Cities of the Plain tbt-3

by Cormac McCarthy

  They went back into the kitchen and John Grady leaned and cupped his hand at the top of the lamp chimney and blew out the flame and they went out and shut the door behind them. They walked out in the yard and John Grady turned and looked back toward the cabin. The night was overcast. Dark, cloudy, cold. They walked down to the truck.

  Will they wait supper on you?

  Yeah, said HZctor. Sure.

  You can eat at the house if you want.

  That's all right.

  They climbed in and pulled the truck doors shut. John Grady started the engine.

  Can she ride a horse? said HZctor.

  Yeah. She can ride.

  They pulled out down the rutted road, the tools sliding and clanking behind them in the truckbed. En quZ piensas? said John Grady.

  Nada.

  They jostled on, the truck in second gear, the headlights rocking. When they rounded the first turn in the road the lights of the city appeared out on the plain below them thirty miles away.

  It gets cold up here, HZctor said.

  Yep.

  You spent the night up here yet?

  I was up here a couple of nights till past midnight.

  He looked at HZctor. HZctor took his makings from his shirtpocket and sat rolling a cigarette.

  Tienes tus dudas.

  He shrugged. He popped a match with the nail of his thumb and lit the cigarette and blew the match out. Hombre de precauci-n, he said.

  Yo?

  Yo.

  Two owls crouching in the dust of the road turned their pale and heartshaped faces in the trucklights and blinked and rose on their white wings as silent as two souls ascending and vanished in the darkness overhead.

  Buhos, said John Grady.

  Lechuzas.

  Tecolotes.

  HZctor smiled. He took a drag on the cigarette. His dark face glowed in the dark glass. Quiz++s, he said.

  Pueda ser.

  Pueda ser. S'.

  WHEN HE WALKED into the kitchen Oren was still at the table. He hung up his hat and went to the sink and washed and got his coffee. Socorro came out of her room and shooed him away from the stove and he took his coffee to the table and sat. Oren looked up from his paper.

  What's the news, Oren?

  You want the good or the bad?

  I dont know. Just pick out somethin in the middle.

  They dont have nothin like that in here. It wouldnt be news. I guess not.

  McGregor girl's been picked to be the Sun Carnival Queen. You ever see her?

  No.

  Sweet girl. How's your place comin?

  Okay.

  Socorro set his plate before him together with a plate of biscuits covered with a cloth.

  She aint no city gal is she?

  No.

  That's good.

  Yeah. It is.

  Parham tells me she's pretty as a speckled pup.

  He thinks I'm crazy.

  Well. You might be a little crazy. He might be a little jealous. He watched the boy eat. He sipped his coffee.

  When I got married my buddies all told me I was crazy. Said I'd regret it.

  Did you?

  No. It didnt work out. But I didnt regret it. It wasnt her fault. What happened?

  I dont know. A lot of things. Mostly I couldnt get along with her folks. The mother was just a goddamned awful woman. I thought I'd seen awful but I hadnt. If the old man would of lived we might of had a chance. But he had a bad heart. I seen the whole thing comin. When I inquired after his health it was more than just idle curiosity. He finally up and died and here she come. Bag and baggage. That was pretty much the end of it.

  He took his cigarettes from the table and lit one. He blew smoke thoughtfully out across the room. He watched the boy.

  We was together three years almost to the day. She used to bathe me, if you can believe that. I liked her real well. She'd of been a orphan we'd be married yet.

  I'm sorry to hear it.

  A man gets married he dont know what's liable to happen. He may think he does, but he dont.

  Probably right.

  If you sincerely want to hear all about what is wrong with you and what you ought to do to rectify it all you need to do is let them inlaws on the place. You'll get a complete rundown on the subject and I guarantee it.

  She aint got no family.

  That's good, said Oren. That's your smartest move yet.

  After Oren had gone he sat over his coffee a long time. Through the window far to the south he could see the thin white adderstongues of lightning licking silently along the rim of the sky in the darkness over Mexico. The only sound was the clock ticking in the hallway.

  When he entered the barn Billy's light was still on. He went down to the stall where he kept the pup and gathered it up all twisting and whimpering in the crook of his arm and brought it back to his bunkroom. He stood at the door and looked back.

  Goodnight, he called.

  He pushed aside the curtain and felt overhead in the dark for the lightswitch chain.

  Goodnight, called Billy.

  He smiled. He let go the chain and sat on his bunk in the darkness rubbing the pup's belly. He could smell the horses. The wind was gusting up and a piece of loose roofingtin at the far end of the barn rattled and the wind passed on. It was cold in the room and he thought to light the little kerosene heater but after a while he just pulled off his boots and trousers and put the pup inhis box and crawled under the blankets. The wind outside and the cold in the room were like those winter nights on the north Texas plains when he was a child in his grandfather's house. When the storms blew down from the north and the prairie land about the house stood white in the sudden lightning and the house shook in the thunderclaps. On just such nights and just such mornings in the year he'd gotten his first colt he'd wrap himself in his blanket and go out and cross to the barn, leaning into the wind, the first drops of rain slapping at him hard as pebbles, moving down the long barn bay like some shrouded refugee among the sudden slats of light that stood staccato out of the parted board walls, moving through those serried and electric prosceniums where they flared white and fugitive across the barn row on row until he reached the stall where the little horse stood waiting and unlatched the door and sat in the straw with his arms around its neck till it stopped trembling. He would be there all night and he would be there in the morning when Arturo came to the barn to feed. Arturo would walk with him back to the house before anyone else was awake, brushing the straw from his blanket as he walked beside him, not saying a word. As if he were a young lord. As if he were never to be disinherited by war and war's machinery. All his early dreams were the same. Something was afraid and he had come to comfort it. He dreamed it yet. And this: standing in the room in the black suit tying the new black tie he wore to his grandfather's funeral on the cold and windy day of it. And standing in his cubicle in Mac McGovern's horsebarn on another such day in the cold dawn before work in another such suit, the two halves of the box it came in lying on the bunk with the crepe tissue spilling out and the cut string lying beside it on the bunk together with the knife he'd cut it with that had belonged to his father and Billy standing in the doorway watching him. He buttoned the coat and stood. His hands crossed at the wrist in front of him. His face pale in the glass of the little mirror he'd propped on one of the two by fours that braced the rough stud wall of the room. Pale in the light of the winter that was on the country. Billy leaned and spat in the chaff and turned and went out down the barn bay and crossed to the house for breakfast.

  THE LAST TIME he was to see her was in the same corner room on the second floor of the Dos Mundos. He watched from the window and saw her pay the driver and he went to the door so that he could watch her come up the stairs. He held her hands while she sat half breathless on the edge of the bed.

  Est++s bien? he said.

  S', she said. Creo que s'.

  He asked was she sure she had not changed her mind.

  No, she said. Y toe?

&
nbsp; Nunca.

  Me quieres?

  Para siempre. Y toe?

  Hasta elfin de mi vida.

  Pues eso es todo.

  She said that she had tried to pray for them but that she could not.

  PorquZ no?

  No sZ. Cre' que Dios no me oir'a.

  El oir++. Reza el domingo. Dile que es importante.

  They made love and lay with her curled against him and not moving but breathing very quietly against his side. He did not know if she was awake but he told her the things about his life that he had not told her. He told her about working for the hacendado at Cuatro CiZnegas and about the man's daughter and the last time he saw her and about being in the prison in Saltillo and about the scar on his face that he had promised to tell her about and never had. He told her about seeing his mother on stage at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio Texas and about the times that he and his father used to ride in the hills north of San Angelo and about his grandfather and the ranch and the Comanche trail that ran through the western sections and how he would ride that trail in the moonlight in the fall of the year when he was a boy and the ghosts of the Comanches would pass all about him on their way to the other world again and again for a thing once set in motion has no ending in this world until the last witness has passed.

  The shadows were long in the room before they left. He told her that the driver GutiZrrez would pick her up at the cafe in la Calle de Noche Triste and take her to the other side. He would have with him the documents necessary for her to cross.

  Todo est++ arreglado, he said.

  She held his hands more tightly. Her dark eyes studied him. He told her that there was nothing to fear. He said that Ram-n was their friend and that the papers were arranged and that no harm would come to her.

  fl to recoger++ a las siete por la ma-ana. Tienes que estar all' en punto.

  EstarZ all'.

  QuZdate adentro hasta que Zl llegue.

  S', s'.

  No le digas nada a nadie.

  No. Nadie.

  No puedes traer nada contigo.

  Nada?

  Nada.

  Tengo miedo, she said.

  He held her. Dont be afraid, he said.

  They sat very quietly. Down in the street the vendors had begun to call. She pressed her face against his shoulder.

  Hablan los sacerdotes espa-ol? she said.

  S'. Ellos hablan espa-ol.

  Quiero saber, she said, si crees hay perd-n de pecados.

  He opened his mouth to speak but she put her hand to his lips. Lo que crees en to coraz-n, she said.

  He stared past her dark and shining hair toward the deepening dusk in the streets of the city. He thought about what he believed and what he did not believe. After a while he said that he believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.

  Cualquier pecado?

  Cualquier. S'.

  Sin excepci-n de nada? She pushed her hand against his lips a second time. He kissed her fingers and took her hand away.

  Con la excepci-n de desesperaci-n, he said. Para eso no hay remedio.

  Lastly she asked if he would love her all his life and she'd have touched her fingers to his mouth but he held her hand. No tengo que pensarlo, he said. S'. Para todo mi vida.

  She took his face in her hands and kissed him. Te amo, she said. Y serZ to esposa.

  She rose and turned and held his hands. Debo irme, she said. He stood and put his arms around her and kissed her there in the darkening room. He would have walked her down the hallway to the head of the stairs but she stopped him at the door and kissed him and said goodbye. He listened to her steps in the stairwell. He went to the window to watch for her but she must have gone along the street beneath him because he could not see her. He sat on the bed in the empty room and listened to the sounds of all that alien commerce in the world outside. He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his own doing. The room was dark and the neon hotel sign had come on outside and after a while he rose and took his hat from the chair by the bed and put it on and went out and down the stairs.

  AT THE INTERSECTION the cab stopped. A small man with a black crape armband stepped into the street and raised his hand and the cabdriver took off his hat and set it on the dashboard. The girl leaned forward to see. She could hear trumpets muted in the street, the clop of hooves.

  The musicians who appeared were old men in suits of dusty black. Behind them came the pallbearers carrying upon their shoulders a flowerstrewn pallet. Wreathed among those flowers the pale face of a young man newly dead. His hands lay at his sides and he jostled woodenly on his coolingboard there astride the shoulders of his bearers and the wild notes from the dented gypsy horns carried back from the glass of the storefronts they passed and back from the old mud or stuccoed facades and a clutch of women in black rebozos passed weeping and children and men in black or with black armbands and among them led by the girl the blind maestro shuffling with his small steps and look of pained wonder. Behind them came two mismatched horses drawing to a weathered wooden cart and in the bed of it unswept of its straw and chaff a wooden coffinbox of handplaned boards pinned with wooden trunnels and no nails to it like some sephardic box of old and the wood blacked by scorching it and the blacking sealed with beeswax and lampoil so that save for the faint wood grain of it it looked a thing of burnished iron. Behind the cart came a man bearing the coffinlid and he carried it upon his back like death's penitent and his clothes and he were blackened with it wax or no. The cabdriver crossed himself silently. The girl crossed herself and kissed the tips of her fingers. The cart rattled past and the spoked wheels diced slowly the farther streetside and the solemn watchers there, a cardfan of sorted faces under the shopfronts and the long skeins of light in the street broken in the turning spokes and the shadows of the horses tramping upright and oblique before the oblong shadows of the wheels shaping over the stones and turning and turning.

  She put up her hands and pressed her face into the musty back of the cabseat. She sat back, one hand over her eyes and her face averted into her shoulder. Then she sat bolt upright with her arms beside her and cried out and the driver wrenched himself around in the seat. Se-orita? he said. Se-orita?

  THE CEILING of the room was of concrete and bore the impression of the boards used to form it, the concrete knots and nailheads and the fossil arc of the circlesaw's blade from some mountain sawmill. There was a single sooty bulb that burned there with a grudging orange light and a millermoth that patrolled it in random clockwise orbits.

  She lay strapped to a steel table. The steel was cold against her back through the short white shift she wore. She looked at the light. She turned her head and looked at the room. After a while a nurse came in through the gray metal door and she turned her stained and dirty face toward her. Por favor, she whispered. Por favor.

  The nurse loosed the straps and smoothed her hair back from her face and said she would return with something for her to drink, but when the door closed she sat upright on the table and climbed down. She looked for some place where they might have put her clothes but save for a second steel table against the far wall the room was empty. The door when she opened it led to a long green corridor dimly lit and stretching away to a closed door at the end. She went down the corridor and tried the door. It opened onto a flight of concrete steps, a rail of metal pipe. She descended three flights and exited into the darkened street.

  She did not know where she was. At the corner she asked a man for directions to el centro and he stared at her breasts and continued to do so even as he spoke. She set out along the broken sidewalk. She watched the paving for glass or stones. The carlights that passed fetched her slight figure up onto the walls in enormous dark transparency with the shift burned away and the bones all but showing and then passing cast her reeling backwards to vanish
once more into the dark. A man pulled up in a car and drove beside her and talked to her in low obscenities. He pulled ahead and waited. She turned into a dirt alley between two buildings and crouched shivering behind some battered steel oildrums. She waited a long time. It was very cold. When she went out again the car was gone and she went on. She passed a lot where a dog lunged at her silently along a fence and then stood in the fencecorner shrouded in its own breath silently watching her go. She passed a darkened house and a yard where an old man also in nightclothes stood urinating against a mud wall and these two nodded silently to each other across the darkened space like figures met in a dream. The sidewalk gave out and she walked on in the cold sand along the roadside and stopped from time to time to stand tottering while she picked the little goathead burrs from the soles of her bleeding feet. She kept the haze of light from the city before her and she walked a long time. When she crossed the Boulevard 16 de Septiembre she kept her arms folded tightly at her bosom and her eyes lowered in the glare of the headlights, crossing half naked in a hooting of carhorns like some tattered phantom routed out of the ordinal dark and hounded briefly through the visible world to vanish again into the history of men's dreams.

  She went on through the barrios north of the city, along the old mud walls and the tin sides of warehouses where the sand streets were lit only by the stars. Someone was singing on the road a song from her own childhood and she soon passed a woman walking toward the city. They spoke good evening each to each and passed on but the woman stopped and turned and called after her.

  Ad-nde va? she called.

  A mi casa.

  The woman stood quietly. The girl asked do I know you but the woman said that she did not. She asked the girl if this were her barrio and the girl said that it was and the woman then asked her how it could be that she did not know her. When she did not answer the woman came slowly back down the road toward her.

  QuZ pas-? she said.

  Nada.

  Nada, the woman said. She walked in a half circle around her where she stood shivering with her arms crossed over her breasts. As if to find some favored inclination in the blue light of the desert stars by which she would stand revealed for who she trulywas.