“Kit now what’n ’e hell are you—” But sweeping her hair somehow out of the way and lengthening her bare neck for him. At some point they became aware that the show had resumed, the Burgher King and his associates up to the usual tuneful intrigue.
Kit and Dally were sitting in a box, and nobody seemed to be watching them. She slipped to her knees and began getting rouge and saliva all over his trousers. His fingers were deep in her hair. Their pulsebeats were hammering louder than the music. “This is crazy,” whispered Kit.
“Come on,” she agreed. They got back to the room with no more than a bell-hop’s presentation of a bushel of gladioli and the usual garment fastenings to slow them down. For the first time it seemed Kit had a minute to admire her in her full rangy nakedness and glow. But only a minute, because she had run at him, borne him to the bed, straddled and begun to ride him in an extended episode of heat, laughing, cursing, hollering in some language of her own that Kit was too carried away to translate. Presently she had collapsed forward into a long kiss, her undone hair surrounding them in a fiery nimbus.
“Are those freckles? Why are they glowing like that?”
“Paprika flashback,” she murmured, and shortly was asleep all naked and wet in his arms.
BEST BET, it seemed to them, was to stay clear of the Szeged station, go up the river by steamer instead as far as Szolnok, catch the local there to Buda-Pesth, and from there take the Wagons-Lits via Lake Balaton to Pragerhof, where they would pick up the Graz-Trieste train and ride second class to Venezia.
That seemed devious enough. But Lake Balaton looked too good to pass up. They detrained at Siófok and were soon reclining in the water, along with hundreds of families on vacation.
“Some headlong escape, here.”
“We really ought to be moving faster than this.”
“Trainloads of screaming Turks headin up the line.”
“Wavin ’em swords and Mausers and so forth.” By now they were looking into each other’s eyes. Again. There seemed no limit to how long this would go on. The sun set, the little gaff-riggers put in to their home piers, other bathers departed, the fogások swam in close to see what was up, and this confounded gazing would just not stop. Somewhere on a terrace, a dance band started playing. Lights came on in the restaurants facing the water, in gardens and hotel rooms, and there Kit and Dally remained until the first star, when, as if reminded of all there was to be wishing for, they found their way back to the ceiling of their room, which is where, in this exuberant elopement, they were tending to spend most of their time.
“SOMEBODY’LL BE OUT LOOKING for you, won’t they?” Kit said.
“Not sure. Some would feel a lot easier in their minds if I wasn’t ever found, I guess.” The sun through the window lit her from behind, as she paced the little room, observing him carefully. Having had too much attention from peculiar quarters, she had learned to be careful about what she told men, while more and less nervously waiting for Kit to start inquiring into her colorful past. He didn’t seem to be looking for a fight, but men were like storms in the sea, on you before you saw them coming, and there you’d be, swamped and confounded. She decided to let him in on what she could. Who else had she ever confided in? You trusted people until they betrayed you, but the alternative, trusting nobody ever, turned you into one more Clive Crouchmas, and the world had enough of them already. “Kit, how much do you want to know about what I’ve been up to?” Had she really just said that?
“How much of it would I understand?”
“A lot of it’d be international high finance.”
“Oh. No, uh, functions of a complex variable, nothing like that, I suppose.”
“Mostly adding and subtracting, but it does get kind of—”
“You’re right, o’ course, I’d just get lost. . . .”
“No, listen—” Mentally she held her nose and flexed her toes, and cannonballed straight down into her history with Clive Crouchmas. Kit listened attentively and did not noticeably fly into a jealous frenzy. “I was spying on him for some people,” she concluded, “and he found out.”
“He’s dangerous, then? Your old beau.”
“Maybe. I could go back to London, I’m supposed to have a small part in a new show, but right now I’m not sure if I should. Maybe it’s better to lay low for a while.”
“Thing that’s really been on my mind—”
She stopped in her tracks, smooth muscles poised, microscopic golden hairs all along her bare legs alert in the sunlight.
“—is, is what do we do for money till I find some work up in Italy?”
“Oh. We’re all right for money. Don’t even worry that darlin brain.” But fair being fair, she did give him maybe a minute and a half to say something unpleasant like “His money,” or “What did you have to do for it?” before tiptoeing purposefully over to where he sat, and taking him by two handfuls of his hair, and bringing his mercifully silent face to the fragrance of her pussy.
The light didn’t come in exactly the way it was supposed to in churches—not mediated by sacred images of stained glass but by new leafage on trees outside, holes broken in the adobe by federal artillery, accidentally passing shadows of birds and clouds. It was Holy Week in the Sierra, still freezing at night but tolerable during the day. Sometimes a breeze off the mountain came through. This part of Chihuahua was safe for the time being. Though the federales had driven off Madero’s force at Casas Grandes, they had no appetite for fighting in the open and remained for the moment in their garrisons.
Nearly every day somebody from the recent battle died here. Wounded lay in ragged rows on the ancient tile floor, the priest and the doctor passed among them once a day, women from town came when they could—when there was not a child to see to, a novio to be with or bid good-bye, a family death to mourn—and tried to clean wounds and change bandages, though sterile dressings on this side of the border were luxury items.
One day Frank woke from a dream of running, running without effort or pain at a speed not even horses got up to, not pursued or in pursuit, just running for the hell of it, the heaven of how it felt, he guessed. As long as he kept moving forward this way, easy, weightless, he knew somehow he could never be in trouble of any kind. Ahead of him there seemed to lie a concentration of light, something like a city after dark, and he wondered what it might be. At the rate he was running, he ought to be there before long. But all at once he was back on the floor of the cold, broken church, immobilized and hungry, among the smells of casualty and dying, with a face he was about to recognize bending close, in its mouth, being lit, then held out to Frank, a store-bought Mexican cigarette.
“I saw them bring you in.” It was the Indian shaman El Espinero, who had once showed him how to fly.
“Well ¿qué tal, amigo?” Frank took the cigarette and inhaled on it as deep as he could given the situation with his ribs, at least one of which had to be cracked.
The brujo nodded and lit one up for himself. “You think you are dreaming, ¿verdad? No, as it happens, my village is just up there,” he motioned with his eyes back up at the mountains. “I was in Durango for a little while, but now I am here, scouting for Don José de la Luz Blanco.” He took a quick inventory of Frank’s damage. “You were with him and Madero at the fighting.”
“Yes. I should’ve been someplace else.”
“But you will recover. Only one bullet.”
“One more than I needed. The rest was falling off the horse, and underneath the other horse, and so on.”
“The Chihuahua horses are the best in the world, but they know it well, and a man on the ground means little to them, unless he is Tarahumare. They respect us because we can run faster.”
“This horse was kind enough to drag me as far as an irrigation ditch anyhow. . . .” Frank exhaled smoke into a momentary sunbeam, and the brujo watched it vanish with patient interest.
“Somebody is looking for you.”
“Should I be jumping up and getting the hell out
of here?”
El Espinero laughed. “Yes, I think so. It is your other Estrella.”
“She’s here?”
Yeahp and on the arm of some impossibly good-looking Mexican dude. No surprise. Frank wished he could go back to sleep.
“This is Rodrigo.”
“Mucho gusto,” Frank nodded. Well she wasn’t about to be traveling alone all her life was she, besides being, have mercy, even more beautiful now than, what would it be, two years ago, closer to three, sun in her face and hair, a confidence in how she carried herself, no more little dainty .22 beneath some ladylike frock but a serviceable Colt strapped to one of a pair of, he could not help noticing, interesting legs in britches of trail-grade whipcord.
Old Rodrigo here was looking down at Frank with a certain disdain, perhaps that of a Mexican of the land-owning class for a gringo saddle-tramp who has allowed himself to be stepped on by one or more horses, so the situation was not what you’d call uncompetitive. Not that Frank could blame him, much.
“Pretty becoming rig you’re in there, Estrella, but where’d all that high fashion get to?”
“Oh it and me we got to a fork in the trail, it’s all that straight silhouette these days, wisdom of the seamstress trade, sad but true, can’t put no ol’ cowgirl into nothin that narrow, she starts trying to take what she thinks is normal-size steps, and just wrecks the stitches somebody spent all night puttin in.”
“And how’s business been?”
“I’m more of a diplomat these days,” gesturing lazily with her head at Rodrigo. “Madero’s people seem to have mistook this one for his look-alike, some federal big shot. Truth is he just wandered up the wrong piece of trail. So now we’re all dickering.”
“Prisoner exchange. How does ’at pay, good?”
“Sometimes.” Making an effort, he noticed, not to let Rodrigo catch her eye. Did she think Frank would mind if it wasn’t all strictly business? And how much, and so forth.
“What’re you smoking these days?”
“Store-boughts. Here, keep the pack.”
Frank drifted off and when he drifted back, everybody had left including El Espinero. Stray had put the cigarettes under the rolled-up shirt he was using for a pillow to keep them safe, which seemed such a tender thought he wished he’d been awake for it.
NEXT DAY SHE SHOWED UP AGAIN, and it took Frank about a minute to identify her new companion, owing to a beard and a growth of hair his sombrero was having trouble staying on top of. “This raggedy excuse for an Anarchistic troublemaker says he knows you.”
“By God it’s ’at there Ewball Oust ain’t it,” said Frank. “Don’t tell me you—”
“Yeahp, swapped him for Rodrigo, who’s now on his way back to the family mansion in Texas. Another one out of my reach. Adiós, mi guapo—” She shrugged and pretended to look sad. “Frank, tell me I got a bargain here.”
“Well, give me a minute.”
“Thought you was wounded or someth’n compinche, this don’t look much worse’n foot blisters.” Ewball had somehow managed to keep a tin canteen of tequila away from federal attention, and cheerfully poured copas for everybody.
Stray regarded Ewball, shaking her head and pretending to sigh in dismay. “Maybe I’ll get back into arms dealin after all.”
“Footsoldiers like me are a dime a dozen,” Ewball agreed cheerfully. “But for matériel you’re sure in the right part of the world, here. Artillery, just for openers. Federales are hitting us with howitzers, machine guns, time shrapnel, best we can do is throw dynamite sticks and trust in the Lord.”
“I could look around. How big of a piece are we talkin?”
“Caliber wouldn’t be as important as mobility, we need something’s easy to break down and pack around on mules, like you heard of that Krupp mountain gun, somethin along those lines’d be nice.”
She was taking notes. “Uh-huh, what else?”
“Disinfectant,” Frank put in, a little feverish today, “as many tank cars of that as you can find. Plus pain medicine, any kind, laudanum, paregoric, hell, anythin’s got opium in it, damn country’s in way too much pain.”
“Tobacco,” Ewball added.
After a while they got into a discussion about Anarchists and their reputation for rude behavior, such as rolling bombs at people they haven’t been introduced to.
“There’s plenty of folks who deserve being blown up, to be sure,” opined Ewball, “but they’ve got to be gone after in a professional way, anything else is being just like them, slaughterin the innocent, when what we need is more slaughterin of the guilty. Who gave the orders, who carried ’em out, exact names and whereabouts—and then go get ’em. That’d be just honest soldiering.”
“Don’t they call that nihilism?” Stray objected.
“’Cute, ain’t it? when all the real nihilists are working for the owners, ’cause it’s them that don’t believe in shit, our dead to them are nothin but dead, just one more Bloody Shirt to wave at us, keep us doin what they want, but our dead never stopped belongin to us, they haunt us every day, don’t you see, and we got to stay true, they wouldn’t forgive us if we wandered off of the trail.”
Frank hadn’t seen Ewball like this, it was more than drunk tearfulness, Ewb had been out in this, maybe longer than he thought he’d stay alive for, and over the years had gathered up, Frank guessed, a considerable number of dead he now felt were his. Not quite the same as Frank’s two-second interlude with Sloat Fresno back down the Bolsón de Mapimí five, no, six years ago. How much had Frank advanced since then? Deuce Kindred was still out there, maybe still with Lake, maybe, by now, not.
NEXT EVENING Frank woke up into some long dissertation Ewball was handing Stray about Anarcho-syndicalist theory and praxis to feel a strangely familiar melancholy in the twilight that he couldn’t for a minute locate, till down the aisle between the wounded, her small face warmly illuminated by a cigarette in her mouth, came his favorite back-east girl anthropologist, Wren Provenance.
“Knew I should’ve went easy on the laudanum tonight,” he greeted her.
Wren was wearing trooper’s boots, campesino trousers, a man’s shirt a few sizes too large with some buttons missing, and nothing in the way of underlinen to veil from the casual onlooker’s gaze her flawless little breasts, though Ewball and Frank, attempting to be gentlemen about it, were trying not to stare, or at least not for too long at any one time.
She had been up at Casas Grandes, the archæological site just down the road from the recent battle of the same name, under semi-official Harvard auspices, studying the mysterious ruins thought to have been built by refugees fleeing from their mythical homeland of Aztlán up north.
“Thought you were headed for the South Seas,” Frank said.
“Just not romantic enough there, I guess.”
When Madero and his small army had arrived here, one by one all her male co-workers, some apologizing over their shoulders, had fled to avoid being shot.
Stray had been looking her over, with some interest. “Why didn’t you leave?” she wondered.
“Oh, too busy probably. Loud noises, flashes of light, no worse than bad weather, one more field condition to work under—and work’s the thing really.”
“Really. But what are you doing for a social life, if I’m not being too curious?”
“As the day may provide,” Wren shrugged, “or not provide. Right now, actually, sleep has emerged as the most important issue.”
“Known to do that, I guess, ‘emerge.’ Nice Indian bracelet there.”
“Jasper and turquoise. One of the classic Zuñi designs.”
“Hmm. How much’d you pay?”
“It was a gift.”
“Travelin man.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Indians at every train depot west of Denver sell these.”
“Why that two-timing double-crossing snake. He made me feel like it was so— I don’t know, special.”
“They’re all like ‘at, dar
lin. Even ol’ Frank here.”
“Frank, shame on you too, then.”
The ladies were having a swell time. After a while Frank found himself chain-smoking Stray’s Buen Tonos and trying not to cringe too noticeably. His ribs were throbbing and he figured he better not laugh too much either, though the way things were drifting, this was not fixing to be a problem.
In came a campesino with a message for Stray. She stood, took her field port-folio and slung it by a strap over her shoulder. “Dealin never stops. Ewball, you better not go too far, Don Porfirio’s boys might want you back after all.”
When he thought she was out of earshot, Ewball said, “I think she likes me.”
“Well you’re a handsome devil but you sure ain’t no Rodrigo,” it seemed to Frank.
“You don’t mind do you compadre, I mean seein’s how it is with you and ol’ Wren here—”
“You may have things a little backwards,” Wren through a fixed smile, eyes aglitter. “But thanks all the same, Ewball, it is just ever such a boost to a maiden’s self-esteem to find that she is keeping apart two people who ought to be together, for whom indeed, by every anthropological principle we know to be valid, it is an unnatural violation of scientific reality not to be together. Tell me, Frank, are you stupid, or blind?”
“That’s the choice, huh. . . . Let me think.”
Ewball waved a beer bottle at Wren. “Answer is ‘stupid.’ Always has been. Care for another cerveza, there, tetas de muñeca?”
“Why yes, that would be so thoughtful of you, there, pinga de títere.”
“Uh-oh,” said Ewball and Frank in unison.
“SAY, REMEMBER those little cactuses?”
El Espinero had been sitting there in the dark for some time, beaming at Frank, eyeballs somehow reflecting more light than was available. “I apologize for waiting until you ask. But the hikuli is not for everyone.”
Had he brought any along? Does the Easter Rabbit bring colored eggs? Before too long, Frank found himself in a strange yet familiar City, an outer arc of low warehouses up at the ridgeline, dropping down to a grid of wide boulevards and canals and open plaza spaces, down one of which now comes strolling, among the folks on pilgrimage here streaming in and out of town, an apprentice practitioner who seems to be Frank himself, as he used to be, before the Broken Days came upon the land and the people, bearing a small leather pouch containing the sacred Scrolls entrusted to him the day he left the pigs snuffling in the dust, his mother whispering, as she handed the bag to him, before he turned and went away down the path, looking back once, perhaps again, as his sisters at early chores dwindled among the green hillsides, soon hearing someone playing a reed instrument whose wood simplicity touches his heart, finding a mule train headed up here to the City, the line of beasts beginning slowly to switchback up the range in the yellow sun, which warms and releases the keen smell of bruised cilantro in bales, and strings of chilies destined for clay pots to be set out on long common tables in the basements of the City’s Temples, beneath low, rough-joisted ceilings, shadowed in dark brown, smelling of musk-scented hay tracked in from the lavish pens of the Sacred Peccaries—the string of mules on this uphill journey bearing also maguey stems just harvested by the tlachiqueros, and glossy swamp-beaver hides flashing darkly from beneath canvas tie-downs, to be traded for velvet, gold and silver brocades, giant feathers from very yellow, red, and green parrots, enormous parrots whose wingspreads darken the sun, each feather of but a single color, plucked far away at great personal risk, in a precariousness of stone and windy space, from beneath the birds’ wings as they soar past deploying claws the size of ceremonial lances, in fact the same feathers as those gathered for the glory of that inner circle of the priesthood known as the Hallucinati, who enjoy strolling out in groups in the evenings to impress visitors from the outer districts, or like “Frank” here, up from the lowlands and beyond, who come flocking in to town just to gaze upon the promenading hierarchy and their female attendants who have spent hours on eye adornment, parrot-patterning their orbits in bright yellow with red stripes and green crescents, with their hair drawn back from sweetly convex child-brows, sacred girls, some of them beauties celebrated enough to provoke discussion during mule-train coca breaks, for coffee is not the only stimulant found among these caravans, where everyone moves and talks at high speed and, like the mysterious Capital they are bound for, avoids sleeping or even catnapping—they look forward to some paseo time after the factors have taken delivery, to going out at any hour they like and finding it impossible to know if it’s even day or night, the City itself being entirely indoors and nobody but the most senior Astrologers even being allowed to view the sky. Cafés are open on every street corner, ceremonial maidens gathered between shifts, dozens to a table, temple gongs and bells contributing their timbres and rhythms to the urban bustle. “Frank” wanders through it all, enchanted with everything, stalls selling mangoes and star fruit, agave fermenting in terra-cotta bowls, ristras of dark purple chilies strung to dry, pearly green aromatic seeds being crushed in heavy stone mortars, death’s-heads and skeletons of raw sugar which children come running up to buy with obsidian coins bearing likenesses of notable Hallucinati, and run off crunching the sweet splintery bones which the dim light in here passes through as through amber, stalls hung all over with brightly-colored pamphlets, illustrated, in no inferable arrangement, with narrative caricatures erotic and murderous, hand-tinted heliographs in luminescent violets and saffrons and coal blacks, veined with rust and damp green. . . . He begins to read, or no not exactly read one of these stories. . . . It is the tale of The Journey from Aztlán, and presently he is not so much reading as engaged in a confab with one of the high priests, finding out this is a city not yet come fully into being, but right now really just a pausing point of monochrome adobe, for this gaudy, bright city they hope to find someday, Frank sees, is being collectively dreamed by the community in their flight, at their backs a terror not of the earth they thought they knew and respected, ahead of them, somewhere, a sign to tell them they have truly escaped, have found their better destiny, in which the eagle would conquer the serpent, the trespassers, content with what they had seized and occupied of Aztlán, would give up the pursuit and continue with their own metamorphosis into winged extraterrestrials or evil demigods or gringos, while the fugitive people would be spared the dark necessity of buying safety by tearing out the hearts of sacrificial virgins on top of pyramids and so forth.
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