Ariel Gore: Santa Fe Noir

“I think this is the hotel,” Tséh Dog says, brandishing a ratty paperback, “from this book.” The book is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. “This is the hotel ahead of the ‘savage reservation.’ That’s what they call it. Big men hunting from helicopters.” She sips her drink, and pushes the book into her back pocket where the spine suffers. “I got us a room,” she says, and there are no choices. Her smile is crooked. “Let’s see if it has perfume faucets, like in the novel.”

Rainbows caught in lemon bubbles — eyelashes — some bright glycerin reef, or a glossy discotheque, popping dreams glittering around Billy’s asshole, a shiny penny encircled with soap. He was a dishwasher, and the hotel where we did this has been covered over with another. So it is with dreams. So it was with Billy. The last hotel is low in the rosy sediment, where the subterranean parking lot gouges like a gray goldmine. Everyone loves Billy, in the way that crows love their scarecrow. You know the sepia smut of his photograph, the stupid eyes, his rabbit teeth. I like to come to the new hotel and pretend. The scent of his groin like raw lamb, he shrugs through the furniture like a civet cat, drifts up through the floor. What was Garrett thinking with this feral boy?

We wake and it’s not yet midnight, so go downstairs and walk the few yards to the plaza where the drivers of a pair of unmuffled lowriders, both sixties Impalas, one violet the other grasshopper green, are doing their slo-mo Ben Hur past the muted yellow windows of the Palace of the Governors — wolf-whistles — deferential applause — no one wins — and this is where the Indians sit in the day, surrounded by tourists who must look uncomfortably down upon them to see their jewelry laid out on black sheets. Tséh Dog doesn’t sit on Indian row anymore. She struts and poses for photographs and tips. But mostly she’s a pickpocket. Moonlight slips through the plaza’s broad trees, strobes in the wind. Briefly, she engages with a man dressed in a quilted jacket, seated on a park bench, returns empty-handed. We’re sitting on the stone steps of the bandstand, watching the past ripple across the facades of the expensive stores, where once there was a drugstore, a firing squad... Tséh Dog regards the gray light falling on the obelisk, To the heroes who have fallen in various battles with — Indians in the Territory of New Mexico. The word savage was removed in 1974. She thinks of Huxley and his shining helicopters, of nerve gas falling on wolves, pueblos strafed by machine guns, and she thinks of American Spirit and Hollywood, motorcycles and buffalo. Tséh Dog wants a Manhattan, so we go back.

The rugged, sandy-haired man in the bar says he’s an astronaut. He is spending one night at La Fonda, and a night at the Sierra Grande Lodge down in Truth or Consequences, three hours south, before he is shuttled to the spaceport on the Jornada del Muerto. “Then what?” Tséh Dog asks. Mars, he tells her. The Agency’s colonization project, he explains. She’s imagining becoming an outlaw on another planet, a planet blushing with promise, taking a dune buggy, a motorcycle, or a horse over the ancient curves of red sand. How old are you? he asks, and Tséh Dog says, “Old enough,” and presses a cherry between her lips. He hooks it out with his tongue. Something goes wrong in the elevator to the floor where the room is, and when the guillotine doors open the astronaut is dead. “Get up,” Tséh Dog insists, puts a motorcycle boot into his ribs. “Get up!” She is certain now, satisfied. The astronaut, a shriveled heap of plaid and denim, is still and silent, stiffening in the gaping doorway.

He’s the third. In the hotel room, he is arranged on the bed, and Tséh Dog stands over him, pulling a crease out of the blanket with its Navajo pattern. She is cool-nerved, contemptuous of the body, thumbing shut the eyes. She pulls his room key from his jeans, and $312 from his new snakeskin-embossed wallet. It has a receipt in it from one of the arcade stores off the lobby. His cell phone rings, and Tséh Dog rejects the call, thumbing that shut also. In the night, long before dawn, we’ll use rope to saddle him up into the Sangre de Cristos — pinion — piñon — the astronaut will ride up there into the pines like the corpse of El Cid into battle. So much Christendom... Charlton Heston played Ben Hur and El Cid in the movies. “And Moses, and the astronaut Taylor in Planet of the Apes ,” Tséh Dog says. “He also played a rancher who hired Billy the Kid. And he played Andrew Jackson.” That’s something. His room is on the same floor. We make it with his key. There’s a suitcase from the Agency and a packet of American Spirits, and a silver vinyl wash bag in the bathroom, but that’s it. These things we take. The sandy-haired astronaut waits for us. Tséh Dog lies down next to him while I go through the suitcase and count the cigarettes. I’ll show the stuff to Tséh Dog when she wakes up, in a few hours — rosary — book — silver flight suit, like the others... When the hotel is quiet, we will carry him with our shoulders like a crucified man pretending to be merely an alcoholic. Tséh Dog dreams of Billy riding on the red dunes, the plumes and plummets of their ghosts. I think of the fear and disgust rippling like heat haze through mission control as another astronaut goes missing. I open my eyes and the corpse is still there on the bed.

At another time, in slanted monochrome, Martin Richter would have been a Pinkerton man. Now he is an Agency man, paramilitary police for the Mars program, gaunt and moonlit, pulling on the dog end of his cigarette before striding toward his helicopter. It waits on the Kirtland tarmac, tense as a crouched grasshopper, a Huey UH-1, its skids pulsing and bracing outside the hangar. Lights blink on its green shell. It emits a high-pitched screaming over its rhythmic chop, before this becomes a thick percussive drone. The pilot works dispassionately through his checks as Richter climbs into the passenger compartment behind him, pulling his comm-link headset on, and crossing the belts over his flight suit. “Get us up.” It should have been reported hours ago, when the biometric link ran flat, when he didn’t answer his cell, or when they couldn’t reach surveillance. A local cop found the watcher on the plaza, bloody quilting seeping from his jacket, around the horny grip of a bone knife. The thirty minutes to Santa Fe will pass slowly enough for him to slow his pulse, slipping it inside and under the rapid beat of the blades. Momentarily, he imagines himself on Mars, less vulnerable than these missing astronauts. There’s a blank space in his consciousness where his wife and children might be. It would not be hard to leave. Martin Richter studies his phone for a moment, before addressing the pilot. “He’s not at the hotel anymore. He’s moving.”

When we leave La Fonda, the plaza is taped off close to the obelisk. Yellow plastic flaps between the trees, sectioning the space where men scan their forensic grid for evidence. The body has been removed. Though the cops are engrossed, Tséh Dog works the throttle tenderly, and turns her black Thunderbird onto East Palace Avenue toward Paseo de Peralta. We pass the adobe-colored Basilica of Saint Francis of whom it is said that he pitied the wolf, and loved wild flowers, the vivid animals, and haunched mountains. The ropes hold the astronaut upright on the motorcycle, lashed around Tséh Dog’s leather back, his rigorous arms pointing at the road, his head encased, embalmed in a glittering silver helmet. She accelerates toward a high abstraction in the mountain, chiseled by old rain and old lightning. The road is empty and the sky is full, the dark scattered with mica. The astronaut lolls slightly, like a sailor bound to his wheel, or Ahab on the whale, as the asphalt switches and undulates closer to the summit, and the toe of her left boot works the gears. His ghost shivers under the weight of his skin, the gravity of the speeding motorcycle. When the time comes, Tséh Dog will stop, unfasten the knots across her chest, and disentangle the astronaut from the cycle. Heavy with himself, he will be carried into the pines as a deer is carried, up the ragged slope, under the canopy of the forest. Soon, we will stand together in the grove in the mountains where the others are. The way is difficult. She sweats in the darkness. Two bodies, strips of blackened flesh hanging from grids of bone, cavities chewed from their torsos, are propped against the rock when she brings the astronaut there, one in the remains of his gray flight suit, one in bloodstained jeans and a denim shirt. She places the third, wearing his helmet, between them. The originals have been desecrated by animals, decomposed. They face west. The moon exposes them. Here are the decaying orbits of the archangels. Here is the decline of the overmen. Theirs is the madness that makes ours, these hopeful men. Tséh Dog appears oblivious to their state, accepting them, as she puts her weird trinity together. Whatever this is, it is her own. It has no past in her ancestors. There is quiet fury in it, a waste of courage. It is sad to observe. The hollows of bough and bone exchange absurdity and sorrow. She cocks her head subtly, listening.