Was it possible, then, that here too . . . ?
He began to feel hot and cold.
Mike ran his hand gently on the horse’s mane. “Where’d you get him?” he asked.
The Indian was suddenly as closed as darkness. “You not have money?” he said.
Mike shook his head and the man led the horse away. He looked back once, narrowly, with a look of distrust that might be dangerous. Then he turned the corner and was gone.
12
Wild horses, he told himself, run to tablelands. They don’t run to woods and hills. They don’t like obstructions, they have a terror of falling, they know that broken legs can kill them. Mesas are what wild horses love.
Janasco was practically surrounded by mesas. There was one after another to choose from, one rising mountain, then a plateau, another rising mountain, then a plateau again. It was senseless to choose one in preference to another. Especially since nearly all tablelands are beautiful.
This one, the third they had explored that afternoon, was the most beautiful mesa Mike had ever seen. A barren and breathtaking magnitude of nothing. As if nature said it had no need to squander decoration on such amplitude—space was enough. Space and a burning sun and stillness.
In a little while, standing in the middle of an immensity, Mike realized there were, on closer view, a few decorations he hadn’t noticed. Sage, cactus, catchweed, goosegrass. But nothing obtrusive—simply there, and motionless. He wished his truck didn’t have to be there, even if it did look more magical than real, on fire as it seemed to be, silhouetted against the blaze of sunset. And seeing the boy standing away from him, wanting to be alone, Mike thought: he doesn’t agitate the landscape when he’s still.
Mike didn’t regret the afternoon. They couldn’t have made time northward anyway, without money, without food and gasoline. He didn’t regret at all having come to a place so beautiful that it made him lonely and elatedly happy, both at once, an impossible combination. Regretted nothing except there were no mustangs.
The only sign of them was skeletons. They saw the first one near a dead mesquite tree, half buried by sand and catchweed, no longer bone-colored but blanched paperwhite by the sun. Then two together—it had been a fight perhaps, two stallions out to prove that each one owned the mare, the mesa, the wind. But the last group had not been battling, unless it was disease or drought. A whole cemetery of them spread out on a sweep of plateau desert, fifty or sixty skeletons, dry bleaching bones.
Nothing alive. And Mike was sure there wouldn’t be. What a fool he’d been to believe the man. The horse he had tried to sell them was some sort of maverick, that was all, a wild one without its owner’s brand, a mean one undoubtedly, undeserving of a brand, banished from the herd. Wild horses don’t exist. Too bad.
That quickly changed his mood. He was hot and discouraged. Better to get off the mesa right away. He knew plateaus like this. Beautiful, beautiful, and suddenly it was nightfall and they were cold and windswept and cruel. It would be chilly enough sleeping in the town tonight, in the back of the truck with one of the doors missing.
The boy was walking toward him. His gait wasn’t as cocky as usual. “Nada,” he said.
“No,” said Mike quietly. “Not a goddamn thing.”
“Maybe he lie to us?”
“You think?”
“I think is no horses.” Then, because he was always looking on the bright side, “Anyway, who wants to ride a wild horse to Texas?”
Mike had kept his own counsel about his intentions. Now that there was no need to do so, he said, “I wasn’t figuring on riding them, I was figuring on selling them.”
Rafo grinned. “Oh, is good idea. Let us do that.”
The boy couldn’t stay with a thought of failure. Only an instant ago they had realized there were no horses, now he was going to be catching them anyway and selling them . . . anyway.
“Sure—let’s,” said Mike dryly.
Rafo, realizing the silliness of his enthusiasm, was embarrassed and turned in another direction.
“What’s that?” he asked. He pointed into the distance.
Mike looked. He saw something he was certain hadn’t been there before. It must be something imaginary, for he could have sworn . . . Yet, the light was changing quickly now and, with new reflections, it might be . . .
“It looks like a building,” he said.
Rafo agreed. “Looks like a house.”
“There wouldn’t be a house up here.”
It was a far way off. Perhaps when they arrived at the place, they would see it had been a trick of the light.
They got into the truck and drove to it. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It was a small house, hardly a house at all, nothing but a tiny structure of adobe, mud and wattle, painted white. It shouldn’t be here, Mike told himself; perhaps it wouldn’t be here when they got out of the truck and tried to touch it. But it was there to the touch and the door opened when they pushed it. Guardedly they went inside.
Indoors it all made sense. It was a chapel. One of the thousands of chapels that turn up unexpectedly in Mexico, in deserted places, everywhere and nowhere. This was a nowhere place. It was a single windowless room with only one large candle and a number of small, homemade tallow ones. All of them illuminated the icons of Mary, a crudely painted picture of an Indian-faced Virgin with part of her dress flaked away and part of the tin scorched by the flames of candles that perhaps had been too tall. That was all there was in the room. Nothing, not a thing more.
Rafo turned to Mike and smiled. “Is a shrine,” he said.
“Yes.”
“To Santa Maria.”
Mike nodded.
Rafo’s eyes were bright. “Santa Maria!” he said again. Then, even more happily, “How the hell do you like that?”
Mike smiled. “I like it fine.”
There was a moment of uncertainty; neither of them could make a decision. Then Macho made it. He strutted into the darkest corner of the room, scratched a little hollow in the earthen floor, squatted down in it, lowered his head into his neck feathers and went to sleep.
Mike took his coat off and laid it neatly on the floor. Then he sat down on the floor and started undoing the laces of his boots.
“What do you do?” Rafo was frowning.
“We’re going to spend the night here.”
For the first time he saw a trace of shock in the boy’s face. “Here—in a shrine?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell you think it is—a hotel?”
Mike said pleasantly, “Don’t say hell in front of her.”
Rafo was too irritated to be put off. “No! We cannot sleep in the shrine of Mother Mary!”
Gently teasing, Mike said, “Take your shoes off, kid. Mother won’t mind.”
Rafo gave it deep thought. After a bit, it struck him that Mike was right. So right in fact that he wondered why he himself had not thought of Mary that way. But what was even more remarkable was how a gringo could know so much about Santa Maria.
Following Mike’s example, he began to take his shoes off. But he caught himself and stopped. One shoe off, he hobbled over to the icon of Mary and crossed himself. “Perdóneme, Santa Maria.” It was then all right for him to take off his other shoe.
* * *
• • •
It must have been well after midnight when Mike awoke. He couldn’t stand the suffocating airlessness of the little chapel. Without any window, the shrine sweltered from the heat of the burning votive candles, and the air reeked of smoke and sanctity. He opened the door wide and saw a billion stars in a sky so bright, so close, that he felt if he went outdoors he would bump his head. He stood at the doorway and then, unable to find himself in such a vastness, lay down on the floor and gazed at the doorful of sky and thought: a doorful is all I can manage.
Then he told himse
lf, with a wry smile, that’s no way for a grown man to think: a grown man should be able to handle all the sky there is; only children should feel small in it. Well, Rafo wouldn’t feel small in it, Mike speculated; Rafo would think the immensity had been cut precisely to his measure. No. Rafo would pretend to think that way.
Pretending was what counted with the boy. Mike tried to shake such a thought—he knew it would lead him, sleepless and guilty, to rodeos and cold-eyed fathers and sick-minded mothers . . . Enough of that.
The wind blew gusts into the room. The candles thrashed against the draft; some that were not in glass containers guttered and went out. It was getting cold and Rafo stirred a little. Startled, he awoke and sat bolt upright, not certain where he was, unaware of Mike beside him. He stared wonder-eyed at the votive lights, then at the rectangle of blue sky, then back to the icon again. He seemed frightened by the picture of the saint, as if she had come awesomely alive to him in the night. He crossed himself and sat gazing at her, very still. He knew where he was, finally, and looked at Mike.
“You okay?” said Mike quietly.
“Sí.”
The boy shivered. He had not been sleeping in the sleeping bag but on it.
“Better get in the bag,” Mike said.
“I’m not cold.”
“You’re shivering.”
“Not from cold.”
“From what, then?”
Rafo didn’t answer immediately. “You believe in God, gringo?”
At one time Mike had actively believed in God; later, he had actively disbelieved. God was important to him both times. Now he neither believed nor disbelieved. God was now of so little account to him that he didn’t mind being elastic with the truth—besides, it was a standard answer to give a child. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“You are Cat’lic?”
“No.”
“Then how can you believe in God if you are not Cat’lic?”
With a smile he lied. “I try.”
“You better give up.”
“Okay.” Then, offhandedly, “Why do you think I should give up?”
Rafo thought it over and proceeded reflectively. “Well, even if you believe in God—if you are not Cat’lic, He don’t believe in you.”
“He plays favorites, huh?” He was teasing the boy, but not entirely.
Rafo took him seriously. “Yes, I think so. I do not believe this horseshit about we are all God’s children. Do you?”
“Hell, no.”
“But . . .” The idea, whatever it might be, was giving the boy trouble. “You got any children?” he asked.
“Me? No.”
“But you are married, yes?”
“I was, yes.”
“And no children?”
“We had one. She died.”
“Oh . . . I see . . .”
He was surprised at the boy’s solemnity. Even in talking about God he hadn’t been so reverent.
“Why you did not have more?”
Mike responded quickly, without thinking. “Maybe I shouldn’t have had the one!”
“Why not? You don’t like children?”
A simple question that should have been answerable in a word or two. But simple questions were the killers. Once, in an irritable moment, he had said to Laurie, “Don’t ask simple questions.” What he thought he meant was simpleminded ones, the witless queries of an emptyheaded little girl who will be satisfied with any answers, anything at all to stock the vacuum in her skull. But ultimately he realized he had truly meant “simple”—and the reason the simple ones gave him such vexation was not because he couldn’t answer them to a child, but to himself. You don’t like children? Of course I do—no, I don’t. Or, equivocating: Some I do—some I don’t. You don’t like children? Loss. Some way or other, loss. They grow up or grow away. They pretend not to understand, or they actually don’t. Or they make themselves misunderstood and they’re gone. The moment before you’re ready to talk to them, just as you have something to say that they’re likely to hear, they vanish.
They die.
A simple question: You don’t like children? Don’t you, Mike Milo?
“No, I don’t,” he said.
Why did the boy look at him with such astonishment? Mike had read somewhere that all Mexicans love children and treat them sweetly, tenderly. Did the boy so believe it to be true that he could deny his own experience—the cruelty of his mother, the neglect of his father—and be shocked when somebody said he didn’t like children? Or, worse, was the boy shocked that Mike didn’t like them? Why? Have I given him any indication that I like them—or that I like him? None, Mike told himself. His dishonesty had not gone that far.
If you’re asking simple questions, Rafo, ask this one: “Do you like me, Mike?” Simple answer: no. It’s a truth you can count on.
The wind was stronger now than when he had opened the door and too many candles were blowing out. It made Rafo nervous to see that happen. Mike relighted them but as soon as he did another gust came. Regretfully losing the oblong of blue sky, Mike shut the door.
They both heard the sound. There could be no doubt of it for they both responded to it.
A neigh. A wild neigh, then another, then seemingly a number of them together.
Mike tore open the door and ran out onto the mesa. He heard Rafo a step behind him.
Mike pointed. They were barely visible in the distance. Surprising that the sound of them should have been so clear. Mustangs. Three wild mustangs on the horizon, against the moonlit sky. One of them reared, then another. They raced across the horizon, dipped beneath it and were gone, almost instantaneously reappearing against another sweep of sky. Then, to snatch the breath away, a whole herd of wild horses stampeded against the wide arc of the horizon, sounding a distant thunder across the mesa.
“Jesus!” Mike said. “Oh, Jesus!”
He ran indoors and, raging with impatience at himself, pulled his boots on. Rafo was getting into his shoes, cursing the delay. The boy was ready to go, his shoestrings still flying.
“Hurry up!” he yelled.
They rushed outdoors together.
Gone. The mustangs, every last one of them, were gone.
Totally, not a sign of any of them. No sound of hoofbeats, no dust in the air, nothing. Well, the middle of the night, write it off, a dream turned nightmare.
Suddenly the hoofbeats again. Not a herd this time, only a few came over the horizon, two at first, then a third, a white one stampeding directly toward Mike and Rafo. It stopped, turned and the whole herd was back, charging over the rise of the tableland.
The white one reared, seeing something or catching a scent on the wind. It stopped, twisted itself around, came back and reared again. The herd, one after another, began to catch the signal. Some were quietly nervous, others roared.
Mike yelled, “Come on!”
He raced toward the truck, Rafo at his heels. “What we do?” the boy called. “What we do?”
“I’m going to start the truck! Then you get in—and drive! I’ll get on top!”
The kid, running alongside him, couldn’t understand a single word. “What? What?”
Mike got into the truck, started the motor and jumped out.
“Get in!” he shouted.
The boy was on the verge of tears. “What? I don’t know what you going to do! I don’t know what you want me to do!”
Mike tried to calm down—he couldn’t. “You’re getting behind the wheel,” he shouted, as if the boy were deaf. “You drive—right into the middle of them—right into the herd! Understand? And I’m riding on top! Get in!”
“No!” Rafo was panicking.
“What’s the matter—scared?”
“Yes! You will ride on top? You can’t!”
“Get in, I said!”
“No! You will
get dizzy!”
“Okay, I’ll go by myself!”
He started to get back in the truck, but Rafo ran after him.
“No, I go! I go!”
“Get away!” Mike pushed him roughly. “You’re scared!”
“No!”
Rafo jumped in and got behind the wheel. He didn’t go into gear but shoved his foot all the way down on the gas pedal—angry, defiant—to make the motor howl. Mike jumped up on the hood, then onto the top of the truck. He lay down flat.
“Turn the headlights on!” he ordered.
The headlights blazed.
“All right!” he yelled. “Go!”
The truck lurched out. It veered one way, then another, as if the boy had never driven before, then it straightened and charged in a swift line across the mesa. Bumping over sage, mesquite, cactus, the vehicle went sharp as a torchlight toward the herd of mustangs. Mesmerized by the light, the horses stood still, stone still, carved forever. As the truck bore in on them, they reared, whinnied, collided with each other, then went berserk across the sky. Routed by panic, they scattered in all directions. Only a few remained, racing wildly on variable winds, a hundred directions.
“Follow the white one—follow the white!” Mike cried.
The truck turned, went flightily in pursuit of the white mustang. Terrorized, the wild horse at last stopped, changing his mind and his bearings and found a single beeline—away.
“Follow him!”
Mike moved from his prone position to his knees. His hands on the flat rock of the truck, bracing himself against the wind, he called:
“Closer! Go closer!”
The truck moved right behind the mustang.
“Closer!”
Now, alongside, Mike stood up, crouched but fully ready. The truck was close to the white animal. So close that even over the noise of the motor, he could hear the snort of the mustang, like a rushing sob.
Cry Macho Page 19