Wild Penance (14 page)

“Number Six with the bruise!” she shouted as I tried my first stroll across the stage. “Do you think you could try walking on the balls of your feet, just so we can imagine what it would look like if you weren’t barefoot like a peasant?”

One at a time, we entered stage left, walked to downstage center, posed, turned around and paused for the back view, then turned front again and waited for a cue in the music. Then we walked to center stage, posed again front, turned and posed back, and then front again. After all that, we sauntered across to stage right and exited into the wings. Six of us then crossed behind the curtain to stage left again and waited. When Number Twelve had completed her solo routine, we all entered together, half from each side, doing a brief ensemble routine, during which Ailsa Ten and the Decade performed a smoking version of Bob Marley’s “One Love.”

After a time—perhaps because of the infectious beat of the music, but surely also because every other girl in the show was equally exposed and the only man in the club was Ernie—I forgot about my bare backside and focused instead on not tripping, not starting too soon or taking too long, and on doing my best to get through it.

“Number Six with the bruise,” Wynetta scolded me on my second time out, “stick out your chest and suck in your stomach!” The band stopped playing.

“I can’t move if I do that,” I countered.

In unison, all the other models’ heads turned and looked at me, as if I had just admitted I was a demon.

“This bustier thing is so tight, it’s got my breasts pushed up to my chin,” I griped.

The room was quiet. Wynetta pulled her glasses down and looked at me over the rims.

I stuck out my chest, feeling like the laces on the front of my top might burst.

Wynetta yelled, “Ernie, will you open the front door again and leave it that way? All this lingerie is going to smell like grease if we don’t get some air in this place!” Then she looked at Ailsa Ten. “Well, go on!”

The band started playing.

When the rehearsal was finished, I was glad to get back into my jeans. I was on my way to the open door at the front of the club when Ernie stopped me. “You can leave through that door now, but use the stage door when you come in tonight.”

“There’s a stage door?”

Wynetta saw us talking and hurried over.

“Yeah, around back,” Ernie said. “It’s unlocked.”

Wynetta grabbed me by the shoulders and drew back her head, examining my face. “Your complexion is fair, I’d say ivory tan. We’ll go a shade lighter for your bottom, a number three pancake to cover that bruise. That is all.” She released me. “And don’t forget your number,” she called behind her as she started to walk away.

“Six with a bruise,” I muttered under my breath. I turned and went out the open door.

But she must have thought I said something else. “You go on sixth!” She yelled it after me, loud enough that anyone in the parking lot could have heard, even maybe the people in the cars passing by on the highway.

“I got it.” I turned to give her a thumbs-up.

“You forgot it?” she bellowed. “How can you forget so quickly? You go on sixth!”

I held up six fingers and tried to smile through gritted teeth.
This woman was driving me nuts!
I spun around and smacked my left shoulder into something large and yielding. I gasped, startled, and looked up into the sunken eyes and battle-scarred face of Manny, the dishwasher. His two big hands grabbed me by the upper arms as we collided, and he held on to me for what felt like several moments, then set me back from him as one might a disobedient child. I was so shocked by the unexpected run-in that my heart was pounding, and I noticed I wasn’t breathing.

“You better watch where you’re going, señorita,” he said. “Somebody could get hurt real bad.” He released my arms and maneuvered around me. I watched as he went into the club and crossed the room toward the counter in the back, heading for the kitchen.

Mrs. Suazo

The Suazo residence might have been a nice place at one time, but it cried out with the pain of neglect as we drove up the dirt drive. The adobe face on the house was cracked and water had seeped in, causing some of the bricks to melt. In previous summers, vines had grown up the wall on the north side, and now their skeletons looked like bony fingers clutching at the structure as if to pull it back into the earth. A pack of lean and sickly dogs ran up to boast territorial rights to the property, their barks turning to pleas for attention and squeals of complaint about their sordid lives as we walked among them toward the door of the house.

A large picture window had fogged up between its panes of glass—the compressed gas barrier that had promised good insulation now almost totally obscuring any view. Over the window hung a faded sheet, and the fabric moved at one side and then swung back into place. A place beside the front step had been repeatedly used to empty the cat litter, and the acrid ammonia smell of cat urine was the only welcome besides that of the dogs.

Kerry opened a listing aluminum storm door with no glass in the bottom and banged on the peeling wood door. He removed his hat and began shuffling his hands around the outside of the brim, turning the hat just slightly with each new hand grip. I looked at him in profile and felt a warm flood of attraction. The door opened.

A rake-thin, middle-aged Anglo woman peered timidly around the edge. Her coarse gray-brown hair tried to escape from a sad bun at the back of her neck. Her face was blotchy and red against the pale white of her neck and shoulders. The one eye we could see was swollen and moist, as if she had been crying.

“Mrs. Suazo?” I asked.

“He ain’t home,” she said, matter-of-factly, anticipating my next question.

“Do you know where we might find your husband?” Kerry said in a gentle voice.

“He’s probably somewhere drunk.” She clutched a tissue to her nose as her eyes watered over with tears.

“Where does he do his drinking, ma’am?” Kerry pressed.

“If it’s not with someone else’s wife, it’s usually at that biker joint down in Española.” Her voice cracked with anger and frustration as she cried. “I just don’t care anymore, and I’m not protecting him.” The door fell open a little wider now, and we could see that one eye was bruised and blue, the side of her face swollen. She might have been pretty at one time, but the years since her youth had not been kind or easy ones. There was a delicacy to her features, as if she once had been becomingly childlike, perhaps even baby faced. I could imagine that her slight frame had seemed willowy or sprightly then, instead of empty and used up, as it did now.

“What has happened here, Mrs. Suazo?” I asked.

“He’s gone clear around the bend this time, and I can’t even tell you what it is. It ain’t this”—she pointed to her black eye—“he’s done this plenty of times, usually when he’s drunk, which is most of the time. This time it’s different. There’s something going on.” She used the tissue to blow her nose, making loud honking sounds.

Kerry and I exchanged glances while she did this, and then waited until she was finished.

“What makes you say there’s something going on, Mrs. Suazo?” I asked.

She looked past us into the yard, as if she were speaking to the trees. “He says he’s really struck it rich, that this time, he’s really hit pay dirt. He has, too. I looked in his pocket when he was asleep. He had him two rolls of twenties in there—each one was as big around as my arm!” She held up a thin, bony wrist. “I don’t know where he got that, and I have a feeling I don’t want to know. I should have never come out here with him! I shouldn’t never have left my family! I have had nothing but trouble since the day I met him, and it just keeps getting worse. My family ain’t even speaking to me now, on account of he’s ripped them off, too, just like everyone from here to Santa Fe. I don’t have a friend in this world thanks to him. I can’t even go home!” She began sobbing now in earnest.

I looked at Kerry. It was awkward here—her tucked half behind the door, us standing on the
portal.
Uninvited, and without any jurisdiction, we were tentatively holding the ground between inside and out by virtue of the aluminum storm door resting against Kerry’s left shoulder.

“Mrs. Suazo,” I tendered, “could we come in for a minute?”

“There ain’t no need of you to come in here, and I’m ashamed of the way we live anyway. I already done told you everything. I don’t know where he got the money. That there is the most money I ever saw him carry, and I know he didn’t get it from selling no wood. I should have never left east Texas. I had a good job at the oil refinery there. I can’t even find work here, except as a maid during the ski season, and that’s been terrible this year on account of the snow not coming until late. And then, he leaves me here without no car about half the time. I can’t keep a job like that. Even when I do make money, he takes it all and drinks it all up. I just don’t have nothing. He makes sure I don’t have nothing. That way, I can’t leave.”

“Is there someone we can call, or would you like us to take you someplace? There’s a shelter in Taos,” I said, my voice as tender as I could make it.

“No. I don’t want to be with nobody, I don’t want to talk to nobody, and I don’t want no help from nobody. I’m sorry to complain like I did.”

I pulled out a business card and handed it to her. “If you change your mind, just call me.”

She took the card gingerly and pulled it in to her chest.

Kerry looked at me. He raised his eyebrows and held them there for a moment, his forehead wrinkling, his face asking me
What now?
He turned to the woman. “Mrs. Suazo, is there somewhere we might find your husband? Besides that bar in Española? Maybe someplace he hangs out here in Taos?”

“He ain’t here. That’s all I know. And when he has money, he ain’t hardly never here. And when he don’t have money, he ain’t worth being around, because his mood’s so foul.” A little anger was creeping into her voice, and she was sounding less pathetic now, and more resigned.

“Mrs. Suazo.” Kerry spoke very gently. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I’d tell you to run over him,” she said, her voice growing increasingly bitter, “but he ain’t got no life insurance, and I’d just have to pay for someone to bury him.” She snickered at her own black humor. “No, I reckon I’ve got myself into a real mess, and can’t no one help me but myself. Thank you, though. Thanks a lot.” She pushed the door shut softly, and I had a feeling that more doors than that one had just closed for Mrs. Santiago Suazo.

A Man of Many Talents

“Mind if we stop by my place real quick—just so I can pick up something?” Kerry asked. “It’s right up ahead, won’t take us out of our way.” We had taken his truck when we left the BLM to pay our little social call at the Suazo residence.

“Sure, I guess.”

“Thanks. I’m going into Santa Fe this afternoon, and there’s something I need to get first. I’ll make it fast.”

“When do you sleep anyway?” I asked, feeling tired.

“Working nights like this? Usually right after a shift. But I have an errand to run. I’ll grab some shut-eye when I get back. I’m off all weekend. I can make it up by sleeping late tomorrow morning.”

“I’m off this weekend, too.” I yawned. “Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?” He looked across the cab at me.

I blushed. “I have stuff I have to do. I won’t get much chance to rest up.”

“Well, that’s too bad. I was going to say—when you said you were off, too—maybe we could go to a movie or something.” He focused on the road now.

“I’d like that. Can I have a rain check?”

He glanced at me and smiled. “You bet. Just say when.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes. I was thinking about poor Mrs. Suazo and how hopeless she had seemed.

“You’re upset about Mrs. Suazo, aren’t you?” Kerry kept his eyes on the road ahead.

“Yeah. She seemed pretty beat down.”

“Seeing her like that makes me wish I could run into Santiago Suazo on my time off,” he said. “I’d like to show him what it feels like to have somebody pound on your face. Not that it would really solve anything.”

“I know. You’re probably right. But it feels kind of good just to think about doing it, huh?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. Then he nudged me on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “You know, you have a little ornery streak in you, don’t you?” He was giving me that devilish grin again, and I had no tools to resist it. My boundaries seemed to malfunction with this guy. All my fences turned to open gates, my battlements became highly decorative entry ramps, my moats became swimming pools with neon signs hanging above them reading:
Come on in, the water’s fine!

When we pulled in front of a row of apartments near the Forest Service office, Kerry offered, “Want to come in? I’ll just be a minute.”

“Well, I . . .”

“Come on. I promise I won’t try to get you to cha-cha.”

I don’t know whether or not I felt relieved about that.

 

When he opened the door, I smelled incense or copal. In contrast to the bright midday sun outdoors, the efficiency apartment contained a soft shadow—gray-green, hushed, halcyon. I paused on the threshold. Kerry urged me in. It was clean, spare, everything carefully considered, everything in harmony. The pine bed was made up with plain white sheets and a Hudson Bay trade blanket. A gun cabinet housed four polished rifles, their stocks gleaming, the barrels burnished black. A well-used blue enamel camp-style coffeepot waited on the stove like an old friend, but the counter and table were clean and uncluttered. Along one wall, books lined a built-in shelf. Wild treasures—stones, feathers, small animal skulls like perfect white sculptures—were the only decorative accents. Except for the pictures.

Arrestingly beautiful, large, framed photographs hung like windows looking out into beautiful landscapes. There were shots of desert canyons, their rock strata a lasagna of mauves and umbers—statuesque pink and gray demoiselles erupting from them like exotic mushrooms. A view of a thin white toenail moon in an otherwise azure sky, with the Rio Grande Gorge moving like a highway from the bottom of the photo to the blue and pink mountains in the distance. Anasazi ruins in the side of a cliff. A long view featuring the red dirt of the Carson road, with green scrub growing up the center line and rising in clumps on either side, the track wide at the bottom of the frame, but dramatically narrowing to a point in the distance beneath an indigo sky full of white clouds. And there was one of a local mountain range, Tres Orejas—Spanish for “three ears.” The trio of rounded peaks stood in perfect black silhouette against a red-orange sunset, the valley floor in dusky darkness.