Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

It’s just like Aunt Mimi to set up hurdles for me to leap over even after she’s departed this world and really shouldn’t care anymore. Of course I go to the house. I use the key to unlock the big wooden door and step inside to a smell of musty feet and stale food. The refrigerator is still packed full of perishables, all, sadly, perished. Worse: the front toilet bowl still has piss in it. “If it’s yellow let it mellow... ” Aunt Mimi used to sing, because save the water or some shit. Now it’s anything but mellow... it’s fucking rank. I wonder why nobody bothered to clean shit up before I came.

“Isn’t that what a lawyer or whatever is supposed to do?” I mutter to myself.

I have my hands full, clearly, but I’m not too disappointed. Real estate prices in Santa Fe are astronomical. At the very least, I can sell the house and make a kick-ass profit.

That’s when I notice a padlocked wooden box sitting smack in the middle of the dining table, and there’s a card with my name on it pinned to the top of a wire stand, like the type you put place cards in for fancy dinner events. Not that I’ve been to a fancy dinner event... yet. I open the card, hold it into the light from the dining room window, and read.

Welcome back, Katrina. I’m sure you’re a little confused by all of this, so allow me to shed some light on things. I could think of nobody more worthy of this final task than you, so please follow these simple instructions. Before anything else happens, the box on the table needs to go to its rightful owner. Please walk it over to the house on the corner — you know the one. With the blue shutters and broken front walk. Ring the doorbell and give the box to Mrs. Santo. Do you remember meeting her? Her father, a Japanese American, was captured and interned in the prison camp set up by the government during World War II right here in what’s now this neighborhood. Anyway, she’ll open the box while you’re there so that you’ll know what happens next. She’s expecting you.

Please give your mother and sister my love.

I sigh. More hurdles to leap, and no, I don’t remember Mrs. Santo. Maybe she was one of my aunt’s yoga students? I grab the box off the table — it’s not as heavy as it looks — and walk down to the corner. Ring the doorbell. Let’s get this over with, I think.

A very old woman opens the door and looks at me. Her dark hair is streaked with a flash of white like lightning and it falls past her shoulders. Her face is a network of wrinkles, like riverbeds running from the corners of her eyes down over the curve of her jaw. Yes, I realize, when she pushes the screen door open and gestures for me to come inside, she was one of my aunt’s yoga students. She doesn’t smile; says nothing. I go inside and hold the box out to her.

“I’m Tina,” I say. “My aunt died and she wanted me to bring this to you.”

Mrs. Santo nods and takes the box from my hands, places it on the table. She walks away then, down a hallway, and I’m left standing in her darkened living room alone. What the actual fuck is going on?

She’s back a moment later, and hands me something. It’s the cap. The cap I took off the head of the person I thought was Tic. I hadn’t seen it since that night — it vanished, much like the ghost in the arroyo.

“Where did you get this?” I ask, incredulous, and suddenly everything goes downhill.

“So, you recognize it,” Mrs. Santo says, and pulls open the living room drapes. The room floods with light, and I turn the cap over in my hand. How does this relate to the box? To my aunt’s death? To... anything at all?

I shrug. “I mean, yeah, I do. But—”

She nods and claps her hands. “But nothing,” she snaps.

That’s when I hear it, a high-pitched whine and the crunch of plastic — a sound I recall from my childhood, when my grandfather lived with us. He used a wheelchair in his final days, and my mom put down thick plastic runners over the hallway carpeting to make it easier for him to get around. I’d know that sound anywhere.

I turn and there he is. Unmistakable. The spirit... the person... from the arroyo. His dark hair still falls past his shoulders, and in his face I see what I saw that night, but without the distortion from the acid. He looks like Tic, but not, and he’s in a fully motorized wheelchair. His limbs are Velcroed to the chair, a tube runs from the front of his throat. Only his eyes move.

And all I can do is look from him to the cap and back again.

Mrs. Santo walks over to the man in the wheelchair, and puts her hand on his. “This is my son,” she says to me, then to him she asks, “Is this her?”

The dark night after Zozobra rushes back in fragments, and I’m rooted there, staring at the man’s face, as his eyes travel the length of my body. They stop, then, on my upper arm.

He pushes his lips out, and his mother follows the gesture. Sees my arm too. Walks over and grabs it to look.

“Why do you have a tattoo of my son on your arm?” she asks.

I pull my arm away; her fingers burn. “It’s not... him,” I answer, tipping my chin at the man who clearly resembles my tat.

“It most certainly is,” she says, and looks back at her son. He blinks once, and I realize that means yes.

“You’re the one who was in the arroyo that night, aren’t you?” Mrs. Santo says. “You’re the one who pushed my son down as he tried to get away from the flash flood.”

“That’s not...” I stammer. “I didn’t mean to...”

“You didn’t mean to push my son into the flood?” Mrs. Santo says, her voice rising.

“It was an accident,” I implore. “He grabbed my arms and—”

“You didn’t report the incident.”

I stand there, my legs rooted to the spot. A rush of anger burns my face. “It wasn’t my fault! I was high... tripping... and I thought...” I gesture at the man in the chair. I’m about to say that I thought maybe he was just a hallucination... maybe even that he was La Llorona. But I stop. I can hear how ridiculous I sound.

“You thought nothing,” Mrs. Santo says. “You are the reason he’s in this chair, and worse, he was only trying to help you get away before the flood hit.”

That snapshot image comes back to me: him pulling me, then falling, then lunging for my arm.

“I was scared, I didn’t know—” I try, but Mrs. Santo cuts me off with a wave of her hand.

“Enough,” she says. She swipes the cap out of my hand, and gently places it on her son’s head. Then she walks over to the box.

“Your aunt found my son’s cap in your closet when she cleaned up the room where you lived that summer,” she explains, pulling a small key from her back pocket. “She saw his name written in it, so naturally she walked over to give it to me.”

She sticks the key in the tiny padlock. Twists.

“She didn’t know then that my son was gravely injured in that flash flood, and all because of someone who had pursued him to that arroyo, through the night, then assaulted him as he tried to avoid detection.”

The lock springs.

“And even after being assaulted, he tried to help his assailant.” Shaking her head in disgust, she lifts the box lid.

I can’t see what’s inside, but whatever it is, Mrs. Santo seems satisfied.

“Your aunt wanted you to work out your karma, as I think you know,” she says then.

“That’s, yes... what she wrote...” I have visions of being pushed in front of a flash flood wave — an eye for an eye. Absent that, a train? Truck? Bus? What’s even happening?

“Well, this should suffice.” Mrs. Santo closes the lid, walks over to her son, and places the box on his lap. “Had you only found my son’s cap on the ground while walking home, I would be handing you this box. But in light of the truth of what happened that night, your aunt wished for my son to have it. Everything she left behind.”