 |
And it would
not be so bad to go on now. She’d outlived four of her children
and two of her great-grandchildren, not counting the ones that never really
came. Her husband had died so long ago she had lived longer without him
than she had with him.
There was only one thing keeping her, and Placida had to fix it before
she could go. So it was that she gathered herbs and incense and candlesticks
that she had not used for a long, long time. And she waited till the moon
was right—full and bursting with the light of women--and she cast
her petition to the Madonna, the Virgin, the Mother.
Prayers did not always work. But this time, Placida felt a rush of warm
wind over her old bones and through her heart. For a moment, she scowled
at the candle flickering over the carved wooden robe of the statue of
Guadalupe, thinking maybe this was just going to bring her more energy
to see to things herself. “No,” she said, and poked a finger
toward the candle. It fell over.
With a small cry, she grabbed it up, but it was too late. The flame on
the old altar cloth sped right for the thin muslin curtains over the window.
They went up in a shiver of smoke. With her gnarled fingers, she could
not unfasten the knots of her apron as fast as she wished, and in despair,
she turned and took up the kitchen towel, trying to beat out the leaping
flames. With sharp, disappointed movements, she slapped at the fire.
That was the trouble with saints and prayers and spells. A person had
in mind a perfectly reasonable plan, but the tricksters always seemed
to take it as a challenge.
####
Filler from the Taos
Daily News:
FULL MOON FACTS
The full moon is the phase of the Moon in which it is fully illuminated
as seen from Earth, at the point when the Sun and Moon are on opposite
sides of the earth. The full moon reaches its highest elevation at midnight.
High tides. Names for the September full moon: Full Red Moon, Full Green
Corn Moon, Full Sturgeon Moon.
CHAPTER
ONE
It was a good thing for Placida Ramirez that the moon was full when she
set her house on fire at three o’clock in the morning that September
night. Because it was the moon, shining like a searchlight through her
bedroom windows, that had awakened Luna McGraw. Technically, it was a
dream about her long-gone father that yanked her out of sleep. It was
worries about her daughter’s arrival tomorrow that kept her awake.
But the moon, so coldly white in the summer sky, took the blame.
Dragging on a pair of shorts beneath her sleeping shirt, she got up to
make some coffee. It would make her mother crazy to know Luna was making
coffee in the middle of the night. Why not a cup of tea? Something soothing
and relaxing?
Not her style. Once upon a time, she would have poured a hefty measure
of gold tequila into a water glass and sipped that. A part of her still
wished she could.
At least coffee had some bite. Measuring out Costa Rican Irazu into her
new Krupps grinder, she counted out the seconds to twenty-one. Perfect
grind for a latte. Perfect grind for her, anyway. The world was entirely
too full of coffee nazis these days—coffee was about individual
taste, and no one should let anyone else tell them what to like. She liked
hers strong enough to stand and walk by itself, with steamed milk and
a pound of sugar. As drugs went, it wasn’t bad. Also, a good latte
took some detail work. The measuring. The grinding. Now she pressed the
grounds, the color of good earth, into a tiny metal basket, and clicked
on the machine. While it was heating up, she poured one-percent milk into
a giant ceramic mug and waited, yawning, for the steam to be hot enough
to make a froth.
The actions and the smell of coffee eased some of her restlessness, and
she found she could stand there with one bare foot over the other without
twitching too much in nicotine withdrawal. Or wondering why it had suddenly
seemed like such a brilliant plan to quit smoking right now, when her
daughter was coming to live with her for the first time in eight years.
Maybe, she thought with resentment, it would be better to try again in
a few weeks, when there wasn’t so much at stake.
But of course, Joy was the reason she had decided to try. The reason she
could stick with it for a few more days. Joy hated cigarettes and Luna
hated feeling like such a failure in front of her daughter. Not smoking
seemed like a gesture of earnestness.
And really, she needed to quit anyway—everybody had to quit, right?—it
stunk and made you wrinkle faster and it was bad for your health, and
it was nearly impossible to go out and have a long, lazy dinner with anyone
these days unless you wanted to keep a patch handy, which was almost as
sick in its way.
Primary reasons, she said to herself, an old habit. A note taped to her
cabinet said it: Smoking Stinks. Never mind dread diseases or wrinkles.
She hated the smell of cigarettes on her body and in her hair, in the
air and on her hands. Yuck. The way things smelled mattered to her—perfumes
and incense and flowers, herbs and morning on the desert. Coffee brewing
in the middle of the night.
The machine started to gurgle, and she stuck the steamer into the milk,
bringing a fine foam to the top, then poured the finished espresso into
the mug, added three packets of turbinado sugar, and stirred it all together.
Now what? There was a button that needed sewing on her best blouse. A
novel, lying face down on the kitchen table, could be read. In the workroom
off the kitchen an assortment of crafts, including a half painted table,
waited. Luna went and stared at it----the wildest one yet, a blooming
pink rose with a bleeding heart at the middle of it. Her mother hated
it, said it was scary, and while Luna didn’t agree with her, she
wasn’t in the right mood to work on it, either.
Tobacco. Tequila. White zinfandel. A long Marlboro, red pack.
At least they would be something to do.
With a half-bored, half-agitated sigh, she carried the mug outside to
the porch. The cold moon burned overhead like an evil omen. Luna glared
at it, settling into a metal, motel-style rocker she had painted with
a kitschy, smiling Virgen de Guadalupe in a pink dress and lime green
cloak and a Barbie-doll face. Guadalupe Barbie, she told people who wouldn’t
be offended. Even people who really loved her—and frankly, what
was there not to love about ‘Lupe?—were pleased by the rendition.
Sitting there eased Luna, like sitting on her mother’s lap.
But still that searchlight of a moon blazed over Taos. In the canyons
of her mind, Luna’s demons howled at it. She could see them, with
their greenish lizard skin and long claws and ears like bat wings, dragging
out all the forgotten sins of a lifetime, the little and the big. All
the sorrows that ordinarily stayed safely buried, the tattered bits from
childhood, the protected velvets of things she couldn’t bear to
look at. One demon plucked out a bracelet made of copper links, machine-stamped
with thunderbirds, and hearing her gasp of surprise and outrage, ran off
cackling with it.
Night sweats, her mother called them, but that seemed to be understating
the case a bit, especially when Kitty had them, she was probably thinking
about things like the time she swore at her boss, or the night Luna and
her sister Elaine saw her grabbing a boyfriend’s rear end on the
way out. Kitty had just not done that much she’d have to regret.
Unlike Luna, with her AA pin and the daughter she’d lost custody
of and the career she’d destroyed.
Oddly, though, none of those things were the ones haunting her tonight.
Instead, she’d awakened thinking of her father, who’d left
home when Luna was seven and never came back. She dreamed about him once
or twice a year, so it wasn’t particularly unusual. Sipping her
latte, holding the sharp, milky taste in her mouth for a moment, she did
think it was amazing how long you could miss a person, especially when
he didn’t deserve it.
Sitting now in Guadalupe’s lap, with a smooth wind blowing over
her face, Luna heard the trained therapist in her head, Therapist Barbie,
who wore big tortoiseshell glasses and her silver hair in a French knot,
point out the truth: Not too surprising you should dream about him tonight,
when your own child is coming to live with you. That drags up a lot of
old issues, doesn’t it?
Bingo.
She was wide-awake in the middle of the night trying not to smoke cigarettes
because her fifteen-year-old daughter was coming to live with her for
the first time in eight years. More than life itself, Luna wanted to get
it right.
A smooth wind, warm from sun-baked rocks high in the Sangre de Cristos
that circled the town like a ring of sentries, blew across her face and
knees. It smelled of the fields of chimaso and sage it crossed, fresh
and utterly New Mexico. She’d missed that scent more than she could
say when she’d left home at sixteen. Tonight there was a hint of
woodsmoke in it, and Luna imagined a pair of honeymooning lovers curled
before a kiva-shaped fireplace. The picture eased some of her tension,
some of that crawl of nicotine-need.
It helped so much, she did it again, just breathed in the night, hearing
crickets and the faint howl of the wind, or maybe La Llorona, the famed
weeping woman of legend who was said to walk the rivers here, looking
for her lost children.
Lost children.
Bingo, said Barbie, dryly.
It was perfectly normal to be nervous, especially because there was quite
a bit of murkiness surrounding the sudden change in custody agreements.
Joy had been in a little trouble the past year, but it hadn’t appeared
to be serious. Luna had flown down to Atlanta twice, a hardship financially,
but hadn’t made much progress. Joy’s appearance had shifted,
her attitude was sometimes hostile, and her grades were slipping, but
there were no sign of drugs or other substance abuse. Still, Luna had
been uneasy, and asked her former husband to consider letting Joy spend
a season or two with Luna in Taos. He’d adamantly refused.
Things had grown worse over the spring and early summer, during which
Joy had been forced to stay in Atlanta instead of coming to Taos as she
usually did thanks to flunked classes. And then, suddenly, Marc, Luna’s
ex, had called to say Joy could come live in Taos. Luna, suspicious of
a trick, had asked Marc to put it writing. He had agreed. Even stranger.
Something was afoot. But whatever Marc’s ulterior motives, Luna
had a chance to make sure her daughter was all right, a chance to see
her and be with her every day, a chance to find out what had caused such
a dramatic change in her behavior over the past year. A chance, as the
old Quantum Leap show said, to put right what once went wrong.
She’d painted the second bedroom, framed the thick-silled window
with gauzy curtains, brushed up on the nutritional aspects of cooking
for a child, even shifted her schedule at work to make sure she could
be home after school. Friends teased her about it—no fifteen-year-old
particularly cared if Mommy was home after school, they said—but
Luna just smiled. Her own mother had worked nights to be at home for her
daughters after school, and it had meant a lot to her.
The crickets went utterly still, as if a giant hand had squashed them.
Luna straightened, hearing a gust of wind gather in the distance. It rolled
toward her, and she covered her eyes and put a hand over her mug just
as it slammed into the little porch. It wasn’t cold, just dusty,
and Luna waited, eyes closed tight, for it to pass.
Smoke.
Not cigarette smoke, which she would have gladly inhaled to the very deepest
part of her lungs. And not the gentle wisps of a honeymoon cottage. This
was full-bodied, almost a taste, the thick smell of a fire that was pretty
full of itself. When the gust of wind died, fast as it had come, she peered
into the darkness, wishing that moon wasn’t so bright so the flames
would show. The summer had been painfully dry and fires were burning all
over the Four Corners. The ancient neighborhood, surrounded by fields
of dry grass and sage, was particularly vulnerable. Even a small fire
could be disastrous.
She put her cup down and dashed out to the road, turning in a circle very
slowly to see if she could see it, breathing in the strong smoke smell
for clues to direction.
“Oh, shit!”
The fire wasn’t at all distant. Bright orange flames poured out
of the window of the very old woman who lived two doors down the street.
Charged with adrenaline—and likely caffeine---Luna dashed inside,
phoned in the fire to 911, and then dashed back out, up the dirt road
on bare feet, then up the grassy, prickly expanse of yard toward the old
woman’s house. A goat head bit her arch and she had to stop to pull
it out, hands shaking. Fire danced through the kitchen window, licked
at a pine that stood sentry near the back, threatened to burst, any second,
through the roof.
Thinking with a sick feeling of the old woman, Luna leapt onto the porch
and yanked open the screen door. “Hello!” she cried, pounding
with her fist on the door. “Hello! Are you in there?”
Nothing. She tried the door and found it locked. “Hello?”
She pounded harder. No answer, and smoke thick enough it was making her
want to cough. She tried the window. Locked.
There was a flower pot thick with chrysanthemums sitting on the step.
Luna grabbed it, smashed the window, unlocked it, and stuck her head in
the smoky interior. “Hello? Is anyone here? Grandma!” Maybe
Spanish would be better. “Abuela!” she cried. “Hola!”
The
smoke stung her eyes, sharp and acrid. An ache of some primal terror burned
in her chest. For a moment, she hesitated. The fireman would be here any
second. They were trained for this. It was arrogant of her to think it
was her job to try to save someone, wasn’t it?
But then she thought of the wizened, tiny old woman, and there was no
way she could just walk away and live with herself in the morning. Before
she could chicken out, she ducked into the house through the window, dropping
to the floor in some remembered bit of lore. The smoke wasn’t so
thick down there, and the air felt cool. Crawling on her hands and knees,
she made her way through the dark. Living room. Door to a bedroom, closed.
Her heart was skittering so fast that she felt shaky. The fire was beginning
to crackle and breathe, an animal gathering power. Get out, get out, get
out. Luna resisted the terror. Coughing, she opened the bedroom door.
The room was blissfully free of smoke, at least for this second. She stood
up and checked the bed. Empty.
From the back of the house came a loud, cracking noise, and a strange
groan. Luna almost choked on her fear, imagining the beams of the house
coming down. But faintly, she heard a yell—not a scream, but some
kind of curse—and she dashed out of the room, pulling up her t-shirt
to cover her nose and mouth. Her eyes watered profusely, but against the
hellish light of the kitchen, she spotted a wizened figure moving, a shadow
in the light.
Bracing herself for a millisecond, Luna took a breath through the fabric
of her shirt, then dashed down the hallway to the heart of the fire. The
old woman was in there, slapping a wet towel at the flames that danced
up the walls. Hacking, coughing, sometimes nearly doubling over, she still
kept swinging.
“Abuela!” Luna cried, “come on!”
Giving Luna a look of fury, the old woman backed away, her foot nearly
into the flames, and uttered a spate of Spanish Luna didn’t understand.
Heat singed the hairs on her face, and it took everything she had to reach
out, venture more deeply into the inferno, but she did it, connecting
however she could with the old woman, who slapped at Luna’s arms
and wiggled her legs when Luna picked her up around the waist and tossed
her over her shoulder. She could hear the fire engines now, close and
coming closer.
“No! No!” Abuela cried, smacking at Luna’s head and
back, kicking her hard in the stomach. Luna grimly hung on and ran outside
with more power than she would have believed she owned. When they were
safely on the grass, Luna dumped her struggling bundle, taking an elbow
to the eye for her trouble. At the influx of cool, mostly fresh air, she
coughed hard and wiped the tears from her eyes, wondering if she’d
be bruised tomorrow. Her cheekbone ached---
The old woman made a break for the house.
Luna grabbed her back the back of the dress. “You’ll kill
yourself in there!”
For a long moment, the old woman stared at the flames with an expression
of purest fury. She said something in Spanish, and tried to yank her arm
away.
Luna held on. “Are you going to try to get back in there again?”
“No,” she said proudly, and slapped at Luna’s hands.
“All right.”
With narrowed eyes, Abuela took three steps back, watching in something
like disgust as the firemen tramped up with their hoses, first hitting
the old pine with a good soak, then addressing the fire licking up the
roof. “How did it happen?” Luna asked her, finally.
Abuela glared. Then she spat out something Luna didn’t understand,
and waved her hand at the fire. She clamped her lips together and wouldn’t
say another word.
###
Thomas Coyote was not sleeping when his phone rang. He was sitting at
the kitchen table doing nothing much of anything, just sitting under the
glare of the overhead light in the unbreachable silence of late night
and loneliness, his hands folded in front of him. He examined them minutely.
Big hands, even for a big man, which he was. They were brown, both from
nature and the sun, a kind of reddish brown, ho ho ho. The crayon color
burnt sienna, which was what he always used to color faces when he was
a boy, making them the same color as the people around him. Burnt sienna
and brown and another one he couldn’t quite name just this minute.
The one called peach he’d saved for ribbons or dresses.
The house was big and silent, though not empty. Sprawled across threshold
to the dining room was his dog, Tonto, a young and foolish Akita mix with
a patch of black over one eye. His paws twitched as he chased a dream
squirrel or rabbit. On the windowsill over the sink sat a fluffy black
cat, Ranger, his tail swishing back and forth, back and forth, as he stared
at the moon-bright landscape. In an upstairs bedroom slept Manuel “Tiny”
Abeyta, one of his best workers, who’d appeared on Thomas’s
doorstep six weeks before with a black eye, the just-out-of-jail hair
greasies and a beaten look around his mouth. Three months on an ankle
bracelet for domestic violence, and two-way restraining order—Tiny
couldn’t approach his common-law wife and she could not approach
him. His wife, too, was under restraint, facing a similar stretch of anger
management classes. They were halfway through, and Thomas frankly didn’t
see much improvement, but you never knew when the turnaround might come.
Tiny didn’t have anybody but Thomas just now.
Tiny wasn’t the first one to take the bed in that room, and wouldn’t
be the last. It had made his wife crazy, these strays Thomas found, people
as often as animals. Or animals as often as people. The stray part was
the bit that had bugged Nadine.
At the back of his mind, a niggling vision of his ex-wife tried to rise,
and resolutely, he went back to his hands. Nail oval, neat because he
filed them regularly while he was watching TV. Couldn’t stand raggedy
nails. His work as an adobe layer meant there were inevitable bangs and
nicks and cuts, and the clay sucked every bit of moisture out of a man’s
skin, but every night after his shower, he rubbed them with Bag Balm to
help the cuts heal and keep the skin soft, a trick he’d learned
from his grandmother, who told him when he was eighteen and getting ready
for a date that no woman wanted to feel rough hands scratching up her
chichis.
The memory made him smile, and he rubbed his hands together easily, liking
the strength and flexibility in his long fingers, flat palms. Hands that
had weighed a good number of chichis in their time, though not for a very
long time. Maybe wouldn’t anymore. It made him tired to even think
of it, all the trouble and turmoil that went along with women.
The phone, shrilling into the stillness, made him jump, and he stared
at it, a green phone hanging on the wall, for a long moment. Middle of
the night phone calls were bad news. On the third ring, he got up and
yanked the receiver off the hook. His hello was gruff.
A woman’s voice said, “No one died or anything, but is this
Thomas Coyote?”
“Yeah.” A ripple of worry crossed his belly. “Is it
Placida?”
“She’s fine,” the woman said. A good voice. Anglo, but
western Anglo, with a little softness at the end of words. “But
she…uh…had a bit of an incident tonight. She set her curtains
on fire and the kitchen is damaged?” The voice rose on the end of
the word, as if in a question, and he knew she was a native of the general
area. He grunted acknowledgement, and the woman continued, “She’s
going to need to stay somewhere else tonight.”
“I’ll be right there.”
It was a little less than two blocks, one block east and one downhill.
He loped it easily, seeing the fire engines he’d heard and dismissed.
A chill touched his chest. What if….?
His grandmother, technically his great-grandmother, stood in huffy silence
to one side of the yard. She was dressed in an ordinary flowered house
dress, her hair in a long braid down her back. Her skinny arms were crossed
over her chest, and light caught on the thick glasses that distorted her
eyes. Soot covered her in streaks, and her hair carried a layer of fine
ash. A cold sweat touched him. Damn. “Abuela!” he said, censure
and worry in his tone. He didn’t need to see her eyes to know she
was irked, and that somehow, the woman standing beside her was—right
or not—taking the blame.
“Grandma,” he said, bending to put his arm around her shoulders.
“What happened?”
She made a pishing noise, dismissive. In Spanish, she said, “You
could see. I caught the curtains on fire.”
He responded in English. It was their pattern. He spoke English. She spoke
Spanish. The only time she ever used English, it was in a whisper. “How?
Why so late?”
Placida Ramirez was old, but not feeble. “That’s my business.”
The woman standing on the other side of his grandmother made an amused
little noise and he raised his head, gathering impressions. An air of
sturdiness and directness, a headful of wild brown and blonde curls, strong-looking
legs. She’d obviously been inside the burning house---soot was smeared
along her chin and the front of her shirt. One knee was scraped and dusty
and she had a streak of blood on one arm. “You went in?”
“I broke the window,” she said. “I knew she was really
old, and it scared me that she might be still asleep.”
“You know you’re cut?”
She frowned and looked down, not seeing it at first, then lifted the sleeve
of her t-shirt. “Ah, it’s not bad. I’ll be all right.”
Her voice was smooth and green, like a pond in a forest. He looked at
her muscled legs below her shorts, the looseness of breasts beneath her
shirt. Rubbed his palm against his thigh. “You sure?”
She backed away. “Yeah. Now that she’s safe, I’ll just
go clean up.”
“I’m Thomas Coyote,” he said, and extended his hand.
A way to hold her another moment.” Thank you.”
She hesitated and put her hand into his big one, and he liked the sensible
feel of her fingers. Strong palm, a good grip. “Luna McGraw.”
His grandmother snorted and let go of an annoyed stream of Spanish, none
of it complimentary. Thomas glared at her, letting go of the woman, feeling
her flee the second he let her go. He thought it would have been neighborly
to tell her they’d have her to dinner in order to thank her. Something.
But he didn’t. He settled his face into a frown and watched her
cross the street, breaking into a simple, athletic lope as she passed
the house next door, then cut across the lawn to a house he’d often
noticed, a small, well-tended adobe with a pretty yard full of flowers.
She ducked inside. A moment later, light brightened a set of long windows
to the back.
His grandmother cursed next to him, and he couldn’t make it all
out—his Spanish was not that good—but he gathered it had something
to do with the Anglo and the trickster. “She saved your life, Abuela,”
he said.
Placida scowled up at him.
He knew she wasn’t trying to kill herself. It was a mortal sin,
for one thing, and if she was anything, it was a good Catholic. But whatever
she’d been doing, she wasn’t talking now. “C’mon,
let’s get you home and in bed. You’ll be too tired tomorrow
to do anything.” |
