NAKED AND NAMELESS I WAS BORN INTO THIS DREAM

Chapter 30

IN THE TWO YEARS since Abby Jo treated her oldest son to a double scoop cone of Cherry Jubilee at Baskin Robbins—and in the almost two and a half years since the twins were born—Johnny had grown taller than his mother. His shoulders were broadening. There was a width and squareness to his jaw which had never been there before and which caused Abby Jo to turn her head back again and again when she looked up at him. And while she had been much better than she had been before the day that she wept to her son, the periodic disappearances from the house and family to consume her chemicals and see her men left Johnny in charge.

Though Seph was still there every evening and night, Johnny dressed his younger brother and sisters and cooked them breakfast and put them on the school bus or took the twins to one of his classmate’s mother’s trailers on Gusdorf so she could take care of them while he was at school and while his mother was away. Often, his nights were sleepless. He stayed up with the twins as their cheeks and necks burned red and fevers ran or when their teeth first came in through the gum. And it was this way when Abby Jo slid into the apartment in the black and starless morning after waking up in the bushes behind Wendy’s with a bad scratch on her cheek.

The woman collapsed on the couch and slept through Johnny’s getting his brother ready for third grade—and his other two sisters for first and kindergarten. The boy had cooked breakfast and made an extra two pancakes, one for his mother and one for him to eat with her before leaving for the high school. And once the other three were gone, Johnny went to the couch and pushed one of the twins—who had blond hair and were blue eyed and big as if sired by an elf or some other race than Johnny and the other children—into her face. Her mouth was dry. She was drooling onto the cushions on the couch. And now, she choked slightly and sat up and rubbed her eyes, flicking away whatever grit she’d found in them.

“That’s a bad scratch, Ma.”

“Huh?” She said, putting her fingers to her face and touching the wound and wincing.

“What happened?”

“Mmm…” she groaned.

“Come on. Let’s get it cleaned. Can you take him?” Johnny asked, handing her one of the twins and moving to the cabinet for some peroxide and a rag and wiping the crusted blood from her skin.

Abby Jo moved slowly. She grunted. And saw the breakfast and sat at the table and rubbed her head and hands and yawned, saying,

“You made this?”

“For you, Ma. Course, gotta give the kiddos some.” And they sat at the table for some time. Each had a child in the chair next to them and helped them eat and passed syrup. Johnny stood to get a glass of orange juice. “We’re out of stamps, Ma. Maybe I’ll get to the foodbank tomorrow after school.”

Abby Jo dropped her hands into her lap dramatically. She poked at the bacon with her fork, now, and frowned and shook her head. A silent tear slid down her face. Johnny took the twins and put them on the floor with their toys and returned to his quietly weeping mother and pulled her up and held her and was bigger than she was, squeezing her and telling her that he loved her and that everything was going to be okay and that she was beautiful, that he really did love her.

Minutes passed. Abby Jo wiped her nose, and Johnathan was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and smiling at himself in the mirror. It was quiet. She smoked in the doorway and watched her son becoming a man before her. He winked at her in the mirror. He was standing at the door hugging her and telling her,

“The kiddos are with you, today, Ma. Don’t let them give you a hard time.”

“Oh,” she shook her head, “No, not me,” and laughed.

“You hear me, kiddos.” Johnny shouted into the living room. Sesame Street was on the TV. Their four blue eyes looked up at him standing in the door, and the sunlight was on him. “Don’t you give your mother a hard time!”

The twins laughed and waved liked children. Johnny snatched the cigarette from her lips and pulled on it and blew the blue smoke up into the air.

“I can’t believe you.”

“Can’t believe what? That you smoked my whole life and now I do, too?”

They laughed and smiled, and Abby Jo said,

“Get going, boy. You’re going to be late.”

“Oh. Don’t worry about me, Ma.” The boy said, holding her back. And now, he pulled her close and hugged her and kissed her forehead and touched her chin and said, “Get that scratch cleaned. I love you, Ma. Don’t cry. I love you.” He smiled and winked at her and pulled hard on the short cigarette in his teeth and gave it back to her. “I love you, Ma.”

“I love you, too, baby.” She reached for his shoulder.

As he turned away, her one eyelid drooped, as if in exhaustion or fatigued from no sleep and the residual effects of the chemicals she entertained when she was gone from the house. And he wanted to go back. He wanted to say something to her. But the morning had been so pleasant. He didn’t want to ruin it. He didn’t want to make his mother cry, again. She was broken, and he loved her, and she was trying so hard.

And when he saw where the sun was in the sky and how much the traffic had picked up as the morning had progressed, he forgot about her. Johnny stepped more quickly and was jogging past the Super Save and running along Paseo del Pueblo when he saw the old Baskin Robbins sign across from the Burger King and turned up Cervantes Street to the high school. And he was sprinting and screaming,

“Wait! Wait! I’m here! I’m here!” as he heard the first bell ringing.

Chapter 31

THE LUNCH PERIOD THAT DAY WENT too quickly, as it always did for Johnny. He drank a bag of milk Ruben Trujillo gave him and ate two sides of fries off the trays of the Medinas—a brother and sister with the same buck teeth in the grade above him. After that, he sat on the bench watching the boys who always played basketball play a game, and one was fouled and bled from the nose and pinched it and ran to the bathroom. The others laughed. It was warmer than the morning had been. And the air was dry as it often is in the last days of summer and the first part of autumn in Taos County.

The bell rang for class. A mass of adolescence shuffled through the hallways to lockers and classrooms and joked or walked silently. There was a soccer ball being batted by the many hands and a teacher chasing it and screaming for the kids to stop, and that same teacher stopped and put his finger in the face of a taller boy with an earring. The teacher demanded that the student remove his hands from particular parts of his female companion’s body while at school.

And outside of Miss Hochsprung’s geometry class stood Mr. Lawrence with his arms by his side and Miss Hochsprung feebly resting her fingers on the man’s shoulder, as if comforting him. He was watching Johnny walking through the halls and joking with someone and shaking his head and stepping up to the doorway, when the boy saw the man and said,

“Hey. Mr. Lawrence!”

“Hi, Johnny.”

“What’s up, long time no see!”

“Yes. Long time no see, son.”

“What are you doing here? I thought you worked in the middle school, Mr. Lawrence.”

“I do. But I came here…”

There was a moment of silence. There was no smile on the man’s face. So, the boy asked,

“What?” he looked to Miss Hochsprung and asked, again, “What is it, Miss H?”

“Looks like they need to see you in the office. Mr. Lawrence is here to walk with you.”

“Walk with me?” the boy whispered.

And soon, he was sitting in a chair looking through the glass into a room of adults solemnly huddled and whispering among themselves. Johnny sat in the pink leather chair of the small waiting room there. He rubbed his moist palms back and forth. He bounced his knees. The dozen-or-so brown eyes broke from their quiet conversation and looked at him sadly. And finally, an open hand beckoned him.

Now, they sat him down in another chair at the hard metal desk. He took a deep breath. Johnny prepared himself to answer the questions he’d answered before about cigarettes or his letter to the girl in homeroom, or maybe, he thought, it might be about the chicken prank from 8th grade. But, now, one of the women was sniffing and wiping at her eyes. All of the other eyes were unusually swollen and the faces unusually long.

Mr. Lawrence paced slightly and leaned over him and said,

“Son, one of your sisters…” the man balled his fist up and pushed a knuckle into his teeth, looking down at Johnathan, “Your sister got hit by a car today. Your brother… I guess he’s been flown to Denver.”

And the adults stood there looking down and waiting for him to move or cry. The lady closest to him—she was the school counselor and had tissue paper skin and pig eyes—touched her teeth and shook her head. There was the sound of watery snot being sucked back up through a nostril somewhere in the mass of adults. They watched him. They looked for a response, but there wasn’t.

Johnny nodded.

“The twins? The babies?”

Mr. Lawrence nodded. And the boy asked if he should return to class.

“Johnathan,” Mr. Lawrence said and squeezed his own wrist, “I’m going to get you after school.”

“Why?” the boy asked.

“Just meet me by the bleachers, okay?”

Johnny wouldn’t look up.

“Okay? Huh?”

“Sure, whatever,” he said and stood up quickly, so that the adults in the room all flinched.

And he never came back to school after that day.

Chapter 32

In the boy’s absence, the lore around him was born and was told and was believed by the multitudes and carried for some years, so that a whole generation of humanity native to Taos could tell the stories of Johnny Red. Some were true. And some were lies. And some said that the boy was too crazy to come back to school after the death of his sister and the fate of his mother. They said that his mind and body had been broken by the trauma of losing so much so quickly and that he thew tantrums and had fits and was bound in a strait jacket and lived in a rubber room where he was spoon-fed mush by the orderlies of the hospital. And they said that it was only a matter of time before the doctors—who were at their wits’ end with the boy’s case—would order a lobotomy like they did for the crazies in the movies to snip away the parts of his brain which bore the grief of his life and caused him to act the way he did.

And one said his father was an infamous outlaw in one of the smaller but most vicious biker gangs around Oakland—called the Stranglers Motorcycle Club—and that, after years of being anonymous and absent from the boy’s life, Johnny Red’s father had found him and moved him to California. They said his father was grooming him to become the next leader of that gang. It was believed by those who told this version of the boy’s life that he was making millions of dollars a year for the gang running guns and narcotics between cartel members in the borderlands of southern Texas and Arizona up to Russian mafia who dwelt in the Pacific Northwest. He’d lost his eye, so they said, and wore an eyepatch and rode a stolen Harly Davidson motorcycle.

Still, others said the stress of his homelife had given him a rare cluster of tumors which populated the flesh and bones around his lungs. It was a medical anomaly. And even though the boy had come from abject poverty and dysfunction, even though he and his siblings were known for their odors and for being the children of a grown woman who slept with underage boys while her youngest daughter was killed by a car, even though Johnny was a nobody, some of the greatest doctors to ever live had come to see and study him. They ran tests on his body and the cancer. Groundbreaking books were written by oncologists about him and his disease.

As Ruben Trujillo had shouted to a group of girls who denied that these imaginings were true,

“You don’t believe me? They’re just waiting for him to croak!” and then whispered, “They need him to die, so they can chop up his body and study the tumors inside of him!”

But in truth, he slept in the greasy basement of an overcrowded foster home. He lived separated from his brethren. The boy was beaten with pipes. Twice, he was burned with cigarettes and many more times than that with a whole cigar for things he never did by a pair of disgruntled foster parents. This is where he went and where he was, and this was his life when these stories about him were first told.

Chapter 33

THE OLD WIDOW who lived on the corner of Siler and Hatchery Roads was discarding the old coffee grounds from that morning into the trashcan at the back of her house when she saw the red of a truck pass on the other side of her latilla[1] fence. Tires screamed as the driver tried to brake. A horrifying thud let out. And the vehicle was tipped down into the ditch there.

As the old woman made it out to the scene, the driver was out of his truck and in a fit of histrionics, yammering incoherently to her and pulling at his hair. She stepped around. She saw the blood and was on the ground. She held her bosom. She was screaming at the sky.

The Taos Police put up yellow tape. They parked their cars and milled about the scene. The chief patted his belly and scratched his head and took questions from the driver and the widow and another, younger couple from a house opposite the widow’s home on Siler. And shortly thereafter, a woman with pitted cheeks and a scar in her nose came to the police. She spoke quietly like she was embarrassed. The witness was pointing back towards the Section 8 housing on Randall.

And they found Abby Jo naked in her bed with one of the boys from the high school and a broken pipe on the windowsill. There were two plastic sandwich bags on the night stand under an overfull ashtray. One contained a white powder. A black goo was pressed into the corner of the other bag. Several leaves of charred tinfoil littered the sheets of her bed.

Abby Jo was in handcuffs and in the back of a squad car. She was speechless in the small, dark Taos County Jail shivering and moaning in despair and was sleepless and ate nothing and was known as the mother who let her kids get hit by a car, for such things are known in the tiny jails of a small town like Taos. There was an arraignment. The charges could be counted in dozens. Over half of them were crimes against children, her own and the boy from the high school. Her bail was set. And there was another day in court where the incident in which Johnny had been burned as a young boy was mentioned and a judge shook his head and sent her back until certain parties could be contacted so that legal proceedings could begin.

One of the girls in Abby Jo’s cell—a stout female with bad breath and a neck tattoo—was animated to violence toward the redheaded prisoner and pointed and hissed and spat in her face and accused the disconsolate figure drooping on the bottom bunk of being infested with demons and screamed that the white girl had a cankered and cursed womb which smelled of old septic tanks, a putrid uterus which snarled with rotten, hollow teeth and breathed out a warm halitotic breath. And the angry woman was pulled off of Abby Jo by the guards, once and two times after that and sent to the hole where she screamed promises to murder the derelict mother through the echoing jailhouse, day and night, for a whole week until transport came and took her to prison in Cibola County. There were long sideway stares from the guards and other inmates. There was accusation in their eyes and disbelief. And another much younger girl sat on the bunk with the grieving redheaded mother and touched her hand and asked her if she had anyone.

“Is there anyone you know?”

Abby Jo’s face was swollen and white and creased with grief. She breathed through her nose and said nothing.

“Hey.” The girl shook her and asked, again, “Hey. Is there anyone I can get ahold of for you, girl? You don’t know anyone? You have to know someone.”

“Mary.”

“Mary?”

Abby Jo nodded.

“Who’s that?”

“Lives in Carson by herself. I mean with a… with her kid.”

“Mary, huh? What’s she look like?”

“Got the one silver dreadlock like this,” Abby Jo mimed a long dreadlock in her hand and pulled at it. “She’s got the tattoo on her forehead, of the Virgo sign. You know?”

“Oh…” the girl smiled. “I know about her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You think she’ll help you? I can get someone to go out there and get her. What you say your name was?”

“Abby Jo.”

“She’ll know you, if I get someone to tell her you’re here?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. She’ll know me.”

Chapter 34

MARY CAME. Whether the news of Abby Jo’s crime and detainment in the Taos County Jail came to Mary from the girl in the jail cell or whether the news had come to her through some other means is not known. All that is known is that she was in Taos sometime in mid-October and was at the jail and was told that visits were not allowed while inmates were in the county lockup.

She waited in the houses of any acquaintance who lived in town for Abby Jo’s court dates. Mary bought pairs of long white socks and thick thermal underwear for the woman inside and left them with the jailhouse staff and was at the court appearances when they led the frazzled, red-haired Abby Jo in her orange pajamas and handcuffs to a table where things proceeded in a cloud of legal jargon and formalities. Abby Jo put her head on the table, except to receive words of instruction from her fat and sunburned public defendant who looked like a walrus stuffed into a suit.

On the third court room visit, Abby Jo’s lawyer talked to Mary. And he made arrangements with the prosecution and the judge and the child protection agents in the court room so that Abby Jo could be released once a bed was open at a drug rehabilitation center down in Albuquerque. It was stipulated in the arrangement that when Abby Jo was released, she would be taken to her treatment by the older desert woman. Mary accepted the responsibility and saw the dejected face of Abby Jo led back to the jail and arranged for a ride with a boy named Joaquin—the nephew of Lindo Corrales—down south.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving—the date on which Abby Jo was to be released—Mary and the boy named Joaquin waited in the dirt parking lot under the brown and leafless branches next to Albright Street. And hours passed. They waited, and more hours passed, and soon, the frozen frost that covered the world around them sparkled red and orange as the sun rose silently over Taos. A car passed. A pair of trucks drove by after that. And as daylight grew, the parking lot at Super Save filled with the vehicles of employees and then the cars of stay-at-home mothers pushing their carts across the asphalt. But Abby Jo never came out of the jail.

Chapter 35

Now, hear the door buzzing. And see it open. See, the criminal stepping out into the cold hugging her elbows and shivering and staring blankly at the dumpster behind the jail. It is Thanksgiving. And the grey, feeble light of the freezing sky is melting, now, into a puddle of purple night and black and points of clear starlight.

No one waits for her. She is looking for a truck and Mary, but there is no Mary. There is no truck. And she is mad with grief. She is walking, now, in the dark along Paseo del Pueblo and up into El Prado, and it is dark. It is freezing. And the delirious—the lumpy—red woman is undressing herself in her madness and walks naked on the silent roads in the night. A pair of headlights pass by and honk. Another pair passes and someone screams from the window for her to get dressed and laughs.

She is naked. It is freezing. Her boots are in the road some miles back behind her. And her foot is bleeding as she passes Blueberry Hill, and the vast expanse of desert blackness is before her and is frozen against her bare chest and stomach as she steps further into that void west of Taos.

When she gets to the bridge, Taos lights glimmer in the distance. It is silent and black and freezing on the concrete bridge spanning the gorge. She cannot remember her name. But, as one possessed of some foreign spirit or entity, she sings these words:

NAKED AND NAMELESS

I WAS BORN INTO THIS DREAM

OF SMOKE AND SHADOW

AND I DID NOT ASK FOR IT

AND STILL

I DO NOT WANT IT

NAKED I CAME AND NAKED

I SHALL GO

WOUNDED BY THE WORLD

AND WORN

FOR THE THINGS I HAVE DONE

AND THE WICKEDNESS I DID SEW.

NAMELESS I WAS,

AND NAMELESS

I SHALL GO

THERE ARE NO ANGELS SINGING

THERE IS NO LIGHT NOW WAITING

THERE’S ONLY MY PLUMMET

TO THE JAGGED ROCKS BELOW.

And she nods in the cold dark. Abby Jo stands on the railing with straight arms. She falls forward stiffly into the chasm of the Rio Grande Gorge. She is, and she is not. The bloody, tattered rags of her flesh burst upon the small bank of stone and snow—all that remains of her life—cannot be identified. The detectives mumble in the cold. The two men look at each other and shake their heads.

What teeth are found—blackened and broken, hollow and without metal—are evidence against the existence of such records being kept in any dentist’s office. They scribble her in as a Jane Doe on the paperwork concerning her suicide. Her death, just as she told, is as her birth. She is naked and nameless and a stranger to the world in her departure, just as she was in her entrance.

And so, this is the account of child’s mother, beginning with her birth, concluding with her early and tortured death. It is given to us so that we might hear it and behold it like images in handfuls of dust cast up before our faces or a cloud of smoke turning in our midst and slowly dissipating and, now, gone from us. It is the tragic tale harbored in the hearts and minds of those who walk the desert west of Taos today. It is her legend, whispered and believed by starving junkies escaping the rain under Seattle bridges. It is the scrawled words on jailhouse walls—a dream made of wax shared by those lonely prisoners turning and whimpering on their cots at night.

It is the history of the mother of the child. It is her story and her life, the child who became the boy’s doorway into this world. And it has been told, so that we might know it, so that we might know the boy. So that we might know the child.

[1] A traditional material for fencing in northern New Mexico, the ashy colored saplings of Aspen trees.

Submitted August 22, 2022 at 05:28AM by ASavageLost https://ift.tt/1Mrwcgm