The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (28 page)

“He sounds like my mom,” I whispered to
Demetrio.

The man, Diego, whistled for the dogs and cats, and
they all gathered around him - including, to my astonishment,
Buddy. I felt betrayed.

“You can get him later,” Demetrio told me. “I think
we need some alone time right now.”

I watched as the man and woman left the church,
closing the doors behind them, and then I turned to face Demetrio
in the soft light of candles.

♦

Demetrio wasted no time, pulling me in close
to him, and moving in for the kiss. Gone was the reticent bad boy
from before; he’d been replaced by a seductive bad boy with only
one thing on his mind: Me. The hunger in his eyes was completely
intoxicating, knowledgeable and mature, and where I’d longed so
desperately for his kiss before, I now began to wonder if I could
handle whatever it was he had in store. I was relatively
inexperienced, having only kissed two boys in my life, and even
then not so much.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, as though reading my
thoughts once more, “I’ll show you what to do.”

I held my breath, and closed my eyes, waiting, every
cell in my body resonating in pure and perfect harmony with his
frequency, more alive, and afraid, and excited, than I’d ever
been.

He kissed me, and the music in my soul and cells
swelled and crescendoed, beyond where I had imagined it could ever
go, into a felt but not heard thrum of the lowest low and the
highest high, woven all through me in every direction.

I felt the floor drop out from below my feet, as it
had in the dream, but this time I didn’t fall. This time, it felt
as though I floated for a moment, with his arms holding me; and
then it - and I mean this literally, and not in a hackneyed
romantic symbolic sense - felt as though we spun, and soared.

When I opened my eyes, I was still in Demetrio’s
arms, but we weren’t in the sacristy of the church in Golden. Only
a few seconds had passed since our lips had blissfully touched, but
we were somehow now on the side of Highway 14, at mile marker 21,
in the bright blazing light of the winter afternoon. My feet were
on the ground once more.

It was real.

I stared about me in shock, as Demetrio chuckled,
apparently delighted by my discombobulation, and by the fact that
he had someone to share his world with now.

“How did you
do
that?” I demanded. It was
starting to be a habit with me, that question of him.

Demetrio pulled back from me just a smidge, cocked
his head to the side again, to get a better look with those
unflinchingly beautiful eyes, at my dumbfounded face. He grinned
like the cat that got the mouse.

“Do what, mamita?” he asked. “I didn’t do
nothing.”

I didn’t hold back this time. This time, confronted
with his ridiculous denial of obviously miraculous accomplishments,
I reared back and slugged him, playfully but hard, in the arm.

“Ouch!” he cried, rubbing the spot where I’d made
contact, affecting a much more beleaguered face than the blow
required, playing along.

“So you can still feel pain?” I asked, popping him
lightly again on the arm. “Yeah?”

He grinned, and held my hands back now, far more
powerful than I was, but gentle, too. Every fiber of my being
quivered as the did this. I wanted him with a profound ache. He
came close, and brushed his lips against mine again, biting me a
little, playful still. I could scarcely breathe.

He whispered in my ear now. “Of
course I still feel pain. During the day, everything about me is
human, as it was in the days before my death.
Everything
.”

He kissed my neck, and below my chin, and then the
chin itself, and my lips. I couldn’t move, except to accept his
offerings, my eyes closing on their own accord. I let out a little
groan of pleasure. He pulled away from me, and began to tickle me,
switching gears.

“You suck!” I cried, tickling back.

He laughed, and dodged my hands. I managed to slug
him again.

“Easy there, mamita.” He grabbed me in a powerful
embrace now, and held my arms down at my sides. “Don’t make me hurt
you.”

“Unlikely,” I boasted, enjoying this normal,
childlike display of affection.

“True. You’ll probably hurt me
first,” he said. “You’re a strong girl, Maria Ochoa.”

“So you can bleed and break bones and die?”

“Sort of.”

“What if you get killed again?”

“I forfeit my rights to redemption.”

“That’s rough.”

“It’s part of the deal.”

“Why’d you take it?”

“Beat the alternative.”

“How are you so glib about all this?”

He nuzzled my neck as he answered, hungry for me.
“What else can you do, you know? I try hard to be careful.”

“Where do you go at night?” I asked him.

“Too many questions,” he said as he ran his finger
across my lower lip. “Too little kissing.”

He kissed me again, harder than before, and longer,
and more deeply, pressing me hard to his body. I kept my eyes open
this time, though, hoping to catch any shenanigans he might try to
pull on me. The world around us began to move, the way it does when
you’re on a carousel, faster and faster. The bottom fell out again,
and suddenly we found ourselves in the center of a gold and white
tornado, though we floated in complete stillness as the sparkling
light spun around us. I gasped, broke away from the kiss, and
looked at his face. Demetrio looked back, calmly, comfortingly, and
winked to let me know it was okay. I giggled, and tried to push
away from him, to touch the sparkling lights, but he grabbed me,
hard, with a stern look.

“Do not let go of me, whatever you do,” he said.
“Not here.”

I heeded the advice, and clung to him. In short
order, the spinning stopped, the storm faded, and we were once
again at the side of a road, one I’d never seen before. It looked
to still be New Mexico, but there wasn’t any snow now. It was
warmer, and the vegetation was different. I looked around me, and
saw another set of descansos, near a road sign that indicated we
were about twenty miles from Carlsbad Caverns. We were in the
Southern part of the state, south of Roswell, hundreds of miles
from Golden.

“What the…?” I asked, breathlessly.

“Kiss me, mami,” he said with a naughty, teasing
grin.

I did as he said, and again the ground fell away,
again we were enveloped in the warm tornado of golden light, and
again we alighted in a new place, this time in a foot of snow, next
to a field with six freezing, skin and bones cattle hunkered down
against the wind, two of them calves, one a large black bull who
seemed to be trying gallantly to protect the herd. Again, we were
near roadside crosses.

“Come with me,” he said, as he jumped the fence to
the field, and strode toward the cows. They looked at us with
weary, tortured eyes, but didn’t move away. They were too cold. The
babies especially seemed to be in terrible condition. I was
sickened by the sight of them, at the cruelty of people toward
these peaceful creatures.

I watched as Demetrio laid his hands upon the
weakest of the babies. It looked hungry before he touched it, but
its sides fattened under his touch, it’s fur patched itself and
thickened against the cold.

When he’d finished with the animal, Demetrio seemed
to spin a warm wind out of nowhere, and wrapped it around the
little herd. The cows noticed, and stomped their feet and nodded
their heads lightly, snorting their relief. The snowy ground was
now melting where they stood, as though they were protected in a
heated bubble of air.

Demetrio tended to the others now, healing
frostbitten legs and noses, fattening where starvation had set in.
The animals did not have facial expressions like ours. I remembered
reading about this in one of Kelsey’s mother’s vegan magazines.
Cows had all our same feelings, but they didn’t show them the same
way we did. This was what made people think it was okay to eat
them, or to gore them to death in bullfights. They were by nature
gentle, thoughtful things who meant us no harm.

“Okay,” he said, after he’d finished. “Time to get
back.”

“They’ll only be slaughtered and
eaten in the end,” I told him. “Why do you bother? Why can’t you
save them from
that
?”

“Everyone has a fate,” he said.
“Save them from the slaughter, and someone else starves. It’s a
strange universe we live in, Maria, equal parts creation and
destruction. The best I can do is try to ease their suffering for
now. There are millions, maybe billions, just like them. If you
include all of time, too many to count. I am only one
revenant.”

“It’s very sad. The owners don’t seem to care if
they freeze.”

“To the extent that they remain alive, the owners
don’t care. To the owners, these are not souls. They’re money.”

“How can that be?” I wailed, as he took me by the
hand and led me back to the fence. He jumped it, and waited for me
to do the same.

“You want to hang with me, mamita, you gotta toughen
up.”

“No!”

“Listen to me. The people who do
this to them, Maria, there will be justice. Not here, and not now.
But it’s there. You have to believe it. That’s all that keeps the
despair away.”

I began to weep, and fell again into his arms.

“I’m sorry the world is this way,
too,” he whispered in my ear. He kissed my cheek, my mouth, and
then said, “For all the good we do, there are
chindis
, others who pull the balance
the other direction. That’s how this whole thing works, apparently.
No good without bad. No bad without good.”

“Why can’t The Maker stop them?” I cried.

Demetrio held me around the waist with one hand, and
with the other he touched the top of one of the roadside crosses.
The ground gave way again, and again he held me up, and again we
moved through a twinkling storm. He did not answer me until we’d
alighted once more, this time in the churchyard in Golden, next to
his own grave marker. Incredibly, Buddy was there, too, with
Nutmeg. They seemed to be waiting for us, biding their time with a
rawhide chewies.

“There are things I don’t understand, either,”
Demetrio said, and I saw that his own eyes shimmered with tears. “I
suspect sometimes that there’s more than one Maker. Or there’s a
Maker and a Destroyer. Twins, of equal and ever-conflicting
powers.”

Together, we stooped to pet Buddy and Nutmeg. Buddy
seemed different, but I would later realize it was I who was
different. I understood more, felt more, intuited more from living
things, for loving Demetrio.

“You use the crosses to move, don’t you?” I asked
him.

He nodded. “Sort of. Yes. Crosses, or any other kind
of memorial of love built to a departed soul by someone good left
behind. Mounds, stones, cards. Outpourings of love, connected like
highways, one to the other, like a web. I’m not sure how it works,
but it has to do with love and memory. I can go anywhere in the
state of New Mexico, those are the rules. I can do good deeds
anywhere I land, but I’m really supposed to stick to the Highway
where I died.”

“Who made your descanso?” I asked.

“Girl named Claudia.” He spoke this name plainly and
without hesitating.

I felt a pang of jealousy. “Is she the one in the
picture of you?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s very pretty.”

“Yep.”

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“Yeah.”

I pouted at him through narrowed eyes. Demetrio
lifted my chin with his fingertips and forced me to look him in the
eye. “Listen, mami, that’s unnecessary now. Jealousy.”

“Yeah, but
you
were jealous of Logan,” I
complained. “You were checking up on me and everything.”

“That ain’t it, Maria. I’m not
jealous of Logan. I just don’t
trust
the guy.”

“Same thing.”

“No. Not the same thing.”

“Double standard,” I said.

He seemed extremely irritated by this. “Ain’t no
room for jealousy on this side of things, where I’m at. It’s hard
to explain to a human, but jealousy disappears here, where I
stand.”

“I’m not big on polygamy,” I said.

“We all have only one true Kindred
Primary, Maria, and I believe that’s you. Claudia was a Kindred
Other. I can never harmonize with her the way I do with you. But I
can still love her, and appreciate what I had with her.”

“You
love
her?”

“I always will. But it’s different. Baby, I’ll never
be able to touch that girl again, you understand that, don’t
you?”

“I thought you could appear to Kindred Others? And
touch them.”

“I can.”

“And have sex with them.”

“No. I can’t have sex. Not unless it is my Primary.
Those are the rules. Hard rules to follow, too, especially when you
come back in the body of an 18-year-old male human, you know what
I’m sayin’?” He smiled, but I didn’t find it humorous.

“Has she seen you, since - since you...?”

“Died?”

“Yeah. Right. I can’t say it.”

“I made contact with her.”

I felt my stomach lurch with bitterness. “I hate
her,” I said.

“Maria. It ain’t about that, mami.
She’s a good person.”

“Don’t see her anymore.”

His eyes danced with amusement. “She’s real
religious and it spooked her. Plus, she has a Kindred Primary of
her own to find. I’ve tried to find him for her, so she won’t be so
sad. I know he’s on earth now, but he’s, like, in fourth grade or
something. Ten year age difference. They’ll be cool when they’re
both adults. Time comes, I’ll arrange a hookup.”