Fast cars, Paint ponies and Pueblo warriors
A fiction series tracks dire shifts in the Wild West — and stinging poems from a master
ADOBE DAZE
By Tom Tatum
Wolfpack Publishing (2021, 250 pp.)
In a land where Spanish land grants collide with ancient Native American hunting grounds and, more recently, Anglo cattle ranches, might makes right.
Former pro extreme skier Trey Stuart powers his parents’ black Maserati 650 GT coupe through Aztec, New Mexico, and chats up the waitress at a café in town. She
happens to be a national drag racing champion whose father has given her a 1977 Shelby Mustang restored for her
graduation from Fort Lewis College in Durango the year before. They decide to head off together, fast, into the sunset.
Except this is just the beginning of Tom Tatum’s Wild West romantic
suspense novel, and it looks like a dangerous Mexican drug cartel based in Durango has got the Maserati on its radar.
Protagonists Trey and new girlfriend Maria Duran, aka M, both have deep
stakes in the territory of southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico:
he is the scion of four generations of ranchers at the YbarC Ranch near Telluride; she hails from Apache, Spanish and French ancestors. Trey has been charged with renovating and running another ranch his family owns, near Costilla, New Mexico — his parents, Cooper and July, whose story will be familiar to readers of the previous
series title, “Telluride, Top of the World,” need help running the Ute Peak Ranch,
40 miles north of Taos. Trey is the only one to maintain it as a moneymaker for cattle, hay and private elk hunting.
“My mother always said farming is way more dangerous than ranching,” M tells the fast-driving, wildly riskseeking Trey. “I believed her until I met you.”
Trey keeps a 9mm Glock pistol in the car just in case, as well as a saddle rifle when the pair goes riding on Paint
ponies. The latter comes in handy when the Mexican cartel starts tracking the couple, who spy the operation’s dropping suspicious parcels from a
twin-engine airplane near the Costilla ranch. “He had been raised old Western ranch tough in the rapidly changing new West,” Tatum writes of the 26-yearold Trey, with his Serengeti driving
glasses and $1,200 pair of black handmade custom cowboy boots.
Tatum’s writing style might be described as everything but the kitchen
sink, in terms of precisely piled detail about cars and clothing, and stilted dialogue that is determined to advance
the action — damn the torpedoes. There is a veritable catalog of people who claim the land. For example, Trey’s father’s former girlfriend, Adrianna,
heads a foundation called Land or Death that is trying to return the land
to the original northern Taos County Spanish families. Her exchange with M is brutally forthright:
“Keep your brown eyes open and protect your heart from your Anglo ranch boyfriend,” Adrianna warns her. “They all ride for their family’s brand.”
“I’m a modern Four Corners woman,” M angrily informs her. “Your Spanish
families stole [my mother’s] tribal land before the Americanos stole the Spanish king’s land grants. Her ancient people actually chose real Land or Death.”
Triumphantly, the heroes of this over-the-top tale (of fantastical cultural appropriation) prove none other than
the War Chief’s council of Taos Pueblo. It is time, the Pueblo Warriors resolve,
to face down the drug lords on their own terms.
MY BOOK OF THE DEAD: NEW POEMS
By Ana Castillo
High Road Books (UNM Press, 2021, 111 pp.)
“Above all,
Don’t let the lemmings know They are falling.”
This from Ana Castillo’s wonderfully cranky poem “Tantrum,” which takes aim at the previous presidential administration’s minions, named like Santa’s reindeer, who promised wondrous change was about to happen while “The whole country stunk, in fact.” A tinge of bitterness piques many of these poems by the Chicago-raised author, Xicanisma feminist, novelist and editor (“Black Dove: Mama, Mi’jo and Me”), now living in southern New Mexico, who writes in “The Reflection”: “Once upon a time/I was told not to take up much space.” A bullied
A tinge of bitterness piques many of these poems by the Chicago-raised author, Xicanisma feminist, novelist and editor now living in southern New Mexico.
girl regards her reflection in the school bathroom mirror (“with disheveled
hair and decalcified teeth,/snot running to her upper lip,”), recalling when
she looked at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror of a former house, perhaps where she was raised — “neighborhood ploughed,/families scattered,
lives gone,/our stories of arrival, learning English … all dismissed.”) Looking at herself is not arrogance, however, but a hard-won wisdom.
Some of the poems are offered bilingually, Spanish translation on one
side, such as “Insomnia,” which makes a rude awakening in the middle of our dreams: “Nothing or no one/can take you/above the clouds/where God’s eternal eye/may watch over you.”
Elsewhere, the poet mourns cataclysmic events, such as years of mass
shootings (“2016 to 2019 and Counting”), a recurrence of breast cancer (“Cancer Poem”), laments for Trayvon Martin and George Floyd and even the failure of language, and still she writes
powerfully (in “Wednesday Night in the Boogie Down Bronx”):
“Keep going, something inside urges. Nothing’s kept you quiet thus far. Not then, not now, most likely not even from the grave.”