LITMIR.BIZ

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to wear his new sunglasses. Beginning to worry, he thought he could feel his eyes fogging up with cataracts. Soon he’d be blind. Then Estelle would say, “I told you so.” He’d have no one to blame but himself.

      “So Padilla belongs to the Native American Church,” Fidel said, after a long pause.

      He turned, remembering Fidel. “That’s why he didn’t report Soto’s body until this morning—to give them time to pack up the teepee and get the hell out of here.”

      “Why would they want to conceal the meeting? The Native American Church is legal—”

      He was interrupted by the sound of a distant “crack” and then the zing of a bullet kicking up sand just to their right in the direction of the arroyo.

      “Get down!” he yelled, as the two dived into the sand.

      Just then a second bullet struck behind them, closer to the house.

      Fidel tried to get up.

      “Wait!” He grabbed Fidel around the waist and pulled him back down. “Just listen.”

      They heard nothing. Just silence. After about a minute, he rose to his knees slowly, looking around at the distant mesas over toward the Rio Grande. He saw no obvious places where a shooter could be situated. The shot was from a high-powered rifle, fired from a great distance. He could tell by the sound.

      “Shit,” Fidel said. “I didn’t sign up for this, I’m a fucking news reporter.”

      He ignored Fidel, standing up now and looking around for any possible movement on the mesas, a shooter, a vehicle, something.

      “Where did it come from?”

      He pointed toward the river. “Whoever it was, he’s probably gone now.”

      “Yeah, well I’m getting the hell out of here.” Crouching low, Fidel scurried off into the sagebrush like a human crab, heading toward Padilla’s house.

      He made a mental note to send someone out later to try and find one of the bullets. Good luck with that.

      He frowned. The day was shaping up even worse than he expected. Getting involved with the Native American Church, or some renegade branch of the church, was the last thing he wanted to do.

      Technically, Fidel spoke correctly. The courts had ruled that peyote ceremonies were legal if held as official meetings of the church. The legal issue didn’t bother him. Never had.

      But having to deal with trigger-happy members of the church did bother him. They were the kind of people who gathered in teepees at night to gobble peyote, a hallucinogenic drug similar to LSD that induced visions of...what? The world of spirits and apparitions? He didn’t even know what to call it, never being one to believe in a spirit world. He was just trying to make sense of the one he inhabited, the physical world. Just thinking about the Native American Church gave him a headache.

      He heard Trujillo’s loud, angry voice coming from inside the small adobe as he approached. He hurried inside, hoping he wouldn’t be too late to stop the rough stuff.

      Fearing the worst, he breathed a sigh of relief when he found Padilla unharmed. The disheveled little man stood in one corner of his living room where he seemed to be showing Trujillo a finely carved kachina on the mantle above his fireplace. The kachina stood about eighteen inches tall, but brown and gold eagle feathers on its headdress made it appear much taller. The brightly-colored kachina danced in full costume, with a red cloth sash tied around its yellow waist, waving a gourd rattle in its right hand.

      “Soto offered me five thousand dollars,” Padilla said. “It’s probably worth a lot more, because it’s a Hemis kachina carved in the nineteen twenties.”

      He walked to the fireplace, negotiating a maze of worn sofas and stuffed chairs faded to a dull beige color. The other two men made room for him.

      “When was Soto going to buy the kachina?” he asked suddenly. “Before or after the peyote ceremony?”

      Padilla’s jaw tightened.

      He could see the tension in Padilla’s face.

      Trujillo looked puzzled, as if he’d missed something.

      “I can’t talk about the church. Our ceremonies are secret. It’s a question of religious freedom.”

      “Not when murder’s involved, it’s not,” he said, raising his voice.

      Trujillo moved closer to Padilla, who shrank back against the whitewashed adobe wall.

      “Now...I want you to tell me the names of everyone who came to the meeting last night. Then I want you to tell me exactly what happened. Everything from sunset to sunrise.”

      3

      Arms folded across his chest, he sat at his desk studying the peyote button he’d found at Jacoñita. The button looked harmless enough—brown, wrinkled, and no larger than a dried apricot. He knew peyote came from a small, blue cactus that grew wild in parts of southern Texas and Mexico. The cactus produced white flowers, as well as mushroom-like crowns that contained mescaline, a naturally occurring psychedelic drug that produced vivid hallucinations and deep introspection and finally nausea. Members of the Native American Church prized the dried crowns and used them in their all-night meetings. When chewed during the meetings, peyote induced extraordinary physiological and psychological effects such as visions, bright colors, and dramatic changes in time and perception. Some people argued that peyote unlocked the door to a separate, higher reality.

      He knew peyote could be a potent drug, because he’d made the mistake of eating a couple of buttons one fourth of July afternoon at Cañjilon Lakes. It seemed like a million years ago—1968, or maybe 1969. The Lopez family—including an assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins—had gone up to Cañjilon for a weekend of camping and fishing. His cousin Manuel, who was a member of the Native American Church, brought a bag of peyote and shared it with him and some of the older cousins. He could still remember wandering off by himself to lie in the grass and watch the sky change colors like a giant kaleidoscope. He didn’t remember how long he laid there, only the feeling of being incapacitated, unable to move.

      Personally, he didn’t care much for the feeling, or for the sense of powerlessness he experienced while under the influence of the drug. The loss of control frightened him.

      Manuel made fun of him. Called him a “tight ass” and lectured him on the importance of seeing beyond one’s individuality. Individuality was a prison, Manuel said.

      Maybe so, but he wasn’t comfortable with the loss of control. That’s the way he’d always been. Manuel could go fuck himself if he didn’t like it. Which is what he had told him back in 1968. Whenever it was.

      The Indians were different, of course. He had no problem with Indians using peyote. He knew the Navajo and Pueblo Indians had used peyote in religious ceremonies for hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived. Predictably, the Spanish tried to stop the practice by persuasion and, when that failed, force. No doubt about it, the Spanish had been heavy-handed in their efforts to stamp out the “pagan” religions of the indigenous peoples, issuing decrees that prohibited religious dances and other ceremonies, and destroying whatever religious masks and icons their searches uncovered at the various pueblos. Talk about stupidity. It always amazed him that people could be so lacking in judgment.

      He did not consider himself religious, a fact that distressed Estelle, but even he recognized that the sword was not an effective means of religious conversion. Times had changed, or so his wife argued whenever they discussed this murky subject. But had they really, given the never-ending ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence that still plagued the world? He could trace his family’s presence in New Mexico back to 1630, the year Salvador de Lopez, originally of Valladolid, Spain, came to Santa Fe. A soldier and a blacksmith by trade, Salvador accompanied a mission supply train up the El Camino Real trail from Mexico City to Santa Fe.

      He took pride in his family’s history and in the Spanish contribution to the cultural

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