The gypsy blew softly through his teeth. He studied the fire.
Y entonces que? said Billy.
He shook his head. As if the recollection of these things were a trial to him. Ultimately they had climbed out of the gorge and made their way out of the mountains as far as Sahuaripa and there they had waited until at last a truck came droning down the all but impassable road from Divisaderos and they rode in the bed of this truck for four days, sitting with shovels across their knees, shapeless with mud, climbing down times uncounted to dig and pitch in the muck like convicts while the driver shouted at them from the cab and then groaning on again. To Bacanora. To Tonichi. North again out of Nuri to San Nicolas and Yecora and on through the mountains to Temosachic and Madera where the man with whom they had first contracted would demand the return of the monies advanced them.
The gypsy pitched the stub of his cigarette into the fire and crossed his boots before him and drew them to him in his hands and sat leaning forward studying the flames. Billy asked him if the airplane had ever been found and he said that it had not for indeed there was nothing to find. Billy then asked him why they had returned to Madera at all and the man weighed this question. Finally he said that he did not believe that it was by chance that he had first met this man and been hired to go into the mountains nor was it chance that sent the rains and flooded the Papigochic. They sat. The tender of the pail rose a third time and stirred it and set it by to cool. Billy looked at the solemn faces about the fire. The bones beneath the olive skin. World wanderers. They squatted lightly there in that ring in the wood, at once vigilant and unconstrained. They stood in no proprietary relationship to anything, scarcely even to the space they occupied. Out of their anterior lives they had arrived at the same understanding as their fathers before them. That movement itself is a form of property. He looked at them and he said that the airplane they now freighted north along the road was then some other airplane.
The black eyes all shifted to the leader of their small clan. He sat for a long time. It was very quiet. Out on the road one of the oxen began to piss loudly. Finally he shaped his mouth and said that he believed that fate had intervened in the matter for its own good reasons. He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them at naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one's own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless. Billy then asked him if it was his notion that the false plane had been swept away by God in order to single out the true and the gypsy said that it was not. When Billy said that he had understood him to say that it was God who had ultimately made the decision concerning the two planes the gypsy said that he believed that to be so but he did not believe that by this act God had spoken to anyone. He said that he was not a superstitious man. The gypsies heard this out and then turned to Billy to see how he would respond. Billy said that it seemed to him that the freighters did not hold the identity of the airplane to be of any great consequence but the gitano only turned and studied him with those dark and troubled eyes. He said that it was indeed of consequence and that it was in fact the whole burden of their inquiry. From a certain perspective one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will. Yet the witness could not survive the witnessing. In the world that came to be that which prevailed could never speak for that which perished but could only parade its own arrogance. It pretended symbol and summation of the vanished world but was neither. He said that in any case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. For the world was made new each day and it was only men's clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.
La cascara no es la cosa, he said. It looked the same. But it was not.
Y la tercera historia? said Billy.
La tercera historia, said the gypsy, es esta. El existe en la historia de las historias. Es que ultimadamente la verdad no puede quedar en ningun otro lugar sino en el habla. He held his hands before him and looked at his palms. As if they may have been at some work not of his own doing. The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?
He looked toward the pail. The steam had ceased rising and he nodded and stood. Rafael rose and took up the musette bag and slung it over one shoulder and picked up the pail and all followed the gypsy up through the river woods to where the horse lay and there one of the men knelt and raised up the horse's head from the ground while Rafael took from the bag a leather funnel and a length of rubber hose and they gripped the horse's mouth and opened up its jaws while he greased the hose and ran it down the horse's gullet and twisted the funnel over the end and then they poured with no ceremony the contents of the pail into the horse.
When they had done the gypsy washed again the dried blood from the horse's chest and examined the wound and then dredged up a double handful of the cooked leaves from the floor of the bucket and packed them against the wound in a poultice which he bound up with burlap sacking and tied with cord over the horse's neck and behind its forelegs. When he was done he rose and stepped back and stood looking down at the animal with long contemplation. The horse looked very strange indeed. It half raised its head and blinked at them and then wheezed and stretched its neck in the leaves and lay there. Bueno, said the gypsy. He looked at Billy and smiled.
They stood in the road and the gitano pulled the brim of his hat down level and slid the scrimshawed length of birdbone which he used for a drawtie up under his chin and looked at the oxen and at the float and the airplane. He looked out through the trees to where the rolled soogan that held Boyd's body was wedged in the low branches of the tascate tree. He looked at Billy.
Estoy regresandole a mi pais, Billy said.
The gypsy smiled again and looked north along the road. Otros huesos, he said. Otros hermanos. He said that as a child he had traveled a good deal in the land of the gavacho. He said he'd followed his father through the streets of western cities and they collected odds of junk from the houses there and sold them. He said that sometimes in trunks and boxes they would come upon old photographs and tintypes. These likenesses had value only to the living who had known them and with the passage of years of such there were none. But his father was a gypsy and had a gypsy mind and he would hang these cracked and fading likenesses by clothespins from the cross wires above the cart. There they remained. No one ever asked about them. No one wished to buy them. After a while the boy took them for a cautionary tale and he would search those sepia faces for some secret thing they might divulge to him from the days of their mortality. The faces became very familiar to him. By their antique clothing they were long dead and he pondered them where they sat posed on porchsteps, seated in chairs in a yard. All past and all future and all stillborn dreams cauterized in that brief encapture of light within the camera's closet. He searched those faces. Looks of vague discontent. Looks of rue. Perhaps some burgeoning bitterness at things in fact not yet come to be which yet were now forever past.
His father said that the gorgios were an inscrutable lot and so he found them to be. In and out of all depicting. The photographs that hung from the wire became for him a form of query to the world. He sensed in them a certain power and he guessed that the gorgios considered them bad luck for they would scarcely look at them but
the truth was darker yet as truth is wont to be.
What he came to see was that as the kinfolk in their fading stills could have no value save in another's heart so it was with that heart also in another's in a terrible and endless attrition and of any other value there was none. Every representation was an idol. Every likeness a heresy. In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased. This was what his father meant to tell him and this was why they were men of the road. This was the why of the yellowing daguerreotypes swinging by their clothespegs from the cross-wire of his father's cart.
He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive.
He smiled. Pensamos, he said, que somos las victimas del tiempo. En realidad la via del mundo no es fijada en ningun lugar. Como seria posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo tambien. Somos lo mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapiadado.
He turned and spoke in romany to the others and one of them took a bullwhip from the keepers nailed to the sideboards of the float and uncoiled it and sent it looping through the air where the crack of it echoed like a gunshot in the woods and the caravan lurched into motion. The gypsy turned and smiled. He said that perhaps they would meet again upon some other road for the world was not so wide as men imagined. When Billy asked him how much he owed him for his services he dismissed the debt with a wave of his hand. Para el camino, he said. Then he turned and set off up the road after the others. Billy stood holding the thin sheaf of bloodstained banknotes he'd taken from his pocket. He called out to the gypsy and the gypsy turned.
Gracias, he called.
The gypsy raised one hand. Por nada.
Yo no soy un hombre del camino.
But the gypsy only smiled and waved one hand. He said that the way of the road was the rule for all upon it. He said that on the road there were no special cases. Then he turned and strode on after the others.
IN THE EVENING the horse rose and stood on trembling legs. He did not halter it but only walked alongside the animal out to the river where it stepped very carefully into the water and drank endlessly. In the evening while he was fixing his supper from the tortillas and goatcheese the gypsies had left him a rider came along the road. Solitary. Whistling. He stopped among the trees. Then he came on more slowly.
Billy stood and walked out to the road and the rider halted and sat his horse. He pushed his hat back slightly, the better to see, the better to be seen. He looked at Billy and at the fire and at the horse lying in the woods beyond.
Buenas tardes, said Billy.
The rider nodded. He was riding a good horse and he wore good boots and a good Stetson hat and he was smoking a small black puro. He took the puro out of his mouth and spat and put it back.
You speak american? he said.
Yessir. I do.
I thought you looked about halfway sensible. What the hell are you doin out here? What's wrong with that horse?
Well sir, I guess I'm mindin my own business. I reckon I could even say the same about the horse.
The man paid no attention. He aint dead is he?
No. He aint. He got cut by roadagents.
Cut by roadagents?
Yessir.
You mean they nutted him?
No. I mean they stabbed him in the chest with a pigsticker.
Whatever in the hell for?
You tell me.
I dont know.
Well I dont either.
The rider sat smoking contemplatively. He looked out across the landscape to the west of the river. I dont understand this country, he said. Not the first thing about it. You aint got any coffee anywheres about your person I dont reckon?
I got some perkin. You want to light I got some supper fixin. It aint much but you're welcome.
Well I'd take it as a kindness.
He stepped down wearily and passed the bridlereins behind his back and adjusted his hat again and came forward leading the horse. Not the first damn thing, he said. Did you see my airplane come through here?
They squatted by the fire as the woods darkened and they waited for the coffee to boil. I never would of thought about them gypsies stickin the way they done, the man said. I had my doubts about em. One thing about me, when I'm wrong I'll admit it.
Well. That's a good trait to have.
Yes it is.
They ate the beans rolled up in the tortillas together with the melted cheese. The cheese was rank and goaty. Billy lifted the lid from the coffeepot with a stick and looked in and put the lid back. He looked at the man. The man was seated tailorwise on the ground holding the soles of his boots together with one hand.
You look like you might of been down here a while, the man said.
I dont know. What does that look like?
Like you need to get back.
Well. You probably right about that. This is my third trip. It's the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after. But it sure as hell wasnt what I wanted.
The man nodded. He didnt seem to need to know what that was. I'll tell you what, he said. It will be one cold day in hell when you catch me down here again. A frosty son of a bitch. I'll tell you that flat out.
Billy poured the coffee. They drank. The coffee was vilely hot in the tin cups but the man seemed not to notice. He drank and sat looking out through the dark woods toward the river and the silver panels of the river plaited over the gravel bars in the moonlight. Downriver the nacre bowl of the moon sat swaged into the reefs of cloud like a candled skull. He flipped the dregs of coffee into the darkness. I better get on, he said.
You welcome to stay.
I enjoy to ride of a night.
Well.
I believe a man can even cover more ground.
There's robbers all in this country, Billy said.
Robbers, the man said. He contemplated the fire. After a while he took one of the thin black cigars from his pocket and studied that. Then he bit the tip from it and spat it into the fire.
You smoke cigars?
I aint never took it up.
It aint against your religion?
Not that I know of.
The man leaned and pulled a burning billet from the fire and lit the cigar with it. It took some lighting to get it to burn. When he had it going he put the piece of wood back in the fire and blew a smoke ring and then blew a smaller one through the center of it.
What time did they leave out of here? he said.
I dont know. Noon maybe.
They wont make ten mile.
It might of been later.
Ever time I lay over somewheres they have a breakdown. They aint failed a time. My own fault. I keep gettin sidetracked by them senoritas. I liked them mamselles over yonder awful well too. I like it when they dont speak no english. Did you get over there?
No.
He reached into the fire and took out the stick he'd used to light his cigar and whipped away the flame and then turned and drew in the dark behind him with the red and smoldering end of it like a child. After a while he put it back in the fire again.
How bad's your horse? he said.
I dont know. He's been down two days.
You ought to of got that gypsy to see about him. They're supposed to know everthing there is about a horse.
Is that right?
> I dont know. I know they're good at makin a sick one look well long enough to sell it.
I aint lookin to sell it.
I'll tell you what you better do.
What's that?
Keep this here fire built up.
Why is that.
Mountain lions is why. Horsemeat's their favorite kind.
Billy nodded. I always heard that, he said.
You know why you always heard it?
Why I always heard it?
Yeah.
No. Why?
Cause it's right is why.
You think most of what a man hears is right?
That's been my experience.
It aint been mine.
The man sat smoking and contemplating the fire. After a while he said: It aint been mine neither. I just said that. I wasnt over yonder like I said neither. I'm a four-F. Always was, always will be.
Did those gypsies bring that airplane out of the sierras and down the Papigochic River?
Is that what they said?
Yeah.
That airplane come out of a barn on the Taliafero Ranch out of Flores Magon. It couldnt even fly where you're talkin about. The ceiling on that plane aint but six thousand feet.
Was the man that flew it killed in it?
Not that I know of.
Was that why you come down here? To find that plane and take it back?
The Crossing Page 41