by Albino Carrillo
Guadalupe Santos Trujillo had been
riding a silver-green15-Speed Ross Mountain Bike since he saw it for sale during
a dope run over to the college campus.
After he dropped off some G-13 for a couple dumb hippies from Vermont
who were waiting for him in the all night Laundromat (these were in his
“bicycle days”) he found himself in the tree-lined part of town banging on the
heavy oak door of an old Professor who was waiting for a Ms. Julia Walpole to
take a look at the thing: a sky
blue 1967 Volkswagon Squareback. He had seen it in
the distance and likened it to candy.
Sweet metal candy. The
coolest thing was that it was in almost cherry condition. After selling a pillow, Guadalupe had the cash then and
there, and even though this greatly confused the old man at first, twenty
minutes later they were at the kitchen table, filling out the title
transfer.
Guadalupe had plans. Snatching up the title so quickly that
the professor’s yellow Lab barked from where it was on floor beside the stove, he strode out, just as Julia
Walpole knocked on the door. He
slipped past her and past the professor, who still held tightly in his weak
hand the wad of fifteen 100 dollar bills that he’d just made. The only thing Guadalupe left behind
was a certain acidic smokiness that wouldn’t linger in the air much longer that
Walpole’s patchouli. Her eyes were
wide with astonishment.
Now the car had never acted up before,
and with the car Guadalupe thought he could extend his business and his social
life. He had been riding up to
Santa Fe on the Sun-Runner every weekend to sell weed to the hippie crowd
frequenting the Japanese-Style hot-spring baths, the same who went dancing to
World-Beat music all night at El Club Suroeste. Guadalupe Santos Trujillo’s main problem was that he
was always running away: this
started when he was a boy. He’d
sit at his desk all day at school making up other realities—he thought for a
while he was the son of a king, lost and adopted, certainly not the son of his
real father, an old alcoholic encyclopedia salesman who’d disappear into the
deep expanses of Central Texas for days in search of profit. Because he could too clearly imagine
his father hobbling up to a small one-story stucco house framed by 3-foot high
galvanized fencing in search of a sale, he could also imagine that he’d be
rescued someday, recognized and taken to a castle or palace that would be all
his, somewhere in La Extremadura de España. Of these places he’d read, and had spent hours copying heraldic
shields from the set of Britannicas his real dad had won in a sales contest.
So when he found The Audubon
Society Field Guide to the Night Sky under the passenger seat one evening while he was trying stash a
pillow of Diesel under it, the first thing he thought was how far he could
already see: back then, the night
sky in New Mexico was still clear and black and icy. He drove to Santa Fe on the back road, through Madrid. The crowd at El Club Suroeste was typical
for a Saturday night in mid-June: güeras
from the U, local gals from Taos dressed up like their mothers, like fresh
young hippie things: toe rings,
hip-huggers and flip-flops. The
boys and men mostly a mix: the Santa Fe locals who, as lawyers in the daytime,
wore pressed chinos and starched shirts; the locals with black, straight hair,
leather jackets and big belt buckles; the star-struck boys who liked the wild
hippie southwestern look—turquoise rings, maybe even a heishi, faded 501’s,
Birkenstocks, the distant pot-soaked bedroom eyes of John Lennon.
It occurred to Guadalupe, at that
moment of intimate self-reflection when he dug his hand around and underneath
the passenger’s side seat in the blue VW and could hear the noise of the band
playing on the patio, that he had come upon very lucky moment: kneeling, with the door open,
Guadalupe, while fishing for the big bag, grabbed the book instead—with it, the
first thing he did was turn to the point in the book that is full with color
pictures of stars, nebulae, and galaxies, in particular a crystal clear shot of
M 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.
The streets in Santa Fe are small,
narrow paths that remind you that the Spaniards built this city in the
1600’s. They reminded Guadalupe of
the time he’s gone to Spain for the summer, actually traveling to the small
city Alburquerque. It was the cobblestone, the neat two- and three-story stucco
buildings that did it for him. In
the bar, he immediately and without plan ran into Julia Walpole who of course,
when the blue VW pulled-up on the curb, next to the bar, was sucking on her
second clove smoke, her schooner sized margarita almost drained. Walpole had become what a TV producer
or urban sociologist might call a semi-regular—she knew two of the waitrons by
name and the host often talked to her about his trouble getting good bus
help. This because Walpole had
once accused an ugly, slightly chubby Peruvian bus-boy of stealing her watch
from the bar where she’d left it while talking to a friend she’d met in the
hallway by the restroom. It was behind the door labeled Mujeres all the
time. The watch, a sliver-banded Bulova, actually had been her
father’s; she simply picked it from the bedpost the night after her father died
in his sleep—all it
needed was a new mainspring.
It was the way he was sitting in the
car that drew her attention.
Guadalupe had bought the car before anyone even had a chance to drive it
around the block or make an offer.
It had been sitting for a while.
The truth was that they had known each other in college, 20 years ago
now, the desert still the same night after night the same stars, the same
lonely people, now in their 40’s driving drunk between ‘Burque and Santa Fe,
still looking for kicks and UFO’s out there on the Turquoise Trail, stoned on
ecstasy or G-13. Being lost in the
Southwest was a gift and a sentence.
The blinding blue sky literally drains your will to move on, drains you
of ambition and color. And even though you may be skin-darkened
by the insufferable sun, that is in itself is a reminder from the desert, of
human frailty.
At the wrought-iron entrance to el
patio del Club Suroeste, then, Walpole walked right up to poor stoned Guadalupe
and with one hand grabbed the book of stars and kept smoking with the
other:
“Hey, motherfucker, that should’ve been
my car.”
She pushed him hard, like Elaine Benes
would, as she grabbed it, twisting with all her weight like she’d learned in a
self-defense class. Too stunned to
react (he had smiled broadly at her as he entered the courtyard) he stumbled
away.
“Hey
man, what the fuck…nice to see you, too!
He pushed back against the wall and she slipped in a puddle of beer. He kept his hands up like he’d learned
in jail. “No way. I fell in love with it the minute I saw
it, and I had the money and I, you know, it was the right time. Like it was all set up, cosmically. I wanted something like that car since High-School. Have you seen the dashboard? Not a bit of sun rot. And, anyway…why do you want an old
hippie car? Some goddamn book came
with it too.” Guadalupe knew he
was lost. The book might explain,
what? He was way past that here,
and the alarm was ringing in his head.
They opened it together.
On his right, the open portico to the
street yawned and was tired.
Walpole hung back on the patio wall and Guadalupe was vaguely sick. “Have you ever seen the stars
from behind the Sandias?” he asked, as he hot-boxed Marlboro Menthols and
nursed a beer he didn’t want.
“No. Well, driving, yes, she said. You know I’m from Missouri. We have stars out there too.”
“Naw, what I’m talkin’ about is the
thick white Milky Way you can see if you drive to Madrid and then over the
mountains. There’re some clear
meadows out there and you can see forever!” He said this as his heart pounded and he wondered if
he were really alive. Julia drank
another Lone Star as she flipped through the Field Guide, dog-earring some pages as she
went.
The
drive down to ‘Burque is always furious.
Even more furious that Walpole was following him down I-25 at 75 miles
an hour in her 1985 Ford Ranchero GT.
After sitting in the bar for almost an hour, they’d decided to go out to
the llano to see the stars in the naked black sky that was there, hanging over
the desert.
It’s
almost all downhill to ‘Burque.
Guadalupe could see Julia closing at times as he neared the Sandia
Reservation cutoff that would take him into the dark hills. They drove like racers, taunting each
other, flying by at 85, shouting, flipping the bird at one another, laughing,
thowing empty bottles of beer out their windows. But it
was on a straight two-laner just north of Burque that his mind began to drift
into the dark night swallowing the foothills into fog. He had formed a map in his head: soon, he and Julia would be sitting on
the hood somewhere, staring at the nothingness that is space, naming stars from
a book, looking for a page not in that book.
A
bottle tumbled carelessly under his feet as he made the wide, dancing curve
that took him onto Sandia Pueblo land.
He could see the lights of ‘Burque far to the south and they looked like
lost stars from a map he imagined.
He gunned the engine, with Julia riding him parallel along the two-lane
highway that lead to the other side of the Sandias. They threw kisses and cursed one another. Going east briefly, his eyes caught the
dull, surprised eyes of a coyote crossing the road. As they both roared past, it vaguely turned to watch a rabbit
farther down the road. In a few
minutes, the rabbit would be dead in the coyote’s jaws. Far in front of him, in the darkest corner of the northeast
sky he could see the Pleiades rising, its cup of hot blue stars casting a 440
year old light on the scene.
