An excerpt from a novel in progress with the working title of Santa Fe
© 1996 Mark Seymour

Santa Fe

I got the call just after I woke up. It was her, all the way from the next room. "Are you awake yet?"

Looking down at the rapidly falling tent in the sheets, left over from a dream about some lucious blonde whose name I couldn't remember, I nodded. "I am now."

"I need to ask you a favor..."

She sounded hestitant. Knowing what I didn't know about her and her condition, whatever this was about, it wasn't going to be easy for her. "At your service, ma'am."

"Did your mother teach you to talk like that?"

"Yes, ma'am." I chuckled. "And Gunnery Sergeant Fitzgerald."

"Well, did your sergeant ever teach you how to take a shower?"

I shrugged. This conversation was getting weirder by the minute. "Even taught me how to wash behind my ears."

"Good." I heard a big inhale through the phone; this was the hard part, whatever it was. "Then could you come help me take a shower?" When I hesitated she jumped right into the silence, talking fast. "Look, I know this is not what you thought I hired you to do but my friend, the one you're taking me to in New Mexico, well, she's been helping me for a long time, so I'd normally have her around to help but since she's there and not here I can't do this on my own and, even with the air conditioning, a couple days without a shower and I..."

I only yelled to get her to shut up, then spoke softly to get that panicked edge out of her voice. "No problem. I'll be there in a bit, and we'll work this out."

The long silence worried me, but when she spoke her voice was almost normal again. "Thank you." Another big inhale, followed by a really big exhale of relief. "When this is all over, I hope we can still be friends." The phone click was almost imperceptible.

Hell, when this was over, we'd probably have to get engaged. And her parents weren't liable to like what she brought home, either. Rolling out of bed, I headed into the bathroom and, while pissing away what little was left of my hard-on, had a long talk with myself in the mirror, starting with What have you got yourself into now? and ending up with And what are your going to do about it?

When I walked up to the connecting door, I still didn't know for sure.

...

Max Boudreaux is my doppelganger, that evil twin everyone has somewhere. Mine is from New Orleans. Over an omelette, Max smiled that twisted grin of his, reminiscing. "I took this jeune fille home from Bourbon Street late one Friday night... Ah, Lord, we did ever' thin' a man an' a woman can do, in ever' place a man can put it, all the weekend. But come Sunday mornin' she got me up powerful early, insistin' I take her home right then, you see. Didn't want to be late to church, that girl. Had to clear her conscience wit' God, I suppose. But I know I was featured in her confession, ohhh, I tell you me."

Max had been running a bait shop, down to Key West, the last time I'd seen him. There he'd also been in what the locals, referred to as conchs, called the 'square grouper' trade, running bales of marijuana in at night from the big boats offshore. Just driving the hellishly-fast cigarette boats over the reefs, loaded with illegal cargo, was dangerous enough, but he'd had to get out of it, he said, when the Columbians moved in. Columbians would kill people over the most trivial things, or sometimes for no reason at all. A lot of them'd floated ashore amidst shoals of square grouper, after bad nights out in the channel.

But his gallery seemed to be doing well. Santa Fe operated, best I could tell, as one huge money extraction machine, funneling the tourists in one side of the Plaza, running them through the various parts of the machine, and sending them out the other side loaded down with trinkets and gewgaws, lighter by a few hundred or a few thousand dollars each, letting the Native Americans lined up under the eaves of the Palace across the way take the last of their money for handmade silver necklaces and earrings. Max was good at the process, able to keep up the right patter in his soft New Orleans accent for hours at a stretch, sweet-talking the women until they turned to their husbands with their hands out for the cash, or the traveller's checks, or the MasterCard. Because Max didn't take American Express, just like the ads said. They wanted too big a cut, he felt, and anyone who carried the green card almost always had a walletful of alternatives.

 

"Nice tits, eh, Jack?" Max eyed the good-looking blonde trapped in the chair, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like she'd never notice. "Would you ever fuck a woman in a wheelchair?" I shook my head. "Me neither." He shuddered. "Gives me the cold willies just thinkin' about it."

"I didn't say that."

He turned, surprised. "Didn't say what?"

"I didn't say I wouldn't fuck her. I just said I wouldn't fuck her in the chair."

"What're you sayin'?"

I smiled. "I fuck women in bed, Max. The only problem I can foresee is figuring some elegant way to get her out of the chair and into the bed."

He stared at me a long time. "You are one weird motherfucker, you know that?"

I nodded. "Coming from you, Max, that's a compliment. Now, would you like to buy the pretty lady a drink, or shall I?" 

... 

"What's happ'nin'?" Billy's grin, a line of white that seemed to stretch from ear to ear, appeared around the curtain.

Preroccupied with pulling my boot on, I jumped, then winced with the sudden pain. "Nothing much."

"Nothing much, the man says." Black Feather laughed. "I've seen you suit up in pain before, my white brother, and it was never for nothing much."

I nodded, caught out again. "Okay, it's party time."

"Really?" His face grew serious. "Is this a private party, or can anyone come?"

I shook my head, gently, for fear it would fall off. "It's not your fight, Billy."

"So?" His grin was back. "When was that ever a consideration?"

I thought back to innumerable nights on the border when we needed extra bodies, when the coyotes were flooding the line with illegals, and William Black had always been there, time after time, the same grin on his wide brown face. But I'd always felt there was more than simple devotion to duty hiding behind that smile. I nodded. "You know, I worked with this Samoan once..." I watched Billy's raven eyebrow ratchet upwards. "Yeah, a real Samoan, big as the side of a barn, and every Monday morning he'd come to work and tell these stories about how he'd gone over to one or another cousin's house and they, or their friends, or all of them and just some guys from down the street, they'd gotten into a fight." I shook my head. "Finally I had to ask him what the hell was going on. You know what he said?" Billy shrugged. "He said: 'Don't you know, brah? Samoans, they just love to fight.' And I wonder, my friend..." My eyebrow went up this time. "...is that how it is with you?"

"No." The famous Black Feather smile went pensive. "Let's just say that, deep down inside, I'm an Apache, one from the old days, and let it go at that."

I remembered why they called the desert below the Mescalero reservation the Jornada del Muerto. It wasn't just because of the harsh ecology; some of it was due to the welcome given to the Spanish by the original inhabitants. "Sure, as long as you remember that it was a different Jack Hayes, one from the old days, that was the Texas Ranger."

His laughter got us all the way out to the truck.

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