Ariel Gore: Santa Fe Noir

“No. I live alone.” Goddamn Josie the erotic slam poet. Thanks for stealing my alibi along with my girlfriend. “You should probably speak with my attorney,” I said. “Just to be prudent.” I rifled through my Rolodex and handed them her card.

“Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll be in touch.”

Todd. He stole the jewelry, but tried to frame me. Just my luck to be the one he decided to nail. Delphine was my only client that day. Delphine. I hoped she was okay. I called her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. I’d drive over and check on her before I called my lawyer.

About three-quarters of the way down her road, I realized that the gate would be locked. I couldn’t make a U-turn on the narrow road, so I steered into the next driveway. I saw a flash of telltale orange behind the neighboring house. It looked like a U-Haul truck.

I began to back out of the driveway, braking when I heard an approaching car. The gray-primed Trans Am rumbled by. In my rearview mirror, I glimpsed Delphine’s profile framed by the passenger window, wind lifting her hair from the side of her face like a bird’s wing, flash of gold at her ear.

The car turned into the next driveway and parked in the back. I parked my car behind a low cluster of piñon trees, and crept through the bushes and trees between the two hovels. I saw Delphine pull a burlap sack from the car, heard her curse as a small rain of mannequin hands spilled onto the ground. The driver’s door opened, and out stepped Todd.

Todd.

He laughed, picked up a plaster hand, rubbed it against his chest. “Oh yeah,” he said.

She took the hand from him and tossed it in the bag, then put her own hand on his chest. They kissed. I thought of his gray and metal teeth.

“Tonight, Joe will drive the truck out to his junkyard in Chupadero and blow it up,” he said. “When he’s done, it’ll blend right in with the rest of those fucked-up carcasses. Get it? Car -casses...” He guffawed. My brother had that stupid sense of humor too. And yeah, we had the same taste in women.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and clicked on the camera app, noting that the last photos I took were of the U-Haul truck as I returned it. Relief. I had proof . I snapped more photos of Todd and Delphine near the truck.

I was almost to my car when my phone rang. Loudly.

“Hey, what the fuck?” Todd yelled.

It continued as I broke into a run and slid into my car, dropping the keys on the floor after I hit the lock button. My hands scrambled blindly for those keys as Todd’s meat hooks slapped against the windshield. Delphine ran up behind him, gun in hand. I rammed the key in the ignition and floored the gas pedal, knocking Todd into the ditch. As I hugged the curve, a bullet took out my right-side mirror. It would only be a matter of time before Todd’s Trans Am caught up to my old shitbox Corolla. I turned left on 285, and blazed through a yellow light at the Vista Grande intersection, going 85 in a 50.

Delphine knew where I lived. I couldn’t go home. Was she even a Hathaway? Was her name really Delphine?

Sirens. I saw a cop car’s blazing cherry in my rearview mirror. Thank God.

“You again,” Officer Valdez said, perhaps unnerved by my thank-you-savior smile. “Do you know how many people get killed at that intersection? We were getting ready to arrest you anyway. This saves us the trouble.”

“Please do,” I said. “Put me in your squad car, fast, and then look at these photos on my phone.” I pointed to the cell on the passenger seat.

As I stepped out of the car, I heard the Trans Am in the distance. It crossed 285 and kept going. Were they thinking they’d head me off on my way home?

I sat in the back of the squad car, handcuffed, while Valdez completed mysterious and prolonged tasks on his tablet. The minutes ticked by.

I looked out the back window, saw Valdez lob my phone into the tall grasses. What the...

A giant truck hauling hundreds of hay bales barreled toward us, from the look of it fixing to blow the 285/Vista Grande light. That’s the problem with that intersection — trucks fresh off the interstate off-ramp don’t start slowing down in time, and then they can’t stop, and some mildly distracted driver in a Saab or a Subaru hits the gas when their light turns green.

Todd must have braked too late. The car slid under the truck, tires squealing. Its roof lodged against the bottom, as the truck’s back wheels punched through its side.

I take little comfort in knowing that it was Todd’s side the wheels chewed up and spit out, as seconds later, flames engulfed his corroded whip. They licked around the top and set the hay ablaze, torching the stacked golden bricks. Thick dark smoke billowed upward into the sky. Miles away, people wondered which forest was on fire. As everyone else looked up, my eyes stayed trained downward through the back window of the squad car, toward the crumpled and blackened Trans Am, hoping that Delphine’s end was as merciful as she deserved. Strike that. As merciful as her tenacity was strong.

Later, most people agreed that the conflagration helped paint the sky with one of the most beautiful sunsets anyone could recall.

Platypus venom is nonlethal to humans. However, those punctured will find any kind of subsequent pain to be more intense for months to come.

Aspen Vista

The feeling that you’re being watched is a common one. How often is it comforting?

Having grown up in a claustrophobic major city on the West Coast, I was relieved, as a young adult, to call Santa Fe home — a small city with miles of desert in every direction. As a child, I’d dreamed of Salvador Dalí dreamscapes. Now I lived in one. A perfect escapist fantasy. The people in Santa Fe were introverted, and if you wanted to get away from the adobe buildings that never rose above three stories (to preserve the view of the mountains), all you had to do was drive twenty minutes and you’d be in desert so desolate, it’d take months to find your body.

Surrounding the city were the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Spanish for the Blood of Christ . Watch one sunset and you’ll know why they named them that. The way the massive clouds, like parade floats, turn hot pink, reflecting crimson red on the mountains below, while the whole city turns gold. Callie and I watched a lot of sunsets against those mountains, never realizing how blood-soaked they really were.

Santa Fe is full of paradoxes — the high desert is like that. In any direction you can escape into vast desert, nothing but your body and junipers and piñons against the horizon. But if you go into the mountains — there is a whole kingdom of trees, peaks, and valleys in which to hide or get lost. If you crave the exposure of the desert, it is there ready to hold you like a heart on a platter. But if you want to be swallowed up for good, the mountains wait, ready to consume you in their dark folds.

“Danny? Danny, I think I’m lost. I need you to come into the woods and find me.”

I’d been getting calls like that for weeks from Callie’s phone. I thought about calling the police the first time it happened, but I wrote it off as an acid flashback or some lucid dream. I don’t know why I kept picking up, maybe I was hoping she’d say something different, or just say goodbye. But she kept calling me into the woods. Acid flashbacks don’t last this long. I hadn’t gone to Aspen Vista since they found Callie’s body up there in the fall.

Callie used to roll down the windows and let her hair curl on the wind as I zoomed up the winding mountain roads. Many trails etch off from the main road, but Aspen Vista was our favorite. Thirty minutes from the plaza — Santa Fe warps space like that. Some call it a vortex. One moment you’re in the center of downtown, half an hour later you’re walking on a dirt forest path, damp leaves underfoot, and all the aspens watching.