He had wiped the vessels with a cloth and packed them in his travel Mass case, each in its place. Chalice. Ciborium. Paten. He’d zipped his vestments into a hanger bag to keep the road dust off it, and with it and the Mass kit in hand, he met Lisette at her clinic. Organized and deliberate, Riordan was annoyed by her rushed, improvisational way of doing things. It tired him to watch her flinging equipment haphazardly into reusable grocery bags—portable ultrasound machine, nebulizer, digital thermometers, disposable syringes—then pulling pill bottles and antibiotic packets from cabinets as indiscriminately as a drug addict burglarizing someone’s medicine chest.
They lugged the bags outside, dumped them into her Dodge pickup’s rear seat, then dragged a portable plastic bathtub from the courtyard and wedged it into the truck bed between two jerricans (one for water, one for gasoline) and two spare tires, which he fervently hoped would not be needed; both were as bald as Hugo Beltrán’s skull.
“Four stops before we leave,” she said, climbing in behind the wheel.
“Couldn’t you have gotten this done yesterday?” Riordan tried but failed not to sound disapproving.
“No time,” she answered, a little out of breath. Drove Nick and Pamela to Tucson on Sunday, drove herself back Monday, and then had to see patients.
The twenty-year-old Dodge was her clinic’s back-country vehicle, and it suffered from every off-road mile it had been driven. When she turned the key, a wheezing sound came from under the hood, prompting her to pump the gas pedal. On the third try, the engine caught. Lisette advised him, as she removed a thick silver bracelet from her wrist and turquoise rings from her fingers, to take off his watch.
“This old thing?” He raised a hand to display his forty-dollar Timex with its cracked leather band.
“It’ll look like a Rolex up there.”
“I’ve worn it up there before with no trouble.”
She tilted her head, an ear halfway to her shoulder. “C’mon, Tim. Humor me, would you?”
He stashed the Timex in the glove compartment with her jewelry. She popped the clutch, and the Dodge Ram rattled down the cobblestoned street to a tienda de comestibles, where she picked up beans and nixtamal and cans of fruit to pass out as gifts. From the grocery she went to a pharmacy for more antibiotics, from there to the Pemex to top off the tank, from the gas station to the bank for a quick withdrawal at the only ATM in San Patricio—the only one, for that matter, within a radius of about fifty miles.
Finally, she sped out of town, crossing the Santa Teresa, passing through mesquite and stands of columnar cacti resembling giant spiny pickles. They were stopped briefly at the roadblock, but this time Riordan did not meet with any unpleasantness. The road went past the army base before it turned to dirt and began its hairpinning—and, for Riordan, hair-raising—climb into the high Sierra. They were headed for the aldeas and caserios—the villages and hamlets—in the easternmost part of the municipality, near the Chihuahuan border. Wild country, puma and jaguar country, inhabited by Mayos, Guarijios, and isolated bands of Tarahumaras. Lawless country also, maybe the most dangerous in North America. It had been so for decades—the last renegade Apaches had held out in the Sierra Madre well into the 1930s, and Pancho Villa had eluded General Pershing in its labyrinthine canyons.
The road twisted up and up, skirting shadowed barrancas. In one ascent, it slanted like a raised drawbridge and appeared to end in midair. Riordan shut his eyes, half-expecting the Dodge to fly into space. Instead, it slid around a switchback and ran along a level stretch, the slope on the right side, steep as a chalet roof, plunging hundreds of feet. The oaks at the canyon bottom, speckled with the pink blossoms of the amapa trees, were reduced to the dimensions of yard plants. Lisette drove twice as fast as he would have dared on his Harley. She hit a pothole without braking, then another. Bang. Crash. Something was bound to fall off the truck at any moment.
“So who are you marrying?” she asked offhandedly, as if she were on an interstate.
He didn’t answer. He felt nauseous, his breathing short, his palms damp.
“Did you hear me, Tim?”
“I did,” he croaked. “I know you don’t believe in heaven, but you drive like you do. Could you please slow down?”
“Oh, right. Your acrophobia.”
She eased up on the gas pedal, but not as much as he wished.
“What was the question?”
“Who’s getting married?”
“A couple in Mesa Verde. They’ve been living together, a kid to show for it now, so they sent word that they wanted to make it legal.”
“Are you going to make them repent first for living in sin?” she wisecracked.
“I make allowances for Indians.” He let a second or two pass, then threw a barb: “For non-Indians, too.”
“Ooooooh. Am I supposed to be grateful for your open-mindedness? I was only needling you, y’know.”
He fluttered a hand in apology, pleading that the near-death experience she was putting him through made him edgy.
* * *
They topped out on the mesa from which Mesa Verde derived its name. It was as though they had traveled from Mexico to British Columbia in an hour. Patches of snow lay on pine-shaded hillsides. A vaquero rode by wrapped in a wool blanket, his burro blowing steam, and stove smoke like vaporous serpents rose from a caserio a short distance ahead. The mesa was off every kind of grid—no electricity, no phones, no running water. If it weren’t for a pickup truck parked off the road, Riordan and Lisette might also have traveled from the twenty-first to the eighteenth century.
The caserio was their first stop before Mesa Verde. There wasn’t much to it: half a dozen rock and adobe shacks, some with verandas sagging on bent poles; a cistern perched on a mound; latrines covered by what looked like discarded shower curtains; and non-eighteenth-century trash everywhere—beer and soda cans, plastic bottles, food wrappers. Though he’d never visited this particular settlement, he’d been to ones like it, and the squalor always dismayed him. It bent his political correctness in the opposite direction, inclining him to see the early missionaries’ unflattering descriptions of Sonoran Indians as largely true.
Lisette dove right in, laughing and hugging women and girls in long, colorful skirts, her brown curls flouncing and bouncing. With the greetings out of the way, she and Riordan hauled the portable tub out of the pickup and carried it to a hut that would have looked like a jumble of rocks if it had not been roofed, the roof being a blue tarpaulin thrown over interwoven branches. Inside, sunlight spearing through cracks in the walls provided the only light. A mound of filthy sheets and blankets lay in a corner, on a dirt floor smooth and hard as pavement. The room would not have made a decent stable, though it smelled like one. When Lisette poked the mound with a twig and cried, “Yaretzi! Despertarse! Soy yo, Dr. Lisette!” he realized that someone was under it: the woman Lisette had come to bathe, Yaretzi Olivares. She was believed to be one hundred years old—no one could say for sure—and every day of those years had scribed thin, deep lines into her coppery face. She sat up, iron-gray hair tumbling down her back, grinned toothlessly, and immediately began to babble in some incomprehensible Indian patois. Lisette responded in Spanish, telling her it was time to clean her up, Yaretzi protesting that it was too cold. Hace mucho frío. Mucho, mucho. Riordan helped pull the old woman to her feet, then into a walker that Lisette had brought along. Yaretzi had been lying for God knew how long in her own feces and urine.
Lisette built a fire in the stone hearth, and Riordan hauled water from the cistern, poured it into a galvanized basin, and placed the basin on the hearth. While the bath water heated, Lisette put on surgical gloves and pulled the foul blankets outside; then, fetching a twig broom, she brushed them off. Next, she filled a bucket, sloshed the floor, and began to sweep human waste out into the dusty yard. Two women and a teenage girl stood near the doorless doorway, watching. Yaretzi’s great-granddaughters and great-great-granddaughter, Lisette said.
“You shouldn’t be doing this—they should,” he said, thinking at that moment about a commentary from one of those colonial missionaries, something to the effect that native Sonorans did not venerate parents and grandparents, showed no esteem whatever for their nearest kin. A racist observation? Or an accurate depiction of a reality that persisted to this day?
“The best way to teach is by example,” Lisette said.
He grabbed the broom in frustration and said, “Let me handle this.”
He hadn’t taken two strokes before one of the women, the older of the two, yelped, “No, Padre. No!” and stepped in and snatched the broom from him. Apparently, the sight of a priest cleaning up shit had provided the teaching moment that the sight of a doctor doing the same thing had not. He looked to see Lisette’s reaction, but she was preoccupied with the bathwater, dipping her fingers into it to test its warmth.
She declared it hot enough. He lifted the basin and poured the water into the tub, which Lisette had set outside, under a kind of porch roofed in the same manner as the hut. Yaretzi, her modesty undiminished by her years, asked him to leave while she undressed. He walked off a distance sufficient to preserve decency and sat down, leaning against the cistern, a huge fiberglass tank that had somehow been trucked to this forlorn hamlet. Across the road, brown, shriveled cornstalks rasped in fitful breezes. Underfed goats nibbled the grass at the roadside, and a Corriente steer, likewise underfed, grazed on the hillside above the cornfield. Yaretzi let out a shriek. Looking toward her dwelling, he saw her splashing in the tub like a child while Lisette, beaming and chatting like mad in Spanish and whatever native tongue was spoken here, shampooed her hair. He envied her joy. La mayor felicidad es servir a los que nadie más va a servir was how Father Batista had phrased it so long ago. The greatest happiness is to serve those whom no one else will serve.
“So it is true. You have come again to the mesa. Everyone has said you would be coming today.”
The man was missing half his teeth, wrinkles spiraled on his cheeks, but his voice was strong, he stood straight, and dark hair peeked from under his frayed straw hat. It was hard to tell if he was a weatherworn forty or a well-preserved seventy.
Into Riordan’s silence, the man asked, “You are Padre Tim, are you not?”
Riordan wasn’t wearing his clerical collar or coat, only a barn jacket and Levi’s.
“I am,” he answered as he stood up. “And who are you?”
“Mi nombre es Alonso Castillo. You are going to perform a marriage in Mesa Verde today, and the lady doctor Moreno is going to make the sick better. Everyone has been saying this.”
Riordan didn’t doubt that everyone had. E-mail and phones were unnecessary in the Sierra. News of their visit, its spread probably accelerated by Brotherhood lookouts, had reached the mesa well before their arrival.
“I, too, am a healer,” Alonso Castillo declared. “I am a sonadoro. I cure with my dreams. But, you know, lately, my dreams are not so clear. They have lost much of their power. I wish to ask you for a blessing.”
Riordan brushed off the seat of his jeans. “To restore your powers, Alonso?”
“Not me. That, there.” Motioning at the cornfield across the road. “Bless the field, please.”
He’d blessed babies, children, houses, and, once, a new car. Never a field. This one, belonging to Castillo’s brother, required supernatural assistance because of drought. The summer rains had been sparse, the autumn harvest poor, Castillo said. With Padre Tim’s blessing, it would be more fruitful next season. Riordan, joking to himself, wondered what the shelf life of a blessing was. If he gave it now, would it expire before the spring planting? He fetched his Roman missal from Lisette’s truck and flipped to the table of intercessory prayers. Thirty-eight altogether. One to say in Time of Earthquake, another to Avert Storms (no, he wanted to ask for them), still others for Times of Cattle Plague, Times of Famine. Ah, here it was: For Rain.
He stepped out into the road, Castillo alongside him, and just as he began, “O God, in whom we live, move and have our being, grant us reasonable rain—” a farm truck jounced around a curve and came to a sudden stop a few yards from them. It wasn’t carrying produce. Seated in the bed against the wooden rails were half a dozen young men in dark clothing. Black jeans, black, purple, or navy-blue jackets, baseball caps and backpacks in the same colors. Gallon water jugs, spray-painted black, hung from their shoulders on rope straps. Two men were in the cab. The driver leaned out his window and yelled, “Get the fuck out of the way!” He had a broad, chubby face and wore a Mohawk haircut and a wispy mustache.
“Show some respect, Su!” Castillo called. “Show some manners! Don’t you know who this is?”
“No, and I don’t give a shit. Get the fuck out of the way. I’m in a hurry.”
Drug mules riding in the back, and “Su” was short for Jesús. Riordan strode up to the truck, struggling to keep his temper in check, for self-preservation among other purposes. Delgado and his buddy were probably armed.
“Hola, Su,” he said. “I know who you are and what you did. Everyone in San Patricio knows. You got away with it for now but not forever, because God Himself knows.”
From Delgado came a puzzled look that in seconds turned into a contemptuous glare, followed by a call for Riordan to commit a hermaphroditic act. He wrenched the floor shift and punched the gas, the rear wheels spewing clods of dirt.
“A dog, a piece of shit, that one,” commented Castillo. “Those kids in the back are from up there somewhere.” He swiped a hand at the mountains. “Tarahumara. Delgado is taking them to la línea, the border, to carry mota into the U.S. Fifty, sixty kilometers they might have to walk through the desert, each carrying twenty-five kilos!”
He went on: If the boys weren’t arrested, they would then hike back into Mexico and hope that someone would be waiting to drive them home, where they would further hope that someone would pay them for their services. El narco preferred the Tarahumara above all others. They made such excellent burreros, famous throughout Mexico, throughout all the world as the greatest of runners.
“I am myself part Tarahumara, and I know we are truly Rarámuri—the light-footed people. Oye, Padre Tim, once when I was young I ran in a festival race more than one hundred kilometers. Yes, it’s true. In my huaraches! Those kids—their fathers and their fathers’ fathers ran in the races, they hunted deer on foot, and now they are mules for those people…”
Riordan stood silently in the road, indulging Castillo’s soliloquy, part harangue, part lament. He seethed inside; it felt as if someone were thumping his breastbone with a mallet. The brazen look on Delgado’s fleshy face, the way he’d spit those words, Go fuck yourself. He could not imagine how that poor girl had not lost her mind, assaulted by that animal for days. An animal but no devil. Delgado’s evil was very much of this world.
He turned to Castillo. “I will finish the blessing now.”
It was a short prayer, taking only fifteen or twenty seconds to read. Castillo thanked him and walked off toward the caserio. Riordan plopped down right there at the roadside, in the posture of a weary hitchhiker. His anger drained away, and a gloom dropped over him, like a hood over a man about to be hanged.
* * *
Riordan and Lisette set off for Mesa Verde a little before noon. It was only five miles away, but the road was in such awful shape it would take half an hour to get there, even with Lisette’s driving. When she slammed over a hump, sending Riordan’s head into the roof, he again snapped at her to for Christ’s sake slow down.
“I don’t want you to be late for the wedding.”
“The wedding will be whenever I get there,” he said savagely.
“Wow, what put you in such a sweet temper?”
He took a breath and, in a more moderate tone, told her about his encounter with Jesús Delgado. The Brotherhood was corrupting everybody, ruining everybody, she said. The Tarahumara had escaped the conquistadores in the distant past, they’d evaded land developers in the present, but the narcos had gotten to them.
“You were a teacher before you got sent here, weren’t you?”
“At a high school in L.A.,” he said.
“I’ll bet that sometimes you wish you were back there.”
“Hardly. And I hardly think St. Michael’s or the Franciscan Friars would want me back. The school was involved in a big scandal…”
He was slightly too late in checking himself. He had never told her about what happened at St. Michael’s.
“Was it one of those scandals?” she asked.
“Yeah, one of those.”
“If this story is going where I think it is, maybe you don’t want to tell it.”
“I wasn’t a defendant. I’ve done my share of wrong, but not that, for God’s sake.”
“Okay.”
“When the whole sorry mess was off the front pages, I put it back on. I spoke out in a radio interview and another one with the L.A. Times. Creeps in Roman collars were making the church sick, is what I said. I wanted it to be healthy again, but the Franciscan Friars of California, I guess they figured I could do with an assignment to Mexico. That’s how I came to be where I am.”
They were silent while Lisette negotiated a sharp downhill slope with a deep, zigzag ditch in the middle. To avert a rollover, she positioned the wheels on the ridges astride the ditch and eased the truck down like a freight car on crooked rails.
“Well done,” he said when they reached the bottom.
“You were saying…”
“There was a boy at the school I was mentoring. A bright, talented kid, a gifted artist, Luis Gonzalez. Horrible background. Mother had five kids by three men, and Luis was in a gang. The Chicano Kings, Chicano Lords, something like that. I got this idea to save him from the streets. He was my reclamation project.”
“I’m guessing it failed.”
“Sure did. I made a mistake about him. A common mistake, I suppose. I assumed that talent plus intelligence equals character.”
“Of which he didn’t have much?”
“He was a hustler. That was his real talent. Even at fourteen, fifteen, he could charm just about anybody into just about anything, and himself out of trouble, and he was in trouble a lot. A sociopath, that’s what, but some way or another, I went on believing in him. He was suspended in his junior year, he was going to be expelled, and I went to bat for him and kept him in school.”
They were bumping through an arroyo now, under an archway of pines and oaks. An Aztec dove flew out ahead, as if to lead them. Riordan pictured Luis: his mesmerizing smile, his earnest—and false—promises to do better.
“The scandal broke around then,” he said. “A bunch of former students filed a class-action lawsuit against five Franciscans: three priests, two brothers. One of them, James Brenner, taught at St. Michael’s. Luis jumped in at the last minute. I think he saw a chance to cash in. He gave a deposition that was a half-truth. Brenner had had sex with him—that part was true. Luis had initiated it—that part he left out.”
“Uh-huh,” Lisette said. “But it would still be statutory rape. It doesn’t excuse that Brenner guy.”
“I don’t mean it did. What he did to those boys was vile, he betrayed their trust, but I can’t help but feel that Luis betrayed my trust in him. He came on to Brenner, playing a sort of male Lolita. I’ll never know why, but I do know that’s what Luis did because—I can say this now—Brenner confessed to me. Later on, he admitted to everything he’d done in his own deposition.”
“Sorry. I’m not tracking this.”
“I was deposed too, but before Brenner came clean in his. The lawyer asked if I’d ever heard a confession from a cleric who’d sexually abused a minor, and I … It was an unfair question. But the judge allowed it.”
“You lied under oath.”
The road turned out of the arroyo and resumed its meandering across the mesa.
“I don’t get that church of yours, Tim,” she continued. “Here’s this pervert, raping teenage boys. He tells you, but you can’t tell anybody.”
“For good reason. People would be reluctant to confess theirs sins otherwise. It’s like attorney-client privilege. Or between—” He checked himself.
“Between a doctor and a patient,” she finished for him. “Except that if a doctor knows a crime’s been committed…”
“That isn’t why I perjured myself, not completely.” Riordan paused to line up his thoughts. “It was for Luis’s sake. I didn’t want it to get out that he’d done what he’d done. Maybe I was afraid of what his homeys would do to him. You’re the first person I’ve told this to.”
“A lot to carry around,” she said. “So what happened to Brenner?”
“He was shipped off to a retreat house before the trial got under way. It was kind of a treatment center for pedophile priests.” Up to this point, Riordan had told his tale without emotion, as if relating a story he’d read in a magazine; but now his throat began to swell with regret, with sorrow, with all the pain of bad endings. “He hanged himself there. Twisted his bedsheets into a rope, threw it over a beam in the basement, and hanged himself.”
“Holy shit. What about Luis?”
“He was killed in a drive-by shooting three, four months later.” Riordan’s voice caught. “I read it in the L.A. Times. ‘Gang Violence Claims Three Lives,’ some headline like that. And you know, I felt like a father who’d lost a son. I felt that I’d failed him. It made me angry, but it hurt at the same time. It still does, now and then.”
“I’m sorry, Tim.” She paused. “I want to tell you that you shouldn’t blame yourself, but I get the feeling you won’t buy it.”
“Haven’t sold it to myself so far,” he said.