mâché wise men, Joseph and Mary, a wheelbarrow in which lies a plastic doll, the baby Jesus. A square of straw- strewn earth surrounds it.
She rises and limps to the shelter of the hut, bone- weary and feverish. Into the wheelbarrow she curls her body around the doll, its blue plastic eyes open wide with artificial lashes fat and spiky.
She lies there, shivering, delirious. A flock of seagulls hovers over the crèche, their black eyes like polka dots upon the swirling red snow. After a time a nun appears. You cannot sleep here, she says. Please. It is a sacrilege.
Ruby only blinks at her, blood and scratches on her face. The nun makes the sign of the cross and hurries back inside the church, leaving Ruby there, holding the plastic baby Jesus in her arms.
I t h a s b e e n t w o y e a r s and thirteen days since ward Costello's wife and baby girl passed away. On the outskirts of Pueblo he passes a billboard that reads, when americans believe in god, god will bless america. A dark blue deportation bus roars by, filled with illegals, mainly women and children, their sorrowful faces near the windows. They watch him through the smeared glass of his windshield.
He feels swollen. As if it is all too much for him. He's had this
odd itching for a while now, since his wife had and daughter have been gone: a feeling that all his past, all his memories, is just a blink away, the width of an eyelash, the click of a tongue, everything, right there. The slightest movement or hiss of wind can bring it all rushing back. A trapped sensation that there's nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, from this tsunami of the past. The more he focuses on the present the more he can't wish or will it away.
This he remembers: her long, dusky eyelashes, her incredible warmth, the smell of her and her alone on the cotton pillowcases, the feel of spooning next to her, the curve of her smoothness against his lap. The bliss remembered. Waking up to call her by name, a single word, baby.
He exits I- 25 in downtown Pueblo. He drives west, the sky ahead like a hammered sheet of copper, traffic moving in fits and starts. He passes a truck hauling cattle, the whites of their bovine eyes rolling at him through the slats in the cattle trailer. He heads down 4th Street, through a moribund district of brick shops long closed. His eyes burn like they've been soaked in Tabasco. His heart beats too hard and fast and the dividing stripes in the road seem to rise in the air above his car like flying white snakes.
He rolls down his window to let in the cold. When his scalp begins to tingle and goose bumps cover his arms, he rolls it back up. The heater blasts hot air, so he feels cold and feverish at once. He worries it could be a touch of the sickness, even though he's supposed to be immune now.
He heads toward an odd darkness in the sky, toward the prairie that divides Pueblo from the Sierra Mojada, foothills to the Rockies, where he plans to do his bird- population study. After sleeping in the car and no shower, he smells sour and homeless. He keeps expecting a motel to pop up on the western edge of town, where it would be convenient. None do. Hispanic teenagers in muscle cars rumble in the other lanes, blasting Tejano hip- hop.
Sitting at an intersection he closes his eyes and the next thing he knows a pickup behind him is honking and he's faint and frantic, pressing down on the accelerator and giving the driver behind a guilty wave. He passes pawnshops and massage parlors and Mexican restaurants. He squints at the street signs and sees he's crossing Pueblo Boulevard, on the edge of town, a sign indicating to turn right for the city zoo. All the billboards are in Spanish. He keeps driving until he realizes he is beyond everything. The landscape here is tan and rust- colored rock on cliffs above the road, and below it cottonwoods and Russian olives, pale green and dusted with road drift, along the banks of the Arkansas River.
Here what little is left of town looks like Mars conquered by Cortés. In a sudden moment of panic he loses his way. A cloud wall of dark red dust swallows the road and he slows to a crawl before pulling onto the shoulder. The car shakes in the wind. Sand and dust pummel the windshield.
Ward closes his eyes and leans against the steering wheel. His thoughts bob and float. A memory lurches up like a zombie: how as a boy he would mow the grass of an aunt and uncle's house. His mother would drive him there on weekend mornings and drop him off, return to pick him up hours later. The mowing didn't take long and he'd have hours to kill in the musty- but- clean house of the old couple. He must have been eight, nine years old. His cousin was much older and was already grown, but in his old room there was a large box of vintage comic books. Richie Rich, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, Archie, Spiderman, the Flash. He remembers how happy he was just to sit in the room and read the comic books. How peaceful it was. How long ago it seems.
Later he wakes in a daze, a spot of drool on his crossed arms. He rubs his eyes and sees that the storm has passed. Weak and brain- befogged, he does a U- turn in the empty road and heads back toward town, crosses the Arkansas River and the railroad depots. A neon sign the shape of a buffalo, upon which rides a cowgirl holding the loop of a lariat. The Buffalo Head.
He pulls into the parking lot and kills the engine. The car ticks like the sound of his brain defusing. He stares at a horse tied to a stanchion near the office. A faint snow begins to fall. Ward rubs his eyes and blinks. A horse? He wonders if the fever is affecting his vision. The snow looks pink.
In the motel office Ward stands at the check- in counter, blowing his nose. His head is clogged, each beat of his pulse causing a throb of ache in his temples. To his left is a platter of glazed doughnuts, a coffee machine with an urn full of black liquid. He takes a seat on the ugly brown sofa near a wall- mounted, taxidermied buffalo head. The lobby paintings are all cowboys herding steers across a river or coyotes against a full moon. The lamp- shade stand is made of deer antlers. Ward sits and stares at the painting of cowboys and steers as if stunned by a slaughterhouse air gun. His face is pale and he can smell himself, feel the waxy sweat upon his fevered forehead.
After some time he awakens in the chair, his bladder full and hot with pain.
Are you okay?
It's the clerk. She's behind the check- in counter now, leaning forward to see him. A bleached blond chewing gum. Hey, mister. You okay? she asks again.
He finds himself staring at the garish electric sign of the motel. A cowgirl with loopy neon lariat, riding a stylized buffalo. The yellow- and- blue light streaks like glowing tattoos upon the deep blue skin of dusk. No, he says. Not really.
H i r a m p a g e opens his pawnshop with a premonition of something wonderful about to drop into his lap. Not one month ago he saw a red- haired preacher's daughter sitting in a pew of the Lamb of the Forsaken temple and knew she would become his third wife. He has a way with these things and it isn't to be argued with.
Hiram is forty- eight but looks older, discount- store distinguished. He's a tall, broad- shouldered man with a wide, shrewd face, a high forehead and white hair. Handsome enough to use his looks for his own gain. Although raised in a Mormon family, he enjoys a drink now and then, but who doesn't? The chastised pride themselves on overcoming vices, but it takes a man to manage them for his own enjoyment.
The secret to success is constancy of purpose, he often says, a quote from no less than Benjamin Disraeli, a British prime minister from the nineteenth century. The man was an accomplished as a British statesman despite being a Jew. Hiram attends an FLDS church every Sunday and professes to believe in the mirage of the one true prophet. A foolish idea if there ever was one.
His pawnshop lurks on Northern Avenue, at the edge of Mexican town, a good place for poor folk desperate to sell something for much less than it's worth. The shop itself is an ex– convenience store, its wide glass windows girded by burglar
