Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Too late.” Dwayne nodded out the window. “As I estimate maybe five more minutes for you to brush up on those legendary dynamite skills . . . Kid.”

  The train was braking to a stop, sure enough, and Frank began to hear commotion close by. He looked out the windows and saw, riding escort, a couple dozen men who looked to be under some oath of sobriety as to personal display—shaven upper lips, modest hatbrims no charro’d be caught dead in, cotton shirts and workers’ trousers in a range of earth tones, no insignia, no evidence of any affiliation to anything.

  “All for me, huh?” said Frank.

  “I’m coming along,” Ewball announced.

  “Wouldn’t have it otherwise.” Someplace in the last few hours Dwayne had obtained a pistol it seemed.

  After a few seconds, Ewball said, “Oh. Ransom money? ‘S that it, that’s what you’re counting on, the legendary Oust fortune? Not a fruitful plan, vaquero.”

  “Hell, they’ll be happy ‘th whatever they get. They’re happy folks. What you see out there’s so far just a small-time endeavor, one day to the next, no hostage too insignificant, long as it’s bourgeoisie that can pay somethin.”

  “Ay, Jalisco,” muttered Frank.

  “Oh, and you’ll want to meet El ñato.” An energetic presence had entered the carriage—officer’s jacket from the defunct army of some country not too nearby, smoked lenses, steel practicalities where you might have expected silver ornaments, and perched up on one epaulette a very large tropical parrot, so out of scale in fact that to converse with its owner it had to lean down to scream into his ear.

  “And this is Joaquín,” El ñato smiling up at the bird. “Tell them something about yourself, m’hijo.”

  “I like to fuck the gringo pussy,” confided the parrot.

  “How’s that?” Ewball blinking at the bird’s theatrical-British accent, recalling somehow vaudeville Shakespeare and profligate nights.

  A hideous laugh. “Got a problem with that, pendejo?”

  El ñato beamed fretfully. “There, there, Joaquín, we mustn’t give our guests the wrong idea—it was only that one house-cat, one time, up in Corpus Christi, long, long ago.”

  “Sin embargo, mi capitán, the adventure has haunted me.”

  “Of course Joaquín and now gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

  There were horses saddled and waiting for Ewball and Frank, which it was now indicated they mount. “Not coming along, Dwayne?” Frank swinging up into a black leather saddle rig, built onto a military-style tree, he noticed, little unexpected this far out of town, free of carving or stamping or anything fancy except for the Mexican curb bits and “taps” over the stirrups. “Keep smart boys,” Dwayne called back from the carriage doorway, “and maybe we’ll be seeing you down ‘em rails again someday.” As the train began to move, El ñato tossed him up a leather sack, small but with some heft to it, got his horse to rear dramatically, wheeled about, calling ”¡Vámonos!” to his riders. The parrot flapped his wings as if signaling to a confederate in the distance. Surrounding the Americans, the guerrilleros moved off, alert, silent, picking up a trooping gait, until soon the train behind them seemed just one more chirring summer insect in the distant brush.

  “RIDIN WITH ANARCHISTS NOW, got-damn never thought I’d be doin this. . . .”

  “What’s the matter,” needled Ewball, “you’d feel more comfortable with just some everyday bandits?”

  “Bandits may shoot, bandits may cut, but at least they ain’t blowin things up every chance they get.”

  “We never blew nothín up!” protested El ñato. “Nobody here knowss nothín about no explosives! Steal a li’l dynamite from the mines maybe, throw a stick here, stick there, but now all that’s changed, now you’re ridín with us, ¡el Famoso Chavalito del Quiselgúr!—now we get respect!”

  They rode till well after dark, ate, slept, struck camp, moved out hours before dawn. The escort were a humorless bunch, and any thoughts of even a companionable copa now and then were soon abandoned. Days went by like this, as they rode deeper into Mexico than Frank had ever believed anybody could without hitting a coastline, Ewball meantime acting less and less like a hostage and more like a long-lost brother who was trying to charm his way back into a family he thought was his own. Stranger than that, El ñato and his lieutenants appeared to be falling for this routine, and soon even encouraging Ewball to join up and ride with their guerrilla unit. “You’ll have to travel fast, keep up. But we don’t always get to eat, or find a town to requisition, and the rule in the outfit being that first to find anything is first to enjoy it, pues . . . you’ll keep up, I believe.”

  They rode down small-town boulevards lined with ancient palm trees, through precipitous canyons, the indigo mountains fanned like paper cutouts into the miles of haze. One day, looking down off a high ridge, Frank saw a rust-colored city spilling up and down the sides of a deep gulch. Piles of tailings loomed everywhere, which Frank recognized as spoil from silver mining. Rambling between the high uninflected walls of the town, alleyways were apt to turn to stairsteps.

  They pitched camp outside of town, near a bridge over an arroyo. The wind funneling down the ravine never quit all the time they were there. Streetlights came on early in the dark brown afternoons and sometimes stayed on all the next day. Frank, seeming to enter a partial vacuum in the passage of time, found half a minute to ask himself if this was really where he ought to be. It was such an unexpected question that he decided to consult with Ewball, who was squatting next to a Maxim gun broken down into bits and pieces on a blanket and trying to remember how to get it back together.

  “Old compinche— say, you look different somehow. Wait, don’t tell me. The hat? maybe all those ammo belts there full of machine-gun bullets ‘t you’re packing? The tattoo? Let me look— ¡Qué guapa, qué tetas fantásticas, ¿verdad?”

  “These folks knew it all along,” said Ewball. “Just took me awhile to see it, was all.”

  “Hey! Tell you what. Don’t be hasty. We, we’ll switch. Yeah! Yeah, you can be the Kid, and I’ll be the sidekick. O.K.? They never believe a thing I tell ‘em, but maybe they will believe you.”

  “Who, me? Be the Kid? Aw, I don’t know, Frank. . . .”

  “Five minutes and I can teach you everything, Advanced Blasting course on the cheap, all the latest thinking— here, for instance, you ever wonder which end of these is the one you light?”

  “Dammit now Frank now get that thing away from me—”

  “Why it’s this one here, see—”

  “Ahhh!” Ewball was out the tentflap faster than the muzzle velocity of any known firearm. Frank placed the smoking cylinder, which on a closer look might’ve been no more than a giant Cuban claro in a Partidos wrapper, between his teeth and strolled out among the tropa, who, under the impression that he was actually smoking a stick of dynamite, scattered from his path muttering in admiration. The only one willing to engage him in conversation was the parrot Joaquín.

  “Ever wonder why they call it Zacatecas, Zacatecas? Or why it’s Guanajuato, Guanajuato?”

  Frank, fallen by now into the doubtful habit of Conversation with a Parrot, shrugged in irritation. “One’s a city, one’s a state.”

  “¡Pendejo!” screamed the parrot. “Think! Double refraction! Your favorite optical property! Silver mines, full of espato double-refracting all the time, and not only light rays, naw, uh-uh! Cities, too! People! Parrots! You just keep floating along in that gringo smoke cloud, thinking there’s only one of everything, huevón, you don’t see those strange lights all around you. Ay, Chihuahua. In fact, Ay, Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Kid engineers! All alike. Closed minds. Always been your problem.” Giving in at length to parrot hysteria, sinister in its prolonged indifference.

  “Here’s your problem,” Frank approaching Joaquín with his hands out in strangling position.

  The comandante, sensing psitticide in the air, came hurrying up.

  “Apologies, Señor Chavalito, but with only a few mo
re hours to go—”

  “Few more hours, um, till what, ñato?”

  “¡Caray! Did I forget to tell you? sometimes I wonder why they even let me lead a unit. Why, your first commission, of course! We want you to blow up the Palacio del Gobierno tonight, ¿O.K.? Give it, you know, that special El Chavalito punch?”

  “And you’ll be on hand for that?”

  El ñato grew evasive, or, as he would have termed it, self-conscious. “To be honest, it isn’t really the primary target.”

  “Then why?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Ñato—”

  “All right, all right, it’s the Mint. While you’re creating a diversion—”

  Later Frank couldn’t remember if the word loco had come into the discussion, though its Mexican euphemism lucas might have. His point, simple enough, really, being that silver coinage in any quantity would weigh a great deal. At twenty-five grams to the peso, a good mule might carry five thousand pesos, a jack maybe thirty-five hundred, but the question was how far before the mule fell over and had to be replaced. Even with a string of mules long enough to make a Mint robbery worth the trouble, they would be sitting ducks for any federal posse.

  “I knew that,” said El ñato. But Frank could tell his feelings were hurt.

  It got no further, actually, than trying to steal the dynamite they would need from one of the silver mines on the slopes of Monte el Refugio, southeast of town. Before anybody could shout a warning, they found themselves in the middle of a fire-fight, maybe with mine guards, maybe rurales, hard to tell in the dark.

  “Ain’t like we blew into town all that quiet,” Ewball muttered between squeezing off shots. “What’s he expect?”

  They got back to camp to find more shooting there, with El ñato somewhere out on one flank, holding off what seemed to be a halfhearted assault. Nobody wanted to be shooting at night, though the clear suggestion was that daylight would be different and it might be wise to be gone by then.

  “¡Ay, Chavalito!” screeched the parrot Joaquín, in some inaccessible dark frenzy from his cage, which was being loaded onto a pack mule, “we are in some mierda, pendejo.”

  “Huertistas,” said the comandante. “I can smell them.” Frank must have had an inquisitive look, because ñato glowered and added, “Like Indian blood. Like burned crops and stolen land. Like gringo money.”

  They moved out before dawn, angling away westward from the railroad and into a gullied and barren plateau, heading for Sombrérete and the Sierra beyond. Each time they went over a rise, the pointed ears of the horses in silhouette on the sky, everybody waited for rifle fire. Behind them after a while a dustcloud appeared.

  There was discussion over whether to stop in Durango, Durango, but it seemed better to press on for the mountains. About noon the next day, Ewball rode up alongside Frank and directed his attention down into a little arroyo.

  At first Frank took them for antelope, but they were running faster than he’d ever seen anything run. They disappeared into a cave in the base of a low cliffside, and Frank, Ewball, and El ñato rode over to have a look. Three naked people crouched by the cave entrance, watching them, not in fear or expectancy, just watching.

  “They’re Tarahumares,” El ñato said. “They live in caves up north of the Sierra Madre—who knows what they’re doing down here this far from home?”

  “Huerta’s folks ain’t that far back. You think maybe that’s who these people are running from?”

  El Ñato shrugged. “Huerta usually goes after Yaquis or Mayas.”

  “Well they’re goners if he catches them,” Frank said.

  “Rescuing Indians is the last thing I need right now. I have my own people to think of.”

  Ewball motioned to the three people to stay back in the cave and out of sight. “You all better keep moving, Ñato, I’ll see what I can do, catch up with you in a little.”

  “Crazy gringo motherfucker,” opined Joaquín the parrot.

  Frank and Ewball proceeded up to a patch of rocks overlooking the valley. Inside of ten minutes, a line of soldiers appeared below, tightening, folding, stretching, repeating the motion, like a disembodied wing against an ashy sky attempting to remember the protocols of flight.

  Ewball, humming “La Cucaracha,” set about sighting in.

  “Better save our rounds,” it seemed to Frank, “ain’t much we can do at this range.”

  “Watch.”

  After the crack, and a second of stillness, down on the valley floor a tiny mounted figure went lunging backward in the saddle, trying to grab the sombrero that had just forcefully departed from its head.

  “Could’ve been a gust of wind.”

  “What do I have to do, start killing them, to get some respect here?”

  “They get close enough, they’ll sure try for us.”

  The detachment seemed to be in some confusion, riders going every which way, changing their minds every few seconds. “Ants in a anthill,” chuckled Ewball. “Here, let’s see if I can just shoot that rifle out of his hand now. . . .” He chambered another round and fired.

  “Say, nice one. When’d you get so good? Mind if I—”

  “Try a different angle, give ‘em somethin’ to think about.”

  Frank was able to get far enough around in the direction they’d been going to set up a nice crossfire, and eventually, leaving two or three Mausers behind them, the pursuers turned and made off for an evening at some fandango saloon in town, if they were lucky.

  “Guess I’ll go see to those Indians,” said Frank. There was more. Ewball, obliging, waited. “Then I’m headin up north, back the Other Side. Adios Mexico for me. You interested? Or . . .”

  Ewball smiled, snorted, indicated with his head the riders waiting for him, trying to make it look like he had no choice. “Es mi destino, Pancho.” Ewball’s horse, impatient, had already begun stepping away.

  “Well,” said Frank as if to himself, “vaya con Dios.”

  “Hasta lueguito,” said Ewball. They nodded, each touching his hatbrim, turned away.

  Frank rode down to where he’d last seen the party of Indians, and found them in a shallow cave about a half mile farther up the valley. There were one man and two women, none of them wearing much in the way of clothing besides red bandannas around their heads.

  “You saved our lives,” said the man in Mexican Spanish.

  “Me? no,” Frank gesturing vaguely after the long-departed anarquistas. “But I wanted to make sure you’re all right, and then I’m on my way.”

  “Somebody saved our lives,” said the Indian.

  “Yes, but they’re gone now.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “But—”

  “You go north. We do, too. Let us go together for a while. With permission. You may find something you have been looking for.”

  He introduced himself as El Espinero. “Not my real name—it’s a name the shabótshi gave me.” He had demonstrated at an early age a skill for locating water by examining a random spill of cactus thorns, and he soon became a working brujo, gazing into scatterings of thorns and telling people what would happen to them in the near future, the grammatical tense that mattered most these days back up in the Sierra.

  One of the women was his wife, and the other her younger sister, whose husband had been taken away and presumed murdered by the huertistas.

  “Her shabótshi name is Estrella,” said the shaman. He nodded, a smile beginning. “The name means something to you. She is searching for a new man now. You saved her life.”

  Frank took a look at her. This was a peculiar place to be reminded so abruptly of the other Estrella, Reef’s sweetheart back in Nochecita, by now with any luck the mother of a walking, talking little one. This Tarahumare girl was very young, with a notable great fall of black hair, big expressive eyes, and a fiery way of using them. Dressed for the trail, meaning hardly at all, you couldn’t say she was a chore to look at. But she was not Estrella Briggs either.


  “I didn’t save her life,” Frank said, “the young fellow who really did that rode off a while ago, and I’m not sure we can find him now.”

  “Qué toza tienes allá,” the girl remarked, pointing at Frank’s penis, which did in fact at the moment resemble sort of a small—well, medium-size—log. This was the first time she’d mentioned him directly. Her sister and El Espinero also examined the member, and then the three of them conferred for a while in their language, though the laughter was easy to translate.

  AFTER A DAY and a half’s journey, El Espinero led Frank to a long-abandoned silver working, high over the plain, where nopales grew and lizards lay in the sun.

  Frank understood that he had been waiting for the unreadable face of the one duende or Mexican tommyknocker who would lead him like this up some slope, higher than the last roofless wall, into a range of hawks and eagles, take him beyond his need for the light or wages of day, into some thorn-screened mouth, in beneath broken gallow-frames and shoring all askew, allowing himself at last to be swallowed by, rather than actively penetrating, the immemorial mystery of these mountains—and that now the moment of subduction had come, he would make no move to prevent it.

  Frank had been looking at calcite crystals for a while now, through Nicol prisms of lab instruments whose names he’d forgotten, among the chats or zinc tailings of the Lake County mines, down here in the silver lodes of the Veta Madre and so forth, and he doubted anything like this piece of spar had ever been seen on Earth, maybe since the early days up in Iceland itself, yes quite a specimen all right, a twin crystal, pure, colorless, without a flaw, each identically mirrored half about the size of a human head and what Ewball would call “of scalenohedral habit.” And there was this deep glow, though not enough ambient light in here to account for it—as if there were a soul harbored within.

  “Be careful. Look into it, see things.”

  They were deep inside a cavern in the mountain, yet some queer luminescence in here allowed him to see as much—Frank couldn’t avoid thinking—as much as he had to.