I watched the clip again: the lifeless body of a white-winged dove entered the shot at the top of my screen and plummeted off the bottom a half second later. Whoever was holding the camera didn’t notice; they stayed focused on a white guy speechifying about City plans for a soccer stadium. A few seconds later, four or five more birds fell behind the guy at the podium. The audio caught a few gasps from the crowd. But most people were too focused on the foreground to notice what was happening in the background. Observation bias is hilarious.
Next, a lot of birds fell all at once. Probably three dozen. The camera jerked to the ground, catching their bodies scattered like popcorn on the pavement. Off-screen, the speaker continued his endless list of thank yous. The doves did not move again.
Birds falling from the sky mean nothing but bad news—we’ve known that since Roman times. But I still didn’t know why a City employee named Heather had sent me this clip in the first place.
I’m Max Herkimer, psychogeographic investigator, or, as I’m more commonly and less charitably called, “that wacko”. Heather said she got my number from one of the letters I have a bad habit of sending to various City departments. That particular letter was about renaming a street to pacify an angry genius loci (I mean, can you blame it? No one wants to be the spirit of Corporate Forest Drive.) All my letters to the City went directly into the shredder, even the normal ones about installing new public bathrooms. Until now.
Heather asked to meet at a nothing bar on the far end of town, to make sure nobody she knew saw us. Of course, Albuquerque’s not that big. The first person she saw let out a big “Heather! What are you doing here?” and I slid into a booth while they hugged.
I’d never been to this particular bar. It had vibes, though. The decor screamed “Be average!” Vinyl beer ads. Peeling laminate bar. TVs mounted on every TV-worthy surface. It smelled like Lysol and fry oil. I’d put money down that the “good bros” in the corner were cheating on their wives with each other. You learn to spot these things in my line of work.
Another part of my work: avoiding notice. Every space has a pattern. Look at churches: you stay quiet. You keep your head down. You don’t wander into the fancy part up front. If you can find that pattern, you have power.
At a bar like this one, the pattern says order a light American lager and get lost in your phone. Heather’s pal walked off without even seeing me. You’re welcome, Heather. Her dark brown eyes were still scanning for acquaintances as she slid into the booth across from me. She was fifty-five, five foot six. An Albuquerque Dukes cap covered her straight black bob.
She eyed me as she swigged her Jack and Diet. “So . . . should I call you Mis—”
“Mx. Herkimer, if you insist, but I prefer just Max.” I had neither time for nor interest in watching her puzzle out my gender.
“Alright, Max.” Heather cleared her throat. “Your letter got my attention. But I’m curious. What exactly is pyschogeographic inquiry?” It rankled, the way she said my name, like an overburdened school teacher scolding a wretched teen. But there was no way I was going to let a City employee slip through my fingers after all this time.
See, Heather worked for the City. I worked for the city. Our jurisdictions just looked identical on a map, but they were two very different entities. I worked for the land, the graffiti, the spirits, the water, the birds, the people. She worked for the buildings, the policies, the infrastructure, the power. Still, a solid connection with the City would help with my more esoteric investigations.
“I solve problems people have with, you know,” I gestured vaguely, “our urban fabric.” I ought to work on the elevator pitch.
She snorted. “Sounds like we have the same job.”
“But I work for myself. You follow the rules.”
“Yeah, about that. Your card said you were licensed, bonded, and insured.” She looked at me with that school teacher’s look again. “Who licenses psychogeographers?”
“I do,” I said. She coughed. I added, “I have very high standards.”
She looked at the door. Maybe it was time to try a different tack.
“I am also bonded and insured. By someone else. And registered with the City as a private investigator. License #94792, if you want to look it up.” Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but it looked to me like her shoulders relaxed. “So tell me, what can I help you with?”
“You watched the video?”
“Several times,” I said.
She surveyed the bar one more time before continuing. “So . . . obviously there’s the birds, right? 47 birds just dropping dead behind a press conference.”
“The news said it was bird flu.”
“It wasn’t bird flu. We tested them.” She took another sip of her drink. Her hands had started to tremble. “Aside from the birds, it’s just weird there. Things go wrong, like, way too often.”
I loved those kinds of spots. “What kind of wrong?”
“It’s not any one thing.” She paused as the server refilled our water, then started counting incidents on her fingers. “The birds aren’t the only dead animals—they turn up constantly. Cats. Dogs. Raccoons. Then there are the floods. This huge trumpet vine pulled down some power lines and electrocuted someone. A dysentery outbreak. The sewer system.” She sighed heavily. “You cannot imagine how bad the sewers have been. Calls to poison control. And the neighbors are convinced there’s a serial arsonist.”
“Where?”
“Romeroville.” Heather pulled out a manila envelope. “There’s this little park—that’s where the video is from.” She showed me maps, newspaper articles, charts of City data from the last two years. She let out a breathy laugh. “Nobody takes me seriously.”
“I know the feeling,” I murmured as I reviewed her documents. Parts of the City develop a bad attitude, a reckless habit, negative vibes, whatever you want to call it. And they don’t always get better on their own. The City had their words for this kind of thing: Condemned. Substandard. Abandoned. Blighted. I preferred mine: Haunted. Cursed. Crossed. Vengeful.
“So what’s the goal here?”
Red crept into her tan, freckled cheeks. Heather took another drink from her Jack & Diet. “I need you to un . . . curse it.”
“Might not be cursed, but I take your point.” I hadn’t expected a City employee to be so direct.
She grimaced and signaled for the check. “Look, I can pay you. But I have to put you down as an exterminator or something.”
I had a couple rules in my line of work, but the first was I didn’t take clients who were embarrassed to talk to me. Plus, my spidey senses were telling me that something was off with Heather’s story. But here’s the thing: I was going to be in Romeroville ASAP no matter if I formally took the job or not. A neighborhood so fucked up that birds were falling from the sky? I had a professional obligation to uphold and personal curiosity to satisfy. May as well get paid while I was at it.
And besides—I spent so much time trying to get the City to listen, and now the City had finally come knocking. Rules were made to be bent, right?
“Well, Heather,” I said, the same school teacher way she’d said Max earlier. She blinked. “I’ll take the case.”
“Great.” She slid the papers across the table to me. “And don’t call me; I’ll call you.”
I rolled my eyes.
The next day, the bus wheezed to a stop two and a half blocks from the epicenter of the issues and I stepped into the already hot, dry morning air. I tucked my mop of hair (currently green and pink) into a baseball cap and adjusted the hem of my Lobos t-shirt.
My first time in a new area, I tried to be as invisible as possible. To be clear: I love the city. I love being out in the city. I love looking the way I do. But. As a very obviously queer person, and I do mean that in both the rainbow and the oddball sense, acting weird in a new part of town only invited trouble. Invisibility is a prime protection. Once I got comfy, then I’d get weird.
At first glance, Romeroville was a modest residential neighborhood. Public elementary school. Siberian elms and white oaks for shade. Mixed income housing. Nice, wide sidewalks, but not a lot of pedestrians. Dogs barked as I passed. Thunderheads loomed over the volcanoes west of town, promising monsoon rain, but then, they’d been promising that all summer long.
The heart of the trouble was this park. Sometimes what looks supernatural is mundane. But I could tell from two blocks away that this case was not your everyday bit of trouble. If the neighborhood were a mattress, that park was a bowling ball plopped in the middle. All the energy in the area rolled down to that spot.
It wasn’t a park in the way a person might imagine a park. It was more like an oversized alley, a pedestrian thoroughfare connecting two streets. The cement had been colored blue to look like a river. A brown metal sign read Acequia Grande Park. Young honey locusts—what I think of as “new City trees”—shaded the area.
Across the street from the park rose a colorful, fiberglass statue. Sort of a Pietà thing—a man holding a dying woman. They rested on top of a giant hill made of more blue cement, like a mountain or a frozen waterfall. I’m no art critic, but the guy looked bummed out. Beyond the sculpture was a grassy area with a surprising number of informational signs.
I’d read those later. Now that I’d acquired a general lay of the land, I needed to find the more subtle patterns. My methods included talking to strangers, whether human, bird, tree, or other. Observing the swirl of dirt in the wind. Searching the historical record for unusual events. Watching neighborhood cats at work. But the primary tool of a psychogeographer was and always would be the dérive: a walk with no destination beyond knowledge of the place itself. (I subscribed to the Situationist dérive. Earlier versions involved a lot of opium.)
I found a spot a few blocks from the park where I felt no skin crawling, no heebie-jeebies (yes, that’s a technical term). I opened an app to track my path through the neighborhood (Without uploading my location to the cloud. Obviously.)
Then, I began the dérive: I wandered, meandered, crept, rushed, paused. I sniffed and inhaled and sang. I closed my eyes. People are always surprised how much shit they miss because they were too busy looking. This is the part where people will start to call the cops on me if I’m not careful.
As I went, I recorded a cluster of sensations. Anything spooky, strange, or generally interesting got a pin on my app:
- Whiff of spring flowers (lilac?) long out of bloom: Pin.
- Footsteps sound hollow on the sidewalk: Pin.
- Skin crawling on the back of my neck: Pin.
- Seven quarters lined up on a fence, all face down: Pin.
- Cold spots: Pin. Pin. Pin. (Ghosts?)
- Sound of rushing water, no obvious source: Pin. Pin. Pin.
- Intense encounter with a man who shouted, “You and I share a cousin in Pueblo, Colorado, Miss Miller!” at me. Not my name, but whatever: Pin.
And so I went until about 10 am. I was starving and sweaty. I had 73 pins on my map. But no answers.
Time to get a theory going. I found a bench in the shade and pulled out a peanut butter and red chile sandwich. As I ate, I reviewed the map. A rough outline emerged, of where the strangeness was happening, but that just confirmed what I already knew. Next, I coded the pins based on sight, smell, sound, feel. Sound and smell clustered right down the center of the alley and headed west. Interesting. Visual and touch pins were scattered all over the map.
Alright, Herkimer, think: someone could have cursed this intersection. But who and why? The only idea I had was that unhelpful note to myself: Ghosts? I’d seen solo ghosts over the years, of course. But the sheer number of cold spots, the general sense of malevolence in the area, not to mention dropping a bunch of birds out of the sky in the middle of the day . . . it would take a lot of ghosts to do that. Like, piles of ‘em. I’d never seen something like this. Not even in that abandoned hospital.
Seemed unlikely, but maybe there had been some kind of horrific tragedy I’d missed? Amelia would know.
“Special Collections Library, Ms. Collier speaking.”
“Hey, Amelia.”
“Max! Too busy to come in person?” Amelia was head librarian at Special Collections, the archival home of everything about the City and the city. The perfect library—a relic of a different time, full of Albuquerque oddities, and deeply haunted. Plus the librarians loved me. I always had research-y questions instead of “What’s the code for the bathroom?”
“You know I’d rather be there.” I imagined her behind the desk, in a knee-length floral dress, gray cardigan, and chunky Mary Janes. She always looked professional, but I knew for reasons I shall not disclose that she hid a number of excellent tattoos under that sweater.
She laughed. “What are you working on this time?”
“I’m in Romeroville.”
“Ooh, nice. Not the oldest neighborhood around, but pretty close. It grew up in Colonial times—should be some signs about it.”
Yes, yes, I know. Everybody always says, “Read the signs!” and I’m over here like, Why do you think I’m staring at this ant colony?
Anyway, it was cool history but way too early. “What about more recently, like the last couple years? I’m looking for something that would,” I paused, failing to think of a different way to say it. “ . . . make a lot of ghosts.” Amelia didn’t really believe in my weird shit, but she also didn’t laugh at me. Usually.
She snorted. But just a little. “Are you talking, like, a mass murder? I thought you didn’t do the whole true crime thing.”
“I don’t, but yeah, something like that. Or a gruesome accident? Old folks’ home burned down? Horrific school bus crash or something?” I sounded stupid, but I was trying to get the scale of the thing across to her.
“Not seeing anything like that.” I could hear her mouse clicking. “It’s a pretty quiet place.”
“Dammit.” I chewed my lip and stared at the alley. Back to square one. Ghosts would have been a hard sell for Heather, but at least I’d had a theory.
“I’ve never known someone to get so morose that an old folks’ home didn’t get burned down,” Amelia said.
“Sorry—that’s not it. I just . . . there’s something weird going on here.”
“You know I’m a born skeptic. Not much help with ghosts. But the other thing about that neighborhood is they really—pardon my language—fucking hate the City.”
Huh. Heather hadn’t mentioned that little detail. “Oh, yeah?”
“It’s been a whole thing. The City let the feds put two freeways through it in the 60s. Then in the 70s, the City tried to declare it substandard, so they could put in some government buildings, and Romeroville organized themselves to stop all that. Then there was a Superfund site that was ‘cleaned up’ in the 90s. Anyway, probably nothing to do with your ghosts, but figured I’d mention.” I could hear her addressing a patron. “Hey, Max, sorry—gotta go. Call me back later?”
“No worries. Tell you about it over drinks on Friday.”
Was this City nonsense related to the birds dying? Unclear. But was it fishy as hell that Heather hadn’t mentioned it? Absolutely.
Heather answered my third call, her voice low. “I told you not to call me.”
“Hi, Heather,” I said. “Curious if you were planning to tell me about the whole Romeroville hates the City angle of the case.”
“Let me get outside.” Her footsteps echoed down a stairwell.
I skimmed the informational signs as I waited. These people were serious. They had a committee. A crest for their committee. A timeline of their protests. I let out a low whistle. “Man, they really do hate you guys. Sounds like maybe you earned it though.”
She huffed. “Yes, there have been . . . tensions. Obviously. But that was a long time ago. Are you saying you think this is our fault?”
“Do you think it’s your fault?”
“I didn’t think all that was relevant.”
I took a deep breath. Where to start. “Heather, you mean well. But there are things in this world you don’t know much about. Shit can get weird. Right now, things are getting bad in Romeroville.” And I was getting angry. “So is there any other information you’re withholding?”
An indignant breath came over the phone. “Okay, fine. There are plans to build a soccer stadium there. They asked me to find out about the neighborhood. See if I could make the neighbors a little more receptive to our plans. Like, in a good way, you know.”
“Everybody loves being made more receptive,” I muttered.
“Point is I noticed all this bad shit happening there. But the funders didn’t care. If anything, it made them more excited. They thought if the neighqbors got spooked, they’d let the City have the land.” She huffed again. “Well, it worked, for what that’s worth. A little too well. Some of the local funders got spooked, too, and now they’re backing out.”
Say what you will about New Mexicans, but I have always loved the way we as a people take weird shit seriously. Still, what did I have to do with any of this? Why had she called me to fix it? Nobody in the City respected me. The only thing calling me would achieve was discredit—Oh. Oh.
“Okay, I get it. You called me because you knew that if I started talking about how it was haunted, nobody would take it seriously. They’d be too embarrassed to be associated with me and my weird theories.” Tears pricked my eyes. “And your stadium would be back in business.”
Heather didn’t say anything. I’d learned to read silences over the years and this one was loud and clear. Goddammit. I’d been so excited they were taking me seriously for once that I’d broken my own rules.
“Even though you hired me for bullshit reasons, you do still have to pay me.” My voice was tight. I hung up.
The sun beat down on me as I stood alone in Romeroville. My instincts had warned me something was off and I was pissed I hadn’t listened. I took a deep breath and listened to the sounds of the city around me: traffic on the major arteries, sure. But also the skittering sound of a lizard in the leaf litter under a golden currant bush. Children shrieking at recess. And a westerly wind blowing the clouds nearer. Beneath it all, that malevolent energy roiled.
I didn’t have to help Heather any more. But I definitely wanted to know what was going on in Romeroville. The neighbors ought to have some insights.
A woman, graying hair pulled into a bun, watered roses in the shade of her yard. She had an eye on me but pretended she didn’t. The piney scent of rosemary wafted through the air. Her garden, ringed by a straw-flecked adobe wall, bordered the Acequia Grande and was exuberant with lavender, blue flax, and orange globe mallow.
“Lovely garden,” I called as I approached. “Can’t get my roses to look like yours no matter how hard I try.” It was the truth. I’d tried everything and they were still scraggly.
“I have my secrets.” She stood several feet from the gate, hands clasped behind her. Not quite ready to trust me. “But if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
I nodded gravely. “Otherwise my roses might beat yours at the State Fair.”
She smiled. “Couldn’t have that.”
We were both quiet for a moment, but she didn’t move to go inside.
“I heard the City wants to build a soccer stadium here,” I said.
“They do.” I could see her clocking my outfit, deciding which side I was on. I was real glad I’d chosen the university t-shirt and not the soccer team t-shirt for today’s invisibility drag.
“Do you know where, exactly?”
She gestured broadly, a furrow in her brow. I frowned sympathetically.
“Sorry for all the questions, but have you noticed anything strange lately?” It can be awkward, trying to explain what a psychogeographic investigator does, but I’ve learned that, at least in New Mexico, if you ask the weird question first, you get a lot of information. Some of it is even useful. “I heard about all those birds that died. Stuff like that?”
She gave me another look, and I swear I could almost read her thoughts. But maybe that was just my imagination getting away from me. In place of an answer, she asked, “Would you like some water? Or lemonade? Hot day to be walking around.”
“Lemonade sounds great.” I paused. “My name’s Max.”
“Lupe. Nice to meet you, Max.”
The aggressive atmosphere of the neighborhood dropped away as I crossed into her yard. We sat on her porch as we drank the lemonade, which was sweet and strong. She had sprinkled dried lavender on top. When she spied the colorful hair under my ball cap, she insisted I take the hat off so she could admire my messy mop. A long broomstick skirt colored like red clay pooled around her wrinkled, brown feet, toenails painted sky blue. She told me a little about her gardening secrets and her grandchildren. I told her about my pet squirrel—a rescue. Condensation dripped from my glass and cooled my foot. I wondered if she’d ever answer my question, but I also kind of didn’t mind that she hadn’t. What good is life as a psychogeographic investigator if you can’t have lemonade with strangers on a hot day?
Then she finally turned back to it. “I’ve been here for, oh, forty years. Not quite as long as some. Best place I’ve ever lived. But something in the land isn’t quite right. I do my best with this little patch of dirt. But it’s sad, no?”
Sad. I’d been feeling the vibes all wrong. The air was filled with rage, yes, but it was the rage that comes from grief.
“It is,” I said and we looked at each other. I decided then that I’d figure this out for Lupe’s sake, even if nobody else cared.
“Thanks for the lemonade.” I lifted my empty glass to her in a toast.
Lupe nodded like she, too, had decided something, then disappeared into the house. When she returned, she pressed a book about roses into my hands, the edges frilled with sticky notes. I put the book in my bag, tucked my hair back into my cap, and promised I’d return soon.
Back at Acequia Grande Park, the epicenter, I couldn’t believe I’d missed the grief, the helplessness in the air. I’d been too focused on Heather’s version of events. Now, I paced the length of the park, feeling echoes of my morning observations: cold spots, whispers with no obvious source. Back in the sun, sweat ran down my neck into the channel of my spine. A handful of white-winged doves landed nearby to drink from a puddle. The blue sky had gone grey while we chatted, and the trees worried themselves sick in the wind. I hoped—and could feel everything around me, from the sidewalk to the bumblebees, hoping as well—that today there would be rain.
Okay. Not ghosts. And, though I was pissed at Heather, this didn’t feel like a case of the City neglecting a neighborhood. Yeah, the stadium idea sucked. But this had been going on a lot longer than that.
As I walked, I let my focus go soft. Heat radiated from the blue pavement river, blurring the edges of my vision. I imagined the years peeling away. Back to the 70s when it was declared “substandard.” Back to the agricultural 1800s. Time grew thin. If I squinted, I could see (or imagine?) the area as it had been: sheep grazing. Water flowing where I stood, through the acequia the park was named after: an irrigation channel carrying water from the Rio Grande. These ditches spiderwebbed the area, carrying the green life of the river just a little farther into the surrounding desert.
Acequias were easy to miss. Some were well kept, some less so. And in Romeroville? Paved over. Just then, the drinking doves exploded in flight, breaking the spell. My shoulders tensed.
One small feathered body remained, convulsing on the edge of the water. I walked over to it. The other birds landed overhead on a power line, witnessing me as I picked the creature up. Its body trembled in my palm, so light it was like the air itself was seizing. Before I could think what to do, it stopped shivering and died.
The birds took flight again, noisy and chaotic. I traced the line of their passage. Never ignore the communications of a bird. They landed on the statue, perched on the mass of blue that looked like the headwaters of a spring. A spring capped with a man cradling a dying woman. The water is lost. I realized I was standing right about where they’d had the press conference I’d seen on the video clip.
I looked down at the bird in my hand, at its bright orange, sightless eye. A trash can stood nearby, but putting a messenger in the literal garbage was a quick way to get on nature’s bad side. No. I needed to bury the bird.
I didn’t pay much attention when I heard someone shout, “Him!” It’s not a word I hear applied to me very often, so I kept scanning the ground, searching for a suitable avian burial site,. But then I heard footsteps. A moment later, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder and spun me around.
The man it belonged to snarled at me, red-faced in his rage. My shock garbled his words, mixed them up until I couldn’t put them back together. My shoulders rose along with my hands and forearms, to shield me and the bird, the little thing, lifeless against my thumping heart.
He grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled me back to that spot where all the bad energy pooled. Did he realize that’s what he was doing? I stumbled after him, and the jumble of noise coming from his mouth resolved into words: “I already called the cops, you prick.”
I had no idea what he thought I’d done but—Ah. He pointed at a car with all four tires slashed.
Something I’ve noticed over the years: I pretty much only ever get identified as a guy when people are pissed at me. I accelerated to match his pace and tucked the point of my elbow into the crook of the arm he was using to drag me. His hand slackened in surprise, and I pressed down with my elbow to twist away from his grasp. Nice move, Herkimer—but I barely had time to preen before he tackled me to the ground. I banged my arm up good as I moved to protect the little feathered body still in my hand.
The hot concrete scraped my cheek as he held my head down. Pulsing rage flooded me. I wanted to fuck this guy up. But that feeling wasn’t mine: it was the land, the water, the very earth rising up and egging us on. This guy had 30 pounds on me and (what the hell was I going to do with this bird) I was down a hand. I don’t like making a scene but, goddammit. I was going to have to.
“Help!” I shouted. I could have pitched my voice up to be more audible, sound more vulnerable, but it felt wrong. “Lupe!”
He was still screaming at me, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. I wondered if this rage was as foreign to him as it was to me. A rumble of thunder, low and easy, joined the excitement.
Neighbors were already out in their yards, staring at us. Not every oddball is the center of attention type, no matter how we dress. My cheeks flushed. Tears filled my eyes. My mouth tasted sour. A mineral smell rose from the ground.
I called again. “Lupe! Somebody. Help!” He pushed down, shuddering, and pain throbbed through my temples, my cheek, my jaw. I bucked against him hard, but he didn’t move. Still he could have—should have—been hitting me and he wasn’t. Something was up.
Everyone, human or otherwise, was in thrall to us—or whatever was using us. Time seemed to flow downhill, pooling around our tableau. The birds moved in closer, knowing I held their kin. The trees grew still and even the sky had gathered itself up. A hot drop of moisture landed on my cheek and ran into my mouth. The water is lost. It tasted salty. Sweat? Tears?
Then the rain came. Fat, ice-cold raindrops slapped against leaves, against skin, drumming on cars and roofs. With my face this close to the pavement, my nostrils filled with the smell of evaporating rain water—that mineral smell I’d noticed earlier.
The hammer of rain drops broke the spell; the entire neighborhood seemed to exhale. Time resumed its normal flow as people started to scatter. Another hot drop of moisture—tears, I was pretty sure this time—landed amid the cold ones. The pressure on my head lessened as he sagged off to one side. I rolled away, landing in a cold stream of storm run-off.
The man’s rage-torn face was slack now, as if he’d just woken up. I opened my mouth to speak, but a chunk of hail pinged him on the head. Larger and larger pieces of ice bounced on every surface. He shook his head and stumbled away.
I took shelter under the nearest tree, one hand cradling the bird and the other touching the abrasions on my face. I was no stranger to the way rain would lighten the city’s mood, but I’d never seen anything like this. The doves rustled and cooed in the tree above me. I tried and failed to calm the shivers that had taken over my body.
Lupe’s gentle voice called out to me. “Max!”
She waved from her front porch. I curled my body over the bird and ran to her.
“Are you okay?” She reached for my face. I flinched.
“Yes. No. Sorry. Yes. I was thinking I’d—” I wiped my eyes with my empty hand and held the bird out, feathers mussed. The sight of the feathers out of place turned the shivers into tears. “I was planning to bury this bird, I guess. Before.”
She nodded. “What about here, once the rain ends?” She gestured at a tiled nicho in her adobe wall. It enclosed a statue of the Virgin Mary, a rosebush flourishing at her feet. People often assume someone like me doesn’t go in for Christianity, and for the most part, I don’t. But sacred is sacred.
I looked for signs of mockery in her face, but found none. The pressure eased in my heart. At least I’d get one thing right today.
Lupe fetched a compress for my face. I straightened the errant feathers and laid the dove on her porch. We sat in silence as the storm poured off her porch, raindrops illuminated in gold by the coming sunset. Water flooded down that big fiberglass pietà. Both figures wept, and the blue mountain they sat on turned into a waterfall.
Lupe clicked her tongue. “It’s gonna be a mess to clean this one up.”
I didn’t understand at first, but—right. Heather had given me flood records. Hmm. I remembered the sensation from earlier, like the Acequia Grande was a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. The park must catch all the storm water for the neighborhood. And probably a few neighborhoods beyond.
I stepped off the porch into the drizzle. The water is lost. That phrase came back to me as I watched the rain fill the gutters, sheet across the street—and head to the Acequia Grande. I remembered the way that man’s pressure on my face had slackened with the first drops of water.
The water is lost. This water shouldn’t be flowing over concrete to the sewers. I turned to Lupe. “The way it changed when the rains came. You felt it, too. I know you did.”
She held my eyes with a long, level gaze, then nodded. I looked out at the flat pavement of the park, water rushing down it in a pattern that told us everything we needed to know: fast, flat, unnatural. I imagined earth instead of blue-tinted concrete. Natural dips and rises to slow the water, let it soak into the ground. Instead of a few trees trapped in concrete rings, we would have yucca, desert willow, horsetail, screwbean mesquite, and goldenrod thriving where the water collected.
Or: the City could build a stadium. Instead of this small park, we would have acres of blacktop, no shade, and the land disconnected from water and life for good.
Wait. Wasn’t that what the press conference had been about in the first place? The stadium? I should have seen it sooner. To fix this one, I was going to have to talk to Heather again. Gross.
The rain stopped and Lupe turned to me. “Shall we? The ground will be soft.”
She watched in silence as I tucked the bird’s fragile body into the earth, then covered it in soil and bark.
“Most people don’t care enough to bury a city bird.” Lupe held up her garden hose. “Want a rinse?”
I stuck my hands out. She hit the trigger on the sprayer, gently, and cool water rinsed the dirt from my hands. The flock of white-winged doves cooed mournfully from their nearby post.
I met Heather for the second time at a bar of my choosing: a windowless poolhall in the heart of downtown. It smelled of stale beer and incense. The music on the jukebox was loud and aggressive. I hadn’t forgiven her for using me to discredit her opponents and I wasn’t going to put up with her shitty bar this time.
Once again, Heather carried a Jack and Diet from the bar.
“What happened to your face?” she asked.
“Not your business,” I answered. “Speaking of business, though, I found your culprit.”
I walked her through it: the acequia was abandoned in 1976. The earliest sign of weirdness was in 1977, when the neighborhood finally had access to the City’s drinking water and didn’t want to bother with irrigation any longer. The land was lonely, heartbroken for water. But that probably would have been fine. It was when the City announced plans to build a soccer stadium that shit had gotten real. Whatever spirit animated that place didn’t want to be buried in a parking lot. And it wasn’t going down without a fight.
To Heather’s credit, her first question wasn’t “Are you stupid?” It was “What are my options?”
“Either way you’re gonna have to find somewhere else for the stadium. But, since you asked. Option one: rebuild the old acequia. But there’s a lot more city between Romeroville and the river these days. Even if you took it underground . . . . ” I sucked air through my teeth. “It’s gonna cost.”
Heather blanched. I had to guess she was imagining the many, many, many buildings, properties, roads, and parks involved. Precisely the feeling I wanted her to have so my idea didn’t sound so hard.
“Option two: turn the Acequia Grande park into a rain garden. You’ll stop having all these weird incidents, which is what I care about. The flooding will stop, which is what the neighbors care about.”
She gave me a flat look. “What am I supposed to tell the people who want the stadium? The thirsty land is killing people?”
“Obviously not. That’s the kind of shit I say. You get an engineer to say you need higher ground. The monsoons happen at the height of the United season. Blah blah blah.”
She looked at me for a long time, then the corners of her mouth curled up. “Putting in a rain garden would be a big PR win.”
As if I cared. I checked my watch. Just enough time to walk to the bar where I was meeting Amelia. “Done and dusted. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure. You’ll get my bill this week.”
I headed out into the twilight: a couple hurried into a ramen joint. A lowrider cruised past, done up in rose gold and purple. Heat rose from the sidewalk. The stars were beginning to shine and Amelia was waiting for me. A perfect night in my city.
One year later, almost to the day, I was back in Romeroville in the pink light of dawn. The park didn’t look so different: the same shape, trees, benches. But now instead of broad swathes of blue cement, the paths were narrowed, made of water-permeable materials. The ground was shaped and carved, not so differently than I’d imagined, and the plantings Lupe and I had done were starting to look hearty.
Two cottontails darted under a bush as Lupe, Amelia, and I approached. The City would have their opening ceremony later that day. I wanted to do a ceremony of our own first.
I closed my eyes, felt for that bowling ball on a mattress sensation. It had changed; the energy in the neighborhood flowed easily through the park. We had all collected rainwater, a gallon or so each, just for this. I opened my eyes and found Amelia looking at me with an arched eyebrow and a smile. I directed her and Lupe to opposite corners of the park, and we poured out our rain water with all the solemnity we could muster. I watched it sheet across the ground and soak in as the first rays of sun broke over the mountain. I whooped and the other two joined me, raucous and loud as roosters.
Wasn’t much, but it felt right. As for what the land thought, I had to trust we’d done okay.
We watched the City ceremony from Lupe’s porch. Well, sort of. The speeches were quite boring and I wanted to show Amelia an antlion in Lupe’s yard.
Heather came over after the fuss was done. “I know I messed up. But if you’re looking for work . . . . ” She handed me a thumbdrive. “Give me a call.”
Would you look at that? Heather talking to Max Herkimer in public. Could I trust her? Probably not. But I have always loved a good mystery. I dropped the thumbdrive in my pocket and headed back toward the house.
A roadrunner, all punk rock eyeliner and jagged crest, ran along the fence beside me and hopped into a willow tree. A blue whiptail lizard dangled from its beak. Storm clouds, ripe and dark, ambled in from the west. The scent of water hung in the air.
Delightful!