More Margarito and Me

By David Kyea

Margarito Montoya is a musician, farmer, and above all else, a teller of stories. His world is populated with the stuff of history and legend; the unexplained, the magical, the musical, the exceptional, and cultural tradition. His friend Ricardo is a willing listener and participant. After all, what is the value of a story if it is not shared?

When Ricardo doesn't know the answers hidden in a dream that seems to be more than a dream, Margarito knows someone who just might have the answer. Bumper crop of zucchini? When Ricardo's grandmother says enough, Margarito must find somebody who might want it and talks Ricardo into a trip that takes them on a journey to the past. A horse with a mind of his own. An angel who makes musical instruments and bestows a precious gift. When witches rage and wreak havoc, innocents suffer. Has El Diablo finally met his match in a woman? A mysterious litter of puppies, and a dog who seems to show up where he's needed most, bring together a young girl and her dream. What is the secret of an unusual mandolin player and his mysterious wife?

Ricardo finds out just how difficult it can be to repair an old washing machine or get a driver's license, shares tales of his favorite uncle and aunt, and learns the truth about a long-dead ancestor.

History, culture, myth, humor, and more, live in these fifteen short stories set in the mountain villages of 1970s New Mexico, suitable for readers from their teens to nineties and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350935417

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More Margarito and Me

Copyright © 2023 by David Kyea. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be translated, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from the author.

All names and locations represented in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people or real occurrences is unintended and coincidental, except those locations or persons used and known to be real and of historical or cultural record.

ISBN: 979-8-35093-540-0

ISBN eBook: 979-8-35093-541-7

Published and Printed in the United States of America by BookBaby.

Cover Photo by Leroy E. Fresquez Jr: Professional Disc Golf Association Member, extreme skier, farmer, and scrap metal sculptor.

DEDICATION

I must first dedicate this volume to Lani, my wife and life-partner of fifty years. She has kept me working through those times when preparing a manuscript became tedious and I was ready to walk away from it all. Without her there might be stories but most certainly, no book.

I am indebted and grateful to those readers who have asked for more.

And to the amazing people and places of this wonderful State known as New Mexico.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

When I began writing in earnest there was no plan to publish any of my stories in a book. A few tales were submitted at Lani’s suggestion, to an online e-zine and to publications by the New Mexico Book Coop. I was surprised and pleased to have those submissions accepted.

Still, I had no plan to publish, despite Lani’s urging. I did continue to write. Lani pursued writing queries to various publishers. None of them replied. I kept writing stories, many of which included the same characters as previous tales.

When we decided to self-publish KITE and Other Short Stories of NEW MEXICO, I still had no plan for future publications. Then we self-published a second book, MARGARITO and ME.

I continued to write more stories and we decided to self-publish a third book. As the name implies, the stories in this volume involve many of the same characters as MARGARITO AND ME. Without intending to, I had created a sort of series.

So, if this is this first of my books which you happened to purchase or intend to read, I will begin with an introduction to MARGARITO AND ME in these notes. If you have read my previous books, I apologize for repeating some of what you have already read.

In MARGARITO AND ME I introduced my narrator, Ricardo Deveaux, whose mother had recently died after a hard-fought battle with cancer. It was the early 1970s, and following her death, Ricardo dropped out of college, walked off his job, stuffed his life savings in a boot, and hitchhiked two thirds of the way across the country to New Mexico and his maternal grandmother. He arrived during a late afternoon downpour. No one was home, and his last thought before dozing off on the porch was that he hoped it was the right house. After all, he hadn’t been to New Mexico, seen, or even spoken to his grandmother since he was ten years old. Twelve years earlier.

He awakened to headlights in his eyes, voices, and the sudden appearance of a little woman in a blue plastic raincoat and matching floppy-brimmed hat, holding a rain-spattered paper sack of groceries in her arms. It was her. His grandmother. Even though more than a decade had passed, she smiled and said simply, Come in where it’s warm, Ricardito. And take off those wet, muddy clothes.

Having been raised in a city, Ricardo had a lot to learn about life in a tiny mountain village. Under the tutelage of his grandmother and his friend and mentor, Margarito Montoya, Ricardo soon learned that life, people, and animals could be much more than they seem at first glance. A musician and storyteller, Margarito accompanied Ricardo through a world of hard work, wonder, magic, mischief, and tales of people and animals . . . living and dead.

I, just as Ricardo, first arrived in New Mexico in the early 1970s and entered a world much different than what I had known. There were a great many lessons to learn, and I found it best to listen, observe, try things for myself and, above all . . . accept. After all, I was a stranger in someone else’s land.

The language of New Mexico was, and remains to me, one of its most wondrous aspects. Many of the elders I have known spoke an archaic form of Spanish, English, and portions of one or more Native American dialects. New Mexico has historically been home, at least in recent memory, to Navajo, Apache, Ute, Spanish, English, and a variety of Puebloan languages.

I have refrained from overusing many of the unique peculiarities of New Mexico language in my writing at the risk of being less colorful and in the hope of being less tedious to those who are unfamiliar with them. For example, coke is used in some regions of the State to designate any flavor or brand of soft drink. In parts of New Mexico, a person gets on, off, or down from a car or truck. I often refer to the wood cedar in my stories. New Mexico has no native cedar tree however, the juniper is common. When split, the center of the juniper is red. Because of this, in some areas of the state, the tree is referred to as cedar.

Sheep in Spanish is borrego if the speaker is referring to a single animal. In English, sheep is both singular and plural. In Spanish the plural is borregos. When an old-time Spanish speaker is referring to multiple animals in English, they quite naturally become sheeps, or more accurately, cheeps. There are very few Spanish words that begin with sh and most of those are imported from other languages. The simple logic and ease of it has always astounded and pleased me. For these reasons, I have included a Glossary, such as it is, of New Mexican terms.

There is no particular order to most of the stories in this volume, although there are some that relate to what preceded them. My mind just doesn’t always work in an orderly fashion. I don’t even recall the exact year that I became a resident of New Mexico. It is but one of the spells that have overtaken me since finding my way to the Land of Enchantment(s). Spells that have only increased their hold through the years. That, I believe, is the best sort of magic. The stuff of life that doesn’t shout out its own wonder at the time but later, sometimes many years later, you realize that its influence has been there within you all along.

What I can tell you for certain is that Lani and I have been at home here from the first day of our arrival and have met a level of acceptance that has astounded us. We may not have been born in New Mexico, but we have shed enough blood, sweat, and tears on her soil that we might at least be considered a small part of her.

The characters in this book are fictionalized, and at times embellished impressions and composites of people we have known, worked with, eaten with, shared good times and not-so-good times, shared tales with, and most importantly, learned from. There has been, and always will be, something new to learn. I can only hope that I have left something of value with each person I have known.

The tales in this volume are based in experiences, observations, stories that I have heard, or ideas that came to me while nailing tin on a barn roof, digging a post hole, fixing a fence, shearing sheep, feeding cattle, or otherwise going about the everyday business of life.

I know that readers will have varying impressions of my experiences and cultural knowledge . . . or lack thereof. That is fine. It is the beauty and wonder of who we are.

The names of towns, mountains, and rivers are also fictional except of course, those the reader might recognize for reals, or of historical and cultural record.

These stories have been written over many years and I have spent many more years struggling with the decision to publish them. It has been a tremendous effort for Lani to keep me on the path and convince me that I should let them live on their own merits.

My greatest and most earnest hope is that you, the reader, might experience at least a small portion of the wonder, joy, sorrow, and magic that I enjoyed in writing these stories of humble, yet in their own way exceptional, people, animals, and experiences.

Contents

TÍO FREDDIE, TÍA HELEN, and THE BEAR

ROSARITA’S PUPPIES

TÍO FREDDIE, TÍA HELEN, and THE GOLONDRINAS (Swallows)

BONIFACIO MARTINEZ

DRIVER’S LICENSE

COWBOY?

THE MUSIC ANGEL

CASIMIRO

MOONLIGHT

LENT

WASHING MACHINE

TWO WITCHES

RATTLER

THE DEVIL’S BROTHER

ESTRELLA

GLOSSARY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TÍO FREDDIE, TÍA HELEN, and THE BEAR

I was ten

when I first met my tío Freddie. My parents and I had traveled to New Mexico to visit my mother’s family. It was the first, and last, time we made the trip together. When I was twenty-two and came to Llano Alto to stay with my grandmother, Freddie and I got reacquainted. The morning after I arrived, he had driven up in a battered, mostly windowless, rusty green pickup, stomped mud off his boots on the porch, and sat down across the table from me at my first grandmother-cooked breakfast in twelve years.

Freddie knew a whole lot about history, the things animals do, why trees and plants grow the way they do, why pickups won’t start (and how to make them start), and how people, no matter what they do or what other people say about them, are after all … just people.

Freddie and his wife Helen didn’t have any kids of their own. It was a shame because Freddie really liked kids and it seemed he would rather chase me and my young cousins around playing cowboys and Indians, or pirates, than sit at a tableful of adults talking about grown up stuff. We used to get pretty carried away with it all. When the war whoops, galloping, giggling, childhood swashbuckling, and shouted gunshots reached a level that had the adults covering their ears and rolling their eyes … Helen was the only one that could put the brakes on it.

The adults talked about Freddie when he wasn’t around. If you happened to wander into a room where they were and it suddenly got all quiet, it was a pretty good bet they had been discussing one or the other of my tío Freddie’s misadventures.

Still, despite the best grownup efforts at secrecy, you couldn’t help hearing some of the gossip. The best I could piece it together, Freddie was a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a Japanese prisoner of war in World War II. People said that when he came home, he just wasn’t the same. My grandmother said he had always been different, even before the war. I always believed Freddie was her favorite and the others were jealous.

Freddie was really my grandmother’s sister’s son. When her sister died, my grandmother raised him as her own. In the eyes of the family, and pretty much everyone else, that made him her son. Technically, he was my grandmother’s nephew and my mother’s cousin. I guess that made him my cousin of some sort. Whatever. I’ve never really understood all that once, twice or three times removed, first second or third cousin stuff. He was a lot older than me, so it just seemed natural to call him tío. He called me sobrino.

I remember how, when I was a kid, people would look up at clouds and predict rain or snow or drought. Not Freddie. He always saw a rabbit, a horse, a face that reminded him of someone, a cow, a ship … sometimes even a dragon or a saint. Later, after I moved to Llano Alto, there were times I’d drive over to visit Freddie or help him out with one job or another on his farm. I’d find him just leaning on his shovel in a field of bright-green knee-deep alfalfa, sitting on a fence, or maybe a rock on a hillside, looking at the sky. It seemed like he could stand or sit that way for hours. Just watching clouds.

It was always like that with Freddie. He just didn’t see things the same way as other people and it seems like, over the years, it must have worn him down. He wasn’t the same fun-loving guy I remembered from when I was a kid. Of course, I wasn’t a kid anymore and I’d pretty much put playing cowboys and Indians, pirates, conquistadores, or wild horses on hold.

Helen told me once, how she always tried to keep Freddie busy around the farm, doing some sort of work for Lebanon or one or the other of her family. She was afraid that Freddie had gotten to a point where he would rather be with the clouds and that if he didn’t have something to keep him busy, a day would come when she’d look up from whatever she was doing, and there Freddie would be . . . floating up and away. I couldn’t see it. I knew how much Freddie loved and relied on her.

Freddie was nearly blind without his glasses, which he mostly refused to wear. He had this habit when he talked, of leaning toward you, eyes all squinched up, asking who you were. I was never sure that he wasn’t just teasing.

He insisted that he only needed the glasses to drive, but you never wanted Freddie to brand your cattle or shear your sheep. You sure didn’t want to be holding a fencepost or nail when Freddie was swinging the hammer.

In the Río Pueblo valley, where almost everybody drove beat-up-better-than-ten-year-old vehicles, Freddie’s rusty green fifty-nine Chevy pickup stood out like a run-down taco restaurant stuck in between all the slick art galleries on the Santa Fe Plaza.

It wasn’t just the mismatched recap tires. Most of the trucks in the valley rolled happily along on a collection of the least expensive and most readily available rubber. As long as you couldn’t see the air in a tire, it was good to go.

It wasn’t just the collection of dents. All the trucks in the mountains had dents and dings of various sizes and ages from years of carrying oversized loads of firewood or rocks, and sideswiping fence posts on icy or muddy roads.

And cracks in the windshield? No self-respecting New Mexican would drive a truck that didn’t have at least one. Freddie told me once that new trucks all over the state came off dealers’ lots with pre-cracked windshields just to get the inevitable over with.

Freddie’s Rosinante boasted all the usual dings, dents, cracks, scrapes, and rust of his neighbors’ trucks. And more.

What really distinguished Freddie’s truck from others in the valley was the vacant, pockmarked driver-side headlight socket, the red cellophane Christmas wrapping stuck on with fraying layers of duct tape tail-light lens, the foggy plastic duct-taped over the driver’s side door and back of the cab where windows used to be . . . and the bullet holes.

Freddie and Helen lived on a farm in Vallecito, a narrow little valley about five miles from the nearest paved road, between Río Pueblo and Valle del Indio. There were four or five steep-roofed houses in the valley and everyone that lived there were Helen’s relatives, the Vigils. Each family had a horse, a hayfield, a handful of sheep, two handfuls of chickens, a few cows, orchards, gardens, lopsided weathered-log barns, and huge conical wood piles. The people in Río Pueblo secretly called the residents of Vallecito, Los Vigilbillies.

Nobody in Vallecito had electricity. It seems that when the La Plaza Electric Co-op surveyors came around, they just couldn’t believe anyone lived in the place. As a result, electric lines were put in through the mountains, about three miles east of the valley. Even when they pooled their funds, the Vigilbillies couldn’t afford to pay for a three mile long hook up, so while everyone else within fifty miles was enjoying television, refrigerators, electric pump wells, washing machines, and lights at night, the people in Vallecito were still using kerosene lamps, candles, flashlights, the laundromat in Río Pueblo, battery powered radios and clocks, treadle sewing machines, and hauling water by hand from a hundred-fifty year old, hand-dug rock-lined community well.

Things got a little better when Helen’s uncle Leonides bought a gas-powered pump that he hooked up to the well and the Vigilbillies were able to fill fifty-gallon barrels with water that they hauled home on trailers made from the beds of worn-out pickups.

When it snowed or rained, nobody but a Vigil dared to enter or leave Vallecito. The red adobe dirt road to the little valley was barely a lane wide, with a steep, rocky drop off and deep ruts. When the road got wet, it got slick and if, for some reason you had to get in or out of the valley there was only one way to stay on the road … you aimed for the ruts and gunned it. All the truck beds in Vallecito were loaded down with a couple hundred pounds of rocks to add weight for better traction.

Despite its tiny population, Vallecito was famous all over the mountains for a few things other than its road. Vallecito women were rumored to be the most beautiful, capable, and strongest willed in the state (my tía Helen was no exception); the men were rumored to be fiercely loyal to their women (my tío Freddie was no exception either); and the Vigils’ orchards produced a great many pickup loads of fruit. Every year.

When the rest of the orchards in the area were fortunate to produce barely a two-gallon bucket of undersized and shriveled apples, peaches, or apricots, the trees in Vallecito bent and groaned under the weight of ripening fruit. Most people in Río Pueblo said it was because the Vallecito women were brujas.

Whatever the reason, there was an abundance of fruit and what they weren’t able to can, dry, or make into pies they sold from their pickups parked alongside the roads to Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Taos. The extra cash always came in handy.

But it seems like every blessing in life comes with a downside. Despite (or more likely because of) the good fortune of having the only ever-bearing fruit trees in the north half of the state, the people of Vallecito waged an annual war with bears. The furry forest denizens, from miles around, were drawn to the valley by the scent of ripening apricots, pears, peaches, and apples.

Every night in early autumn, an hour or two after sunset, the bears would come. The valley dogs would run for safety beneath pickups where they snarled, barked, growled, and howled for hours while the bears snuffled, shuffled, and groaned their way up and down the valley, gorging themselves on the ripest, easiest to reach fruit.

People did their best to sleep through the racket. They pulled pillows tight over their heads and tossed and turned from one side to the other until they just couldn’t take it