Healing Sands (19 page)

I came upon a playground around the corner and pulled up. I didn't realize until then that my mouth had gone dry. As I scanned the yard children were supposed to play in, it felt even more like I was chewing sawdust. The ground was bare except for the clumps of weeds at the bases of the slide and the monkey bars and one of those things that went around in circles until somebody threw up. I wouldn't let a child get within a half mile of that equipment.

Feeling like I was going to suffocate, I got out of the car and leaned on the door. My usual prayer—
God, please give me the story I'm supposed to tell
—nearly screamed in my head.

A smell thick as fog hit me in the face. Raw sewage. I'd know that odor anywhere, and now I knew why the place had seemed so familiar as I drove toward it. This was as bad as any Third World country I had ever been in.

“Can I help you?”

I jumped like I'd been shot.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.”

A small Hispanic man with a graying ponytail tied at the nape of his neck did a full search of me with his eyes.

“I'm Ryan Alexander, with the
Las Cruces Sun-Times
,” I said.

I pulled my badge toward him, and he moved in close to examine it. Most people barely gave it a glance. When he stepped back, he nodded.

“We can't be too careful,” he said in perfect yet Hispanically clipped English. “Someone without a child in the backseat stops at the playground, we have to check it out.”

I nodded too.

“So—can I help you?” he said again.

Can I help
you
?
I wanted to cry out to him. And yet he didn't have the weary, hopeless look someone had the right to wear if he lived here. Any hint of pity from me would have closed every door in my face.

“You have never seen a colonia before,” he said.

I tried to smile. “Is that where I am?”

“El Milagro,” he said. “The Miracle.”

The irony was so clear in his voice I couldn't pretend not to hear it. I probably couldn't pretend anything in front of those sharp eyes.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I've come completely unprepared. I had no idea.”

He nodded at the camera. “I'm surprised the newspaper sent you up to take more pictures. By now, I think they would have a whole gallery devoted to our cesspools and our unfit wells and our illegal propane tanks.”

“I don't know. I'm new in Las Cruces.” There. My worst fear had been realized. I did sound like an idiot. “But that's not what I want.

” He just looked at me.

“What I'd like to do is make some pictures of the people who live here. This is a community, right? You aren't just about cesspools and propane tanks.”

“Some people think so.” He gave me another long look. “We'll see if we can find some people for you.”

He held out his arm, gallant as a prince, and I knew I wouldn't be going solo today. When I'd grabbed my bag and fallen into step beside him, I said, “So are you the mayor here or something?”

His laugh was like a grunt. “Mayor? No, we have no mayor. We are an unincorporated settlement. No running water, no solid-waste disposal, no natural gas. So . . .” He shrugged. “No city government.”

“So there's no infrastructure here at all?” I said.

“Not here. Not in any of the other thirty-seven colonias in the county.”

“There's more of these?” I erased that with my hand. “I'm sorry. I don't mean to put down your home here.”

“No. Feel free to put down the living conditions. We didn't create them. We hate them too. Just don't put down the people.”

“That's why I'm here. To show who you are.”

I didn't know it until it came out of my mouth, but I was sure of it.

He told me his name was Paolo Velasquez, but I could call him Paul. I wanted to call him
Saint
Paul after he squired me around the colonia like a visiting dignitary. Anyone who could not only survive in the squalor I saw, but live there with such compassion, was right up there with Mother Teresa.

His heart seemed to break anew as mine did when I shot the children playing merrily in the watery runoff from an upstream dairy farm. He, too, chewed at his lip when I photographed the old man picking through the ruins of his burned-out, uninsured mobile home, destroyed when dodgy wiring set it on fire.

And Paul gave a sigh identical to mine when we came across two small girls who couldn't have been more than four, curled up together like a pair of left-behind kittens asleep in the back of a car. He said their mother was at work in a nearby pecan orchard and had no child care for them. They were safer in the car than in the house.

There were smiles in some of my shots—the pregnant girl who had just come from the free clinic in Las Cruces with the news that her unborn baby had a heartbeat. Paul said many of them were not so lucky. And the teenage boy who stopped shooting a basketball at the netless hoop on the weedy court and posed like Michael Jordan. I wanted to ask him if he knew Miguel, but my heart wouldn't let me.

In fact, I said nothing about the Sanchez family as I made my pictures and gathered my audio. I felt enough like an intruder.

Paul walked me to my car when I said I thought I had enough for now. His eyes were still kind, but his voice when he said goodbye was firm.

“Don't romanticize us in the newspaper,” he said. “We're not noble savages. We're just poor people who believed in
el milagro
and were given chaos by unscrupulous land developers. We don't want anyone to fix it for us. We just want them to show us how.”

“May I come back?” I said.

He raised his chin. “Bring the pictures. Then we'll see.”

I drove away slowly, determined not to leave him in the dust.

I was late to soccer practice and, having missed the day before completely, I wanted to make it up to Alex somehow. Not that he said anything to me about it. The child seemed to have the resilience of a Slinky. Maybe it was myself I was making it up to. Or maybe I just wanted to give him everything after what I'd seen that day.

I was watching him, alone, when J.P. came down to the bench behind me in the bleachers.

“Are you free at seven tomorrow morning?” she said.

“I start work at seven,” I said.

She frowned.

“Why?” I said. “You need help with something?”

She looked a little startled. “No, we just need to have a planning meeting about our trip this weekend.”

I had completely forgotten about it, although I wasn't admitting that to her.

“I can squeeze it in,” I said. “Where?”

“You know where Milagro is?”

“I'm sorry—what?”

“Milagro. It's a coffee shop on University Avenue. The only one worth going to as far as I'm concerned.”

Still reeling, I nodded. “I'll be there,” I said.

After practice I asked Dan if I could have Alex for a while. Alex inserted himself between us, brown eyes dancing.

“I want Mexican food,” he said. “You could come too, Dad.”

Dan ruffled Alex's hair and inspected a speck on his cheek and basically did everything but look at me.

“I need to get home to Jake, buddy,” he said. “Ginger has things to do.”

Undoubtedly a manicure, a massage, a face-lift. Maybe a trip to the doctor for some Valium. How about a side of strychnine with that, Ginger? I hated it so much that she was spending more time with my sons than I was, I couldn't even think about her without images of homicide. And I was sure those weren't coming from God.

“You guys have fun,” Dan was saying to Alex. “I know Mom will have you back in time to do your homework.”

Alex parked his ball cap backwards on his head as Dan moved away. “So, can we?”

“Can we what?”

“Can we do Mexican? I'll take you to our fave place.”

Whose fave? I wondered. What constituted
our
?

“Whatever you want, pal,” I said.

Alex's fave Mexican restaurant was less authentic than the one I'd been in the night before, but the ambience made up for that, and the salsa was measurably milder. The inside of Arriba! was cool and rich with a smooth tile floor and thick furniture with parrots carved into the chair backs. Fans turned overhead, and the Hispanic woman who waited on us had a content way about her. I wondered if she knew how rich she was.

Alex and I ordered fajitas to share, and he munched happily on chips while we waited. He was so engrossed in telling me about this cool trick he and Felipe pulled on the computer teacher—no, seriously, Mom, the teacher thought it was funny too—that I was completely flabbergasted when he abruptly came out with, “So how come you and Dad got divorced?”

I feigned choking on a chip and drank half a glass of water while I tried to find an answer I could give that didn't make his father sound like a deadbeat. When I put the glass down, I was no closer, and Alex was waiting, hands jittering on the tabletop.

“We have different ways of approaching life,” I said. “And those two ways just didn't fit together anymore.”

“What's your way?” he asked.

“Um—I like to plan and figure out how things can work and then try to help them work that way.” How could this possibly be making any sense?

“So Dad's way's the opposite.”

“I guess you could say that.”

Alex narrowed the big brown eyes as he poked the straw up and down in the Coke I wasn't supposed to buy him after a soccer game. I wanted to let it go if he would, but I couldn't, not and live with myself.

“What?” I said.

“Nothin'—except that's not what Jake said.”

“Oh? What did Jake say?”

Alex was suddenly still, and his gaze drifted guiltily to his lap.

“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to,” I said.

“Whew.” He brightened his face and drew a hand dramatically across his forehead as if he were sloughing off sweat. “I'm not supposed to tell, but I forgot for a minute, so thanks, Mom.”

He raised his glass to toast mine and then greeted our arriving food with more enthusiasm than it warranted. He was done with that conversation. I, of course, could think of nothing else until I drove him home.

“Are we late?” he said when we pulled up to Dan's place.

“Maybe a little. Can you still get your homework done?”

“Piece of cake.” He looked at me sideways. “But will you go out to the studio and tell Dad I'm here? That way I can
definitely
get it done.”

I wanted to settle the thing right there, tell him his father and I were not getting back together no matter how many times he shoved us in that direction. But his eyes were so hopeful. And he did throw his arms around my neck and tell me I was the best. I needed to ride on that for a while.

It wasn't quite dark as I picked my way through the sculpture park to Dan's studio. The metal musicians were turning to velvet silhouettes, their instruments catching the last orange glint of the sun. New Mexico quiet settled over them, so still that I wasn't sure Dan was actually out there.

But I found him standing at the base of his swirling sculpture, working at a small space on its metal finish with a square of sandpaper. As gently as he smoothed it, he could have been rubbing powder on a baby's bottom. A faint image of him changing Jake's diaper, his own face freckled with powder, passed through my mind.

“Excuse me?” I whispered.

He kept sanding. “I saw you. What's up?”

“Alex wanted me to tell you he's back. Said it would give him more time to finish his homework if I did it.”

A smile twitched around Dan's eyes. “Uh-huh.”

“You know he's playing Cupid with us,” I said.

“All kids think their divorced parents are going to get back together. It'll pass.”

“He asked me tonight why we split up.”

The sanding slowed. “What did you tell him?”

“Whatever it was, it isn't what Jake told him. Do you know anything about that?”

Dan pulled the paper back, inspected the metal, blew on it. “My guess is that Jake gave him some version of what I told him.”

“Which was?”

“That things change.”

“That's it?”

“That's what I told him then, and he seemed satisfied with that. He hasn't asked me lately.”

“Would you give him a different answer now?”

I wasn't sure why I asked it. Maybe because I wasn't ready to scream at him—or throw the discarded chunk of aluminum that was next to my foot.

Dan wasn't going to answer anyway. He went back to sanding in small, even circles, and I turned to go.

“I might,” he said. “I've given myself a different answer.” He stepped away from the sculpture and looked up at it. “What do you think of it?”

“What do
I
think of it?” I said.

“Do you still think I'm fooling around with artistic monstrosities in a world that needs hard work to change it?”

I was stunned by the words I'd hurled at him in the last fight we'd had before I asked for a divorce. The last fight
I
had had, while Dan stood with his arms crossed over his chest, X-ing me out.

“Why are you asking me that now?” I said. “What difference does it make?”

“I'm answering your question.” He turned to me. “I took all the anger you heaped on me about my work because I wanted to keep the peace. I thought that was honoring God.” His gaze traveled up the sculpture and held there. “Since you left, I've learned that God doesn't want peacekeepers. He wants peace
makers
. And sometimes you have to disturb the peace to make real peace.” Dan shrugged and refolded the square of sandpaper. “That's a huge change for me. If Jake asked me now, I would say I can't be married to his mother because I won't keep the peace with her anymore. And I'm not sure she and I know how to make it.”