Red Sky at Morning (16 page)

The Montoyas' big farmhouse was bright and clean, with newly whitewashed walls and some good, simple homemade furniture. The Montoya family was well-known in the mountains for having always produced solid artisans in a number of fields, and while none of them ever became famous at any particular skill—saint-carving, for instance, or curative powers—the tribe could always offer a good carpenter and builder, with sidelines in veterinary medicine, midwifery, weaving, or just useful muscle. In recent years, various Montoyas had become famous as jackleg mechanics. They were never clerical or bookish, but they could all read.

I never got the count entirely straight, but there were about a dozen people living in the house beside the Montoyas senior. Some were children, two were grandchildren, and one was a niece from an unfortunate branch of the family. There were some married sons and daughters living away from home; the oldest resident child was Tony, the seventeen-year-old boy, who was shorter than I, but as strong-looking as Chango.

Excilda asked me if I remembered Vicky, and I didn't. "Don't you remember that Fourth of July, ten years ago?" she asked. "I remember coming here for dinner, but that's all," I said.

"You followed Vicky around like a sheepdog all afternoon," she told me. "You held her hand and kissed her and told me and Amadeo you were going to marry her as soon as you could scrape up the money to buy a house and a diamond ring."

"I remember," Vicky said.

There is a Mexican movie star named Maria Felix with a symmetrical oval face that seems to be cast in porcelain and never ages. The Montoyas' daughter Victoria looked like her, but with skin softer than porcelain. Big eyes, Indian cheekbones and a pointed chin, a slim body that made her appear taller than she was, coarse black hair gathered by a clip in back and cascading down her back, a quiet, low voice with a faint Spanish rhythm to the words.

"If you're trying to embarrass me," I said, "you're doing a good job."

"You promised you'd become a Catholic and learn to speak Spanish if Vicky would marry you. I don't think your mother liked to hear that kind of talk, but your father thought it was real funny."

Excilda had an eight-burner black stove in her kitchen, and the whitewashed
vigas
were hung with herbs that she'd grown or picked herself. She named some of them for me, and when she got to Yerba de Lobo I asked her what wolf grass tasted good on. She laughed and said it didn't taste good on anything; you made tea with it and it kept you running to the toilet for two days. It was good for people who had ringworm, boils and bleeding gums. It was also good, she said, for kids who got out of line.

Instead of beating them, you make them drink a cup of Yerba de Lobo tea and it keeps them out of mischief for forty-eight hours.

Sitting at the kitchen table was a small Spanish woman smoking a cigarette and looking disturbed. She was Mrs. Saiz, Excilda told me, and was one of Vicky's teachers in Yunque. I could tell that she and the Montoyas had been involved in some sort of argument, because she kept saying,
"!Jamás! !Jamás! !Es una tontería tremenda!"
which means, roughly, "Never! It would be real dumb!" That isn't a literary translation, but it gives the sense. Mrs. Saiz left when I came in, and when she passed Vicky she thumped her lightly on the forehead with the heel of her hand and said, "!Cretina!" Vicky didn't look like a cretin. She was only sixteen, and already a senior.

I sat with Excilda, Tony and Vicky in the kitchen and drank coffee out of a bowl. Excilda hadn't asked me what I was doing in Río Conejo on a school day, and I knew it wasn't polite in the hills to come right to the point. When the Montoyas were in Sagrado they acted like town people, but at home they stuck fast to country customs.

Tony had said very little since I arrived, but now he asked his mother for lunch, because he had to go back. "Tony's helping a man rebuild his house. You know, Procopio Romero's house burned down last week? Was there a story about it in
The Conquistador?
No? Well, it was a big fire for Conejo, and he lost everything except a few crocks of cider and his family. Everybody's helping out."

From the oven she took a dish of
carnitas de puerco
which, after stuffed pompano, is my favorite food in the world, and gave some to Tony along with a few tortillas made of blue corn meal. He wolfed it down and had another cup of coffee, and then left, saying he'd be back for dinner.

"You hungry?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "I had a big breakfast and ate a sandwich on the bus." It was a lie. I was starving.

"Well, have some
carnitas
anyway."

"I couldn't. Absolutely. I'd bust."

"Vicky, give your
novio
here some
carnitas
before I get mad and push him out in the snow." While Vicky was dishing up the meat, she went on. "Look,
niñito,
we still have lots of pigs. We can last all winter on no money at all if we have to, and that's more than you can do. Eat your
carnitas
or I'll get insulted."

The little cubes of pork had been baking all morning, and each time I bit into one my eyelids got heavy, as though someone were rubbing warm butter on them. It should be against the law to do anything to a pig but chop him up into cubes for
carnitas.
No ham, no spareribs, no pork chops, no bacon.

"Amadeo should be back pretty soon," Excilda said. "He went up to Molydenum to see about a job in the mine there."

"That's what I came up here about," I said. "Can't you come back to work for us in Sagrado? We could really use some help."

"You better talk to Amadeo when he gets back. He's the one decides things like that. He was pretty mad when we left the other day. I've never seen him so mad."

"All right, I'll talk to him too. But I sure wish you'd come back."

"We didn't leave; we got kicked out. Oh, I don't want to talk about it now. Amadeo should be back pretty soon. Vicky, take your
esposado
back in the big room and send the kids in here for some lunch."

Victoria and I sat on a lumpy couch in the front room while the children ate. She was nearly my age and beautiful; I didn't know that girls sixteen could be really beautiful. I was nervous and couldn't think of anything to say, and she seemed very calm and serene.

"What's your dog's name?" I finally asked her, to break up the silence.

"Don Carlos," she answered.

"He's a nice dog."

"He's okay."

"What kind of dog is he?"

"I don't know. Different kinds."

The dog talk obviously wasn't going to get me anywhere with Maria Felix, Junior, so I tried Memory Lane.

"Do you remember that stuff your mother was talking about? Me chasing you all around?"

"I guess so."

"Well, I don't remember it at all."

Victoria didn't answer, and the conversation, never very lively, died again. The only things left to discuss were movies and school.

"Have you seen any good movies recently?"

She thought about that for a while, then said, "Abbott and Costello."

I was on sure ground. "Abbott and Costello in what?"

"In the Army, something."

"Sure, that's 'Buck Privates.' I saw it in Mobile. Did you like it?"

"I guess so." Her eyes wandered to a window and stayed there. I wondered whether I'd committed some serious breach of manners, or smelled bad. It came to me suddenly that it was a weekday, and she wasn't in school.

"Have you been sick?" I asked her.

"Sick? No."

"I was just wondering why you weren't in school today. Where do you go, here in Conejo?"

Some animation came into her face for the first time, and she focused on me. "No, in the valley, in Yunque. I used to go. I quit school when they—" she pointed to the kitchen with her chin—"lost their work. I have to go to work, now, and make some money." Her eyes began to sparkle, and she turned on the old sofa to face me directly. "I was doing real good in all my subjects at Yunque. I was getting A's in everything. Mrs. Saiz said she thought after I graduated I could get a scholarship to any school in the state. When I told her I'd have to quit school she told me I was crazy, even when I explained why." Her voice had become sharp and piercing, and she was spitting the words at me. Now she really looked like Maria Felix, when she told the bandit to go ahead and rape her, because no matter what he did to her body he couldn't touch her spirit. I forget the name of the picture, but it was full of corn like that, which I suppose they call
"maiz"
in Mexico.

Excilda heard Victoria's voice, and came out from her kitchen, holding one of the toddlers under one arm. "Mrs. Saiz was right," she said. "You are crazy. You should finish your high school, anyway. You don't have to work."

"I'm sixteen," Victoria said. "I can do what I want."

"Que no seas cabezuda,"
Excilda said, "don't be stubborn." But she said it in a way that showed they'd been all over the ground before, and that Excilda hadn't got anywhere. "This girl's just like a mule," she said to me. "Makes up her mind and that's it. Like a rock."

Don Carlos began to bark outside on the portal, and I heard a truck coming. "That's your father," Excilda said. "You better not give him any back talk."

We could hear Amadeo talking to Don Carlos, calling him affectionate names in Spanish: "Three times miscarried son of a sheep-stealing coyote," for example and "courageous fighter of blind kittens." Then he came in and took off his hat and fur-lined jacket.

"Hello, Josh," he said. "How you doing? You come up to see Vicky? That's a long way to ride just to see a stupid girl."

I stood up. "No," I said, "I came up to see if you and Excilda would consider. . . ."

"Never mind about that," he interrupted. "We got fired fair and square, and you didn't have nothing to do with it." He turned to his wife and said,
"El capataz me dijo que hubiera trabajo en dos, tres semanas."

"Amadeo," I said, "you don't have to wait three weeks to get work. Really. And I remember you and Dad talking about that job. He said it was a hundred miles away."

"It's good money. Don't worry about it. I been a bucket man before."

"I'm sure it's all right with my mother," I pleaded. "She's so mixed up she doesn't even know why you're gone. She's been sick. We really need some help down there."

"Your mother," Amadeo said, "doesn't have anything to do with it. If she hadn't fired us we'd have quit anyway. There's no man around there to give the orders.

Your papa is out there in the Navy somewhere, and that
maricón
in the red bathrobe don't know what the hell he's talking about, and he's lucky I didn't kill him, some of the things he said to me."

"Well,
I
don't know how to be anybody's boss. And besides, you know more about what you do than I ever could. I'm only seventeen."

"When my grandfather was sixteen he had a wife and a baby and was farming four hectares right here in Conejo, with two Indians from San Ysidro helping him in the fall. I mean, goddamn, boy, are you gonna be Papacito for a while or you gonna let that . . . woman do the job?"

"Amadeo, I don't
know
anything about what you do."

"Damn, boy, that don't matter. You got what down there, eight, nine acres? You got forty apple trees, four of 'em dying, you got an
acequia menor
and ten ditches to work, you got some lawns and some roses and some flags and some Japanese plum and six lindens and a patch of tulips. About two times a year you got some carpentry to do, and some replastering. There isn't nothing you can tell me about how to take care of a place like that. All I need is some
gallo
in charge to let me do it, and maybe once in a while some business about money comes up to tell me
'Sí, lo podemos hacer'
or
'No, no lo podemos hacer.'"

"That's all we want," Excilda put in.

"Cállate,"
Amadeo told her, without even looking at her. "But she's right. Don't forget, that's not my land down there. That's your papa's land, and I just work on it. Up here, this is my land and I work it the way I want to. If I make a mistake, it's my own mistake, and I don't make many mistakes on my land. But down there in Sagrado, I'm not my own boss. Now, is there gonna be somebody around there to be boss, or am I gonna be a bucket man for sixty a week at Molybdenum?"

The whole business was getting over my head, and I sat down on the couch next to Victoria and pretended to be thinking. Victoria was no help; she simply sat there looking from me to her father as if she were enchanted by all the adult discussion.

"Amadeo," I began, "I don't know. . . ."

"No, that's right. You don't know. So I wrote a letter to your father last night to that crazy address that pretends he's in New York when he's really around Old Spain some place. Victoria, bring me that letter." Victoria got up quickly and went into another room.

"Excilda and Victoria and I stayed up until nearly eleven last night writing this letter," he went on. "Victoria spells the words better, and she wrote it down in pencil first and then Excilda wrote it again with ink. Excilda's got a good hand."

Victoria came back with two pages torn from a ruled notebook, and handed them to Amadeo, who reached into his breast pocket and drew forth a pair of spectacles I'd never seen before.
"Yo me vuelvo ciego por cierto,"
he said, referring to a mild nearsightedness. "I'm going blind for sure."

" 'Dear Mr. Arnold,' " he read, " 'Everything is going fine here except that we got fired by Mrs. Arnold. We don't know how come, because we were just doing our work like always.' "

"I told him that should be 'as always,' " Victoria said.

"You can say what you want to in your own letters," Amadeo told her. "This is my letter. 'We don't know anything about being a doctor but both of us think that Mrs. Arnold is sick and your son Joshua M. Arnold should give the orders if you can't be there to give the orders. If you will send me a letter saying this we will go back to work at your place. Meantime I am looking for another job.

" 'We hope you are feeling okay. Respectfully, Amadeo Lorenzo Montoya R.'"