Mountain Road: A Novel

By Al Stotts

Journalism professor Adam Colbert has come home to Albuquerque after a reporting career that took him all over the world. A nineteenth century adobe house with a mansard roof that he admired as a boy is now his home on Mountain Road. He loves the old neighborhood and the road that once connected Albuquerque with the Sandia Mountains. But some unwelcome new neighbors are the organizers of a twenty-week abortion ban initiative on the fall municipal election ballot.

Adam’s journalism students write investigative stories about the initiative and its backers, which puts him in the crosshairs of a corrupt university regent who supports the anti-abortion campaign. Two women, one a young anti-fascist vagabond and the other a gorgeous and ambitious graduate student, enter his life and dramatically influence his political activism and his romantic experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532066764

Al Stotts

Al Stotts lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of four previous novels: Pont Marie (2011), No Angels in Montmartre (2013), Oligarch Games (2016), and Mountain Road (2019).

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Copyright © 2019 Al Stotts.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6675-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6676-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019901595

iUniverse rev. date:   02/19/2019

Contents

Long Roads and Wrong Roads

Mountain View

A Sense of Place

Crossroads

Vagabondage

Suba

I Only Call Fascists Fascists

What I Know About Life Comes Out of a Book

Juana Baca of Carnuel

Reverberations

Hallucinations

Postpartum Depression

The Bra Leash

Buffoon with a Spittoon

Abort Hypocrisy

Dinner at Monroe’s

The Lust Phase

The Convert

The Breastplate of Righteousness

Reconnaissance

Masters the Commander

The Source

Southwest Experiences

La Petite Mort Versus L’amour

Not Born-Again

Suba Redux

Strange Bedfellows

South Valley Excursion

Suba’s Legacy

Mountain Trail

The Knives of Jealousy

Not a Droll Tale

Y’all Will Pay for This

Harwood and Hollywood

The Diva

Scripts and Stories

Underlying Morbidities

Defeat and Retreat

Transitions

La Charmante Gabrielle

Mask of Happiness

Emotional Vagabond

Wildflower

An Audacious Proposal

Paul Lacroix confirmed in conversation with me today what Gavarni told me about Balzac’s thriftiness in the expenditure of his sperm. He was perfectly happy playing the love game up to the point of ejaculation, but he was unwilling to go any further. Sperm for him was an emission of cerebral matter and, as it were, a waste of creative power; and after one unfortunate incident, in the course of which he had forgotten his theories, he arrived at Latouche’s exclaiming: I lost a book this morning.

~Edmond de Goncourt, 30 March 1875, Pages from the Goncourt Journal

For Balzac’s lost novel

My thanks to Melissa Howard for her patient, thoughtful editing skill.

And thanks also to the following people who were gracious enough to read early drafts and provide comments:

Melissa Stotts, Steve Baca, Maureen Baca, Genieve Florez, Bill Barker, Eric Hajas, Julianna Kirwin, Gabriela Barros and Amanda Cardona

The enemy is Texas and the Texans.

~ New Mexico Territorial Governor Henry Connelly, 1861

Long Roads and Wrong Roads

Adam Colbert noticed odd things in the old Albuquerque neighborhoods where he ran every morning from his house on Mountain Road. For instance, there was a five-gable Victorian house on Slate Street with a window-mounted air conditioning unit on the first floor that was always on, night and day, all seasons of the year. What needed to be constantly cold in that house all the time, he wondered.

A block away on Orchard Street there was a small wood-frame house in need of repair that always had luxury cars parked in the driveway and on the street in front. An Audi A-6 sedan, a Porsche Macan SUV, and a Mercedes Benz E-Class sedan were among the expensive vehicles he saw there routinely. The value of the cars certainly was greater than the value of the dilapidated little house. And when he saw anyone at the house it was usually a good-looking woman. What was the back-story of that place?

Just down the street was the former home of New Mexico historian Erna Fergusson. The house originally belonged to her mother when the street was called Orchard Place, in recognition of its sylvan history. The house had been sadly neglected and it was difficult to see the pleasant Territorial-style features of the structure because trees and shrubs had overtaken the property and obscured the architecture.

In the introduction to Fergusson’s New Mexico, A Pageant of Three Peoples, fellow historian Paul Horgan recalled her modest home’s elegance of complete simplicity. He remembered a great garden cottonwood at the house, but unpruned elm trees and mature sumacs, which were more weed than tree and had a foul odor, had become its most prominent landscape features. And hardly anyone knew Erna Fergusson had lived there.

There were houses he passed that irritated him because of their politics. He saw legacy presidential campaign signs and stickers on windows and vehicles. A Feel the Bern poster was still in a window at one house and next door there were Make America Great Again stickers on cars in the driveway: political narcissism and cult behavior on the left and right of the spectrum. Both sides wanted to blow up the established order, but neither had a rational plan for how to govern afterward.

Trump trash, he said out loud when he passed the Great Again house. Bernie bozos, he grumbled as he passed the other.

Some mornings he ran east on Mountain through the nearby Wells Park community, the neighborhood where iconic professional boxing champion Johnny Tapia had begun his vida loca. There was a portrait of Tapia on a street light banner at Fifth Street and Mountain. Like Adam, Tapia was a graduate of Albuquerque High School, but that was the only similarity between their lives. When he passed by the community center where Tapia learned to box in Henry Anaya Senior’s training gym, he always thought about the great successes and tragic circumstances of Tapia’s tortured life that ended at age forty-five from heart failure.

Just east of Adam’s house on Mountain Road there was a compound of several small adobe residences that he admired. The Northern New Mexico-style buildings with pitched, corrugated tin roofs were nestled together on the south side of the street around a courtyard. The entrance to the residences in the cloister was narrow, which limited the view of the interior court, but what he could see from the street always looked inviting. The property went up for sale on a Monday and sold immediately. Within a week the tenants at all three houses had moved out. Adam regretted that he didn’t get a chance to consider making an offer on the property.

The previous residents of the compound had four compact cars that fit nicely in the small parking lot. Now there were two big black SUVs with Texas license plates and anti-abortion bumper stickers man-sprawled in the parking area. An anti-abortion sign had been placed in one of the small dormer windows that faced Mountain Road. The next morning as he ran by the property Adam was shocked to see not just the SUVs, but also a big white delivery truck in the parking lot. It had giant graphics on each side – bloody depictions of aborted fetuses. Above the images a banner said, Vote for the Late-Term Abortion Ban.

Adam had just assigned students in his freshman and sophomore reporting classes to research and write about the initiative, which had been approved for the November ballot on a 5-4 vote of the Albuquerque City Council. But he hadn’t expected the controversial campaign to suddenly move into his beloved neighborhood.

Mountain Road neighborhood residents were reliably progressive in their politics, and they had the In This House We Believe… yard signs to prove it, so the sudden appearance of a Texas-based anti-abortion cell just down the street was not only unwelcome, it was unnerving. He wanted to know who purchased the appealing compound that had been defiled with objectionable politics.

In July, a group known as Defense of Life had collected almost 30,000 signatures, mostly obtained at fundamentalist church services, to qualify their Pain Capable Child Protection Ordinance for the ballot. If approved, the measure would ban abortions after 20 weeks. Its supporters included the Republican Mayor of Albuquerque and the Republican Governor of New Mexico, both of whom had close ties to Texas billionaires and their political action committees.

Adam reminded himself that in 1862 a Confederate Army battalion made up of Texans briefly occupied southern New Mexico Territory in an attempt to push north to Colorado and west to California. Union troops routed General Henry Hopkins Sibley’s Army of New Mexico in early 1862 and, after the Battle of Glorieta Pass, forced the Confederates to retreat. Historians characterized the battle as the Gettysburg of the West. Adam hoped this new battle with Texans would have the same outcome.

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Adam was born in Albuquerque to middle class parents who were originally from California. In their youth they had a worldview that was somewhere between beatnik and hippie on the counterculture spectrum, so they migrated to northern New Mexico and settled briefly in Taos, a favored destination for young people who wanted to experience the utopian movement.

When they decided to finish college, Adam’s parents made a more practical move to Albuquerque’s rural North Valley and worked in restaurants while they attended the University of New Mexico College of Education. After graduation, Adam’s mother taught at elementary schools in the valley and his father taught French and English literature classes at high schools throughout the city.

Adam’s father was a Francophile because his paternal grandfather was a Frenchman who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s to work for a French-owned winery in northern California. Adam had the opportunity to spend several summers in Paris with his parents and he developed his own passion for the French capital.

After his parents retired from teaching, they bought a small neglected seventeenth century stone house outside of Bayeux in Normandy and spent years restoring it. They moved in permanently when Adam began a three-year assignment with the Associated Press in Paris.

Both of his parents loved reading, so Adam became a reader before he entered kindergarten. His love of reading led to a love of writing as well, hence a career in journalism.

Adam also loved baseball. He played for Little League and Babe Ruth League teams through his elementary and middle school years, then he qualified for the Albuquerque High School baseball team and made the University of New Mexico varsity team as an outfielder.

But during his sophomore year Adam began to experience blurred vision, dizziness, fatigue, weakness and bouts of confusion after baseball practice, which was eventually diagnosed as non-diabetic hypoglycemia. His doctor said it was caused by the low carbohydrate dietary regimen he and his parents had always followed combined with his intensive sports exercise requirements.

Adam did not want to abandon his lifelong nutritional habits nor his commitment to physical exercise, but he decided the extra demands of being a college athlete would continue to exacerbate his vulnerability to hypoglycemia. So, he came to accept that baseball would have to be more of a hobby than a potential career.

He left the team and focused on academics. Initially he thought he wanted to be a sports reporter, but his interest in politics and world affairs also eclipsed athletics. His newspaper reporting career would eventually include local, state and national political assignments highlighted by the position with the Associated Press in Paris.

Six feet tall and skinny, Adam had a lanky physical demeanor. Owing to his French genes, his skin tone was olive. His thick black hair was long, and he constantly pushed it away from his face. When he played baseball, he pulled the hair into a pony tail under his hat. His intense brown eyes eagerly scanned everything around him, especially good-looking women. Adam always greeted people with a shy, close-mouthed smile and took his time developing friendships, although he usually rushed into relationships with women.

Adam didn’t have the stereotypical muscled physique of a college athlete, but he was fit and intellectually curious. His lack of brawn meant he didn’t get much attention from cheerleaders who he lusted after, but he realized there were other, more intellectually substantial girls who liked him for his mind and his corny humor.

One was a petite brunette journalism major from Santa Fe whose parents owned a small red brick rental house on Mountain Road. He lived there with Cynthia for a year, which he considered to be the most enchanted year of his life. They made love frequently, studied together, hiked in the Sandia Mountains, and had compatible political views. He thought they might eventually get married.

But near the end of their senior year she suddenly announced she would transfer to the University of Missouri to go to graduate school. He never saw her again, but a mutual friend who also went to Missouri told him a few years later that she had an affair with a married journalism professor, got pregnant and left school. She moved back to Santa Fe while Adam was in Paris and married a stock broker.

Adam remained confused about Cynthia’s sudden departure from his life. He could not comprehend what had gone wrong, but he retained hope that he would someday meet a life companion.

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Without these mountains, there can be no doubt that the city below would have suffered both an aesthetic and economic impoverishment.

~ Marc Simmons, Albuquerque

Mountain View

Mountain Road had appealed to Adam since he was a kid. When his family drove south on Rio Grande Boulevard to shop Downtown, they always made a left turn onto Mountain Road before turning south onto Sixth Street on their way to Central Avenue. Sometimes they stopped at the Müller grocery store, which was housed in a pleasant one-story light brown stucco building with a Mission-style parapet and a canopy that covered the front entrance and the west windows. Adam liked the store’s architecture. His dad liked the homemade sauerkraut the German immigrant owners sold inside.

Adam also liked the Müller family home next door. Its mansard roof covered with cedar shakes was an unusual architectural feature in Albuquerque and it seemed exotic to him. One day as the family drove past the house, Adam asked if there was a room inside the tall roof. His dad explained that a mansard roof created a habitable attic-like space in buildings.

That’s why there are windows in the roof, he said. It’s probably a bedroom.

Can you buy that house, so we can live there? Adam asked.

Well, son, your mom and I really like our house in the North Valley, he said. We like having chickens and being so close to the Rio Grande. Wouldn’t you miss living in a rural area?

No, Adam said. "That’s where I want to live."

Adam remembered asking his mom if Mountain Road went east all the way to the Sandia Mountains. It didn’t anymore, she told him, but during the nineteenth century it did. Back then it was a dirt road named Carnuel that served as a route for pack horses and horse-drawn carts filled with firewood collected from the southern side of the Sandias for delivery to customers in Albuquerque. Cottonwood trees along the nearby Rio Grande Bosque had been over-harvested for firewood by the mid-nineteenth century, so the Sandias became the next best source.

There were a lot of interesting houses on Mountain Road. Some, like the Müller house, were made with traditional sun-dried earth blocks known as adobe and others were made from wood or brick. The street had many attractions for young Adam, like a large open space near Old Town that had once been Herman Blueher’s truck farm that provided vegetables for sale at local markets. Elsewhere on Mountain there was an early twentieth century gas station with two cylindrical gas pumps; mom and pop grocery stores; and a red brick 1925 Neo-classical Revival building that housed the Harwood boarding school for girls.

As Adam grew up in the 1970s, the old twenty-acre farm became a beautiful municipal park. Later, Mountain Road near the park became a museum row that featured the Albuquerque Museum of History and Science, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and the Explora children’s museum.

While he was away from Albuquerque pursuing his journalism career, a Democratic state representative who lived in the neighborhood secured capital outlay funding to complete and widen sidewalks on Mountain, narrow the traffic lanes, and install bishop’s crook street lighting from Old Town to Fifth Street. The improvements enhanced the aesthetics of the street, slowed down automobile traffic, and provided greater pedestrian access.

The old gas station was rehabilitated as a café with new housing units constructed around it. An antiques store opened in an old wood frame house and a consignment furniture store with pieces exclusively from Santa Fe homes opened in the former Müller grocery store. Other old houses and stores nearby were converted to art studios and galleries and the dorm rooms of the old Harwood School were repurposed as ateliers for artists.

Next door to the Müller house an artist created a home and studio in an old grocery store building. She recruited other artists to design banners about the history of Mountain Road and they were hung on the bishop’s crook street lights along Mountain between Fifth and Twelfth streets.

Mountain Road wasn’t Santa Fe’s Canyon Road, but it had developed into an important arts corridor. The only other old narrow streets with as much appeal for Adam were Old Town Road, which veered off Mountain at Seventeenth Street on its way to San Pasquale Avenue in Old Town, and Griegos Road, which was about five miles north of Mountain.

Old Town Road, which was just under a half-mile long, ran past the south side of Tiguex Park and was lined with beautiful old adobe houses, with some newer construction on each end. Griegos Road had always been a primarily residential thoroughfare between Rio Grande and Twelfth Street and it remained that way while Mountain blossomed as a multi-use street.

When Adam left his reporting and editing career to teach journalism at the University of New Mexico, he bought the Müller house. It needed work, but he was excited to finally own the house he always wanted. His realtor told him it was a one-story adobe when the Müller family bought it in 1903 and that they added the second mansard roof story that had fascinated him as a boy.

But as Adam became more familiar with the building’s infrastructure, he decided the house had always been two stories. The first floor had 10-foot ceilings and the mansard roof did not appear to be an add-on. In any case, the house was still beautiful, and it stood out as always in a neighborhood that mostly contained cottage-style homes.

Mountain Road remained an important artery for the Downtown and Old Town sectors of Albuquerque. It still ran west past Old Town and Rio Grande Boulevard through old and new residential developments and terminated near the Rio Grande at an entrance to a pedestrian and bike trail that followed the river.

To the east it was lined by late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses as far as Seventh Street. After that there was an occasional old structure, but Mountain was primarily commercial until it dead-ended under an Interstate 25 overpass near Lomas Boulevard. On the other side of I-25 Mountain Road resumed sporadically into the Northeast Heights through uninviting suburban neighborhoods that dated to the 1960s and 1970s. A newer fragment existed in the far Northeast Heights. But the old road and its descendants fell far short of a path to the Sandia Mountains.

Adam’s house was set back about twenty feet from the street and it was oriented in a slight northeast direction, not precisely parallel with Mountain Road like the other structures to the west and east. That meant he had a great view of the Sandia Mountains from his second-floor northeast-facing bedroom windows.

The origin of the name Sandia, which meant watermelon in Spanish, had numerous explanations. Some said it was derived from Santilla, or little saint, which a few old documents used to describe the mountains. Other Spanish records used Santo Dia as a name for the range. Erna Ferguson said the swift elision of Spanish speech might have made Santo Dia sound like Sandia to an American ear.

The shape of the mountain and its reddish melon color at sunset may well have suggested the appearance of a watermelon to the Spaniards, but nearby Pueblo Indians called it Oku Pin, or Turtle Mountain, because they thought the ridge looked like the shell of a turtle. To Adam, the mountain had an amorphous shape, but it defined the place where he lived. It was a magnificent natural backdrop to the sprawled-out community that had developed to its west.

When he drove east along sterile city arteries like Montgomery Boulevard on the north side or Gibson Boulevard on the south side, the mountains were always there to redeem, or at least alleviate, the man-made ugliness that resulted from the lack of attention to urban planning and design during the city’s rapid expansion from the 1960s to the 1980s. As Albuquerque author Harvey Fergusson, Erna’s brother, wrote prophetically in 1933, the changeless mountains offered refuge to the weary sons of change.

To the west of the city, the row of five volcanic cones on the mesa provided a similar, if less dramatic, aesthetic backdrop for the weary eyes of residents. The ancient dark cones, surrounded by yellow terrain, were pleasing to contemplate. Just to their east, however, developers had built ill-advised tract housing that bumped up against the mesa’s escarpment. Further east was the Rio Grande Bosque and its beautiful cottonwood trees.

The elongated Sandia mountain range was made up of granite and topped with limestone and sandstone. Adam loved to look at its rugged ridges and peaks, especially during the crimson glow of sunset. He recalled author Willa Cather’s description of the Sandias as a sculptured, naked mountain chain and historian Erna Fergusson’s characterization of the mountains as that great upthrust of a fault block that created a stone wall to catch the sunset glow.

Crest hikes always rejuvenated Adam’s body and his soul. The Sandia Crest trails revealed the diversity of the seventeen-mile long range, from the thick fir and spruce forest of the southern end to the rocky open terrain spotted with low scrub brush and cactus on the north side. The Crest was mostly wide, but in some spots, it was as narrow as a knife blade with steep inclines on both sides.

One of the things he always looked forward to on a Crest hike was to see an elegant grove of tall, thin, white-barked Aspen trees on a small saddle along the Chimney Canyon Trail. Every time he encountered that small stand of Aspens, it was like meeting friends on the trail.

Aspens were beautiful. They grew in burned areas and served as place holders for conifers that would eventually supplant them. Their heart-shaped leaves fluttered gracefully in soft breezes and turned luminous yellow in the fall. They would thrive until fir and spruce trees grew tall enough to block the sunlight the Aspens needed to live.

The granite core of the Sandias was one-and-a-half billion years old and seemingly eternal, but given global warming, there was reason to worry about whether the ecosystem of the mountains could remain self-sustaining. He knew that climate change threatened to increase the frequency of droughts that could destroy forests.

A friend who was a tree physiologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory told him an alarming conclusion of his research: