Stallion Gate (22 page)

“I knew you would come,” Roberto said.

“I came because they’re finding your wands on the Hill.”

“What kind of cigarettes?” Ben asked.

“At fires on the Hill. Luckies.” Joe handed the pack to Ben, who tapped one out suspiciously.

“How’d you know they were mine?” Roberto squatted by Joe.

“Mica in the paint. Typical Taos horseshit.”

“Yes.” Roberto grinned. He had such a long nose and his hair was so brown that he must have some French trader or Jack Mormon in his background, Joe thought.

“I like Chesterfields.” Ben put two in his pocket, one in his mouth, and gave the pack back.

“You’re welcome. You’re a real frightening pair of desperadoes.” Joe gave Ben the lighter. “You’re supposed to be hiding, not getting into more trouble. Fires are serious business to those people.”

“He thinks we’re causing the lightning?” Ben lit his cigarette.

“Who?” Joe took the lighter back.

“The doctor?”

“Oppenheimer? He sees that he’s supposed to think that.”

“That’s smart enough.” Roberto held up two fingers for a smoke.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Joe lit cigarettes for Roberto and himself. “You said you were going to escape, not take on the U.S. Army. I’m warning you. Right now, you’re hiding from the Indian Service. That’s one thing. The Army will send a Captain Augustino. Augustino will find you. And Augustino will find out who’s been helping you on the Hill, planting a wand every time they see a fire.”

“You think that’s the way we do it? First the lightning, then the wand?” Roberto asked.

“That would be my first guess.”

“They sent you?” Ben asked.

“Nobody sent me. I’m supposed to be on the post right now.”

“But they notice the lightning?” Roberto asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then we’re doing a good job.” Roberto let out a long, plumed exhale. “Good cigarette.”

As the valley went dark a full moon rose from the Sangres. They made camp on the eastern tip of the mesa, where ancient raincatches rose in worn steps. Ben built a fire in a crack of the rock, using stones to prop cedar twigs and bark. Joe started the bark with his lighter. The fire caught quickly and had the advantage of being impossible to see from a distance. Ben made a stew of chili and jerky in a No. 10 can. Looking over the Rio Grande, they could make out lamplights in Santiago and Esperanza, even the village of Truchas
high in the Sangres, and the bright, pollenish haze of Santa Fe at the tail of the Sangres range. Los Alamos was invisible. They cupped the glow of their cigarettes and waited for the stew to boil.

“I’ll get you a pair of Greyhound tickets to Tucson. You don’t like Tucson? How about Los Angeles? The two of you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the Pacific Ocean. What have you got against the Hill, anyway?”

“What they’re doing there,” Ben said.

“You don’t know what they’re doing there. It’s a secret. It’s the biggest damn secret of the war.”

“I had a dream they were making a gourd filled with ashes,” Roberto said.

“A gourd of ashes?”

“I had the dream in Taos. Two Hopi men had the same dream—two elders. A woman in Acoma had the dream.”

“Four dreams.” Joe nodded, as if the conversation were sane. Listening, Ben went on stirring the can.

Roberto tilted his head up. “Each time they take the gourd to the top of a long ladder and break it open. The ashes fall and cover the earth.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Then let me set your mind at ease. I’ve seen what they’re making, and it’s not a gourd of ashes. Let me get you those bus tickets.”

“There’s more.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“In my dream there was a giant.”

“How about train tickets?”

“As soon as I met you, I knew the giant was you.”

“Roberto.” Joe controlled himself. “Roberto, you’re a nice guy, bright, and I’m sure you’re sincere. But you’re playing medicine man in the middle of a war. Out in the real world, soldiers are dying, cities are burning, women are raped. What they’re trying to do on the Hill is to end the war. You and Ben insist on being buckskin loonies, okay, just don’t include me.”

“Hot!” Ben shoved a tin plate of stew at Joe.

“But the ashes will poison the clouds and the water and the ground and everything that lives on it. All the dreams are the same about that,” Roberto said.

“Sounds like scientific proof.” There were no forks. Joe picked up steaming, gray-green strips of beef with his fingers.

“They will erect a great ladder in the sky. Then, in my dream, a giant climbs the ladder.”

“Not bad,” Joe told Ben. “Starving helps. Just in
your
dream?” he added to Roberto.

“It’s not that I dream better; it’s that I can concentrate on dreams. Being blind helps. To me there’s not the same difference between day and night, awake and asleep. One leads to the other.”

“Dreams and reality?”

“Two sides of the same thing. Don’t you agree?”

“I would have said the major difference in the world right now is not being awake or being asleep, but being alive or being dead. And one doesn’t lead to the other like a hand to a glove. More like a stump to a glove.”
Joe put his plate down. “So don’t dream about a giant on a ladder. Dream about Japan. Dream yourself a hundred thousand dead men bobbing in the water. Dream red beaches, banzai charges, kamikazes, paper cities and B-29s. Put a meter on your dream. One million dead, two million, three. See, I don’t mind you dreaming; I just mind easy dreams.”

Well, I’m a bad guest, Joe thought. A pall had fallen over the dinner party. Ben looked as if he was choking. Either he was choking or he was angry.

“I have to catch a cutting in Santiago.” Joe rose to his feet. “That was your last warning. Good luck.”

Roberto lifted his sunken eyes. “All the same, you were in my dream,” he said.

Joe rode back on a moonlit ridge between canyons. Around was a seascape of ridges, a foam-brightness on the rocks and junipers. He still heard himself speaking, and Oppy’s words coming out: invasion casualties, kamikazes. It was the way he felt, but the words sounded like a formula. To give Roberto credit, he really didn’t talk about the war at all. He just cared about his precious pueblos; the rest of the world could go to hell. In return, Oppy appreciated Indians, as people from a time warp. Sophie was right, Joe thought; he didn’t seem to have his own words. As if there were no words for where he was, which was not Indian, not Oppy, in a no-world, on a high ridge, in the sweet light of the moon.

He came down off the ridge near an irrigation ditch
where alfalfa fields, flowered blue, rolled in the night breeze. After putting Crisis in the pasture, he carried saddle and tack to the Hill stable. There was still time to sign out a jeep and get down to Santiago to catch Felix cutting. He’d take a Geiger counter and check some cows as an excuse for the trip.

In the tack room, the saddlebags opened and spilled. Horses shifted in the stalls. He used his lighter. On the floor were boxes of horseshoe nails, bent snaffles, broken reins and two yellow zigzags. Lightning wands. Roberto must have put them in the saddlebags.

His first instinct was to burn them, but he was in a hurry. He stuffed them in his shirt and slipped out the stable door.

He still had the wands when he reached the motor pool. Keys were kept in the ignitions. In the back, he put a Geiger counter. Under a seat, he stowed the wands where he could reach them easily and throw them away on the road to Santiago.

Men sat on the top rail of the corral and shouted encouragement to boys in batwing chaps who chased calves in the dark. The cutting and branding was done at this hour because the work bus to the Hill left at dawn.

Two fires were going, one outside the corral for coffee, one inside for Felix Tafoya. The men at the coffee fire juggled mugs and shakers of salt to take Joe’s hand softly and say good morning. Inside, running after a calf, the boys gave Joe a quick glance. He noticed that the largest boy wore a homemade chevron sewed to his sleeve and tucked his bandanna in like an Army tie. Everyone in Santiago had a son or a nephew in the service and Joe knew he was not only a hero to them, but the walking possibility of coming home alive.

The calves were Herefords with cotton-white heads that looked like a herd of little floating ghosts. The boys lassoed, tackled and dragged them one by one to the fire. Wearing a leather apron over the coveralls that were his Hill uniform, Felix knelt by the coals, chose
a knife with a double-wrapped rawhide handle and honed the blade on his apron. Arms and hooves converged. The fire seemed to invest Felix with a magisterial glow.
“Coont-da, hitos!”
While the boys held the calf still, Felix squeezed the testes to the bottom of the sac, sliced and flung them into the coals, then doused the wound with kerosene. The bright orange dogleg of a running iron dug into the calf’s flank, and the smell of burning hair joined the odors of coffee and cow manure.

In his white suit and hat, Hilario Reyes came down the fence as nimbly as a lizard. “The Chief himself. See my boy yesterday? I hear he put out a fire and saved the whole Hill.”

“He looked good.”

“You mean great. What are you doing here?”

“The Army sends me to look over the cows. What’s the lieutenant governor of the State of New Mexico doing here?”

“I have great respect for the old-fashioned ways and traditions of the people here. You know, I’ve never missed a dance in Santiago. Most of all, I love the taste of balls.”

Hilario gave a grin of open, energetic venality before going to talk to the men gathered around the coffee fire—to check Joe’s reason for being at the corral, Joe assumed. Hilario liked being the fisherman, not the fish.

Joe leaned against the rail and watched the boy with the rope try a
peal
, a fancy throw designed to catch a calf’s hind feet. He caught the calf by the head instead
and almost flew out of his shoes and laces as the calf kept running.

Felix came over to the fence to offer Joe a stick skewering what looked like two burned chestnuts. “Joe, if you’re talking to Hilario, you need all the
guevos
you can get.”

Someone on the top rail threw a shaker of salt and Joe snatched it out of the dark.
“Coont-da!”

“Hilario’s friend didn’t stick around long,” Felix said. “He went to look at the old cows in the pen.”

Joe peeled back the blackened skin and liberally salted the pearly insides. It was an odd ceremony, the cutting of the calves and the redistribution of their bullhood around the corral. A secret male ceremony all the more effective for the early morning hour, something basic and shameful and powerful. The roasted testes had the texture of oysters and the flavor of nuts.

“Heroes will soon be a drug on the market.” Hilario returned. He wasn’t so much a lizard, Joe thought, as an incorrigibly evil elf. Even the white outfit had the bright aura of a bad fairy. “You won’t be able to swing a cane for heroes. All with their scars and ribbons and stories. See, I’m already gearing for the veterans’ vote. I’m going to be the vets’ friend, but first I’m going to be your friend.”

Felix laughed and went back to the branding fire, where the boys were wrestling with another calf.

“How are you going to do that?” Joe asked.

“Teach you how to measure your grip on reality. Profit is the only fair measure of reality. Market value,
Chief. The value of a has-been is not high, but I’m going to help you cash it in. I’m speaking of two thousand dollars in your hand right now.”

The ground around the branding fire was pulverized and dry. Boys and calf struggled in explosions of dust.

Two thousand dollars? That wouldn’t buy Bar Top and tablecloths for the Casa Mañana.

“Why?”

“There’s not a loyal native New Mexican who wouldn’t put his last dollar on you in the ring. Formerly eighth-ranked heavyweight in the world. A big night at the gym in Santa Fe, crowds of friends and well-wishers, lots of priests—they always tone up a fight. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the imminent end of the war than Chief Joe Peña’s farewell appearance.”

“I’m retired.”

“This is the Texas boy I’m talking about.”

“I look forward to improved relations between Texas and New Mexico.”

“Then let me ask you a question.” Hilario raised his voice so that everyone in the corral could hear. “Out of sheer curiosity. Could you beat him if you did fight him? Out of curiosity.”

Joe shrugged. Along the rail the men leaned forward, salt shakers and cigarettes in hand. Holding a knife, Felix looked up. Even the calf seemed to lie still.

“Because I think he’d kill you,” Hilario said. “Southpaw, ten years younger, ten years faster. You look soft and tired. You should be scared of the boy. It’s no fun getting beat up in public.”

“How does all this make you my friend?”

“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt without being properly paid.”

“You mean without you getting properly paid.”

“That, too.”

Joe shook out a cigarette and lit it. How washed up did he look? he wondered. He wished he’d paid more attention when the kid beat Ray. He remembered the figure swaggering away from the truck at D Building, rolling the wide shoulders, his fist high. He wished he’d seen the kid’s face. The face always said a lot more.

“Give me a straight answer,” Hilario said. “See, that’s what I mean by testing reality. Could you win?”

“Really?”

“That’s what we’re talking about.”

Joe still hesitated.

Hilario said, “Five thousand dollars, Joe. Side bets are up to you.”

“Ten thousand, winner take all.”

“You’re crazy. We’re talking about reality.”

“Uncle, the reality is that the war is over and the soldiers are going home. You’re an ant in the desert watching a picnic pack up. Does the kid think he can beat me?”

“He knows he can.”

“So winner take all should be fine with him.”

“Then the rest of the rules are mine. No priests, no gloves, no ring, no referee. Strictly a sporting event for
interested parties. Anyway, you know how to use a ring; you’d tie a faster man up in the ropes. A referee just gets in the way. I can keep time for rounds.”