Where the Cactus Grows
by Emily Withnall
Sandra Dal Poggetto, Understory, 1993, ink on paper, 5.5 x 7 inches. Private collection.
Claret cup cacti announce themselves in everything I write. This surprised me at first, but it shouldn’t have. I’ve been pierced more than once by their spines. When in bloom, tiny vermillion bouquets dot the dry ground. They are everything I aspire to be.
Papa bartended at Sipapu ski lodge. The lodge looked like it had been built in another century. Only locals skied there. Black widows lurked in the bathrooms, scuttling around the puddles left by wet ski boots. We played Pac-Man upstairs and stole packs of grape Bubblicious and Fireballs.
There were probably black widows in our woodpile, too. And brown recluses. I knew a girl who almost had to get her leg amputated because of a brown recluse. At least that is what Güero in the ski shop said. (It was a name he’d claimed with good humor.)
My friends all had crucifixes on their walls, and the Virgin of Guadalupe was everywhere. She graced the hoods of cars, candles, blankets, and T-shirts. She smiled from men's arms and backs. She appeared on matchboxes, stamped tin earrings, and murals. She was a statue everywhere.
My Girl Scout troop leader had a TV. She let us watch Rainbow Brite, and Care Bears, and Smurfs. One time, she put on Chucky. Chucky killed everyone with a gun. The people took his batteries out, and still, he could kill. They shot Chucky, but he couldn’t die. The people had so much regret and terror. They couldn’t take anything back. Nightmares washed over me each night like the tide.
In the summertime, we picked chokecherries and rosehips on the side of our long dirt road. I ate chokecherries until my fingers looked bruised with purple and my mouth puckered.
Sometimes, I spent the night at Angelica’s house. Angelica had two moms, one Anglo and one Hispanic. I peed in Angelica’s bed once and woke with shame like a fever all over my body. Her moms brushed my ratty hair with a comb that dug into my scalp. They yanked and pulled and French-braided and secured the ends with hair ties with big purple bobbles on them that looked like grapes. I blinked back tears.
The spring wind in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains was cold and relentless and made everyone cranky. I imagined the cacti on the mountainsides hunkering down. Plastic bags whipped through the streets. Madcap tumbleweeds flung themselves across the highway.
My room faced the alley. I had heard gunshots and police sirens. “West Side Locos” and “East Side Locos” claimed different parts of town, tagging stop signs and buildings with the windows punched out. I imagined people with guns running past my window. A gunfight, bullets rocketing into my bedroom, killing me instantly. I imagined what my family would say about me when I was dead.
The arroyos were mainly dry, so we walked through them looking for signs of life beyond the shapes water had carved into stone and earth. Fossils. Arrowheads. Horny toads. Sometimes in the summer, the Arts Council offered art classes at the Immaculate Conception School. We painted poems along the river walk to cover the graffiti. Graffiti spread like weeds across our poems.
Most summers, outdoor watering was forbidden unless we used rain barrels or greywater. In the backyard, packed dirt. In the front, a few yuccas and a juniper bush. They could survive anything.
July thunderstorms came just when we thought we’d never see water again. Clouds gathered in billowing piles, white turning to gray turning to black before they ripped open to release a hard, cold downpour. We ran into the streets, faces tipped toward the sky.
On Christmas Eve, we traveled over Holman Hill, through Mora, and up over U.S. Hill to get to Taos for the Pueblo bonfires and procession to the church. We drank hot cider and stood as close as we could to the fire, listening to the heartbeat of the booming drums.
Once, I walked through Lincoln Park towards the gazebo that smelled like urine. A low-rider slowed on the other side of the park, and a gun appeared through the passenger window, aimed at a man on the sidewalk. I froze. The men shouted. Finally, the car revved and sped off. I kept walking towards my friend Erin’s house, heart in mouth, hoping she was home.
On the Fourth of July, we gathered at Carnegie Park to watch the parade. A mariachi band played from one float, flamenco dancers danced in the street, and men dressed like Spanish nobles from Old Europe rode by on horses. The yellow flag with red Zia fluttered from floats. It was harder to spot an American flag.
I bought purple Doc Martens at Hot Topic in the Linda Vista mall in Santa Fe. A rainbow seat-belt belt, too. And sew-on red lips that read “Kiss My Patch,” which I affixed to the back pocket of my ripped-up jeans. Sara taught me how to steal compacts and mascara at Walmart. You couldn’t take the stuff with the raised, foamy bar codes, just stuff with regular stickers. She showed me where the cameras were and how to turn my back. I eyed the shoplifting warning signs uneasily when we left.
Sara lived in the Enchanted Hills Trailer Park. It was way closer to our middle school than my house, so we’d cut behind Walmart and hop through the hole in the fence. She had TV and I didn’t. We binged on Little Debbie snack cakes and Twinkies and watched Saved by the Bell, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV.
Like the town, our school show choir was stuck decades in the past. We sang Everly Brothers medleys and Grease medleys and did jump turns on wobbly risers, splaying our jazz hands.
Our friend group consisted of all the people who were too uncool to fit in with the skaters, jocks, ranchers, or nerds. We were the misfits and wannabes. When we were bored, we sneaked through dry culverts with flashlights to avoid anything slimy or dead. We hoisted ourselves up onto window sills and climbed onto roofs of buildings on the tiny university campus. Sometimes, campus security would spot us and put their lights on. We shimmied down the building on the side opposite from where they parked. Then we ran.
Saba was tall like me, dyed her hair bright red, and hung out with the skaters. Mr. King intercepted my note to her one day in English class. He always read students’ notes out loud, and he was triumphant when he grabbed mine. He hadn’t caught me all year. Saba and I smirked at each other as he unfolded it. We’d written it in code. His face darkened. “I’ll read it later,” he muttered. We saw it as payback for making us watch his daughter’s toddler pageant videos.
The summer that Selena and Titanic came out, I almost lived at the drive-in. I memorized the lines and the songs. “My Heart Will Go On” and “Como Una Flor” became my soundtrack for the summer and for the years that followed. Such tragedy. Such romance.
Abe Montoya went to my high school. Cruising one night, the way I often did with my friends, he sped up. Police lights came on. Scared, he drove faster. They sprayed bullets at him through the back window. Later, the city named a rec center after him.
I’ve always loved cottonwoods and the shade of their broad leaves. I favored one tree more than others. Massive and stalwart, it graced the banks of the Gallinas. Its low, almost horizontal branches offered a place to sit. Sometimes I felt like the tree knew me better than anyone, better than I knew myself.
Sunday was pancake morning. We drizzled maple syrup over stacks of pancakes and listened to powwow music on Singing Wire.
According to legend, Apaches drove Spanish colonizers up the steep mesa not far from town, where they died of thirst. The mesa is called Starvation Peak.
The sky is so blue here that you’d never believe me unless you saw it for yourself. Maybe it’s because of how strong the sun is, the light like cactus spines, piercing and deep.
Emily Withnall is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Gay Magazine, Orion Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, River Teeth, The Indiana Review, Fourth River, The Rumpus, and Ms. Magazine, among others. She is a recipient of the AWP Kurt Brown award in creative nonfiction, a John Anson Kittredge Foundation grant, and she has received fellowships from Fishtrap Summer Workshop and Under the Volcano. Emily currently serves as a fellow for Community Change, and she is at work on a book about domestic violence and hydraulic fracturing. Her work can be read at emilywithnall.com. Emily lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her two teens.