Hot Sur (62 page)

“Didn’t I try to tell you, Mr. Rose?” María Paz told him later that night in the motel room. “He’s not a murderer.”

“How long ago was that with Maraya, two years, three?” Rose continued their old argument as a response.

“Three . . . around.”

“That’s right, then, three. Sleepy Joe was just beginning. Barely warming up. Today the situation is totally different.”

“It looks that way, Mr. Rose. It looks that way,” María Paz said with a dismissive wave of her hand, as she stared at the television screen. “In the end, we solved nothing by coming here.”

“Well, Olga says that if we want she can take us to Maraya’s grave tomorrow.”

“Incredible—is it true that someone can commit suicide swallowing iodine?”

“What?”

“Lara’s mother,” María Paz said, pointing to the television. “Watch, she is supposedly going to commit suicide taking iodine because her daughter became Komachosky’s lover, or Komarovsky, whatever his name is, the lawyer . . .”

“It’s impossible to talk like this. It’s just an old film, some melodrama without any scientific accuracy. Turn that off, María Paz, and let’s talk.”

“I can’t turn it off; it’s pay-per-view. It cost seven dollars. It’s a medical drama.”

“I wish you would tell me what’s next. I mean, I’m just wondering what awaits us. You and me, and three dogs. Is there any way you can inform me?”

“Wendy Mellons. Another one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends. Maybe she knows where he is. We should find her and ask her. The only bad thing is she lives in Colorado.”

“Colorado? Are you nuts? Do you know where Colorado is? On the whole other side of the fucking country! This is not Monaco, Princess Grace. You can’t circle the kingdom in a couple of hours.”

10

Interview with Ian Rose

“The whole Colorado chapter was completely insane,” Rose says after three hours of talking. “Miles and miles of road, going round and round to the last circle of Hell, with snow falling diagonally, the flakes striking the windshield like coins. The three dogs in the back, drunken with so much sleep, and me at the helm following the instructions of María Paz, who in turn was guided by the stories she had heard about Sleepy Joe’s other loves.”

They were sometimes gruesome secrets and sometimes pornographic ones, some likely real, others undoubtedly invented, and they snared María Paz in a spiral of jealousy and of wanting to know more. One of the recurring characters in these tall tales was Wendy Mellons, owner of a tavern called The Terrible Espinosas. Looking for that woman, Rose and María Paz had gone from bar to bar in the hunting lodges of the hamlets in Cangilones on the old bed of the Huerfano River: Animas, Santo Acacio, Ojito de Caballo, Purgatorio, and Garcia Mesa—little more than ghost villages bathed in the dust of the dry river to reach the ravine where once the legendary Chavez Town had stood.

In Chavez Town, they found only ashes, pieces of broken pottery, and a chilly silence. It was a cold but sonorous silence, according to María Paz, who immediately sensed that something was resonating, and although she could not tell exactly what it was, it most clearly made her break out in goose bumps, and her eyes welled with tears.
Echoes?
she thought. Rather a thread of smoke far in the distance that clutched her heart.

“Makes one feel like praying,” she said.

“Can’t hurt,” Rose responded.

The few people who had crossed their path had warned them that in those parts it would be difficult to find someone, because the dead were the only ones who had not gone off at some point. Along with the dead, the shadows of the Penitent Brothers haunted the place, they who once had flayed their own backs with whips in their own Via Crucis, climbing the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo, those mountains studded with sharp boulders that they had christened themselves after. María Paz let out a long sigh. She mentioned how much she loved all those old Hispanic place names: Alamosa, how pretty, and Bonanza, like on TV, Candelaria, Lejanías, Animas, Perdidas, and Culebra Creek. She blurted out that when she had a son, she would name him Íñigo or Blas. Rose listened and remembered what Dummy had told them—that María Paz would never have children because of damage they had done to her insides in the prison hospital.
Every cloud has a silver lining,
Rose thought.
At least no child would have to suffer the name of some ancient swashbuckler.

“This is where Sleepy Joe is from,” said María Paz, standing on a promontory overlooking the vast emptiness. Her hair flowing in the breeze caught a cluster of snowflakes and made her seem like a cherry blossoming in the wrong season. “This is his land,” she said. “Born and raised here. It’s no wonder he’s like that.”

“Like what?” Rose responded sharply, the harsh tone he used whenever she talked about her brother-in-law with a nostalgic air. “Like what?”

“Like he is, always chasing echoes.”

Night was beginning to fall over the Sangre de Cristo, and they began searching for a motel that would take them and the dogs—although it would be wrong to say that night fell, as if in a single stroke of a guillotine; rather the darkness appeared early and made headway slowly, almost moment by moment. According to Sleepy Joe, the fame of The Terrible Espinosas was so widespread that it reached New Mexico. It was the most amazing and jubilant tavern, no better party around the San Luis Valley, with live music by Los Tigres del Desierto and at dawn, a serenade by the trio from yesteryear, Los Inolvidables. Relying on these stories, María Paz encouraged Rose not to give up. Such a famed place couldn’t escape them. All they had to do was keep asking until someone gave them a clue.

“A most exclusive brothel, according to María Paz, but no one had heard of it,” Rose tells me. “As it was, we caught up with Wendy Mellons in the office of a Reiki practitioner, where she waited among other patients to be attended. She told us later that she visited the place every two weeks for an energy alignment and hands-on therapy for her swollen legs.”

She must have been pretty in her youth, but old age had snuck up on her, and she was wrapped in a thick winter coat, making it impossible to guess at her physical appearance, if not to say it was a bulky package that still may have been consistent with someone who in her heyday had wreaked havoc. It was no accident that her fighting name was Wendy Mellons. But the years had passed, the law of gravity prevailed, and when things had started to collapse, Wendy Mellons had abandoned that nickname, apparently abandoning her old ways also. She quit her job and moved to Cañon City, where she had lived for years working as a teller at the box office of the Rex Theatre. Rose could see plainly why Sleepy Joe would cling to that woman, who must have been for him like a second mother. The second mother, the coveted breast, the homeland, childhood, days gone by, memories, the first landscape, possibly first intercourse, ultimately, the only roots. In fact, Wendy Mellons told them that she was exactly the same age as Sleepy Joe’s mother, who had died young. She received them in her current home in the outskirts of the village of Santo Acacio, which itself was on the outskirts of everything.

“I thought it would be more like the boudoir of a madam, but the place was rather like a cemetery of tires,” Rose tells me.

Past the stacks of tires, they came to a habitable room with an attached shed, in which the snow came through a crack in the roof. Past this, there was a backyard with a small melting furnace, disposable pieces of junk chucked here and there, and a pair of skinny dogs scurrying around like rats. Wendy Mellons lived with a son, Bubba, a drug addict and thief of manhole covers that he hammered, pounded, tossed in ashes, and sold as antique iron pots to tourists. A wood-burning stove heated the habitable part of the structure. Clothing was piled on a rickety rocking chair, dishes with crusted leftover food were stacked on a table, and a bolt-action rifle hung at the head of a bronze cot. A variety of other objects covered with smoke and grease lingered in the corners of the room, including a pair of deer traps, a tricycle, a washing machine without a door, a box full of used windshield wipers, a blacksmith’s bench, and other tools.

Wendy Mellons wore a camisole, so now Rose could examine her in detail: her eyes were rimmed with kohl like some Babylonian whore; her rings were so embedded in her fingers they could probably never be pulled off, even with heavy greasing; she had chipped red nails, olive skin, and what could only be described as a heavy-duty body. There was no sense that anything about her had dried up from lack of use, but rather as if everything had been steeped in oil, smelling of incense and reminiscent of a sacred Mass. Rose could not take his eyes off the ripples of her skin, which created folds where moss could germinate. Impossible not to be reminded of Mandra X. According to Rose, both were heavyweights, each in her own style, and if placed face-to-face in the ring, you would have to bet on a draw.

The walls of the house were coated in newspaper, presumably to conserve heat, and few pictures hung from nails.

“The family of my comadre,” Wendy Mellons said pointing to a small photograph faded by age and sunlight.

“It was Sleepy Joe’s Slovak clan,” Rose tells me. “And there in the family portrait, in that old photograph, there he was, Sleepy Joe, the guy who killed my son. It was the first time I had seen a photograph of him. It’s a kick to the gut, let me tell you, to finally see the face of the man who killed your son. But there was something off; the person in that picture was not a man but a child. In fact, he was the smallest of the seven siblings. Don’t ask me why, but the image of that child got all jumbled in my mind with the memory of Cleve as a child. A very emotional fusion that completely upset me. I couldn’t channel all the hatred and urgency for vengeance toward the child in that photograph. I can’t really explain it. My hatred bounced off that child and boomeranged right back to me, forcing me to swallow mouthfuls of my own bile. So I stopped looking at the child and focused on the father, who was behind him, a gloomy man with drunken eyes and a cauliflower nose. I was able to hate him right away, wanted him dead. On this man, I could unleash my rage, perhaps because I saw Sleepy Joe as an adult in him. Moreover, at that moment, I could also wish for the death of the child Sleepy Joe, for the sole purpose of hurting his father. I had been robbed of my son, and from the depths of my soul, I wanted to rob him of his.”

When María Paz and Wendy Mellons chatted with their backs to him, Rose took a photograph of that picture, and now he hands me a copy. I hold it in my hand and scrutinize it, knowing that in it are encased the seeds of everything that would happen later: the germ of this story. In the picture of the picture, there is a large peasant family, Caucasian, mired in poverty and foreigners to joy. The father dominates the image of the group, with his broad shoulders and stony expression. He wears a turtleneck and has a biblical beard, looking like a middle-aged Tolstoy, but rattier. The mother is sitting in the foreground. The dark scarf that conceals her hair and neck makes her seem an almost monastic figure. Surrounding the couple and not counting Sleepy Joe, there are six children, all of them hardened by work. They’re not really children but short adults—have never known childhood. They have golden hair parted in the middle, the girls with braids and the boys with bowl cuts. Two people seem out of place in the group, the mother and the youngest son. Both seem separated, isolated, as if enclosed in an invisible bubble.

There is something beautiful about them, both in the woman and child, and that also sets them apart from the rest. But what’s different about them? Almost nothing, some minor detail, a slightly higher arch of the eyebrows maybe, or cheekbones that are an iota more pronounced, the brow a few millimeters wider, the chin a few less. Or perhaps what is perceived as beauty is only a matter of contrast. There was something lacking in the flat humorless faces of the others that failed to mask a general vacuity, the larger fossil of the angry father, the smaller fossils of the resigned children.

There was another suggestive detail, similarly revealing. To be able to fit everyone in the photo, members of the family had bunched together. Yet none of them touched another; instead they were separated by tiny spaces that signaled the harsh loneliness of each figure. The exception again was the boy Joe, resting confidently on his mother’s knees. That child was not afraid of his mother; on the contrary, it would seem he took refuge in her against the others.

“No doubt there was something lovely about the woman,” Rose tells me. “A battered loveliness, almost destroyed by the husband’s merciless beatings, the marks evident on the children as well.”

According to María Paz, the woman was just someone who lived murmuring prayers and rarely bathed, but her character gained some depth with the details supplied by Wendy Mellons. Her name was Danika Draha, and she wore her hair in a braid tight and stout as a rope. She was perennially pining for the mountain country she had left behind in her homeland, because she was convinced that it was through those forests that one reached heaven. There were no signs that she missed her parents or her siblings, but the longing for those mountains often made her weep, and it was impossible for her to adjust to the landscape of Colorado. Since coming to the New World, everything in her life had been vulgar, sad, and ugly. Everything except her youngest son, the bright and beautiful boy whom she had not named Joe (that nickname came later, and she had never approved of it) but Jaromil, which in their language meant spring. In that creature, she invested all her affections, and she lived to please him. According to Wendy Mellons, little Jaromil was the only green branch in the withered tree that Danika Draha had become.

“Jaromil. That was Sleepy Joe’s real name,” Rose tells me. “And no doubt how he must be listed as such in his official documents.”

Mother and son prayed together, visited the church daily, fasted, painted Easter eggs, in December put up the Nativity scene, and during Holy Week were always in the first row for the reenactment of the Crucifixion that the Latinos in town put on every year. Liturgy by liturgy, they forged a religion in common as a sort of homeland in common, apart from the rest of the tribe—a world of its own made of candles, silicon, cassocks, confessionals, prodigious saints, sacrifice and redemption, blood, miracles, alms, and chanting. The mother was so attached to the child that she breastfed him until he was nine years old. “You’re sucking the life out of her,” the father said to his youngest every time he saw the boy latched on to the breast, and beat him away. On the death of the mother, the father laid the entire blame on the coddled child, the favorite, the spoiled one. The youngest. “He sucked the life right out,” he told anyone who would listen, “this dastardly child sucked and sucked on my wife till there was no life left in her.”

“The tragedy for Jaromil began with her death,” Wendy Mellons told Rose. “Imagine the loneliness of that child who went from being the light of his mother’s eyes to the most insignificant one in the home, which was no longer a home, because no one ever again provided or cared for the children or hardly fed them. One by one, the sons soon disappeared to find work and a life in the world. None of them could tolerate the drunkenness and anger of the father for long. The daughters also left as they quickly married, which wasn’t hard since white healthy flesh was coveted and in demand. Greg, the oldest, stayed behind to watch over the youngest, until he too eventually left. He went off to become a cop and did not reappear till years later. And Jaromil? Under the bed, in a ditch, in the top of a tree. He learned to hide every time the father came home, to avoid the ridiculing and the beatings.”

At some point in his childhood, Sleepy Joe understood that he could use the mystical to protect himself, or maybe he immersed himself in the mystical traditions learned from his mother. He went into a trance every time the priest raised the Host at Mass. His eyes rolled back in his head during these outbursts of love for God. He remained in the trance for minutes; no one could shake him or pinch him out of it, hence the nickname he acquired about this time: Sleepy Joe, in tandem with the reputation that came after a handful of these episodes. His looks didn’t hurt. From the time he was a little boy, he was pretty and alluring, like a little Jesus, people said, especially because of the blond curls cascading on his shoulders. His father, however, was not moved by his curls, and he made Sleepy Joe’s life impossible, telling him he was nothing but a prissy little girl. The townspeople’s reactions were very different, though. A few of them began to whisper that he was a holy child, others that he was suffering from some mysterious illness. Eventually most of them began isolating themselves from him, because they believed he was an instrument of bad luck.