More Margarito and Me (eBook)

David Kyea (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
252 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-3541-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Whether it's building a chicken house out of an old pickup, cleaning a ditch, or counting cattle high in the mountains of 1970s northern New Mexico, Margarito Montoya has a story to tell. And his young friend Ricardo, even when he's struggling to keep an overloaded pickup from going off Deadman's Curve, just can't help but pay attention. These fifteen short stories, suitable for readers in their teens and beyond, bring to life the animals, history, culture, legends, and people, living and dead, of New Mexico through the magic that can be found every day if you just know where to look for it.

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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.

Textauszug

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...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.2.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-3541-7 / 9798350935417