The Temptation Of Demetrio Vigil Part 16

Two young men from Los Cerrillos lost their lives in a tragic fatal alcohol-related crash on NM Highway 14 over the Christmas weekend. They were Hilario Gallegos, 19, and his half-brother Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil, 18. Both young men were reputed gang members...

"No," I said, softly. I gulped for air, and felt dizzy. I read on.

Both young men lived in Los Cerrillos with relatives. Neighbors and friends expressed shock at the deaths, but at least one person who knew the young men said he was not surprised, as both young men had allegedly been involved with gang and drug activity.

The grandfather of Vigil said the younger brother was an outstanding singer and ch.o.r.eographer, and that he graduated with honors from Santa Fe High, though at press time the Journal could not confirm this. Friends say Vigil had expressed interest in leaving the gang, and was working as a veterinary a.s.sistant in Santa Fe to save money to attend St. John's College in the spring, where he hoped to major in world religions and philosophy. He also gained entrance to Stanford and Princeton, where admissions officials say his essay about leaving gang life moved them to tears. Alcohol and drugs are believed to have been a factor in the accident, according to state police...

There were two photos of Hilario Gallegos with the article. He was every bit as good-looking as Demetrio, though without any of the warmth or intelligence in his eyes that his brother had. I punched Demetrio's number into my phone, but he didn't answer. I tried again, and again, and there was still no answer. I texted, and got nothing back.

I would not be ignored.

I called my dog over to me now, and held him tightly.

"Come on, Buddy," I told him, adjusting the cone so as to be slightly more comfortable. I got up from my desk and went to my closet to find something suitably warm to wear in the middle of nowhere on the coldest night of winter thus far. I stuffed some pillows in my bed to make it look like I was sleeping there, in case my mother awoke from her drunken stupor and found her way to my room. Unlikely.

I knew I needed sleep to excel at final exams, but something in me told me that could wait.

"We're taking a drive. There's someone we need to talk to."

iPod and cell phone in pocket, with a flashlight I appropriated from the garage, I headed off into the night, in my jeans and recklessly applied layers of shirts and sweaters that either looked bohemian or ridiculous. There was a very real chance I had achieved both. Buddy tagged along at my heels, limping with his little cast, yet overjoyed to be going on a trip at last. I suspected he had felt abandoned by me over the weekend. I lifted him into the Land Rover, and closed us inside. It was about 12:30 a.m.

Shortly before 1 a.m., we arrived in Golden. I wasn't sure of what to do or where to go at first, so I simply parked at the church, turned off the lights and the car, closed my eyes and hoped for a sign. I was afraid, but not as afraid as I'd been before I understood, at least partly, what was going on. Now, I felt some semblance of control over my life. He was dead, but he was nice.

After a while, I had the urge to go to the descansos. The crosses that someone had erected for Demetrio and his brother. I was filled with a crazed bravery that made little sense to me, fueled in part by anger and disbelief. Why hadn't he told me? That was easy, I reasoned. Because I wouldn't have believed it, just like I didn't entirely believe it now.

I drove to the crosses, grabbed the flashlight and my dog, and jumped down into the cold dark of night. Somehow, knowing the cross on the right belonged to someone I knew and loved made it not nearly as creepy as it had been before.

I remembered the first time I'd met Demetrio, and the way I'd joked about the crosses, the strange look that had come over his face then. Of course. I'd been joking about death, and bragging about how I'd skirted it, when he himself had not been so lucky. But how? How was any of this possible? I knew that there was a scientific explanation. He'd even begun to tell me, and it had made sense, to a point. Something about the Golden Ratio.

I walked to the descansos, with Buddy shivering in my arms. The blackness of the frozen night was complete, but for the weak cone of illumination from the flashlight. I stood and stared at the crosses, and tried to feel something. Anything. I tried to conjure Demetrio up from the blackness, but nothing came.

"Where are you?" I called out into the night, softly at first and then repeated with more volume. "Where are you?"

Nothing.

"I get it," I cried, loud, a desperate sort of courage coming to me. Overhead the stars twinkled coldly, by the millions, so very many stars. Dizzying billions. Smears of stars. We didn't have stars like this in the city.

"So you're dead, big deal," I screamed. "I'm not scared, okay? You don't have to hide from me anymore. I believe you. I want to understand you."

I waited, and soon enough heard something rustling in the pinon trees nearby. My pulse jumped in my chest and began to bombilate against my sternum like the wings of a trapped bird. My mouth was heavy and dry; my nose numb from the cold. I realized that what I was doing could be incredibly stupid. What if he wasn't good? What if he was a morboso, like the plumber had said? What if he wanted to eat my soul? But I also know what I felt for Demetrio, and how I felt around him. I trusted him.

"I'm here, Demetrio. Let me see you."

It sounded absurd as it came from my lips, but it was what it was. The world as I'd understood it before was gone, something new and aberrant having taken its place. "Please don't be afraid of me. I won't fear you if you won't fear me."

The rustling grew louder, as though something were moving through the frozen scrub gra.s.s and crunchy snow toward me. I was excited and petrified both, with the possibility of seeing him again, and touching him. I wanted to ask him all sorts of questions about life and death. I needed to understand, as a scientist. I smiled to myself, and Buddy, responding as he often did to my own body language, panted and wagged his tail and twirled in circles in the snow.

Suddenly, the rustling grew louder, and was accompanied by a terrible, horrible low growl, followed by the wet, nasty sound of chops being licked. Big chops. I looked up and saw a pair of yellow eyes shining at me from the darkness.

Before I knew what was happening, an enormous, rabid-looking coyote - the one I had seen next to the Land Rover Friday night, I was certain of it - leapt out from the darkness, snarled menacingly at me. It s.n.a.t.c.hed Buddy in its muscular jaws before leaping back into the blackness. It happened too quickly. I had no time to react.

Buddy was gone.

"No!" I screamed, devastated. I ran a short way into the darkness, but realized I was too slow. I saw a shadowy outline of the thing lope across the land, fast as a jaguar, and it was gone.

"Buddy!" I wailed. "No!"

He'd looked like a ragdoll in the beast's jaws, just dangling there. Was the coyote Demetrio? Why would he take Buddy?

"Bring him back! Don't take Buddy! We don't want to hurt you! We come in peace!"

I listened, but heard nothing.

"Buddy!" I yelled, hot tears percolating in my eyes. I was in an agitated panic now, unsure of what to do, punishing myself with guilt for having brought Buddy out here in the middle of the night. What was I thinking? He weighed nine pounds. He had injuries. He was no match for a predator. It was quite possible, I realized in horror, that the coyote was just that, a coyote, not a spirit or trickster, just a hungry carnivore who'd happened across a lucky domesticated meal.

"Oh, dear G.o.d," I cried, tears flowing coldly down my cheeks. I had to do something. Anything. And fast. "Dear G.o.d, help me. Please help me."

I ran back to the Land Rover, climbed in, and sped back to the church. I drove all the way to the top of the scrubby hill this time, crushing weeds and bouncing over small boulders, dispensing with the formality of the empty parking lot, putting the hearty Land Rover to some sort of practical use for once. I parked, and jumped down, leaving the headlights on high, shining down upon the desolate ruins of a house. Something in my gut told me I was in the right place. I'd get Buddy back by coming here. I knew it. I don't know how I knew it. I just knew.

"Demetrio!" I cried, at the top of my lungs. "Demetrio! Come out! Let me see you! I need your help!"

I waited, starting to hyperventilate in my state of terror and important purpose. My voice rose to a powerful shout.

"I saw the newspaper stories about you! I saw the news videos. I know what happened to you, and I'm really, really sorry. I am so terribly sorry. I know who you were, and I know about your brother. I wouldn't bother you now except something just grabbed Buddy and took him away, and I need your help to get him back. Buddy's helpless." I broke down sobbing.

I fell to my knees now, in the emptiness of the night. I was foolish, screaming alone into an empty house without a roof, a ruin whose walls crumbled in all around it. If my mother could have seen me then, she would have locked me away and shoved Lexapro down my throat. I was losing my mind. Maybe my mother had a point. I'd lost it, hadn't I? I wasn't the girl she knew anymore. I hardly even recognized myself. It was senseless, all of this. Nonscientific. Impossible. I beat my fists weakly against the frozen earth, and I wept - for Buddy, for myself, for mysteries, for the imperfect nature of religion and science, and all the myriad ways they failed to intersect.

"They took Buddy," I lamented. My voice faded to a normal volume, then grew weaker. "All because of me. I was hoping you could help me. I don't know. I want him back. I love that dog."

I heard more rustling, and braced myself, scared. I didn't want more coyotes - though if one came and carried me off now, it was what I thought I deserved for sacrificing my beloved dog, and disrespecting my poor mother.

I lifted my eyes, and looked around. Still nothing. No one. Just an endless black, ceilinged with stars.

"Demetrio Vigil," I warbled, tears seeping from my eyes, my nose starting to drip. "I don't know how it is that I see you, and feel you, or how it is that you smell so good to me, and make me laugh so hard, but I know one thing, one crazy thing."

I stood up now, sniffling and delirious, and stumbled back to the car, with an inexplicable urge to turn the lights off. Let the coyotes take me, I thought. Let them get me.

I cut the lights, and closed the door, standing next to the car in the night with my arms stretched out at my sides. I listened for a moment, to the near complete silence all around me. For a moment, I felt Demetrio's presence. I cannot explain precisely what the sensation was, because it was sensed with something beyond the five senses humans normally engage. I knew he was there, as surely as I knew my feet were cold.

"I don't know much," I said, softly now, to the darkness. "But I do know that I think I love you."

The rustling returned, and this time, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the silhouette of a dog, too fat and puffy to be a coyote, just at the edge of the ruined house. A Chow-Chow?

"Bring him back," I said to the shadow. "Buddy never hurt anyone." I reconsidered my statement, and smiled to myself. "Well, you know. Except a few stuffed animals and ankles, but he thought it was for love. You get a dog snipped, you think that sort of thing is going to stop, but it didn't. I don't know. I guess some urges are just too strong for most boys."

I heard a faint and faraway tinkling of bells at this, like a wind chime crossed with a human voice, coming from very nearby and yet sounding as though make from a very great distance - the way an old radio broadcast might have sounded, crackling from a speaker near your ear. It seemed to come from a tree just a few feet away. I turned my head to look at it, and to my astonishment, saw those same sparkler-like lights I'd seen Friday night, moving faintly though the branches. They flared quickly, and died out, leaving me with nothing but the disquieting possibility that I had not seen them at all.

Meanwhile, down by the ruined house, the shadow of the animal began to move toward me with alarming speed.

"Oh, G.o.d." I wanted to get into the car, but there was no time. The thing was upon me in seconds - but thankfully, it wasn't a puffy beast set upon my demise. It was Nutmeg, the cheery rescued road kill from earlier that day.

"Nutmeg!" I cried out, kneeling to pet her. She seemed happy to see me, and wagged her whole body. She leaned into my caress and whined. Her fur was warm and soft, and oddly smelled of cookies baking, b.u.t.ter and vanilla.

"What a good girl," I told her. "Who's a good girl? Nutmeg is! That's right. Where's Demetrio, girl? Where is he? Huh?"

The dog looked me in the eye with an alarming expression, one of complete understanding - an almost human look. She pawed the ground, and nuzzled me, and began to walk, turning back every few paces to whine at me. She wanted me to follow her.

"Okay, okay. I'm coming. Tell me something," I said to the dog as I walked behind her, still delirious with adrenaline and trying to keep myself sane. "If Demetrio has been dead for two years, why does he smell so good? Hmm? You'd think he'd smell like a pile of rotten eggs."

Again, the bell-like tinkling, still nearby, only this time in a different tree. I stopped walking and looked, and saw the sparkles, flaming out as quickly as they appeared, only now that my eyes had adjusted even more to the darkness, I saw that as they faded, their lines made the shape of a human being. A specific and recognizable human being.

Demetrio.

"It's you!" I screamed, a smile washing over my face as I stared off into the darkness once more. "I saw you! You're here, aren't you?"

Nutmeg whimpered again, and pawed the earth. When I didn't come promptly, she returned to me and gave me that imploring look again, as if to say this way, this way!

"You know where Demetrio is, don't you, girl?" I asked her. She nodded. Yes, she did. She looked at me, and in the darkness that was lit up now by a full moon overhead, she nodded.

I followed her, and tried to think of another joke. I couldn't. It seemed like the sparkles were a sort of laughter, and that they were the best way to see Demetrio, if that's what it was in the bushes.

Ahead of me, Nutmeg arrived at the fence to the graveyard for the small church, and leapt over it. On the other side, she stood on her hind paws, placed her front paws on the fence, and peered over the top at me as if to invite me in.

"Uhm, is this where he is?" I asked. I shuddered at the thought of trespa.s.sing into a cemetery in the middle of the night.

"Yes," said a disembodied voice.

I snapped my head around, looking for his face, for those amazing lips. Nothing only darkness.

I scrambled over the fence, heart thundering, and followed Nutmeg across the small churchyard, to a grave in the Southwest corner. It had a gray stone marker that looked newer than the others, engraved with a kneeling cherub, and adorned with a collection of plastic flowers. A large, white stuffed bear leaned against the stone, smiling with ridiculous optimism, holding a red heart in its hands; it was the kind of toy you might find at a drug store around Valentine's Day.

"Ah, now you," I said, pointing to the stuffed animal. "You, Buddy would like. You're just the right height for maximum pleasure."

Again, the tinkling of chimes and a soft sort of singing laugh, echoing as though from far off, but made quite close to my ears. Again, the faint, quick quiver of sparkles, this time in the air just above the tombstone, the lines leaving a brief impression of his smiling face there.

"You have a sick sense of humor, Demetrio," I said, and again came the tinkling, and the small spray of light, this time smaller than before, as though it were losing force - or maybe the joke just wasn't that funny.

Nutmeg stood next to the headstone and wagged her tail enthusiastically. I clicked the flashlight on, and shone it now on the tombstone. The name was clear.

Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil I turned the light off, because it felt intrusive here, and knelt at the side of the grave, next to the dog. I'd never been so unafraid in my life, oddly. I was suddenly at peace here. Calm.

"You see him, too, don't you girl?"

Pant, pant, pant.

I scratched her behind her ears, and tried to understand.

"How is this possible?" I asked the tombstone, as though it might answer me. "I know you're there."

A small, very faint breeze kicked up then, and circled around me, warm. It was well below freezing out, but I was enveloped in a warm little gentle tornado that smelled of sun on sand.

"I don't understand," I whispered.

The lights were back now, circling in the moving air, and softly flaming in and out. In them, I saw his outline, and his eyes, briefly, but they were there.

"But how, Demetrio?" I asked, tears coming to my eyes.

I heard his voice again now, right next to my ear, smooth as always, and filled with confidence, though sounding now as though it traveled to me from a great distance, crackling and amid a cacophony of static.

"If you love me, as I love you, tell no one, mamita. Tell no one. Not even Kelsey. You are part of my world now, and you have to keep my secrets. If you want Buddy back, tell no one. I'm just the guy called 911. That's it."

"Do you have Buddy? Did you take him?"

"No," came the hissed, elongated reply, from far away. There was a brief pause, and then the voice returned, stronger. "It is important that you do as I ask this time. Promise me. If you let me down, it could mean the end of Buddy, and the end of my chances. And yours. I need your word."

I watched as the light died out one last time, as though exhausted from the effort. I wrapped my arms around myself as the cold air came flooding back over me and the warmth and peace I craved and adored seeped away into the night. Fear returned. I didn't know what chances he referred to, but I knew I loved him, and he needed my help.

"I promise," I said, as I ran my fingers across his name on the gravestone, my shivering beginning anew.

I got home late, happily undetected by my snoring mother, slept, and drove myself to school the next day feeling blank and moving on automatic pilot. It might seem strange, to someone who didn't experience the surreal things I had, that I reacted with numbness to such extraordinary circ.u.mstances, but I'm positive in retrospect that this reaction from my mind and heart was a protective one. Denial. There are some things that human beings simply are not equipped to process all at once, some things we need to take in piece by piece - if at all. Denial was given to us through evolution, so that we could survive. The old Maria never had thoughts of this nature; for the new Maria, the post-accident Maria, they were somehow second nature.

I arrived in Art History cla.s.s before Kelsey did, and sat in my usual spot. It didn't take me long to notice that our cla.s.smates were whispering about me, and trying to seem like they weren't. I was clearly the center of attention, and not in a good way.

"They're talking about me," I told Kelsey.

"I know." She looked at me with great pity. "It's all over Twitter and Facebook. Logan's started a 'save Maria' campaign to let everyone know you've lost it. Apparently someone has a video of your argument with your mom at Dion's, and he got ahold of it. It's everywhere. I guess Logan thinks any chick who dumps his lousy a.s.s is certifiably insane."

"Oh, G.o.d." I slid down in my chair, wishing myself invisible.

"You can get him for cyber-bullying," Kelsey said. "I looked into it. He's such a pig."

"This is really bad."

"Don't worry. We'll get through it," she said. "I started a 'Screw Logan' page, and we're getting almost as many hits as the 'save Maria' page. Thomas had a photo of Logan in his underwear with a rainbow afro wig on, from the school camping trip last year. I used it."

"Thanks," I said, smiling a little, but still feeling pretty glum. "Nice to know we can sink to his level when we need to."

Yazzie appeared in the room then, rushing in from somewhere with her hair half sticking up all over her head. She looked like she'd been electrocuted by a clown, and inexplicably wore what appeared to be a red rubber pair of overalls. She apologized for being late, and instantly set out to feel and read the energy in the room, drifting about. When she got to me, horrifyingly, she stopped, and stared as she was wont to do.

"A revenant," she said.

I balked. Kelsey snorted, because she didn't know what I knew - otherwise, I was sure she, too, would have balked.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am?" I said.