Steven Havill: Bag Limit

I knew roughly where Sosimo Baca lived, and I idled the county car along as the dirt lane meandered westward, sometimes passing so close to the front of a house that I could have reached out a hand and streaked the living-room window.

Driving no more than two or three miles an hour, I rounded the corner of a rambling adobe whose front porch corner post had been nicked a time or two by careless bumpers, and damn near ran into a dark figure trudging along the road. He carried a wooden walking stick and had already begun the process of seeking higher ground, but by narrowly missing a mailbox on the left, I was able to swing around him.

I didn’t know Sosimo Baca well, but I recognized his face in the glare of the headlights as he turned to ponder this intrusion into his quiet, dark, no doubt well-lubricated world. Stopping the car, I rolled down the window on the passenger side.

“Good morning, sir,” I said. He was wearing a dusty, earth-colored coat that blended perfectly with the dark shadows of Regal.

“Now who’s that?” he said, stringing out the last word a little bit in an accent that was rich and thick.

“Bill Gastner, Sosimo. We met a time or two, a while back.”

“Oh, yes.” He stepped closer and I could see that the walking stick was carrying a lot of weight. He transferred his left hand to the roof of the car. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, just out. Can’t sleep.”

“Yes.” The single word carried so little inflection that it could have run the gamut of meaning from “me too” to “oh, sure, I know you’re up to something.”

“Mr. Baca, we need to talk with your son.”

“Mateo?”

“Yes. He’s got himself in a little trouble.”

Sosimo moved his right arm so he could rest the walking stick against the door of the car, supporting himself. “You know that boy,” he said after considerable thought. He turned and looked off to the east. “You know, I was just over at Ibarra’s place.”

“Is that right?”

“They got a good thing with that cider this year.”

“I bet.” And you’ve sampled more than your share , I thought. “Are you expecting Matt home tonight?”

He turned back and peered in at me. “Well, I don’t know. He took the truck, you know.”

“Right. It’s in Posadas.”

“Well, then, that’s where he is,” Sosimo said slowly, and patted the roof of the car as if he was sorry that I was so slow-witted.

“Sosimo,” I said, “Matt wrecked a friend’s car up on the pass. He was driving a vehicle that didn’t belong to him, and ran into another car. The kids are all right, but he took off running.”

“You don’t say so? He’s pretty good at that.”

“Yes, he is. I thought he might have hoofed it down here since then.”

“Well, you know…he might have. But I haven’t been home, you know.”

“You mind if we check?”

“No. You can do that.”

“Get in and let me give you a lift. You can point me in the right direction.”

“That sounds good,” he said, and it took him a long moment to find the door latch. When he settled into the seat, his stick caught in the door, and I waited patiently while he extricated it.

“There,” he said, after the door slammed. His fragrance filled the car. I left his window down and lowered mine as well.

“So that cider’s a pretty good brew, eh?” I said as I pulled the car into gear.

“It sure is. It sure is.” He rocked forward a couple of times to add emphasis. “That Lucy Ibarra, she makes pretty good cider.”

I wondered if Lucy Ibarra’s husband had been home during the sampling, but that was none of my business until the whole crowd started shooting at each other.

“Right here,” Sosimo said. We had driven no more than a hundred yards and awakened a couple dogs. Sosimo could have walked the distance in the time it took him to get in the car.

The Baca place was one of those adobe houses that had shed its plaster long ago. The faces of the individual adobe blocks were rounded and contoured by age and weather to a soft brown weave that no modern building material could match.

All but one of the vigas had busted or rotted off flush with the wall, but other than that, the place was tidy, squat, and square, ready to dust off the worst that southwestern weather could throw at it, whether it be broiling sun or driving west winds that moved Arizona dust into Posadas County.

“The light’s not on,” Sosimo said. “You can park right here.” The “right here” was a vague wide spot on the shoulder of the road that put my door right against the old juniper limb-wood of Baca’s fence. I stopped half in the roadway so I could open my door.

“They’ve all gone to bed,” Sosimo said as he levered himself out of the car. “Me too,” he added with a grunt. He reached the front gate and stopped. “If he’s not here, maybe you can come back tomorrow.”

“That’s a possibility,” I said. “Bob Torrez will probably swing down this way.”

“Oh, yes.” He stopped with one hand on the first gate picket, remembering something. Maybe it was a moment of parental concern, perhaps felt more strongly when he was sober. But he shrugged off whatever the thought was and headed for the house. He walked like a man of eighty-five, even though I knew he was younger than me.

Across the street, two dogs had waited long enough. Convinced that we were now headed in the opposite direction and were no longer a threat, the mutts set up a rhythmic yapping.

The Bacas’ front door wasn’t locked, and even in the harsh-shadowed light of the headlights I could see its delightful rhomboid shape. It was the sort of authentic Z-braced territorial door that would fetch a mint in an Albuquerque antiques shop, the nailheads square and rough, drizzling little tongues of rusty stain down the gray wood.

The lintel was low, no more than an inch over my head, and I stood five feet ten only if I straightened my sore back and threw my shoulders out of joint. If Bob Torrez came charging through that door without paying attention, the rough wood would catch him right in the chin.

“There’s a light here somewhere,” Sosimo muttered, as if the furnishings of the front room hadn’t been rooted in the same spots for the past forty years. He found the switch, and as the sixty-watt power flooded the room in pale yellow, I saw that it wasn’t just pillows that contoured the old sofa along the south wall.

Matt Baca lay stretched out facedown, his head buried in an old comforter. One hand was curled down beside him in one of those postures only possible when deeply asleep.

“Well, he’s here,” Sosimo said, and paused, uncertain of what to do next.

Since young Matt was half a century or so younger than I was, and in far better shape even when drunk, I thought it prudent to take advantages as they presented themselves.

“Don’t bother to wake him,” I said as Sosimo took a hesitant step forward.

“Oh, no,” he said, as if the idea had never crossed his mind. “You two go ahead and talk all you want,” and he turned toward the door to the left of the sofa, just beyond his son’s feet.

I reached around under my jacket and slipped the handcuffs off my belt. The curled right arm I didn’t worry about, since the weight of Matt’s body would keep it pinned until I was ready for it. I stepped across to the sofa, reached down and took his left wrist and pulled it around behind his back, slapping the cuffs on as I did so. He managed a disoriented “Whuh?” as I snicked the cuffs on his right wrist.

“Now you didn’t say…” Sosimo started, but let it trail off.

Matt startled fully awake, twisting so violently that he pitched himself onto the floor, landing hard on his left shoulder. With the resiliency of youth, the maneuver didn’t prompt so much as a grunt.