Ariel Gore: Santa Fe Noir

Ramona’s cell phone rings. She doesn’t recognize the number but answers anyhow.

“Hi, Ramona, it’s Tino. Remember me, the Laundromat stripper?”

“Oh yeah, what’s up?”

“Want to have lunch tomorrow, my treat?”

“Okay. Where?”

“How about the Plaza Café Southside?”

“Perfect. I’ve been meaning to stop by there to see if they’re hiring.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there around eleven thirty before the lunch rush.”

“Who was that?” Ramona’s mother asks.

“Oh, just some guy I met in the Laundromat,” Ramona chuckles.

At the Plaza Café Southside, Ramona finds Tino in a booth.

When he sees her, he stands up and waves. “How’s it goin?” he asks.

“Goin.” She slides into the booth.

“Hungry?” Tino asks.

“Starving. I want a stack of blue corn piñon pancakes and a side of bacon.”

“Got it.” Tino waves to the waitress to take their order, then looks back at Ramona. “So what’s up?”

“Oh, my mother is sick. I’m just worried about her.”

“Sick with what?”

“Cancer.”

Tino lowers his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, just when she kicks some slimebag boyfriend out of her life, she finds out she’s sick.” Ramona can’t shake the image of Juan sucking the life from her mother.

Tino sips his coffee.

“Yeah, and now I’m afraid he’s back. He’s Mexican, got deported, but you know how those guys just turn around and walk back across the border the next day.”

“How do you know he’s back?”

“I found three fresh cigarette butts of his in our fireplace when I made a fire last night. My mom doesn’t smoke.” Ramona is close to tears, but when the waitress presents her with her pancakes, she perks up.

Tino picks up his green-chile cheeseburger and takes a big bite.

“So how long you been in Santa Fe?” Ramona asks.

“All my life. You?”

“Same, born and raised, Santafesiño all the way. Funny, I’ve never seen you around before the Laundromat.”

“Oh, I went away to the Marines right after high school. Then Afghanistan. Deployed three times, that’s how I got this limp.” Tino taps his left thigh. “But I’m okay now. Got a disability check. I live with my mom too.”

“How’s the burger?”

“Excellent!” Tino offers a thumbs-up.

The café fills with lunch customers and the noise level rises. Ramona and Tino finish their food.

“Let’s get out of here.” Tino motions to the door. “I’ll pay up.”

In the parking lot, they make small talk. Ramona thanks him for lunch and he tells her he’ll call. “Maybe we can take in a movie. I hear there are some dope films at Regal 14 now.”

“Okay. Call me.” Ramona gets in her car and leaves Tino standing in the parking lot.

Ramona knows that slimebag is in the house as soon as she walks in. She breathes him with her first breath. She doesn’t see him or hear his voice but she smells him as she walks into her mother’s kitchen. She sees his half-empty plate on the kitchen table. Beans half eaten, a piece of tortilla left with the rice. Salsa jar left open.

“Where is he?” Ramona demands.

“Who, mija?”

Ramona points with her chin at the beans and rice. “Him! That asshole.”

“I’m eatin’ that food, mija, what are you talkin’ about? There’s no one here but me and you.” Her mother sits at the table and starts eating the food.

“How can you eat his food and lie to me? I know he’s here.” Ramona walks to the broom closet where her mother keeps her father’s guns.

“I’ll kill the bastard.” She pushes past her mother, who stands up to stop her.

“Mija, no. I’ll call the cops, they’ll take him away.”

“That doesn’t work! He just comes back.” Ramona stares at her mother. “Look at you.” She points to her mother’s neck. “That bastard’s been sucking on you again. You have the hickeys to prove it.” Ramona will not be stopped. Her mother asked her to take care of her and she will take care of her. She holds the pistol and remembers her mother told her it was loaded. No need to find bullets . Her father taught her how to handle the gun when she was a little girl. They used to target practice together in the Caja del Rio.

By now Ramona’s mother is crying, desperate to keep her daughter from shooting Juan.

“Come out! You son of a bitch!” Ramona yells toward the pantry just off the kitchen. She pulls open the pantry door and sees Juan crouched under a shelf of canned tomatoes, gallon jars of rice and beans. He holds a twenty-pound bag of flour to hide his face.

“Get up, you bastard!” Ramona points the gun at him.

“No! Don’t shoot. Your mother loves me and she’s not sick. We just made love.”

“You son of a bitch!” Ramona screams. “Go to hell where you belong!” She points the gun at Juan and fires three rounds.

Juan lies dead on the pantry floor, white flour covering his face. The blood from his chest wounds mixes with the flour, creating a pink paste encasing him.

“Oh my god, mija, you killed him!” Ramona’s mother pulls Juan’s still-warm body out of the pantry to the kitchen floor. “Now what?”

Caja del Rio is an 84,000-acre expanse of volcanic plateau five miles from Ramona’s mother’s trailer. Two abandoned thirteenth-century pueblos lie within the Caja. It’s an area of piñon and juniper, big sagebush and chamisas. The roads in and out of the Caja are rough dirt roads not well maintained by the Bureau of Land Management or the US Forest Service, which oversee them.

Ancient petroglyphs carved into basalt cliffs and outcroppings watch what occurs in the Caja. It’s home to coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and grazing cattle. Nopales turn red in the January sun.

In Tino’s battered Ford pickup, Ramona and he take Juan’s bloodied body, shrouded in an old blue tarp, up into the Caja.

They drive to the edge of a steep cliff and push the body off into a deep ravine.

Two red-tailed hawks soar overhead. Ramona looks out over the Caja where the sky is more than half the world. One-hundred-year-old junipers dot the red earth.

“I wonder if we really do return to the stars when we die.” Ramona remembers her father telling her stories of the Milky Way and how in death we live there again. Will even that bastard Juan make that journey?

She steps back from the edge of the cliff. “I never thought I’d turn out to be a murderer.” She faces Tino, and thinks about the first time she saw him, stripping at the Laundromat before she even knew her mother was sick.

“You had to do it,” Tino says. “That’s it.” He wipes his hands on his jeans. “Let’s get out of here.”

Santa Fe Plaza

Against the mountains, a vast wave of blood broke and receded. Through the waxy aspens and bristling pines, over the crenels and ragged tracks, shucking the soil and switchbacks, it fell like a robe of red from the reclining rocks — Sangre de Cristo, the blood of Christ — beneath it all, Kuapoga — Santa Fe — where Tséh Dog drinks her martinis at Hotel La Fonda. I sit next to her at the bar. We come here all the time, like a dare, some affront, a double-dare. With the jut of her jaw and the wicked scrawl of her pomaded hair, her leather jacket, cuffed pants, and motorcycle boots, she is photogenic in her Brando drag. In the hotel it is permanent dusk, an antique light drips through the bar. We become flies in amber. The counter is curved, a scimitar shape. Beyond the square tables, margaritas, and menus, the bar is open to the arcade that rims the hotel, a series of fragrant tourist traps selling silver and leather, haute couture cowboy duds, pottery. There are crocodile-skin bags in striplit terrariums. Turquoise stares back from locked cabinets. Behind us, the sometime open-air restaurant with its central fountain hums and flashes — mole and squash blossom, poblanos and corn. The conversations are loud. It sounds like Texas.