The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,58

Sangre de Cristos, making the peaks look pink and purple. She made her way down tiny alleys and through archways leading to courtyards with now-dry fountains. The stair-step, two-story buildings were seamed together, with one giving way to the other, so that each block was made up of one huge, mismatched structure. A curved missionary arched roof flowed into the flat-topped pueblo roof of the next building, which joined the art-deco tile of the next.

The shop owners in the low adobe buildings were starting to close up. Every other store seemed to have the words trading company in its name. Golden Bear Trading Company. Eagle Wings Trading Co. The cheap stores sold cowboy hats from the Philippines and American Indian rugs made in China. The expensive stores sold antique photos of Georgia O’Keeffe and turquoise bracelets made on the pueblos.

She heard laughter coming from the third story of La Fonda hotel’s patio just above her. The hotel was one of the most famous and tallest buildings in town, at barely five stories. Only St. Francis Cathedral was taller. By law, no building could be taller than the cathedral.

When she reached the Plaza, she watched the tourists. It was easy to spot them. They were always so much better dressed than the locals. If you could afford to vacation in Santa Fe, you could afford to dress well. A family walked past her, the kids looking like blond Stepford children in their neat white shirts, pressed khaki pants, and parkas. The father was J. Crew, the mother Ann Taylor. Clean-cut American upper class.

Down the street, a man was yelling incoherently, his voice guttural and coarse. She thought at first he had Tourette’s syndrome, but as she got closer she realized that he was just German, yelling to his relatives across the street.

She made her way to the tamale vendor on the corner of the Plaza. The man nodded at her in recognition, and she ordered the usual: pork with red chile. Lucy was a firm believer in food ruts. She got stuck in them often. Two weeks ago it had been baked potatoes. Last month it had been sopaipillas with honey.

The tamale steamed as the man handed it to her, almost falling out of the corn husk it was baked in. She paid for her food and found a cold bench on the Plaza to sit on.

She watched the jewelry sellers sitting under the portal of the Palace of the Governors, which was a palace only in the New Mexico sense. It was a huge, dark-beige-adobe hacienda built in the 1600s on top of an old Indian settlement. The palace had changed hands frequently over the years: Spanish, Indian, Spanish, Mexican, American, Confederate, American. Every passing army seemed to have conquered it. The building was now a museum, but she could still make out the edges of the old fort.

Lucy always marveled at the walking encyclopedia she had become since working at the newspaper. She could have been a Santa Fe tour guide, sitting in a bus and telling vacationers from Minnesota, “And off to your right is the oldest public bathroom in the United States.”

She watched one of the sellers under the portal of the Palace of the Governors polish a squash-blossom turquoise necklace laid out on a bright blanket. The woman was sitting bundled up in comforters, to fight off the cold shadows and the hard concrete. All the sellers under the portal had to be American Indian. It actually was a rule. There had been some big lawsuit in the 1990s brought by Hispanic sellers who thought they had as much right to sit under the portal as the Indians. The state supreme court had decided the issue. Only Indians. So the Hispanic sellers had been forced to sell their paintings and santos on the other side of the street, which didn’t seem that bad a fate to Lucy. They got to be in the sun and away from the shade of the portal. They got to be on the Plaza.

The Plaza itself was only about a block square, with sidewalks crisscrossing its grassy areas. If it had been back East, they would have called it a park, and a small one at that. But here it was the Plaza, with a capital P.

The early conquistadores had built the Plaza to serve as a vegetable garden and center of the fort. It had been a place of cockfights, public floggings, Indian slave markets, and bullfights. It was the