The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (9 page)

I exited the Land Rover and set
out on booted foot across the frozen, snowy ground, heading for the
small, decrepit-looking house. The ground was uneven, so I moved
slowly and cautiously. The house was typical for this area, a
slightly saggy, nondescript square of pink-beige stucco, capped
with a simple pitched tar-shingle roof. As I approached the house,
I saw that it bore the same number on the mailbox as the paper in
my hand. This was the place. My pulse accelerated again, and I
tried to calm down, telling myself - ridiculously, really - that
of
course
it
wasn’t dangerous to go looking for a known gang member in the
middle of nowhere, alone, at a house with a broken fence and a
rusting hull of an old, tireless car in the side yard. The home
looked abandoned, except for the wisp of smoke rising from the
chimney, and the glow of lights behind the yellowed curtains hung
in the smudgy windows.

I approached as quietly as I could, smoothed my hair
down a little, and pushed the doorbell with my gloved finger. The
button was crusted and sticky, and didn’t seem to have been getting
much use, so I removed my glove and knocked hard on the door as
well, just in case. I replaced the glove and then stood there,
shivering with cold and nerves, for what seemed like five minutes.
Though I heard a small dog bark inside, and rustling noises, no one
came. I was just about to turn around to leave when the door
finally opened a crack, with a stiff, horrible scraping noise. My
heart thundered as I peered into the musty darkness within the
house.

I hoped to see Demetrio, of course, but I was met
instead by a sharp and narrow chin that jutted out from an ancient
face, the way chins do when the teeth are missing from the mouth
and the lips have caved into the visage. The body upon which the
countenance sat was skinny and short, and I was forced to look down
to see it. A large nose curled downward toward the chin, both of
them housed in a narrow brown face crisscrossed with valleys of
wrinkles. Two tiny eyes, filmy with cataracts and the size of hard
gray pebbles, perched far back in sunken sockets. A smell of
mothballs, stale smoke, hot cooking oil, corn tortillas and
insecticide wafted out, making me cough.

“Hello!” I called, trying to sound cheerful in spite
of my feeling like a complete and utter fool.

“What do you want?” came the reply, in a hoarse old
voice with a trace of a Spanish accent to it. “You selling
something, I don’t want none of it.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but I’ve come here
hoping to find a young man named Demetrio Vigil. Google said he
lived at this address.”

“Who did?”

“Google.”

The door opened a tiny bit more now, and the face
stuck itself into the space between us, scowling with a hand cupped
to his ear.

“You what, now?” came the gruff, wispy old
voice.

I repeated myself, and he opened the door a bit more
again, and this time stepped halfway out, sizing me up with a look
of guarded mistrust.

“Demetrio Vigil, eh?” he asked.

“Yes. I’ve only recently met him.”

“No, no,” he shook his head and
jabbing his own thumb into his chest. “
I’m
Demetrio Vigil. I don’t know
you.”

His jaws worked convulsively, as jaws will do in the
absence of teeth. I could see now that he wore dark jeans, cowboy
boots, and a red flannel shirt with a bolo tie.

“Oh,” I said. “Then I’m terribly sorry. I’ve made a
mistake. I met a young man from Golden last week, who said his name
was Demetrio Vigil, and you’re the only such person listed in the
white pages.”

“Los
white pages,” he repeated, running an antique hand across his
scruff of white beard.

“I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Ni modo, hita
.”

“Sorry?”

“Are you Hispanic?” he asked me. “You look
Hispanic.”

“Does it matter?” I asked, defensively, annoyed that
older people always seemed to ask me this while people my own age
didn’t care.

He shrugged. “If people think it matters, it
matters,” he said. “It didn’t used to matter, now it matters.”

My spine tingled with the words, so similar to the
ones Yazzie had spoken earlier. Another coincidence. Or was it?
Maybe I’d baited him into saying it. Maybe I was losing my mind. I
wondered if perhaps I’d hit my head in the crash, because the world
seemed slightly tilted now, emotionally. I’d never been anxious
before, but now anxiety seemed to define me.

“I’m Hispanic, yes,” I told him, shaking myself out
of the chill. “But I don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t think it
matters.”

“This other Demetrio,” he said, his eyes narrowing a
tiny bit. “When did you meet him?”

“Just last week. I saw him this morning, too. I
wanted to thank him for helping me. I had a crash. It’s a long
story. I’ve made a mistake, sir, so sorry. I’ll just go now.”

“No, no,” he said, touching my arm. As he got
closer, I smelled alcohol on his breath, and pungent, unpleasant
body odor. “I have a grandson who carries my name. Demetrio.”

I gasped a little, and my eyes widened. “Oh? Does he
live here?”

The old man shook his head
solemnly. “No. Not no more,
jovencita
.
Ya se fue
.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Se fue. Se fue
,” he repeated, gesticulating angrily, as though saying words
I didn’t know, over and over, would somehow make me understand
them. “He ain’t here no more. He’s gone. I don’t want no trouble.
Don’t be asking me no more questions.”

“Oh, okay. Well, do you know where I might be able
to find him?”

The old man frowned, and shook his head solemnly. He
took a raw, homemade-looking cigarette out of his pocket and lit it
with a match ignited - to my horror - on the zipper of his jeans.
He took a long drag, then jabbed the cigarette into the air to
punctuate his thoughts.

“My late wife,
la loca esa que Dios la bendiga
,
with all her rosaries and
todo
eso
, she thought good of everybody, she’d
tell you exactly where he is. She’d know. But me? I don’t know
nothing. I don’t tell you nothing, I don’t tell the police nothing,
I don’t tell no one nothing, that’s how I am, I don’t tell nothing
because I don’t know nothing. You understand?”

I nodded, realizing now that he
probably
did
know
where Demetrio was, but thought he was protecting him from
something by refraining from sharing the information with me. I
thought of mafia movies, for some reason, and the idea of loyalty
to the family. I wondered if this old man were also a gang
member.

“Okay,” I said, realizing this was going nowhere. I
took the iTunes card out of my pocket, and ripped a little piece
off the edge of the photocopy of the folk tale Yazzie gave me
earlier. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pen, would you?”

“What for?” He eyed me mistrustfully again.

“I just want to give you my phone number, in case
your grandson shows up after I leave.”

“He ain’t showing up no more,” he said wistfully,
blowing smoke at me. “But I take your number for me, if I ever get
lonely, you come see me.”

I heard him laughing uncleanly as he disappeared
back into the house and shut the door. I stood stupidly for a
moment, wondering if he were coming back. Just as I was about to
leave, however, he returned, with a dull, thick pencil, the kind a
child might use in the early years of school. I could hear canned
laughter coming from a television inside the house. My mom had told
me about how huge numbers of people in New Mexico were illiterate,
and I wondered if this was one of them. I’d never known any
illiterate adults.

I scribbled my cell number on the scrap of paper,
along with a note thanking Demetrio for all his help, wrapped it
around the gift card, and handed them to the old man.

“Please give this to him, if you see him,” I
said.

“I won’t see him,” he said. “But I think taking this
is the only way I’m going to get you to go away so I can get back
to watching my stories.”

I stood in shock at his rudeness, and watched his
smile spread slowly across his face.

“Ay, hita
, that’s the problem with you fancy people, you don’t got no
humor.” He reached out and squeezed my arm before examining the sky
with his milky eyes. “The weather lady, she said more snow coming.
Be careful. They’re no good, these roads up here.”

“I realize that,” I said with a shudder, but decided
against going into details about my crash with a crazy, drunk old
man who clearly enjoyed playing mind games with me. I turned to
walk back to the Land Rover.

“Thank you, sir,” I said over my shoulder. “Take
care.”

The old man did not return my goodbye before
slamming his door shut.

♦

I hurried back to the Land Rover,
disappointed and trembling with cold. The sun was low behind the
mountains now, and darkness would set in soon. I realized then that
I’d allowed myself to become a little hopeful about seeing Demetrio
again, and it disturbed me because the hope felt the way it does
when you like a guy. Like
like
him, like
that. After talking to Kelsey the attraction I’d felt for Demetrio
had surfaced. I was generally pretty good at controlling my
emotions, but not now. Now I felt a bubbling in my gut,
butterflies, at the thought of seeing him again. It was subtle, of
course. This desire hadn’t been conscious, and I’d
never
betray Logan in any way. Not consciously. Not in
real life.

I sat in the car for a couple of minutes, letting it
warm up a little before I began driving. To pass the time, I took
out the paper Yazzie had given me, and began to read it. I got no
further than the first lines before my entire skin had risen up in
goose bumps, and a sick sort of thrill pierced my gut.

In Cochiti, the cacique had an
only boy ("grandson probably"). He never went out. He didn't know
the country, nor how to hunt. He only knew how to sing.

I stopped reading because it was only a coincidence,
that’s all. Nothing more than that. I stuffed the story back into
my pack, cranked up the stereo, and put it all out of my mind. I
drove along the dirt roads, toward Highway 14, and tried to forget
about Demetrio Vigil, and the crash, and Saint Anthony, and the
Cochiti boy - all of it. I was making mountains out of proverbial
molehills. It was ridiculous to let my imagination run wild like
this! I had to get hold of myself.

I was doomed, however, to failure because as soon as
I got to the hill with the small adobe church on it on Highway 14,
I saw the younger Demetrio Vigil after all. He was walking casually
through the snow on the shoulder of the roadway, as though
impervious to the biting cold. My heart raced at the sight of him,
and my cheeks blazed because, quite simply, he looked great. Very
handsome, in that dangerous, forbidden way of his. Carefree,
peaceful, serene, boyish and almost innocent, because he didn’t
realize he was being watched. He had a black bandana tied beneath
his baseball cap. His neck tattoos exposed to the elements. His
toolbox swung from one hand, and with the other he pressed some
sort of animal - a cat, maybe? - to his body, carrying it like a
baby. He appeared to be...singing.

At least he
was
singing, until he spotted me
behind the wheel of the slowing Land Rover, pulling over next to
him on the shoulder of the road. At that point he
stopped
singing, and
smiled in an amused sort of way. He strolled toward the car with
great confidence, and waved - as though seeing me here were the
most natural thing in the world.

As though he expected me.

I got out of the car to walk toward him. He stood
grinning and waiting for me.

“Hey!” I said, stupidly, waving like a moron.

“Hey, mamita,” he said, cocking his head a little to
one side and checking me out. “What a coincidence.”

I gasped a little. Mentioning coincidences counted
as a coincidence, didn’t it?

“Do you believe in coincidences?” I asked him,
blurting the words before I even realized they’d tumbled from my
mouth.

“You ever heard this one quote, that coincidences
are God’s way of staying anonymous?” he asked casually.

“No. Who said that.”

He shrugged. “Anonymous, of course.”

I cracked a smile, loving the way he put me
instantly at ease. “You know, we really have to stop meeting like
this,” I joked, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say.

“I’d say this is a lot better than the first time,”
he countered. “We made big improvements. Nice ride, by the way.”
His eyes flickered over the Land Rover.

“It’s huge.”

“That it is.”

By then, Demetrio and I stood about two feet apart,
he grinning at me and checking out my new car in an impressed and
incredulous sort of way, me smiling at him and looking at the
floppy, sleeping beast in his arms with growing trepidation. It was
bigger than I’d at first assumed, and it wasn’t a regular cat. It
looked like a small lion, with long hairs sticking out of its
ears.

“What is
that
?” I asked.

“Baby bobcat. Poachers got the mom. I’m taking her
home, gonna fix her right up.”

He set the toolbox down, and turned away from me a
little so that the bobcat was on the opposite side of him.

“C’mere,” he told me. Then he reached out to give me
a half-hug with his free arm. As before, I felt a jolt of
excitement under his touch. “It’s good to see you. You doing okay?
You look good, mami. You healing?”