Altas Horas De La Madrugada

It was something like a Saturday. The air that filled his bungalow was stale. Wood siding crumbled in the November dust and snow and wind. The place had been in disrepair for years and its chipping walls returned echoes of a creaking box spring. It grated and scraped, ebb and flow. Outside, yellow grass fields had turned white from one flowing sea of monotony to the next. Inside, she moaned.

On that stark morning of wind and snow, hips jerked back and forth and pounded hard and harder still. Their thighs slapped together as sweat teemed out and stained the thrown back sheets. Both bodies made steam in the air only for it to condense to droplets that ran down a length of skin.

Their mouths were close together and humid, and foul morning breath passed back and forth, dense and abrupt. His eyes closed tight as his fists clenched. Her back arched, tense, and she dug her fingers into his shoulders.

Together they whimpered.

Time slowed.

He collapsed down onto her chest and pressed her breasts down with his own weight, the distinct exhaustion of being wasted washing over his body while she, too, grew limp.

Snow continued to fall and the weather beat harder outside, and in a slow blur his closed eyes erased the stench of week old kitchen waste. Momentary respite. The neighbor’s persistent rapping for overdue rent evaded him. Her sweetest words only fell to the floor, whispered while she stroked small hairs on the back of his neck. He was somewhere else entirely.

He tried to imagine it. He tried to imagine her killing someone. He tried to imagine himself killing someone. He could not.

The room was quiet except for slow breathing and the wind howling through drafty windows and creaking floorboards. A light bulb buzzed above the kitchen window, and the sink dripped slightly to keep the pipes from freezing.

Rolling onto his back, he never looked once to her.

"I work here before long.”

He sat up and put his face in his hands, his elbows between his knees.

“And I’ve been thinking on things.”

His fingers ran through dirty hair and then both hands rested on the nape of his neck.

“ I can’t see right by it. We shouldn't be doing this.”

The gas heater clanked and clanked and hissed.

She neither looked at him nor said anything and sat up facing opposite his silhouette. Twinges coursed through her face and burrowed under her scalp. She felt sick. Sketches from the morning flared through her mind in broken white and red.

A thought came over her and she looked down through her hair and stroked its length with two fingers.

His words interrupted the thought and brought her back to the room and she felt very cold and pulled a blanket up over her shoulders. He was pulling on his jeans and buttoning a shirt and pulling on socks and boots and scraping mud and manure off the soles.

“You just can't take it back is all. And I don’t want to be mixed up in it.”

Shaking three aspirin into her hand from a glass bottle on his nightstand, she cocked back her head and tossed them into her mouth. Her tongue soaked up the bitter flavor and with some effort she swallowed and the pills caught the back of her throat. For a brief moment she choked, her eyes welling with tears. She felt exposed.

The wind increased, clanking the shutters against the brick, while the pipes groaned inside the walls. Early winter always raised her skin with chills, but this was something different a new kind of cold. Time caught up to her and she found herself lost in her thoughts. Under her feet the floorboards creaked and clothes were gathered up into her arms.

She could not take it back.

He buttoned his shirt, zipped his coat.

“I’m leaving town.”

Wood looked back to her, then turned away. A few steps and he walked out the door and she listened until the crunching of snow under his boots disappeared. The truck started and drove off.

Rummaging for the last of her things, she wept and shook. Rest she wanted, but refuge she needed. Sleeplessness smudged her eyes, closeted behind runny black cosmetics. The pills still felt as though they were in her throat, though they had long since been swallowed. She replaced her dress, hanging it back over her bones.

A cigarette searched out her mouth from her hand. Flame found the end, smoldering the paper into an ember in full glow. Her lungs swallowed the smoke and she walked out into the cold, closing his hollow door carefully, then letting the screen door slam shut behind.

She stood out on the porch for a moment listening. For anything. In the distance, the sparse highway. Somewhere near the house a mourning dove, who had forgotten to hide for the winter, cooed and then disappeared. Just her lips sucking the filter.

And the wind.

A dirt road led to his bungalow from the farm-to-market and she set off down it. Her shoes didn’t hold up well to the cold and she thought her legs would freeze. The coat was wool, but drafty.

But not even the cold could distract her from what had happened that morning. Her hands were still shaking from it.

There was nowhere to go, and even if there was, everything was at least a mile up the road. Even alone, she was afraid. Wind gusted and threw bits of snow at her face and she ran as quickly as she could out in the weather towards the Co-Op. No farmers would pick her up for a ride along the way.

Un Viento De Tal Violencia

Inside, the diner smelled like burned grits and cheap coffee. On the walls hung felt signs of the Tulia chapter Elk’s Lodge, celebrating years of fraternizing. People hunched over in their metal chairs with vinyl cushions, some breathing in the steam from their food, but most just trying to hide from the freeze. A table of farmers across the room mumbled about taxes and canned foods and cattle prices and laying new fence. They all drank coffee and ordered biscuits with gravy. One of the waitresses marked off another day on one of three calendars about the store, endorsing: Happy State Bank and John Deere and Roadrunner’s Taxidermy and Processing. Felicita hated the place.

She sat the milk down on the table. Taking the spoon and dipping it into the cup, stirring and clinking as it turned, the white swirls dispersed into black. The movements of her hands were sharp, trying to drink the coffee slowly, but only twitching and shaking instead. Other than the clinking of silverware and low chatter, and the sizzle of bacon, and the sucking noise of a coffee maker, and chairs being scooted across the linoleum tile, the place was nearly silent. She had no idea how long she’d been crying.

Her jaw was clenched and she could not hold her cup without spilling coffee over the sides onto her hands. She could not light the cigarette hanging from her pursed lips. Her feet were cold and she could hardly feel them.

Behind her a church pastor and a schoolteacher were talking low and secretive about rumors of oil wells out past such and such’s place. Felicita hated them, them and that place, and that town. Her mind left her coffee and the diner; back through the wind and snow and down the farm-to-market and back to the house where Marshall and Wife lived.

***

After Felicita walked into the bedroom and made her way towards the bed, sleeping eyes opened in confusion. Wife saw her first.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Marshall saw her then.

“Jesus Felicita?”

“Why is she here?”

“She’s a girl from the gin.”

Marshall and Wife were two naked shadows, trying to cover themselves with the sheets, thrashing and screaming about calling the police, but neither of them moved from the bed. Marshall asked her to leave, but Felicita did not flinch. Then they screamed again about calling the police and Felicita screamed back about betrayal and dishonesty and together they were all screaming and not listening.

Felicita stood at the foot of the bed and slowly moved around to Marshall’s side. He sat up and covered Wife with one arm and tried to hold an open palm towards Felicita to push her away. She was shaking fiercely and started repeating something Spanish in a low voice and Marshall continued to yell while the wind whipped outside, blowing snowflakes into the windowpane with angry little ticks and raps. Wife struggled to cover herself with the sheet.

A dull light that shone through the window reflected off the snow on the sill, glinting against cold aluminum of the broken ginning rib in Felicita’s hand. The end in her fist was wrapped in dirty cheesecloth a curved metal sickle.

Clumsy and shaking and angry, she raised it and sent it into Marshall’s chest.

“No…”

The noise of the cut was not what she had expected and it frightened her. She let go and jumped back, looking at the dull end jutting out from Marshall’s chest, cheesecloth dangling from the end.

Disbelief fell from his eyes to the wound and up to the ceiling and back down to Felicita. He did not yell again. Blood ran out of his mouth with each breath and his hands cupped together catching more of the blood. Wife continued screaming and crying in confusion and the air was cold and filled with panic. Felicita did not know what to do, so she backed away and looked to the fireplace. The fire had gone cold overnight.

Trying to breathe slowly, Felicita reached and took the iron stirring-rod from the small broom and shovel, and stoked the coals, checking for embers still lit. They all crumbled to white ash. Her breaths quickened.

Slowly, she walked back over to the bed, crying, rod in hand. Her eyes were glazed and stared ahead through tears across Marshall’s hunched body to Wife, who screamed and tried to stand and run, but was entangled in the sheets and fell face first to the floor. Felicita paused for a moment and looked down at a smear of Marshall’s blood down the line of Wife’s back, then raised the rod over her head and swung it hard into the back of Wife’s exposed neck.

A different noise.

When Felicita looked down through her hair and caught her breath, she kicked the still body onto its side and she noticed Wife’s breasts were bigger than her own and even then Felicita felt a rotten jealousy crawling up her throat, as the sheets, wrapped around the limp body, slowly turned darker and heavier.

Snot ran down onto her lip.

Looking back over to his face, as it grew whiter and he lost more of himself in thick strings of black and red, Felicita considered whether she had really ever loved anyone before, and with this thought she felt very sorry.

Marshall’s hands were on the cheesecloth handle of the ginning rib shard and he was breathing more heavily.

Cows lowed in the fields, standing out in the weather. Felicita turned her back to Marshall and Wife, and began to take off her clothing, one piece at a time. Each movement she made was slow and shaky and she cried. Marshall was drifting in and out of consciousness and fell onto his back with a jolt of pain. He moaned.

He then found the strength to slump over onto his side, and reached out to Wife, who was limp against the floor, and he tried to scream. Nothing came of it.

When Felicita had removed everything but the rosary beads she had stolen from her mother, and her clothes were at her feet, she turned back to Marshall, let her hair down to fall over her breasts, and she was sorry like before, only now she felt a ghost rise up in her throat. Goosebumps ran down her legs and back.

She took a few steps to stand over him, looked down through her own black hair, stared into his emptying eyes and whispered something. Marshall had once told her he loved her hair and said it was endless. He told Felicita that she was the woman he loved most in this life and that someday soon he would marry her and they would move somewhere near the sea, away from the winter. Marshall was full of shit.

After looking back over to Wife’s fresh body clumped up on the ground, Felicita crawled into the bed with Marshall and cuddled up close to him. She picked up his hand and stroked her own hair with it.

“¿Te gusta mi pelo, corazon? Mi amor, ¿te gusta mi pelo?”

She waited for an answer, but Marshall could hardly breathe.

“¿Por qué a mi hiciste esto? ¿Y con este chumina?”

Again no answer.

“Íbamos a casar Marshall, bichito.”

Judging by the movement of his eyes, Felicita knew he was soon to die and that perhaps he wanted to cry. She looked at him and her throat choked up as though she too would well up with tears. The small shape of a kiss crossed her lips and the thought of a prayer filled her mind. She looked down at the rosary beads.

Dios perdoname.

He grew weaker and Felicita could sense his exhaustion and she began to cry furiously. After some time he held still and the only breathing left was hers and it was heavy and the room was without sound but for the wind.

“Por favor, no. No Marshall.”

Sitting up over him, she shook his jaw with her hands and tried to wake him.

“¡Dios mío, no!”

Looking over his body, she fixed her stare on the cheesecloth handle of ginning rib and rubbed the wooden rosary beads between her fingers. The wind blew steady outside.

She rose quickly from the bed and replaced her dress and coat, threw the door open, running out and wishing she had never known about Wife.

A cold, biting wind urged her to hurry, so she ran with her face down until a farmer stopped and told her she could ride in the bed of his truck, that it was cold and she’d catch pneumonia walking in such weather. He said he was going to The Diner and that he would take her that far. She was hesitant at first, but did not want to run any longer.

He drove into town and she huddled down as low as she could near the cab while the snow whipped over and pieces of straw flew up into the air from the bed. Muddy ruts and dried up hay marked their trail in the snow.

When they pulled into the diner she was still shaking and panicked and followed the farmer inside, jumping down into the muddied snow. She squinted through dry eyes.

“Gracias.”

He did not speak to her, but nodded his head, and they parted ways inside the Diner, he to his morning coffee mates and she to the other side of the room, alone. Sitting down at a window booth, Felicita put her palms over her eyes, elbows on the table. Waitress noticed her after several moments, took her time and assembled a plate of eggs and brought it with a cup of coffee and a milk server.

“Here you go honey.”

Felicita looked at the plate and did not look up to Waitress.

“Me gustaría salsa.”

Waitress was smacking away at a piece of chewing gum, hand against her hip, arm bent at the elbow, looking down her nose at Felicita.

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Quiero una salsita.”

Waitress wiped grease from her hands onto her apron and spit her gum into her palm.

“No es pan yol.”

Felicita looked the waitress in the eyes.

“Perdón.”

Popping the gnarled piece of gum back into her mouth, Waitress turned and walked away and looked back over her shoulder at Felicita.

“Well just let me know if you lack anything.”

Felicita stirred her coffee and stared ahead, into nothing. She could not pray.

¿Qué has hecho?

Unexpected tears nearly choked her and as she wept her hands were wet with eye shadow and tears and spilled coffee. Waitress noticed her again and refilled her cup. The Diner patrons only tended to their own business with slight unease, as they did when Mexicans came in to eat.

She had no idea how long she had been crying. When she opened her red eyes filled with salt, a man had approached her booth wearing a tan Carhartt jacket, a Tulia Farmer’s CoOp nametag on the left breast: Wood Bivins. He stood over her with stiff legs and a rust colored winter beard. Wood smelled like cow shit and dirt. He asked what was the matter, but she only glanced at him sideways. He took a step toward her.

“Excuse me. You all right ?”

He placed his hand on her shoulder, which surprised her, and she drew away from him quickly. He took a step backward, a length enough so as not to intrude.

“Shit. Esta bueno?”

Her shoulders dropped and then tightened again. Both of her hands shook so badly that she had to put the coffee down and wiped her hands on her jacket. He held out a crumpled napkin to her, covered with stains of his meal.

Canción De Veinte Sombras

They drove west into the late afternoon, into New Mexico. Sharp air whipped against the truck and the tires slid occasionally in the snow and Felicita stared out the window and shivered. The road was silent as the panhandle grasslands gave way to desert and the snow was lighter there, and eventually non-existent, but the cold wind cut through everything. Felicita was so tired of the wind and wanted to be back in Mexico. Wood still smelled like cow shit and dirt.

“Sorry about leaving for work like I did.”

Felicita did not say anything.

“My mind’s just twisted around all this.”

He looked to her, hoping for some kind of affection, but she only stared out the window and sat quietly. Something about the quiet made Wood itch and he was worried about the sheriff as they drove on towards the mountains into the graying afternoon.

Accessory to murder. Wood looked out his window across the landscape.

Across the desert prickly pear cacti were sitting out the cold without their pear apples. Mesquite trees jutted out of the ground every so often and sage poked out in small patches. Nothing moved but the rusted truck across miles of dead looking plants.

Wood looked back to her and was nervous.

“You all right ?”

Felicita said nothing to him. She could hear the plains in him, all the dead grass, all the winter. Rolling, roaring quiet and slow, and she hated Texas and wanted to be back in Morelias. She rubbed the crucifix on her rosary beads between her thumb and finger, along the smooth wood. Wood was not unlike Marshall. Not as stout, perhaps more honest, but he felt like Marshall did. Another cowboy from Tulia who wanted to take her to bed. Maybe he could be different, but maybe he just wanted inside her again. Then maybe he would just go to work again and leave her alone in the cold. She had no idea what to think.

Wood was agitated.

“How ‘bout we listen to something.”

He didn’t wait for a response and tuned through the radio dial, but found nothing until he switched to AM, where the only station was playing old hymns sung by the Sweet Beulah Land Baptist choir. He tried to sing out words he did not remember.

He would have done almost anything to break the silence.

“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross. The emblem of suffering and shame…”

He felt embarrassed.

After forgetting the lines, the station began to cut out and Wood gladly turned the radio back off. He was not prepared to come back to the quiet of the cab. Felicita still stared out the window into the falling sun and Wood’s knees were sore and his back stiff, and her silence roared, and his boots were rubbing blisters. Pressing his palms against the steering wheel to stretch his arms, he noticed the road’s first ascent into the bluffs and buttes, where the mountains fell into the desert so many years before.

“I’m glad you came back to find me so quick.”

Silence.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone in the first place”

More silence.

“Just you and me now, sugar. Our worries are behind us.”

Felicita stared out into the distance and shifted her weight to lean her face against the cold glass of the passenger window, and let the road rattle the truck and start to lull her to sleep.

“Sólo quieres las chabombas.”

Wood was excited by her words and laughed a little.

“What’re chabombas?”

Only silence and wind.

Wood looked over to Felicita for an instant, who had closed her eyes, then back to the road and pointed over the steering wheel.

“Up yonder, bout a hundred miles. That’s my brother’s place.”

Felicita opened her eyes and first glanced sideways at him, then turned her face and managed to cock a smile up one side of her mouth. Wood relaxed and did not mind when she returned her stare out the window again just before closing her eyes a second time.

“Everything will be just fine. Just wait.”

Snow had begun to fall heavier than it was in Tulia and thicker on the ground, smoothing out the rolling hills except the occasional yucca jutting upward. Wood concentrated harder on the road. His eyes were heavy and tired, but his mind untamable.

“Just wait.”

Felicita was glad to be away from Tulia, but still could not reckon with what had happened that morning. Even though she was tired, sleep did not welcome her in. She was cold and dipped her face down into her jacket, which smelled of masa and it brought her back to the kitchen.

***

Mother stirred a pot of meat while Felicita flattened out masa onto soaking cornhusks. Wind blew in through the windows and under the doors so they had towels shoved into the thresholds, and all four burners of the gas stove were lit at once. It was cold enough out to bring their chickens inside. Several slept while others clucked and pecked at dirt on the floor, shitting occasionally. Mother would cuss under her breath and clean the mess with a rag or newspaper.

Mother chattered about the snow and rumors about cutting labor at the cotton gin. Felicita listened, preoccupied with thoughts of home. Neither of them expected to hear from Father. If they did hear from him, it would be from a place Felicita only knew by name. Even if they had wanted to go and look for him, there was hardly money between the two of them and he had not sent any back for months.

Mother talked about people she had seen throughout the day, and she always talked about people because the only other things to talk about in Tulia were cows and cotton, and church. And true to form, Mother talked about rumors of a new priest at the Spanish church. Felicita did not care, but listened to Mother without looking up. Mother went on and on about women she thought were promiscuous, about hearing no news from Mexico, and about nada while Felicita spread the last of the masa and wiped her hands on a dirty rag sitting on the table.

Mother saw that she had finished.

“Yo vi a la esposa del Jefe Marshall en el mercado. Me fui para los pollos. Necesitaban mas semill”

“¿La mujer?”

“Si se llama...”

Felicita denied it before it could be spoken.

“No mamá. No es posible que se haya casado.”

“Pues, corazon hablé la verdad.”

Felicita did not know Marshall had a wife. Her pupils shrank, her face flushed, and her jaw tightened. When her mother saw her knuckles turning white in a fist against the table, she turned the stove off and removed the meat as it simmered, trying to inquire casually.

“¿Que te pasa, corazon?”

Felicita did not answer, but only wiped fresh tears away from her eyes quickly, trying to keep composure, and set out plates for the both of them, and shredding lemongrass into a boiling pot for tea.

“Ya basta con la chusma. Comemos mamá.”

A nearly silent meal.

They both cleaned the dishes and dried them and put them away and her mother went off to her room to read her favorite psalms, while Felicita stayed near the front of the house and smoked cigarettes. Her hands shook as she rocked back and forth on a stiff juniper chair, staring at the floor. Outside the cold wind grew spirited.

The house creaked with joint pains and the weather was relentless. These were things that crept into the character of Tulia residents and they crept in deeper than usual with such a brash winter. Felicita did not consider herself a resident of Tulia. She never considered herself a part of a place capable of winters that brought in chickens. It was absurd. It was not even Christmas.

She sat like this and passed most of the night. After hours of listening to wind and her own lips sucking in smoke, she got up to check on her mother who had fallen asleep with the bible open on her chest. Felicita picked it up and closed it, then lightly tossed a blanket across Mother’s body. She noticed her mother was a fat woman, and though the thought must have always been tucked away, only then did she consciously realize it and only then did she feel the heavy weight inside.

Marshall.

There was a chair next to the bed and she sat and stared at Mother and tried to pray, but could only think of la mujer. She felt sick and stupid and furious.

Felicita picked up Mother’s rosary beads from the nightstand and kissed the crucifix, then placed them around her neck. She saw a broken ginning rib on the table that Mother had taken home from work sometime before. Taking it into her hand, she felt out its weight. She ran her fingers across it dull from wear on one end and jagged where it broke from the machinery. Its aluminum finish was cold in the night.

Taking a piece of cheesecloth from the crude bedside table, Felicita wrapped it around the ginning rib tightly and stared at Mother sleeping on the bed.

The sun had nearly risen and Felicita got up from the bedside chair, shut Mother’s door quietly, and put on her coat and shoes and decided to walk all the way to Marshall’s. She knew he would be there on Saturday, but she did not know what she would say. It would be very cold, but she did not care. By the time she got there it was well into the dawn.

Up the mud and snow she walked, with a red face and numb feet and a mind full of spiders and a stomach full of anger. When she stepped onto his porch she stopped and listened. For anything. The house was quiet inside. Cows huddled together in the fields beyond and snow glistened under the clouds and the landscape was not hers. She reached for the doorknob and turned it.

***

“We’re nearly out of gas and the snow’s getting thick for driving. But this is a motel up there that we can stay at tonight.”

“Esta bien.”

“All right , well. Sit tight and I’ll go in.”

He parked outside the motel office, hopped down out of the truck, leaving it running. He leaned back in the door before shutting it.

“I’d kill for a drink.”

She smiled at him and nodded and crossed her arms to ward off the cold he had let in. It was dark out.

Wood shut the door.

Pulling his coat collar over his neck, he hustled toward the office of the Thistle Motel, and then pulled out his billfold as he walked in the door and wiped his boots.

Felicita watched into the window. It was fogged over and the light inside was warm and quiet and she thought the people inside must be kind and happy. Looking out the other direction, the night absorbed everything. She pushed the radio dial on, turning it to see if anything would pick up. The first station she found was playing Harve Presnell.

“Maria. Maria. They call the wind Maria. Away out here they got a name…”

Felicita had never heard the song before and didn’t care for it so she scrambled further through the dial only to find static. When she turned it off, she heard coyotes crying in the distance. The sound made her shrink into the seat and suddenly she felt the great weight inside and wished she had her mother’s bible to hold and read.

Peso De La Silenciosa

The pain he felt in the morning was not his own. It was the whiskey’s. A sour mash bottle sat out on the table next to the Gideon, and the keys to his truck. When Wood saw it, he felt his mind trying to crawl out of his skull, and wished the Sapello General Store and Sundries had carried beer instead. He looked over to Felicita’s place in the bed, but she was not in it. Her indention in the mattress, exposed by blankets carefully folded back, was the only sign that she had even slept there.

Room eight looked like every other room in the motel. He and Felicita hadn’t done much to change that look, except scatter clothes about on the floor the night before.

Wood did not remember drinking as much as was missing from the bottle, but he also didn’t think it impossible to have finished as much because he didn’t remember going to bed. Leaning over the edge of the mattress, he could see clothes still scattered on the floor and thought she was in the bathroom. The light in the room was dim except a stream of it coming in from a section of the window where the curtain did not meet flush with the wall. Wood squinted and closed his eyes, and put his face down into his pillow and fell back to sleep.

When he awoke for the second time several hours later she was still not in bed, but clothes were still scattered amongst the mess of things on the floor. The alcohol had gripped him and he knew it was the start to a very rough sort of morning, but was glad not to be out in the cold, pitching feed and loading trucks.

Wood got up, sighed deep, slid on his thermal underwear and walked to the bathroom door. It was closed, so he knocked.

“You ok in there?”

Not a sound not even the wind.

The upright, furnace-style gas heater kicked on in the corner of the room and Wood jumped at the noise and his heart beat faster. His next thought caused him to cringe.

Her pack of rolling papers and tobacco were on the sink counter outside the bathroom, next to a plastic cup with whiskey lining the bottom, and Wood did not want to open the door. He turned away and ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation.

Wood mumbled to himself under his breath.

“Fuck. Come on.”

He turned back to the bathroom door. Everything smelled like cigarettes and though normally the scent did not bother Wood, and though he could typically handle his liquor, he felt nauseated and dizzy.

“Hey dammit. If you’re in there say something.”

Nothing.

He reached out for the knob and turned it and closed his eyes when he found it unlocked. His face teemed with sweat and he swung the door open. Wood felt dizzy to the point of collapse and opened his eyes.

Oh god.

The bathroom was empty and cold.

All the alcohol and stewing worry had done a number on his stomach, and in a mixture of relief and desperation he threw his head over the toilet to vomit and it smelled sweet like bourbon. He wiped his lips with his right arm from the left corner of his mouth and tried to breathe normally again.

“Fuck.”

He went to the sink and rinsed out whiskey from the cup there and filled it with cold tap water and drank it. When it was gone he filled it again and drank it and exhaled.

Wood walked to the window and drew back the curtain covering it. The glass pane was dirty. Out of the filmy brown he could see the snow had stopped falling sometime in the night and the sun was shining.

It shone like spring and summer. He wondered if Felicita would still be with him in the spring. He thought of love and wondered if he would ever experience it, or if it was just an idea in books. Love was just in books.

He put the thought aside. The smell of fertilizer was coming strong from his jacket on the floor. For the first time it stood out to him and he felt nauseous again. He tried to focus on thoughts of Felicita and a nice house somewhere far away. He didn’t want to throw up again. But all he could think about was whether he could kill somebody. He thought about what happens when people die. He took another drink of water and it came back to him.

Marshall.

***

Wood was loading fertilizer bags onto a flatbed the day he spotted Marshall’s truck from across the lot. It was winter then too, a winter past. And for a man who ran a cotton gin, Marshall moved slowly, lacking the energy of a harvest businessman, and Wood could sense it even from a distance. Marshall was looking for somebody to talk with.

Tulia was a slow town, but things moved quickly at the CoOp. It was an open place where all kinds of work was done, and small farmers were always filling up with diesel and checking on seed rebates and drinking coffee and talking about older times. A welder mended gate hinges and most anything else that could be welded and next door, the feedlot had agreed to sell manure for composting. There was a mountainous pile of it.

Wood had finished loading fertilizer and walked past the pile of manure and made his way over to Marshall’s truck and greeted him as he took off his gloves.

“What can I do for you?”

Marshall talked slowly and looked at the ground.

“Well I need lubricant for the baler. Y’all got anything tougher than kitchen grease?”

Wood dusted the thighs of his jeans off, and tried to look Marshall in the eye.

“Yes sir we do. We got most anything you need, from baling to lint cleaner.”

Marshall looked at Wood and thought for a moment.

“Had good rains this year.”

Wood just smiled.

“Yes sir.”

Marshall was like a fidgety boy.

“And a perfect freeze. Ain’tnever seen another like it.”

“Yes sir.”

Marshall rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his head around to stretch.

“The wholesaler shorted us. Didn’t account for such heavy crop.”

“Who do you buy from? Them thieves over at Spinning Co.?”

“Well, yeah.”

Wood thought for a moment. He was about to sell something.

“What would you say if I told you I can get you everything you need, three quarters of the cost?”

Marshall thought for a moment.

“Y’all got coffee inside? I been at the gin couple days on end.”

“Course. Why don’t we have us a cup.”

They stood and drank their coffee and talked details of a new distribution deal, about cotton and cattle and the weather. Wood was polite and courteous to him and told him that the CoOp’s partnership with cotton ginning was the most sensible thing for Tulia and that made Marshall proud. Marshall was a proud man and didn’t make an effort to hide it.

“Well Mr. Bivins, I think we got us a deal.”

Wood set down his mug and extended his hand and shook Marshall’s.

That’s how it started. A handshake. The perfect angle.

Wood knew for a long time about Marshall’s affairs with young women working at the gin. Everyone in Tulia knew. Marshall’s hands were in so many baskets, Wood figured a number of extra purchases from the CoOp wouldn’t raise much suspicion. And Wood was right. Nobody suspected a thing.

The bank account number came to mind without thinking hard about it: Tulia Cotton Co. Farm and Gin 790-645-354-959. It was a regular fixture like a phone number or an address. Wood had written it on a year’s worth of deposit slips without flinching. Nearly eleven thousand dollars in undercharged baling materials, pesticides, and fraudulent vendor purchases funnelled from the gin’s account into his own pockets. All of it temporarily untraceable, deposited into a bank account opened under a false name: Tulia Farmer’s CoOp Emergency Fund. Withdrawn with a forged signature and tucked into the cardboard box behind the seat in Wood’s pickup. Emergency indeed.

Marshall was dead.

There would be investigations. And even though most of the people in Tulia were idiots, the sheriff was quick on the draw. He was known to arrest people just for being drunk. If he weren’t out already, he would be by Monday. Wood knew that his brother’s place would be safe for a while, but not long. Felicita was in a worse way than Wood, but ten to fifteen years in the Clements Unit was not a charming prospect by any slant he could see. When Felicita followed him to the CoOp, begging him to take her along, he suddenly saw not only his way out of it, but a piece of pussy for the ride. Opportunity had stricken, of the richest kind.

Wood took off from work early, said he had a sick calf from his Hereford stock, and Felicita climbed in the truck while he filled the tank with gasoline. They drove into town. When Wood stopped in front of the bank, he parked and told Felicita to go into the grocery next door and get something to make sandwiches for the road. She hated sandwiches, but wasn’t in much of a position to fight about it. He handed her money from his wallet and they parted, she to the grocery and he carried a cardboard box into the bank.

They drove out of town with hardly a word while Felicita made sandwiches to eat. The silence along the road to New Mexico unnerved Wood, but the cardboard box sat under his seat urging him to deal with it. He thought about telling her. She might stay with him then, or at least want to. She had told him everything about the murders and that took guts and Wood was the kind of man who respected guts. But Wood kept quiet.

That night at the motel she just sat in a chair and stared ahead most of the night, drinking the bourbon without any water. Wood was nervous because he didn’t know what killing could do to somebody. He kept drinking on the bed hoping she would just let it go. He wondered about her life and about what would happen to them. He wondered about why she decided to kill Marshall and Wife over such a small thing. Pussy was pussy. Marshall was just doing what men do. But suppose she just up and decided to kill him, maybe while he slept. Wood did not like the thought, so he just drank faster. The night was cold out and whiskey always kept the cold away.

***

Down with one last gulp of water. Wood put down the cup on the plain motel room dining table and walked back to the bed. His hands were shaking and he was sure then he had drunk as much as was missing from the bottle. The sun looked warm from inside the room.

After pulling on his jeans and boots, shirt and coat, he locked the door and set out to the office. Felicita had probably gone to get breakfast somewhere.

Winter was still a deep cold and the sun, deceptive. The mountain air was thin and crisp and was good medicine for whiskey. He knocked the hood of his truck twice as he walked along a brick wall.

The sign: Thistle Motel, falling down and peeled paint. The place was in much worse condition in the daylight than it looked in the night. Sapello was a quiet town. He and Felicita were the only patrons staying in the place. Wood buttoned his coat all the way and crunched through the pack ice slush into the office.

Escrúpulos

Wood rang the desk bell and waited. His mind wanted breakfast, but his body rejected the thought, and the headache started to settle in. The office was a small place and he tried imagining himself working there for a winter, but nothing cut through the throbbing in his temples. After a moment of shuffling behind a door in the back of the office, a skinny man with a long, gray beard came to the counter.

“Yes sir. You need a room?”

“No. I stayed a night.”

“I am sorry sir. Should have known. What can I do for you?”

“Y’all seen a Mexican girl around this morning?”

“No sir. Ain’tnobody been here except me.”

“You sure?”

The man paused and thought for a moment, looking away to the wall. His eyes shifted back and forth.

“Well I’m pretty sure. You might check over at the store though. They serve up hash browns and biscuits for breakfast.”

Wood could sense the man was a liar. The devil knows his people.

“Thanks.”

“You from round here?”

“No sir. My brother lives up in north Taos County.”

“Lot of good country up there.”

“Yes sir there is. What’s the weather today?”

“We don’t get but one station here on the AM.”

“Yes sir.”

“They was talking about a murder in Texas.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Some feller who runned a cotton gin.”

Wood felt dizzy again.

“What happened?”

“Can’t say. No information. I seen you was from Tulia though.”

Wood was sweating out whiskey and remembered his nametag.

“Ain’t heard nothing about it.”

The clerk’s mouth moved even when he wasn’t speaking and he looked at Wood, suspicious, and started pulling at the hair from a wiry, white beard.

“Yep. In Texas.”

Wood was nervous and felt like he would vomit again.

“Well. I best be on my way.”

The clerk nodded in parting.

“Check on over at the store. Your Mexican might be there.”

Wood looked back at him, nodded, and walked out of the office.

Across the road and a block over was the Sapello General Store and Sundries. It was a place of antiquity, where old ways had not given way to new. Wood walked in and the smells were exactly as they had been the night before, of mountain cedar and pine tar and tobacco and burned potatoes. The place was full of ill color, but Wood thought it was just the whiskey dragging on.

A man was whistling somewhere in the store.

Wood walked slow over the floor, crunching sand under his boots, trying to find the whistler, past Prince Albert tobacco canisters, past the bottles of sour mash and pralines, and peered around an old crank handle coffee grinder. He stopped at a shelf hook holding wooden rosary beads, and cleared his throat.

An old man answered without looking up from his work.

“Morning. You here for breakfast?”

“Could be. Y’all seen a Mexican girl come in here?”

The old man moved back across the store and Wood followed him to a counter, where the his bony fingers fidgeted with glass bottles on a shelf that read: APOTHECARY ITEMS.

“Ain’tnobody been in here. Got breakfast though if you want it. Dollar thirty.”

“No. Thank you. Coffee?”

The old man turned to Wood and a thought crossed his face, wrinkling it around the eyes. Nothing in the store made a noise.

“Course. Just a quarter.”

Turning back to the shelf, the old man grabbed an old mug hanging from a wooden rack, blew dust out of it and pulled at a cobweb hanging from the handle and then poured coffee into it.

“All I got’s a dollar. Keep the rest.”

Wood slid the bill across the counter and took the cup into his hand.

“Much obliged.”

The man pulled out a wooden box from below the counter and placed the dollar into it. He looked back at Wood.

“You from Tulia?”

Wood looked down from the cup at his coat’s nametag and back up to the old man, who had started chewing bits of sawdust from his flannel shirt pocket and spitting them on the floor.

“Yes sir. I am.”

Nodding at Wood, the old man smiled and swallowed some of the sawdust.

“Well. Good luck finding your Mexican.”

The old man wandered back across the store to deal with whatever he was doing before and Wood sat on a stool and drank back the cup and licked away the grounds from his lips and picked them from his tongue with his thumb and finger. It was hardly warm and tasted thick and several days old. He tried to finish the cup but couldn’t get back the last of it and with a sour face, slid the cup across the counter. He scoured across the store for the old man, who was still whistling, and Wood felt dizzy.

“Beg your pardon sir, who else is open in town?”

The old man was annoyed by the interruption and turned slowly and looked at Wood through slim eyes.

“How’s that?”

Wood took a step back.

“Anyone else doing business in town?”

“No. Afraid not. Just me and the motel and I seen you was stayed there.”

Wood was wary of the man.

“Well, sorry to bother you.”

Wood turned away, but was stopped by the old man, who grabbed his arm and Wood saw long, dirty nails jutting out from the fingers around his jacket sleeve.

“Them trinket stores is all closed up til spring.”

“I appreciate it.”

Wood pulled his arm away from the man’s grip and turned away again, making for the door and trying to be casual. The old man followed behind him.

“If you’re missing that Mexican, there ain’t but two roads out of town.”

When Wood looked back at him, the old man was coughing and putting a piece of sap candy into his mouth, long fingernails dragging across his bottom lip. Wood looked away from him.

“I think I’ll try the one up to Questa.”

The old man switched the candy from one cheek to the other, clicking it against his yellowed teeth.

“Yep. That’s the one goes up through the Chevron mine strip. Santa Fe railroad runs through there.”

Footsteps dragged along the floor somewhere behind a shut door in the back of the store. Wood craned his neck a bit and looked past the old man.

“Anyone else here with you?”

There was a brief silence and the man lingered on a thought, looking at Wood and smiling with one side of his mouth, the sap candy jutting his cheek out.

“More snow coming on so best be on your way.”

“Thanks again.”

Wood turned out of the store. Outside he stepped up into his truck and slammed the door shut and started the engine. It grumbled and sounded cold and stiff. Still in park, he pressed down the gas pedal and listened to the throttle. He had switched to thinner oil for the winter but wasn’t convinced it did much in the way of helping anything. Twinges coursed through his head from the alcohol. He turned the radio on and found the only station picking up; playing whatever it was that would take his mind off the headache.

Wood was sweating and it smelled like bourbon and his jacket still smelled like cow shit. His boots scraped at his feet through damp socks. The cab of the truck was thick with gas fumes so he rolled the window down to let in the air.

Staring down into his lap and then looking back up to the rear view mirror, Wood remembered something and suddenly the cold shook him and worry finally set in through the alcohol.

Come on. Where are you?

Wood kicked the truck into reverse, then into drive, and spun his tires in the snow pack down the road to Questa.

Wood shivered, even in his jacket, mumbling under his breath.

“Where are you?”

Los Coyotes

Wood was just north of the town’s sign: Sapello Village Limits. Ele. 6,968 ft., when a coyote crossed the road at the foot of the stripped mining mountain. It was hopping through the powder and stopped to look at Wood’s truck, then turned back, leaving its sloppy tracks behind. When Wood saw its piss yellow fur glistening in the snow from a distance, he stopped the truck and put the gearshift into park and got out and left the engine running to keep it warm. The radio was picking up the country station again.

His truck grumbled. All other sound was swallowed by the fallen snows and the ponderosa pines behind him. The coyote was mangy and sickly thin, a black tip on the tail like the mountain before him was bare and sick, a bald black rock peak rising up to the building clouds. It was too high up for desert coyotes.

As he reached back in the truck, leaning the chair forward he saw the cardboard box and looked at it for a moment.

Wood moved the box over and pulled out a Browning 220 swift he had stolen from his father as a boy. Leaning the chair back up, he stepped away from the open door and pulled the bolt back on the gun. It was loaded and he took a few steps more into the powder, raising the butt to his shoulder. He fell sway to a carnivorous instinct.

Whispering to himself, he calmed his nerves.

“Pussy is just pussy.”

He spit into the snow.

“Oil is for drilling. Chickens is for grilling. Coyotes is for killing.”

He thought of his father as he held the gun and felt its weight and knew its balance well. His movements were slow and natural, even the cold and whiskey could not take away muscle memory. Following the coyote with the cross hairs, it trudged through deep powder off the road, across railroad tracks, and up the slant of a small boulder onto a deeper ledge. He aimed slow, his eyes following his prey with more time than he really had. The stripped mountain was a hunter’s advantage. Edit nature and eat of her sweet fruit.

He lost sight as the coyote climbed the boulder and disappeared behind the ledge and his breath steamed up into the bitter air.

“Not so fast, friend.”

Wood followed up the tracks, around to the slope of the snow covered boulder and followed it up as quietly as he could. When he reached the top, he expected the coyote to have run off, but instead saw it across a good way on the thick ledge. Getting up onto the ledge with his father’s rifle, Wood crouched down and squinted and saw the coyote from below alongside another coyote. Their teeth and paws were tearing at something on the ground, thrashing back and forth, canine fashion. Wood leaned back onto his haunches, digging his right foot into the snow. His finger squeezed against the trigger, on command, as though his father were with him telling him to hold steady. He breathed in, slowly.

The coming storm had begun its breezy winds and brought the rank scent of coyote fur to his face, with a strong mixture of sulphuric fumes from the mountain mine, and it gagged him. His head turned away and he choked on the smell and the noise of his choking was loud enough for the coyotes to hear.

Both coyotes’ heads shot up stiff, ears pricked forward. One turned around in alarm, its teeth jutting out from black jowls, as Wood cursed himself and shot off a round. The coyotes tore off around the opposite end of the ledge, making the mangled tree line on the far end just before Wood fired his second shot.

Standing up slow in disappointment, Wood spat into the snow and slung his gun strap over his shoulder, the rifle straight against his back as he walked across the fresh powder. He could hear the footsteps of more coyotes hiding in the pines, crunching through the snow. They were invisible to him, except shadows and snarling noises. He knew they would have been hungry and thought it strange for desert coyotes to be so far up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Wood was nearing whatever they were eating at before, and it had started to turn.

Nausea again.

His cracked lips reminded him how thin the air was and how thirsty he was. He looked up at the mountain, bare except the snow. A bald mountain. A thirsty mountain. Clouds had rolled in and the wind began to pick up. When he had neared the spot where the Coyotes were feeding the smell grew worse, like thawing meat. Turning his head away into the arm of his jacket, he peered over the sleeve. He stopped cold and dropped his arm down to his side, looking down ahead of his boots, where a wooden rosary necklace lay in the red snow.

Cocerse En Un Propia Salsa

Wood’s ears were ringing when he came to. He was lying face first in the snow and his cheeks were frost bitten. He tried to move his arms underneath his chest so he could rise up and figure out what happened. But he could not move the left half of his body and when he tried to move his right arm, the pain quickly set in from a broken forearm and collar bone. Glass shards covered his skin and he could feel more in his forehead.

He could move his neck enough to turn and breathe shallow breaths and while his lungs fought his shattered ribs, he could see the snow next to his head absorbing blood and he felt a fear rise up into his throat.

When he tried to cry out, his voice did not make a sound.

God.

Not even a whisper. Just a quiet thought. The pines swayed and swished in a steady breeze.

The radio was still playing from his truck, smashed against a tree a few yards behind him, the battery moaning and trying to die. Harve Presnell

“Oh bury me not on the Lone Prairie, where coyotes howl and the wind blows free…”

Wood closed his eyes and the nerves still working in his legs stung. He tried to think of what had happened. He tried to remember why he was driving in his truck. He tried to remember where he was. He tried to remember.

***

The body hung over his shoulder and the dress was ripped away and missing at the leg where muscle showed. Wood’s rifle was over the other shoulder and he stammered forward, lumbering through the snow. He never cried, but could not help but to cry, and his breath was heavy and sharp and made clouds in the air that rose up and disappeared into the wind. The old man from the store was right about the storm. It was coming in, stout and cold.

Wood felt the waist of the body slipping off his shoulder, so he bent his knees and rocked upward to try and balance it, but only fell in the deep snow. He pushed the body off and stood up, looking around for his rifle. When he saw it, he picked it up and slung it back over his shoulder and grabbed onto the ankle of the unscathed leg, his fingers around the knee high stocking, and started to drag it, walking backwards. It was a long way to the truck and the dress managed to work itself up over the neck of the body. She was dragged naked except for the dress covering her head and her stockings. Her skin was cold to the touch.

Stopping and gagging twice along the way, Wood eventually stammered back to his truck, set the leg of the body down, and lowered the tailgate. The engine was still running like he’d left it and the exhaust pipe made a foul steam, and he accidently breathed in and coughed it up hard. There was a trail of dark red spotting behind him, all the way back to the spot he had fallen, and he looked down and noticed blood on his own jacket and jeans. Then he looked down at the body.

Wood was shaking from the cold and nerves. He pulled out the rosary necklace out of his coat pocket and felt their weight, and put them around his neck.

“What happened to you?”

He wiped tears from his eyes and tried to imagine her still alive, but whiskey was still sweating out of him and slowing down his thoughts.

He lifted the body up from under the arms, into the bed of the truck, where he sat it on a layer of snow, between bags of fertilizer and wood handled shovels, hoes, and iron plow fixtures. His hands shook as he pulled her dress down as best he could and then hopped down out of the truck bed.

Shutting the tailgate, he stepped away from the truck and went to a drift of snow off the road, bent down onto his haunches and scooped up a handful and put it into his mouth. Most of it melted on his tongue and he swallowed the rest that had not. Sulfur fumes were thick and the wind blew them about.

Wood stood up and went back to the truck and got in, slamming the door and throwing the gear shift into drive and flooring the accelerator. The tires spun around without moving the truck forward and Wood jerked the steering wheel back and forth, rocking the truck until it lurched forward and sliced new ruts through the snow pack. Tears filled his eyes again and he was slamming his fists against the steering wheel and he screamed. Coyotes were running alongside the truck in the woods.

The speedometer had been broken since he could remember, but he could feel the momentum the truck was gaining down the mountain road and realized how quickly the truck was moving. His back tires slid to the left and right and Wood could only try and correct the drifting by turning hard in the opposite direction.

When the truck rounded a turn that ran close to the foot of the bald mountain and a line of aspen trees that gave way to ponderosas and mountain cedar, a coyote ran across the road, Wood overcorrected and the back left tire caught traction and threw the momentum hard left, putting the coyote to waste, while the truck pitched head first down a steep grade into the trees.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Everything in the bed of the truck was jolted around as Wood tried to steer through the trees. Tools slammed into Felicita’s body. Everything was moving so quickly to either side of him. The truck slammed into the thick trunk of an aspen. Glass shattered.

Wood’s head broke the windshield as he flew through it.

***

Wood felt something soft and wet against his forehead and opened his eyes to the mouth of a coyote licking blood from his forehead. He panicked, but could not move most of his body. Trying to get his right arm up to defend himself, he felt his forearm bone move and managed only to make a whining sound come out of his broken jaw. He was wriggling when felt another tongue through his hair on the back of his head. He did not cry. Even if he had wanted to, he could not.

He could hear more small footsteps around him, but could only see blurs of movement beyond the snout of the coyote in front of his face. Wood had never been truly terrified in his life and his heart was in his mouth. The weight. A sharp pain seared through the back of his head, hair being pulled out of his scalp. At first only a small pain, but then it felt stronger all over the back of his head as there was more hair pulled in little nips.

Wood tried to move again, but nothing came of it. He let out a series of whimpers that sent white pain to his mind as he tried to close his broken jaw.

He could hear the snarls of competition behind him, coyotes fighting for position, a seat around the dinner table. Another tongue licked Wood’s mouth and cheeks and he closed his eyes and tried just to fall asleep. He tried to think of everything he had done in his life, but nothing came to mind. He tried to remember, but he could not. The coyotes were yelping and scrambling over one another. The wind picked up and stopped. He opened his eyes again and saw the rosary beads outstretched from his neck, and coyote feet, so he closed them one last time and breathed in a shallow breath. And that’s when everything in him fell quiet and snow started drifting down onto his head.