Jane Hammons
La Sombra
The big-mouthed white woman came to the desert to study water. There are coyotes and rats and cactus and ocotillo. There are people and chickens and horses and cows. Lizards and bats. Scorpions and flies. Cats and dogs. There are four madrones in the plaza. Two were already there when the lunatic who founded the village got tired of looking for treasure he was never going to find, gave up, sat down, and named the place La Sombra to honor the shade that fell beneath the madrones. One hundred years later, a botanist came to La Sombra and called the madrones Arbutus menziesii. Every day he went into the bakery to buy bread and make small talk with Virgie Maria Contreras de Santileces, who had hair like obsidian and lips like blood. When the botanist told Virgie that the madrones were rain forest relics, she invited him to dinner. He was a bore, but when he talked, and he talked a lot, Virgie heard the chatter of faraway monkeys and got as wet as the Amazon. Before he left, the botanist transplanted two madrones from a rocky cliff to the plaza, giving Virgie a bit of shade near the bakery. He also left her with twins.
In La Sombra there is no water to speak of, so it must be said that Mateo Luis Hernandez de Roybal knew what he was getting into when he held conversation with the white woman who didn’t care that people laughed about what she was doing in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert.
The woman never went anywhere without a rack of clear glass tubes on the seat next to her in the truck. In them she tried to catch the rain that evaporates before it hits the ground. In the back of the truck, she carried the rods that she drilled into the desert. In plastic pouches, she collected samples of bone dry dirt. The woman had a computer and maps and some government documents. She drove around in her truck and talked to the rangers at the Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the Living Desert State Park. And she talked to ranchers and developers and other people who had some interest in water that doesn’t exist. The ranchers thought she was going to bring some government water to the Guadalupe Mountains. She had no such plan. She did not come to make changes, but to study things just the way they were.
Her face was covered with freckles, and her hair was the color of sand. Where she came from, she was probably considered pretty. And even though they laughed at her, the people of La Sombra liked her. She shook hands and hugged the people who’d let her. She’d pitch pennies and shoot baskets with the kids when she pulled into the plaza. She’d pet their dogs and ask for names.
The dogs that get respect are named Oso or Lobo by people who like to think their dogs are part bear or wolf. Gallinas and Gatos are scrawny dogs that skitter about La Sombra, begging for scraps and getting nothing but dirty looks. Sometimes dogs are named for their color: Blanca or Negrita. These are the dogs that play with children.
It was Mateo’s dog the woman met the evening she decided to take a walk up the hill along the gravel road that led away from the house she rented from Antonio Ulibarri. The dog met her in the road and growled down deep in his throat. She put her hand out, palm up, to show she meant no harm.
“Lobo,” Mateo called from the steps of his falling down adobe house that he patched here and there with bricks from Ace Hardware in Carlsbad. He had a big stack of them next to the house, just waiting for something to crumble. His call to the dog was followed by a sharp whistle, a command to return to his master. Lobo ignored him. He licked the woman’s hand and stuck his muzzle into her crotch where she let it stay just long enough to establish a friendship.
“He likes me,” she called to Mateo, stepping past Lobo who followed at her heels. “Ann,” she called out, “Ann Brock.”
“Mateo Roybal.” He gave her the simple version of his name.
With Lobo by her side, she walked up to Mateo and gave his hand a firm shake. “Akita,” she said.
Mateo knew Spanish and English, but he didn’t know anything else.
“The dog,” she added and smiled.
Her mouth was big and wide, and Mateo thought if he put his ear next to it, he would hear the ocean the way he had when he listened to the conch shell his abuela had kept on her bureau. Inside it was smooth and pink, and deeper inside, Mateo knew, it was wet.
“Part Akita, don’t you think.”
“I don’t know Akita,” was all Mateo could say.
“A Japanese breed. The tail curls like this.” Ann grasped the firm length of fur that curved up over Lobo’s hindquarters. “The wedge shaped head. And the ears.” She stroked them. “Erect.”
“Japanese,” Mateo repeated. What he knew of Japanese was the atomic bomb that had been tested somewhere on the other side of the Guadalupes. But he desired her company, and so he said, “The bomb.”
“Teriyaki,” Ann laughed.
Mateo decided to be honest. “I don’t know much about Japanese.”
“Me neither,” said Ann. “But I know dogs.” Lobo circled them as they stood in the road. His black and white coat was thick, shot through with bits of ocher, the color of the clay beneath their feet.
“He keeps the coyotes out of my chickens,” said Mateo. “I got him from Virgie’s twins.”
“La panadería,” Ann said. She liked to practice her Spanish.
“Yes.” Mateo said nothing more about Virgie or her baked goods. Before the botanist, Mateo and Virgie had planned to wed. After the twins he would not be thought a fool.
For a while longer, they talked about dogs and chickens. When Ann spoke Mateo heard the noisy rush of a river he had once fished with his father.
Night fell. Ann returned to her house, Mateo to his. They slept in fits, their sheets tangled and wet. Rivers carved canyons through the desert; the swollen sky spilled into the Amazon. Lobo crept into the coop and killed Mateo’s chickens. The next morning when he went out to feed them, Mateo saw Lobo sleeping soundly in a bed of feathers and blood. Right then, Mateo should have shot him.
Instead he thought of Ann who knew dogs, so he put Lobo on a heavy chain and ran alongside him all the way to her house. He wrapped the chain tightly around a fence post. Then he sat down at the side of the house where the faucet dripped a little and stirred the puddle with his finger. When she came out with her laptop and her papers and headed for her truck, he told her what Lobo had done. “Keep him on the chain,” he growled.
She smiled and for a moment raindrops tinkled like bells around him.
Mateo should have known that a big-mouthed white woman who brings a computer into the desert to study water that isn’t there was not going to keep a dog on a chain for very long. For two nights Lobo howled at the stars and leapt after the moon. Bats tormented him, zooming through the night. Flies mocked him in the day. On the third night, Ann set him loose. Lobo headed straight for Mateo’s house and killed the fighting cock he had spared the night he killed the chickens. He dragged the cock out of its own special pen, sat down in the dusty front yard, and tore its head off. Lobo chewed on the stringy carcass and waited for the sun to rise.
When Mateo saw what Lobo had done, he went inside and got his pistol. Ann heard the shot and ran up the hillside followed by Antonio Ulibarri who had come to collect the rent. Lobo sat in the yard wagging his tail. Mateo stood at the door with a gun in his hand. Ann was confused, but Antonio Ulibarri understood what had happened when he saw Lobo’s stained muzzle and the bloody clump of golden feathers.
“Lobo ate his cock!” Antonio crowed. Mateo’s cock had more than once defeated his own. He headed down the hillside into La Sombra with the news.
Ann went to the door and took the gun from Mateo. She put it on a table near the hole he had blown high enough on the wall to tell Ann he’d had no intention of shooting Lobo. She ran her hands through his thick black hair. When she kissed him, he pulled her to the hard wooden floor.
“Manzanitas,” he murmured, pinching her nipples, hard and red like the berries that grew on the madrones. He shoved his tongue into her canyon and ate the storm. She drove his cock into her wide wet smile. Lobo barked and howled and crashed against the door.
Afterwards they put Lobo in the back of Mateo’s truck. Avoiding La Sombra, they drove down the backside of the mountain and dumped Lobo by the side of the road. He lifted his leg on a fence post, slipped under the barbed wire and chased a flock of bleating sheep. Mateo and Ann went to a kennel in Carlsbad where she bought an Akita.
They put the Akita between them in the cab of the truck, drove into La Sombra and let him loose in the plaza. He walked in circles around the madrones and then settled down for a nap. Father Romero walked to the chapel to perform noonday mass. Virgie sliced bread for Antonio Ulibarri. The twins fed their new litter of puppies. Everyone heard the shot.
Virgie was the first to take a look. “That’s not Lobo,” she laughed, wetting her red lips with her tongue. “That’s an Akita.” Virgie went back into the bakery. She baked conchas and brewed coffee and told to all her customers the tale of Mateo Luis Hernandez de Roybal, the fool who wouldn’t shoot the dog that ate his cock.
©2007 by Jane Hammons
