The Temptation Of Demetrio Vigil Part 4

"We've got a fascinating topic today, Maria," she called out to me. "Sin. You think it'll go over well with high school kids?"

"Abso-diddly-lutely," said Kelsey.

I said nothing because I was horrified to be singled out again, and was conscious of the sympathetic snickers and rolled eyes of my cla.s.smates.

Soon, all 14 students in the cla.s.s were seated. Yazzie forgot to take attendance, as usual, and immediately began instead to "read the energy" of the room, floating on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet between the rows of desks, chanting to herself, before closing the shades on the windows, lowering the overhead lights, firing up the projector, and flipping hastily through the slides until she landed on one she liked. Most of her cla.s.ses were of this type, random slides and lectures on whatever she liked at the moment, with a flexible chronological thread connecting them.

"Cla.s.s," she said, "I'd like you to take a look at this oil painting. It's pretty famous, some of you might be familiar with it if you've been reading ahead. The t.i.tle of this painting - which is done on three wood panels and which hangs in the National Art Museum of Antiquities in Lisbon, Portugal - is, and you might want to jot this down, The Temptation of St. Anthony."

I inhaled sharply at this, remembering the little laminated prayer card Demetrio had given me at the cafe. I'd stuffed it into the side pocket of my backpack. I dug for it now, pulled it out and checked the name. Yep. Saint Anthony of the Desert. I slid it over to Kelsey, who responded with a surprised face that seemed to echo my sense that it was a strange coincidence.

"That's a little weird," she whispered.

"This is like the third thing like this that's happened since the crash," I whispered back.

"Girls," said Yazzie, looking at us. "Is there something you wish to contribute to our discussion?"

"No, ma'am," I said, conditioned to use the honorific by my somewhat formal mother.

"Then may I continue without your help?" asked Yazzie. "And don't ma'am me."

"Yes, ma'am," said Kelsey, mocking me.

"The artist," continued Yazzie, ignoring Kelsey as usual, her eyes on fire with pa.s.sion for art, "is Hieronymus Bosch. You might recall from previous discussions we've had that Bosch was a Dutch painter who worked in the 1400s and 1500s.

"Bosch often worked in a form known as the triptych, which is a painting in three panels, like the one we observe here now. The middle panel is usually the largest, with the side panels being smaller and related. It was a popular form for religious painters in the Middle Ages in Europe, given the obvious reference to the holy trinity. Of the painters from that time who used this form, Bosch is the best known.

"Now, it might surprise some of you here to know that yours is not the first generation to be concerned with s.e.x and violence. A closer look at this painting reveals some pretty racy, horrible things. The panel on the left shows lots of physical pain and punishment. The one in the center is a black ma.s.s, while on the right we have the temptations and sins of food and s.e.x."

A few of my cla.s.smates giggled about this.

"The Bosch is notable," Yazzie continued, "because like many of his paintings, it focused on the corruptible nature of human beings, and replaced cheerier earlier images of religious figures with highly troubling, even disturbing, images of the people those figures sought to save from themselves.

"The left wing of the painting is the Flight and Failure of St. Anthony. Here we see a desert, and demons within in. Horrible flying fish and strange monsters engaged in hideous acts. This all seems surreal to us now, but back then the Flemish told folk tales that featured all of these creatures, and they would have been as familiar to the average person then as stories about La Llorona are to New Mexicans today."

Kelsey slid a piece of paper to me, with writing on it. I think it's a sign that you need to apologize to the s.e.xy gang-banger for treating him like c.r.a.p.

I kept my eyes on the slide, and scribbled back as discreetly as I could: I don't have any way to reach him. And he's not s.e.xy, though you're probably right about Logan trying to one-up him. He's very compet.i.tive. Which, I added to myself, was a good quality in a boy or man.

Kelsey responded by removing her iPhone from her jacket pocket, and Googling "Demetrio" and "Golden, NM". I rolled my eyes at her in annoyance, and returned my attention to Yazzie's lecture.

"The center panel tells of the saint's actual temptation. Here again we see the flying ships and monsters, almost a sort of premonition of airplanes and flying machines. We see a village burning, people trapped and tortured. And in the middle of it all we see the saint himself, in a burst of light amid the darkness. The right wing, St. Anthony in meditation, also shows horrible things, stabbings, misery, naked women, but it also shows us a figure in the middle of it all, with a book in his hands, contemplating sorrowfully the sinful nature of his fellow man, removed from it but still surrounded by it, defined by it, his face showing that he is horribly, tragically aware."

I looked closely at the painting, and felt goose b.u.mps rise on my arms and legs. I didn't know why, exactly, only that the piece moved me - and almost to tears. I loved art, and painting, but both of my parents thought of it as a hobby, not a way to make a living. In Yazzie's cla.s.ses, I always felt like art was more than a hobby, though I'd never admit this to anyone I respected.

Kelsey touched my arm, and when she had my attention, pointed to the screen on her iPhone. It was a white pages listing for a Demetrio X. Vigil, in Golden, New Mexico, a phone number and street address.

"s.e.xy gangsta," she whispered, proud of herself.

I nodded, amazed that she'd found it, but I was not about to agree to his obvious and unsettling s.e.xiness - not openly, anyway. Kelsey copied the information down on the sheet of paper we were using to communicate, folded it up, and stuffed it in the pocket of my jacket.

"At least get the dude a thank-you card," she whispered in my ear. "Emily Post would approve of that."

I tried to ignore the way my heart raced at the thought of calling Demetrio, hearing his voice again, maybe even seeing him again. There was no reason to be nervous, I reasoned. It must have been that I a.s.sociated him with the crash, and all the drama of it. Maybe, I reasoned, it was like when you're kidnapped and end up falling for you captor just because you're dependent upon him for your survival the way a baby is dependent upon its mother. By that logic, we all loved our parents only because they were our original captors. Made sense.

Yazzie carried on. "The story of St. Anthony's temptation has been a ripe subject for artists and writers for a long time. The basic story, for those of us who are not familiar with it, is that St. Anthony the Great made a lonely trip through the Egyptian desert, where he was tempted by many sinful things but through sheer will power and conscience, was able to transcend them. This idea that fallible human beings are able to rise above their own ba.n.a.l nature, to aspire to greater things and greater beauty in spite of their cravings, l.u.s.ts, desires and wants, is an enduring theme.

"You see this same mythology play out in works by painter Salvador Dali, composer Paul Hindemith, Michelangelo. The famous French author Gustave Flaubert -"

"Ooh! Gussie Flubber," whispered Kelsey, who thought calling Flaubert by this name was high comedy.

Yazzie continue, "...who many of you will be reading and discussing this year or next, wrote a novel about the temptation of St. Anthony, and it is said to be his best work, a book that took him his entire life to complete.

"It's all there - the seven deadly sins, martyrdom, G.o.d, science, l.u.s.t, death, monsters. And transcendence through self-denial and moral self-control. Incredible transcendence, through self-imposed isolation. Human beings have an unquenchable thirst for hope in the face of despair, for the faith that no matter how bad things get, there will always be a way to pull ourselves back toward the good, the just, and the right."

Yazzie paused now, as she often did, and hummed a few notes of a melody that only she knew. She had explained to us that this was her way of connecting with her spirit guides on a higher plane. We'd grown used to it, and simply waited for her to flutter back to earth and resume her professorial duties.

Yazzie stared dreamily at the painting in silence for a moment, then carried on.

"As dreary and frightening as this Bosch is at first glance, it is ultimately a work of a man I believe had great hope for people, and for our ability to rise above greed, avarice, sin. It is an optimistic painting. Now, let's hear what you think. I always love hearing your thoughts. This is a great group, with curious minds. Starting with the left panel, and the lower left corner. We see something hatching from an egg. What might this mean?"

And so the discussion with the cla.s.s began. Thirty-five minutes later the bell rang. Kelsey and I were about to leave when Yazzie called me back.

"Yes?" I asked, standing at the side of her desk. Kelsey waited for me in the hall.

Yazzie burrowed through a desk drawer, and tugged out a yellowed, half-torn sheet of paper with pale photocopied text on it. Most of her notes looked like this. She handed it to me.

"Before I forget, I wanted you to read this when you have a moment. I would suggest you read it soon. Today. But I know how you girls are with your time. It's busy."

I looked at the paper. It was a Cochiti Indian myth. Yazzie was forever handing me things like this, myths from the 19 Indian Pueblos of the Rio Grande River valley in New Mexico, and I had long ago stopped reading them too carefully because most of them didn't make any kind of sense to me.

"Thanks," I said politely.

"I've been thinking," she began, for no apparent reason, "that if you believe a thing matters, then it will, and if you don't believe a thing matters, then it won't. What do you think?"

"I don't know," I answered, truthfully. I wondered if she'd overheard me and Kelsey talking about the coincidence.

"Well, maybe you'll have some thoughts on that, eventually, and when you do, I want you to come tell me what they are. Come by whenever. Here, or at my studio downtown. Deal?"

Yazzie held her hand out for me to shake it. I did, tepidly. Her hand was strong and dry, the skin thick from working with clay.

"Have a great weekend," she said, releasing my hand, and busying herself with her slides again.

"You too."

I returned to Kelsey in the hall, and we giggled in spite of ourselves as we walked back down the hall, toward the exit.

"Yazzie's freakin' weird, and quite unhealthily obsessed with you, I might add," said Kelsey. "I daresay the unattainable MILF is in love with you."

"You're a disgusting perv," I said, looping my arm through hers as I wadded up the photocopied story and stuffed it in my pocket, next to the neatly folded paper bearing Demetrio's contact information. "I think she means well."

"Naive, like I said," Kelsey told me. "You think everyone means well, except for me and Demetrio, and we're the ones who actually do."

After cla.s.ses ended for the day, I stood outside the dance studio at school, with a dozen other girls, and read the "dance troupe practice is canceled" note taped to the door with disappointment. I needed the release of a workout, and nothing calmed me or centered me better than dancing. I lived to dance. Oh well. The anxiety headache I was nursing would have to be remedied the old-fashioned way, with Tylenol. p.r.o.ne to headaches since the crash, I now carried painkillers in my backpack, like an old woman. I felt overwhelmed, unlike myself, sleepy, and worried about the anxiety that I simply couldn't shake.

To clear my head, I walked across one of Coronado Prep's many landscaped quads, to the gym complex. My father, who had gone to college back East, said the stately crimson brick buildings and towering trees on the grounds of my school reminded him of the way Ivy League schools looked in New England. It certainly required a lot of water to make anything in the desert look like a lush forest, and I figured a hefty chunk of our sizable tuition went to grounds maintenance and the water company.

The storm from earlier had wrung itself dry, and the afternoon sky blazed clear now, a bright cobalt blue. The angled rays of the lowering sun struck the snow in such a way as to make it twinkle like millions of diamonds had been sprinkled across the world. I stood for a moment, breath caught in my throat, admiring the work of nature. Snow, I thought, could be so many things. It could be peacefully sparkling jewels, or slippery claws of near-death. I'd heard that Eskimos had many words for snow, and now understood why. Snow was multifaceted, both a playful bringer of life-giving water and a dark messenger of slow and ruthless death. Nothing was simple, when you took the time to really examine it.

No wind blew now. I caught sight of three small bunnies, huddled together, perfectly still beneath a pine tree, watching me with their perfectly round, blinkless black eyes. How did they survive such harsh weather? I wanted to gather then into my arms and bring them inside. Perhaps humans had simply become too soft, incapable of surviving the elements. We must surely have been tougher in the past, when Native Americans lived on this same land 10,000 years ago without benefit of heat and electricity. How did they do it? Did they know something - or some things - that we'd forgotten now?

I crunched across the snow, opened a side door to the West campus athletic complex, walked into the soothing blast of heated air, and snuck into the basketball court where Logan was jousting with the fencing team. I liked to watch him do this because of the grace and skill involved; but I hated to watch him do this because it involved swords and stabbing. In his white suit and facemask, he was nimble and robust, a man who would protect me from all harm. Like everything else he did - shooting, swimming, skiing - he excelled at fencing, an obscure, testosterone-soaked art of gentlemanly sword fighting. He looked up, saw me, and nodded his acknowledgment. My presence seemed to galvanize him to perform harder, the way girls always seem to inspire the best in compet.i.tive boys. He went after his opponent with a vengeance now. I cringed and tried to understand the appeal of thrusting a weapon another human being. It was a guy thing for sure.

After a triumphant sparring match, Logan removed his mesh mask, and strode over to me, beaming and glowing with sweat.

"What're you doing here, babe?" he asked me, out of breath, his cheeks glowing pink from healthy exertion. He gave me a humid hug and a peck on the cheek. One amazing thing about Logan was that he never smelled bad, even after working out. He always carried the scent of freshly squeezed limes. I told him dance practice had been canceled, and that I was wasting a little time before heading up to Santa Fe for a couple nights with my dad and then back Sunday for my big dance compet.i.tion.

"Wish I could come see you compete," he said, "but I'm heading up to Colorado with my dad. There's whitetail coming down near Buena Vista, tons of 'em. Late December's the best for archery. We're trying out some crossbows for a big company that wants to endorse me."

"Stay warm," I said, not knowing what else one might say under such circ.u.mstances. Don't get too much blood on you? I put the thought of hunting deer with a crossbow out of my mind, because it sickened me just a little. Okay, a lot. My mom's dad and brothers all hunted, as did my own dad, and mom once told me it was a woman's duty to ignore certain things men did for the sake of getting along with them. I was doing my best, but did wonder if I'd ever get the hang of ignoring what Kelsey called Logan's barbarism. I stared at his beautiful face, and wondered how such a good-looking person could have it in him to kill anything.

Logan's coach whistled for him to come back to practice, so he gave me another quick peck, on the lips this time, and trotted over to his team. I quickly grew bored, and decided to head out. I walked back across campus, admiring the glistening snow again, and loaded myself into the Land Rover for the hour-long drive to Santa Fe. Kelsey had promised to come up to go to the movies with me tomorrow, meaning I wasn't going to be bored out of my mind babysitting my twin toddler half-sisters while my dad and his new wife went out on the town, as was often the case on my visits. My dad and his wife seemed to think of me as their resident weekend babysitter.

As I left Coronado Prep's student parking lot I called my mother on the Bluetooth, to let her know I was fine and on my way to my dad's a little early. She answered in her usual stressed-out voice full of sighing and deep inhales, telling me she was in the middle of an important meeting with the city council and couldn't talk long.

"Are you taking Buddy to your dad's?" she asked.

"No. He's still limping a little from the crash."

My mom sighed, then complained. "So I have to feed and walk him all weekend."

"Not the whole weekend. I have my dance compet.i.tion Sunday, so I'm coming home early," I said.

"Regardless. He's your dog. When we got him you agreed to take care of him. I expect you to live up to your responsibilities."

"Mom, he's injured. I don't want to stress him out. Just this once."

"Fine." She sounded annoyed. "Call me when you get to your dad's."

"Okay."

"Take the Interstate. I don't want you on those back roads again. We saw how that ended up. And focus on the road this time."

"Fine."

We said our goodbyes and hung up. I felt an incredible sense of isolation, anger and sadness wash over me - a new mix of feelings that left me wanting to punch something, or someone. I didn't like feeling this way; it didn't make me proud - but I couldn't deny it, either. I had a dark, untapped well of anger inside. Hurling a gla.s.s at a wall would have felt wonderful just then. I wasn't generally quick to anger. My emotions seemed to be out of whack completely, ever since the crash. Maybe I had damaged my brain somehow. I didn't know anymore.

I did know I wouldn't be following her orders. It was a pa.s.sive resistance, but one that was all my own. I steered the car West on Academy Boulevard for a few blocks, past the upscale mini-malls and the empty, frozen golf course, fully intending to go to the South on Interstate rather than North. I would take Highway 14 again, in spite of her - or to spite her. Maybe a little of both.

When I got to San Mateo boulevard, Kelsey called me to remind me to call Demetrio to apologize.

"You're so obsessed with him, maybe you should call him." I told her. "You want me to set you up or something?"

"That's not a bad idea," she said.

"Yes it is."

"Whatever. Call him. Why are you so snippy?"

"Sorry. My mom p.i.s.sed me off, blaming me for the accident."

"I'm sorry. Just ignore her. With parents, that's often the best approach. Do not make eye contact. Do not feed them. Etcetera."

I laughed, grateful once more for my best friend's ability to set the world right whenever it went askew. We made arrangements for her to visit me at my dad's tomorrow morning, and hung up.

Not quite sure why, I did as she asked, punching the phone number from the sc.r.a.p paper into my phone's keypad at a red light near the McDonald's. The call connected through the Bluetooth, and the ringing noise came through the car's speakers. My pulse sped up in antic.i.p.ation of the awkward call, but not for long. Soon, the telltale tones signaling a disconnected number bleated out of the speakers, and I pressed the call off. Dead end.

As I pulled into the Southbound lanes of Interstate 25, a sort of denial came over me, where I knew I was defying my mother's instructions, but where I didn't want to think too hard about it. I just kept driving, and told myself it was okay to prefer the East side of the Sandias, where the mountains sloped gradually, and where rainfall allowed for the growth of Ponderosa Pines and Aspens at the higher elevations. The East side, the Albuquerque side, was dry and rugged, more cliffs and cacti than forests. The evergreens of the East side lifted my mood. I cranked my music up, and rolled on, toward the towering, flat-topped purple Sandia Mountain range, until the city of Albuquerque had slipped behind me, and I found myself driving though the mountain cleavage known as Tijeras Canyon. Yep. I was heading once more toward Highway 14. The place where I'd crashed and thought, only one week ago, that I would die. I wasn't going to let a freak accident - or my mother - make me afraid of this drive. If you weren't vigilant in life, it could scare you into paralysis. I thought of my mother, so bitter and lonely, scared away from love because of her bad marriage to my dad. That was sort of an accident, wasn't it? I would not be like her. I wasn't going to be scared away from taking chances.

I suppose I knew at some level that I intended to drive past the address on the slip of paper, too, just out of curiosity. Kelsey had made me feel guilty enough about how we'd treated Demetrio that I at least wanted to see for myself just what kind of home he came from. Perhaps I'd misjudged him. Somewhere near the town of Canoncito, driving in the shadow of the mountain but beneath an azure sky, I remembered something Yazzie had said earlier, seemingly off-the-cuff, earlier that day. If you think a thing matters, then it does. Maybe it held true for people, too. If we thought a person mattered, they did; if we thought they didn't matter, they didn't. Demetrio had thought I mattered enough to call for help on my behalf, and to find me at the coffee shop to give me my necklace. The least I could do was think he mattered enough for a proper thank-you.

I pulled the Land Rover off the highway, onto the gravel at the San Pedro Overlook, with its cliff-top view of the barren mesa scrubland below, covered in white snow, and I typed the address into the navigation unit on the dashboard of the car. That way, the car could be responsible for me going there, not me. It was starting to get dark, and you just never knew what you might find out here in the middle of nowhere.

I drove on along the twisting narrow road, until I got to the town of Golden, at which point the navigation unit took me off Highway 14 and onto a series of even narrower, and more twisty dirt roads. Soon, I was directed just off a road called Luz Del Cielo, onto a stark and narrow lane where the houses were few and far between. The soothing woman's voice of the navigation system announced: "You have arrived at your destination."

It was only now that I realized I didn't have anything to give him - in the event that I actually found him, that was. I'd meant to maybe have a card, some way to thank him for helping me. Maybe a handshake would have to do, I thought. That's when I remembered that I had a gift card for $50 worth of free downloads on iTunes, somewhere at the bottom of my backpack. It was a late birthday present from Missy, my dad's new wife, and even though I liked iTunes as much as the next girl, I didn't particularly like the home-wrecking usurper that was Missy, so I'd essentially ignored it rather than deal with my emotions. I burrowed through my pack until I found it, buried at the bottom and covered with lint and cracker crumbs. I wiped it off, then slipped it into my jacket pocket.

I exited the Land Rover and set out on booted foot across the frozen, snowy ground, heading for the small, decrepit-looking house. The ground was uneven, so I moved slowly and cautiously. The house was typical for this area, a slightly saggy, nondescript square of pink-beige stucco, capped with a simple pitched tar-shingle roof. As I approached the house, I saw that it bore the same number on the mailbox as the paper in my hand. This was the place. My pulse accelerated again, and I tried to calm down, telling myself - ridiculously, really - that of course it wasn't dangerous to go looking for a known gang member in the middle of nowhere, alone, at a house with a broken fence and a rusting hull of an old, tireless car in the side yard. The home looked abandoned, except for the wisp of smoke rising from the chimney, and the glow of lights behind the yellowed curtains hung in the smudgy windows.

I approached as quietly as I could, smoothed my hair down a little, and pushed the doorbell with my gloved finger. The b.u.t.ton was crusted and sticky, and didn't seem to have been getting much use, so I removed my glove and knocked hard on the door as well, just in case. I replaced the glove and then stood there, shivering with cold and nerves, for what seemed like five minutes. Though I heard a small dog bark inside, and rustling noises, no one came. I was just about to turn around to leave when the door finally opened a crack, with a stiff, horrible sc.r.a.ping noise. My heart thundered as I peered into the musty darkness within the house.

I hoped to see Demetrio, of course, but I was met instead by a sharp and narrow chin that jutted out from an ancient face, the way chins do when the teeth are missing from the mouth and the lips have caved into the visage. The body upon which the countenance sat was skinny and short, and I was forced to look down to see it. A large nose curled downward toward the chin, both of them housed in a narrow brown face crisscrossed with valleys of wrinkles. Two tiny eyes, filmy with cataracts and the size of hard gray pebbles, perched far back in sunken sockets. A smell of mothb.a.l.l.s, stale smoke, hot cooking oil, corn tortillas and insecticide wafted out, making me cough.

"h.e.l.lo!" I called, trying to sound cheerful in spite of my feeling like a complete and utter fool.

"What do you want?" came the reply, in a hoa.r.s.e old voice with a trace of a Spanish accent to it. "You selling something, I don't want none of it."

"I'm sorry to bother you, sir, but I've come here hoping to find a young man named Demetrio Vigil. Google said he lived at this address."

"Who did?"

"Google."

The door opened a tiny bit more now, and the face stuck itself into the s.p.a.ce between us, scowling with a hand cupped to his ear.