Sulfur Springs Read online

  Rainy sat with her hands in her lap, her back straight, her eyes focused somewhere ahead of her. I wondered if maybe she was visualizing a good outcome to all of this. She reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph I couldn’t see. She handed it over to me. It was two kids in swimming suits, standing at the end of a dock, smiling at the camera. On the day it had been taken, the sky was seriously blue and the lake behind the boys looked cool and inviting. One of the boys had dark hair, a dark complexion, and Rainy’s dark, beautiful eyes. The other kid’s hair was wiry and red, and he had so many freckles his face looked like a bowl of cornflakes.

  “Peter with Arweiler Bosch,” she said.

  “Arweiler?”

  “His family was from Germany. His father was an academic, doing some research on Native Americans of the Great Lakes. He brought the family onto the rez when Arweiler was twelve, the same age as Peter. Arweiler was an awkward kid, a loner, spoke with a thick accent, picked on by everyone. Peter took him under his wing, befriended him, got into fights with kids who tried to bully him. Arweiler attached himself to Peter. It got so Peter couldn’t go anywhere without Arweiler following him. He was always at our house, under foot. Honestly, I found the kid irritating, but Peter was so patient with him.”

  She took the photograph back and studied it.

  “Arweiler began to show up with bruises. Like I said, he was an awkward kid, and he had stories about falling off his bike, stumbling over rocks, credible stories. Then Peter was at his house one day, and Arweiler’s father was stinking drunk. He yelled horrible things at Arweiler’s mother. It was all in German, but Peter had picked up a lot of the language by then and he understood. The man began to beat his wife. Arweiler tried to intervene and got beat as well. Peter ran, came straight to the tribal clinic, where I was working, told me what was happening. I called the sheriff’s office, but got the runaround, so Peter and I headed back to Arweiler’s. The man had beat his wife senseless, Cork, but the boy, his son, Arweiler, he’d beat to death.”

  She stopped her story and sat staring at the two boys in the photograph.

  “Why did you keep that all these years?”

  “I didn’t. It’s Peter’s. He kept it pinned to the wall of his bedroom. He blamed himself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he ran to get me instead of staying to help.”

  “It was the wise thing to do.”

  “That’s not what his heart told him.”

  “Why did you bring it with you?”

  “I was going to throw it away. But I’m not the one who needs to do that.”

  She put the photograph back into her purse.

  A small woman came from the hallway off the reception area. She wore a colorful, flowing dress, with lots of turquoise on one wrist and about her neck. Her hair was silver-gray and, not unlike Rainy’s, hung very long down her back. Her skin was dark, the result, I figured, of a lifetime in the Southwest. It looked soft, not at all like the leathery flesh I’d sometimes seen on people who’d worshipped the sun for decades. I put her at fifty, but she could have been much older, her youthful look the artful work of a skilled plastic surgeon, maybe. The smile on her face at seeing Rainy, however, was all her own and genuine.

  “Rainy,” she said, sweeping toward us and offering her hand in what struck me as a grand manner. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Hello, Jeanette. How are you?”

  “Busy and content,” she said. The blue diamonds of her eyes took me in, then swung back to Rainy.

  “My husband, Cork O’Connor,” Rainy said.

  “New development?”

  “April.”

  “How do you do, Cork?” She held out her hand, and I took it and felt her soft, warm palm. “I’m Jeanette Saunders, the director here.” Her attention turned again to Rainy. “You’re asking about Peter. Let’s go to my office.”

  We followed her down the quiet corridor. The walls were hung with impressionistic paintings whose bright colors suggested the Southwest. She stepped into her office, and when we followed, I saw that the far wall was all glass, overlooking the azure water of a very large swimming pool. I understood why everything inside the building seemed so quiet. All the action was at the pool. In the shade of umbrellaed tables, a lot of good-looking, partially clothed people sat together, sipping what I presumed, in a facility devoted to recovery, was iced tea or lemonade or soft drinks. Before she sat at her desk, Saunders took a moment with her back to us, admiring the view. The room smelled faintly of patchouli.

  “They come estranged from one another and from the world. They find reconnection here, a healthy way of centering.” She turned to us. “I wish I could say that they all leave healed. But at least they leave knowing that they can be healed, if that’s what they truly want.”

  I thought three months of iced tea and swimming in a little paradise away from the rest of the world would probably cure a lot of people of what ailed them.

  “Please, sit down.” She gestured to a couple of cushy-looking chairs on our side of her big, polished desk. She folded her hands and looked sympathetically at Rainy. “Peter,” she said.

  “The young woman in reception told me he doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “That’s true.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Over a year ago.”

  “A year?” Rainy sat back, as if struck. “He didn’t say anything when I saw him in April. Did he resign?”

  “He probably didn’t say anything because I had to let him go, Rainy.”

  “Why?”

  “When you saw him at your wedding, how did he seem?”

  “Good,” Rainy said. “A little intense maybe, but happy.”

  Saunders nodded. “I’m glad to hear that. When I let him go, he was different. He’d started coming in late, looking exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept. It affected his work. I talked to him about it.”

  “You thought he was using again,” Rainy said.

  “It was a classic symptom. He denied it. Of course. They always do. He told me he was simply having trouble sleeping. Bad dreams, he said, flashbacks to Afghanistan.”

  “He’s had them before,” Rainy said.

  “I know. So I asked him to see Dr. Jordan. She’s a staff psychologist with extensive experience in dealing with PTSD.”

  “And did he see her?”

  “Only once. She reported that he was sullen, withdrawn, uncooperative. I insisted on a drug test. Instead of complying, he simply stopped coming to work. I had to let him go, Rainy. I’d be happy to help him. We did once. Sometimes it takes more than one stay.”

  “He was clean,” Rainy said. “When I saw him in April, he was clean.”

  “I’m sure that’s what he told you. And you believed him. We love them so much, we want to believe them.”

  “Did he tell you what he was going to do?”

  Saunders shook her head. “But I heard that he was working for Jayne and Frank Harris. They have vineyards on the other side of the Coronados.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Not since he left us.” Saunders leaned across her desk and put out her hands to take Rainy’s. The turquoise bracelet she wore slid over the polished wood with a sound like bone scraping across a dinner plate.

  “You’re a healer, too,” she said. “When you find him, if you can convince him to come back to us, we’ll have another go. All of us together.”

  She saw us out and hugged Rainy in parting.

  We stepped outside, into the heat again, and the glare of the sun.

  “Just a minute,” I said to Rainy and went back inside.

  Jeanette Saunders was walking away. I called to her and she came back.

  “Yes, Cork?”

  “How much does it cost for treatment here?”

  Her face betrayed a little concern, in her eyes a clear hesitation. Finally she said, “We charge thirty-five thousand dollars a month.” Then, as if to justify, “We’re very good and we’re v
ery discreet and we’re very isolated.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Rainy was waiting in the shade of a palm. “What was it?”

  “Nothing important.”

  We walked out of that little piece of paradise, past the expensive cars shooting arrows of reflected sunlight off their chrome. No medical insurance plan I knew of would cover the cost of rehab in a place like the Goodman Center. I wondered how Rainy, who’d lived in self-imposed poverty on Crow Point for years, could afford to pay over $100,000 for the three months Peter had spent at the center during his recovery. It was only one of the many questions about Rainy that I was beginning to ask myself.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  “We should try Sulfur Springs,” Rainy suggested. “See if we can find where he lives.”

  Peter had never been a young man who called or texted frequently. Instead, he preferred to communicate through letters, long, thoughtful missives, a habit from his days in the military, when he used the letters, he’d told Rainy, to get his head clear. The letters she’d received from him for the past year—ever since he’d been let go from the Goodman Center, I now understood—had a return address in Sulfur Springs, a tiny town another ten miles south, toward the border. Before that, he’d been living in Cadiz.

  “All right,” I said. “Next stop, Sulfur Springs.”

  We continued to follow the river, winding our way up the valley between the mountains until we came to a cutoff with a sign pointing southeast: SULFUR SPRINGS 8 MILES. The road we followed snaked steeply upward, then crested. Below, along the base of the range, lay a kind of alluvial plain, an apron of high desert with a clear view to the south. We could see for miles and miles. In the distance, unnatural against the pale, washed-out color of the desert it ran through, was a long black line that stretched all the way to the horizons east and west.

  “The fence,” Rainy said.

  I’d read about it. Hadn’t everybody by now? But I’d never seen it. The structure was often referred to as a fence, but along the line that separated Coronado County from Mexico, it was a tall, stark metal wall. Like a scar follows the shape of a body, the wall followed the contour of the land. And that’s exactly what it looked like—a dark, ugly scar. I thought it was probably not unlike the wall that had once divided Berlin. Except that this one had been erected to keep people out and not in. From what I understood, it wasn’t doing a stellar job.

  We passed an abandoned ranch house, a weathered, gray derelict with fallen-down fences and a windmill that no longer pumped. Someone had made a go of it, at least for a while, in this desolate country. Then something had happened, harsh enough to drive them away. Or maybe it wasn’t a single thing, but the long struggle against a land that, I imagined, received too little rain and too much sun and, day after relentless day, was beset by heat that could bake your brain.

  I saw Sulfur Springs long before we hit the outskirts. A gathering of buildings shaded by a few trees, the glint of sunlight reflected off steel and glass, the harsh, unnatural geometry of habitation.

  “What do you know about this place?” I asked as we approached.

  “Nothing, really. I never came here when Peter was in rehab. No reason to.”

  “Why does he live here?”

  “He told me he liked the simplicity.”

  “Any idea where he lives?”

  She shook her head. “His letters all have a return address with a P.O. box number.”

  “That didn’t strike you as odd?”

  “He told me he might be moving around a bit until he really settled in. He said it was easier.”

  “Maybe we should start at the post office,” I suggested.

  Sulfur Springs was a cross-hatching of a dozen or so streets. The houses were simple, single-story structures, the yards ornamented with cacti instead of flower beds, every one of them enclosed by adobe walls or metal fencing. The trees, when there were some, were thorny-looking things with sparse leafage, not what, in Minnesota, we would have called a tree at all.

  The business section was a single block, old buildings not updated and boutiqued in the way they’d been in Cadiz. The effects of time and weather were evident on every storefront. There was a small grocery store, a barbershop, a little eatery called Rosa’s Cantina, a one-pump gas station, a real estate office, a few other businesses that appeared to be not particularly thriving. There was also a little police station, more a storefront operation, it looked like, and next to it was the post office, which was not much bigger than one of the stamps you could buy there.

  Inside the post office, set into the wall to our left, was a small bank of P.O. boxes. On the wall to the right was a narrow counter with postal forms. Above the counter hung a bulletin board with both official notices—“Policies for the Apprehension, Detention, and Removal of Undocumented Immigrants”—and also notices of local interest—“Fiesta at St. Esteban’s, Wednesday, July 17.” Although the hours posted on the door said the office was open from 10:00 until 4:00, the place seemed empty. I could hear Tejano music playing somewhere in back.

  “Hello!” I called.

  “Just a minute,” came a woman’s reply.

  True to her word, in one minute, she appeared, a dark-skinned woman with a bright, white smile. Her hair was a wild crown of black and gray. Her eyes were dark and shiny in a face full of welcome. She was clearly well fed, though not quite rotund, and was dressed in the blue, short-sleeved shirt of a postal employee. Below that, she wore bright floral shorts.

  “What can I do for you folks?” she asked, with a slight Hispanic accent.

  “I’m trying to locate my son,” Rainy said. “He has a post office box here. His name is Peter Bisonette.”

  The woman shook her head. “I don’t know that name.”

  “Do you know most of the people who have post office boxes here?” I asked.

  “Towns don’t get much smaller than Sulfur Springs. Everybody knows everybody.”

  “But you don’t know a Peter Bisonette?”

  “Not that name.”

  Rainy pulled her wallet from her purse and drew out the photograph of Peter she kept there, one taken after he’d completed rehab. “This is him,” she said, handing the picture over.

  The woman studied it. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “You’re sure?” Rainy asked.

  “Like I said, small town. We all know each other.”

  “His post office box is number twenty-seven.”

  The woman smiled but shook her head. She handed back the photograph. “You said you’re his mother?”

  Rainy nodded.

  “You look worried.”

  “I am.”

  “I have a son I worry about, too. I hope you find your Peter.”

  “Gracias,” Rainy said. Then she said a good deal more in Spanish and the woman closed her eyes and nodded.

  Outside, we stood a moment in the sun, looking down the main street, which was quiet and mostly empty.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Something a mother once told me. That for the sake of her child, a mother’s heart has to be like a willow branch, bending but never broken.” She looked around her at what she could see of the desolate little town. Not far away, a rooster crowed. “I don’t know why, but maybe he goes by another name here.”

  “He can change his name but not his face,” I said. “She claimed not to recognize that either.”

  “Claimed?”

  “Small town. Everybody knows everybody. If Peter collects his mail there, she’s bound to have seen him at one time or another.”

  “You think she lied to us?”

  “Let’s talk to some more people,” I said.

  We walked to the police station, which from the outside, didn’t look much larger than the post office. A sign hung on the door: ON PATROL. IN EMERGENCY, CALL 911.

  Rainy glanced at me. “Peter said someone was after him. Maybe the police here?”

  “Ma
ybe,” I said. “But jurisdiction in something as serious as a killing is going to fall to the county. The sheriff’s people didn’t seem to know anything.”

  A couple of motorcycles roared into Sulfur Springs, loud and fast, and cruised down the main street. The riders, two guys with red bandannas wrapped around their heads and wearing black T-shirts and sunglasses, gave us a good looking over as they passed. They seemed out of place to me in this quiet border town.

  We visited every storefront on both sides of the single, run-down block of businesses, asking about Peter and showing the photograph. Everywhere the response was the same. We tried the church on the corner across the street from the mercado, St. Esteban’s. Empty and locked. The information on a little sign in front indicated that two services were held there on Sundays. One was Catholic at 8:00 a.m., the other Methodist at 10:00 a.m. There was a different name and contact number under each service.

  At last we stood in front of the town’s eatery, Rosa’s Cantina.

  “Let’s see if Feleena is whirling inside,” I said.

  Rainy gave me a blank look.

  “From a great song by Marty Robbins,” I explained.

  The aroma of chilies and melted cheese and tortillas on a hot griddle greeted us as we entered. I realized that we hadn’t eaten since breakfast during our layover in the Twin Cities airport, and I was starved. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light inside, which was dark compared to the glare in the street. Except for a couple of hombres sitting at the bar, the place was empty. It wasn’t Marty Robbins on the jukebox but Kenny Chesney, crooning “All I Need to Know.” The two at the bar, who had beers in front of them, turned their heads to stare as we entered. One of them was an old-timer, long beard and all, wearing a red and black Diamondbacks ball cap. The other was dressed in a police uniform.

  A young woman, tall, with jet-black hair, came through a door behind the bar. She wore a colorful blouse and tight jeans. Gold hoops big enough for a bird to fly through hung from her earlobes.