The Way We Bared Our Souls (19 page)

THOMAS MET ME AT MY
locker after school let out.

“Are you free this afternoon?” he said. I smiled.

“I was planning to ask you the same thing.” Jason’s party had ended on a high note, so I didn’t necessarily regret that Thomas and I hadn’t gotten to spend much time alone together. But now I wanted to talk about our kiss, or the future we might have after Saturday. Or maybe it was too soon for future talk? Maybe I just wanted to kiss some more.

“What do you want to do?” I said.

“I’ve been thinking about my little brother,” he said, scooping up my backpack. We began walking down the corridor toward the parking lot. “Henri. Until now I’ve been too . . . I don’t know. Ashamed, I guess, to contact him. He saw me do so many terrible things. But I know that he’s living with our aunt and uncle in Monrovia, and his birthday is coming up. Do you think you could come downtown with me and help me pick out a present for him?”

“I’d love to,” I said.

When we arrived at the Plaza, the historic soul of our fair city, it was more crowded than usual. The tourists were in full tourist mode, obliviously gumming up the sidewalks as they stopped to moon over every psychedelic wolf T-shirt and shapeless cowhide jacket in the shop windows. In a frenzy of frying, vendors served greasy tacos and tamales to long lines of customers who probably couldn’t handle the spices. Even the street performers seemed to be firing on all cylinders as they out-juggled and out-saxophoned each other. And amidst all the chaos, Native Americans sat cross-legged and quiet under the awning of the Palace of the Governors, selling their handcrafted silver and turquoise jewelry spread down a long row of traditional Navajo blankets.

“I came Christmas shopping here once,” I said as Thomas and I walked under the awning, pretending to admire the time-honored craftsmanship but really savoring the life experience on every seller’s face. “And I started talking to this old Indian woman selling her handwoven blankets. I’d been eyeballing this beautiful red-and-black one, thinking that my mom might like it, when the woman pointed to a flaw in the pattern. She told me that every blanket the Navajo make has a flaw built in. Did you know that?” Thomas shook his head. “She said something like ‘Imperfection leaves room for the spirit, for the creator to enter.’ It stuck with me.”

Thomas knelt and ran his finger thoughtfully along the wool fabric of a blanket. “I wonder if that’s true for humans too,” he said. “That our imperfections and our problems are how we stay open to something greater than ourselves. That embracing our burdens is actually how we grow and become our best and truest selves.”

“Problems can definitely, like, kindle something in you,” I said. “You just have to be willing to pay attention without . . . I don’t know. Freaking out? Is there a better way to say that?”

“Probably not,” said Thomas, smiling. I told him about my encounter with Jay that morning. “Wow,” he said. “Do you think we’ll see him again before Saturday?”

“I don’t know. But he’d fit in perfectly with these Santa Fe eccentrics.”

“For real,” Thomas said.

In the Plaza’s too-green grass, adult neo-hippies played hacky sack and strummed guitars for spare change. The horns of mariachi bands erupted at every corner. Preteen boys skateboarded around the Plaza’s central Civil War monument, harassing passersby. The monument’s controversial inscription read:
TO
TH
E
HEROES
WHO
HAVE
FA
LLEN
IN
THE
VARIOUS
BATTLES
WITH
SAVAGE
INDIANS
IN
THE
TERRI
TORY
OF
NEW
MEXICO
. Evidently the rock had been carved before the era of political correctness. At least someone had scratched out the word “savage.”

For his brother’s birthday present, Thomas decided on a little oil painting from a street artist. It depicted a young Indian boy on horseback, naked from the waist up, pulling taut the arrow in his bow.

“Henri would like this,” he said. He playfully twisted the deer totem around my neck. “He always wanted to ride a horse.”

After Thomas completed his errand, we wandered down Old Santa Fe Trail. “Trail” was a bit of a misnomer now that the road was paved and resembled any other gift-shop-lined route in the vicinity, but this was the same historic route that had been used by tradesmen, trappers, and missionaries for several hundred years. I’d seen photographs of exhausted travelers from the East Coast finally arriving at their destination in the center of town, having evaded Indian attacks, rattlesnake bites, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, and every other variety of disaster to make it to the great capital city, as if they’d beaten some kind of epic frontier video game.

Many of the storefronts still looked the same as they had well over a century ago. The adventurers of yore had drunk beer in these saloons and slept in these hotels. And at one point or another they had probably all passed through the city’s cathedrals and intoned desperate prayers. Even now, just past the reliquaries, there was a book in St. Francis where people wrote down their wishes. My mother had once shown me the inscriptions: “Please, God, take away my infertility.” “Pray for the soul of my dead father.” “May the hungry children be fed.” I don’t know why it took a book of burdens, all with different penmanship, to drive home the fact that
everyone
has obstacles to overcome.

I steered us left toward Canyon Road, a quaint street where art galleries sold larger works, the kind that couldn’t be contained inside the shops off the Plaza. We stopped to admire a cherry tree strung with rosaries that rattled like wind chimes. A bench sat empty next to a bronze, life-size statue of a horse.

“Let’s sit here,” I said, but Thomas was one step ahead of me. At my side, he unwrapped the painting in his lap, and we both stared at it. “You made a good choice,” I said. “I love how sure of himself that boy is. How centered.”

“Me too,” Thomas said. “Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the Indian warriors.”

“Kit’s influence, I imagine,” I said.

“He might have loaned me some books. Anyway, they make me sort of . . . envious. After going to war, these young warriors got to return to their villages and pueblos as heroes. They were celebrated in their communities. Even if they were just boys. Like I was. But I returned to Monrovia as a pariah. Worse, actually. I was not allowed to return. I was sent away. At the time I thought I was a warrior, but I was just a killer. And a fool. I was a trained beast. There was nothing noble in my actions. Now, in my dreams, I see these young Indian men riding their horses across the mesa, like this one in the painting, and I gun them down. . . . It’s dehumanizing. Consuelo, I’m afraid that I stopped being a real person during my year in the bush. I’m not sure if I can ever retrieve my soul. Not completely.”

I gripped his hand in mine. “Imagine if a war like Liberia’s had come to that hypothetical Indian boy’s village. Imagine if he’d been kidnapped, brainwashed like you. If he’d been taken from his family and his friends. If he’d been given a machine gun and had been told that it was basically a toy. He would’ve done the same things that you did. He would’ve met your same fate. People are the same everywhere, none better or worse. They just grow up in different circumstances.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said.

“What would you tell that Indian boy in the picture if all that had happened to him? To give up? What if it was Henri?”

“I’d never tell Henri that, no matter what he’d done.” He reached into his hoodie pocket, where I knew he kept his rabbit totem. My eyes wandered upward.

“Look, Thomas!” I said. “Is that one of yours?” A white balloon was crossing the sky over St. Francis Cathedral. The pink-rimmed, sunset clouds behind it made me think of paradise.

“Yep,” Thomas said, smiling.

“You know the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, right?” I asked. “She lived in the desert north of here. I once read a book about her. She said that if she painted a particular mountain often enough, God would give it to her. Maybe it’s like that with you. Maybe if you go into heaven often enough, like in one of your balloons, God will give it to you.”

“I don’t need a balloon to feel like I’m in heaven,” Thomas said.

Then he kissed me. I didn’t taste blood this time, only elevation and our combined weightlessness. It was as if we were in the sky again.

“Why do you like me?” I asked him, pulling my lips away reluctantly. “I’m just normal. There was nothing special about me until I got sick.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re the opposite of war, the antidote to war. You are peace. You’re the opposite of scorched earth. You plant seeds wherever you go. It’s so subtle you don’t realize you’re doing it. You leave a trail of small ideas, small affection, that grows and grows until it touches everyone. Heals everyone.”

“I
wish
. I wish I had that much power.”

“It’s not power, exactly. It’s energy. Remember when I first started school here two years ago? You spoke to me like a human being. It was the first time I felt normal here.”

“But you’re not ‘normal.’ You’re special. And I knew that right away. Before I even read your poem. Maybe that day at Agua you weren’t responding to my treating you like an average student so much as . . . you were just glad to be recognized as whole. And unique.”

My phone rang in my purse. Kit.

“I should probably get this,” I said, hitting
ACCEPT
.

“Are you with Thomas?” he said before I could even say hello.

“Yes.”

“Good. I need to talk to you guys. Where are you?”

Fifteen minutes later we met Kit in a coffee shop off the Plaza.

“Kaya asked me to go with her into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains tomorrow,” he said. “She told me there’s something she needs to do there, some sort of ceremony to communicate with her ancestors, and she needs my support. She was pretty intense about it, and I know that we made a pact to protect each other and stick together, so I just wanted to let you know. . . .”

“Thanks, Kit,” I said. “For telling us. Kaya should go up the mountain, if that’s really what she wants. The rest of us have gotten to follow our whims this week. But if she’s going, we’re all going.”

“You too, Thomas?”

“I’m with Lo,” he said. “I’m not crazy about going up the mountain when all I hear are wildfire warnings. But Kaya wouldn’t ask unless it was important. Let’s do it. Let’s go together.”

“All right!” Kit said. “Camping trip. We’ll blow off school tomorrow and climb a mother-effing mountain. And you know we have to spend the night up there—tomorrow is the last day of the swap. Or so Jay said. It will be like a farewell party for our adopted burdens. I’ll tell Ellen. We’ll all meet at my house at eight tomorrow morning.” He elbowed Thomas lightly in the ribs. “And don’t forget your two-person sleeping bag.”

I HAD NIGHTMARES THAT NIGHT.
Dreams that my father’s lungs were turning black, dreams that Thomas was an Indian warrior shot off his horse, dreams that I got so swept up in a song that I danced myself right off a cliff.

But somehow I woke up happy. And at seven thirty Friday morning, I still entered the kitchen feeling wide-awake and excited about the camping trip. I’d packed my overnight gear in my book bag so my parents wouldn’t be suspicious, and planned to call them later and tell them I was spending the night at Kaya’s so they wouldn’t worry.

The kitchen smelled like burning wood, because my dad wore his work clothes. I cherish his characteristic fragrance, even though I’ve never told him so. Flaming piñon trees notoriously smell of incense, so being around Dad is sometimes like being dragged to one of my mother’s high Catholic masses, where the heady aromas are often the only redeeming features of the service. I inhaled the sweet smoke as I plopped down at the kitchen table and poured myself a glass of orange juice.

“
Buenos días
, McDonoughs,” I said brightly to my parents.
“Habla desayunos?”

“I don’t know about a three-course breakfast,” Mom said, “but we definitely speak cold cereal.”

“A bilingual household is better than nothing,” I said. Mom gave my shoulder a brief squeeze as she walked to the fridge. She still wore her nursing scrubs from working the night shift at the hospital, and I suddenly wondered about the people she’d touched, those she’d helped to heal.

“How you feeling, hon?” Dad asked from the sink.

“Hunky-dory, Daddy-o,” I said. “Same as always.” This week I was carefully avoiding all domestic discussions on the subject of my mercurial body.

Dad set a cereal bowl in front of me, and I started cracking up. A fat green chili sat on top of my steaming oatmeal like a maraschino cherry on an ice cream sundae. “Don’t you think the day is a little young, Dad?”

“Never,” he said, taking his seat across from me and rolling up the sleeves of his uniform. He dug his spoon into a matching bowl. “Think of all the vitamin C you’re about to consume. Forget the orange juice, Lo. New Mexico chilis beat Tropicana any day as part of a balanced diet. On three. Ready? One, two. . . .”

Dad and I had an ongoing contest to see who could maintain poise the longest when eating habañero peppers. I took a deep breath and began chewing on the count of three.

“You think that being sick is going to mess up my game?” I said. “Fat chance.” Mom sat down with a bowl of ungarnished oatmeal and proceeded to sprinkle brown sugar on top.

“How
reasonable
people get a healthy start,” she said.

“So, you’re up awfully early this morning,” Dad said as his eyes began to water from the habañeros. “Trying to get a jump on the chickens?” He tried to act casual as he reached for his glass of water, but I was onto him. His whole body was rigid with effort. I could tell he knew that I knew, but he remained committed to the ruse. When his forehead broke out in a sweat from the chili, he began whistling “You Are My Sunshine.”

“Is it early?” I said innocently, dabbing my lips with a napkin, not feeling the usual burning sensation enveloping my mouth. I might actually win this time. “I’m catching a ride to school with Kit Calhoun.”

“I thought his mode of transportation was exclusively skateboard,” Dad said.

“Yeah, well, he’s more comfortable behind the wheel these days. What’s up with you? Do you have work today?”

“Just have to finish getting the blaze on the mountain under control. Should be today or tomorrow.”

“Please be careful, Dad.”

“I always am. I firmly abide by something your aunt used to say. ‘Fire can’t burn you as long as you keep moving.’”

“And she was right. Just make sure the fire doesn’t move faster than you.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Dad and I smiled at each other as matching chili tears dripped down our cheeks. I could still have the telltale reaction to the peppers, even though I didn’t feel the pain.

“Tie,” I said, winking at him. “Gotta run. Great breakfast,
padre
, though a
pequeño
mild.”

“Glad to see you’re brushing up on your Spanish, sweetheart,” Dad said. “Be sure to commend your teacher for me.
Hace calor!
” He ran for the sink for a water refill.

I docked my mostly full bowl of oatmeal on the counter under a tin can Jesus and kissed my parents goodbye. I wanted to leave before I felt too guilty for lying to them about skipping school and confessed everything.

• • •

I threw my backpack in the trunk of Kit’s car. I was the last one of our group to arrive at his house and the most eager to leave. With the exception of Kaya, anyway, who’d been watching for me in the driveway when I walked over. Even though we’d been hanging out all week, I felt that camping was going to be our biggest and best outing yet. Spending the night with Thomas on the mountain?
Fantástico
.

“Let’s do this,” I said. “Before Thomas decides it’s too dangerous.” I gave Thomas a kiss on the cheek so he knew I was teasing, and Kit smiled approvingly at my little display.

On the way out of town, Ellen insisted we stop for breakfast at Cocina de Carlos.

“It’s the best roadside Mexican stand in the state,” she said. “My appetite has come back with a vengeance this week, and I’m taking a sick, sick pleasure in food. I think these chorizo breakfast burritos might qualify as a drug.”

“Careful, Lo,” Kaya said, as I prepared to take a huge bite of my steaming egg burrito. “They’re hot. I’ve burned my mouth on them before without realizing it.”

“Thanks, Kaya,” I said, blowing lightly on my breakfast.

“Speaking of burning,” Thomas said, “aren’t there still wildfires on the mountain? Maybe we should just camp out at the KOA near the river.”

“No,” Kaya said. “There’s something I have to show you. We’re going up. All the way up.” She was acting more impassioned than she’d been even in the last few days, but we weren’t worried about it that morning, considering that she was our leader. It took some intensity to reach a summit. We had no idea that she was the last person we should have allowed to be in charge.

“Kaya!” I said, suddenly remembering something. “Didn’t you have a birthday party planned for tonight?”

“I canceled it,” she said. “I’d rather do this.”

“When’s your birthday?” Ellen asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“No way,” Ellen said. “Well, we’ll have to do something tonight to celebrate. Damn. Did anyone pack candles, by chance? A layer cake?”

“I might have a sparkler or two left,” Kit said.

“It’s really okay,” Kaya said. “I’d prefer not to do anything this year. Birthdays all sort of blend together, you know.” Not for me. I hadn’t had
that
many.

“Can we at least play a birthday game of truth or dare?” Kit asked. “In Kaya’s honor?” Ellen stuck out her tongue at him.

“Keep dreaming, Kit,” she said, smiling coyly.

Shortly after passing the site of our ritual in Pecos Park, Kaya directed us off the main road to a deserted parking lot at the timbered base of the mountain.

“Whoa,” Ellen said, gazing up the rocky, overgrown trail issuing from the edge of the lot. “It looks steep.”

“Do you think you can make it?” I said.

“Yeah. I feel okay for now.”

“Well, tell me if you start hurting or something,” I said. “We can stop.”

“Good thing you haven’t been smoking cigarettes this week,” Kit said to Ellen, swinging his backpack over his shoulder.

“I haven’t been doing a lot of things this week,” Ellen said, as we started up the trail, Kaya first. “And I don’t know if it’s Lo’s wack symptoms talking or what, but I really don’t miss them.”

“So . . . are you saying that, if given the choice, from a purely hypothetical standpoint, I mean, you wouldn’t want to switch back tomorrow?” I asked, testing the waters, even though I was pretty sure I knew—and wouldn’t like—her answer.

“Are you kidding? I can’t
wait
until we switch back tomorrow. But not for the same reasons as a few days ago. Now I feel way more equipped to conquer my old habits. Even if everything is reversed, I just can’t go from
this
back to . . . that.”

“What’s ‘this’?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Like, allowing myself to feel stuff again? Even when it sucks? I might be shaky this week, but I still feel more like myself than I have for the last year or so. After the ritual, if I feel tempted by pills or . . . whatever again, I can see myself going to get some help.”

“You mean, like therapy?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ellen said. “I guess. And maybe some kind of outpatient treatment or something. If my mom can buy me a brand-new car after I drunkenly crash mine, she can certainly pay for me to get sober. I know what I need now, and I just have to tell her, because otherwise she’s clueless.” Ellen held a branch aside until everyone passed, then let it fly back into the empty path. “I’m sick of feeling sorry for myself.”

“Atta girl,” Kit said, stopping to high-five her.

“Thanks, Kit,” Ellen said, blushing a bit.

The higher we climbed, the more triumphant I felt. Here were five people who’d never hung out together before last Saturday, and now we were taking the world—or at least one of its peaks—by storm. Though I still had some nervous energy I didn’t know what to do with, I felt pretty good. Proud even. Of myself and of my friends.

Thomas seemed especially to enjoy the mountain air. After several miles, he hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“This reminds me of when I used to take walks in the hills with my little brother,” he said. “Before the war.”

“Lucita and I hiked around here once or twice,” Kit said. “She hiked barefoot, if you can believe that. Said it gave her better traction. Plus it was a lot quieter, so we didn’t scare off the animals. We used to see the deer even before they saw us.” He reached down to help Ellen negotiate a large rock in the path. For a second I didn’t think she was going to accept his hand, but then she took it gratefully.

“Do you smell something, Lo?” Ellen said at my back. “Like smoke?”

“I don’t smell anything,” Kit said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The fire’s almost under control.”

Ahead of us on the path, Thomas turned around and smiled broadly at us, eyes shining. Then his face changed. He became deadly serious. He held up his hand for us to stop walking and then pointed to something behind us.

We all turned to look. Kaya was trailing us by several hundred yards. She walked slowly, as if in a trance. How long had it been since she’d said anything? Maybe twenty minutes? We’d all been giddily chatting away and hadn’t noticed her dismal silence or her retreat to the back of the group.

“Kaya?” I said. “Are you okay?” She didn’t answer. She just kept walking robotically, lost in her own dark world. As if by instinct, we looked to Thomas for guidance.

“We need to be careful,” he said. “If we push her, she could snap. Let’s just keep a close eye on her.” We stood aside as Kaya passed us without acknowledging our presence. We exchanged glances as she began to speed up. Then she veered off the trail at a jog.

We struggled to keep up with her, following her through the thickening underbrush. In a short time we reached a ravine. It was so dry that fissures ran through the earth at its bottom. It looked as though someone had recently pulled aside the vegetation along the bank to reveal its thirsty depths. Rocks and boulders of all sizes populated the ravine as if they’d fallen from the cliff above. Then my attention turned to the other white objects littering the scorched hollow.

At first I thought they were the skulls of steers. Misshapen steers. But no. I looked more closely and saw they were human skulls. And arm bones. Leg bones. Pelvic bones. The ravine held the scattered remains of human skeletons. I remembered the skull that the coyote had whisked through the ceremony on Saturday night. Maybe I hadn’t imagined it after all. My heart began to pound. And then Kaya turned to us with a remote look in her eyes.

“We were a small tribe,” she said hypnotically. “And that was our home, as far as you can see below. The Americans thought they’d find gold on our land, so we had to be removed. We were rounded up and told we’d be taken care of, given food and medicine, if we surrendered to federal authority. The American soldiers at the fort told us that we’d be protected. So we showed up in Santa Fe, trusting, emaciated. We stayed for weeks and weren’t given our rations. Still starving, we decided to take our chances and return to our village. Then one night the American soldiers came with guns. We tried to escape by running up the mountain, but they hunted us. They shot us in our backs, stole what little we had. Mutilated our bodies. I can see it happening. It’s happening right now. They threw our corpses in this ravine.”

I stood staring at her in shock. We all did. This fugue state was similar to the one at the airfield, but more emphatic. More . . . focused. And a thousand times more powerful, considering that she was standing among the evidence of the destruction she described.

Kaya squatted in the ravine and trembled as if from some deep reservoir inside. She seemed to be experiencing the massacre herself, in real time.

“Here’s where my mother was shot,” she said, fingering the dirt. “She was trying to protect me. She wore my baby sister in a papoose on her back. The vigilante came up and ripped her from my mother’s body. He threw her in the ravine, which flowed with water back then. ‘Nits make lice,’ he said. Then he stabbed me through the heart with his bayonet. He pulled my kachina doll from my hands, said he’d keep my teeth for himself as trophies and give my doll to his daughter as a souvenir. He cut off my mother’s private parts.”

One thing hadn’t changed after Jay’s ritual: Kaya still couldn’t cry.

“Kaya,” I pleaded, unable to raise my voice above a whisper. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d screamed. She was somewhere else.

We hadn’t read about this massacre in school. We’d never heard of this mass graveyard on the mountain. No marker or monument commemorated the deaths. How had Kaya known? She seemed to have a photographic memory for events that happened long before she was born. Even before her great-grandparents were born. But that couldn’t be. Could it? Maybe if we just . . . waited it out, these images would disappear, like the ones on her legs that my swimming pool had swallowed.