Mayor Cabrera reached up and removed the calendar from the basement wall. He folded it in half and put it in the trash. He remembered what was in his back pocket and pulled out a Christmas card from Ran. More garbage. It was a holiday card, no reference to Jesus, a photo of a farmhouse on the front. Ran had signed the card but hadn’t written anything personal. Mayor Cabrera couldn’t figure Ran out. He was some kind of well-meaning con man, but most people meant well and everyone was conning someone. Mayor Cabrera didn’t feel he could be conned, at this point. Or maybe he wanted to be conned, which made you immune.
There was a door at the back of the basement that led outside and Mayor Cabrera opened it and stepped out and folded his arms against the wind. It was a low wind, sweeping the desert floor, bothering Mayor Cabrera’s pant cuffs. It was coming from the Northwest, like the wind always seemed to this time of year. Mayor Cabrera’s stomach felt light and he could feel that he was grinding his teeth. It was his niece. Mayor Cabrera didn’t have a child of his own but he had a niece. His absence in her life was a great adult shortfall. Mayor Cabrera never thought this way, and his mind was in a quiet terror. There were the trappings of adulthood, which everyone wound up with, and then there was being an adult. Mayor Cabrera felt dizzy and widened his stance. He’d been managing the regret of neglecting his sister-in-law all these years, but he’d neglected his niece too. He’d held her when she was a baby, taken her for ice cream when she was a toddler, dropped her off at pee-wee soccer practice. And then he’d stopped. He’d bowed out. He’d resigned from unclehood. He closed his eyes for a time until his balance returned. He felt the opposite of how he’d felt after that trip to Taos. The desert didn’t seem like an answer but like a hostile maze. Mayor Cabrera hadn’t looked after anyone, and there was no other accomplishment worth a damn. And now Cecelia was a young woman and she was a stranger to Mayor Cabrera. He’d allowed himself to indulge in motel troubles and town troubles. He was a few years from fifty. Cecelia deserved a competent uncle, but at this point she wasn’t expecting one. Mayor Cabrera had busied himself with the town so he could ignore the shambles of his private life. He’d passed Christmas in the basement of the hotel, staring at action movies. The TV station had arranged a sprig of holly in the corner of the screen and they left it there all day. Mayor Cabrera had eaten leftover pasta salad. He’d drunk a couple beers and then lost interest and switched to ginger ale.
Mayor Cabrera stood facing a multitude of spiny plants and eroding rocks and forced himself to remember when Cecelia was a baby, when his sister-in-law was herself, when Mayor Cabrera’s wife was alive. They’d been sure Cecelia would have a better life, though their own lives were far from bad. Nothing had seemed more important than Cecelia growing up happy. Mayor Cabrera didn’t know much about his niece at this point, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t happy.
THE WOLF
It was a concert of religious guitar music. The wolf had settled under an RV on the edge of the fairgrounds to listen to the reverberating licks and preening voices. At the end of each song a roar rose up from the humans attending the concert that was louder than the music and full of fervor and made the wolf nervous. It was a chilly night, the smells thin. The underside of the Rv stank but the wind that buffeted under and rippled the wolf’s fur was vacant of worthwhile scents — smoke, birth, another predator.
The musicians kept asking questions of the crowd and the crowd kept combining their voices with certainty. The wolf was afraid of these humans and he also pitied them. They had little soul left and that’s why they aggrandized what sliver remained. And what of the wolf’s soul? Lately he found himself panting with no cause, while resting on a cool morning under an outcropping. He’d caught himself clamping his jaws down on his own foreleg.
The wolf hastened away from the concert straight toward Sandia Mountain, exhilarated because he’d completely broken off his rounds. They were unrecognizable tonight, his rounds. He didn’t feel worried about them. He felt a blessing of strength that needed to be used, so instead of skirting Sandia he began to climb it, the most inefficient and unpleasant route to Lofte, beating up his paws, thirsty, hoping to ensure he’d be able to sleep in the morning, straight up the mountain and then he’d go straight down the other side and he would not avoid anything the remainder of the night nor give way nor hold himself still, meaning that whatever creature fate put in his way before dawn would be subtracted from the living world without any knowledge of what had happened to it.
THE GAS STATION OWNER
As soon as the offices opened back up he called the free paper that covered the basin and ordered a want ad. The next issue wasn’t going to press for over a week.
NEEDED: gas station/store managers, lofte, no nights, two positions open, 505-386-2387
The idea of leaving the station put the gas station owner in mind of a young boy shedding a shabby blanket that had always comforted him. The mirror in the back room he peered into when he trimmed his hair. The bills he got to sit and write out, the amounts of which changed by mere pennies from month to month. The short aisles of canned goods he could straighten and straighten — condensed milk, chili, potted sausage, peppers. His radio stations that came and went. His whisky in the evenings. The big window behind the register.