Hard Twisted (11 page)

Their future, he told her. Together.

For their new lives he chose new identities. Clint became Jimmy, and Lottie became Johnny Rae. Palmer became Montgomery. To strangers she was his niece, or sometimes his daughter. Alone together, she was his wife.

They attended a square dance in Adrian, and a cockfight in San Jon, and outside the farming town of Milagro, drinking applejack cider with a Panhandle farm family, he bobbed Lottie's hair with sheep shears.

Johnny Rae Montgomery! he said, laughing drunkenly, twirling her in the firelight.

Their provisions lasted until Moriarty, and their cash until Albuquerque, where Palmer learned of a roadhouse card game from which he'd returned at dawn without his belt buckle.

And so it was that Jimmy and Johnny Rae Palmer, or Clint and Lottie Montgomery, or some amalgam thereof, arrived in La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis, the capital city of New Mexico and of the northern territories of Mexico and New Spain before it, broke and filthy and nearly starving.

Palmer popped the shortbread tin and handed her the ribbon and shook the gold tooth and the thin gold cross and chain into his palm, spreading them with his thumb.

I'll be a minute, he told her. Why don't you stretch your legs. He opened the door and slid from under the wheel. Mind who you talk to.

The town square by which they'd parked was green and treed with ancient elms and bustling with activity. Men in suits and hats and jet-haired women in Sunday finery, some with mantillas and old-fashioned parasols, strolled or sat on benches or picnicked on the shaded grass. A stone obelisk stood at the center of the plaza with a trellised bandstand beyond from which came the rhythmic strum and bleat of ranchera music. On the far sidewalk, in the shade of a broad portal, Indian women sat cross-legged against a mud wall hawking jewelry and beadwork and other crafts.

Lottie followed the covered sidewalk. In the storefront windows were dry goods and millinery, sundries and curios and brightly patterned blankets. A barbershop and a bakery restaurant. And at the far end of the street, a massive stone cathedral, stark and aureate in the late-morning sun.

She saw him then, on the block ahead, tall and lean in his jeans and mackinaw, adding his shuffling gait to the variegated crush of parishioners drifting slowly toward the cathedral. She surged forward, elbowing her way past shoppers and strollers, then into the street, where a car swerved and honked.

The church bells tolled. She glimpsed him again, then lost him as the crowd filled the street, jostling and murmuring, converging on the wide stone steps that led to the elevated
cercado
.

Daddy! she called above the heads on the stairway. Several turned, and a way was made for her to push through, ducking and dodging, until she saw him again passing under the cathedral's towering archway.

Daddy! Wait!

She grabbed, breathless, at his coat sleeve.

The man pulled free, his black eyes flashing. Several of the parishioners had paused to watch, and a bottleneck quickly formed.

¿Qué quiere, joven?
the man demanded, his dark brows knitting.
¿Estas pérdida?

She turned and fled, across the lawn and down the stairs and back into the roiling crowd.

Palmer sat on the fender with one foot on the wheel hub, his neck stretched and craning. He'd been smoking, and when he caught sight of her approaching, he flicked his butt to the gutter and circled the front of the car.

Let's go, damn it.

The car was already moving as Lottie fell in beside him.

You come this close to gettin left. Where the hell'd you go?

Walkin, she said, nodding. To the church yonder.

You and your goddamn church.

The roads around the plaza were traffic-choked, and he muttered and honked and edged his way onto a side street. The block they circled was taken up by a single building; a multitiered confection of stepped walls and staggered roofs that appeared to have risen in stages from the red clay mud on which it stood, and to have melted over time and a thousand rains into the very earth of its origin.

An awning spanned the sidewalk, from the entrance doors to an idling Harvey tour bus, whose passengers leaned from the windows to haggle with the Indian women holding pottery and silver jewelry aloft as in oblation to some multilimbed deity.

Palmer parked at the curbstone. He turned to Lottie and studied her in the manner of a man estimating whether a wardrobe might fit through a doorway.

What?

Man at the pawnshop says they's a card game upstairs. I might be a hour, or I might be longer.

I'm hungry.

Palmer leaned and straightened and counted the bills from his pocket.

All right, he said. Come on.

The lobby of the La Fonda hotel was the largest room Lottie had ever seen or had ever imagined seeing, its plastered walls and dark vigas framing a vast salon in which couches and chairs were grouped in threes and fours on a floor of polished stone. Herringboned
latillas
and intricately carved and painted ceiling corbels. Rugs of dazzling color and geometry. Sconces and chandeliers of amber glass and hammered tin and riveted iron.

For all the tumult on the sidewalk, the lobby was cool and hushed, and their footfalls on the flagstones echoed of Spanish armor and Tewa moccasins, of Mexican huaraches and the bootheels and rowel spurs of untold generations of soldiers and ranchers and farmers who'd passed this way before them.

They found their way to a cantina off the main lobby. There a man in a vest and shirtsleeves stood polishing bar glasses, and there sloe-eyed girls in peasant blouses arranged a plankwood table with the fruits and
pastelerías
, the tamales and posole, of a Sunday-morning buffet.

Palmer slapped a coin on the copper bartop and ordered a Nehi.

This here is as good a place to wait as any, he told her. Once the church lets out, you can sneak yourself some grub. He took a
swig from the bottle that the barman set before her. Anybody asks, you tell 'em you're waitin on your pa, who's gettin his hair cut, understand?

Palmer stood and straightened his pockets. The barman watched his retreating back and then took up again his sodden towel.

The cantina grew crowded as the day wore on. Men alone in ones and twos, then couples, and soon entire families streamed in from the lobby, their faces flushed and their conversations animated. They spoke in Spanish, or in English, or in some local conflation of the two. First the tables filled, then the barstools, and soon Lottie found herself surrounded by men who sat or stood in dark wool suits and some with hats and silver bolo ties smoking cigarettes or slender
puros
.

Bills and coins of silver crossed the bartop. The men smelled of bay rum, or of tobacco. They ordered cervezas or tequila or soft drinks for the children who clung to their pantlegs and gazed up at Lottie with dark and questioning eyes.

Although she'd finished her Nehi long ago, the barman had left the bottle unclaimed, and once, when she'd turned to watch the musicians arriving in their black, fitted suits with buckled silver edging, he'd replaced it with a full bottle.

The music when it started was a lively pulsing of guitar and fiddle with sudden bursts of brassy horns. On the worn parquet square before the bandstand, couples, some quite elderly, moved and swayed or shuffled and spun with clicking heels and swirling skirts to the shouts and claps of their fellows.

Waitresses moved among the patrons with painted clay pitchers and fresh plates for the buffet. A young Indian girl with braided
hair displayed a fabric board on which earrings and pendants of silver and turquoise were fastened, petitioning each of the diners and then each of the bar patrons in turn, and when she came in her circuit to Lottie on her barstool, she passed without a glance.

When at last Lottie left for the women's toilet, she returned to find her bottle missing and her seat taken. She stood in the archway of the cantina and regarded the buffet and the women in their dark skirts and embroidered blouses tending and replenishing it. The surrounding tables were all yet occupied and other townsfolk late arriving stood vigil in the corners and aisles and out in the hallway, chatting and waiting to eat.

She passed through the lobby, the music fading behind her. Outside the hotel, the shadows had lengthened and the plaza had all but emptied. She walked a slow circuit, past the open storefronts and the lingering strollers, past the last of the Indian women banded where they sat in bars of light and shadow.

Before the empty bandstand was a bench, and beside the bench an iron trash can rimmed with pigeons that scattered, fluttering, at her approach. She found there among the papers and wrappers and other refuse of the day a stiff tortilla smeared with cold frijoles that she carried to the bench and ate quickly, tossing the papery crumbles to the pigeons that circled her with bobbing heads, harrying one another for her scatterings.

When she'd finished eating, she closed her eyes to listen. To the cooing of the pigeons and the flit and trill of smaller birds. To the dolorous tolling of the church bells. To the cars and buses rumbling in the street. And when she opened them again, she saw white clouds banked in towering drifts over the stunted towers of the cathedral.

Down the path by which she sat, an old man bent and lifted a
guitar and placed some copper coins in its open and battered case, as though rewarding himself for this small labor. He plucked strings and twisted pegs on the headstock, his ear lowered to the tuning, and when he straightened again, he nodded gravely in her direction and played a showy flourish.

Lottie smiled, and the man smiled in return.

Pigeons flew as she stood. The man sat with his legs crossed and his eyes closed, his music haunting and tragic, his fingers on the fretboard the languid remembrance of a lover's caress. Lottie stood for a long time listening, and when she turned and started again toward the hotel, the music stopped.

Joven
, the man said.
Espérate.

He bent to the guitar case and picked out a penny and pressed it into her hand. Go with God, he told her in English, and then he settled back and closed his eyes and resumed his mournful song.

The cantina was all but empty. The buffet table had been cleared and the bandstand stood vacant under colored lights and the few patrons who remained amid the wash pails and the bustling charwomen were hunched and smoking at the bar. The new bartender wore a thick mustache and glanced at Lottie in the archway and dismissed her with a toss of his wrist.

She roamed the hotel hallways like a shadow, and like a shadow left no impression on what or whom she passed. The shopwindows all were darkened now, the fireplaces lit. In the courtyard off the lobby, a woman sat cross-legged on the rim of a tiled fountain, her foot tapping, her cigarette glowing and fading and glowing again in the slanting half-light as laughter echoed down from an upstairs window.

Lottie sat in an alcove by a telephone. The telephone was tall
and black and sat in its tiled
nicho
like some Bakelite icon wanting only for a votive. She lifted the handle and listened, but nobody was talking.

People passed by in the hallway. Some were couples arm in arm, and some were men in low conversation. Two women wearing aprons, giggling. A Mexican boy sweeping.

She dozed. Then a man appeared and startled her awake, frowning and gesturing toward the telephone, and she rose and hurried past the man and past the reception desk and past the empty cantina, entering again into the women's toilet, where she vomited into the sink.

The plaza lay in darkness. She breathed the cool night air and smelled the piñon woodsmoke, pausing in vain to listen for the old man's guitar.

She was very much alone.

She retraced her afternoon promenade, the docked hair and gangling gait of Johnny Rae Montgomery trailing her by lamplight in the black and empty storefronts. Moving like the hour, or like the declination of solstice, and the stone obelisk in the center of the plaza some ancient nodus by which to chart the course of her movement.

In the back of the Buick she found a saddle blanket, and in the front she lay curled beneath the steering wheel, her eyes closed and her hand splayed at her cold and naked throat.

And there she wept.

When Palmer emerged blinking into the new sunlight, his face was freshly shaved and his barbered hair was parted and slicked with pomade. He brushed his hat as he scanned the curbline, his
eyes lighting on Lottie where she sat upright and rigid in the front seat of the Buick.

Where've you been? he asked as he slid behind the wheel. I been lookin all over.

She turned her face to the street.

Don't you start with me. I told you I'd be a while.

He turned the ignition and released the brake and wheeled the Buick sharply into the street. They'd circled the block, past the stone cathedral and the little park beside it, and they were heading west along the river before either spoke again.

I'm hungry, she said quietly.

Well, what do you know. She can talk after all.

The café huddled in the shade of an ancient church with buttressed walls and a leaning bell tower whose shadow threw a long and crooked cross onto the cobblestones before it. Lottie ordered doughnuts and coffee while Palmer sat smoking and watching the morning strollers pass through the rippling cruciform, ceremonial in their transit, as communicants might walk in some ritual passage from shadow into sunlight.

He spoke without facing her. He told her of the men he'd met in the game, and of their advice to him that the land he sought and the life he'd described lay three hundred miles due north, in the mining town of Durango.

Silver is crashed and the mines is shut and they's givin away land for a song, he said, his eyes shifting in the plate glass. Horses everywhere, turned out to forage and free for the takin. Plus the bank's been run, so the whole town's full of men got their life savings buried in coffee cans and nothin to do but drink and play at cards all day and wait for the mines to reopen.