But they were no more than a quarter of a mile down the road when again Helena caught sight of the pickup following them. Instead of heading in the original direction as they had planned she had started back toward Santa Fe with every intention of staying as far away from that guy’s stomping grounds as she could. “Now, what does this fucker want?” she said, banging the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. He wasn’t big. She would have been glad to jump out and take him on, but the memory of a rifle pointed directly at her on the road kept her from doing anything but pushing hard on the gas pedal. She could see in the rearview mirror that he was still getting a big kick out of scaring her. Finally, after a couple of miles or so, he pulled off the road and sped off back in the direction from which they had just come.

“Man! And I thought L.A. freeways were dangerous!” Helena said, relieved to see that they were rid of him at last. Innocent people were shot at by snipers on freeways in big cities but it was too much for Helena to see that even on these sleepy roads, people could fear for their lives. And that furthermore, dudes were just dudes no matter where you went, even in the sacred land of the Anasazi.

Then Helena remembered something her older brother who had been with the LAPD for more than fifteen years told her once. Back in the ’70s, he said, there was a small town somewhere up north in New Mexico that he and his fellow cops used to refer to as the Narc Capital of the United States. Helena couldn’t remember the name of the town her brother had referred to. “Hmm,” she said aloud. “What do you know about your ancestral village, anyway?” Helena asked Maria after she had finally calmed down and was driving at normal speed.

“Not much,” Maria replied. “Like I told you before, I’ve never kept in touch with my relatives in Truchas.”

“Hmm,” Helena said again. She thought to herself that it was possible that she was completely off base with her hunch that that crazy dude threatened to kill them because he suspected they were narcs. But then again, her guess made her feel better than to simply conclude that he was just nuts and had chosen them at random to stalk.

Maria, on the other hand, had a very different feeling about that experience that day. Her veins ran with the blood and dust of that land and she stayed quiet all the way back to Santa Fe thinking only about what she had seen in that slender man’s dark eyes. She had foreseen a time in her future alone when Helena, brave and fast-acting warrior woman that she was, would not be there to warn: “HIT THE DECK!”