Perdido. Rick Collignon
good hour of driving. Will leaned back low in the seat and lit a cigarette. He cracked open the window and watched the draft pull the smoke from the cab. He thought that since coming to New Mexico, he had spent half his life in the cab of a truck.
Felipe took his eyes off the road. He could see that Will’s head moved with the motion of the truck and that his eyes were closed. “When we get to the bridge,” he said, “if it’s still raining, we’re turning back.”
“I’d hate to have to do this again tomorrow,” Will said, his eyes still shut.
Felipe grunted and looked back at the road. It was raining harder. “Don’t think you’re going to sleep on this ride either, jodido,” he said.
They had worked together for nine years. For a little while, at the beginning, they had been polite and careful with each other. But now, after so long, it seemed that all they did was argue like viejas. Felipe knew that this was not his doing and wondered how someone as even-tempered as he had come to have two wives who each took a great deal of pleasure in telling him what to do.
“You know why this lady wants a price?” he said. “So she can get her brother or her tio or some other relative to do it for less.”
The sky became gray, light enough now that they could see the flatness of the land stretched out between the two mountain ranges, the Sangre de Cristos behind them and to the west the low, barren hills of the San Juans. They drove by some old fence lines and a ruin that was no more than a stone foundation and a pile of rocks that had once been a chimney. Felipe wondered why anyone would choose to live out here, where winter was too long and the wind always blew and nothing grew but sagebrush and sparse grass cropped short by generations of cattle. The road was beginning to rise gradually, and Felipe knew that just over the next hill it would dip down to the river. “Finally,” he thought.
Las Manos Bridge spanned maybe eighty feet of river. The Rio Grande hadn’t gouged out the terrain here as it had farther south but flowed slow and steady. The bridge was built with heavy steel trestles above and below, the roadway lined with thick planks that jarred loose when a vehicle passed over them. The trestles were dripping with rain; the steel was dull black.
Felipe stopped the truck in the middle of the bridge and shut off the engine. Will could see that Felipe’s eyes were bloodshot. From driving, from not enough sleep, from too many beers the night before, he didn’t know.
“What do you think?” Felipe asked.
“I think you were right,” Will said. “This is a bad idea.”
“Now you say that. We can go on if you want.”
Will shook his head. “You want to stay here and talk about this, don’t you?”
Felipe grinned and then leaned against the truck door, pushing it open. “Eee,” he said, “it’s probably a sunny day in Guadalupe. The rain sitting out here.” He climbed out of the pickup, walked to the edge of the bridge, and began urinating in the river. Out the driver’s door past Felipe, Will could see that the river was running high and muddy, rain spitting against the surface. Felipe said something to him in Spanish that he didn’t catch.
“My father’s neighbor calls this place puente de la niña,” Felipe said then, “and he says if you want to fish in the river, fish somewhere else.”
Will shook his head and smiled. “I didn’t get that,” he said.
Once, for two weeks, Felipe had refused to speak anything but Spanish to Will. Both thought this would be a good idea, as Will would thus learn a language spoken by everyone, but after the two weeks had passed, Felipe gave up in frustration. While it was true Will learned the words quickly, it was also true that when he spoke, his speech was so slow and out of cadence that Felipe would close his eyes and smile with feigned patience, wishing his friend would shut up and speak English. He thought there must be a part of Will’s brain either underdeveloped or missing altogether.
“I will never understand,” Felipe said, “how anyone could be here so long and know so little. Niña is girl, a young girl, but what my father’s neighbor means it to be is ‘dead girl.’” He zipped up his pants, came back to the truck, and leaned against the cab. His hair was black and wet with rain. His face was a little puffy but clean shaven and deep brown now from the summer.
“Puente is bridge,” he went on. “Bridge of the dead girl. Puente de la niña. He found a dead girl, a gringa, out here hanging from one of the beams. So he named this place after her.”
Will got out of the pickup and faced Felipe across the hood. The rain was falling heavily enough that he could feel it through his shirt. He looked up at the dark trestles.
“Some white girl hung herself out here?” he said.
Felipe shrugged. “That’s what I heard.”
Will looked back at him. “Damn,” he said. “What a place for her to be. So when did this happen? Yesterday or a long time ago?”
Felipe grimaced and blew air out of his mouth. “Twenty, twenty-five years ago, I think. Maybe a little longer. I was still in school. I forget how old.”
“I never heard this story. I’ve been here a long time, but I never heard this story.”
Felipe pushed himself off the side of the pickup. “So?” he said. “You think you should know the whole history of a place after just a few years? Besides, it’s just a story, Will. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Will said. “It’s just that there’s nothing out here.” He looked past Felipe. On the west side of the river, the earth was churned up where cattle had come to drink, the river beginning to cut into the clumps of mud, rising with the rain. Beyond that there wasn’t much to see. Flat land with sagebrush and a sky that sat low with clouds. He looked up again at the trestles dripping with rain and thought that if he were to close his eyes, he would almost see her.
Felipe straightened up and moved his shoulders back and forth. He ran a hand through his hair, squeezing out the rain so it dripped down the back of his shirt. He shivered and thought that he did not need to catch a cold in July. “It was a long time ago, Will,” he said. “Come on, let’s get out of here and go home.”
They drove back the way they had come. Felipe dropped Will off at his house and then went home. He hoped his children were still asleep and that his wife, Elena, was still in bed and would be happy to see him. Will took the Lady out of the wall and spent the day with her, staring at the rain and thinking about a gringa hanging by herself from Las Manos Bridge.
Telesfor Ruiz, Will Sawyer’s only neighbor, died in his bed of old age just a year after Will came to Guadalupe. Telesfor lived in the adobe his father had built, a couple of hundred yards from Will’s house. After Telesfor’s death, his relatives, who no longer lived in Guadalupe, came and buried him. They emptied his house and his sheds, hauling away even the old man’s cookstove. They sold his sheep and three head of cattle to the Medina family. Then they boarded up the two small windows in the house, nailed shut the door, and went back to where they had come from. Will never knew what happened to Telesfor’s dog, which was small and twisted with age and no longer barked at anything.
The first time Will met Telesfor, he had been in Guadalupe only a few weeks and knew no one. He had spent that time alone, working on his house and wondering what he was doing in a place where people looked at you as if you weren’t there and almost always spoke in a language in which all the words sounded alike. One afternoon, he had walked to Telesfor’s house and found the old man sitting on a stool beneath his portal. Telesfor invited him inside for coffee, and they sat awkwardly at the kitchen table for a long time. Finally, as if from nowhere, Telesfor told him that one winter when he was a small boy, the snowfall had been so heavy that all of the roofs in Guadalupe collapsed on the same night. When he woke, he said, there was mud and water in his bed and he could not feel his feet. All he could see above him was falling snow and