Monkey on a Chain (23 page)

Chapter 8

TIERRA AMARILLA

The night approach to Albuquerque from the east is beautiful. The Sandia Mountains lie right on the edge of town. As you fly in, you see scattered lights from houses built in the mountains, then nothing as you pass over the national forest, and then the city lights explode beneath you. The plane passes over the entire city and then banks into a U-turn over the mesa. You lose most of your altitude over the west bank of the Rio Grande, and then, after you cross the river for the second time, the land below climbs quickly up to meet you at the same time you drop toward it. You are on the ground before you expect it.

Except for the grand concourse, the airport could be anywhere. It is only after you step outside that you realize you’re in the desert. The air is thin and dry. Albuquerque International is about a mile high. When the humidity shoots up to thirty percent, the natives wipe their foreheads and complain about how muggy it is.

After the Philippines, Seattle, and Washington, it felt like heaven, or as close as I expect to come to heaven. We picked up our bags and caught a shuttle to the car. I gave it the same attention I had the last time we flew in. There were no surprises under the hood this time either.

We had dinner in Albuquerque and then headed home. Placitas is quiet in the early evening. There was very little traffic on the main drag and none on the road to the house. At the driveway, I stopped and told April to take the wheel and follow me the rest of the way in. I walked up the drive with my eyes open for surprises.

There had been traffic since we left. I couldn’t tell how recently, but I thought it was in the last couple of days.

The house was waiting silently when we reached the clearing. I motioned April to stop behind me and studied it. The red Jaguar was parked by the front door. The door was closed and the windows all looked okay from this distance. Same with the garage.

April came up beside me. “What are you waiting for?”

“Confidence.”

She studied it briefly. “It looks fine to me.”

“It isn’t. Stay here until I call you.” I slipped into the woods and worked my way around the clearing to make sure no one was waiting to do to me what I’d done to the two soldiers by the van on Luzon. The woods were clear. I walked around both the house and the garage. The house hadn’t been approached, as far as I could tell, since the Filipinos, Mexicans, or whatever they had been, that Jenny told me about. But someone had been at the garage. The side door showed signs of forced entry. I unlocked it and stepped cautiously inside, then gave my eyes a chance to adjust to the gloom.

If we had returned an hour later, when it was completely dark, or if I hadn’t been so spooked, we would have died. Even so, it took me a while to see what had been done.

A line ran from a small stone cemented to the floor about where the front bumper would be. It ran straight up, through an eye-hook screwed into one of the joists, and then over to a small, curved black package that pointed down toward where the windshield of the car would stop. Another Claymore. You drive in. The bumper hits the line and triggers the mine. It explodes and sends a shower of shrapnel through the windshield. Finis.

I backed out of the garage and locked it, then headed for the house. It wasn’t likely that two devices had been set, but I didn’t take any chances. I checked each room, the refrigerator, the furnace, the crawl space, everything. It took over an hour. When I was done, I checked the Jaguar. Everything but the garage was clear. I waved April in. She was angry at the wait until I told her what was in the garage.

“How are they finding us?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe they followed you here the first time. Maybe they followed us back from Los Angeles. Corvin has resources from his agency contacts. He could either use them or rent talent. Or do the job himself.”

“And if it’s Roy?”

“Roy probably has a good idea where I live from the old days. He knows Walker is in Phoenix. He didn’t know we were going to the Philippines, but he might have figured that out. The only thing is, I can’t see him putting together the attack on Luzon. Not on such short notice.”

“And Sissy?”

“Sissy is a question mark. Maybe we’ll learn something tomorrow.”

We spent the night there. April was nervous. She asked if she could sleep with me. I told her sure. She came to bed wearing Montezuma and stayed on her own side until we fell asleep. When we woke, we were together in the middle of the bed, but that was just an accident.

It was light enough in the morning to tackle the garage. I carried a ladder out and disarmed the Claymore, then carried it up the mountain and disposed of it. The explosion reflected my mood.

April had done the laundry while I took care of that business. When I returned we were repacked and ready to go. I looked at what she had done and added a few things. An AR15, the civilian version of the M16, but modified for full automatic fire, and a .45 automatic. She said nothing when I bagged them and carried them out to the car. We stopped at a pay phone in Bernalillo and made reservations at the La Fonda in Santa Fe, then drove on up.

The room wasn’t ready when we arrived, just under an hour later, so we drove out to the high school and looked through old yearbooks until I found Sissy’s picture with the class of ‘fifty-nine. Juan Cisneros.

He had lettered in track. He hadn’t participated in any clubs or other sports. His ambition had been to drive a corvette and make a million. Like eight out of ten of the boys on the page, he’d worn his hair in a DA. His friends had voted him most likely to marry a movie star. His expression in the senior picture was friendly, but there was a dissatisfied quality to it. That had intensified in the ten years before I met him in Saigon.

I copied out the names of the other members of the track team and we left. The La Fonda was ready for us when we returned. Perhaps because of its age, the rooms there are smaller, more like the rooms in a private house. Everything in them feels antique. They have no balconies. There is no swimming pool. The adobe walls in the older parts of the building are plastered and a foot and a half thick. You get the feeling that your great-grandfather might have slept in the same bed. On the same mattress.

Three of the boys on the track team with Juan Cisneros were listed in the phone book. I gave each of them the same story. We were in ’Nam together in ‘sixty-nine. He told me to look him up if I ever got to Santa Fe. Did they know where he was?

They all told me, as gently as possible and with much hesitation, about his death on his last tour. Something about a helicopter. In one case he was a gunner, but the other two said he was just catching a ride. They all agreed that his death had been heroic. They all told me I should be proud of what he had done, his courage in signing up for all those tours. They had been civilians, of course.

I told them all that I was sorry to hear he hadn’t made it back. I said I wanted to talk to his parents, to tell them how he had been in Vietnam.

They understood that, and they all thought his parents would appreciate hearing from me. But they had moved. No one knew where they were living now.

I got his address when he had been in high school. They all gave the same address. I asked when they had seen him last. No one had seen him after Christmas of ‘sixty-six, when he was home on leave before his first tour. One of them asked if I had talked to Jack Tafoya. “Tafoya? No. Who is he?”

“Jack was Juan’s best friend in school,” he said. “He has his own insurance company now. If anyone knows where the family went, it’ll be Jack.”

I thanked him and hung up, then found Tafoya’s name in the phone book. I made an appointment with him for later that afternoon.

April and I had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant downstairs before walking over to the Gallisteo Street office. Tafoya was about three inches shorter than I, with ten more years on him, and graying temples to prove it. He waved us to a couple of chairs and asked what he could do for us. I gave him the same speech I’d given the others, except that I now knew Cisneros hadn’t made it back.

He developed a sorrowful look when I mentioned Sissy’s name. “The best friend I’ll ever have,” he said. “We did everything together. Chased the girls, got drunk the first time, everything. I even met my wife through him.” He shook his head sadly. “It about killed me when I heard he was dead. I was drunk for a week, man!” He tried to laugh, but it didn’t work.

“How did you hear?”

“His mom called me. She was crying. An officer drove up from Albuquerque just to tell her. She appreciated that. It was nice of the Army to send an officer up. He stayed with her until her neighbor, Mrs. Martinez, came over, and then she called Tony. Juan’s dad. And then she called me. She knew how much I loved him.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Christmas. Just before his first tour. He never came home after that. All those tours, and he never thought about himself. He was a real patriot.”

“Who was Mrs. Martinez?”

“She lived across the street. She grew up with Mrs. Cisneros, I think. They were like sisters. That’s why his mom called her when the officer told her to call someone.”

“Maybe she knows where they moved?”

He shook his head. “I asked her when I found the house empty. She said they just packed up and moved out. That was about two months after Juan was killed.”

“I’d really like to talk to them,” I said. “Can you think of anyone else who might know where they went?”

“No way. If there was anybody, I would have found them. He was close, you know? It really hurt when the family moved out like that. They should have left word. It wasn’t right.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. I motioned to April and we got up to leave. I thanked him for talking to me. He dismissed it and shook my hand. His eyes were moist and he was reaching for a handkerchief as we walked out. On the way back to the hotel, April asked what I thought.

“Two months,” I said, “is about enough time to recover from a leg wound and make it hack to the states.”

“But you don’t think he knew?”

“Tafoya? No. Maybe they were best friends in school, but Cisneros seems to have dropped everybody after he got involved with Roy.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he was ashamed. Or maybe he just grew apart from them. Maybe the war came between them. How the hell should I know?”

She was quiet for a few steps, then suddenly reached over and patted my chest, pressing the monkey under my shirt.

“What’s that about?”

“Just checking,” she said. “You still have it.”

“If I don’t have it, you will.”

We took a car out to the old address. It was a poor neighborhood but not a bad one. We knocked at the house across the street. It took a long time for the door to open. Mrs. Martinez was a short, bent woman with a head of thick hair just beginning to gray. She looked to be in her early seventies. I introduced myself and began the same story I’d told the others. She started shaking her head before I finished.

“No comprendo. Yo no hablo lngles,” she said.

I started over in halting Spanish.

She shook her head again. “I already told the other man. I don’t know nothing about them,” she said.

“You speak English?”

“I don’t speak nothing. I already told the other man.” She closed the door in our faces.

Back in the car, I sat staring out the windshield. “She knows where they are,” April said.

I nodded.

“Can we make her talk?”

“I don’t want to. She’s an old woman.”

“Then it’s a dead end?” April asked.

“Maybe I’ll think of something tonight. But we aren’t the only ones looking for him. Somebody else thinks he’s alive.”

We had dinner at a restaurant I liked on Rodeo and returned to the hotel early. April tried to talk about how we would find Sissy, but I kept losing my train of thought. Eventually, she gave up and went to bed. I joined her after midnight. The next morning I woke with an idea, a long shot.

After breakfast, we drove out to the cemetery. The headstone said Juan Cisneros, December 25, 1941–July 17, 1971, Staff Sergeant, USA. I hadn’t known he was born on Christmas Day. The grave was not kept up. Of course not. It was empty.

The next stop was the parish. I talked to the priest. His predecessor, Father Steibner, had been there in ‘seventy-one. He was living at a retirement home in Pennsylvania. I got the name of the place and made a long distance call from the hotel.

Steibner remembered the Cisneros family well. He had officiated at the memorial services for Juan. When I asked about Sissy’s parents, he said that they had not told him where they were going. They hadn’t even said goodbye. He still seemed hurt by the memory of that old snub. But he did remember one thing. Mrs. Cisneros had come from a little town up north. Tierra Amarilla. So had her friend, Mrs. Martinez. I was smiling when I hung up. “What is it?”

“The family was from Tierra Amarilla,” I told her.

“I’ve heard that name! Where?”

“In El Paso. While we were tracing those properties, trying to find Roy. One of the companies had holdings up north. In Rio Arriba County. And the county seat is a little town called—”

“Tierra Amarilla!”

I smiled. “Feel like a drive?”

“Yes!”

We checked out and bought a couple of hamburgers for the trip. We took Highway 84 out of town and then followed it north, through Tesuque and then down into the Rio Grande valley to Española. The highway falls steadily from an altitude of seven thousand feet at Santa Fe down to the Rio Grande crossing at Española, then rises as it traces the east side of the Rio Chama to Abiquiu. It crosses the river there and bears west, toward the Continental Divide.

Northern New Mexico is dry, but it is not a desert. This high, the land is rolling hills between mountain ranges. It is covered with scrub oak, juniper, piñon, and small pine trees, separated by grasses. Cattle range freely over the land. The people are of Spanish, Anglo, or Indian descent, and many of the families have been in place for hundreds of years. Thousands, for the Indians.

At Abiquiu Reservoir, Highway 84 turns more northerly and parallels the continental divide, thirty to fifty miles east of it. It cuts through a corner of Carson National Forest and then edges into a vaguely triangular chunk of private land bounded by the national forest on the east and the Jicarilla Apache Reservation on the west. The altitude there climbs steadily, averaging between seven and eight thousand feet, but it frequently pokes above ten. The canyon walls that constrain this part of the highway are frequently barren. Yellow and red cliffs break through the hills on either side of the road.