss in or a mattress to sleep on or edible food, waiting to be raped or tortured by the machine. Compared to that, Martha Conover and a big American car could seem like a blessing.

As time went by I also got a sense of the ambiguity a prisoner feels about her jailer. You hate the guy, but his is the only face you see all day, the only hands that can release or feed you or let in light, and you do begin to feel something like relief when he comes back. When I heard the footsteps on the ramp,
the
key in the lock, I was almost looking forward to Jorge's smile.

It was in place and as malevolent as I remembered, but I didn't get to see it for long. Lights blazed briefly, long enough for me to see Jorge in the doorway and Manolo with a bandanna in his hand, though not long enough for my pupils to adjust to the change. The men grabbed me, tied the bandanna tight around my eyes, dragged me out of the trailer, pushed me forward, dumped me on the floor of a car and threw a blanket over me. One of them sat down and put his feet on the blanket to keep it and me in place. It was an abduction in the best Argentine thugs' manner. I couldn't speak or see any evil, but I could hear Manolo giving directions, an indication those were his feet on my back and he was the one who knew where we were going—east and uphill all the way.

When we reached our destination, Manolo lifted his feet and the blanket, pulled me out of the car and pushed me forward. “
Tenés lasllaves
?” asked Jorge. Do you have the keys?

“
Sí
,”said Manolo.

I heard one of them try several keys in a lock. When he found the right one, he opened the door. They pushed me forward. I stumbled on a hardwood floor and tripped on a rug. My shoulder landed hard against a banister, and I heard the sound of metal rattling against wood. “
Silencio
,” Manolo whispered, jabbing me in the back with his gun. It was a very quiet place and dark too. Only a sliver of light came in under my blindfold.

“
Ádónde vamos
?” asked Jorge.

“
Allá
,” said Manolo.

They pushed me forward stumbling through a large house. We walked down hallways, crossed rooms. A door opened, a light came on, my feet stepped on a thick carpet.

“Shit,” a voice I recognized said. “How in the hell did you get in?” It was a question I might have answered myself if my mouth hadn't been tied shut. They had a key, taken most likely from Martha Conover's key ring by their buddies at Mighty. The house we were in belonged to her, although she didn't live in it. “What are you doing here?”

“We heard you wanted to talk to us,” Jorge, the spokesman, said.

“To you, yes, but what did you bring Hamel here for?” I could have answered that one, too, if I hadn't been gagged.

Someone untied my blindfold but left my gag in place. I blinked back the light. We were in a house I knew but a room I hadn't seen yet, a large study with wall-to-wall carpeting, bookshelves and shabby but valuable furniture. It had the look of old money gone threadbare or broke. A brass lamp with a green shade sat on a large mahogany desk. The light switch on the wall beside me was flipped up, indicating, possibly, that it controlled the green lamp, the only light in the room. It illuminated the apoplectic face of Whitney J. Reid III, who was standing behind the desk, wheezing and drumming his
thick
fingers on the polished wood.

“She made the connection,” Jorge said. “She went to Mighty and was asking questions about Argentina and the car keys. She told the courtesy van to take her here. We got curious and we started to follow her. She went to Atalaya. She went to your building in Arizona. She came to the polo field. She knows about you and us.”

“You guys are really brilliant. Hamel didn't know a thing until you brought her here,” Whit said. “She's a two-bit divorce lawyer with no credentials or experience, whom my mother-in-law hired to represent her. If you'd left things alone she would have fucked the case up and my mother-in-law would have gone to prison for sure.”