The Old Priest

The City of Gold

T h e O l d P r i e s t 61 The City of Gold C OU P LES DO DIFFERENT THINGS WHEN they’re about to break up. Charlie and I fly to New Mexico. We spend the afternoon in the lounge of the Albuquerque Hilton, drinking margaritas and listening to a flamenco guitarist. They don’t proof me. I look older, I’ve always looked older. Charlie tells me I was born older. “I can come out here and get a leg up,” Charlie says, licking salt from the rim of his glass. “If I’m going to work in the casino businessthen Ishould makeasmuch moneyasIcan.”He’s got on a lime-green golf shirt and tan chinos, and his thinning blond hair is clipped straight across the forehead, like Caesar, maybe, but a little boy Caesar, which makes me melt for him when I think about it. Charlie can still do that: he can still cause me unexpectedly to melt. “That’s true,” I say, ruffling his bangs with my little finger. “Time is money, baby. Tick tick tick.” Charlie’s friend Rodman is helping with the startup of Indian gaming in New Mexico. The Indians are working on a compact with the state to expand their bingo halls into full-fledged casinos and Rodman called Charlie up to say that there is money to be made, fun to be had. He wants to put a few people he can trust around him while he jockeys for position. “I’ve got to take this, I think,” Charlie says, stroking my hair, 61 A n t h o n y Wa l l a c e 62 tugging the silver buckle at my throat. “I’ve got to start thinking about the future, Amber. What about you?” After the drinks we drive into Old Town, buzzed on mescal, energetic and trippy. The streets have this hushed quality, as if it’s oneoftheunspokenrulesoftheplacethatyoushouldn’tbeina hurry. The buildings are old, stately, with historical plaques on the doors and fence posts. There are a lot of people who look like Asians walking around and I decide they’re the Indians, the Native Americans of New Mexico. The white guys you see have long hair and wear bell-bottomed jeans and the girls wear denim skirts and blouses overflowing with embroidery, and I’ve never considered that a different part of the United States could really be, well, so different. New Mexico, we learn in one of the brochures I’ve picked up at the front desk, was settled by the conquistadors who came up from Central America on rumors of the lost city of gold, El Dorado. “Gaily bedight,” Charlie says. “Huh?” “It’s Poe, from a poem called ‘Eldorado.’ A knight sets out to find gold but finds death instead.” Charlie was an English major in college, about a hundred years ago, and is always throwing that stuff around, famous lines from literature and film, and I like that, I mean, I always thought I’d be with a guy who had some education, but then again he hasn’t really done anything with it, either. He often complains he can’t figure out what he wants to be when he grows up. Myself, I’m still in school. I’m nineteen years old, actually . I’ve been with Charlie since I was sixteen. Some people have an issue with that, but I know Charlie’s always done what’s 63 T h e C i t y o f G o l d best for me. In fact, I’m sure that if it doesn’t work out I’ll never again have a man treat me as well as Charlie has. “I can take the shift boss job,” Charlie explains, “and you can transfer to the University of New Mexico. This could definitely be cool.” He pulls me by the hand down the winding leafy streets of Old Town, ristras on the painted doors and in the windows and hanging down from the spindle-posted galleries, dried red peppers everywhere you look. At the Museum of Natural History we watch a movie about the Anasazi, “the people.” Their civilization flourished for centuries, then disappeared without a trace. The film shows naked, primitive people jumping around in a stream, their faces covered with mud. Then in the next scene it’s night and they’re...