Boyd, he said.
Yeah.
Are you ready to ride?
His brother sat up and looked out at the country. Yeah, he said.
We could head back north to the hacienda. The old lady would hide us out.
Till what?
I dont know.
We're supposed to meet her tomorrow.
I know it. It caint be helped.
How long would it take to ride to the hacienda?
I dont know. Let's go.
They set out north and rode till they came in view of the river. There were cattle grazing along the edge of the trees at the river breaks. They sat the horses and looked back across the rolling high prairie to the south.
Could you kill a cow with a shotgun? said Boyd.
Get close enough. Yeah.
What about with a pistol?
You'd have to get close enough to where you could hit it.
How close would you have to get?
We aint shootin no cow. Come on.
We got to eat somethin.
I know it. Come on.
When they reached the river they crossed through the shal?lows and looked for a road on the other side but there was no road. They followed the river north and in the early afternoon they rode into the pueblito of San Jose, a clutch of low and graylooking mud hovels. As they passed along the rutted track with their string of horses a few women peered warily from out of the low doorways.
What do you thinks wrong here? said Boyd.
I dont know.
Maybe they think we're gypsies.
Maybe they think we're horsethieves.
A goat watched them from a low roof with its agate eyes. Ay cabron, said Billy.
This is a hell of a place, said Boyd.
They found a woman to feed them and they sat on a mat of woven rushes on the clay floor and ate cold atole out of homemade bowls of unfired clay. When they wiped the bottoms of the bowls their tortillas came up gritty and stained with mud. They tried to pay the woman but she would take no money. Billy offered again for the ninos but she said there were no ninos.
They camped that night in a grove of cottonwoods by the river and staked out the horses in the river grass and they stripped off and swam in the river in the dark. The water was cold and silky. The dog sat on the bank and watched them. In the morning Billy rose before daybreak and walked out and unstaked Nino and led him back to camp and saddled him and mounted up with the shotgun. Where you goin? said Boyd. See if I can rustle us up somethin to eat. All right.
Just stay here. I wont be gone long. Where would I go?
I dont know.
What am I supposed to do if somebody comes?
There wont nobody come.
What if they do?
Billy looked at him. He was crouched with his blanket around his shoulders and he was so thin and ragged. He looked at him and he looked out past the pale boles of the cottonwoods and over the rolling desert grassland emerging in the gray dawnlight.
I guess what it is is you want me to leave you the pistol. I think it might be a good idea. Do you know how to shoot it? Yes, damn it.
It's got two safeties. I know it. All right. He took the pistol out of the bag and handed it down to him. There's one in the chamber.
All right.
Dont shoot it. That and what's in the clip is all the shells we got for it.
I aint goin to shoot it. All right.
How long will you be gone? I wont be gone long.
All right.
He rode off downriver with the shotgun across the bow of the saddle. He'd taken the buckshot shell from the chamber and rummaged through the shells in the bag and come up with a couple of number five shot and loaded the gun with one of them and buttoned the other into the pocket of his shirt. He rode slowly and he watched the river through the trees as he rode. A mile down he saw ducks on the water. He dismounted and dropped the reins and took the shotgun and began to stalk them through the shore willows. He took off his hat and laid it on the ground. The horse whinnied behind him and he looked back and swore at it under his breath and then raised up and looked out down the river. The ducks were still there. Three dark scaup motionless on the pewter calm of the tailwater. The mist rising off the river like smoke. He made his way carefully through the willows, crouching as he went. The horse nickered again. The ducks flew.
He stood up and looked back. Damn you, he said. But the horse was not looking at him. It was looking across the river. He turned and there he saw five men riding.
He dropped to his hands and knees. They were coming upriver singlefile through the trees on the far side. They had not seen him. The ducks wheeled overhead in the new sunlight and swung away downriver. The riders looked up, they rode on. Nino stood in plain sight among the willows but they did not see him and he did not whinny again and they passed on and disappeared upriver among the trees.
He rose and grabbed up his hat and jammed it on his head and walked carefully back out to where the horse stood that he not spook it and he caught the reins and mounted up and swung the horse around and put it into a lope.
He cut away from the river and made a swing out over the prairie. The upper branches of the cottonwoods were already in sunlight. He fished about in the mochila behind him as he rode trying to find the buckshot shell. He did not see the riders anywhere across the river and when he saw his own horses grazing at their stakeropes among the trees he turned toward the camp.
Boyd knew what was happening without he said a word and set off to get the horses. Billy swung down and grabbed their blankets and rolled and tied them. Boyd came up the river afoot at a run hazing the horses before him.
Get the ropes off of em, Billy called. We're goin to have to make a run for it.
Boyd turned. He put up one hand as if to reach for the first of the horses as they came up out of the trees and then his shirt belled out behind him redly and he fell down on the ground.
Billy knew afterward that he had seen the actual riflebullet. That the suck and whiff at his ear had been the bullet passing and that he had seen it for one frozen moment before his eyes with the sun on the side of the small revolving core of metal, the lead wiped bright by the rifling of the bore, slowed from having passed through his brother's body but still moving faster than sound and passing his left ear with the suck of the air like a whisper from the void and the small jar of the shockwave and then the bullet caroming off of a treebranch and singing away over the desert behind him that by a hairsbreadth had not carried his life away with it and then the sound of the shot come lagging after.
It rang out across the river lean and flat and echoed back from the desert. He was already running among the frantic and careening horses and he knelt and turned his brother over where he lay in the bloodstained dirt. Oh God, he said. Oh God.
He lifted his head out of the dust. His ragged shirt wet with blood. Boyd, he said. Boyd.
It hurts, Billy.
I know it.
It hurts.
The rifle cracked again from across the river. All of the horses had run out of the trees save Nino who stood stamping at the dropped reins. He turned toward the sound and raised one hand. No tire, he called. No tire. Nos rendimos. Nos rendimos aqui.
The rifle cracked again. He laid Boyd down and ran for the horse and caught the trailing reins just as the animal turned to quit the place. He hauled the horse around and trotted with it to where his brother lay and he stood on the reins while he picked his brother up and then he turned and pushed him up into the saddle and threw the reins over the horse's head and grabbed the pommel and swung up behind him and seized him around the waist where he sat tottering and leaned and dug his heels into Nino's belly.
Three more shots rang out as they came out of the trees and into the open country but by now he had put the horse into a gallop. His brother lolled against him all loose and bloody and he thought that he had died. He could see the other horses running on the plain before them. One of them had dropped back
and appeared to be injured. The dog was nowhere in sight.
The horse he overtook was Bailey and he had been shot just above the rear hock and when they passed him he stopped altogether. When Billy looked back he was just standing there. As if the heart had gone out of him.
He overtook the other two horses in the length of perhaps a mile and they fell in behind. When he looked back he could see all five horsemen on the plain coming hard after him in a thin line of dust, some of them whipping over and under, all carrying their rifles held out at their side, all of it clear and stark in the new morning sun. When he looked ahead he saw nothing but grass and the sporadic palmilla that dotted the plain stretching away to the blue sierras. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to stand. He whacked Nino with the heels of his boots. Bird and the Tom horse were already beginning to fall back and he turned and called to them. When he looked ahead again he saw in the distance a small dark form crossing the landscape left to right in a trail of dust and he knew that there was a road there.
He leaned forward clutching his brother to him and he talked to Nino and dug in with his heels under the horse's flanks and they went pounding over the empty plain with the stirrups flapping and kicking out. When he looked back Bird and the Tom horse were still with him and he knew that Nino was tiring under the double riders he carried. He thought that the horsemen behind had dropped back some and then he saw that one of them had stopped and he saw the white puff of smoke from the rifle and heard the thin dead crack of it lost in the open space but that was all. Ahead the carrier on the road had vanished in the distance and left only a pale hovering of dust to mark its passage.
The road was raw dirt and as there was neither selvedge nor bar ditch to mark it he was in it before he knew it. He reined up skidding and hauled the gasping horse around. Bird was coming hard behind him and he tried to head him but then when he looked to the south he saw laboring towards him out of the emptiness an ancient flatbed truck carrying farmworkers. He forgot Bird and turned and put the horse south along the road toward the truck waving his hat.
The truck had no brakes and when the driver saw him he began to grind slowly down through the gears. The workers crowded forward along the bed looking down at the wounded boy.
Tomelo, he called to them. Tomelo. The horse stamped and rolled its eyes and a man reached and took the reins and halfhitched them about one of the stakes in the truckbed and other hands reached for the boy and some clambered down into the road to help lift him up. Blood was a condition of their lives and none asked what had befallen him or why. They called him el guerito and passed him up into the truck and wiped the blood from their hands on the front of their shirts. A lookout was standing with one hand on top of the cab watching the riders out on the plain.
Pronto, he called, pronto.
Vamonos, Billy shouted to the driver. He leaned and pulled the reins loose and hammered the truckdoor with the side of his fist. The men in the truck reached down their hands to help aboard those in the road and the driver put the truck in gear and they lurched forward. One of the men held out a bloodstained hand and Billy clasped it. They'd made a place for Boyd on the rough boards of the truckbed with shirts and serapes. He couldnt tell if he was alive or dead. The man gripped his hand. No to preocupes, he shouted.
Gracias, hombre. Es mi hermano.
Vamonos, the man shouted. The truck labored forward up the road in a low whine of gears. Out on the prairie the riders were already dividing, two of them cutting away to the north to follow the truck. The workers waved and whistled at him where he sat the horse in the road and they gestured with their hands in great circles over their heads to they gestured to him to go on. He'd already boosted himself forward into the saddle and found the stirrups and the blood was soaking cold through his trousers. He booted Nino forward. Bird was a mile ahead on the prairie. When he looked back the riders were less than a hundred yards out and he leaned along Nino's neck and called upon him to give his life.
He rode Bird down on the prairie but when he overtook him he had in his eye much the same look as the Bailey horse and he knew that he had lost him. He looked back at the riders and he called one last time to his old horse to give him heart and then he rode on. He heard again that distant flat report that a rifle makes over open ground and when he looked back one of the riders had dismounted and was kneeling beside his horse firing. He leaned low in the saddle and rode on. When he looked back again the two riders had diminished on the plain and when he looked one final time they were smaller yet and Bird was nowhere in sight. He never did see the Tom horse again.
Midmorning alone in that country he led the drenched and bottomed horse afoot up a cobbled arroyo. He talked to the horse and kept to the rocks and where the horse put a foot in the sand of the arroyo floor he dropped the reins and went back and repaired the mark with a whisk of grass. His trouserlegs were stiff with dried blood and he knew that both he and the horse were going to have to find water very soon.
He left the horse standing with the latigo loosed and climbed up and lay in the arroyo breaks and studied the country to the east and to the south. He saw nothing. He climbed back down and picked up the reins of the standing horse and took hold of the pommel of the saddle and he looked at the dark shape of the blood in the leather and he stood for a moment with the reins doubled in his fist and his forearm across the wet salt withers of his father's horse. Why couldnt the sons of bitches have shot me? he said.
In the blue dusk of that day he saw a light far to the north that first he took for the polestar. He watched to see if it would lift off of the horizon but it did not and he turned slightly in his course and leading the exhausted horse afoot set out across the desert prairie toward it. The horse faltered behind him and he dropped back and took hold of the bridle cheekstrap and walked beside the horse and talked to it. The horse so crusted with white salt rime it shone like some prodigy embarked upon the darkening plain. When he'd said all he knew to say he told it stories. He told it stories in Spanish that his grandmother had told him as a child and when he'd told all of those that he could remember he sang to it.
The last thin paring of the old moon hung over the distant mountains to the west. Venus had moved away. With dark a gauzy swarm of stars. He could not guess what they were for, so many. He trekked on for another hour and then halted and felt the horse to see that it was dry and swung up into the saddle and rode on. When he looked for the light it was gone and he fixed his position by the stars and after a while the light appeared again out of the dark cape of desert headland that had obscured it. He'd quit singing and he tried to think how to pray. Finally he just prayed to Boyd. Dont be dead, he prayed. You're all I got.
IT WAS NEAR MIDNIGHT when they struck the fence and he turned east and rode till he came to a gate. He dismounted and led the horse through and closed the gate again and remounted and rode up the pale clay track toward the light where dogs had already risen and come forward howling.
The woman who came to the door was not young. She lived in this remote station with her husband who she said had given his eyes for the revolution. She shouted back the dogs and they Blank away and when she stood aside for him to pass this husband was standing in the small lowceilinged room as if he'd risen to greet some dignitary. Quien es? he said.
She said that it was an American who had lost his way and the man nodded. He turned away and the weathercreased face caught for a moment the light from the oil lamp. There were no eyes in his sockets and the lids were pinched shut so that he wore a constant look of painful selfabsorption. As if old errors preoccupied him.
They sat at a pine table painted green and the woman brought him milk in a cup. He'd about forgotten that people even drank milk. She struck a match to the circular wick of the burner in the kerosene stove and adjusted the flame and put on a kettle and when it had boiled she spooned eggs one by one down into the kettle and put the lid back again. The blind man sat stiff and erect. As if he himself were the guest in his own house. When the eggs had
boiled the woman brought them steaming in a bowl and sat down to watch the boy eat. He picked one up and put it down quickly. She smiled.
Le gustan los blanquillos? said the blind man.
Si. Claro.
They sat. The eggs steamed in the bowl. In the unshaded light of the coaloil lamp their faces hung like masks.
Digame, said the blind man. Que novedades tiene?
He told them that he was in the country seeking to recover horses stolen from his family. He said that he was traveling with his brother but that he had become separated from him. The blind man inclined his head to hear. He asked for news of the revolution but the boy had no news to give. Then the blind man said that although the countryside was tranquil this was not necessarily a good sign. The boy looked at the woman. The woman nodded her head solemnly in agreement. She seemed to set great store by her husband. He took an egg from the bowl and cracked it on the rim and began to peel it. While he was eating the woman began to tell of their life.
She said that the blind man had been born of humble origins. Origenes humildes, she said. She said that he had lost his eyes in the year of our Lord nineteen thirteen in the city of Durango. He'd ridden east in late winter of that year and joined Maclovio Herrera and on the third of February they had fought at Namiquipa and taken the town. In April he had fought at Durango with the rebels under Contreras and Pereyra. In the federal arsenal was an antique demiculverin of french manufacture which he was placed in charge of. They did not take the city. He could have saved himself, the woman said. But he would not leave his post. He was taken prisoner along with many others. The prisoners were given the opportunity to swear oaths of loyalty to the government and those' who would not do so were stood against a wall and shot without ceremony. Among them were men of many nations. American and English arid German. And men from lands no one had even heard of. Yet they went also to the wall and there they died in the terrible volleys of riflefire, the terrible smoke. They fell down soundlessly beside each other, their hearts' blood on the plasterwork behind them. He saw this.
Among the defenders of Durango there were of course few foreigners yet there was one such. A German Huertista named Wirtz who was a captain in the federal army. The captured rebels stood in the street chained together with fencewire like toys and this man walked their enfilade and bent to study each in turn and note in their eyes the workings of death as the assassinations continued behind him. The man spoke spanish well for all that he spoke it with a german accent and he told the artillero that only the most pathetic of fools would die for a cause that was both wrong and doomed and the captive spat in his face. The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man's spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive's head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man's eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.
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