The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (5 page)

“What does Logan think?” Kelsey asked me, sipping
her own hot drink. She said my boyfriend’s name derisively, in a
tone dripping with resentment. She and Logan had never gotten
along. She said it was because he was an outdoorsman and she was a
vegetarian, which was valid, but I thought it was due to the fact
that he was my first real serious boyfriend and as such was the
first person to come between me and Kelsey since we’d become
inseparable best friends in the third grade.

“He hasn’t seen it yet,” I said. “He’s been in Texas
for that US Shotgun Junior Olympic thing. He just got back last
night.” My friends met this with awkward silence, so I said, “He
made the team by the way. Thanks for asking.”

“Oh, goody,” said Maria
sarcastically. “Your boyfriend can shoot innocent creatures better
than everyone else our age. How
nice
. You must feel so
proud.”

“Is he joining us this morning?” asked Victoria, who
often tried to smooth things over among our group - and
particularly between me and my best friend.

“Yeah. He’s on his way.”

“Yay,” said Kelsey with sarcasm.

“That’s awesome he made the team,” said Victoria,
with a cautionary look at Kelsey. “I know he’s been working really
hard at it.”

I smiled my thanks at her, tugged my physics book
out of my crowded backpack. “What are you guys studying?” I changed
the subject because I noticed that Thomas, who wasn’t exactly the
outdoorsy, manly type - and who probably liked Logan as little as
Kelsey did - was being politely uncomfortable with my boyfriend’s
shotgun success. Thomas and Logan knew each other, but were not
friends other than to mutually hang out with us; on their own, they
had completely different groups of friends.

“The Golden Ratio,” said Thomas, lighting up.
“Pretty interesting stuff. Did you know the ratio governing the
spiral of growth for a pinecone is the same as the ratio between
the length of your forearm and hand? It’s like when Einstein said
he believed in Spinoza’s version of a God that concerned itself
with the orderly harmony of all that exists.”

“Here we go,” said Kelsey, half-jokingly. Thomas, a
certified genius who was thought when he was younger to have been
afflicted with a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome (but had
“outgrown” it with age) was prone to lecturing us professorially. I
often enjoyed the lessons, but Victoria, by virtue of hanging out
with him all the time, was understandably less enthused.

“Tom,
please
,” groaned Victoria, cringing
an apology at us on his behalf. “No tangents right now, okay?
Please?”

I noticed a fly buzzing desperately against the
window behind Thomas’s chair. He turned to see what I was staring
at, spotted the insect, and without taking his eyes off it, grabbed
his composition notebook off the table and aimed it like a
swatter.

“Don’t!” I jumped up, in a girly panic, and snatched
the notebook from him.

“What?” He gawked at me.

“It’s a living
thing
! What happened to Spinoza’s
harmony and all that?”

“It’s a living
disease
,” He plucked his notebook
back, annoyed. “I don’t think Spinoza was fond of vermin. Humans
are equipped with a natural revulsion for flies and other
disease-carrying animals for a reason, and that reason is
self-preservation and, by default, preservation of the
species.”

“Let me deal with it,” I said. I ate meat and I was
a hunter’s girlfriend, but the thought of unnecessarily killing
animals, even ones so common and contemptible, irked me. I
understood Logan and my own dad loving to hunt and fish – it was
basic biology, a guy thing, just like watching football – but I
would never have gone with them when they did it.

I hurried to the counter and asked the barista for
an empty paper cup with a plastic lid. I brought these to the fly,
and cornered it against the cold glass. I could feel Thomas rolling
his eyes in disgust.

“
Be right back.” I hurried to
release the trapped fly into the tempest outside. I’d forgotten my
coat in the rush, and was instantly chilled to the bone by a frigid
burst of wind that sucked the air out of me. I knew the fly would
likely die in this weather, but at least it would be master of its
own fate now. Maybe it could hijack a ride in a car, or get inside
another shop. At least it wouldn’t be smashed.

I turned to go inside, but was stopped in my tracks
by a bloodcurdling coyote howl. The breath caught in my throat, the
hair on the nape of my neck rose, and my heart raced. I snapped my
head around, squinted against the snow, searching for the animal
with the laughing yellow eyes – the beast of my nightmares. All I
saw, though, was a Husky in a parked Subaru, barking viciously at a
man walking by. It wasn’t a coyote howl at all.

“You’re losing it,” I whispered, wrapping my arms
around myself and ducking back inside the bagel shop. After washing
my hands in the bathroom, I rejoined my little group.

“How can a girl who rescues
flies
be with a guy who
shoots turkeys and deer?” griped Kelsey.

“I’m with Logan because I love him. Love doesn’t
mean you have to be exactly like your partner. It means you have to
respect their choices. How boring would it be if everyone in the
world were all the same?”

“Would you rescue a malarial mosquito, too?” Thomas
popped a scrap of frosted scone into his mouth with a smirk.

“How could I possibly
know
it was malarial?” I
asked, still trembling a little from the cold and hallucination,
wishing my friends were just a tiny bit more welcoming and less
judgmental.

“True. The likelihood of malaria in the High
Desert’s quite low,” said Thomas in his robotic way. “Malaria is a
tropical and subtropical disease. In fact, some say malaria is a
main cause of extreme poverty in nations like Malawi.”

“You’re dating an encyclopedia,” Kelsey told
Victoria.

Thomas droned on but I soon lost interest, when the
door of the café jingled open beneath the very capable and athletic
hand of my boyfriend, Logan Torero. Tall and broad-shouldered, with
gently curly light brown hair, sparkling blue eyes and a smooth,
intelligent face, he was phenomenally handsome in a preppy kind of
way. Truth be told, it was his looks that first drew my attention
to Logan - though now we were also bound by mutual respect, family
ties, and shared interest in movies and music, not to mention
nearly a year as a couple. The first time I laid eyes on him, I was
sure Logan belonged on a sailboat in a Ralph Lauren ad. Today was
no different; he wore his yellow ski patrol parka, dark jeans and
shearling Duck boots – a safe, sensible, mountainy outfit. For me,
Logan was not only handsome, he was reliable and stable looking. He
seemed like the kind of guy who never made rash decisions, unlike,
I suppose, my own father - though at the time I certainly wasn’t
willing to go down that psychological route.

I sat up straighter, and smiled at him. Logan
grinned back, revealing his excellent white teeth and cheek
dimples, but was distracted by the specter of a shadow hurrying
through the snow behind him. Ever the calm, considerate gentleman,
Logan stood back to pleasantly hold the door for the stranger. I
swooned a little at his politeness, reminded once more that Logan
was the sort of guy old ladies trusted to walk them across the
street.

But when the stranger pimp-walked
out of the snow and into view – in baggy jeans that pooled over his
beige work boots, tattoos pressed like fresh bruises around his
strong, masculine neck – my swoon turned to startlement. I gasped
and dropped my coffee cup on the table. The hoodlum my boyfriend
held the door for was no stranger to me. I knew him. It was
Demetrio, the gangster from Golden.

♦

“Hey, you okay?” asked Kelsey, setting my
cup upright again before too much fluid slopped out of it, and
mopping up the rest with her napkin.

“Oh, my God. I
know
that guy.” My voice came out in
a whisper as I halfheartedly tried to help her clean up my mess.
Kelsey laughed uncomfortably.

“Uh,
yeah
you know him. He’s your
barbaric
boyfriend
.”

“Not
Logan
, dork. The other
guy.”

My friends all looked at Demetrio now. I knew how he
must have looked to them. He looked to them as he had initially
looked to me - like a guy who didn’t frequent chic bagel shops near
Coronado Prep. He had small gold hoop earrings in both lobes, and
wore four or five showy gold chains, with large links, around his
neck. He looked like something menacing yet ridiculous that had
just swaggered out of a rap video. Logan came along behind him,
taller than Demetrio by a couple of inches, with a mildly
condescending, curious look on his otherwise pleasant face.
Everyone in the cafe watched at Demetrio with silent concern, as
though he might yank out a gun and yell “on the floor,
bitches!”

“I didn’t realize it was hooligan day at the
Einstein’s,” sneered Thomas softly.

Victoria chuckled unkindly, but quietly enough to be
considered polite.

“You
know
that guy?” asked Kelsey,
stunned.

“Remember I told you a guy called
911 for me after my crash? That’s
him
. That’s the
guy
.”

Victoria looked surprised. Kelsey
was about to ask me another question, but Demetrio was within
earshot now, and slouching ever closer. Everyone kept quiet, and
tried not to seem uncomfortable, which is to say, they all
looked
quite
uncomfortable.

“Hey Maria,” said Demetrio, when
he got to our table. He smiled, in an embarrassed sort of way,
licking his lips nervously and stuffing his hands deep into his
jacket pockets. I noticed, and not for the first time, that he was
unusually attractive, and would have been quite the pretty boy if
not for the gang tattoos and minatory getup.

“What are you doing here?” I
asked, realizing as it came out of my mouth that it was probably a
pretty rude response. I quickly amended myself. “I mean, hi. But,
seriously, how did you
find
me? This is a little weird? Are you following
me?”

He seemed hurt by this, but pretended not to care.
“Don’t worry. I ain’t following you or nothin’ like that. I
remembered you said you came to an Einstein’s near school some
mornings – remember, we used your old cups for the fire kindling? –
so I took a bet it was this one.”

He paused for a moment, and looked at my friends,
his forcedly friendly smile soon fading, and his brows knitting in
worry, as he met their sanctimonious eyes.

“Here,” he said, taking something shiny out of his
pocket. “This is why I came. I found this where you crashed. It
looked expensive, and it had your name engraved on the back. I
thought you might want it back. That’s all.”

He let the Tiffany necklace with the heart locket
unfurl from his fingers, and held it twinkling in the soft
light.

“How sweet,” said Kelsey, sincerely. One look at her
face and you could tell she adored him. She was often drawn to the
bad-boy types, however; I blamed the fact that she was from a very
wealthy family, and was extremely sheltered, and thought everyone
was the same. The last guy she’d dated had been a high school
dropout who raced stock cars and was now in prison for armed
robbery.

Logan came up now, and stood next to Demetrio.
Seeing the necklace he’d given me in the other guy’s hand, he shot
me a worried look, as though he thought Demetrio had stolen it.

Quickly, I said, “Everybody, this
is Demetrio Vigil, he’s the guy who called 911 when I crashed in
the East Mountains last week. Demetrio, these are my friends,
Kelsey, Victoria, Thomas, and my wonderful
boyfriend
Logan.”

I hadn’t meant to emphasize the word “boyfriend” so
much, but it just came out that way. I looked at Logan now, and
said, “Demetrio brought my necklace back today. I lost it in the
crash. Isn’t that nice?” For some reason, I was smiling too hard,
as though part of me didn’t quite believe my interest in Demetrio
were entirely innocent.

Logan still looked confused, as though trying to
figure out how Demetrio knew how to find me.

Demetrio nodded his hello, and my friends smiled
awkwardly back at him and said it was a pleasure to meet him, even
though I could tell they didn’t mean it.

“Where’d you find the locket?” Logan asked Demetrio
of the necklace.

“In the snow where she crashed, under where the car
was. I went by there a couple days ago and there it was, shining in
the sun. Hard to miss all that ice, man. Even in real ice.”

“I gave her that for Valentine’s Day last year,”
said Logan.

Demetrio nodded. “I figured. She talked a lot about
you after the crash.” He smiled at me to let me know he was on my
side, and didn’t intend to make trouble for me. To Logan he said,
“It’s a nice gift.” He handed the necklace to Logan. “I don’t mean
nothing by it. Just thought she might want it back. Cool?”

“I appreciate it,” I told him. “That was very nice.
I owe you twice now. Once for calling 911, and once for finding my
necklace.”

“How’s the ankle?” he asked.

“Better.”

“You gonna dance on it Saturday?”

I felt my friends’ eyes upon me, incriminating for
my having told this stranger so much about myself. “Yeah. I think
so. Doctor said it’s okay, so, you know, if I wear an ace bandage
and all that.”