The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,17
reel, pulling the lure with the current. Fishing the Rio Grande in winter was always slow, especially in the canyon stretch. Gil and his dad had fished the Rio Grande only a few times, not liking the noise of the traffic on the highway. His dad had always wanted to be in the most out-of-the-way stretches of water.
During the drive to mountain streams, they would spend long hours debating which casting grip to use or whether bright synthetic fibers were better than natural ones for fly tying. His father, always a lawyer, would never let the argument die. Once there, they would fish in silence, usually with only the bend of the river between them. When Gil was in grade school, he would get bored within an hour or two and then would try to sneak up on his dad, who seemed to spend as much time looking at the scenery as fishing. By the time Gil was in high school, he could stand all afternoon in the water, placing cast after cast with accuracy.
His dad had taught him how to make ties, showing him how to wind and twirl the fur and feathers. But the last time he and his dad had gone fishing together, almost ten years ago, his dad had changed to using premade ties, Royal Wulffs and Humpys. Their white wings made it easier for his dad, with his bad eyesight, to see. His father, who had prided himself on his fly tying, shrugged when he pulled them out of his fly box and said, “Sometimes you do what you have to do to catch fish.” And then he smiled. He died of a heart attack a month later. Gil had been just twenty-three.
The highway popped out of the canyon and Gil took the road toward the town of Taos. The brown plains stretched toward the Truchas Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where the creases of the peaks were lined with snow.
He parked on the Taos plaza and went into a diner to get a green-chile burrito and a Coke. He ate it outside, sitting on a bench on the plaza, watching the tourists who were there for the ski season. The ski area had only some of its runs open. The winter had started with a good snowfall of five inches in October. But now the temperature most days was about sixty degrees. The tourists who hadn’t come for the skiing loved it. The locals just wanted it to snow.
Gil finished his burrito and tossed the wrapper. He walked back to his car slowly, keeping an eye on a group of local kids as they crossed the plaza, wondering why they weren’t in school. He got into his car and drove past the turnoff for the Taos Pueblo.
One of Gil’s uncles claimed that they were related to Pablo Montoya, who was hanged by the American government after a rebellion at Taos Pueblo. Gil’s aunts said that the story wasn’t true, that Pablo was not related to them but to the Montoya family from the town of Mora. That didn’t stop Gil’s uncle from getting drunk at family parties and telling the children that Pablo Montoya would come get them if they didn’t be quiet. His uncle’s version of the story was that Pablo and his friends were mad at the Anglos who were stealing all the property from the rich Spanish, so Pablo helped lead a revolt in Santa Fe that somehow ended up in Taos. At some point, the new Anglo territorial governor was shot full of arrows and killed—which was true, according to the history books—but Gil’s uncle claimed that Pablo was the one who took the governor’s scalp through the streets of Taos. The Americans eventually hanged Pablo Montoya. Gil’s sister, Elena, had always wanted to take a trip to Taos to look for Pablo’s grave, but that was before their dad had died. Since then, she hadn’t brought it up.
Gil took the highway northwest out of Taos. The hills flattened out to a plain of grasses and sage brush. The only sign of the Taos Gorge out in the prairie two miles away was a thin line of black, invisible unless you knew where to look. One story had it that a bandit being chased by locals galloped his horse right off a cliff and into the gorge, never realizing it was there.
Gil was a quarter of a mile from the gorge before he could see it—a deep canyon