Spirit Walk. Jay Treiber
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had recently had two wings added, a hopeful sign. He remembered his Senior English class, how Mr. Roth began every class session by writing a quote on the board—often Shakespeare, sometimes Milton or Donne. The kids in the 10:00 a.m. class had tittered one morning at the words, “No man is an island,” whereby the middle-aged teacher smiled and raised an index finger, his signature gesture. “You may poke fun now, you guys, but such words tend to burrow into the mind and stay. You’ll come to appreciate them in later years.” And this was true for Kevin McNally, for whom works like Hamlet and Paradise Lost, rather than fading quickly from the consciousness, took root and grew. In April of the spring semester, he had read ahead of the class in Macbeth, encountering the bloody king’s dark soliloquy: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow/creeps by this petty pace from day to day… The words in the passage were astoundingly apt, the very shape of Kevin’s dark feelings at the time; even then he’d had a sense that the tome in his lap—the Riverside Shakespeare, now growing august and dusty on his office bookshelf—somehow spoke his future.
“Things have changed more than you think,” Olivia Hallot told him. They’d met for breakfast at the Corazón Hotel. The building had originally been a colossal mission, the oldest standing structure in the state. Sometime shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, an architect had recast the place into a hotel, and thus it stayed. No record of the original architect or when it was built was known to exist, so there hung a mystery about the place, which for many was the defining feature of the county. Kevin had been struck immediately by the familiar smells of the dining area, the cooking chorizo and eggs, ham and sausage that cloyed into the room from the kitchen—while Olivia Hallot claimed that some things had changed, the smells of the old diner had not.
He sunk his fork into his red-eye gravy and biscuits. “I haven’t seen much of it. High school’s bigger.”
“That’s from a bond-issue vote,” Olivia said. “The money source has changed. And it’s no longer Phelps Dodge.” P.D., as locals tended to call it, had been a copper mining conglomerate that had fairly owned Cochise County for over a century. The company had folded up twenty-nine years before, leaving the cities it had built around it stranded. Douglas’s proximity to Mexico and the quaint uniqueness of Bisbee had kept them alive. Much of the new money source Olivia had mentioned came from black-market smuggling along the border.
The suggestion, however faint, of the illegal drug trade killed the conversation for the moment, and they looked self-consciously down at their food as they ate. “Well,” Kevin said finally. “It’s good to see this old place again.”
Olivia nodded and looked around the room, though they both knew Kevin had meant the town, the valley, the spirit of home and birthplace. “It’s good to see that it’s survived.” The old high ceiling and dark, early-American woodwork of the dining area had been meticulously maintained.
“I found an article in the library I think you need to look at. On microfilm.”
“Oh yeah?” Kevin said. He forked in another mouthful of biscuits and gravy.
“I didn’t print it out—just took a look. It’s from November of ‘76.” Olivia had not looked up from her food.
Kevin stopped chewing, swallowed with some effort.
Olivia raised her head finally, caught his eye. “Xavier Zaragoza wrote it—after the state police had put things together. Not much to it but the basic facts, but the article kind of pushed that incident back out into the open for me. Made me look at things again—try to remember.”
Kevin had put down his fork, though he had not been conscious of it.
Olivia looked down at her plate. “I’m working hard to not upset you, but I think it would help you to look at it before we actually went out there,” she said. A pair of busboys rattled dishes into tubs and a waitress whisked by their table with a tray full of food. “I know you’re only trying to help, Oli,” Kevin said. “And I appreciate it.”
Olivia nodded. “Your mom sure looks forward to seeing you,” she said.
Kevin smiled. “And I her.”
“She and Tracy are staying at the Gilbert’s guest house for the weekend. There’s room for you, too.”
“Well,” Kevin said. “I think it’s more convenient for everyone that I stay at the motel. I brought work with me.”
Olivia measured him a moment, went back to her food. “She’s glad you finally called. It’d been a while.”
“My work is fairly consuming.”
They ate quietly, knowing Kevin’s work was the least of his preoccupations. The divorce two years before had been an emotional hit, though the warning signs had appeared for a decade, and Kevin had ignored them. His daughters, both in college, had known well before their mother had even phoned an attorney. The youngest, Cinda, was attending Pima at the time of the break-up, and showed up in Kevin’s office the afternoon of the day her mother, Janice, had announced her intentions to him.
“Dad,” the girl said, shaking her head now for the third time. “There is no other man. You need to start seeing the you-and-mom thing better.”
His daughter had stood but obviously had one more bit of wisdom for her father. “You and mom were together for a long time, but she finally understands that you guys have finished with your thing. Time to take another road. You need to understand that, too.”
For the next eighteen months, Kevin endured the usual distress that attends such trauma. His alcohol consumption increased, and though he had quit smoking twelve years before, he briefly picked up the habit again, so that often he found himself lecturing on Barth or Updike hoarse from the twenty cigarettes and dozen scotch-rocks he’d consumed the night before. The dating aspect compounded the difficulties. Most women within ten years of his age were already attached, and those available were most often at least twenty-five years his junior.
Then Jessica stepped into his life. The young Ph.D. had been newly hired in the science department fall semester about a year after the divorce. Though just three years clear of thirty, she was brilliant and mature, a bookish blond girl with a quiet beauty, whose sexiness, as one came to know her, unfurled like a flag. She’d minored in English as an undergrad and loved twentieth-century American lit, Kevin’s specialty. They’d been together three months now and had announced their love to each other a few weeks before. And so Kevin’s life had begun to settle. He’d stopped the smoking and tried to drink no more than three scotches at a sitting, which was most nights of the week. The comforting sting of alcohol on his blood was harder to let go of than the cigarettes.
He lay in his bed at the Frontera Motel regretting he had not brought Jessica with him. He’d planned to read a while and nap, but he could not bring himself to engage in Tobias Wolf’s latest book, Our Story Begins. His better sense, though, told him that he’d made the right decision not to drag Jessica into the old hurt with him, not now, when the relationship was so fresh.
His mind kept tracking back to a face he’d seen two hours before, after breakfast. The face belonged to an old Hispanic man whom Kevin had noticed as he left the restaurant at The Corazón. He’d only caught a glimpse of the man, who wore shoulder-length gray hair, but Kevin couldn’t shake the feeling he’d seen him somewhere before. He’d written it off as déjà vu, simply a trick of the brain. But the man’s face had planted itself between him and the page he struggled to read.
Before he met his mother and sister for dinner, Kevin, despite what he’d told Olivia earlier, had decided to stop at the city library. He wanted to make the first move, visit in on his past before it paid a visit to him.
In 1976, Kevin was a senior in high school, and Jimmy Holguin was just a name in a missing persons police report. Kevin knew nothing of the man until 2001, when he stumbled onto the name in an archived article in the Douglas Daily Dispatch when researching for his Ph.D.