Cities of the Plain (24 page)

Goodnight, called Billy.

He smiled. He let go the chain and sat on his bunk in the darkness rubbing the pup's
belly. He could smell the horses. The wind was gusting up and a piece of loose roofingtin
at the far end of the barn rattled and the wind passed on. It was cold in the room and he
thought to light the little kerosene heater but after a while he just pulled off his boots
and trousers and put the pup inhis box and crawled under the blankets. The wind outside
and the cold in the room were like those winter nights on the north Texas plains when he
was a child in his grandfather's house. When the storms blew down from the north and the
prairie land about the house stood white in the sudden lightning and the house shook in
the thunderclaps. On just such nights and just such mornings in the year he'd gotten his
first colt he'd wrap himself in his blanket and go out and cross to the barn, leaning into
the wind, the first drops of rain slapping at him hard as pebbles, moving down the long
barn bay like some shrouded refugee among the sudden slats of light that stood staccato
out of the parted board walls, moving through those serried and electric prosceniums where
they flared white and fugitive across the barn row on row until he reached the stall where
the little horse stood waiting and unlatched the door and sat in the straw with his arms
around its neck till it stopped trembling. He would be there all night and he would be
there in the morning when Arturo came to the barn to feed. Arturo would walk with him back
to the house before anyone else was awake, brushing the straw from his blanket as he
walked beside him, not saying a word. As if he were a young lord. As if he were never to
be disinherited by war and war's machinery. All his early dreams were the same. Something
was afraid and he had come to comfort it. He dreamed it yet. And this: standing in the
room in the black suit tying the new black tie he wore to his grandfather's funeral on the
cold and windy day of it. And standing in his cubicle in Mac McGovern's horsebarn on
another such day in the cold dawn before work in another such suit, the two halves of the
box it came in lying on the bunk with the crepe tissue spilling out and the cut string
lying beside it on the bunk together with the knife he'd cut it with that had belonged to
his father and Billy standing in the doorway watching him. He buttoned the coat and stood.
His hands crossed at the wrist in front of him. His face pale in the glass of the little
mirror he'd propped on one of the two by fours that braced the rough stud wall of the
room. Pale in the light of the winter that was on the country. Billy leaned and spat in
the chaff and turned and went out down the barn bay and crossed to the house for breakfast.

THE LAST TIME he was to see her was in the same corner room on the second floor of the Dos
Mundos. He watched from the window and saw her pay the driver and he went to the door so
that he could watch her come up the stairs. He held her hands while she sat half
breathless on the edge of the bed.

Est‡s bien? he said.

S’, she said. Creo que s’.

He asked was she sure she had not changed her mind.

No, she said. Y tœ?

Nunca.

Me quieres?

Para siempre. Y tœ?

Hasta elfin de mi vida.

Pues eso es todo.

She said that she had tried to pray for them but that she could not.

PorquŽ no?

No sŽ. Cre’ que Dios no me oir’a.

El oir‡. Reza el domingo. Dile que es importante.

They made love and lay with her curled against him and not moving but breathing very
quietly against his side. He did not know if she was awake but he told her the things
about his life that he had not told her. He told her about working for the hacendado at
Cuatro CiŽnegas and about the man's daughter and the last time he saw her and about being
in the prison in Saltillo and about the scar on his face that he had promised to tell her
about and never had. He told her about seeing his mother on stage at the Majestic Theatre
in San Antonio Texas and about the times that he and his father used to ride in the hills
north of San Angelo and about his grandfather and the ranch and the Comanche trail that
ran through the western sections and how he would ride that trail in the moonlight in the
fall of the year when he was a boy and the ghosts of the Comanches would pass all about
him on their way to the other world again and again for a thing once set in motion has no
ending in this world until the last witness has passed.

The shadows were long in the room before they left. He told her that the driver GutiŽrrez
would pick her up at the cafe in la Calle de Noche Triste and take her to the other side.
He would have with him the documents necessary for her to cross.

Todo est‡ arreglado, he said.

She held his hands more tightly. Her dark eyes studied him. He told her that there was
nothing to fear. He said that Ram—n was their friend and that the papers were arranged and
that no harm would come to her.

ƒl to recoger‡ a las siete por la ma–ana. Tienes que estar all’ en punto.

EstarŽ all’.

QuŽdate adentro hasta que Žl llegue.

S’, s’.

No le digas nada a nadie.

No. Nadie.

No puedes traer nada contigo.

Nada?

Nada.

Tengo miedo, she said.

He held her. Dont be afraid, he said.

They sat very quietly. Down in the street the vendors had begun to call. She pressed her
face against his shoulder.

Hablan los sacerdotes espa–ol? she said.

S’. Ellos hablan espa–ol.

Quiero saber, she said, si crees hay perd—n de pecados.

He opened his mouth to speak but she put her hand to his lips. Lo que crees en to coraz—n,
she said.

He stared past her dark and shining hair toward the deepening dusk in the streets of the
city. He thought about what he believed and what he did not believe. After a while he said
that he believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But
that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

Cualquier pecado?

Cualquier. S’.

Sin excepci—n de nada? She pushed her hand against his lips a second time. He kissed her
fingers and took her hand away.

Con la excepci—n de desesperaci—n, he said. Para eso no hay remedio.

Lastly she asked if he would love her all his life and she'd have touched her fingers to
his mouth but he held her hand. No tengo que pensarlo, he said. S’. Para todo mi vida.

She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Te amo, she said. Y serŽ to esposa.

She rose and turned and held his hands. Debo irme, she said. He stood and put his arms
around her and kissed her there in the darkening room. He would have walked her down the
hallway to the head of the stairs but she stopped him at the door and kissed him and said
goodbye. He listened to her steps in the stairwell. He went to the window to watch for her
but she must have gone along the street beneath him because he could not see her. He sat
on the bed in the empty room and listened to the sounds of all that alien commerce in the
world outside. He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he
could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of
it was his own doing. The room was dark and the neon hotel sign had come on outside and
after a while he rose and took his hat from the chair by the bed and put it on and went
out and down the stairs.

AT THE INTERSECTION the cab stopped. A small man with a black crape armband stepped into
the street and raised his hand and the cabdriver took off his hat and set it on the
dashboard. The girl leaned forward to see. She could hear trumpets muted in the street,
the clop of hooves.

The musicians who appeared were old men in suits of dusty black. Behind them came the
pallbearers carrying upon their shoulders a flowerstrewn pallet. Wreathed among those
flowers the pale face of a young man newly dead. His hands lay at his sides and he jostled
woodenly on his coolingboard there astride the shoulders of his bearers and the wild notes
from the dented gypsy horns carried back from the glass of the storefronts they passed and
back from the old mud or stuccoed facades and a clutch of women in black rebozos passed
weeping and children and men in black or with black armbands and among them led by the
girl the blind maestro shuffling with his small steps and look of pained wonder. Behind
them came two mismatched horses drawing to a weathered wooden cart and in the bed of it
unswept of its straw and chaff a wooden coffinbox of handplaned boards pinned with wooden
trunnels and no nails to it like some sephardic box of old and the wood blacked by
scorching it and the blacking sealed with beeswax and lampoil so that save for the faint
wood grain of it it looked a thing of burnished iron. Behind the cart came a man bearing
the coffinlid and he carried it upon his back like death's penitent and his clothes and he
were blackened with it wax or no. The cabdriver crossed himself silently. The girl crossed
herself and kissed the tips of her fingers. The cart rattled past and the spoked wheels
diced slowly the farther streetside and the solemn watchers there, a cardfan of sorted
faces under the shopfronts and the long skeins of light in the street broken in the
turning spokes and the shadows of the horses tramping upright and oblique before the
oblong shadows of the wheels shaping over the stones and turning and turning.

She put up her hands and pressed her face into the musty back of the cabseat. She sat
back, one hand over her eyes and her face averted into her shoulder. Then she sat bolt
upright with her arms beside her and cried out and the driver wrenched himself around in
the seat. Se–orita? he said. Se–orita?

THE CEILING of the room was of concrete and bore the impression of the boards used to form
it, the concrete knots and nailheads and the fossil arc of the circlesaw's blade from some
mountain sawmill. There was a single sooty bulb that burned there with a grudging orange
light and a millermoth that patrolled it in random clockwise orbits.

She lay strapped to a steel table. The steel was cold against her back through the short
white shift she wore. She looked at the light. She turned her head and looked at the room.
After a while a nurse came in through the gray metal door and she turned her stained and
dirty face toward her. Por favor, she whispered. Por favor.

The nurse loosed the straps and smoothed her hair back from her face and said she would
return with something for her to drink, but when the door closed she sat upright on the
table and climbed down. She looked for some place where they might have put her clothes
but save for a second steel table against the far wall the room was empty. The door when
she opened it led to a long green corridor dimly lit and stretching away to a closed door
at the end. She went down the corridor and tried the door. It opened onto a flight of
concrete steps, a rail of metal pipe. She descended three flights and exited into the
darkened street.

She did not know where she was. At the corner she asked a man for directions to el centro
and he stared at her breasts and continued to do so even as he spoke. She set out along
the broken sidewalk. She watched the paving for glass or stones. The carlights that passed
fetched her slight figure up onto the walls in enormous dark transparency with the shift
burned away and the bones all but showing and then passing cast her reeling backwards to
vanish once more into the dark. A man pulled up in a car and drove beside her and talked
to her in low obscenities. He pulled ahead and waited. She turned into a dirt alley
between two buildings and crouched shivering behind some battered steel oildrums. She
waited a long time. It was very cold. When she went out again the car was gone and she
went on. She passed a lot where a dog lunged at her silently along a fence and then stood
in the fencecorner shrouded in its own breath silently watching her go. She passed a
darkened house and a yard where an old man also in nightclothes stood urinating against a
mud wall and these two nodded silently to each other across the darkened space like
figures met in a dream. The sidewalk gave out and she walked on in the cold sand along the
roadside and stopped from time to time to stand tottering while she picked the little
goathead burrs from the soles of her bleeding feet. She kept the haze of light from the
city before her and she walked a long time. When she crossed the Boulevard 16 de
Septiembre she kept her arms folded tightly at her bosom and her eyes lowered in the glare
of the headlights, crossing half naked in a hooting of carhorns like some tattered phantom
routed out of the ordinal dark and hounded briefly through the visible world to vanish
again into the history of men's dreams.

She went on through the barrios north of the city, along the old mud walls and the tin
sides of warehouses where the sand streets were lit only by the stars. Someone was singing
on the road a song from her own childhood and she soon passed a woman walking toward the
city. They spoke good evening each to each and passed on but the woman stopped and turned
and called after her.

Ad—nde va? she called.

A mi casa.

The woman stood quietly. The girl asked do I know you but the woman said that she did not.
She asked the girl if this were her barrio and the girl said that it was and the woman
then asked her how it could be that she did not know her. When she did not answer the
woman came slowly back down the road toward her.

QuŽ pas—? she said.

Nada.

Nada, the woman said. She walked in a half circle around her where she stood shivering
with her arms crossed over her breasts. As if to find some favored inclination in the blue
light of the desert stars by which she would stand revealed for who she trulywas.

Eres del White Lake, she said.

The girl nodded.

Y regresas?

S’.

Por quŽ?