The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  First he got his tinder, crumbling old leaves in his hand until they were powdery. There were ticks in them, he stared at the little reddish forms. How had they got here? Come out with a muskrat, maybe.

  Now for a trick he’d heard of years ago on the Ohio. He had to find a drop of rain, a drop of dew. He looked: the outer leaves were dusty and dry; there hadn’t been any rain.

  He shrugged. There had to be one somewhere.

  He found it, on a reed, deep down in the cleft. A spot the sun hadn’t reached.

  Maybe it’s clear enough. Maybe. …

  He carried it, carefully, gently. Keep it from breaking. If it runs off, your lens is gone. The old men said this worked for them. The old men, full of Indian tales. Remembering for themselves or remembering for their grandfathers. Stories of men left for dead coming back to kill their killers and sew their own scalps back on again.

  Shaking old men. Sitting out in front of Anderson’s grocery, sitting in the sun. Showing small boys the tricks of skinning. Skin a squirrel before you can turn your hand— watch me, nothing to it when you know how to start. Dress a deer, not much work when you know; you only want to keep the best parts anyway. … Do it the Indian way. Learned it when I was living with that squaw. … Stories from themselves or their fathers, stories that came from everywhere.

  Oliver hoped they were right.

  He put aside his drop of dew and began collecting the other necessary things while mosquitoes swarmed his ears and rubbed their wings against his cheek. Tiny twigs, laid out in a straight line, warming on the white shells. Next the bed of tinder. Finally the puffballs. The old men said you had to have puffballs.

  He searched through his shirt pockets, pulling out the lint that had lodged in their corners, shredding the matted bits with his fingernails until he had a puffball about the size of his palm.

  With his pocketknife he ripped a seam and unraveled the threads, his fingers moving clumsily. He accumulated a small snarl of broken threads, took that and his puffball of lint and put them both on the small heap of crumbled-leaf tinder.

  He got his drop of water, separated the leaves surrounding it, lifted it clear on a single green shaft. His lens. Hunkered down, one hand bracing the other, unmoving, steady, he held the tiny spot of white light on the lint. Perfectly still. Perfectly quiet.

  The old men said it would work. The old men said they had done it.

  He’d forgotten to cover his head. Mosquitoes swarmed against his face and neck. He could feel their stingers, but he couldn’t move. He pretended that the back of his neck wasn’t connected to him at all. To hell with it, he told himself. I’m not up there, I’m down here in my hands, and my fingers. … There were mosquitoes on his hands, he could see five or six, no, seven, heads down, needles sucking. … I’m not there either, he thought. I’m in the drop, the lens, I’m in the sun that’s falling on it. …

  It began as a little stir in the lint. He blinked rapidly to clear the mosquitoes from his eyes, willing a flame, forcing a flame. At first it was just a stir, like an insect inside, moving sluggishly. He kept staring at the white-hot spot of sunlight. A squirm. A distinct squirm.

  It was working, the tiny white sun’s eye.

  More movement. A kind of flutter. The light lint color was beginning to darken. Now a thread of smoke and tiny red coals that ran and hid beneath the puffball, like beetles escaping. Still holding the lens steady, he began blowing. Between his teeth, ever so coaxing. As if he were blowing in a woman’s ear.

  He could see the shape of that ear. His eyes could trace the little curling pink channels. His breath moved along them, gentler than any touch, and more insistent.

  The tiny coals became bits of flame. The leaves snapped. He began to feed his fire, little yellow live things. Babies, that he would feed. I nurse them. Titless, I nurse them with wood.

  He built his fire bigger and bigger, ending with whole dry limbs in an arch above it. He tossed in handfuls of moss from the oaks—to make a smudge. His eyes stung, tears ran down his face, but the mosquitoes left.

  He found a shady place with a slight grade so that his head was comfortably lifted. He scraped it clean with the back of his machete and stretched out, staring up at the sky which was filled with his pillar of smoke.

  He woke with the feeling that somebody was watching him. His machete was under his hand, ready.

  It was an old man, small and slight, with toothless fallen cheeks and a shotgun held carefully across his body. Behind him, crouched inside the rough brown shell of a pirogue, was a boy. He seemed about ten; his swollen belly pushed open his buttonless shirt; his bulging navel stuck out like a small pointing finger.

  Oliver said: “You always walk up on people like that?”

  The old man’s eyes were a very pale blue and his face was the color of oak bark. With a jerk of his head he beckoned to the boy, who immediately stood beside him.

  “Don’t you talk?” Oliver asked.

  The boy said, “He don’t talk English.”

  Oliver shrugged. “What does he talk?”

  “French,” the boy said, “but I speak English, me.”

  Oliver yawned.

  The boy said, “My father, he want to know why you are here?”

  “That’s your father?” Oliver thought: Old bastard got more life in him than shows on the surface.

  “He want to know why you have a signal fire?”

  “For mosquitoes . . . you close by?”

  “Là-bas.” The old man gave a backward jerk of his head.

  “That way,” the boy said.

  “He sure understands English,” Oliver said.

  “Like hell,” the old man repeated. There wasn’t the slightest flicker across his shrunken face.

  The boy asked, “Why are you here where only my father traps?”

  “I sure ain’t trapping.” Oliver began rubbing the mosquito welts on the backs of his hands. They seemed worse than the others. “And I’ll tell you.” Oliver balanced between a truth and a lie and decided for the truth. “I jumped ship.”

  The old man nodded. The boy said: “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Where is the ship?”

  “How the hell do I know? In the river somewhere.”

  The old man spoke again, quickly, muffling the words in the back of his throat.

  Oliver thought: Even if I knew the language, I couldn’t understand him. Not a tooth left in his head.

  The boy said, “My father, he asks two more thing.”

  “What?”

  “What are you going?”

  “You mean where. New Orleans.”

  “Do men come after you?”

  Oliver looked at the shrunken young face that was, except for the eyes, exactly like the shrunken old one. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so, but maybe.”

  The old man took one hand from the gun and pointed to the pirogue. Oliver looked at the boy.

  “You can come,” the boy said.

  There was only one place in the pirogue—in the bow— the boy sat in the middle, the old man in the stern. Unaccustomed to the delicate balance, Oliver sent shivers all along the hull, water sloshing over the sides.

  “Still,” the boy said sharply. “Sit still.”

  Oliver held himself motionless. The water was barely an inch below the gunwales as the old man picked up a paddle. With its first bite the pirogue danced sideways, a wild sudden motion. With the second it steadied, began to make way. By the fourth stroke they were moving rapidly through the water, so rapidly that an occasional wave slapped over the bow and drained into the little stagnant pool at their feet.

  They slipped through channels barely wide enough for their passage. The old man turned one way, then another.

  How does he know, Oliver thought. He can’t see any more than I can.

  They came to a wide clear channel, like a small river, some thirty feet from side to side. Oliver thought he felt a slight current, then decided he was wrong. A
water moccasin swam past; from his black head the water streamed out in a V. The old man paddled steadily.

  Oliver said: “Tell your father I don’t have much money but I will give it all to him if he will take me to a road or somewhere I can make my way to the city.”

  While the boy translated—apparently that was too long a sentence for the old man to understand—Oliver thought of his stuffed money belt. If they knew how much he had—he grinned out at the tassel-topped reeds—they would kill him for it. He must look dirt poor or he would not be alive now.

  The boy behind him said: “How much you got?”

  “You want it now?” He stalled, thinking. What would they expect? How poor did he look? He had to keep them away from his belt. “Maybe it won’t be enough for you.”

  “How much?” the boy repeated.

  Oliver decided. “I got a twenty-dollar gold piece in the lining of my coat and four silver ones. You can have the gold.”

  “Now,” the old man said.

  Oliver turned around, deliberately clumsy. The pirogue lurched, the boy grabbed for the sides, the old man’s paddle stabbed at the glassy water. “I start taking off my coat and we are all going to be in the water for sure.”

  The old man took a moment to translate the words to himself. Then he nodded. His paddle dug into the water again, the bow wave folded along the wooden sides.

  THEY STOPPED at a large chênière. In the oak grove, twisted and salt-burned, was a tin-roofed house, raised high on stilts. While Oliver rubbed the ache out of the back of his knees—and the boy stood grinning at him—he saw that it wasn’t a solid house, just a camp with patched roof and big gaps around the shutterless windows. But the yard was swept clean, and four or five chickens roosted under the sagging porch.

  “Get me some water,” Oliver said to the boy.

  He sat down on the bottom step, dropped his machete and his coat beside him, and waited. The boy brought a tin bucket and a dipper.

  Soon as his lips touched the water, Oliver realized how cracked they were. How swollen his tongue. (Why didn’t I notice before? Why didn’t I?) He put the dipper down and drank from the bucket.

  He was sweating when he stopped, cold pouring sweat, and his head was swinging dizzily.

  The boy squatted beside him, his brown shrunken face not two feet away.

  Oliver told him: “You know they got gods in Mexico, little gods that look just like you.”

  The boy squinted, not understanding.

  Oliver rubbed his neck and shoulders. He was certain that someone watched from inside the house, but he didn’t turn his head.

  The boy said: “Tía is coming.”

  “Yeah?” Oliver continued to stare away off over the marshes to the far-off glint of horizon.

  “Tía,” the boy repeated.

  “I heard you,” Oliver said. “Who’s Tía? Your mama?”

  The boy shook his head. “She’s been dead. This is Tía.”

  Oliver turned his head, following the boy’s finger. The first thing he saw was her legs. They were brown and thick and young. They were furred with black hair, and spattered with dirt. Her toenails were long and thick as horn, and the calloused bottom skin wrapped way up around the side of her foot. He looked at the rest of her, a young woman in a sun-bleached pink dress that still held its dark color at the seams. She had short curly black hair, pale blue eyes and a baby on her hip. While Oliver watched, the infant, who was naked except for a small short shirt, urinated. The stream shot out for a couple of feet, dripped through the porch boards. Under the house, chickens scratched and clucked.

  “I come to see who was making the smoke.” She had a high-pitched singsong voice that reminded him of the Chinese women in Singapore.

  “You talk English too.”

  The old man finished at the pirogue and came toward the house, carrying a couple of ducks and a big redfish in his hand. He handed them to the girl without a word. She hung them, like the baby, from her hip.

  Oliver thought: The fish eyes look just exactly like the baby’s eyes.

  He was still bothered by the sense of another person behind him, of another breathing just the other side of the thin house walls. But there wasn’t any point in showing that he noticed. Let them think he was dense and sick with exhaustion.

  But not too much. Or they might just figure it was easier to kill him.

  Tía shifted the baby to the crook of her arm. The old man gave her the knife from his belt. She went to the edge of the water and began cleaning the duck. She worked very quickly.

  Oliver ripped open his coat seam. Four silver dollars and a small thin twenty-dollar gold piece fell into his open palm. “Where’s the nearest road?”

  The old man said, “Pointe la Gauche.”

  “I’ll go there.” Oliver stood up. Behind him in the house a sudden movement echoed his own.

  “Now?” The old man stared out at the marsh.

  “Look,” Oliver lied, “I got friends looking for me and I got to find them. I built that fire so they’d see me.”

  The old man thought a minute, then nodded.

  As they walked away from the house, Oliver put a hand to the boy’s shoulder, “I get dizzy,” he said in explanation. That way he always managed to keep the boy’s body between him and the house. Whoever that is has any idea of shooting, he’s going to have to risk hitting the boy. And to make himself an even smaller target, Oliver doubled up, holding his stomach, pretending cramps. He let his eyes run over the house, carefully. He saw nothing, but then he couldn’t see into the dark windows.

  When they were inside the marsh again, away from the house, with the old man paddling steadily, Oliver released the boy, “I’m all right.” The child scrambled into the bow. The pirogue hardly vibrated, his balance was so good.

  Oliver reached into his pocket and took out the coins, very carefully. He put the four silver dollars in his left hand, and the single twenty-dollar gold piece in his right. He closed both fists firmly over them, and rested his hands on the gunwales of the pirogue, so that the coins were only slightly above water.

  The boy’s eyes flickered, and his face got a curious knowing look.

  “You see? Anything happens to me, like that old man behind me, and plop the twenty dollars goes over the side. How deep’s the water around here?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Don’t matter. You think you be able to find a little round piece of gold in the mud on the bottom?”

  The boy shook his head again, looking over Oliver’s shoulder to the old man in the stern.

  “I want to see that town,” Oliver said.

  It took nearly four hours. Oliver smelled the town long before he saw it. Distinctly, like a long streamer over the sulphurous smell of the marshes, he recognized garbage, and the smell of people.

  Pointe la Gauche had five or six houses, on stilts against storm waters, each with its own boat landing. There were a couple of oaks and a few chinaball trees and one or two oleanders, their dark green leaves shining dully in the late sun. Behind the buildings was a narrow shell road.

  “That the road to New Orleans?”

  The boy nodded without turning his head. He was watching a cat fishing, its black paw held motionless just under the surface of the water.

  The old man drove the pirogue into the bank. The cat pulled her paw out of the water, flicking it dry.

  “Every time we come here,” the boy said, “she is sitting there. And I never see her catch any fish.”

  “Shrimp,” the old man said abruptly, “she look for shrimp, her.”

  Oliver swung around and looked at him. “I kind of thought you spoke English, you old bastard.”

  “Huh …” His hand shot out, palm upward.

  Oliver opened his own clenched fist so that the tiny gold piece dropped into the brown leather mitt.

  The old man looked at it, shining in the late sun. He poked at it, clumsily turned it over. In his big hands it looked very small and very thin.


  “It’s worth twenty dollars,” Oliver said.

  The old man nodded. “Sais ça.”

  The coin seemed brighter for the time it spent in the seam of his coat. “I got that in Vera Cruz,” Oliver said. “I was matching with a big fat Mexican. When he lost, he cried and then tried to knife me.”

  The boy nodded and pointed to a scar on the old man’s face. “A knife too.”

  “Some fight, huh?”

  “He is too old to fight much,” the boy said. “So my brother, he went back the next day.”

  “You got a brother?” That explained the movements in the house behind him.

  The boy nodded. “And that Mexican, he had friends?”

  “I don’t know,” Oliver said. “My ship left the next day.”

  The boy chuckled. “Against his coin, what did you match?”

  “Me? I put up the girl I was with.”

  The boy looked unbelieving.

  “If you’d seen her, you wouldn’t think it was too much.”

  The old man was listening, frowning a little in his effort to understand.

  Oliver said: “I used to wonder sometimes what happened after that. He got her, I guess. He owned the cafe and the hotel. He could afford her.”

  He reached into the pirogue and pulled out his coat and his machete. “Why’d your brother hide in the house?”

  The child’s face went blank. “I don’t understand.”

  The pirogue swung off. Oliver watched until it disappeared into the reeds, leaving not even a trace of wake in the bayou water. He began to wonder if all his precautions had been necessary, if he hadn’t just made a fool of himself. Nothing had happened, nothing had been threatened. … Still, he was alive, and he was going to stay that way.

  He picked up his stuff and headed into the cluster of houses.

  HE WALKED PART OF the way to New Orleans, methodically plodding hour after hour through the summer dust, past orange groves and pastures, and farms, and swamps. And part of the way he rode—in wagons and carts and even once in a black buggy, a bouncy two-seater. The driver was a middle-aged fat man named Pérez, who talked steadily, interrupting himself occasionally to push at his lower belly. “Busted gut,” he explained each time, and went immediately back to his talk. “Mosquitoes, they are terrible, my friend.”