10.
THE SOUND OF DRILLS AND THE SMELL OF FRESH PAINT. We were turning that gray live/work space into a bright candle shop/veterinary clinic/writing studio at trainspeed. With a little bit of profit from selling your beiged-up house by the train tracks and a Home Depot credit card, it turns out you can build a quick life anywhere you like.
We moved what was left of our belongings – carloads of clothes and the furniture my mother hadn’t burned – into the studio apartment and a storage unit down the street.
I bought New Mexican cookbooks from Collected Works Bookstore and shopped for the ingredients at Sunflower Market. Blue corn flour, pinto beans, and red and green chile – I could feed my little family on the cheap here.
Everything was sunshine and transience.
Maia had found a job at a shoe store at the mall, was saving up to get herself back to Los Angeles and college in time for summer session. She showed up at the half-finished live/work space her first day off wearing baggy jeans and high-heeled boots and we put Maxito’s car seat in the back of the Oldsmobile and left Sol to paint things blue and the three of us drove off over a speed bump to pretend this new life was something normal.
At the farmer’s market at the railyard we stocked up on kale and apricots, green chile mustard and red chile raspberry jam. Maxito tapped his foot, tried to sing along with the one-man band – a bejangled old guy who played his accordion and twanged Loretta Lynn and Drifters songs.
“Santa Fe is cute,” Maia promised. “When I first got here I was like, Why have I even heard of this town? It’s nowhere. But it’s all right.”
ALL OVER TOWN, plaques and monuments bragged that Santa Fe was the oldest capital city in the United States, the oldest European city west of the Mississippi, home of the oldest public building and the oldest community celebration – a merry autumn fiesta commemorating colonialism and reconquest. We laughed at the signs. They may as well have just said, Eat it, New England. The streets had names like Avenida Cristóbal Colón and Paseo de la Conquistadora.
Maia had hoped to convince my mother to come with us to the hot springs an hour out of town, but my mother said she didn’t have time. Maia shrugged. “Who needs miraculous healing waters when you can shop for tile with Ronaldo?”
No matter. I was happy to spend the day alone with my two kids who hardly ever got to spend a day together.
We drove the old highway south out of town, listening to the Native radio station that played songs about dusty dashboards and expired tags. Maxito pointed out cactuses and giant birds as we cruised through half-ghost towns with their abandoned mines and their Old West art and anarchy. We circled back north, past the casinos and the sandstone rock formations, through the towns full of double-wides with low riders and old luxury sedans parked out front.
We crossed the Rio Grande and then the Chama, those red-brown rivers still rushing from the spring’s late snowfalls.
The three of us had never been some idyllic family in a soft-focus Sears portrait, but I appreciated the ease of no-held-breath in Gammie’s old car, no insults and nothing burning. Just Maia driving, Maxito babbling his Spanglish and counting cacti from the back seat, and me watching out the window, that desert highway dotted with cemeteries and wooden crosses decorated with plastic flowers.
We got to Ojo Caliente in the blue heat of afternoon and Maia and I took turns soaking in the arsenic tubs and playing with Maxito in the lithium swimming pool where he was allowed to float and laugh far away from the relaxing yuppies with their eye pillows.
“These are our Native waters,” a woman in the lithium pool was saying. Her grandson bobbed up and down next to her. “It’s offensive that these white people from San Francisco with their Kokopelli tattoos claim to ‘own’ it. They charge us twenty dollars to get in and tell us we can’t bring our children?”
Her friend sat poolside, feet grazing the water’s surface. She pointed her middle finger toward the main office behind us. “Kokopelli this, bitches.”
We laughed, and it all seemed so normal – this world of blatant conquest and rebellious submission.
Maxito stuck his face in the water and blew bubbles.
“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” Maia whispered as she approached.
It was. Beautiful.
Afternoon faded into evening and Maia took Maxito into the restaurant for a buffalo burger while I soaked the last of the day away alone in the arsenic tub, watching the cliff swallows dart overhead while stars began to appear, at first one by one, all bright and quiet in the darkening sky, then as if by the hundreds.
IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE, how many stars. I held my breath and wished on the falling ones and almost thought that something important and holy was about to happen to us. Almost had the nerve to hope. But right there on the verge of hope I felt the muscles around my heart contract and I felt something more like panic. All those stars.