Red Sky at Morning (26 page)

"Let's see," Jimbob said, looking slightly depressed. "That would be. . . ."

"Fifteen ninety-eight," she said. "Of course, this part of the country was all part of Spain then. They were just colonists. They had a king."

"Well, naturally," Jimbob said, seeming relieved.

"Nothing like Jamestown," I said, "which started out a hundred per cent American."

"I thought Jamestown was an English colony," Victoria said, "with a king."

Jimbob was becoming agitated. "But the point is," he said, waggling a finger, "the point is that this is an English-speaking country. That was the colonization that took, so to speak. The English-speaking, Jamestown colony determined the culture and language of the United States. Am I right?"

"Sí, claro,"
Victoria said.
"Usted tiene razón."

"No cabe duda,"
I said.

"Let's all have some more chicken," said my mother, "and talk about something else."

"And don't forget the Spanish Armada," Jimbob put in.

"No, sir. I certainly won't," Victoria said.

"You know where Virginia is, don't you, dear?" I said to her.

We had some more chicken, which Excilda had cooked in herbs and wine, leaving out the chiles in deference to Jimbob, who was still recovering from chicken pox.

"You remember that girl we saw in La Cima on Old Christmas?" Victoria said suddenly.

"Oh, yes," my mother said. "Joshua told me about Old Christmas. He said it was delightful."

"Delightful?" Victoria said. "He almost got. . ."

I kicked her under the table. "I got into the spirit of things," I said quickly. "There was plenty of carefree dancing in the streets, fireworks, Santa Clauses—very colorful. I wanted to go caroling, but Amadeo and Victoria said it would be better if I didn't. I didn't belong to the Chamber of Commerce, or something like that."

"Joshua has loved Christmas ever since he was a little boy," my mother told Victoria. "Even now the season makes his eyes fill with tears."

"I noticed that," Victoria said. "Anyway, that girl you saw there in the crowd around the. . . ."

"Around the carol singers, yes, I remember. What about her?"

"Which girl?" my mother asked.

"A girl from school. What about her, Victoria?"

"Was it that nice Amanda Sue Cloyd? You know, Joshua, I was so hoping you'd ask her to dinner."

"No, Amanda Sue went back to Texas," I said. "The whole family had to go. They struck oil on the pasture and the cows started to get sticky. As she explained it, it's bad ranching to have your oil and your cattle on the same range. The oil gets in the meat or something. Victoria, when did you see her?"

"Oh, it was about a week ago," she said. "The folks hadn't come back from Sagrado yet, and Tony and I heard a noise on the road near the house. The girl was out there with a boy, and they were trying to fix a flat in the dark. Tony went in and brought a flashlight so they could see. That's all. It was the same girl."

"What did the boy look like?"

"Spanish," she said. "He kept his face out of the light, as if he didn't want anyone to recognize him. He just looked like one of those La Cima
pachuquitos.
A lot of hair and sideburns."

"Maybe Viola's doing a little social work before she takes the veil," I said. "I guess you have to know life before you can renounce it."

My mother broke in. "I do wish you would speak English at the table, Joshua. It's unfair to leave us out of the conversation. What is a pachakeeto?"

"It's sort of the local version of a Dead End Kid. You know: broken homes, underprivileged, petty crime, standing around the pool hall whistling at girls, stealing apples off the vegetable cart."

"Killing people," Victoria said.

"Killing people. The usual things."

"I'll bet that some of your best friends are pachakeetos," Jimbob said. "You always were an infracaninophile."

"I'm willing to admit it, Mr. Buel," I said. "That's a word I've never come across in the world's great literature."

"It means 'underdog-lover,' " he said. "You ought to read more."

"I just can't seem to focus on those little bitty letters. For instance, there's this book I've been working on since Thanksgiving. I think it's a pretty good yarn, but reading it makes my head hurt. There's a boy named Dick and a girl named Jane, and they keep doing something with a ball. Every once in a while, a dog called Spot runs in barking and breaks up the action. The book doesn't say what sort of dog Spot is, but he looks like a
bouvier des Flandres
with maybe a touch of whippet."

"I think I've read that one," Victoria said. "Aren't there some people named Father and Mother in it, too?"

"Don't tell me how it comes out I want to plow through this baby myself."

"You're really becoming unspeakable," Jimbob said.

"We have a dinner guest, Mr. Buel. Could you save the compliments for later? I get embarrassed."

"You should be embarrassed," my mother said, "behaving like this in front of this nice girl. You're making dinner very unpleasant."

"I thought this was a nice, quiet dinner," Victoria said. "At my house there are usually fourteen people at the table, all yelling at each other, and a dog begging tortillas. No, this is very pleasant, and I thank you for asking me." I decided right then that the following Monday I'd go down to the El Chivo Bookstore and buy Victoria a copy of the complete plays of Lope de Vega. She had the best natural manners I'd ever seen; it was too bad she couldn't get into Harvard.

Victoria and I helped Excilda with the dishes after dinner; my mother and Jimbob had an engagement to play bridge at the house of one of the girls, the one with the whiskers and the bad hip. Our car was up on blocks in the garage, so Amadeo drove them there in the pick-up. That had been Dad's idea; Amadeo used our gas coupons because of the commuting.

"That girl," Victoria said. "What's her name? The one at La Cima."

"Viola Lopez. Her brother's an ex-
pachuco,
now trying out for sainthood. Viola says she's going to be a nun, but I don't know. I believe that she's discovered boys."

"She's not a bad-looking girl. I don't know why she has to go clear to La Cima to find a boyfriend. And I know she could do better than the one I saw her with. He had that
macho
look; you know: 'Don't mess around with me 'cause I'm tough.' And ugly. Looked like somebody had chewed off his ear."

The next morning, when I'd told Chango about it, he said his mother and father had worked on Viola long enough to get her to admit she wasn't seeing Father McIlhenny at the chancery, but it was all she'd told them. "She wouldn't say where she was," he said. "She said she took long walks and thought about Saint Teresa and had mystical experiences."

"Well, that's the story," I said. "From somebody who doesn't even know her."

"She really said the guy's ear was funny?"

"She said chewed off."

"I guess we better tell Chamaco," he said. "He doesn't like to go up to La Cima, but it's in Cabezón County and it's his territory."

"You want me to call him?" I asked.

"I'll call him," Chango said. "It's my sister."

When Chango and Viola went home to lunch, Chamaco met them there, Chango told me that afternoon. He said Chamaco wasn't too rough on her—the parents were both present—but he broke her up in a few minutes.

A few days after Tarzan had put Chango in the hospital, Viola found out where he was hiding. She asked an old fighting honcho of his, who wanted the police to find Tarzan but was too chicken to tell them himself.

Tarzan had built a little shelter out of rumpsprung sofas and broken-legged kitchen tables at the dump north of Sagrado. It hadn't occurred to him to bring food, and in a short time he would have been hungry enough to start eating dead horse. Viola simply hiked out to the dump and found him there, huddled under a red-and-green davenport. She came, she said, to forgive him, and brought her rosary with her. The idea was for them to pray together; his soul had been cast adrift, and she wanted to bring him back.

Viola and Tarzan Velarde spent three chilly afternoons under the davenport in the city dump saying Hail Marys. She brought him bean sandwiches and water, and looked for a better place to hide her prize. She felt, she told Chamaco, that it would be good practice for a future nun.

Tarzan moved into the storeroom of the old Armory building, a warm, secure hiding place which Viola cased for him. The National Guard hadn't been in it since 1941, when they were suddenly mobilized and shipped to the Philippines, where the Army felt their knowledge of Spanish would help them. (It hadn't; they were all dead, or in prison camps learning Japanese.) Tarzan scrounged blankets and a serviceable cot; Viola kept bringing food to him after he'd broken open some KRations and found them inedible. She prayed very hard, she said, and Tarzan prayed with her. Sometimes she went there at night for more prayers, and she told Tarzan about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Phillip of Neri. She told him everything that Sister Polycarp had said about being a nun. Tarzan listened to her carefully for several weeks, nodding his head at the right times, asking her intelligent questions, relearning all the Catholic prayers of his childhood, putting on weight from the food she brought, which was heavy on starches, and turning into a proper student.

And then one night in November he left the Armory storeroom and broke into the Bottle 'n' Corkscrew Liquor Store, making off with two gallon bottles of La Voragine Sweet Vino. He drank one gallon that night, and was well into the second one when Viola arrived the next evening with a covered bowl of tripe stew. She set the bowl down on the olive drab footlocker which they used as a table, and then noticed Tarzan's eyes and the bottles. She tried to run, but he caught her ankle, tripping her, and did something to her that no amount of prayer would ever fix.

Ruined as she was—she had no doubt that ruined was the right word, and never questioned it—there was little for her to do but continue her life of ruination. The same thing happened almost every time she went to the Armory. She began to enjoy it, to look forward to it, the natural consequence of ruin, which gives you a different outlook, making evil things seem good and good things evil. When the weather got so cold that Tarzan began to shiver all night in the empty Armory, Viola gave him eleven dollars and he bought a bus ticket to La Cima, where, as might be expected, he had relatives. She bought a false mustache for him at Woolworth's, trimming it down so that it didn't look too ridiculous, and a felt cowboy hat and wool scarf at Wormser's. He wore the hat low over his right ear and, with the scarf and mustache, was unrecognizable.

He had no trouble in La Cima. He lived with a cousin who was literate and consequently wanted for forgery. Tarzan had the best credentials possible for La Cima: He was being sought for assault with a deadly weapon.

Viola told the story to the sheriff and her parents with a great deal of tears, Chango said. She'd continued to see Tarzan, but not as often. The cousin he lived with worked in Sagrado, drove in and back several times a week and gave her rides in his truck. She knew her story about instruction with Father McIlhenny wouldn't hold up forever, but she didn't care; she was a sinner, this was sin, and she wanted to do it right. Her plans were all made, she said. She was going to take a bus to El Paso and be a prostitute, there being no other path, unless it became necessary for her to go to jail for harboring a criminal. She was quite prepared for that, too.

Chamaco quieted her down and soothed the parents as much as he could, hesitantly suggesting that they take her to a doctor and get a blood test done. "He told me he'd be surprised as hell if Tarzan didn't have seven different kinds of the clap," Chango said. "You know, you'd think she'd know better."

"How do you mean?"

"Ever since I was eleven or twelve she's been praying for me: 'God, please make Maximiliano a good boy,' and that sort of stuff. She sent priests to see me. Once she fasted four days a week for a whole year, and walked barefoot out to the Guadalupe chapel in Texcoco carrying two buckets full of ten-penny nails. None of it worked. I just went on being a prick."

"I thought your desperado days were over," I said.

"Yeah, but she didn't have anything to do with it. I was gonna stop anyway. I was getting tired of Chamaco and his boys coming after me every time somebody stuck an icepick in a tire or wrote something on a wall. It got so when Chamaco didn't have anything to do he'd find me and throw me around some. He may not look it, with that belly, but he's strong. He said he'd never killed a juvenile but he was gonna come around on my eighteenth birthday and blow a hole in me with a three-fifty-seven Magnum."

"Well, he didn't," I said.

"No, and Viola thinks it's all because of the praying. She told us it worked so well with me that she tried it on Tarzan, and it would have worked with him, too, if he hadn't got drunk that night."

"What's Chamaco going to do about him?" I asked. "If he's holed in up there in La Cima they'll need an armored division to get him out."

"I guess, he's got something figured. He hasn't been looking for Tarzan all winter because he thought he was dead. Now he's real sore."

Steenie and I went to the sheriffs office after school to be deputized. We knew how it worked in the movies: You take an oath and the sheriff tosses you a badge, telling the clerk to put you on the payroll. Chamaco didn't seem happy with the idea.

"I know some foolproof come-along holds, Sheriff," Steenie told him. "You won't even need handcuffs for him. All I have to do if he gets rough is put a little pressure on and his elbow snaps."

"Jesus," said Chamaco.

"I can identify him," I said. "I got a real close look at him one day. It wouldn't be any trouble for me to pick him out of a crowd. And I know how to handle a revolver and an automatic."

"You boys are real bloodthirsty, huh?" Chamaco said.

"No, sir," said Steenie. "We just want to see justice done. I mean, if you take all of your regular deputies up there, who's going to mind the store in Sagrado? There'll be a crime wave while you're gone."