The Deep History of San Martin

 

-from Defiled with Blood, due out later this year.

The story welled up out of Rebecca as life had once welled up here, eons ago, first as submerged aquatic life in the ancient inland sea that had long covered this portion of the continent. Then plants had sprung from the mud of the receded waters, and the microorganisms that lived in endless symbiosis with them.

She spoke of that life. She spoke of the trees. Magnificent trees, as if she had seen them herself, seen their boughs laden with leaves, needles, nuts, fruit. In the primordial forest, darkness had ruled, long before man was even possible, before the dinosaurs roamed the surface of the planet, seemingly invincible and enthroned for hundreds of millions of years. That far back, the forest had obscured the Earth, claimed it, owned it, brooded over it, even the rays of the god-like Sun reflected by its high canopy, leaving all below to survive in the dim glow permitted by the occasional opening amid the branches above.

Eventually, though, the dinosaurs had come and they had reigned long and ploddingly. Chewing up the forests no faster than they could regrow, the long-toothed predators among them chewing up their herbivorous fellows no faster than they could reproduce. And so the rule of plants had been replaced by a rule of flesh: immense hulks of meat, eating, defecating, breathing, copulating, birthing more flesh to repeat these processes for eternity.

In all their long reign, never had they developed what men might call consciousness. They differed from the great trees of the early darkness only in that they could move and fuck and kill and eat.

Perhaps, in a universe still young and rife with ballistic dangers, their end was inevitable. Instead of registering surprise when learning of their sudden and cataclysmic end, we who survive might better wonder at their endurance, at the immense window of time in which their dynasties continued without interruption.

From the ashes of their destruction, measly creatures, unworthy even of the meager light that dripped through the clouded aftermath of Armageddon, crawled out to assert a new claim to the planet.

This was a new era, an era of light. Though great forests remained, the darkness beneath their branches was but an echo, a step-child of that primeval gloom which remained now only in the deepest caves beneath the surface, into which its black remains had sunk, much as the dinosaurs bones, subsumed by the Earth, had been drawn down into the depths beneath the dark forest.

Furry creatures now vied with reptiles, fish and birds for dominion. This contest lasted millions of years. There must have been countless watershed moments, strategic victories and crushing defeats, but they are all lost to time, as will be everything that ever happens.

Among the mammals, curious creatures came to be. Primates spread across the globe, clambering among the trees or roaming the forest floors. The apes arose from their ranks, and from them came Man.

A broad definition of Man encounters him not just in Africa among the earliest Homo sapiens, but everywhere around the planet, in forms and emanations that defy the classifications that rise only from the fragments of bone that survived to be disinterred by descendants historical if not biological, eons later.

And here, in the region of the American Southwest now home to the old mining town of San Martin, some of these men gathered. These first men came here so long ago that there is no counting the years. To count them, to enumerate them, provides no significance, adds no energy to the concept of long ago. They came long before anthropologists imagined that such sapient hominids existed.

These men, and others like them, had roamed over this terrain many times before. Their women grubbed for nuts and seeds, while they themselves chased game both big and small. Their savage children scurried behind them and among them. They carved tools from wood, bone and stone, digging holes for shelter or sleeping under trees.

And always they carried fire.

-from Defiled with Blood, the next upcoming novel from Robert Paxton.

Easy

 -from Part III of Defiled with Blood, a Robert Paxton novel due out in early 2021

By the time that the bus reached San Martin, Ken had been drunk for a long time. Prior experience had taught him that you could get away with just about anything on an intercity bus, so long as you were discreet. Considering some of the depravity in which others engaged while traveling aboard these shuttles, he figured he would not be disturbed in his quiet drinking.

He was careful, though, to put on his best face before stepping down from the bus at the San Martin station. He assumed that he might be greeted by a library representative and he didn’t want to do anything that might put the free food and the return ticket at risk. Coming up out of Phoenix, he’d made a slightly unsteady trip to the bus restroom, where he’d combed his hair and splashed cold water on his face.

He descended the steps beside the bus driver and stepped onto the ground of San Martin for the first time at exactly 9:04 AM. The bus had arrived at 9AM as promised. Oh-nine-hundred, Ken had mumbled to himself, recalling the sound of his drill sergeant’s voice in basic training back in ’43. Now in his thirties, and quite inebriated, the memories of his drill sergeant did not inspire Ken with fear or even admiration, as it once had. It made him giggle.

The giggles stopped when he was enveloped by the hot air outside the bus. Waves of warmth seemed to rise from the ground below, billowing him with infernal caresses. Even through his shoes, he could feel the extreme heat of the tarred surface below. Jesus, he thought, lifting his feet gingerly as if expecting to bring up a clinging glob of melted blacktop with the shoes.

He’d gotten a taste of the heat in Phoenix when he changed buses but it had not phased him there. Everyone knew Phoenix was hot. Somehow he’d imagined that San Martin would be considerably cooler. It had been described to him as being in the mountains and, to a Midwesterner like Ken, that provoked images of snow-capped peaks, skiing, and starry-eyed college girls in tight sweaters.

Now, standing on the scorching pavement, Ken looked around and saw what he might have noticed outside the windows of the bus if he hadn’t been so focused on alcohol. The low surrounding mountains were home to cactus, squat creosote bushes, mesquite trees and broomweed. And a lot of dry ground, sand really, between these struggling life forms. At the very peaks of the most distant mountains, did he see stands of pine? He wasn’t sure, and gazing up and away like that was making him dizzy, and dizzy he might puke.

Bringing his attention back down to Earth, he saw that he had an admirer. A middle-aged woman, dark-complexioned, possibly American Indian. She wore coke-bottle bottom glasses and her greatly magnified eyes stared out at him, framed by an abundance of long, straight, black hair. She was not his usual type but, since falling down as low in life in the last few years, Ken had learned to broaden his tastes.

“Hello.” He smiled rakishly and stepped towards her. “Looking for me?”

She smiled widely and nodded in dumb fascination. Ken marveled at how things so often worked out like this. Even here and now, drunk and penniless, he could still pull one in.

Her name was Loretta Halstead. She had led the effort for the San Martin library to bring Ken into town for a reading.

“We are so excited to have you here!” She said, literally trembling. This is going to be easy, Ken thought happily. Having forgotten, he wondered how long he had before the reading. Not that I need that long, he thought as he chuckled and said nothing.

As it turned out, it was even easier than he had imagined. The reading was not until evening and he was going to stay in a spare room at Loretta’s house. She took him to her small home and he noted right away that there was no spare room.

from Sudden Cool Dark

Dalton reserved one of the small study rooms available. Inside, there was a table and three chairs. He set up his lap top and waited for Barb to bring him the books or for Ms. Roberts to show up, which ever came first.

Barb showed up a few minutes later, a little flustered but cradling a pile of books in her arms. She laid them out as gingerly as possible on the table next to Dalton’s computer. They were an eclectic variety of texts. Dalton sifted through the pile one by one until he had a few distinct heaps: local geography and history, the Catholic Church, vampire novels. The latter pile included Bram Stoker, Stephen King, Anne Rice and others.

“They checked out these books?”

“Well, they usually just looked at them in here.” She gestured to the walls and then made one of those characteristic pauses before looking back at him. “Well, not here, of course!” She laughed. “I forget that this place is so new. We were in the trailer back then. Gosh, it has been a long time.”

“Tell you what,” Dalton said, “I’ll just look at all this while I wait. When Ms. Roberts shows up, please send her in.”

Barb nodded, smiling and left. 

Dalton perused the piles of books disinterestedly. He had never read any vampire books but he had seen some movies. Gary Oldman. Winona Ryder. Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt. He thought about the stake in the John Doe’s body.

The books on Catholicism were very old. There was an old missal. He had never owned one before but he knew what they were. They contained the guide to liturgies, particularly the mass. He flipped through it. Each page was divided into two columns of words. One in Latin, the other in English. That might come in handy. He started a new pile: Books he would check out.

He started into the pile of history books. There was a history of Arizona, a history of the Southwest, a few books on the Anasazi, the Hohokam and the Mogollon. The latter seemed to be the most worn. Finally, there was one book about local history called the Witch Cave Massacre. He flipped it open and immediately noticed that someone had written a familiar phrase on the inside cover in red ink.

Satan is King.

from Night Life, an American Gospel Story

A taxi pulled up beside us.

“Sean!” Teresa waved one fleshy brown arm out the back window of the taxi.  “Hop in!”  Sean got in the car while I paid for the coffee and tipped the waiter. 

When I got in Teresa had one arm wrapped around her new boy.  She was an American but often mistaken for a local with her mother’s big, dark, Spanish eyes and her father’s Haitian skin and large lips.  She was big all around and you knew that someday she would be very fat.  I don’t know why Mike still kept her around.

She had met Sean two years ago at a Catholic orphanage in Guatemala when he first arrived there as a volunteer.  A few months later she left the missionary life but kept up a correspondence with Sean.  She met me in a club a few weeks after my arrival in town.  She was already with Mike by then, so I never knew her, as did Sean, in her previous incarnation.

I introduced Sean to Mike, who grunted a salutation in reply.  Mike had a black goatee to go with the white T-shirt and rippling arm muscles that perfected his ex-con look.

At a restaurant named “Dos Hermanos” we ordered sea food.  Teresa ordered her favorite.

“Shrimp!” She licked her lips after she said it. “We know what that’s good for, right?” She laughed her evil laugh.

Sean glanced at each of us.  “What?”

“Makes me frisky.” Teresa said, raising and lowering her eyebrows rapidly.

“Oh.”

After we ordered, Sean asked Teresa how the painting was going.

“What?”

“Painting.” Sean smiled. “You’re an artist, remember?”

Teresa laughed her fake laugh. “Right.  I’ve done a few.  It’s not as easy or cheap to get art materials here as I thought.”  She looked around the room as she spoke.

“The night life here is distracting.” Mike interjected.

“Can’t wait to go dancing!” Teresa said, turning suddenly back to us, hair flying.  She smiled and moved her torso as if already at the club.

“Where’s a good place to write in this town?” Sean asked me.

I told him about my favorite air-conditioned café and about the library at the cultural center.

“Not the University?”

“There are too many distractions there.”

“His conquests.” Teresa said, giggling.

“Your conquests?” Sean asked.

“I’ve gotten involved with a few students.”

I changed the subject to college experiences, something Teresa, Sean and I all had in common.  Obviously, Teresa had not been honest with the boy about our lifestyles.  She had invited a vegetarian to a carnivore’s fiesta.  I guess I should have known, since he had been a missionary just days before.  But Teresa had come from the same place and I assumed she had invited a kindred spirit out of repression.

“What are you doing here, Mike?” Sean suddenly asked.  I wanted to scream at Teresa for letting him come so ignorant.

“You ask a lot of questions.” Mike replied.

“Mike is independently wealthy.” Teresa volunteered, stroking Mike’s shoulder.

“Oh.”

Just then the food arrived.

“Poor little bugs.” Teresa said, bringing a spoonful of rice and shrimp to her lips. “So many must die so that I may be satisfied.”

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” Sean announced.

“About satisfying Teresa?” I asked.  Mike coughed. Teresa smiled, chewing with her mouth closed and those lips working.  Sean’s simple Irish face turned red.

“No, about death.  The end of things.  You know.  Look at this little thing.” He impaled a shrimp with his fork and raised it to eye level between all of us. “We’re on the other side of him now.  We used to live in the same world, but we’re on opposite sides of a line now.  He’s in the past, we’re in the present.”

“You’re not turning into a vegetarian, are you?” I asked.

“No.” He placed the shrimp in his mouth and began to chew, as if to demonstrate his dedication to carnivorousness.   “I’ve just been thinking about what it will be like to be on the other side of that line, to be in the past, to be dead, to not remember any of this.”

“Ugh.” Mike commented, gnashing shrimp corpses vigorously in his partially open mouth.

“Don’t you believe in Heaven?” I probed.

“I do.  I really do.” Sean replied. “But I don’t really want to go there. I like life.”

Teresa gave him a high five across the table. “I like to hear you talk like that!”

Sean smiled. “It’s always been hard for me to understand those stories of saints that welcomed death and begged for it as a release.  No image of paradise has ever attracted me more than my own life.  No amount of suffering has ever made me want to die.”

“Maybe it’s because you never suffered.” Mike offered.

“Maybe so.” Sean replied.

“But you worked at that orphanage.” I said. “Teresa told me about how awful it was.”

“That’s not suffering!” Mike laughed.  Teresa ate. “That’s watching suffering.  That’s TV!”

“You’re right.” Sean admitted.  “But I was never under the illusion that I was suffering there.”

There was a lull in the conversation and for a few minutes we all ate intently.  Finally, Teresa asked Sean about his poetry.  She expressed admiration for the poems he had mailed her and asked if he had published any.

“Quite a few, actually.”

That bitch had known the answer to that question, I’m sure.  He must have tooted his horn in the letters he sent her.  But she knew that I had not published anything besides tourist journalism.

“I’ve written one of my old professors about putting together a collection through the University Press.” He added.

“You think you’ll ever go back and get an MFA?” She continued, staring into his eyes across the table.

“After a while, maybe.  If I put out a collection I could probably get a position as an instructor in the intro classes to help cover tuition.”

Less than half an hour later we were all done.  Mike tossed a bunch of currency onto the table.  “Let’s go dancing.”

We headed to Club Pasion. Like all clubs, Club Pasion made conversation impossible.  We were reduced to speaking with the facial expressions that are the real root of human language.  Millions of years ago our hairier, thick-skulled ancestors furrowed brows to inquire, smiled with delight, rolled eyes in disbelief.  So did we, using sequences and permutations of sequences to ask and answer questions or simply express some feeling.

I drank a lot that night.  It’s hard for me to remember much.  I do remember the pulsing music, the strobe lights, hundreds of young people writhing against one another, slick with sweat, eyes closed, not smiling.  I remember Mike disappearing for a while.  I remember Teresa dancing with Sean, always very closely.  I watched his face, saw the unbelievable opportunity rise into eyes that widened somewhat while retaining, if not increasing, their focus.

Then they were gone, too.  Mike reappeared and took me home.  Outside my apartment, as I stepped out of the taxi, he grabbed me. “No,” I mumbled, breaking free, and went inside.

This complete story is found in American Gospel, a collection of fiction about the American Dream and its end.

...the folly of all flesh

At the main entrance above the floor of the kiva, at the top of the stairs, two figures appeared. One was Alicia, still dressed as she had been in the desert. She was sensationally sexual, reminding Thomas of those paintings of women in the apartment where he had danced with her so many years ago. Her pale skin, contrasted with her raven black hair, turned heads, even those of the Pseudo-Mogollon. Unenthusiastic before, they now appeared to believe that a goddess had entered the kiva.

Thomas assumed that the other figure was Miller. Naked, his form was flawless. He appeared neither young nor old. Muscles rippled in his chest, his thighs, his shoulders, arms. Thomas thought of Adam and Eve, prior to the Fall. Looking at the quietly stunned, subdued reaction of the crowd, he also thought of Christ and Magdalen. He thought of Greek gods, Apollo and Athena, Mars and Aphrodite.

The two idols came down the stairway, hand in hand, and moved through the silent, adoring crowd. As they approached the table they separated and maneuvered around each side of the altar table before joining on the other side and standing just a few feet from Thomas, facing him on the cross.

Once they were close, Thomas was strangely unimpressed with their bodies, perfect though they might have been for runway models or exotic dancers. Now they were just bodies, momentarily arranged differently than that of Dominic but ultimately subject to the same derangement and decomposition.

The mysterious two looked up at him. Miller’s gaze was vacant. In Alicia’s dead eyes was the folly of all flesh.

from Sudden Cool Dark

And then there were the devil-worshipers.

They were not a distinct population of Carlson, like the Catholics, the Baptists or the Native Americans. They did not announce themselves but Dalton had teased out their existence from newspaper reports extending back more than a century.

Here and there, incidents of vandalism. The phrase Satan is King had not appeared for the first time over the doors of old Holy Spirit Catholic Church on the most recent Thursday. Someone had been scrawling the words on the walls of homes, in alleyways and on the exteriors of churches for decades. The local Catholic Church had taken the lion’s share of the graffiti.

The incidents had all occurred far apart, separated by years. Only by looking back through news reports for a century could the detective see a pattern. It was as if someone had not wanted to draw too much attention to their animosity.

And the disturbances were not limited to graffiti. There were occasional disappearances, animal mutilations. Public speculation about causes ranged all over and included UFOs.

Father Joe had stated that the last incident at the church had occurred several years ago. A Christ child was stolen from the nativity scene in 2010. But Dalton learned that in 2005 something truly dire had happened. The detective was not sure if local police perceived a connection.

In the fall of that year, a house fire had completely consumed the palatial residence of Samuel Ellsworth, an elderly man and the last remaining heir of one of the largest plots of ranch and farm land in the region. Mr. Ellsworth had not been found in the home nor had anyone been hurt. Indeed, it was believed that Mr. Ellsworth had been suffering from advanced dementia. He remained missing.

Dalton might have ignored this piece of information completely had it not been for something that had occurred at roughly the same time and subsequently had been mentioned in the following edition of the Carlson Gazette.

A deceased John Doe, middle-aged and white, had been discovered in the desert just outside of town. Completely naked, his body torn by wild animals. His identity was never determined but investigators were certain that he was not Ellsworth.

Wedding

[This story is found in American Gospel, a collection of stories by Robert Paxton.]

Claudia Noraima Neria Montufar, a young Honduran woman who had arrived in the US unceremoniously (and without permission) two years ago, was about to become Claudia Barnes, wife of Jeffrey Barnes.  Those around her that Sunday morning at the tiny, Catholic church in Carlson, Arizona thought that this must be the happiest day of her life.  The Americans present, largely Jeff’s family, smirked inwardly as they thought this and glanced at her swelling abdomen.  The Mexicans and other undocumented individuals present envied her.  Most of them had false papers with varying levels of believability.  Some had none at all and lived every day in fear.  Claudia was going to become legal, join herself officially to the great machine of sustenance that was the United States.

She would have liked to feel good about her wedding.  She would have liked to feel good about anything.  Claudia’s barely kept secret, unknown even to her friends and certainly unknown to her future husband and the father of her child, was that she was insane, and had been so since she crossed the border into the U.S.

This insanity she had managed to submerge in constant activity, any job she could take, any act she could perform.  This had carried over into her sexuality when she met Jeff.  At first, before she got pregnant, before he perceived that his life had been ruined and began to drown slowly in liquor until his death in a car accident a few years later, Jeff had joked with his friends that he’d found a nympho. 

But Claudia, unlike real nymphomaniacs, did not want frequent sex because she confused sex with the love and affection which she starved for.  Claudia liked sex because it felt good and it took her mind off the awful thing she had done that drove her crazy, the terrible deed that haunted her dreams, the gruesome ordeal she remembered every morning when she woke and plunged into madness again, her mind filled with the screams that she had stifled.  She had held them inside as she did it and now she heard those screams all day, every day. “Twenty-four seven,” Jeff had said to her once, about her sexual needs.  She knew all about twenty-four seven.

The church was simply a house with one large room devoted to mass.  The Catholic community in Carlson considered itself small, consisting mostly of retirees, snow birds from the East and the Mid-West come to enjoy the weather as they faded away.  There were many young Catholics in the area, but they were Mexicans or Central Americans and felt unwelcome in the church where no one spoke Spanish and there was an insignificant shrine to the Virgin hidden in a back room, like an old, mad parent.  They only came for baptisms, marriages and deaths.  So they had come in large numbers, standing in the dining room because the pews were full, to see one of their own make it to safety.

Claudia hoped, without really hoping, that God would bless her and erase her memory, take the screams from her head.  She had confessed it all the very next day, two years ago in El Paso, only to learn that it was not a sin.  The young American priest, in slow, awkward Spanish, had said that yes, there were sins involved in her story, but that which truly weighed on her was not a sin.

“You were forced to do it.” The priest said, “Besides, she was already dead.” Then he had told her about the team of South American soccer players who had survived a plane crash in the Andes only by consuming the flesh of those who had died.  That was not a sin, either, he explained.  God understands.

Why couldn’t it be a sin so that she could be forgiven?

So here she was two years later, pregnant, at mass in a strange church in stranger land, with a man she didn’t love and could barely understand beside her, ready to be married.  Yet those two years were a series of blurs, scenes barely noticed as she struggled to distance herself from the horror inside, the other scene, the never-ending scene that played again and again in her memory.  That struggle continued right up to the present.  Even a sane person could not have kept from thinking about it. 

A large crucifix hung on the wall behind the altar table, Christ’s tortured carcass nailed to it for eternity.

During the homily that she couldn’t understand, Claudia got up as discreetly as possible and went through the door to the dining room.  Rosa Maria Rivas, a friend from the hotel where they both worked as housekeepers, lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Voy al bano.” Claudia said as she passed.

“Nervios.” Quipped Rosa Maria, smiling and winking at the other Mexicans standing in the dining room, listening without comprehension to the priest they could not see.

In the bathroom, running cool water into her cupped hands before applying it gently to her face, it was no better.  It had happened in a bathroom.  She looked into the mirror at her dull, terrified face and remembered doing the same thing in a filthy bathroom in El Paso after passing the last condom filled with cocaine and cleaning the feces off them in the sink.  She also remembered the sound of Veronica’s body hitting the floor in the other stall, and the sound of someone gurgling.  These thoughts drove her from the church bathroom, her face still moist from ablution.

But walking back to mass through the dining room Claudia could not fend off images of Veronica’s quivering flesh and the foam dribbling from the corner of her mouth.  Claudia had known right away that it had something to do with the drugs inside them, their tickets across the border.   

When she resumed her seat, everyone was standing.  The priest and the white people sang hosanna and it was time to kneel.  She knelt as she had knelt on that filthy floor in the El Paso bathroom to lift Veronica up onto the empty commode, as if she could will the condoms out of a dead body.  But soon Veronica was still and silent forever, the condoms trapped inside, the angry gringo in the bar outside getting angrier.

As she rose for communion, Claudia recalled the great depth of her fear thinking about that furious white man who only knew enough Spanish to tell them to go to the bathroom and take a shit.  She hadn’t seen any weapons, but she knew that he wouldn’t need one to hurt her or kill her.  When she finally had the courage to walk out of the bathroom, sit next to him in the dark corner and tell him, she nearly fainted when he pulled out a knife.  After he handed it to her she remained confused for a moment.  Using gestures, the gringo explained what he wanted. 

It was the wound in His side that did it, that pushed her past her limit.  Approaching the priest, she tried not to look over his shoulder at the gaping wound in Christ’s abdomen.  It took her right back to the moment she had spent two years trying to erase from her memory, the moment that had haunted her dreams, the moment when she cut into Veronica’s belly and sliced through a length of intestine to search for the condoms.  She had told herself that it was no different than removing an animal’s entrails back home, and used her memories of butchering to guide her hands through Veronica’s guts.

When the priest offered Claudia the body of Christ, the initial scream escaped her lips and her knees buckled. She remembered gently squeezing each length of intestine with trembling hands until she found a lump and pushed it toward the opening she had made.  As Claudia fell prostrate before the priest, hiding herself from Christ’s diffident agony, she remembered the pile of shit and swollen condoms in a pool of blood beside Veronica’s body when she was done, and counting them until there was one less than there should have been because one had broken and killed the Mexican girl.

Her cries were so horrible that Jeff’s family left the church, decanting into the parking lot.  Here and there clusters of people stopped and looked back, apparently considering their return.  Then a new shriek would pierce the calm air of a small town Saturday and they would continue their flight.  A few of them, the older ones, remembered the squeal of hogs being slaughtered on the farms they grew up on.  The rest remembered horror movies.  

Jeff himself did not flee but only retreated to the door way and watched her from there.  The priest had retreated to behind the altar table with his dish full of wafers, one hand held protectively over them.  Claudia screamed until Jeff, ignoring entreaties from his mother to come out into the parking lot, returned to her side, remembering the picture of the ultrasound showing his son.

Claudia rose to her feet with Jeff’s aid, eyes and mouth shut, holding in her breath like a drowning woman, tears darting down her cheeks along routes that would someday turn into wrinkles.  Eventually, the priest came out from behind his shelter and served Eucharist to the man and the woman as the others crept cautiously back into the church. 

The wedding ceremony began shortly afterward.  Claudia was able to open her eyes and breathe raggedly by the time it came for her to take the vows.  There was muted, embarrassed applause as Jeff kissed her briefly on one side of the mouth.

Somewhere in her fragmented thoughts, as Claudia stumbled out the door with her husband into the bright light of an Arizona day, she thought that maybe the worst was over, maybe she would be able to stop thinking about what she had done and enjoy life.

But the truth was that she was just completely broken, for good and forever.