Curse the Names (4 page)

“The toast is here’s to
trying
to quit! Don’t be a quitter. The point is to keep trying.” He poured another for himself. “Anyway, what about this photo?”

“First, let me tell you about the miserable camping trip. It starts with my blood tech.”

“Your what?”

“At the clinic where I get my draws.”

“A blood tech? You kinky fucking pervert!”

“It’s the statins you prescribe me.”

“The statins? You’d take any piece of ass whether or not you were on heart medication.”

“You’re the one who told me about the side effects, Hank. You’re my doctor.”

“Speaking of which, let me see that hand.” He peeked under the bandage. The tent-stake wound was still pretty sore. “Have you had a tetanus shot in the past seven years?”

“You tell me. I’m coming in for test results next week.”

“Keep that thing clean in the meantime.”

Farmer’s wife called downstairs from the kitchen:

“Should I set an extra place for brunch?”

“Leave us alone! We’re classified in here!” Hank hates it when Mary reminds him that his bar is just a fancy cellar.

“The blood tech held my arm and told me,
You want to hook up at this lake?
Hook up: that means sex, right?”

“Does she have a big butt?”

“She’s what you’d call a goth. Tattoos, pierced tongue, keeps her fingernails long and painted black.”

“A goth blood tech?” Farmer slurped his drink. “Only in New Mexico!”

“She told me about this place near Morphy Lake where she said her girlfriends go to party.
We bring a bottle
, she said.
You should come.
”

“You should come!”

“That’s what she said!”

I woke up my laptop and rubbed my hands together. It was going to be a good show. I sipped my drink, and since then I can’t help connecting the taste of the Bloody Mary to the beginning of the trouble.

When I double-clicked the iPhoto icon, the system skipped a beat.

“Come on,” I coaxed. I slugged my drink to keep myself from keying force quit.

“What are we supposed to be looking at, anyway? Dirty pictures?” Farmer asked. “Don’t show me any pornography unless they say they’re eighteen.”

“No. There’s just this one strange shot of me.”

“I don’t think I want to see any strange shots of you.”

“Not that kind of strange.”

While Farmer poured us each another drink, I finally did try to force quit, but nothing could stop the spinning beach ball of death.

None of the key combos to warm-boot OS X could break the ice, so I finally held the power button for a hot shutdown.

I waited ten seconds, restarted, and that was that. When the screen lit back up, the monitor was blue and all I got was the question mark of total annihilation.

Farmer said, “You probably got a virus from downloading so much foreign porn.”

“Is it noon yet?”

“Quarter to.”

“Gotta go. I’m going to take this down to Comp-Medic.”

“Here, at least take your drink with you.”

I raced the Spider downtown, a Bloody Mary in one of Farmer’s to-go cups sloshing in the little hole on the armrest.

At CompMedic I watched from inside a fluorescent daze while the geek booted it up with a utility disk and confirmed my worst fears: “Absolute, unrecoverable disk failure.”

“Can’t you back up the data?”

“Sorry, no data left to back up. This crash left no survivors.”

The laptop was no longer under warranty, and I had declined the manufacturer’s three-year protection plan.

The geek charged me fifty bucks.

“You’re lucky. It’s Saturday, so if you’d come in after noon it would have triggered an emergency-room fee.”

A
fter tossing back the rest of the Bloody Mary, I drove to Smith’s for a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and drank it in the parking lot.

The Lab issued me the cleared PC for home-office use, but I had bought myself the laptop, and it was supposed to have been all mine.

It was going to be my mistress, that laptop, the kind of affair where you stay up all night together. I had fantasized about the screenplay I would write in my off time. I imagined walking to the far reaches of the parking lot on my lunch breaks just to spend twenty minutes in the car with her. But that’s all there had been to it: my imagination.

I had gotten nothing better on that hard drive over the past few years than one document titled
Document
with a few times, dates, and dits:

11:30 p.m., June 4: The beginning.

4:00 a.m., August 12: Can’t sleep.

6:15 p.m., November 30: Telephone, brb.

It was all worthless, just a bag of bones.

There were a few hundred photos on the laptop that I hadn’t backed up, but most of them were of Kitty and Oppie. The biggest loss had been the loser shot. Now I couldn’t remember whether I had deleted the original from the camera.

I thought about when Kitty and I had started taking those photos. When we first came to town, I dropped her off at CB Fox to shop and took myself on a drive, crawling up Central Avenue at twenty-five miles per hour. I remember an old guy on a bike shouting, “Slow down!” Wow, I said to myself, I’ve really arrived.

I went to the end of Central and turned around at Ashley Pond. I could have gone back down Trinity, but on a hunch I turned onto Deacon instead, that Steely Dan song in my head. Nothing happening here, just the back of a Mexican restaurant, specials advertised on a Coke sign, and a bunch of parking lots. Where were the posters for Corona, Tecate, and Negra Modelo? Where was the neon
Cocktails
sign?

That’s when I saw Central Avenue Grille, but when I parked at Starbucks and walked back to peek in, the only people in there at happy hour were the waiter and a young couple with two kids sitting at a table, the dad drinking Diet Coke, the whole scene depressing me.

In desperation, I drove back down the road to Smith’s and read against the stucco storefront:
Deli, Bakery, Pharmacy, Food Court, 1-Hour Photo—
but there was no sign that said
Beer & Wine
, much less
Spirits
. What the fuck was wrong with this place?

Hope dwindling, I pulled into the parking lot, and thank god there was a liquor department. I almost hugged a stocker. I bought a twenty-four-ounce Bud Lime just to calm myself down.

It had almost been easier to find weed. I had a nasty habit of paying more for naturopathy, and marijuana was my mood-booster. True, I had the Lab health plan, so pharmaceuticals were just five bucks a bottle. I could ask Dr. Hank for a scrip, stop in at Walgreens for some antidepressants, and walk out with fifty little pills that were ten times more psychoactive than ganja, chasing them in plain daylight with a tall latte from Starbucks while my neighbors smiled and asked me about my golf game. But I chose to sneak around and pay extra for pot on the belief that if it grows in the earth, it can’t be all that bad for you.

There was no way I could buy from anyone who lived anywhere near the Hill. Maybe you could if you were a division leader or an insider at the Lab, but not me. I couldn’t risk my clearance status. The DOE doesn’t take casual drug use lightly. They actually send a recreational vehicle equipped with a mobile blood-draw unit around to the different divisions at random intervals to screen employees. But I was fortunate to have one of the few jobs at the Lab where you didn’t get surprise tests.

I was a journalist, not a scientist, and so I fell through a crack between clearance levels. I had done the screening upon hire, after a week of detox shakes, and I wouldn’t have to go through it again unless I got involved in a workplace accident, which would be unlikely since on any given day I handled no instrument more dangerous than a pen. The drug-test RV never stopped at
Surge
.

After a quick search on
WeBeKind.com
, I had found the address for Mar Iguana Smoke Shop in Española. I knew I couldn’t just pop in and ask for a connect, so I parked outside and waited until I saw my mark.

It was strange to be doing this all over again. Twenty years in my university town had made buying pot on the way home Friday night as easy as a beeper callback: pick up beer, chips, then marijuana. I watched the door of Mar Iguana for a while. I didn’t feel like dealing with any of the local vatos, but I knew a hippie would show up eventually.

Sure enough, along came a bearded old mountain man wearing a dingy tie-dye. I waited until he emerged with his rolling papers and approached him at his beatup van.

“Excuse me, brother, but would you happen to know where I can get some medicine?” (I had picked up this lingo from WeBeKind.)

“You some kinda fuckin’ narc?”

“No, sir, just new here in New Mexico, and I don’t know how long it will take to get my green card.”

“Well, don’t waste your time on that shit unless you want the man to fuck with your supply. Follow me, and if you are a fuckin’ narc I’ll shoot you and bury you where nobody will ever find you.”

Lucky timing, Mel Woburn told me later, because he doesn’t make it down from Abiquiu but once a month for supplies and he grows the best shit in the Sangre de Cristo.

Now, in the Smith’s parking lot at the bottom of my hard lemonade, I should have let it go. I should have settled into my job at the Lab and never looked back.

Maybe if I hadn’t driven out to Abiquiu I would have forgotten all about my Fourth of July weekend. But when I checked the Altoids tin and saw how little weed was left, I decided to go see Mel. I had no idea how that filthy trailer in the badlands would lead me back to the abandoned house in Ledoux, would drop me right in the middle of the nightmare.

I
drove out Highway 84 and stopped at Bode’s for beer. When I pulled into the parking lot, the sun reflecting off my fender flashed on two young boys crouched in front of the store in tattered shorts. I walked past and the boys looked up from a pothole filled with muddy rainwater. They were torturing something, drowning something, something small that splashed frantically in the puddle. They turned back to their work, intent as surgeons.

A few minutes later I came out with my sack and again the boys looked up, staring at me like they were sizing me up for one of their experiments. I started the car and turned a tight circle to get back out on Highway 84, kicking up enough dust that I knew I would already have to get the Spider waxed again.

A couple of miles off the highway, down a dirt road, up on rusty jacks between an irrigation ditch and an arroyo—it was here sometime in the mid-’70s that Mel Woburn ended up scuttling his trailer. Behind it rose an ancient rock fifty million years old that had once showed up in the background of a famous photo by Georgia O’Keeffe, but Mel’s trailer was well concealed from the road by a tangle of scrub oaks that grew in the arroyo, and now somewhere back there in the desert Mel teased enough water from a spring to grow his killer marijuana.

I pulled in behind the trees. When I shut off the engine the crickets took over. The sun was beginning its descent in the west, and it was cooler up here, like it had been at the campground in Mora but without the humidity of the lake.

I walked up to the trailer with the six-pack. A rusted metal drum overflowing with crushed Milwaukee’s Best cans stood outside the door, and inside I could hear the Mexican station blasting. I banged on the storm door, but I couldn’t hit it hard enough for Mel to hear me through the wall of mariachi horns and drums. I had to wait for the break between songs.

The song ended with a fusillade of sound effects—lasers, sirens, and a long, ominous explosion. I opened the storm door and waited for the split-second lapse after the throaty station ID—
Este es el Big Bro-der de la radio raza, noventa-y-dos-punto-nueve ¡Radio Oso!
—to rap sharply on the window of the steel door.

The next mariachi was cut short at the
rat-tat-tat
of a snare intro when Mel killed the radio and a second later pushed aside the curtain with the barrel of his .22. Bleary and skittish, he looked cockeyed at me. I opened the sack and held up the beer: Bohemia. The corner of Mel’s mouth twitched in recognition, the curtain dropped, and I heard the door unlatch.

The dark, hot room stank of smoke, sweat, and rotten fruit that had been lost in the chaos of clothing piles, stacks of old papers, scattered cassette tapes, and plastic tape cases clouded with dust. On the fireplace mantle stood a wooden crucifix draped by crisscrossed bandoleers packed with shotgun shells.

Mel staggered across the room and sank back into the cushions of his tattered sofa, where he slept beneath wrinkled
Hustler
centerfolds pinned to the wall. He leaned the .22 against the arm of the sofa and turned the radio back up to a moderate blare.

I sat on the straight-back chair, took a lighter from his table, and levered open a beer. Mel accepted it without comment, upending it like a marathon runner at the end of the race, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down on his fat, grizzled neck while the first twelve ounces hit home.

He croaked, “Cold—good.”

I pried open another, handed it over, and opened one for myself.

Mel slid down to the other end of the sofa to throw another log in the stove. No fridge, phone, or electricity out here—just the battery-powered radio, which he kept on the Mexican station. It’s not because he spoke Spanish—he didn’t—or particularly enjoyed the music; it was white noise for him, twenty-four hours of it in this room of dark-paneled walls and blackout curtains, and it was guaranteed that whenever there was a deejay interlude, newsbreak, or other announcement, he wouldn’t understand enough to get an impression of something, anything, going on in the outside world.

“Had this whore here last night.” By whore he meant woman. “Kicked that bitch out about an hour ago. Ugly as hell, but she sucked cock all right. Thought you might have been her come back for more.”

Mel guzzled his second beer. Once in a while I asked myself,
Why do I come all the way out to Abiquiu to visit Mel Woburn?
I hated some things about the way Mel came on—the misogyny, the cranky paranoia—making each pilgrimage for more homegrown like a ritual rehashing of what had gone wrong with the ’60s. Each time I came here I had been patronizing Mel, leading him to believe I was interested in his crazy hippie days, when privately I pitied him for being such a burnout recluse, but there was nobody in Los Alamos I could speak freely with about my fondness for marijuana.