The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (23 page)

After a while, I had the urge to
go to the
descansos
. The crosses that someone had erected for Demetrio and his
brother. I was filled with a crazed bravery that made little sense
to me, fueled in part by anger and disbelief. Why hadn’t he
told
me? That was easy,
I reasoned. Because I wouldn’t have believed it, just like I didn’t
entirely believe it now.

I drove to the crosses, grabbed the flashlight and
my dog, and jumped down into the cold dark of night. Somehow,
knowing the cross on the right belonged to someone I knew and loved
made it not nearly as creepy as it had been before.

I remembered the first time I’d met Demetrio, and
the way I’d joked about the crosses, the strange look that had come
over his face then. Of course. I’d been joking about death, and
bragging about how I’d skirted it, when he himself had not been so
lucky. But how? How was any of this possible? I knew that there was
a scientific explanation. He’d even begun to tell me, and it had
made sense, to a point. Something about the Golden Ratio.

I walked to the
descansos
, with Buddy
shivering in my arms. The blackness of the frozen night was
complete, but for the weak cone of illumination from the
flashlight. I stood and stared at the crosses, and tried to feel
something. Anything. I tried to conjure Demetrio up from the
blackness, but nothing came.

“Where
are
you?” I called out into the
night, softly at first and then repeated with more volume.
“Where
are
you?”

Nothing.

“I get it,” I cried, loud, a desperate sort of
courage coming to me. Overhead the stars twinkled coldly, by the
millions, so very many stars. Dizzying billions. Smears of stars.
We didn’t have stars like this in the city.

“So you’re dead, big deal,” I screamed. “I’m not
scared, okay? You don’t have to hide from me anymore. I believe
you. I want to understand you.”

I waited, and soon enough heard
something rustling in the piñon trees nearby. My pulse jumped in my
chest and began to bombilate against my sternum like the wings of a
trapped bird. My mouth was heavy and dry; my nose numb from the
cold. I realized that what I was doing could be incredibly stupid.
What if he
wasn’t
good? What if he was a morboso, like the plumber had said?
What if he wanted to eat my soul? But I also know what I felt for
Demetrio, and how I felt around him. I trusted him.

“I’m here, Demetrio. Let me see you.”

It sounded absurd as it came from my lips, but it
was what it was. The world as I’d understood it before was gone,
something new and aberrant having taken its place. “Please don’t be
afraid of me. I won’t fear you if you won’t fear me.”

The rustling grew louder, as though something were
moving through the frozen scrub grass and crunchy snow toward me. I
was excited and petrified both, with the possibility of seeing him
again, and touching him. I wanted to ask him all sorts of questions
about life and death. I needed to understand, as a scientist. I
smiled to myself, and Buddy, responding as he often did to my own
body language, panted and wagged his tail and twirled in circles in
the snow.

Suddenly, the rustling grew
louder, and was accompanied by a terrible, horrible low growl,
followed by the wet, nasty sound of chops being licked.
Big
chops. I looked up
and saw a pair of yellow eyes shining at me from the
darkness.

Before I knew what was happening, an enormous,
rabid-looking coyote - the one I had seen next to the Land Rover
Friday night, I was certain of it - leapt out from the darkness,
snarled menacingly at me. It snatched Buddy in its muscular jaws
before leaping back into the blackness. It happened too quickly. I
had no time to react.

Buddy was gone.

“No!” I screamed, devastated. I ran a short way into
the darkness, but realized I was too slow. I saw a shadowy outline
of the thing lope across the land, fast as a jaguar, and it was
gone.

“Buddy!” I wailed. “No!”

He’d looked like a ragdoll in the beast’s jaws, just
dangling there. Was the coyote Demetrio? Why would he take
Buddy?

“Bring him back! Don’t take Buddy! We don’t want to
hurt you! We come in peace!”

I listened, but heard nothing.

“Buddy!” I yelled, hot tears
percolating in my eyes. I was in an agitated panic now, unsure of
what to do, punishing myself with guilt for having brought Buddy
out here in the middle of the night. What was I
thinking
? He weighed nine pounds. He
had injuries. He was no match for a predator. It was quite
possible, I realized in horror, that the coyote was just that, a
coyote, not a spirit or trickster, just a hungry carnivore who’d
happened across a lucky domesticated meal.

“Oh, dear God,” I cried, tears flowing coldly down
my cheeks. I had to do something. Anything. And fast. “Dear God,
help me. Please help me.”

I ran back to the Land Rover, climbed in, and sped
back to the church. I drove all the way to the top of the scrubby
hill this time, crushing weeds and bouncing over small boulders,
dispensing with the formality of the empty parking lot, putting the
hearty Land Rover to some sort of practical use for once. I parked,
and jumped down, leaving the headlights on high, shining down upon
the desolate ruins of a house. Something in my gut told me I was in
the right place. I’d get Buddy back by coming here. I knew it. I
don’t know how I knew it. I just knew.

“Demetrio!” I cried, at the top of my lungs.
“Demetrio! Come out! Let me see you! I need your help!”

I waited, starting to hyperventilate in my state of
terror and important purpose. My voice rose to a powerful
shout.

“I saw the newspaper stories about you! I saw the
news videos. I know what happened to you, and I’m really, really
sorry. I am so terribly sorry. I know who you were, and I know
about your brother. I wouldn’t bother you now except something just
grabbed Buddy and took him away, and I need your help to get him
back. Buddy’s helpless.” I broke down sobbing.

I fell to my knees now, in the emptiness of the
night. I was foolish, screaming alone into an empty house without a
roof, a ruin whose walls crumbled in all around it. If my mother
could have seen me then, she would have locked me away and shoved
Lexapro down my throat. I was losing my mind. Maybe my mother had a
point. I’d lost it, hadn’t I? I wasn’t the girl she knew anymore. I
hardly even recognized myself. It was senseless, all of this.
Nonscientific. Impossible. I beat my fists weakly against the
frozen earth, and I wept - for Buddy, for myself, for mysteries,
for the imperfect nature of religion and science, and all the
myriad ways they failed to intersect.

“They took Buddy,” I lamented. My
voice faded to a normal volume, then grew weaker. “All because
of
me
. I was
hoping you could help me. I don’t know. I want him back. I love
that dog.”

I heard more rustling, and braced myself, scared. I
didn’t want more coyotes - though if one came and carried me off
now, it was what I thought I deserved for sacrificing my beloved
dog, and disrespecting my poor mother.

I lifted my eyes, and looked around. Still nothing.
No one. Just an endless black, ceilinged with stars.

“Demetrio Vigil,” I warbled, tears seeping from my
eyes, my nose starting to drip. “I don’t know how it is that I see
you, and feel you, or how it is that you smell so good to me, and
make me laugh so hard, but I know one thing, one crazy thing.”

I stood up now, sniffling and delirious, and
stumbled back to the car, with an inexplicable urge to turn the
lights off. Let the coyotes take me, I thought. Let them get
me.

I cut the lights, and closed the
door, standing next to the car in the night with my arms stretched
out at my sides. I listened for a moment, to the near complete
silence all around me. For a moment, I
felt
Demetrio’s presence. I cannot
explain precisely what the sensation was, because it was sensed
with something beyond the five senses humans normally engage. I
knew he was there, as surely as I knew my feet were
cold.

“I don’t know much,” I said, softly now, to the
darkness. “But I do know that I think I love you.”

The rustling returned, and this time, as my eyes
adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the silhouette of a dog,
too fat and puffy to be a coyote, just at the edge of the ruined
house. A Chow-Chow?

“Bring him back,” I said to the
shadow. “Buddy never hurt anyone.” I reconsidered my statement, and
smiled to myself. “Well, you know. Except a few stuffed animals and
ankles, but he
thought
it was for love. You get a dog snipped, you think that sort
of thing is going to stop, but it didn’t. I don’t know. I guess
some urges are just too strong for most boys.”

I heard a faint and faraway tinkling of bells at
this, like a wind chime crossed with a human voice, coming from
very nearby and yet sounding as though make from a very great
distance - the way an old radio broadcast might have sounded,
crackling from a speaker near your ear. It seemed to come from a
tree just a few feet away. I turned my head to look at it, and to
my astonishment, saw those same sparkler-like lights I’d seen
Friday night, moving faintly though the branches. They flared
quickly, and died out, leaving me with nothing but the disquieting
possibility that I had not seen them at all.

Meanwhile, down by the ruined house, the shadow of
the animal began to move toward me with alarming speed.

“Oh, God.” I wanted to get into the car, but there
was no time. The thing was upon me in seconds - but thankfully, it
wasn’t a puffy beast set upon my demise. It was Nutmeg, the cheery
rescued road kill from earlier that day.

“Nutmeg!” I cried out, kneeling to pet her. She
seemed happy to see me, and wagged her whole body. She leaned into
my caress and whined. Her fur was warm and soft, and oddly smelled
of cookies baking, butter and vanilla.

“What a good girl,” I told her. “Who’s a good girl?
Nutmeg is! That’s right. Where’s Demetrio, girl? Where is he?
Huh?”

The dog looked me in the eye with an alarming
expression, one of complete understanding - an almost human look.
She pawed the ground, and nuzzled me, and began to walk, turning
back every few paces to whine at me. She wanted me to follow
her.

“Okay, okay. I’m coming. Tell me something,” I said
to the dog as I walked behind her, still delirious with adrenaline
and trying to keep myself sane. “If Demetrio has been dead for two
years, why does he smell so good? Hmm? You’d think he’d smell like
a pile of rotten eggs.”

Again, the bell-like tinkling, still nearby, only
this time in a different tree. I stopped walking and looked, and
saw the sparkles, flaming out as quickly as they appeared, only now
that my eyes had adjusted even more to the darkness, I saw that as
they faded, their lines made the shape of a human being. A specific
and recognizable human being.

Demetrio.

“It’s you!” I screamed, a smile
washing over my face as I stared off into the darkness once more.
“I
saw
you!
You’re here, aren’t you?”

Nutmeg whimpered again, and pawed
the earth. When I didn’t come promptly, she returned to me and gave
me that imploring look again, as if to say
this way, this way
!

“You know where Demetrio is, don’t you, girl?” I
asked her. She nodded. Yes, she did. She looked at me, and in the
darkness that was lit up now by a full moon overhead, she
nodded.

I followed her, and tried to think of another joke.
I couldn’t. It seemed like the sparkles were a sort of laughter,
and that they were the best way to see Demetrio, if that’s what it
was in the bushes.

Ahead of me, Nutmeg arrived at the fence to the
graveyard for the small church, and leapt over it. On the other
side, she stood on her hind paws, placed her front paws on the
fence, and peered over the top at me as if to invite me in.

“Uhm, is
this
where he is?” I asked. I
shuddered at the thought of trespassing into a cemetery in the
middle of the night.

“Yes,” said a disembodied voice.

I snapped my head around, looking for his face, for
those amazing lips. Nothing – only darkness.

I scrambled over the fence, heart thundering, and
followed Nutmeg across the small churchyard, to a grave in the
Southwest corner. It had a gray stone marker that looked newer than
the others, engraved with a kneeling cherub, and adorned with a
collection of plastic flowers. A large, white stuffed bear leaned
against the stone, smiling with ridiculous optimism, holding a red
heart in its hands; it was the kind of toy you might find at a drug
store around Valentine’s Day.

“Ah, now
you
,” I said, pointing to the
stuffed animal. “
You
, Buddy would
like
. You’re just the right height
for maximum pleasure.”

Again, the tinkling of chimes and a soft sort of
singing laugh, echoing as though from far off, but made quite close
to my ears. Again, the faint, quick quiver of sparkles, this time
in the air just above the tombstone, the lines leaving a brief
impression of his smiling face there.

“You have a sick sense of humor, Demetrio,” I said,
and again came the tinkling, and the small spray of light, this
time smaller than before, as though it were losing force - or maybe
the joke just wasn’t that funny.