Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

He shuddered.

“You’re cold, poor guy. Come on, dude,” Ava said. “Let’s get the bike. And, um, Trevor, have you got... money... for dinner? I don’t have any on me. I’ll pay you back.”

“You never pay me back,” he said.

“That’s true,” she said. “Try not to mind too much.” And she took his hand as they turned toward town in the moonlight.

Rancho Viejo

When my father died — shit, that must’ve been over five years now — I flew from my home in Oakland to Albuquerque with my partner. I had to rent a car to drive to Las Vegas, New Mexico, an hour and half up the highway — but not just any car. Nah, I rented a red convertible Mustang that, when you opened the doors, I kid you not, a galloping horse appeared on the ground. Magical. Mystical. I made my partner watch me open and close the doors over and over, made them lie down on the ground with me taking selfie after selfie with that illuminated galloping horse.

Once we left the lights of Albuquerque behind, my partner placed their hand in my lap and cooed, “It’s such a beautiful night. Look at that moon. Let’s stop in Santa Fe on the way.”

“Absolutely not. I boycott Santa Fe.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. How can you boycott a city?”

I didn’t respond but just drove on. They could tell something was up so they kept eyeballing me like, Don’t make me ask you . They possessed such an unwavering stare, I broke.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s like a joke. My dad said he only went there to pick up work or pick up white women.”

“Um, that’s gross.”

“But sadly true. He met my mom there.”

“Thankfully,” my partner said, and grabbed the hair on the back of my head lovingly and hard. The moon was almost full and this blue light filled the car. Beautiful indeed, but eerie in a way.

I said, “I was born in Santa Fe. My mom lived with a bunch of other women in some collective house. She gave birth to me in the middle of the living room surrounded by her friends, with my dad outside drinking and grilling carne asada.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Not really. She had kicked him out. Told him to leave. But he refused so he set up outside, with a couple of his homies, yelling every now and then to see if I was a boy or girl.”

“That’s kind of adorable. Little did he know, ” they said, and tried to kiss my neck, but failed because the seat belt kind of choked them.

I snickered and said, “It was adorable until my mom had to call the cops on him because the party got outta hand when he found out I was a boy.”

“So you really are from Santa Fe.”

“I guess you can say it’s my hometown.” I stopped talking when I said that: hometown . I hadn’t been back in years. But I’ve always felt a sense of pride about being from New Mexico. Or a sense of longing. Of wanting to be filled with something. Connected, maybe. I remembered my parents’ relationship. It was manic. The fights they had. And the parties. Every memory accompanied by screaming and drinking or laughing and loud music. Just thinking about it, my body tensed, like preparing for a fight, like sensing a threat.

My partner asked, “So I take it your dad’s family doesn’t have a framed poster of O’Keeffe on the wall?”

“Never. I tell people there’s more to New Mexico than Santa Fe and it’s not all pretty flowers and blue skies. It’s actually an ugly, conflicted place. My dad took me to the courthouse that Tijerina raided and occupied in the late sixties.”

“Have no idea who that is, but cool.”

“But we also went to the pueblo in Taos and the Chimayo weaving stores. Honestly, the only time I went to Santa Fe was during the summers I came back here to visit my father in like the early eighties. Every Sunday, we drove to visit my uncle Eddie in the penitentiary just to the south. We’d stop in Santa Fe to buy cigarettes to give the guards. My father had to bribe them so he could see his brother.”

“Shut up. That can’t be true. That’s not how prison works.”

“Spoken like someone who never visited anyone in jail.”

“Ouch, but I can’t argue with that.”

“This is the prison where that riot happened in like 1980. They don’t even know how many people died because it was so overcrowded and chaotic. Thirty-three, according to the state historian, but who knows.”

We drove through the night. I imagined all those deaths, all this history of violence, spreading across the desert. The mesas. The arroyos. The stories of Natives resisting US soldiers, of Chicanos resisting ranchers and hippies, of women resisting machista men, of my father and my mother and all they showed me about loving and hating and surviving.

My partner said, “Okay, I’m totally fine with skipping Santa Fe. I understand. Is the jail still there?”

“It became a tourist attraction for a while. Not that the new maximum-security prison wasn’t there too, on the same grounds as the tourist attraction.”

“People are just sick.” Then they said, “Are you okay talking about your father? I know parents come with such problems.”

“I got no problems.”

They laughed. “Says the person who rented a convertible Mustang to go to a funeral.”

We drove on for about thirty miles until we came to San Felipe Travel Center, which I guess is called the Black Mesa Travel Center now — fancy names for a gas station with a casino and a diner. I always got the pork taco with green chile topped with shredded iceberg lettuce and pale diced tomatoes. But more importantly, the place served the best damn sopapillas anywhere, accompanied by that sticky plastic bear full of honey. I beep-beeped the alarm in this parking lot full of old trucks and beat-up sedans. My partner acted all suspect when we exited the car. I could tell by how they sauntered up to the whooshing sliding glass doors.

We ordered four sopapillas and two tacos. The diner served Pepsi in thirty-two-ounce cups, the red plastic kind, with free refills. The food arrived and we watched each other while we ate the tacos: the green chile hot as fuck, my partner’s light skin flushed red, their eyes watered. Me, I let myself go, let the heat and that burn cause tear after tear to run down my face. I didn’t wipe one away. After, we slathered the sopapillas in golden honey and licked our fingers clean like kids.

When we left, the moon hung high over the desert. Somber. Slightly spooky. Like something might jump out and scare you. I suddenly felt exhausted. Like in all this excitement of coming home and bringing my partner, I forgot that I was here to mourn, to deal with my family, the ghost of my father, all the stuff that haunted me.

My partner said as we approached Santa Fe, “Hey, a place called Rancho Viejo is coming up. It’s on the outskirts of the city so it’s not really like going to Santa Fe. Let’s pull over and take a moonlight walk.”

“You wanna hear something hella creepy?”

“Um. Yes. Of course.”

“A part of me is buried in this area. We can even cruise by the house that’s been built on the site on Bosquecillo Street. My mom made placenta pills with half of the placenta but then she gave the rest to my father, who drove out here and buried it. It was just open desert then.”

“Get the fuck outta here. Why would he do something like that?”

There was, of course, no way to answer that without sounding ridiculous. Instead, I exited the highway and turned left onto Dinosaur Trail Road and drove past a smattering of housing subdivisions and soft, undulating mounds covered in shimmering silvery foliage, maybe big sage or saltbush, I couldn’t tell. The last time I drove on this road, I was with my father. He wanted to fuck with the people who lived in the house. He wanted to knock on the door and ask if they felt it was haunted, if they knew they bought a house that was built on a buried placenta. I refused to stop the car. Told him he was acting crazy. My father called me a fucking pussy and didn’t say a word the rest of the way to Vegas.