The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (14 page)

The day was glorious, the sky a shocking shade of
turquoise, the mountains a deep shade of bluish purple, stubbled
all across by short, puffy piñón trees and juniper bushes. The
plains were pure white from snow, pocked by determined squat trees
and an occasional house or boulder. The road twisted and curved
through valleys and frozen meadows, through tiny towns that I
usually only saw in the darkening evening of Fridays and Sundays. I
loved this part of the world with a terrible ache. It was alive, in
its own way; it spoke to something deep within me. My family had
lived in this area for eight generations of my father’s side, and
seven generations of my mother’s side, and at times like this I
felt that they spoke to me.

The visibility, as usual in this high desert part of
the world, seemed endless - except to the distant north, where the
clouds had begun to billow along the horizon, dark gray masses. The
storms was far enough away that I wouldn’t ordinarily be worried,
but storms and I weren’t the best of friends anymore. I made a
mental note to keep my eye on it.

We crested the last of several large, gentle snowy
hills. The idyllic towns of Cerrillos and then Madrid appeared
below us, one after the other, in dormant but fertile valleys
nestled into rolling hills at the base of the Sandia mountain
range. The towns were both run down the middle with streams, along
whose banks tall Cottonwoods reached barren brown branches to the
sky. Sketches of smoke rose from the chimneys of the small,
colorfully stuccoed adobe houses that seemed stuck like decayed
butter mints to the foothills. Snow blanketed the farms and fields
like fine white frosting.

I wove the Land Rover south, past these villages,
and finally, slowed down as we reached Golden. I turned off the
highway at the hill with the church on the top, because that was
the spot where I’d seen Demetrio disappear in a flurry of lights,
and seemed as good a starting point as any in the ghost town.

“This is it,” I told her, parking the Land Rover in
the small, empty dirt lot of the church, which was high on a hill
and overlooked the entire village.

“Let’s get to it,” said Kelsey, opening her door
with enthusiasm, and hopping down with a stretch of her arms,
catlike. Fearless.

I got out with a little more caution, suddenly
nervous and apprehensive. What if he didn’t want us here? What if
he was in the middle of drug running, or knifing someone to death,
or whatever it was that gang members did? On TV, gangs were always
shown in cities, but here in New Mexico, as my sociology-major
politician mother had often told me, the barrios were rural, far
from the city centers. Poverty lived at the edges in New Mexico,
and drug problems and violence flourished amid the most bucolic
scenery on earth.

The church, which was tiny and seemed sculpted of
caramel candy with its soft adobe corners and lazily drooping
walls, occupied the middle section of a small field atop a hill.
All was contained within a chain link fence whose gate was
padlocked shut. A large adobe cross dominated the top of the
structure, a chalky geometric white against the blue sky. A small
hand-painted wooden sign hung askew from the gate, informing people
that mass would be held at 10 a.m. in English and 4 p.m. in Spanish
on Sundays. In front of the church was a old, small cemetery, as
was the case with most of the older churches built by the Spaniards
in the 16th and 17th centuries here. The graveyard had a hastily
shoveled, icy sidewalk down the center, leading to the door of the
church. It was eerie. In the old days, apparently, they’d given the
dead a much more prominent place in the life of the villagers;
these days we preferred to separate them from the rest of us, to
pretend they did not exist.

The chain link and wooden pickets of the patchwork
church fence near the cemetery was woven through with colorful
ribbons and more of those gaudy plastic flowers, American flags,
teddy bears, and whatever else relatives had left for the dead.
People here had not forgotten their deceased loved ones.

`There was something
comforting
and
creepy about this cemetery, something safe that I could not
explain or even name; it was like being held as a child by a
protective and loving parent. That was exactly how I felt there at
that moment. When I mentioned all of this, Kelsey said she had the
same sense, as though no harm could come to us here.

“And I’m a Jewish atheist,” she
reminded me. “Which is saying a
lot
.”

“Contradiction in terms,” I said. “You can’t be both
religious and an atheist.”

“No. But you can simultaneously
be
culturally
Jewish and irreligious,” she said. “If you don’t know this,
you’ve obviously never been to New York or seen a single rerun of
Seinfeld.”

We set off across the pebbly
parking lot, toward the small rise where I’d last seen Demetrio.
There were few houses scattered around, along a small dirt road
that led South. None of them looked like a farm.

“This is where he was when it happened,” I said,
wondering secretly if I were making mountains of molehills, the way
we’d done when we were younger and given to séances at slumber
parties. Sometimes, I realized, it was far too easy to scare
yourself.

“Let’s go,” said Kelsey, walking authoritatively
toward the first house, down the road, swinging her half-f water
bottle the way Little Red Riding Hood must have swung the basket.
Reluctantly, I followed her, and moments later stood next to her as
she banged her fist against the splintered wooden door of a house
that seemed to have been made by sticking pieces of other houses
together haphazardly. A young woman in jeans and a tank top
answered, smoking and holding a filthy baby on her hip. She looked
at us with cruel, cold eyes.

“Is Demetrio Vigil here?” asked Kelsey. “We’re
friends of his.”

“Who?” asked the woman, who, as it happens, was
missing a few teeth. Kelsey repeated herself, but the woman clearly
had no idea what she was talking about, and let us know this in
colorful language she had no business using in front of a baby.

We repeated this scene, more or
less the same way, three other times, walking at least half a mile,
to no avail. No one here had heard of Demetrio, or, if they had,
they referred us to the old man I’d already met and said he was the
only Demetrio Vigil they’d heard of.

“This is weird,” said Kelsey. “You’re sure he said
he lived here?”

“Positive.”

“On a farm?”

“On a farm. With strict homeschool parents who don’t
let him out after dark.”

We walked on, passing several ruins of adobe
buildings, nothing more than crumbled walls with stiff dead yellow
hulls of weeds poking up through the snow where the floors had once
been. Something stirred in one of these ruins, and stopped me. I
grabbed Kelsey’s arm, and waited. Moments later, a very tall, very
skinny man appeared from behind the building, in jeans and a plaid
woolen jacket, walking three dogs off-leash. He glowered at us
through his thick eyebrows, and seemed fixated on me in particular.
The dogs took their cue from him, and sat still.

“Hello, sir,” said Kelsey, with a wave that was far
too enthusiastic for the circumstances. I felt eerily like I’d seen
this man before, but I couldn’t place where.

“No trespassing,” he grumbled,
pointing to a sign near the road. “Stay out of here, get away.
You’re not welcome here.” He glared at me. “Especially
you
.”

“No problem,” said Kelsey,
emboldened by his nastiness as she often was in the face of
unreasonable rudeness. “You’re in luck. We’ve limited our visits
today to houses with
roofs
.”

The man grumbled, and turned back in the direction
he’d come from, shooting a nasty, even hateful, look at me over his
shoulder.

“Nice neighborhood,” deadpanned Kelsey after he’d
disappeared.

“Let’s go back,” I said, thoroughly creeped out.
“This wasn’t a very good idea.”

“There’s one more house left,” she said. “Then we’ll
go.”

The house in question was a decrepit singlewide
trailer, about a quarter mile down the road. In spite of the
freezing temperature, we decided to give it a try.

When we got there, I hesitated. The yard was full of
trash and a skinny, frozen Pit bull was chained to a makeshift
doghouse that was inadequate for this cold. I felt sorry for it,
but also afraid of it as it lunged at us, growling and barking.
Next to the house several rusty old cars crumbled in various states
of decay, while a chop-shop looking Ford Bronco with Old English
lettering in the back window seemed to have been lowered several
inches and covered in glittery green paint. Gangstermobile. All
around us were old and new aluminum cans, with bullet holes in
them, presumably from someone target-practicing out here.

“Let’s just go,” I told Kelsey, as a sick feeling
came over me. I did not like this place. At all. “I have a bad
feeling about this.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, watching the animal as it
snarled at us, nose wrinkling back horribly to reveal dripping
fangs. “Look.” She pointed. “The chain stops it right there. We can
walk around the side. He can’t get us.”

“Still, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said,
urgently, as Kelsey lifted the latch on the broken fence and opened
the rusty gate, brave and, I thought, stupid. This place was so
obviously not inhabited by people who might buy Girl Scout cookies
I was baffled that she didn’t see it. “Kelsey, don’t. Let’s just
go.”

She ignored me.

“I’m staying here,” I called. “You’re not being
smart.”

“Fine,” she called back, with a dismissive wave of
her hand. “Wimp.”

I watched in horror as she barely skirted the
furious animal, grinning at her own agility, and climbed the
rickety wooden steps up to the dented metal door of the ramshackle
structure. She knocked, as though she were simply out selling Girl
Scout cookies.

After a moment, the door opened, and a middle-aged
man with a bandana worn low over his eyes, and wearing a white tank
top and plaid pajama pants on looked out. He had long, stringy
hair, and an ugly face scarred from acne and maybe a knife wound.
His small, hateful eyes were bloodshot, and his unsteady, lewd
smile told me he was probably high. The door opened a little wider,
and two others very much like him appeared on each side of the
man.

They all bore the same exact tattoos Demetrio had on
his neck, on their own necks.

The acid in my stomach churned from fear, and I
fought the urge to run. Kelsey, however, seemed not to realize she
was in the presence of gang members, and carried on, cocking her
blonde head cutely to the side, and speaking with her hands. The
men watched her with serious, unclean looks upon their faces,
amused by her but also as though they were trying to decide what
horrible deed, exactly, they could do to her.

I couldn’t hear the words they exchanged, because of
the barking of the dog. I didn’t like the looks of the guys, who,
the longer she talked, stared more and more openly at Kelsey in a
lustful sort of way, gripping their private parts. The lead one
with the stringy hair seemed at one point to invite her in, tilting
a beer bottle at her as incentive. She, thankfully, did not try to
see the best in him as she had done with Demetrio, and declined. As
she turned to go back down the stairs, the stringy-haired vato
launched his empty bottle at the dog, striking it.

“Shut the hell up,” he called to it. The dog yelped,
and cowered, and my heart broke for it. These men were evil.

Kelsey stared straight ahead, at me, a look of
carefully controlled fear on her face, which seemed drained of
blood.

“So?” I asked, when she reached me.

“Let’s walk,” she said, hurrying down the road the
way we’d come. In all the years I’d known Kelsey, I had never seen
her so nervous.

I followed her, and caught up to her. “What’s
wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She appeared to be trembling.

“Kelsey. What did they say?”

“They were very high,” she said.

“I thought so.”

“You could smell it. Disgusting. But I don’t think
we should take anything they said too seriously.”

“Fine, but what did they say?”

She stared straight ahead, and took a deep breath.
“The skinny one with the long hair said Demetrio Vigil is a dead
faggot.”

“What
?”

“Those were his exact words. Actually, he said ‘it’s
a good thing that fucker is a dead faggot, or I’d kill him myself,
just like I do to people who piss me off by interrupting my day
asking about traitors.’ And then he made sure I saw the gun in his
waistband.”

“What
?”

“Yeah. He was packing heat, girl. Serious gun.”

“Oh my God,” I said, grabbing her arm and linking
mine in it.

“I’ve never met a murderer, Maria,
so I don’t know what they’re like, but I’m guessing they’re
something like
that
guy.”

“You think?”

“He had crazy eyes. I did not like him at all.”

“Maybe you’ll listen to me now and stop with all
your sheltered ‘we are the world’ crap.”

“Please don’t lecture me.”

“But I
told
you not to go up
there!”

“I realize that. And when you stop
gloating maybe you can focus on how we can get the
hell
out of here before
those dudes rape and kill us.”

I turned to look back. “We’re okay. They’re not
following us or anything.”