Territory Spenser Willden

On May 8, 2007, New Mexico State Game and Fish officers responded to a call about a mountain lion attack in the backyard of a house on Water street, just south of Longfellow Elementary, in Raton, New Mexico.

A woman, unidentified in the Albuquerque Journal article written about the incident, called 911 after seeing a predatory cat maul and devour her dog. Preparing breakfast, I imagine still with curlers in her hair, she noticed something was wrong when her dog started barking from the backyard. He was a good boy, and he only got riled up like this when kids passed on their way to school, but school had started hours ago, and it was too early for the mailman to be on his rounds. After all, the mailmen were lazy, so they didn’t come by until evening. When the barking cut off, she looked out her window and saw a cougar ripping into her dog’s flesh.

Game and Fish officers soon arrived, and after a chase, cornered the mountain lion — whose scientific name, Puma Concolor, means “cat of one color,” due to their often-monochromatic light tawny fur — in a nearby ditch, a mile south of the school. Officer Clint Hewson, who later that year would play Don Quixote in the Shuler Theater’s production of Man of La Mancha , shot it dead with a 12-gauge.

Clint’s son Toby once told me that mountain lions claim anywhere from 10 to 300 square miles as their territory. They’re fiercely protective, too. They live solitarily, unless mating or parenting, and will kill any other predator they find in their territory. In Raton, the mountain lions encircle the city like prey, from Raton Pass and Sugarite Canyon in the north to Goat Hill and Johnson Mesa in the east and west. Raton comes in at a measly seven square miles, small enough that an enterprising cougar could make a meal of it. Still, aside from instances like these, the cats keep to the mountains.

According to Clint, this lion was likely young, looking to establish a territory of his own among the staggered houses east of the railroad. A neighbor feeding stray cats probably drew him in, unaware that an apex predator was eating from the pungent cans of Fancy Feast she left on her porch. In all likelihood, he had been around the neighborhood for days already. Bad luck he chose to attack the occupied house — just two doors down and he could’ve gone months before being found out and put down. You don’t know these things when you’re a lion.

Years later, when the aquatic center went up, and we’d wake early on summer mornings to cross the train tracks with our bath towels and half-melted flip-flops, we’d remember the lion — was it a dog he ate or something bigger, right around our age? We know he got shot in the fucking face but who knows? He could still be around — lions come back all the time.

My dad remembers myths from his childhood of cougars descending from the hills to capture unruly children who didn’t pay their parents enough heed. To this day, the thought of a mountain lion attack terrifies him. We haven’t lived in Raton since 2013, but the fear lingers. Once you see a cougar, it’s too late — they’ve had their eyes on you far longer. The best you can do is fight, and even then, you only have a few seconds. My dad is the only man I know other than Clint who has fought mountain lions and lived. Maybe that’s why he has no interest in going back to Raton.

We left in 2012 and have lived in self-imposed exile ever since, only breaking for funerals and hospital visits. Raton has a subtle way of drawing you back — far stronger than nostalgia, there’s something in the recognition of the halfremembered figures occupying the town that makes it still feel like home after ten years gone. I graduate college in the spring, and I’m not sure what I’m doing. If I can afford it, I might go abroad. I might live in Seattle; I might live in New York. There are things I want to do that require living in the city, but in spite of that, in spite of all that made us fall out of love with Raton, more than anything I want to return home.

In July 2007, my dad accepted a new job as the superintendent of schools in Raton, and we moved across the state and away from our family in Farmington to the small town, where we would buy a spacious two-story craftsman-style home on South 4th Street, across from the abandoned Catholic school, just at the base of Goat Hill. I was about to enter first grade, my sister fifth. We used the last of the money Mom had made from working for the city to purchase the house right before the real estate crisis that would follow a year later (good thinking). The original owners had built the home in the late 1800s, and as a result, it bore many marks of its age, including a carriage house in the back and a secret room in the basement, used to house bootleggers during prohibition. Any time I heard the house settle, I knew there had to be someone living down there without our knowledge, biding his time, learning our patterns before he made the move to slit our throats while we slept. When I’d pass the open door to the basement at night, I could feel his breath on my neck. I would imagine ways I’d kill him to protect my family, and in each fantasy, I got better at Kung-Fu. Even when I beat him, though, he’d come back for revenge. He usually won round two, and at my funeral, people would say how much they loved me. Score , I thought. The ultimate victory.

Catty-corner from us lived the Carronos and Capodonnos. Lee Carrono was the town pediatrician, and his house was pristine. On weekends, he’d park his pink T-Bird on the street. He claimed it was so he could work in his garage without having to worry about it, but I always figured he liked staring at it through the window, watching people admire it as they walked by. The Capodonnos worked at the high school and had for years. Jimmie was an anatomy and physiology teacher, and her husband Brian was an assistant coach. Their kids were mine and my sister’s ages; they all had lived in Raton their whole life.

Next to us was a usually empty eastern-bloc style house, one of many in the neighborhood. People moved in for a year or so at a time before the illusion of idyllic smalltown living would fade. We never really got to know them; they never lasted. The longest occupant was the newly divorced Theresa and her four-year-old adopted Russian boy, Jerimiah. I remember thinking that his nose was tiny, but his nostrils were huge. In my head, he looks like a young Voldemort. Within a year and a half, the house grew too empty for them, and they moved back to Ohio. They didn’t belong, and they didn’t force it.

One of my mom’s last summers as a director, 2011, outof-town actor David Goudeau starred in the two-person comedy Red, White, and Tuna , a parody of small-town Texas featuring over 20 roles. Not much really happens: a girl sees a UFO, a reverend gets out of prison, and a woman’s potato salad goes cold. But if we couldn’t see ourselves in the small-town characters, we could certainly see our neighbors — I loved it, and thought David was great. I knew that, when I was older, I’d want to act too, and with any hope, I’d be half as good. When he was on stage, I watched him more than anyone else — I remember his focused catlike eyes scanning the crowds during curtain calls, like an animal stepping out of a cave and into the sun.

Goudeau followed this production with smaller roles in Little Shop of Horrors and Love, Sex, and the IRS later that summer. The Little Shop cast in particular was stacked with local talent: Vinnie Porter as Seymore, Michael Gumlich as Mr. Muchnik, and even Becky Hewson as a member of the women’s chorus. This was Becky’s first role out of high school in an adult production. I remember the cast being terrific, but that might be wrong. I wish I could go back and experience every performance again, just to make sure. David did terrific, I know that, and the community loved him for it; Becky learned a lot from him. Her voice was getting bolder, more confident. He’d return the next year.

Late spring, my mom would audition actors with Bill Fegan, who had run the theater since the eighties. Bill had the idea that if you were to add a single professional actor to a cast of paid community members, their presence would encourage everyone to improve. Some professionals, like David, came back year after year, missing the town as much as the stage, the people in it as much as the local recognition.

I could never sleep the nights Mom would have her actors and tech crew over for fire pits after the shows; it was too exciting to me — they were all so grown-up and foreign. Sitting with them made me feel like an adult. Especially as the youngest child, I wanted to grow up as soon as possible, or at least be seen as mature — I feared my sister getting there first and leaving me the odd-man-out in the family. I’d sit in my small fold-out camp chair, swirling my glass of water, watching David and Ian, nodding in agreement whenever they’d nod. After all, pretending to be a grownup makes other people see you as a grown-up — I gave my best impressions of the recession, as I saw it, and when

Bin Laden was shot, I said, “Good, but we must be wary of counterattack.”

I hardly remember the actresses the Shuler brought to town. They’d stay a year and leave, and when they’d return to visit, it would be nice, but they were never content being local. Unlike the men, they had lives of their own, and didn’t need to assert their status over the town. Raton was always a stepping stone for them — but the men loved the attention too much, and as a result, we loved them back. After shows, the well-meaning elderly would get them to sign their programs: “I want it for when you get famous, how’d a talent like you end up in a place like this?” They presented as stars, so we saw them as stars — it was their way into the community. If you were admired, I thought, you could join the in-group, and it wouldn’t matter where you were from or who you’ve known since preschool, because you were in , and from there, you’re settled.

The Hewsons were some of the first people my sister and I met when we came to Raton. They were at a picnic thrown by Dr. Carrono and his family in their newly landscaped backyard. The Hewson family: Becky, who was a few years older than my sister; Toby, two years younger than her; Wanda, who my dad knew because she worked for the school; and Clint, who later that year Mom would cast in Man of La Mancha despite his warbling voice. Becky was nice and seemed to be well-liked, so I quickly decided that I would have a crush on her. I had other crushes, and I knew Becky was too old for me, but I thought, Maybe we’ll meet back here in 20 years. 10 years to go now, but I’ve moved on.

I don’t remember how we were introduced to Clint, but I remember Dr. Carrono making over the story of the cougar and calling him the “Lion Killer” — Clint protected the kids at Longfellow Elementary and in the process joined the ranks of his ancestors who fought lions and lived to tell the tale. He was so brave — he looked it in the eyes as he loaded the shotgun.

The year Jimmie Capodonno sued the school district and my dad for wrongful termination after she beat a kid with her heel, we set up motion-activated cameras in the alley behind our house. My sister used them for her science fair project, a study of the bears that from mid-April to lateNovember would dig through the town’s dumpsters for any food they could find. Every dumpster had metal locks designed to keep them out, but nobody remembered to latch them, and those that did often woke up to fucked-up dumpsters. This project was the closest thing she ever had to true religion; like clockwork, every morning for a summer, she’d wake up early to check the footage, and every time she got something, we’d show it to everyone who came to the house for the next week.

According to her findings, the bears would come down from the mountain to raid our dumpsters when the weather was fair — on days when it was too cold or too windy, they’d stay in the mountains, not bothering to make the journey. Their diet varied according to seasonal availability. During the summers, when the crab-apples from the tree in our front yard would begin to ripen, we’d wake up to find chewed cores on the ground and our tree scratched up from their keratin-rich claws. We had to be careful, walking home late at night from the theater, not to arrive at the same time as a hungry bear. Even a well-fed one.

My parents, especially my mom, were never afraid of them, though. One night, she heard something digging in the dumpster while she sat by the firepit with some actor. She clamored out of her chair and peered over the fence.

“Go … get out of here. We don’t want you here. Get on,” she shouted. Her words weren’t quite slurring: she didn’t have that much to drink, but she had enough to make yelling at a bear seem like a good idea.

She grabbed the spotlight and shined it through the slats at the dumpster. Just over the ledge of the trash can, a massive bear peered back at her — the actors didn’t know what to do — she was gonna get herself killed. The bear, however, didn’t let the half-drunk woman bother him. He climbed out slowly, sauntered away: Can’t get any good trash here anymore. This neighborhood’s gone to the dogs.

Mountain lions were different. My dad used to tell a story he heard from a coworker who grew up in Romeroville. He and his brother were playing in their yard one summer, maybe ten or twelve years old. They lived on a ranch just out of town, still in civilization, but encroaching outward. They were playing catch with a football — they both played football — when the older brother heard a rustle from the corner of their yard. A mountain lion stared back, shifting his weight to his back haunches. They had no dog, and they had no warning. My dad’s coworker ran into the house to get his father, expecting the older to follow. By the time they got back outside, his brother was nowhere to be found — they would never see him again. “I’m not scared of bears,” my dad would say. “You can keep safe around bears. But by the time you notice a mountain lion, you’re already dead.”

We stopped inviting people over to the house. During Jimmie’s lawsuit, my parents would be on the phone for hours most days, feeding their sides of the stories into the town gossip cycle, but once it all ended, the phones stopped ringing, and absence filled the house. At first, they tried orchestrating arguments. We had no money after legal fees, meaning there was plenty to fight over: packages, working lunches, visits to the doctor. My bedroom was right next to theirs, and as I fell asleep, I could hear them try to find a way to blame each other. It was pointless though, and eventually the arguing returned to silence, the kind that comes after the mountain lion has already left, carting away the kid you will never see again. They’re happier now, but they don’t talk the same way they used to. We never fully bounced back from the quiet, and our house hasn’t been a home since.

David would visit more than the other actors, lingering on weekends or holidays. Eventually, around March, he moved his entire life to Raton. When Summer Stock started that season, he was a local. For some reason, too, Becky never accepted her spot at the university in Albuquerque. I outgrew my boyish infatuation — I had accepted that, maybe, as much as I might bring to the table, a 10-year age gap was insurmountable, no matter how well I conceptualized world events.

That February, Becky came by the house more and more often. She and my mom would go to the backyard for hours, talking about something Mom would never tell me. Before this, they had never been close, and they weren’t after, either. I don’t think Becky ever told anyone my mom had given her advice. David grew distant and never came back to the firepit. We stopped inviting him.

A few months after he came back, Becky started showing and David moved into the Hewsons’ house. They lived in Becky’s childhood bedroom, right across from the gun rack. He didn’t get a job, but he had the small stipend that he’d make for starring in that summer’s production of Servant of Two Masters and for his small walk-on role in Church Basement Ladies . Soon people started to realize why the 25-year-old had moved in with the family of the 18-year-old and stopped complimenting him for his performances — they were always mediocre at best.

Her baby was born in September of 2012, and two months later, David had shaved his head and moved to Chicago, where he could be told again how good he was and how his autograph would be worth something one day.

In 2013, he cut off financial support, but by that point we didn’t talk to the Hewsons much anymore. We were cordial, but things were messy. I don’t know why. Maybe they were friends with Jimmie Capodonno, who at this point, had been elected to the school board after her lawsuit, and who was now my dad’s boss. Maybe because Clint knew my mom failed to protect Becky from David, that she didn’t recognize the lion until it was too late. Maybe because Clint knew he failed to protect her.

The day my dad fired Jimmie Capodonno, he called home early. He told me to lock the front door and not answer it for anyone no matter who it was, except for the family. None of my family was home yet. Carting my bowl of cereal, I grabbed a butter knife and locked the doors. I sat on the stairs across from it, staring, ready at any moment for an Al Qaeda battering ram to bust it down. Occasionally, I’d peek out the front window for fallout: nothing.

When my sister got home a few minutes later, no one answered the door. From my hiding spot in the backyard, underneath the RV, I saw a figure move toward the back door, jiggling the handle. I could hear her, but I couldn’t make myself look for long enough to know who she was — it was scarier that way. Fucking stupid to grab a butter knife, I thought. When you’re a kid, you think you can face any threat until it’s real. I pictured the figure, who I couldn’t make out, dragging me out by my leg and shooting me in the head like an animal. They were faceless — scarier that way.

Ten minutes later, my dad got home. I heard him before I saw him.

“We’ll find him; he’s somewhere around here. He wouldn’t have gone far.” He seemed calm, but he looked too relieved when I crawled out from my hiding spot to not have been terrified. He knew Jimmie wouldn’t do anything, but until earlier that day, he wouldn’t have thought she could beat the shit out of a kid either; she was our neighbor. My sister had tears in her eyes. She had gone in through the side window and found my abandoned bowl of cereal on the steps. I’d seen my father scared before, but never like that. That fear never went away while we lived in Raton.

I stopped walking to school and was home alone less. I went with my dad to his doctor. He stopped waking up early; we stopped watching Wacky Races . His kidney stones kept coming back, and doctors weren’t sure why. Maybe he saw lions all around him. I got my first kidney stone last summer. I think I inherited that from him.

Three years later, we moved out of the two-story craftsman style home and the secret door broke and the carriage house became storage. We claimed we’d be back eventually. Or at least that’s what my parents told me. But we never went back to Raton. The Capodonnos moved down the street, Becky got married, and the theater office got taken apart for a concession stand.

Dad is happier now, but he still doesn’t like to talk about Raton. Neither does Mom. But the last time I went back, I drove by our old house. The paint my mom had put on was finally starting to chip, and the grass was in poor condition, but I could still see the crab apple pits on the ground and the scratches on the tree bark. I wanted to knock on the door and tell the new owner, whoever it was, that maybe it was the same bear coming to the tree, that maybe fifteen years had taught him which cores were the sweetest, which dumpsters the best trash, how to come back to a town so hard to make a life in.

I’m jealous of the bears that come back year after year to feast on the town’s waste and dirty their yards, the bears who nevertheless have become the town’s mascot, not a nuisance but loved and forgiven, relentlessly forgiven despite being unwanted. I read an Albuquerque Journal article the other day about a Raton man who was attacked by a bear a few years ago. The bear latched onto the man’s leg and flung him down a hill, bounding after him. His claws dug into the man’s skin while his teeth rent the flesh from his leg, removing any hope the man had of escape. He was carrying his handgun, but the bear wouldn’t let him reach it — the man let out a roar, and in the moment the bear was stunned, he grabbed the gun and planted the entire magazine in him. The struggle was over. By the time Game and Fish showed up, rigor mortis had set in on the bear, his jaws locked around the man’s leg. They had to saw off the head to get the man to the hospital. In the article, he was asked what happened. “I got too close,” he said. Even after he nearly died, it was still his fault, and the bear was blameless – the bear who consigned him to a wheelchair for life.

I don’t know if I would ever move back to Raton; maybe, if I did, things would be different. I’m worried, though, that I’d become my parents, scared of mountain lions around every corner, unaware of those breathing down my neck. I love Raton, but I don’t have the strength to force myself to fit in there. I don’t know if I have the strength to fit anywhere.

It’s easy to say that Raton never let us in, but that wouldn’t be true. Two months before my dad fired Jimmie, my sister and I played with her kids in our backyard. We didn’t know their mom was a lion, that she’d return for revenge on the man that shot her. Our community was lost, but that doesn’t mean it never existed. We were happy there until suddenly we weren’t. And it will happen again; lions aren’t exclusive to the mountains.

When the town of Raton put metal locks on the dumpsters, that didn’t stop the bears. They’d twist and bite and scratch until eventually, finally, the metal would bend, and when they’d flip open the lid and dive in, the tastes would be that much sweeter for the struggle.

Last week, I read that, in 2015, Clint shot another mountain lion south of the Aquatic Center. A woman opened her door to a puddle of blood on her porch, and he showed up, shotgun in hand to save the day. But I have to think this time was different: that when he saw the lion, he recognized the eyes. Nearly ten years had passed since his first kill, and in that time, he’d learned what a lion was capable of — how they tear into the flesh without claws — how they ruin your daughter’s chances at life — how they return from the dead for revenge. He’d learned that a bullet and a gun rack wasn’t enough to protect the ones he loved.

Maybe he would host a dinner the next week. Maybe Lee Carrono would call him “Lion Killer” again, and for a few days, he’d be back in 2007. Becky would be 13, and his family would be safe. In a few months, he would play Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha — everything would be alright.

Maybe he felt remorse. He knew he was the man who killed lions. He knew that was true. More than anything, though, he knew that it wasn’t true enough — he knew that a lion never dies.