Pobrecito, the girl said.
Billy spat into the dry grass. He said that the arriero was probably lying and besides he was only a drunk and she should not have given him money. Then he got up and walked out to where the horses were standing and buckled the latigo and took up the reins and mounted up and rode out up through the town toward the railroad tracks and the road north without even looking back to see if she would follow.
In the three days' riding that took them to San Diego she spoke hardly at all. The last night she had wanted to keep riding on in the dark to reach the ejido but he would not. They camped on the river some miles south of Mata Ortiz and he built a fire of driftwood on a gravel bar in the river and she cooked the last of the dried beans and tortillas which was all the rations they'd had to eat since they left Las Varas. They ate seated across from each other while the fire burned down to a frail basket of coals and the moon rose in the east and overhead very high and very faint they could hear the calls of birds moving south and they could see them trail in slender cipherings across the deeply smoldering western rim and into the dusk and the darkness beyond.
Las grullas llegan, she said.
He watched them. The cranes were moving south and he watched their thin echelons trail along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years. He watched them until they were gone and the last thin fluted cry like a child's horn floated away on the night's onset and then she rose and took her serape and walked off down the gravel bar and vanished among the cottonwoods.
They rode across the plankwood bridge and up to the old hacienda at noon the day following. People stood all along in the doorways of the domicilios who should have been in the fields and he realized that it was some feastday of the calendar. He rode past her and pulled the horse up in front of the Munoz door and dismounted and dropped the reins and pulled off his hat and ducked and entered the low doorway.
Boyd was sitting on the pallet with his back against the wall. The flame of the votive candle heeled about in the glass above his head and swathed as he was in his wraps of sheeting he looked like someone sat suddenly upright at his own vigil. The mute dog had been lying down and it stood and moved against him. Donde estabas? Boyd said. He wasnt talking to his brother. He was talking to the girl who came smiling through the doorway behind him.
THE NEXT DAY he rode out down the river and he was gone all day. High thin skeins of wildfowl were moving downcountry and leaves were falling in the river, willow and cottonwood, coiling and turning in the current. Their shadows where they skated over the river stones looked like writing. It was dark when he returned, riding the horse up through the smoke of the cookfires from pool to pool of light like a mounted sentry posted to patrol the watchfires of a camp. In the days to follow he worked with the herders, driving sheep down from the hills and through the high vaulted gate of the compound where the animals milled and climbed against each other and the esquiladores stood at the ready with their shears. They drove the sheep half a dozen at a time into the highceilinged and ruinous storeroom and the esquiladores stood them between their knees and clipped them by hand and young boys gathered the wool up from off the raincupped boards of the floor and stamped it into the long cotton bags with their feet.
It was cool in the evening and he would sit by the fire and drink coffee with the ejiditarios while the dogs of the compound moved from fire to fire scavenging for scraps. By now Boyd was riding out in the evening, sitting the horse stiffly and riding at a walk with the girl riding Nino close beside him. He'd lost his hat in the fray on the river and he wore an old straw hat they'd found for him and a shirt made from striped ticking. After they'd come back Billy would walk out to where the horses were hobbled below the domicilios and ride Nino bareback down to the river and wade the horse out into the darkening shallows where he'd seen the naked duena at her bath and the horse would drink and raise its dripping muzzle and they would listen together to the river passing and to the sound of ducks somewhere on the water and sometimes the high thin cranking of the flights of cranes still passing south a mile above the river. He rode down the far bank in the twilight and he could see in the river loam among the cottonwoods the tracks of the horses where Boyd had passed and he followed the tracks to see where they had gone and he tried to guess the thoughts of the rider who had made them. When he walked back up to the compound it was late and he entered the low door and sat on the pallet where his brother lay sleeping.
Boyd, he said.
His brother woke and turned and lay in the pale candlelight and looked up at him. It was warm in the room from the day's heat seeping back out of the mud walls and Boyd was naked to the waist. He'd taken the wrapping from about his chest and he was paler than his brother could ever remember and so thin with the rack of his ribs stark against the pale skin and when he turned in the reddish light Billy could see the hole in his chest for just a moment and he turned his eyes away like a man unwittingly made privy to some secret thing to which he was in no way entitled, for which he was in no way prepared. Boyd pulled the muslin cover up and lay back and looked at him. His long pale uncut hair all about him and his face so thin. What is it? he said.
Talk to me.
Go to bed.
I need for you to talk to me.
It's okay. Everthing's okay.
No it aint.
You just worry about stuff. I'm all right.
I know you are, said Billy. But I aint.
THREE DAYS LATER when he woke in the morning and walked out they were gone. He walked out to the end of the row and looked down toward the river. His father's horse standing in the field raised its head and looked at him and looked out down the road toward the river and the river bridge and the road beyond.
He got his things from the house and saddled the horse and rode out. He said goodbye to no one. He sat the horse in the road beyond the river cottonwoods and he looked off downcountry at the mountains and he looked to the west where thunderheads were standing sheared off from the thin dark horizon and he looked at the deep cyanic sky taut and vaulted over the whole of Mexico where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of men. He turned the horse and set out along the road south, shadowless in the gray day, riding with the shotgun unscabbarded across the bow of the saddle. For the enmity of the world was newly plain to him that day and cold and inameliorate as it must be to all who have no longer cause except themselves to stand against it.
He looked for them for weeks but he found only shadow and rumor. He found the little heartshaped milagro in the watch-pocket of his jeans and he hooked it out with his forefinger and held it in the palm of his hand and he studied it long and long. He rode as far south as Cuauhtemoc. He rode north again to Namiquipa but could find no one who owned to know the girl and he rode as far west as La Nortena and the watershed and he grew thin and gaunted in his travels and pale with the dust of the road but he never saw them again. He sat the horse at dawn in the crossroads at Buenaventura and watched waterfowl trailing over the river and the lonely lagunas, the dark liquid movement of their wings against the red sunrise. He passed back north through the small mud hamlets of the mesa, through Alamo and Galeana, settlements through which he'd passed before and where his return was remarked upon by the poblanos so that his own journeying began to take upon itself the shape of a tale. It was cold at night on the high plains in these early days of December and he had little to keep him warm. When he rode once more into Casas Grandes he'd not eaten in two days and it was past midnight and a cold rain falling.
He rapped long at the zaguan gates. Toward the rear of the house a dog barked. Finally a light came on.
When the mozo opened the gate and looked out to see him standing there in the rain holding the horse he did not seem surprised. He asked after his brother and Billy said that his brother had recovered from his wounds but that he had disappeared and he apologized for the hour but wished to know if he might see the doctor. The mozo said that th
e hour was of no consequence for the doctor was dead.
He didnt ask the mozo when had the doctor died or of what cause. He stood with his hat and held it in both hands before him. Lo siento, he said.
The mozo nodded. They stood there in silence and then the boy put on his hat and turned and put one foot into the stirrup and stood up into the saddle and sat the dark wet horse and looked down at the mozo. He said that the doctor had been a good man and he looked off down the street toward the lights of the town and he looked again at the mozo.
Nadie sabe lo que le espera en este mundo, said the mozo.
De veras, the boy said.
He nodded and touched his hat and turned and rode back down the darkened street.
IV
HE CROSSED THE BORDER at Columbus New Mexico. The guard in the gateshack studied him briefly and waved him through. As if he saw his like too often these days to be in doubt about him. Billy halted the horse anyway. I'm an American, he said, if I dont look like it.
You look like you might of left some bacon down there, the guard said.
I aint come back rich, that's for sure.
I guess you come back to sign up.
I reckon. If I can find a outfit that'll have me.
You neednt to worry about that. You aint got flat feet have you?
Flat feet?
Yeah. You got flat feet they wont take you.
What the hell are you talkin about?
Talkin about the army.
Army?
Yeah. The army. How long you been gone anyways?
I dont have no idea. I dont even know what month this is.
You dont know what's happened?
No. What's happened?
Hell fire, boy. This country's at war.
He took the long straight clay road north to Deming. The day was cold and he wore the blanket over his shoulders. The knees were out of his trousers and his boots were falling apart. The pockets which had hung by threads from his shirt he'd long ago torn off and thrown away and the back of the shirt where it had separated was sewn with a gave and the collar of his jacket had separated and the shredded facing stood about his neck like some tawdry sort of lace and gave him the improbable look of a ruined dandy. The few cars that passed gave him all the berth that narrow road afforded and the people looked back at him through the rolling dust as if he were a thing wholly alien in that landscape. Something from an older time of which they'd only heard. Something of which they'd read. He rode all day and he crossed in the evening through the low foothills of the Florida Mountains and he rode on across the upland plain into the dusk and into the dark. In that dark he passed a file of five horsemen riding south back the way he'd come and he spoke to them in Spanish and wished them a good evening and they spoke back to him each one in their soft voices as they passed. As if the closeness of the dark and the straitness of the way had made of them confederates. Or as if only there would confederates be found.
He rode into Deming at midnight and rode the main street from one end to the other. The horse's shoeless hooves clapping dully on the blacktop in the silence. It was bitter cold. Nothing was open. He spent the night in the bus station at the corner of Spruce and Gold, sleeping on the tile floor wrapped in the filthy serape with his warbag for a pillow and the stained and filthy hat over his face. The sweatblackened saddle stood against the wall along with the shotgun in its scabbard. He slept with his boots on and he got up twice in the night and went out to see about his horse where he'd left it tethered to a lampstandard by the catchrope.
In the morning when the cafe opened he went up to the counter and asked the woman where you went to join the army. She said that the recruiting office was at the armory on South Silver Street but she didnt think they'd be open this early.
Thank you mam, he said.
You want some coffee?
No mam. I aint got no money.
Set down, she said.
Yes mam.
He sat on one of the stools and she brought him a cup of coffee in a white china mug. He thanked her and sat drinking it. After a while she came from the grill and set a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him and a plate of toast.
Dont tell nobody where you got it, she said.
The recruiting office was closed when he got there and he was waiting on the steps with two boys from Deming and a third from an outlying ranch when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the door.
They stood in front of his desk. He studied them.
Which one of you all aint eighteen, he said.
No one answered.
They's usually about one in four and I see four recruits in front of me.
I aint but seventeen, Billy said.
The sergeant nodded. Well, he said. You'll have to get your mama to sign for you.
I dont have no mama. She's dead.
What about your daddy?
He's dead too.
Well you'll have to get your next of kin. Uncle or whatever. He'll need to get a notarized statement.
I dont have no next of kin. I just got a brother and he's youngern me.
Where do you work at?
I dont work nowheres.
The sergeant leaned back in his chair. Where are you from? he said.
From over towards Cloverdale.
You got to have some kin.
Not that I know of I dont.
The sergeant tapped his pencil on the desk. He looked out the window. He looked at the other boys.
You all want to join the army? he said.
They looked at one another. Yessir, they said.
You dont sound real sure.
Yessir, they said.
He shook his head and swiveled his chair and rolled a printed form into his typewriter.
I want to join the cavalry, the boy from the ranch said. My daddy was in the cavalry in the last war.
Well son you just tell em when you get to Fort Bliss that that's what you want to do.
Yessir. Do I need to take my saddle with me?
You dont need to take a thing in the world. They're goin to look after you like your own mother.
Yessir.
He took their names and dates of birth and next of kin and their addresses one by one and he signed four mealvouchers and gave them to them and he gave them directions to the doctor's office where they were to get their physical examinations and he gave them the forms for that.
You all should be done and back here right after dinner, he said.
What about me? Billy said.
Just wait here. The rest of you all take off now. I'll see you back here this afternoon.
When they'd left the sergeant handed Billy his forms and his voucher.
You look there at the bottom of that second sheet, he said. That's a parental consent form. If you want to join this man's army you better bring it back with your mama's signature on it. If she has to come down from heaven to do it I dont have a problem in the world with that. You understand what I'm tellin you?
Yessir. I guess you want me to sign my dead mama's name on that piece of paper.
I didnt say that. Did you hear me say that?
No sir.
Go on then. I'll see you back here after dinner.
Yessir.
He turned and went out. There were people standing in the door behind him and they stood aside to let him pass.
Parham, the sergeant said.
He turned. Yessir, he said.
You come back here this afternoon now, you hear?
Yessir.
You aint got noplace else to go.
He walked across the street and untied his horse and mounted up and rode back up Silver Street and up West Spruce, holding the papers in his hand. All the streets east and west were trees, north and south minerals. He tied his horse in front of the Manhattan Cafe cattycorner from the bus station. Next to it was the Victoria Land and Cattle Company and two men in the narrowbrimmed hats and walkingheel boots that landowners wore were standing on the sidewalk talking. Th
ey looked at him when he passed and he nodded but they didnt nod back.
He slid into the booth and laid the papers on the table and looked at the menu. When the waitress came he started to order the plate lunch but she said that lunch didnt start till eleven oclock. She said he could get breakfast.
I've done eat one breakfast today.
Well we dont have no city ordinance about how many breakfasts you can eat.
How big of a breakfast can I get?
How big of a one can you eat?
I've got a mealticket from the recruitin office.
I know it. I see it layin yonder.
Can I get four eggs?
You just tell me how you want em.
She brought the breakfast on an oblong crockery platter with the four eggs over medium and a slice of fried ham and grits with butter and she brought a plate of biscuits and a small bowl of gravy.
You want anything else you let me know, she said.
All right.
You want a sweetroll?
Yes mam.
You need some more coffee?
Yes mam.
He looked up at her. She was about forty years old and she had black hair and bad teeth. She grinned at him. I like to see a man eat, she said.
Well, he said. You're lookin at one I believe ought to meet your requirements.
When he was done eating he sat drinking coffee and studying the form his mother was supposed to sign. He sat studying it and thinking about it and after a while he asked the waitress if she could bring him a fountainpen.
She brought it and handed it to him. Dont carry it off, she said. It aint mine.
I wont.
She left to go back to the counter and he bent over the form and wrote on the line Louisa May Parham. His mother's name was Carolyn.
When he walked out the other three boys were coming up the sidewalk toward the cafe. They were talking together like they'd all been friends forever. When they saw him they stopped talking and he spoke to them and asked them how they were doing and they said they were doing all right and entered the cafe.
The Crossing Page 33