Cities of the Plain (26 page)

My daddy once told me that some of the most miserable people he ever knew were the ones
that finally got what they'd always wanted.

Well, said John Grady. I'm willin to risk it. I've damn sure tried it the other way.

Yeah.

You cant tell anybody anything, bud. Hell, it's really just a way of tellin yourself. And
you cant even do that. You just try and use your best judgment and that's about it.

Yeah. Well. The world dont know nothin about your judgment.

I know it. It's worse than that, even. It dont care.

QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY in the predawn dark she lit a candle and set the candledish on the
floor beside the bureau where the light would not show beneath the doorway to the outer
hall. She washed herself at the sink with soap and cloth and she leaned and let her black
hair fall before her and passed the wet cloth the length of it a half a hundred times and
brushed it as many more. She poured a frugal few drops of scent into her palm and pressed
her palms together and scented her hair and the nape of her neck. Then she gathered her
hair and twisted it into a rope and coiled and pinned it up.

She dressed with care in one of the three street dresses she owned and stood regarding
herself in the dimly lit mirror. The dress was navy blue with white bands at the collar
and sleeves and she turned in the mirror and reached over her shoulder and fastened the
topmost buttons and turned again. She sat in the chair and pulled on the black pump shoes
and stood and went to the bureau and got her purse and put into it the few toilet articles
it would hold. No coja nada, she whispered. She folded in her clean underwear and her
brush and combs and forced the catch shut. No coja nada. She took her sweater from the
back of the chair and pulled it over her shoulders and turned to look at the room she
would never see again. The crude carved Santo stood as before. Holding his staff so
crookedly glued. She took a towel from the rack by the washstand and she wrapped the santo
in the towel and then she sat in the chair with the Santo in her lap and the purse hanging
from her shoulder and waited.

She waited a long time. She had no watch. She listened for the bells to toll in the
distant town but sometimes when the wind was coming in off the desert you could not hear
them. By and by she heard a rooster call. Finally she heard the slippered steps of the
criada along the corridor and she rose as the door opened and the old woman looked in on
her and turned and looked back down the hallway and then entered with her hand fanned
before her and one finger to her lips and pressed the door shut silently behind her.

Lista? she hissed.

S’. Lista.

Bueno. V‡monos.

The old woman gave a hitch of her shoulder and a sort of half jaunty cock of her head.
Some powdered stepdam from a storybook. Some ragged conspiratress gesturing upon the
boards. The girl clutched her purse and stood and put the santo under her arm and the old
woman opened the door and peered out and then urged her forward with her hand and they
stepped out into the hallway.

Her shoes clicked on the tiles. The old woman looked down and the girl bent slightly and
raised her feet each in turn and slipped off the shoes and tucked them under her arm along
with the Santo.

The old woman shut the door behind them and they moved down the hallway, the crone holding
her hand like a child's and tugging at her apron to sort forth her keys where they hung by
their thong from the piece of broomhandle.

At the outer door she stood and put her shoes on again while the old woman muffled the
heavy latch with her rebozo and turned it with her key. Then the door opened onto the cold
and the dark.

They stood facing one another. R‡pido, r‡pido, whispered the old woman and the girl
pressed the money that she had promised into her hands and then threw her arms around her
neck and kissed her dry and leather cheek and turned and stepped through the door. On the
step she turned to take the old woman's blessing but the criada was too distraught to
respond and before she could step away from out of the doorway light the old woman had
reached and seized her arm.

No to vayas, she hissed. No to vayas.

The girl tore her arm away from the old woman's grip. The sleeve of her dress ripped loose
along the shoulder seam. No, she whispered, backing away. No.

The old woman held out one hand. She called hoarsely after her. No to vayas, she called.
Me equivoquŽ.

The girl clutched her Santo and her purse and went down the alleyway. Before she reached
the end she turned and looked back a last time. La Tuerta was still standing in the door
watching her. Holding the clutch of pesos to her breast. Then her eye blinked slowly in
the light and the door closed and the key turned and the bolt ran forever on that world.

She went down the alleyway to the road and turned toward the town. Dogs were barking and
the air was smoky from the charcoal fires in the low mud hovels of the colonias. She
walked along the sandy desert road. The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the
firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities
burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake. She sang to herself softly as she went a
song from long ago. The dawn was two hours away. The town one.

There were no cars on the road. From a rise she could see to the east across the desert
five miles distant the random lights of trucks moving slowly upon the highway that came up
from Chihuahua. The air was still. She could see her breath in the dark. She watched the
lights of a car that crossed from left to right somewhere before her and she watched the
lights move on. Somewhere out there in the world was Eduardo.

When she reached the crossroads she studied the distance in either direction for any sign
of approaching carlights before she crossed. She kept to the narrow streets down through
the barrios in the outlying precincts of the city. Already there were windows lit with
oillamps behind the walls of ocotillo or woven brush. She began to come upon occasional
workmen with their lunches in lardcans they carried by the bail, whistling softly as they
set forth in the early morning cold. Her feet were bleeding again in her shoes and she
could feel the wet blood and the coldness of it.

The cafe held the only light along the Calle de Noche Triste. In the darkened window of
the adjacent shoestore a cat sat silently among the footwear watching the empty street. It
turned its head to regard her as she passed. She pushed open the steamed glass door of the
cafe and entered.

Two men at a table by the window looked up when she came in and followed her with their
eyes as she went by. She went to the rear and sat at one of the little wooden tables and
put her purse and her parcel in the chair beside her and took up the menu from the chrome
wire stand and sat looking at it. The waiter came over. She ordered a cafecito and he
nodded and went back to the counter. It was warm in the cafe and after a while she took
off the sweater and laid it in the chair. The men were still watching her. The waiter
brought the coffee and set it before her with spoon and napkin. She was surprised to hear
him ask where she was from.

Mande? she said.

De d—nde viene?

She told him she was from Chiapas and he stood for a moment studying her as if to see how
such people might be different from those he knew. He said that he'd been told to ask by
one of the men.When she turned and looked at them they smiled but there was no joy in it.
She looked at the waiter. Estoy esperando a un amigo, she said.

Por supuesto, said the waiter.

She sat over the coffee a long time. The street outside grew gray in the February dawn.
The two men at the front of the cafe had long since finished their coffee and left and
others had come to take their place. The shops remained closed. A few trucks passed in the
street and people were coming in out of the cold and a waitress was now going from table
to table.

Shortly after seven a blue taxi pulled up at the door and the driver got out and came in
and canvassed the tables with his eyes. He came to the rear of the cafe and looked down at
her.

Lista? he said.

D—nde est‡ Ram—n?

He stood picking at his teeth reflectively. He said that Ram—n could not come.

She looked toward the front of the cafe. The cab stood in the street with the engine
running in the cold.

Est‡ bien, said the driver. V‡monos. Debemos darnos prisa.

She asked him if he knew John Grady and he nodded and waved the toothpick. S’, s’, he
said. He said that he knew everyone. She looked again at the cab smoking in the street.

He had stepped back to allow her to rise. He looked down at the chair where she'd put her
purse. The Santo wrapped in the whorehouse towel. She placed her hand over these things.
Which he might wish to carry for her. She asked him who it was who had paid him.

He put the toothpick back in his mouth and stood looking at her. Finally he said that he
had not been paid. He said that he was cousin to Ram—n and that Ram—n had been paid forty
dollars. He put his hand on the back of the empty chair and stood looking down at her. Her
shoulders were rising and falling with her breath. Like someone about to attempt a feat of
strength. She said that she did not know.

He leaned down. Mire, he said. Su novio. ƒl tiene una cicatriz aqu’. He passed his
forefinger across his cheek to trace the path of the knife that had made the scar her
lover carried from the fight three years ago in the comedor of the c‡rcel at Cuellar in
the city of Saltillo. Verdad? he said.

S’, she whispered. Es verdad. Y tiene mi tarjeta verde?

S’. He took the greencard from his pocket and placed it on the table. On the card was
printed her name.

Est‡ satisfecha? he said.

S’, she whispered. Estoy satisfecha. And rose and gathered up her things and left money on
the table to pay for the coffee and followed him out into the street.

In the cold dawn all that halfsordid world was coming to light again and as she rode in
silence in the rear of the cab through the waking streets she clutched the illcarved
wooden relic and said a silent goodbye to everything she knew and to each thing she would
not see again. She said goodbye to an old woman in a black rebozo come to a door to see
what sort of day it was and she said goodbye to three girls her age stepping with care
around the water standing in the street from the recent rains who were on their way to
Mass and she said goodbye to dogs and to old men at streetcorners and to vendors pushing
their carts through the street to commence their day and to shopkeepers opening their
doors and to the women who knelt with pail and rag to wash the walkway tiles. She said
goodbye to the small birds strung shoulder to shoulder along the lightwires overhead who
had slept and were waking and whose name she would never know.

They passed through the outskirts of the city and she could see the river to the left
through the river trees and the tall buildings of the city beyond that were in another
country and the barren mountains where the sun would soon fall upon the rocks. They passed
the old abandoned municipal buildings. Rusted watertanks in a yard strewn with trashpapers
the wind had left. The sudden thin iron palings of a fence that ratcheted silently past
the window from right to left and which in their passing and in the period of their
passing began to evoke the dormant sorcerer within before she could tear her gaze away.
She put her hands to her eyes, breathing deeply. In the darkness inside the cups of her
palms she saw herself on a cold white table in a cold white room. The glass of the doors
and the windows to that room were meshed with heavy wire and clamoring there were whores
and whores' handmaids many in number and all crying out to her. She sat upright on the
table and threw back her head as if she would cry out or as if she would sing. Like some
young diva remanded to a madhouse. No sound came. The cold pneuma passed. She should have
called it back. When she opened her eyes the cab had turned off the road and was jostling
over a bare dirt track and the driver was watching her in the mirror. She looked out but
she could not see the bridge. She could see the river through the trees and the mist
coming off the river and the raw rock mountains beyond but she could not see the city. She
saw a figure moving among the trees by the river. She asked the driver if they were to
cross here to the other side and he said yes. He said that she would be going to the other
side now. Then the cab pulled into the clearing and came to a stop and when she looked
what she saw coming toward her across the clearing in the earliest light of morning was
the smiling Tiburcio.

HE'D LEFT THE RANCH around five and driven to the darkened front of the bar where he could
see the dimly lit face of the clock within. He backed the truck around on the gravel apron
so that he could watch the road and he tried not to turn around to look at the clock every
few minutes but he did.

Few cars passed. Shortly after six oclock a set of headlights slowed and he sat upright
over the steering wheel and cleared the glass with the forearm of his jacket but the
lights went past and the car was not a taxi but a sheriff's prowlcar. He thought they
might come back and ask him what he was doing there but they didnt. It was very cold
sitting in the truck and after a while he got out and walked around and flailed at himself
with his arms and stamped his boots. Then he got back in the truck. The bar clock said
sixthirty. When he looked to the east he could see the gray shape of the landscape.

The lights of the gas station a half mile down the highway went out. A truck went down the
highway. He wondered if he could drive down there and get a cup of coffee before the cab
arrived. By eightthirty he'd decided that if that was what it would take to make the cab
arrive then that's what he would do and he started the engine. Then he shut it off again.