Wall of Glass by Walter Satterthwait

Author:Walter Satterthwait
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

ELEVEN

NORTH OF SANTA FE, the High Road to Taos lopes through badlands where ragged sandstone ridges rising up from the bare arid countryside look like the spines of mammoth fossilized lizards. Now and then it dips down into small neat adobe villages huddled among lush cottonwoods, but always it climbs again, heading up through the sandy high desert to the distant mountains.

Directly overhead that morning, the sky was a clear enameled blue, only a few sedate white clouds loafing across it. But far off, beyond the raw red gullies and the empty red buttes, where the mountains surrounded me like the rim of a bowl, thick gray tumbles of storm clouds were lowering. The thickest and grayest of these were directly ahead, just above the nose of the Subaru, up there in the shrouded peaks where Las Mujeres lay.

Quite a few of the Anglos in Santa Fe don’t like travelling in the northern New Mexico mountains. Living here are descendants of the original Spanish settlers, many of whose families saw their private land stolen by the United States government, their grazing land appropriated by the Park Service. Some of them, not surprisingly, still bear a grudge.

And up here, too, live Los Hermanos Penitentes, the Penitant Brothers. They’ve inspired a lot of talk, some of it distrustful, and some of it horrified, with a ribbon of boogie-man excitement running through it. I’ve been told, by more than one Anglo, and with complete conviction, that up until recently the Penitentes were offering human sacrifices.

It’s not very likely. Humans, up here, are too precious to waste.

Whatever the truth might be, for hundreds of years in these isolated villages they were the sole source of religious comfort for the sick and the dying. And apparently the only people they’ve ever actually hurt, collectively or individually, have been themselves. Which is a good deal more than most of us can say.

It’s a hard country. Where the green stops, not far from the banks of then arrow rivers and the tiny streams, the desert begins, unrelenting and unforgiving. A sudden shift in the weather, a brush fire, a flash flood, a pack of wild dogs savaging the livestock, almost any fluke of nature can mean disaster. The emphasis on atonement, on making peace with an all-powerful God, isn’t difficult to understand.

I was doing a certain amount of atoning myself that morning. The piercing headache that had greeted me when I woke up on Rita’s sofa had softened itself to a dull gray shadow, somehow slightly larger than my skull. But my stomach was still queasy, my mouth still lined with material torn from the inside of an old sleeping bag.

We had talked for a while last night before I collapsed. I had wondered whether the Polaroid prints might’ve had something to do with Griego’s death.

“Blackmail, you mean?” Rita had asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” It wasn’t the world’s most persuasive argument; but I was a long way, just then, from being Perry Mason.

The photographs, maybe fifty of them, were spread out on the coffee table.

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