Cities of the Plain (9 page)

There was a light knock at the door.

Tenemos que pagan she said.

He took the folded bills from his pocket. Para la noche, he said.

Es muy taro.

Cu‡nto? He was counting out the bills. He had eightytwo dollars. He held it out to her.
She looked at the money and she looked at him. The knock came again.

Dame cincuenta, she said.

Es bastante?

S’, s’. She took the money and opened the door and held it out and whispered to the man on
the other side. He was tall and thin and he smoked a cigarette in a silver holder and he
wore a black silk shirt. He looked at the client for just a moment through the partly
opened door and he counted the money and nodded and turned away and she shut the door. Her
bare back was pale in the candlelight where the dress was open. Her black hair glistened.
She turned and withdrew her arms from the sleeves of the dress and caught the front of it
before her. She stepped from the pooled cloth and laid the dress across a chair and
stepped behind the gauzy curtains and turned back the covers and then she pulled the
straps of her chemise from her shoulders and let it fall and stepped naked into the bed
and pulled the satin quilt to her chin and turned on her side and put her arm beneath her
head and lay watching him.

He took off his shirt and stood looking for some place to put it.

Sobre la silla, she whispered.

He draped the shirt over the chair and sat and pulled off his boots and put his socks in
the tops of them and stood them to one side and stood and unbuckled his belt. He crossed
the room naked and she reached and turned back the covers for him and he slid beneath the
tinted sheets and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the softly draped canopy. He
turned and looked at her. She'd not taken her eyes from him. He raised his arm and she
slid against him the whole length of her soft and naked and cool. He gathered her black
hair in his hand and spread it across his chest like a blessing.

Es casado? she said.

No.

He asked her why she wished to know. She was silent a moment. Then she said that it would
be a worse sin if he were married. He thought about that. He asked her if that was really
why she wished to know but she said he wished to know too much. Then she leaned and kissed
him. In the dawn he held her while she slept and he had no need to ask her anything at all.

She woke while he was dressing. He pulled on his boots and crossed to the bedside and sat
and put his hand against her cheek and smoothed her hair. She turned sleepily and looked
up at him. The candles in their holders had burned out and the bits of wick lay blackened
in the scalloped shapes of wax.

Tienes que irte?

S’.

Vas a regresar?

S’.

She studied his eyes to see if he spoke the truth. He leaned and kissed her.

Vete con Dios, she whispered.

Y tœ.

She put her arms around him and held him against her breast and then she let him go and he
rose and walked to the door. He turned and stood looking back at her.

Say my name, he said.

She reached and parted the canopy curtain. Mande? she said.

Di mi nombre.

She lay there holding the curtain. Tu nombre es Juan, she said.

Yes, he said. Then he pulled the door closed and went down the hall.

The salon was empty. It smelled of stale smoke and sweet ferment and the fading lilac rose
and spice of the vanished whores. There was no one at the bar. In the gray light there
were stains on the carpet, worn places on the arms of the furniture, cigarette burns. In
the foyer he unlatched the painted half door and entered the little cloakroom and
retrieved his hat. Then he opened the front door and walked out into the morning cold.

A landscape of low shacks of tin and cratewood here on the outskirts of the city. Barren
dirt and gravel lots and beyond them the plains of sage and creosote. Roosters were
calling and the air smelled of burning charcoal. He took his bearings by the gray light to
the east and set out toward the city. In the cold dawn the lights were still burning out
there under the dark cape of the mountains with that precious insularity common to cities
of the desert. A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood.
In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they
knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the
justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come.
Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are
one.

*Ê*Ê*

THE OLD ONEEYED CRIADA was the first to reach her, trotting stoically down the hallway in
her broken slippers and pushing open the door to find her bowed in the bed and raging as
if some incubus were upon her. The old woman carried her keys tied by a thong to a short
length of broomstick and she wrapped the stick with a quick turn of the bedclothes and
forced it between the girl's teeth. The girl arched herself stiffly and the criada climbed
up onto the bed and pinned her down and held her. A second woman had come to the doorway
bearing a glass of water but she waved her away with a toss of her head.

Es como una mujer diab—lica, the woman said.

Vete, called the criada. No es diab—lica. Vete.

But the housewhores were gathering in the doorway and they began to push through into the
room all of them in facecream and hairpapers and dressed in their varied nightwear and
they gathered clamoring about the bed and one pushed forward with a statue of the Virgin
and raised it above the bed and another took one of the girl's hands and commenced to tie
it to the bedpost with the sash from her robe. The girl's mouth was bloody and some of the
whores came forward and dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood as if to wipe it away but
they hid the handkerchiefs on their persons to take away with them and the girl's mouth
continued to bleed. They pulled her other arm free and tied it as well and some of them
were chanting and some were blessing themselves and the girl bowed and thrashed and then
went rigid and her eyes white. They'd brought little figures from their rooms and votive
shrines of gilt and painted plaster and some were at lighting candles when the owner of
the establishment appeared in the doorway in his shirtsleeves.

Eduardo! Eduardo! they cried. He strode into the room backhanding them away. He swept
icons and candles to the floor and seized the old criada by one arm and flung her back.

Basta! he cried. Basta!

The whores huddled whimpering, clutching their robes about their rolling breasts. They
retreated to the door. The criada alone stood her ground.

Por quŽ est‡s esperando? he hissed.

Her solitary eye blinked. She would not move.

He'd brought from somewhere in his clothes an Italian switchblade knife with black onyx
handles and silver bolsters and he leaned and cut the sashes from the girl's wrists and
seized the covers and pulled them up over her nakedness and folded the knife away as
silently as it had appeared.

No la moleste, hissed the criada. No la moleste.

C‡llate.

GolpŽame si tienes que golpear a alguien.

He turned and seized the old woman by the hair and forced her to the door and shoved her
into the hallway with the whores and shut the door behind her. He'd have latched it but
those doors latched only from without. The old woman nevertheless did not enter again but
stood outside calling that she needed her keys. He stood looking at the girl. The piece of
broomstick had fallen from her mouth and lay on the bloodstained sheets. He picked it up
and went to the door and opened it. The old woman shrank back and raised one arm but he
only threw the keys rattling and clattering down the corridor and then slammed the door
shut again.

She lay breathing quietly. There was a cloth lying on the bed and he picked it up and held
it for a moment almost as if he might bend to wipe the blood from her mouth but then he
flung it away also and turned and looked once more at the wreckage of the room and swore
softly to himself and went out and shut the door behind him.

WARD BROUGHT THE STALLION out of the stall and started down the bay with it. The stallion
stopped in the middle of the bay and stood trembling and took small steps as if the ground
had got unsteady under its feet. Ward stood close to the stallion and talked to it and the
stallion jerked its head up and down in a sort of frenzied agreement. They'd been through
it all before but the stallion was no less crazy for that and Ward no less patient. He led
the horse prancing past the stalls where the other horses circled and rolled their eyes.

John Grady was holding the mare by a twitch and when the stallion entered the paddock she
tried to stand upright. She turned at the end of the rope and shot out one hindfoot and
then she tried to stand again.

That is a pretty decent lookin mare, Ward said.

Yessir.

What happened to her eye?

Man that owned her knocked it out with a stick.

Ward led the walleyed stallion around the perimeter of the paddock. Knocked it out with a
stick, he said.

Yessir.

He couldnt put it back though, could he?

No sir.

Easy, said Ward. Easy now. That's a sweet mare.

Yessir, said John Grady. She is.

He walked the stallion forward by fits and starts. The little mare rolled her good eye
till it was white as the blind one. JC and another man had entered the paddock and closed
the gate behind them. Ward turned and looked past them toward the paddock walls.

I aint tellin you all again, he called. You go on to the house like I told you.

Two teenage girls came out and started across the yard toward the house.

Where's Oren at? said Ward.

John Grady turned with the skittering mare. He was leaning all over her and trying to keep
her from stepping on his feet.

He had to go to Alamogordo.

Hold her now, Ward said. Hold her.

The stallion stood, his great phallus swinging.

Hold her, said Ward.

I got her.

He knows where it's at.

The mare bucked and kicked one leg. On the third try the stallion mounted her, clambering,
stamping his hindlegs, the great thighs quivering and the veins standing. John Grady stood
holding all of this before him on a twisted tether like a child holding by a string some
struggling and gasping chimera invoked by sorcery out of the void into the astonished
dayworld. He held the twitchrope in one hand and laid his face against the sweating neck.
He could hear the slow bellows of her lungs and feel the blood pumping. He could hear the
slow dull beating of the heart within her like an engine deep in a ship.

He and JC loaded the mare in the trailer. She look knocked up to you? JC said.

I dont know.

He bowed her back, didnt he?

They raised the tailgate on the trailer and latched it at either side. John Grady turned
and leaned against the trailer and wiped his face with his kerchief and pulled his hat
back down.

Mac's done got the colt sold.

I hope he aint spent the money.

Yeah?

She's been bred twice before and it didnt take.

Ward's stud?

No.

I got my money on Ward's studhorse.

So does Mac.

Are we done?

We're done. You want to swing by the cantina?

Are you buyin?

Hell, said JC. I thought I'd get you to back me on the shuffleboard. Give us a chance to
improve our financial position.

Last time I done that the position we wound up in wasnt financial.

They climbed into the truck.

Are you broke sure enough? said JC.

I aint got a weepin dime.

They started slowly down the drive. The horsetrailer clanked behind. Troy was counting
change in his hand.

I got enough for a couple of beers apiece, he said.

That's all right.

I'm ready to blow in the whole dollar and thirtyfive cents.

We better get on back.

H E WATCHED BILLY RIDE down along the fenceline from where it crested against the red
dunes. He rode past and then sat the horse and looked out across the windscoured terrain
and he turned and looked at John Grady. He leaned and spat.

Hard country, he said.

Hard country.

This used to be grama grass to a horse's stirrups.

I've heard that. Did you see any more of that bunch?

No. They're scattered all to hell and gone. Wild as deer. A man needs three horses to put
in a day up here.

Why dont we ride up Bell Springs Draw.

Were you up there last week?

No.

All right.

They crossed the red creosote plain and picked their way up along the dry arroyo over the
red rock scree.

John Grady Cole was a rugged old soul, Billy sang.

The trail crossed through the rock and led out along a wash. The dirt was like red talc.

With a buckskin belly and a rubber asshole.

An hour later they sat their horses at the spring. The cattle had been and gone. There
were wet tracks at the south end of the ciŽnega and wet tracks in the trail leading out
south down the side of the ridge.

There's at least two new calves with this bunch, Billy said.

John Grady didnt answer. The horses raised their dripping mouths from the water one and
then the other and blew and leaned and drank again. The dead leaves clinging to the pale
and twisted cottonwoods rattled in the wind. Set in a flat above the springs was a small
adobe house in ruins these many years. Billy took his cigarettes from his shirtpocket and
shook one out and hunched his shoulders forward and lit it.

I used to think I'd like to have a little spread up in the hills somewhere like this. Run
a few head on it. Kill your own meat. Stuff like that.

You might one day.

I doubt it.

You never know.