At some point he performed a manœuvre like a bird circling and landing, except in mental space. Standing there against the light seemed to be Wren, offering him the exact same periodical. “Brought a little light reading for you.” The text was in no alphabet he’d ever seen, and he ended up looking at the pictures, erotic and murderous as ever, illustrating the adventures of a young woman who was called upon repeatedly to defend her people against misshapen invaders who preferred to fight from the shadows, and were never clearly shown.
Soon over his shoulder he noticed El Espinero following along attentively. Finally, “Here, you take it.”
“No, it’s meant for you. So you don’t forget where you were just now.”
“Since you mention it—” but a sort of temporal stupor intervened and the brujo had vanished. The “magazine” was now a Mexico City newspaper in black and white from a few days ago, and there was nothing in it about Casas Grandes, or the battle there.
Stray had grown increasingly fascinated with Ewball, even though, as she reminded him every chance she got, he wasn’t really her type. Having been successfully swapped for Rodrigo, whose family in gratitude had been more than generous about Stray’s fee, there was no real reason for Ewball to be hanging around here with important Anarchist business, she was sure, to claim him elsewhere. “Oh I don’t know,” he mumbled, “sort of vacation I guess. The Revolution’s doing fine on its own, anyway.”
One day they both disappeared, and come to find out damn if they hadn’t taken off together on the Juárez train amid public displays of affection. And who had chosen to linger here instead but Wren Provenance, who, like a mother with a small baby, got to see Frank stand on his feet and take his first steps, who went with him for walks that took them farther and farther from the wrecked church, till one day what was clear to everybody else came to pass and they found themselves down some little arroyo under the willows and cottonwoods enthusiastically fucking, while a variety of wildlife looked on with interest. “Like this,” slipping out of her trousers and straddling him, “Don’t look so shocked, it’s me, remember?” hands in each other’s hair, hands everywhere, come to that, kisses, and when had they kissed so hungrily before? bites, nails, heedless words maybe, neither could remember.
“Well how’d that happen?”
She gave him a look. Her impulse was to say, “Don’t ask me, it never happens to me, fact I tend to forget about it for long stretches . . .” which of course is how the monologue would go hours later, alone with her thoughts. But at the moment she refrained from sharing any of this with Frank.
“Well,” a minute or two away from broodful, “long as it don’t get filed under good works or somethin like that.”
“Frank.” She had been lying with her face against his chest but now pushed upright again, as if to have a good look at him. And she could not, would not keep from smiling. “I’m beginning to think that that Ewball was right about you. Haven’t been taking your daily stupidity pills, have you.”
“All right.” Pulled her back down where she’d been. “All right.”
THE HARSH HUM filled the valley. Everybody looked up. The biplane slowly became visible, as if emerging from the resolute blankness of history. “Now what in ’e hell’s that?” Frank wondered. Though this was the first time it had come up this way, the Tarahumares appeared to know what it was. It might be bringing anything, to a degree of unpleasantness unknown so far in modern warfare, which was already unpleasant enough. Townsfolk would reckon events for years to come as occurring before or after the airplane came.
EL ESPINERO BROUGHT FRANK a cane shaped from a nice piece of oak from farther up in the Sierra, “A gringo might call it a ‘walking stick,’ but the Tarahumare use these as running-sticks, when our legs get sore and we can’t run any faster than a galloping horse.” As usual Frank couldn’t tell how serious he ought to take that. But there must’ve been some sorcery in the stick, all right, because the more Frank used it, the less he had to use it.
“What does that mean?” said Wren.
“Native magic makes you nervous, huh? Some anthropologist you turn out to be.”
When she was sure he was able to sit a horse again, she took hold of him by his shirt front and said, “Look, I’m going to have to go back to work.”
“Back at Casas Grandes.”
“Think I’ve spotted one or two of the old crew back in the vicinity.”
“Mind if I ride along?”
“Didn’t know you were interested.”
The site still bore the signs of abrupt departure, though as Wren had suggested, one or two Harvard halfwits were to be observed nosing around the perimeter. Seeing the spectacle of mud dilapidation, sliding toward abandonment since long before the first Spaniards showed up, Frank understood immediately that this was where the hikuli had taken him the other night, what El Espinero had wanted him to see—what, in his morose and case-hardened immunity to anything extraliteral, he had to begin to see, and remember he saw, if he was to have even an outside chance of saving his soul.
They approached a huge remnant, clearly put together as right-angled as anybody could ask for. “This was the main building,” she said.
“Well. Casas grandes, for sure. I’d say about four and a half acres here, just by eye.”
“And at least three stories high when it was new. Some of the others ran five or six.”
“And these were the same folks—”
“You can see how thick the walls are. They were not about to be caught twice.”
“But if it was them ended up in the Valley of Mexico, then this was a stopover and didn’t last either.”
“Nobody knows. And at the moment I’m also very curious about these Mormon settlements suddenly appearing all over this part of the Sierra Madre.”
“Just like back at the McElmo,” Frank said.
“A professorial person,” she supposed, “would ask at least why the Mormon odyssey and the Aztec flight should have so many points in common.” She did not appear pleased at the thought.
“Maybe I’ll talk to El Espinero. What about those pictures—have you found any of them here?”
She knew which pictures. “Pottery, stone tools, corn grinders, no sign of the creatures they drew on the rock walls up north—so absent in fact that it’s suspicious. As if it’s deliberate. As if they’re almost desperate to deny what’s pursuing them by not making any images of it at all. So it ends up being everywhere, but invisible.”
He understood for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land.
WREN HAD A LITTLE HOUSE at the edge of town with a vegetable patch and scarlet madreselva climbing up the walls and a nice view off the ridge, with the Casas Grandes ruins an easy mile or so down the road. Frank spent the days out and about doing odd jobs, some carpentering and plastering, repair work from the fighting mostly, and the nights in bed with Wren, as honorably as he knew how to inhabit the joys of domestic fucking. Sometimes he searched her sleeping face, so obliged to sorrows older than itself, wishing he knew what it would take for him to set up a perimeter she might at least dream quietly inside of, because she sure was making a lot of noise at night. All he’d ever known how to do really, like Webb and Mayva before him, was move from one disappointment to another, dealing with each as best he could. Wren was on her own trail, and he was afraid that at some point she would scout too far forward, through a canyon or across a stream invisible to everybody else, and pass into the cruel country of the invaders, the people with wings, the serpents who spoke, the poisonous lizards who never lost a fight. Where she would come to no supernally-lighted city but instead into a merciless occupation, lives of slavery o
nly barely, contemptuously disguised, which eventually would gather in her own as well. He knew that in her unspoken story of long pilgrimage and struggle he only happened to be on the same piece of trail for the moment. Understanding that she wished to protect him against whatever lay at its grim destination, he felt a queer twinge of gratitude.
These apprehensions, fugitive and as hard to recover as dreams, were confirmed by El Espinero, with whom Frank would visit now and then up at Temósachic, where the brujo took him out to gather herbs whose names he forgot as soon as he heard them, as if they were protecting themselves against future gringo mischief, and when the season turned, the husband of Estrella taught him to stalk antelope Tarahumare fashion, while rigged out in an antelope skin, and whenever they came in eyeball range of each other, Estrella looked through, past and around him as if he were invisible, which after a while he understood he was.
“Except,” advised El Espinero, “not to the young lady Wren. She will see you no matter what.”
“Even if we—”
“You will not be together for long. You know that already. But she will always see you. I have read the thorns, that is what they say.” They watched a couple of giant woodpeckers systematically eating a tree.
“The professors she works for return in September to the other side,” Frank said, “and soon after that the work is finished for the year. I can’t see ahead anymore. I should be warning her about something, keeping her safe from it, but—”
El Espinero smiled. “She is your child?”
“How can I just—”
“I looked also at the thorns of your life, Panchito. You walk very different paths. Yours is not as strange as hers, maybe.” Frank knew that whenever the brujo spoke to a white person of “paths,” he was thinking not too kindly of the railway, which like most of his people he hated for its destruction of the land, and what had once grown and lived there. Frank respected this—who at some point hadn’t come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love.
Wren got on the Juárez train one day in late October. Frank had thought of riding with her at least as far as San Pedro Junction anyway, but when the moment came he found he couldn’t.
“I’ll say hello to the girls on Market Street,” she said, and though their kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched.
Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian, having passed a few profitable weeks at Biarritz and Pau before the seasonal lull as English tourists gave way to those from the Continent, returning now eastward to the casinos of the Riviera, wandered across the Anarchist spa of Yz-les-Bains, hidden near the foothills of the Pyrenees, among steep hillsides covered with late-ripening vines, whose shoots were kept away from the early frosts by supports that looked like garlanded crucifixes. White columns and shadowed archways emerged from the mists of a cheerfully noisy gave a short distance up the valley, beyond which lay the trail-head of a secret and secure route into and out of Spain. Veterans of the Cataluñan struggle, former residents of Montjuich, hasheesh devotees enroute to Tangier, refugees from as far away as the U.S. and Russia, all could find lodging at this venerable oasis without charge, though in practice even those against the commoditizing of human shelter were often able to come up with modest sums in a dozen currencies, and leave them with Lucien the concierge.
In town, in an elliptical plaza, opening out unexpectedly, into afternoon sun and long shadows, dozens of small groups had set up camp, like bathers at the seaside, with coffee messes, cooking fires, bedrolls, flowers in flowerpots, awnings and tents. It might have reminded Reef of a mining camp early in the history of a silver strike, except that these solemn young folks carried with them an austerity, a penultimacy before some unstated future, a Single Idea, whose power everything else ran off of. Here it was not silver or gold but something else. Reef could not quite see what it was.
Grouped near one of the foci of the ellipse, a choir was practicing a sort of counter-Te Deum, more desperamus than laudamus, bringing news of coming dark and cold. Reef thought he recognized faces from the tunnels, as did Yashmeen from the Chunxton Crescent days, and Cyprian, after a moment of blankness, was amazed to discover who but old Ratty McHugh, with a beard, apparently his own, sandals, and a local goat-herder’s cap.
“Ratty?”
“Around here I’m ‘Reg.’” What Cyprian remarked more than any change of turnout was the radiance of an awakened spirit which Ratty, free unarguably now from the rigid mask of his old office self, was still learning how to keep contained. “I’m not in disguise, no, no this is who I really am—the government career, all that’s over for me, your fault, Cyprian really. The way you dealt with Theign was an inspiration to so many of us—sudden personnel vacuums all over Whitehall, amounting in some shops to mass desertion. Unless you have worked there you can have no idea of the joy in being released from it at last. I felt as though I were on ice skates, simply glided in one morning, through the Director’s door which queerly I don’t even recall opening first, broke into a meeting, said my ta-tas, kissed the typewriter lass on my way out, and damned if she didn’t kiss me back, put down what she was doing, and come along with me. Just let it all go. Sophrosyne Hawkes, lovely girl— there she is, over there.”
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