I squirmed out of the sleeping bag and slipped into my windbreaker, patting the pockets to make sure the camera and the Altoids tin were there.
Oppie, curled in a little ball at the foot of Kitty’s bag, looked up and wagged his tail. I made easy-boy gestures and clipped the leash to his travel collar. If I didn’t take Oppie he would whine and wake Kitty.
I unzipped the tent flap and stepped outside into my shoes.
The dark campground was quiet, the only sounds the crickets, my footfall through the brush, and the tinkling of Oppie’s tags. We followed an unmarked trail out the back of the overflow parking lot. I took Oppie’s leash off and we labored up the steep slope from the lake. The chirping of the crickets became louder.
What starlight made it through the trees kept us on a footpath that ended at a wire fence about a quartermile into the woods. I spent a minute feeling my way around the edge of the forest. Behind the broken branch of a ponderosa pine I found the cattle gate. I went over and Oppie went under.
I flicked the lighter beneath a sign nailed high to the side of a tall aspen:
Aplanado
. Sucking the makeshift bandage on my hand for a taste of the scotch, I dug in my pocket for the Altoids tin, took out a joint, and lit it.
It was a narrow dirt road, packed earth winding potholed between ancient trees. It had been here before horses and wagons. It had been here before the original Indian trail, when barefoot traders and skin-shod scouts beat the prairie grass to dust. It had been here before deer and elk carved the contours of a trail for its proximity to water. It went from nowhere to nowhere.
I smoked and walked between the ruts while Oppie sniffed around the overgrowth at the edges. The road humped at a spot where a culvert had been installed to allow an irrigation ditch to cross under. Water trickled through the metal ribs of the corrugated pipe.
There was no moon. Only starlight reflected off the scarred faces of mountain peaks in the distance. I had a feeling that the road might dead-end any second, but then the tree cover broke open onto a dark valley.
It’s the only place in that valley, right after the bend in the old road.
I took one last hit of the joint, plucked the roach into the ditch, and kept going in the direction of the peaks, where eventually the road dwindled to scratches in the granite.
I came upon the bend at the edge of a pasture and caught a glimpse of a rusted roof. At the bottom of an overgrown drive lay the house, its back turned to the world. No sign read
No Trespassing
, but everything about the place said
Keep Out
: cattle wire all around, ragweed higher than my head, no lights, not a sound.
I climbed over the gate, walking through waist-high cheat grass along a mud drive cut into two deep furrows by centuries of truck and wagon wheels, and the shoulder of the house came into view with its hulking, twisted walls of crumbling adobe. I was high and I was horny, and the house was just as she had described it. I followed the drive around the side and Oppie sniffed away into a thick hedgerow.
The front of the house was L-shaped, one long, straight section of sagging mud rooms with an addition of rough timber protruding from the end. The boardedup windows made me think of a face bandaged after a beating.
An open portal on the inside of the L, with its bowed posts and peeled-back tin roofing, wasn’t doing much to hold up the rooms. The decking was riddled with splintered, rotting boards. A porch swing hung from rusty chains, hopelessly desolate on the threshold of this ruin.
As a precaution I grunted, “Hello.” Silence. I stepped onto the portal and looked through the slats on the boarded windows.
The heart of the house was dark. I hadn’t brought a flashlight, but I did have the camera. I held it at arm’s length through the slats and fired the flash on the abandoned room, burning a brief image of squalor into my retina: floor covered with empty bottles and trash, planks full of jagged holes, and, in the corner, a discarded mattress blackened with filth, moldy stuffing erupting from a gash in its side.
Nothing was happening. Nobody home.
I am one hundred miles from Los Alamos—two hundred miles by road—and eight thousand feet lowdown in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. Is it because I thought that a bunch of horny girls were going to be around here getting drunk without any guys their own age? Because I thought that I was going to bust out a joint and they were going to get uninhibited? Because I thought I was going to take pictures of it all? I did think that. Something about the way she said,
We should hook up.
On the other side of this barren peak, back up on the Hill, I would be watching Letterman about now, actually half-watching and half-wishing I had porn channels, while Kitty lies curled up with flatulent Oppie on the far side of the king-size, springless, formaldehyde-free mattress.
A pudgy blood tech in black scrubs shakes her ass at me, and I drag wife and dog on a miserable camping trip without provisions on a slim-to-none hunch. I set up a tent beside a remote hellhole on Fourth of July so I can sneak out to a house, an abandoned house, on a thin whiff of the possibility of
hooking up
where I wouldn’t even have given a second look twenty years ago.
I held the camera out to take a picture of myself. The flash hit me full in the face.
This is to remind you what a loser looks like.
I decided I might as well take a closer look.
I should have felt fear, I know, in the face of the still, dark house. The front door had been removed altogether and the entryway was a gaping hole.
It was pitch-black inside with all the windows boarded up. But when I stepped across the threshold I felt an instant, soporific comfort. There was a sudden drop of pressure in my chest accompanied by a great fatigue. I couldn’t say what about the place made me feel as though my system was suddenly going to sleep, made me wish there was a chair to sit in.
I fired the flash into the other rooms. The first was actually an attached log cabin that hadn’t been chinked in decades, gaps between the logs big enough to stick your hand through. Of the six adobe rooms, five connected end-to-end with no doors on the passages between them. But at the entrance to the last room, a heavy wooden door was deadbolted.
I wondered about the people who had lived here. These houses, these old adobes, were originally oneroom dwellings. People ate and washed, slept, fucked, shat in the pot, gave birth, and died all between the same four walls.
It was only when the oldest son grew up that they converted a window on one end into a door or broke through a wall shotgun-style and added three more. The young man and his new wife moved into the next room, which they in turn filled with children, and the cycle began again.
In warmer months, the cooking and washing took place outside and naturally so did most of the work: farming, herding, and gathering the next winter’s wood, a chore that began early in spring, as soon as the snow had melted from the last winter.
At eight thousand feet, winters lasted half the year—long, monotonous battles of resistance against the snow, the cold, the wind, the dark. The women melted snow in iron pots and cooked dried meat, chiles, beans, hominy. For six frigid months the families slept long hours, played tired games, told stories, and never let the fire go out.
I walked back out on the portal, heard Oppie rustling in the dark trees, and whistled low. “C’mere, boy.”
He came out of the hedge dragging a plastic bag around his neck.
“Oppie, what the fuck did you get into?”
It was a large shopping bag, not quickie-mart sized but the kind you’d get at a department store.
“Drop!” He did not drop. “Drop, Oppie!” He could not drop. He had somehow gotten his pointy head through both handles, and now the bag was slung around his neck.
I bent over Oppie and he had a bizarre look in his eyes. I took the bag off his neck and felt that it was heavy. Oppie scrambled away.
I opened the bag and held the camera inside. The lighted display shone on an intricate pattern. I felt the lining of my throat thicken. Inside the bag were bones—not from a chicken or pig, but large bones, a tangle of eight or more.
I threw the bag back into the weeds and peered around the overgrown yard. The sagebrush and ragweed glowed dimly in the starlight. A cricket chirped loudly near my feet.
“Come on, Oppie, let’s get back to the campground.”
We walked back the way we had come.
When we got to the campground Kitty was still asleep. Oppie followed me into the tent and curled up at her feet. I slid quietly into my sleeping bag and lay awake a long time.
I played the scene over and over in my head: Oppie dragging a bag of bones out of the thicket. Had there been someone out there? Oppie hadn’t growled. Could he have sniffed around in the brush, found the bag, and looped his head through the handles while trying to get at the contents? What kind of bones were they? Cow? Elk?
Toward dawn, with the crickets giving way to the birds, the insomnia yielded to a throbbing headache. I think of that dark hour waiting for sunrise—tossing in the sleeping bag, irritated by Oppie’s farts, and wincing against the migraine—as a kind of haven, a last quiet before I came to understand the nightmare I had stumbled into.
S
oon it was morning and kids were waking up at campsites all around us, laughing, screaming, jumping in the lake. It was a workday, but we were in no hurry. I had used a personal day to make my birthday a four-day weekend. Great expectations.
“This place is a dump,” I told Kitty after taking Oppie for his walk. “Let’s go home.”
“You drag me way the fuck out here in the sticks and now you want to leave already?”
“There’s no coffee and I have a headache.”
“You and your goddamn headaches.”
We packed out what we packed in and rattled back out of Morphy Lake State Park over that abysmal road, Kitty and I stewing in silence while Oppie stewed noisily.
When we got down from Ledoux, I made a left onto 518, pulled into the Mustang in Mora, and got some awful coffee. We crossed the mountains through Carson National Forest, blowing by Tres Ritos and Sipapu. I made a left onto 75 in Vadito, taking the winding state highway through Peñasco and Dixon.
Today is 7/5, you’re going seventy-five on 75, and you just turned forty years old.
I made a left onto 68 in Embudo and we snaked through the canyon. We climbed out at Velarde and motored across the hot valley of Alcalde, then got onto 30 in Española and made our way through Santa Clara and San Ildefonso. We climbed 502 back up the Hill, all the way home Kitty’s silent treatment accusing me:
Why didn’t we stay in a hotel? We don’t have to be camping. We have money.
I am a reporter, among the best in the in-house publishing industry. I could be doing interviews for
Vogue
or
Vanity Fair
, but after the last wave of layoffs I decided to weather the recession on the richest hill in America, Los Alamos, writing profiles for
Surge
, the Lab’s employee magazine. How many places in the world can a writer take frequent afternoons off and they still pay him enough to keep a restored Spider on the road?
I had the contract, the health plan, cost-of-living increases, grade-level adjustments, pay raises, bonuses, and the 401(k), on top of which I had already saved six figures.
When we got home, Kitty took Oppie for a walk on Pajarito Road.
I had agreed to a dog on the condition that it be a Basenji. I read somewhere that purebred Basenjis don’t bark. Oppie didn’t have to. Even though his low growl was barely audible over the hum of the refrigerator, he skittered around crazily on the linoleum whenever anyone came to the door, and that was enough watchdog for Los Alamos, where a lot of people don’t even bother to lock their doors.
From the day we brought Oppie home, he had been surprisingly well mannered—except for the containment issue. But with the invisible fence he was adapting.
I took my statins and checked the cut on my hand. It was sore, but on the surface it didn’t look so bad. I discarded the duct-taped tissue and dressed the wound with a sterile gauze pad.
I caught the weekend highlights on Golf Network while Kitty chopped Oppie some sirloin and popped a frozen pizza in the oven for us. I sat on the couch and she took the easy chair. More silent treatment while we watched a rerun of
Sex in the City.
Remember when we used to watch TV together and cuddle on the couch and she would stroke my forearm, how I actually used to feel that? Now I don’t feel anything at all. It’s like it all happens in a movie, detached, without sensation. Why is that?
We polished off a bottle of good Shiraz with a couple of thin slices of pizza apiece. I scraped the cheese off mine. I had to watch the HDLs and the LDLs. We want to see the one go up and the other go down, said Dr. Hank, just like the scales of justice. I gave the crusts to Oppie. Back when Kitty and I used to speak to each other, we would call these pizza bones.
At bedtime Kitty went upstairs, popped an Ambien, and climbed under the covers, Oppie curling up at her feet.
I programmed Mr. Coffee and went upstairs to lie beside Kitty for a minute. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, the Ambien would make her pliant, but tonight she was all elbows.
When I got the job in Los Alamos, the real-estate agent had left Kitty and me alone in this bedroom to share our images of the future together. Kitty tickled my ribs. Can we really afford it? Of course not, but that never stops anyone. This was 2007, and as long as you kept your credit somewhat clean, a broker could get you a loan based on stated income.
In better days we had lain side-by-side in the showroom on the king-size, springless, formaldehyde-free mattress, giggling and selecting our own Sleep Numbers. We bought king-size for luxury, but now when I tried getting close to her, all that size felt like we were in two beds, separated by a red zone in the middle that neither of us crossed with even a stray hand or foot.