Ditch Rider (2 page)

“Cheyanne knows who you are. She told me a fine guy lived here.” The Kid laughed. He was slightly sweaty from work and looking pretty good to me right now. “How come she knows about us and we don't know about her?”

“She's a little girl and they are home more. They have the time, you have the power. You always notice what the people with more power do.”

“I have power?”

“You own a house. You work downtown.”

“That's not much.”

“It's enough here,” the Kid said. I gave him his candy bar and watched him roll down the wrapper. What kind of power did he have? I wondered. He was tall and skinny, had thick, curly hair and could fix things. That was part of it. A guy from a middle-class Argentine family that had been forced to emigrate to Mexico, he'd taken the immigrant's route of starting his own business once he reached the U.S.A. In his journey through the Americas he'd taken a turn that led him to believe in himself. Sometimes that's power enough.

I looked out the window at the herb garden behind my house—also the work of the previous owner, who'd planted the mint, oregano, sage and catnip. All I do to keep it green is turn the drip irrigation on in the spring and off in the fall—my idea of gardening. An orange and white tabby was nibbling on the catnip and getting a fix.

2

C
HEYANNE STARTED SHOWING
up now and then with Miranda cradled in her arm. She liked to hang out at my house and search for guys on the computer. Whenever she asked if she'd overstayed her welcome, I said not yet. I didn't meet many teenagers in my line of life, and teen talk was a break from the adult wrangling I usually dealt with.

One Saturday Cheyanne came to the door with another girl who had the same blue fingernails and big hair, only the other girl's hair was dark and her Chicago Bulls t-shirt was an extra small. Every time the subject of having to wear school uniforms comes up in Albuquerque, teenagers complain loudly, but it looked to me like they were already wearing uniforms—Chicago Bulls t-shirts in summer, Chicago Bulls jackets in winter.

“Hi,” Cheyanne said. “This is my friend Patricia.”

“Hi,” I replied. “Where's Miranda?”

“Home with my mom.”

“Do you have one of those bogus babies, too?” I asked Patricia.

“No way,” she said.

The Kid had taken the day off and was in the driveway washing his truck.

“That's your guy out there. Right?” Cheyanne said.

“Right,” I said.

“He's never here when I come over.”

“He works a lot.”

“Can we meet him?” Patricia asked, looking up at me from under heavily made-up eyelids.

“Come on in.” They followed me inside.

“Baaad house, huh?” Cheyanne said to Patricia.

“Real baaad,” Patricia agreed.

I'd mastered the CD-ROM and Radio Austin was playing on the D drive. The girls started giggling, line dancing and doing a wicked imitation of a big-haired country-western singer. They mouthed the words, snapped their fingers, shook their tousled heads.

I went out back to round up the Kid, which took a few minutes because he wanted to get the soap off the truck before the sun baked it in place. The music had stopped and Cheyanne was showing Patricia Digital Schoolhouse when we returned.

“
That stuff's for children,” Patricia said.

“I play the music for Miranda. She likes it.” Cheyanne laughed.

“She's not a real baby, you know.”

“I know.” Cheyanne's laugh turned into a pout. Her moods changed as fast as the weather did on cloud cam.

“You stole that doll from the school.”

“I didn't steal it. I only borrowed it for a few days.”

“A few months, you mean. What's gonna happen when they catch you?”

“They're not gonna catch me.”

I broke up the quarrel and introduced the Kid.

“That's your shop on Fourth Street, right?” Patricia asked. “The one with the flying red horse sign outside?”

“Right.”

“I hear you have a parrot there.”

“Yeah.”

“What's its name?”

“Mimo.”

“Does it talk?”

“Mas o menos,”
he shrugged. “It says hello and
pendejo.”

It said
pendejo
(asshole) a lot more than it said hello. Mimo liked the reaction it got to
pendejo.
Patricia laughed, then lowered her lids and looked at her blue nails. “There was a shooting over by there last night,” she said. “In the strip mall on Ladera. Did you know that?”

The Kid shook his head. “No.”

“A guy named Juan Padilla was killed.”

“I don't know him.”

“How old was he?” I asked.

“Fifteen,” said Patricia.

“How did it happen?” asked the Kid.

Cheyanne had been tugging the tail of her t-shirt and doing a little dance while Patricia told the Kid about the death of Juan Padilla. There was something she wanted to say and she'd been waiting for the chance to say it. She planted her feet, let go of her t-shirt and blurted it out. “It was like this, see. Juan and this other guy, they had a fight. They weren't brothers exactly but they were like that. Juan got scared and he pulled a gun. He didn't want to shoot the other guy, he was just scared, but the other guy didn't know that, see, so he shot Juan first.”

“
Did you know Juan?” I asked her.

“He went to Valley High. I didn't really know him.”

“That's not the way it happened,” Patricia put her two cents in. “It was gang shit. Juan dissed somebody and he got offed for it. It was a power play. The guy that shot him was showing his colors, making his name come out. That's what really happened.”

“Which gang?” I asked.

“What difference does it make?” Patricia flipped her hair over her shoulder. “They're all the same. No matter what color they carry, they all bleed red.”

“It could make a difference to the APD.”

“Anybody who killed Juan will be dead before they get him,” Patricia said.

She had a point. Gang justice was swifter and more effective than the APD's.

“It didn't happen the way you said,” Patricia told Cheyanne. “Those guys were nothing like brothers.”

“Maybe they were alike on the inside. Everybody wants the same things, right?”

“Or they want somebody else's things.”

“I guess,” Cheyanne said in a small voice.

“Are you thirteen, too?” I asked the world-weary Patricia.

“Fifteen in December,” she said. “I'm in high school, but Cheyanne and me, we've been friends for a long time from when she used to live on my street.” They were close in chronological age, but Cheyanne had a few months of childhood left and Patricia appeared to have none, the effect, maybe, of high school. Patricia started as if she'd been stung by a bee, then she pulled a beeper out of her pocket. “It's my mom. We have to use the ones that vibrate now,” she explained, “because of school. They take them away if they beep and you don't get them back till school's out.”

I was standing close enough to see the numbers that had come up on the beeper, 303. “How do you know it's your mom?” I asked.

“If you turn the three over it looks like an M, see? MOM.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Patricia punched Cheyanne in the shoulder. “Gotta go, girl.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cheyanne said to the Kid.

“Mucho gusto,”
he replied.

“El gusto es mio,”
said Patricia, looking up at the Kid with lazy eyes.

******

The minute the girls were across the courtyard and out the door he said,
“Estas vatas estan
corriendo
sin aceite.”
Those girls are running without oil.

“An accident waiting to happen,” I replied. “What do you think they wanted?”

“To tell me about Juan Padilla.”

“Why you?” Because he was the only man available that day in the hood?

“The little one is scared. The big one? I don't know.”

“There's no little one and big one. Those girls are the same size.”

“The one with the dark hair is bigger, no?”

“Older, not bigger. She was flirting with you. Did you notice?”

If he had, he wouldn't admit it. “She's a little girl,” he said, “she doesn't know what she's doing.” He turned and walked toward the back of the house where his truck baked in the sun.

I let him go, went out to the courtyard and sat down on the
banco.
The wall vibrated as a stereo on wheels pounded by. A lullaby tinkled when the ice-cream truck showed up. Pigeons perching on the electric line fluttered and cooed.

******

In the morning the Kid and I followed the Chapuzar Lateral to Casa de Benavidez Restaurant. The neighborhood I live in is crisscrossed with laterals, wasteways, ditches, canals,
acequias
and drains. They are the arteries and veins that carry Rio Grande water through a valley that has been irrigated for 900 years at least. There are roads beside the ditches that are supposed to be used for maintenance. They are not a legal access, but that doesn't stop anyone from using them. Albuquerque has a lawless past it never wants to forget. In some places there are no roads beside the ditches—only footpaths. You can ride or walk all over the valley on the paths.

The Chapuzar Lateral is a major north-south artery with a road on the west side and a footpath on the east. We took the footpath, stepping on the hieroglyphics left by horseshoes, running shoes and mountain bike wheels. If you knew how to cut sign, they'd tell you who had been here and when. Weeds grew tall on the ditch banks, and the intense green contrasted nicely with the Sandia Mountains' distant blue. Pink and white wild morning glories wrapped their tendrils around the weeds. The vegetation hid the cross streets in front of and behind us and made it appear that we were following a long country road. The cottonwoods that grew here had trunks thick enough to support several treehouses. Their branches wandered across the paths dropping cotton that the wind whipped into a whirling dervish. The ditches were high today; somewhere to the north someone had lifted a board to let the brown muddy water flow.

“They call the people who maintain the ditches Ditch Riders, did you know that?” I asked the Kid.

“No.”

“
They take care of the cleaning and the weeding. They try to keep people from falling in. They set the irrigation schedules and settle the arguments.” But there were probably fewer arguments these days than there used to be because the alfalfa fields and horse pastures in the valley were being replaced by subdivisions, and people in subdivisions don't bother with water that comes from the ditch.

At the place where a culvert guided the flow under Montera Street, the trash had backed up. Plastic bottles bobbed in the water, and I saw the twisted white belly of a dead snake. A pheasant with a red eye and a ring around its neck ran down the path and darted into a field. A mallard flapped its wings and lifted out of the water. The ditches are the valley's watering hole, the place wildlife comes to drink and eat—or get eaten. At night the predators and La Llorona take over. La Llorona is a legend in New Mexico, a tale parents tell to warn their children away from trouble. The legend differs from town to town. In some places she's drowned her own children and the current runs red with their blood. In others she haunts the ditch banks, searching for her lost children with the red eyes of an owl. Sometimes she floats like a canoe on the water. Wherever she is and whatever she does, she's crying.

There was a dead hawk on the path. What could kill a hawk around here but a coyote? I wondered. I've never seen a coyote in the valley, but they frequent other parts of town. I turned and looked back at my house. From this angle it seemed sheltered by its courtyard and high wooden fence.

We crossed over a few more streets, passed behind the Kid's shop and came to Ladera. From here we could see the strip mall where Juan Padilla had been shot. The police tape marked the site as being behind the mall, which meant the body could have laid there for hours before it was discovered.

When we reached Casa de Benavidez I stopped to buy the Sunday
Journal
at the vending machine. The Kid went inside and sat down at a table on the patio. A waterfall splashed into a pond that had water lilies floating on top and orange carp swimming underneath. A sign warned parents to keep their children away from the pool, but a barefoot little girl in her pink Sunday best tiptoed along the edge singing to herself. She turned around, saw her parents weren't watching and dipped her foot in the water.

“What are you going to have?” the Kid asked me.

“Papas, bacon, OJ, coffee,” I said. I didn't ask him what he wanted; I knew it would be his favorite breakfast food, a chicharrones burrito. Chicharrones (aka fried fat) weren't something I wanted to face this early in the day, so I unfolded the paper. Juan Padilla's murder was on page one. A witness described the shooter as a gang member, an Anglo teenager, sixteen or seventeen years old, six feet tall with a slender build, curly blonde hair and an earring in one ear. The police were working up a sketch. The body hadn't been found until 2:00
A
.
M
.—too late for the Saturday
Journal.
Crimestoppers was offering a reward, and the witness would get it if the shooter and the description matched. The case was likely to be handled by my buddy in the District Attorney's office, Deputy DA Anthony Saia, who'd been put in charge of gang violence. Some details of the crime were revealed; some were not. The APD can't
give
away too much or the DA will never get a conviction.

The Kid bit into his burrito and the chicharrones crunched. I ate my bacon. The little girl's parents told her to get away from the water, waking her from her dream. Her foot dipped into the pool and the water splashed all over her pink dress.