A Small Furry Prayer (10 page)

19

Joy agreed in July to marry me. For the wedding, we thought maybe next summer, we thought maybe small; we might have thought other things, but neither of us mentioned them, as we stopped talking about the idea not long after we started. Neither of us said another word until one morning late August when Joy woke up and rolled over and found me already awake. It seems we had both been having the same bad dream, specifically what our year would be like if we had to spend it planning a wedding. Neither of us had the stomach for it. Also, Joy had little family left and my parents were already planning a trip to Chimayo at the end of September. We couldn't think of a better way to welcome them than with a surprise wedding.

September was a good month for it. The long, hot days had grown cooler and shorter. The cottonwoods had begun to turn yellow, their bright torches igniting the desert. The coneflowers were in bloom, as were the sunflowers. The hollyhocks, which had risen to seven-, eight-, nine-foot giants over the summer, had died back, but fresh rains had brought new growth, and these second stalks were shorter, their flowers more vibrant. There was a dewy smell to the air, and the scent of sage and second chances as well.

Joy and I got married on our back porch. The catering was done by a guy who sold tacos on the side of the road. The ceremony performed by a rabbi found randomly in the phone book. Decorations were a couple of bonfires. Outside of my immediate family, our out-of-town guests included a rocket scientist, a television producer, and a jujitsu instructor. Our in-town guests, at least the ones we knew before they showed up for the wedding, were dog people, horse people, and one retired dominatrix who had left behind a thriving whips-and-chains business for a life raising chickens. What had started out as a small ceremony turned into a slightly larger festival as, in the days leading up to the ceremony, Joy and I kept inviting whomever we ran into. For reasons still unclear, a lot of those people showed up dressed as pirates.

Somehow, it was a perfect wedding. The phrase “over the moon” is not a phrase I'd ever paid much attention to, but in the days and weeks right after the ceremony that phrase was the only one that seemed to accurately describe my state of mind. It was right around then that I had another telephone conversation with Chris Malloy. We were talking about the satisfaction of married life, country living, and learning to build things with your hands when Chris said, “You'll be walking along one day thinking about all the things you can make and you'll glance down and think: ‘Shoes—fuck ya, I can make shoes.' ”

I had laughed with him then, laughed because I was over the moon, because I really believed I could make shoes, and mostly because it still felt like a game to me. I'd forgotten that choices have consequences. The Cherokee medicine man Rolling Thunder once said: “The teachings don't come like some people think. You can't just sit down and talk about the truth. It doesn't work that way. You have to live it, and be part of it, and you might get to know it. I say you might. And it's slow and gradual and doesn't come easy.” I had set out to find a life that means something and was dumb enough to think I was well on my way. I did not yet understand how wrong this idea would prove to be and how right Rolling Thunder actually was—that the experience I wanted was not an experience that came easy.

20

Our neighbors have roosters, and being a light sleeper, those roosters often get me out of bed around 4:00 a.m. At that dark hour, the world works a little slowly. It's hard to remember key facts, like which dog had eaten something unusual the day before, like where that dog had slept, like turn on the lights before you walk through the living room. Cleaning dog shit out from between your toes before there's been time to drink a cup of coffee is the kind of thing that takes the shine off the search for the meaning of life right quick.

So frequent is this occurrence that dog rescuers have a term for it: “shit foot.” Over the summer, on those mornings I got “shit-footed,” I could treat the experience as part of the adventure, maybe not the best part, but rationalizable nonetheless. I knew that one of the main reasons older dogs get dumped at the pound is an inability to control their bowels. And few want to adopt a dog that craps all over the house. In the real world, shit foot is a terminal offense. So that first summer, there was a rebel pride here: I could take it—other people could not.

I started to change my mind a few weeks after our wedding. There had been a stretch of too many messy mornings in a row and pride was no longer cutting it. After six months of squish, the thrill was gone. This wasn't an adventure, this was a routine. And since Joy had committed her life to doing dog rescue and I had just committed my life to her, this was going to remain my routine for quite a while.

That was a mistake. You can't crack a door like that without further repercussions. I started to notice all the other times the dogs interfered with my life. Reading, for example, has long been one of my great pleasures. But these days, the moment I stretched out with a good book, five dogs would land atop me. As they all wanted to be petted, their goal was to put themselves directly between my hands—which is exactly where my book needed to go. I could ignore them, throw them to the floor, or lock them out of the room, but then guilt set in. We ran a dog rescue; our commitment was rehabilitation, and that required affection. Was I really going to be that selfish? I didn't want to be that selfish; I wanted to be that selfish; was this even selfishness at all? I was paying the bills and needed to read for work. So reading was critical, right? But was it more critical than a dog's recovery? Guilt became resentment, and resentment, as I would soon realize, often presages disaster.

There's not much margin for error in dog rescue. Oversights compound quickly. Take dog food. The good stuff costs sixty bucks a bag, the cheaper variations around twenty. One of the reasons I spent five hundred dollars a month on good food is because bad food often causes allergies in dogs. We had old dogs, sick dogs, and scared dogs—all with weakened immune systems—so either I spent the money up front on quality chow or I spent the money on the back end on medical bills. But with the still faltering economy and my savings account getting low, how to sort such priorities became another concern. Suddenly I was back where I started when I started with Ahab: surrounded by ethical questions with no easy answers.

Then a series of late fall thunderstorms washed away some of our driveway and left a hole beneath the front gate big enough for a dog to slip through. I noticed the gap when heading into town to buy—of all things—more dog food. I didn't want to be bothered, so decided to fix it when I got back. But buying dog food reminded me of all the other things I wasn't buying because I was buying dog food. The house was still half furnished, we hadn't been out to dinner in months, we couldn't afford to go on a honeymoon. By the time I made it back home I was definitely not going to fix that hole until I was good and ready. It was Monday night. Instead, I was going to sit down and watch football—just try to stop me.

Sometime in the first quarter, Otis discovered the hole. We found him not long after halftime, whimpering on the front stoop. He looked like he'd gotten up close and personal with the business end of an ice pick. There was blood on his paws and deep gashes over much of his body and Hugo, who went everywhere with Otis, was also missing. Bull terriers have incredible pain tolerances. It takes a certain kind of know-how to mess one up this bad. Hugo, on the other hand, was a Chihuahua.

Guilt got me out the door in an instant. It was pitch black and pouring rain, and I was underdressed and sprinting into canyon country. The Anasazi once made their home in the canyon country surrounding my house, and what happened to them remains anyone's guess. Six hundred and fifty years ago one of the earliest known North American civilization disassembled itself. Major religious centers were pulled apart. Doorways sealed with rock and mortar. Gigantic kivas—the central chapels of the Anasazi church—had their roofs peeled off and their interiors scorched by fire. Whole cities were abandoned. Then the Anasazi themselves vanished completely. But as I found out that night, disappearing into the desert of the Southwest is not nearly the trick many suspect.

I had never been back into those canyons during a thunderstorm before and probably won't be again. The high cliff walls were saturated with water and bleeding mud and rock and stone and shrubs and bushes and whatever else could be tugged free. Long-dry arroyos had turned into raging rivers. Being out there was dumb and dangerous and I should have gone home. But how could I go home? Instead, I tried hunting up one of those arroyos, a trail Hugo and I often hiked. Canyoneers use the term
slot
to describe canyons where the walls are close enough to touch with both hands. The canyon I was hiking started out wide, grew narrower, and then became a slot. I was somewhere between the narrows and the slot and the bottom was already a deep, churning muck. Not wanting to find out how deep, I was clinging to the bank and rounding a corner when I glanced up and saw a piñon tree riding a thick wave of water out of that slot and straight at my head.

I remember diving off the bank and into the muck. Something flipped me over and something shot up my nose. My shoulder smashed a rock, my body caught the current, and I'm pretty sure I was swept down five flights of stairs. I'm dead certain I landed on a prickly pear cactus. There were spines in my legs, arms, and back, but the new perch afforded a good view upriver. I couldn't see Hugo but could clearly make out the piñon tree wedged between rock walls, right about where I'd been standing only moments before.

It was a long trudge back to the house. I spent most of that slog trying to figure out how to tell Joy a dog was dead because I decided to watch a football game. As it turned out, I didn't have to. Hugo made it home alive, though he'd arrived in considerably worse shape than me. There was a long gash over his left eye, another down his back, and bite marks nearly everywhere else. Whatever he and Otis had encountered, it was bigger than a breadbox.

I fixed the driveway the next morning, then set out to source the source of their assault. Over the next few weeks, I discovered that farmers in Chimayo love to speculate about the weird shit that comes out of the night to maul the dog.

“It's a badger,” said Raul.

“Wild boar,” said Frank.

“Old man Caldron,” said Pablo, “you know, when he's drunk.”

Kerry thought extraterrestrials; Arturo suspected Chupacabra. I didn't know whom to believe.

After a while, Doc set us straight.

“Bobcat,” she said, “big mama of a bobcat.”

A bobcat? Who gets mauled by a bobcat? And in the face of that, seriously, it's hard to believe I was ever concerned about dog shit.

21

There's no real way to tell the truth about northern New Mexico without telling the truth about northern New Mexico. To be blunt: it's very weird here. To be clear: not in the way you think. I don't just mean the heroin dealers, outlaw bikers, UFO fanatics, conspiracy nuts, New Age astrologers, crystal healers, hippie communes, artist communes, alternative architects building recyclable castles out of straw and dung, and the large population of Catholic Penitentes who parade down the street Easter weekend, cat-o'-nine-tails in hand, flogging themselves as they go. I don't even mean my friend Matt, though Matt is a decent place to start.

I met Matt over the summer. I needed to run electricity to an outbuilding and that meant I needed to dig a trench—four feet deep and one foot wide and two hundred feet long—through dense clay and hard stone. Certainly there are machines for such madness. The machine is appropriately called a trencher and looks a lot like a six-foot chain saw strapped to a dishwasher. Running a trencher is akin to bronco busting and, after two days of it, despite the pair of sturdy work gloves I wore out along the way, I'd still managed to peel most of the flesh off both my hands. Worse, the trench was not yet complete. What was left was the delicate shovel work. By delicate I mean there were phone lines and gas pipes that needed to be avoided; by work I mean a good seventy feet of digging. With my flayed hands, there wasn't much I could do, so at the suggestion of a friend I hired Matt, though I didn't yet know him as Matt. I was just given a phone number and a title.

“Call the number,” my friend had said. “Ask for the Human Steam Shovel.”

The Human Steam Shovel earned his nickname by being able to dig holes for days straight. If you've never dug a hole before, this may not seem like much of a talent, but there is very little in the way of work that is more difficult than punching a shovel through soil, and there are very few alive who can do this without pause for hours, let alone days on end. Matt did not tire. He dug and dug and dug—or that was the rumor. I was having a little trouble confirming the rumor because Matt was having a little trouble deciding if he wanted to work for me. The problem was not that he didn't need the work. The very first thing he said to me—after telling me that I could call him Matt instead of the Human Steam Shovel—was that he was completely broke and running out of food and thank God I called.

I told him I would both feed him and pay him and perhaps we could start on Thursday.

“You mean this Thursday?” said Matt, “two days from now?”

I told him that was what I meant, and he told me that was a bad day.

“So you can't work on Thursday?”

“No, I can't work, you can't work, no one can work on Thursday—it's a bad day.”

“Well, um, bad how?”

Apparently, and the mythology got pretty confusing pretty quickly, Thursday was a bad day on the Sumerian calendar, which is technically known as the Umma calendar, which dates to the twenty-first century BCE. Anyway, as far as Thursday was concerned, the stars were misaligned and the timing inauspicious. The only thing I could think to say was: “You're starving, but you're turning down food and cash because of a calendar that's been out of date for four thousand years?”

“Dude,” he said, “you need to understand how things work around here.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, “you betcha.”

Matt went on to explain that there's a power here, in the land itself, some ancient juju to be respected but never understood. No one can quite explain it, but Matt said the closest he could come was “emotional amplifier.”

“A what?”

“Like whatever you're feeling at the time, the landscape magnifies exponentially.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, “you betcha.”

As it turns out, Friday was a fine day to dig trenches, so Matt came over then. As advertised, he dug for two days straight, and that was that. I probably wouldn't have given his warning another thought except for the plumber and what happened after the plumber and, well, you'll just have to judge for yourself.

I hired the plumber to help me fix my septic tank in the weeks right after the bobcat attack. He showed up and told us what most people tell us when they first show up at our house—that he had relatives who used to live in our house. This story is a little more straightforward: Chimayo is a small town and our house has a long history. It was built in the late nineteenth century, and just about everybody who lives in the area knows someone who used to live here. The father of the favorite aunt of the guy who sells us goat meat—a very special treat for the dogs. The sister of the cousin of our postman. And, of course, the plumber, who mentioned that his great-great-great-grandmother had given birth in the room that is now Joy's office. He also mentioned that the baby died at birth and they buried his body in “the old way.”

I didn't know what the old way was, but had visions of Joy heading into the backyard to plant cucumbers and accidentally digging up a corpse. He shook his head, then walked over to my living room wall and slapped a palm against it.

“The body's buried here,” he said. “That's the old way.”

The whole story is that back in the day, when a baby died and a house was under construction, the body was entombed in the foundation.

“It's to ward off bad luck,” said the plumber.

“You sure? 'Cause it sounds like the kind of thing that might bring on bad luck.”

“Don't say that.”

“Huh?”

“Don't think about bad luck, don't mention bad luck. Don't you know there's a power here?”

Which is when I remembered Matt's warning.

“You mean the emotional amplifier? You think that's real?”

“Just wait,” he said, “just wait.”

As it turns out, we didn't have long to wait. Come late October, for the first time since we'd left California, the isolation of Chimayo was starting to get to me. Some of this may have been the coming of winter: the branches going bare, the thick clouds settling over the mountains, the desolation of a dying landscape. Most of it was that we'd been gone from Los Angeles about eight months, which was more than enough time for friendships to begin to fade. Most of the folks we knew in California had already stopped asking when we were coming back to California. By now they'd concluded that as rash as our move to Chimayo had appeared, our return was not imminent. Out of sight and out of mind and outside of my parents, by the end of October our phone had mostly stopped ringing. So I was feeling isolated and lonely, and something—something started to amplify that.

It started slowly. It started with the mail. After six months of perfect delivery service, our box stayed empty. No bills, no letters, not even a bundle of coupons for the grocery store. Either the post office was losing our mail or no one in California could forward it. Forms were filled out and phone calls made, but nothing seemed to help. Our cells never could get a signal in Chimayo, so those calls were made via our landline. But two days after our mail vanished, the city started repairing our road and—since the phone company had buried its cables directly beside that road—those workers started accidentally cutting our land line along the way. Every cut took a few days to repair and since cuts were a daily occurrence we lost our phones not long after we lost our mail.

Then our computers went on the fritz. Joy's went on Tuesday and mine went on Thursday. This shouldn't have been much of a bother, except we couldn't find a Mac repair shop within a hundred miles—so unless I wanted to drive to Albuquerque we had to ship our computers back to Apple for repairs. To make this happen, Apple needed to ship us a very specific box. Something about the warranty, but without that box they wouldn't fix the machines. Unfortunately, the only carrier Apple worked with at the time was DHL, and DHL wouldn't deliver to our area. So no DHL meant no repairs, and that meant no e-mail as well.

Our remaining lines of connection to the outside world became an old television set and a couple of carrier services. The TV sat in our living room, in the middle of a large table. The reception was poor in our area, so none of the standard channels came in. We didn't have cable, but the TV had a built-in DVD player and we used it to watch movies. Or we did until that Amityville night, when Joy pushed the power button and the set jumped straight up into the air, shot a foot forward, and crashed on the ground between her feet. I was standing two feet away at the time and saw the whole episode, and the only thing I can say is that with a dead baby in the walls, what the hell else would you expect?

This was followed by a freak heat wave, some global warming foreshock that only lasted five days but pushed temperatures into the nineties. In the middle of those days, Joy went into town to run errands and I decided to take a nap. As it was hot as hell in the house, I went to bed naked. Sometime not long afterward, the dogs started barking. As the dogs often bark while we sleep, I've learned which sounds to ignore. This bark was none of those. It was a tone used to signal real trouble. I heard their alarm, jumped out of bed, grabbed the closest available weapon, and dashed to the front door. I got two steps outside before I realized I was both brandishing an umbrella and not wearing any clothes. Until I bumped into our delivery woman at the supermarket a few months later and explained the situation, that was the last we saw of FedEx.

The next morning I asked Joy if she thought something was trying to sever our connections to the outside world.

“Well,” she said, “there's still UPS.”

Dog number thirteen was named Bella Chupacabra, with
Bella
being Italian for “pretty” and
Chupacabra
being Spanish for “the dreaded goat-sucker.” Our pretty, dreaded goat-sucker was all muscle, all black, part heeler, part pit bull, and very protective—as our UPS driver soon found out the hard way. Bella bit him four days after I answered the door naked, and that was the end of that. I had started out lonely and ended up completely cut off. By early November, it was just us and the dogs and alone on the island—and that's when things got even stranger.