Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

“Oh my God. Are you saying you think—”

“I don’t think ,” my mother cuts me off, “I know : that woman has to be one of the monsters who kidnapped my sister.”

She hangs up before I can respond. I try back and it just rings. I leave her a message to call me back and drive home. When I get there I try her again and it goes straight to voice mail.

“Hello?” Erica answers, sounding a little sleepy.

“I’m so sorry to bother you but you’re not going to believe this.”

I relay the events quickly.

“So I’m worried about my mom,” I say, wrapping it up. “She’s not calling me back. I’m gonna head over to her place.”

“Okay, but wait, wait — I may know something about how to find the woman with the French braid.”

“What? How?”

“I remember an ex of mine from years ago and his buddies joking around about a woman they knew from work and, I think , if I’m remembering correctly, it had something to do with her having a French braid...”

“Oh my God, try to remember!”

“They used to joke about her braid being so long and thick that she used it to auto-erotically asphyxiate the men she slept with.”

“Where did they work? Do you remember?”

“Fuck!” Erica shouts. “I can’t! But I think I can get ahold of my ex and I bet he would remember.”

“Okay, awesome, thanks. I’ll check in with you later,” I say. I pull onto my mom’s block.

She’s not home and I bet I know just where she is: looking for the horse woman. She’d been saying to my sister and me for years, once we were grown and out of the house, that if she ever found el puta madre que me quitó a mi hermana, she’d rip his penis off with her own hands and choke him with it as he stood there screaming.

She isn’t the kind of person who typically says anything like that — she is a lady, as she always says. So I kind of believe her. And I don’t want her to take the fall on account of those scumbags.

I want to do it. Do it for Aunt Lupita, and my grandparents, and my mom. Do it before my mom does so she won’t spend the rest of her days locked up, away from her beloved garden.

Me, I don’t have a garden. I don’t have shit, come to think of it. Nothing that amounts to much anyway. I’ll make the world a better place by offing these scumbags and spend the rest of my days reading in the prison library.

My phone rings. It’s Erica.

“So I messaged him and he actually remembered her name!” she shouts.

“Oh my God.”

“And get this,” she continues, “I looked her up on the city records and I’ve got an address for her.”

“That’s amazing! I’ll be at your office in like five.”

Erica is kind of crazy, I guess, because she decides to go with me to check out that address and make sure my mother doesn’t somehow beat me to it.

“Fuck, I’m out of cigarettes,” I lament as we get into my car. “This shit’s so fucking gruesome, smoking just seems to kind of go along with it these days.”

“Well, do you want to stop at Owl’s Liquors and get some?”

“No, it’ll waste time.”

“No,” Erica suddenly announces as we near the turnoff on Agua Fria, squeezing my arm, “I want to stop at Owl’s. We have to stop.”

I look at her and she pierces me with those eyes. I miss the turn and pull into the Owl’s Liquors parking lot a block later. I’m about to get out to get that pack when we hear screaming.

“It’s all your fucking fault!” a man’s voice is yelling. “If you’d have just gone to the store and bought some fucking paint and covered that shit up, like I told you to, none of this shit would be happening.”

Erica and I look over to where the shouting is coming from. There she is, in the far corner of the parking lot: French braid.

My take on Erica was more spot-on than I’d even suspected — she knows things. I look back at her, shocked.

I slide my hand into my jacket pocket. My pocketknife is there, as expected. I’d grabbed it before running out to meet Erica.

“Sure, blame it on me,” French Braid yells back at the guy, “that’s been your plan all along, right?”

They’re standing in the empty back corner of the large parking lot, away from the entrance to Owl’s Liquors, by the same Escalade I saw in the driveway this morning.

“...blackmail me after I found out your game and didn’t turn you in,” she continues shouting, “get me to do all your dirty work setting things up so you could always pin it on me if the shit went down!”

“That’s bullshit!” he screams, but it sounds like he’s lying, even to me.

I look at Erica. We watch him storm off into the store. French Braid, in turn, gets into the Escalade and screeches out of the parking lot.

It’s dark now. This is my chance. To avenge my Aunt Lupita and all our family’s suffering. To make sure this asshole can’t handcuff anyone ever again. To finally do something with my life.

I reach into my coat pocket and feel the hefty pocketknife, which I’ve never seen used the way I’m going to except in the movies. I undo the lock feature. The guy comes out and heads toward where the Escalade was, mutters something under his breath, then lights up a smoke.

“The minute I get out of this car,” I say to Erica, “drive away and don’t look back. Drive home. I’ll get my car from you later.”

“What?” I hear her say as I open the door.

“I mean it,” I hiss.

“Hey, you got a smoke, man?” I say, walking toward the guy. “I’ll pay you for it.”

“Um,” he says, looking over at me, “sure, okay.”

He reaches into his pack. I reach into my pocket.

Three minutes later, he’s slumping to the ground and I’m walking away, out of the parking lot onto Hickox Street. I pull some paper towels and a small bottle I’d filled with rubbing alcohol out of my other pocket and douse and clean the knife off as discreetly as possible as I go.

I walk several blocks to Tune-Up Café and walk inside. As I wait in line, I pull out my phone and check my e-mail. I order an Angry Orchard Hard Cider and find a seat on the outdoor patio. Someone wants an appraisal tomorrow at two; I press Accept , see a confirmation e-mail pop up.

I see a text come in from my mom: Por fin, justicia por Lupita .

I down my cider and order another.

Pacheco Street

In my dream, I hear coyotes heckling from the darkened arroyo near my old apartment. Shadow puppets dance on the wall, illuminated by car headlights passing east and west on St. Francis Drive. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains loom over Santa Fe.

He lies next to me, snuggled in the pit of my arm, his left hand on my chest. Who is this man? The weight of his arm on my chest entraps me. The stranger opens his eyes and stares into me, delirious.

I woke to the howls of an oncoming train. I slouched on the wooden bench, my legs splayed, my leather bag anchored around my shoulder.

The person next to me smiled.

I wiped my mouth.

“Is this your train?” The blue in the stranger’s eyes was daunting, the color of turquoise — like his, the stranger in my dream. His blond hair wasn’t completely blond but held bits of gray around the temples.

I nodded.

“I figured the squeals of the train would wake you up,” he said. “I wasn’t staring, just so you know. Is this your normal train?”

I nodded again, silent.

It had been close to a year since I moved to Brooklyn from the Harlem projects. Before Brooklyn, I lived with a family of three, in a two-bedroom apartment, near my job — just over a year. Now, I took the R train each morning to meet the 2/3 train that transported me back into the neighborhood, where I was employed as a social worker.