The Grey Pilgrim

by J. M. Hayes

  They rode south for a few hours until he led them through an easy pass in the range they’d been paralleling. As soon as they were through she spotted Baboquivari Peak and realized they were a hell of a lot farther north and east than she’d thought. Burns’ place would be closer too. It made her feel stupid again. Much more of this, she decided, and she was going to develop a complex.

  They rode east then, until the sun slipped beneath the horizon behind them and a sky, filled with broken clouds, wove itself into a quilt of twilight and flame. They stopped in the gathering darkness to share a quick meal of cold fry bread and jerked beef. It was close to ten before they reached their goal, dismounted, hitched the horses, and climbed onto the porch to knock on the Burns’ front door.

  Bill and Edith were amazed to see her, and very relieved. They’d begun to worry when they found out where they’d sent her. But they were in sympathy with Jujul’s refusal to register his people. As soon as she assured them she was all right and had been well treated, she was able to secure their promise of silence about having seen her until she told them it was OK.

  “You really ought to let that Fitzpatrick fellow know you’re all right,” Edith told her. “He’s been well nigh crazy with worry about you.” The way she said it made Mary think Edith suspected there was something between them. It also reassured her a little. What she’d believed J.D. felt was probably really there. Only that prompted guilt because she’d hardly given Larry a thought. She owed him everything but she hadn’t even glanced at his letters. So, there she was, after all that time away from both of them and no clearer about how to handle things than when she left. And this still wasn’t the time or place to work it out.

  Bill helped her get the pickup started. She loaded her pack and showed Jujul how to get in and out and where he should sit. He seemed delighted with the truck, like a child with a new toy. She estimated the driving time, there and back, allowed a few hours for their peace council, and told Bill and Edith to expect them back about dawn. Bill promised to feed and water their horses. He’d have them saddled and ready when they returned.

  She thanked them, climbed in the truck, and pointed it down the ruts that led to Tucson.

  The White Man’s Village

  He thought they would ride their horses straight into the White Man’s village of Tucson. He was surprised when Marie told him they would be too conspicuous if they did so, that her people now almost universally got around in machines. No one rode horses in Tucson anymore.

  Jujul had been curious about the machines, these things that moved themselves, since he first saw one almost twenty summers ago. Hers was the first he had ever ridden in, or even touched. It was interesting. The thing was big and heavy, with intricate mechanisms which allowed the opening and closing of its doors. And there was another handle inside which he could turn one way to raise and the other to lower the glass window beside him. Most curious, most enjoyable.

  The machine had a gait very different from a horse. A horse moves with a regular rocking motion and one simply moves with it, adjusting to its rhythm, but Marie’s truck moved with a motion understandable only to itself. They had hardly gone any distance before it bucked so violently he struck his head against the roof. Marie told him to hold onto the seat. He did so, and it was just as well because as their speed increased, its motions grew wilder. They pitched and bounced and rolled along in a way that, while alarming, was also exciting.

  They did not move much faster than a horse, though, and Jujul began to doubt the efficiency of these machines. Not only was it just a little faster, it was confined to following a set of rutted tracks across the desert, incapable of going cross country. He though Marie’s claim of how much time the truck would save them on their visit to Tucson must be exaggerated.

  And then they came out on a smooth ribbon of roadway, like a path so heavily traveled over generations that even the rock it crosses is worn smooth, yet wide enough for ten men to walk abreast along its surface. It had always puzzled him why the White Men would want to build such a thing. When they turned onto it, Marie increased the truck’s speed until they moved faster than he had imagined could be possible. It took his breath away. No horse could come close to this pace, and there was no longer much sense of motion to the ride. His respect for the Anglos increased.

  The truck’s headlights pierced the darkness, showing the path ahead for a distance that amazed him. Occasionally, out of the blackness into which they rushed, came a faint glow. It would separate into two distinct blinding flames that launched themselves toward him at a mad pace, then whooshed by Marie’s side of the truck, leaving only tiny fading embers to mark the passing of another machine such as theirs. The first time it occurred Jujul would have torn open his door and leaped for his life, but he was unable to recall how the mechanism worked, and long before the memory returned the danger was safely past. After a few such encounters, it became pleasant to watch these rushing creatures of the night, to wonder whom they might contain and what important missions demanded that they hurry so across the world.

  They topped a rise and a valley suddenly spread before them. It was filled with stars. He thought that when Elder Brother saved the sky from falling he must have missed part of it, and that it lay there in their path. He found he could hardly breathe. But as they continued to rush down into that valley, gradually the stars separated into individual lights, not actually stars at all, but only the artificial lights of the Anglos. He could not have been more amazed if they actually were stars and it turned out that Marie’s people lived in their company. Tucson’s name was derived from an O’odham word meaning “black foundation” for the volcanic hills against whose flanks it rested. He had expected something like that. But he had also expected a village not unlike his own. With the strange buildings of the White Men, of course, and machines in their corrals along with cattle and horses, but never had he dreamed of such a strange and magnificent place as this. It went on forever. In the space it occupied there was room for every village of the People he had ever seen, and more, far more. Buildings, not just like the strange ones at ranches, but others large beyond belief, some that spread across neatly laid-out squares and others that towered like cliffs into the darkness, pinnacles on which to prop the sky. And all of them ablaze with light, colored light, flashing light, moving light. He sought words to express his reaction to this awesome place and had none. Then a recently learned English phrase came to mind.

  “Oh fuck!” he said.

  Dead Men, Waiting

  It was the wrong night for a movie and the wrong movie for the night. The film was a light comedy depicting the adventures of a well meaning young man who was having difficulty remaining faithful to his lovely wife, and whose life was further complicated by the arrival of a shallow cad offering sauce to the goose. It came a little too close to home to be funny, what with Larry and his redhead out there somewhere and J.D.’s earlier decision to take Mary away from him. He hadn’t bothered to consider whether she might want to be taken. He was also having trouble reconciling himself with being the sort of person who would even try.

  J.D. finished his popcorn and soda and walked out into the cool night somewhere in the middle of the first reel. His Ford was in a parking lot off south Stone Avenue. He walked through empty streets, ahead of the bar and theater crowds and behind the shoppers and diners. Downtown Tucson was nearly his own.

  He played “she loves me, she loves me not,” with a mental daisy as he strolled along, occasionally pausing to do a little wrestling with his conscience about the morality of the situation. Larry was a healthy young male, suddenly without his mate. In the same circumstances, how many men, J.D. included, could have avoided what the redhead was offering? And how significant was it, really? Did it mean he loved Mary any less? How would she deal with it if she found out? And what would it make of the man who used it as a weapon, or even a motive? Lots of questions, no satisfactory answers, the stuff of life.

  J.D. was so filled with his own p
roblems, he nearly collided with the beggar when he rounded the corner onto Ochoa Street. A pair of hollow, vacant eyes looked out at him from under the brim of a greasy hat. Ragged clothes, too big for his shrunken frame, hung from narrow shoulders. Gnarled hands held the crutches firmly in the pits of his arms. The right leg was long and skinny, the left, a stump that ended above the knee.

  J.D. was momentarily frozen, unable to breathe, unable to move. The man raised an arm, reached out toward him. J.D. stumbled away. He would have fallen into the street but for the parked car he backed into.

  “No,” he heard someone whisper. “No.” It was his own voice, harsh, almost unrecognizable with terror. And then he was running. He couldn’t stop until he found the Ford. The shaking didn’t end until he got home and significantly dropped the level in a bottle of scotch. Only then did he start to believe his own denial. Only then did he understand it really hadn’t been Ortiz.

  ***

  Questas had stopped screaming. He was only making the regular bubbling moans necessary for a man sucking air through congealing blood. The sun was gone and it was starting to get cold. J.D. watched through slitted eyes. It was too dark to see much. The moon would be coming soon. He couldn’t decide whether that would make it better or worse.

  There was a flat place up in the rocks. The Nationalists had set up camp there. They’d sent a couple of sentries out to guard the road before dark. He knew because one of them stepped on his hand as they went by. It hurt worse than the knife had, but he didn’t move or make a sound. He was beginning to think he might survive if only Questas didn’t scream anymore. If he did, J.D. was afraid he might join him. Then they would find him too and give him more reasons to scream.

  There were still two men near Questas. He could see the glow of their cigarettes and hear the low murmur of their conversation. They weren’t working on Questas anymore. Questas was beyond caring and that took the fun out of it, but they still sat with him, perhaps to watch him die.

  J.D. moved. He had wondered if he could anymore. He flexed the fingers of his injured right hand and they rustled in the gravel. Too loud, but no one came to investigate—no one came to carve him into a likeness of Questas. He moved the hand again. All his fingers worked. Nothing was broken. He brought the hand to his belt and checked. The knife was still there. They’d been careless in their looting. It was a good knife.

  He tried sitting up. His head spun a little because of the tension of lying still for so long with them all around and Questas screaming. He made hardly a sound. No one noticed. He tried getting to his knees and it was still OK. He stood. Figures around a fire up in the rocks cast huge, misshapen shadows that danced malevolently on the surrounding brush and boulders. A match flared as one of those by Questas lit another smoke. His companion muttered an indistinct comment.

  J.D. took a step. Gravel crunched loudly under his boot. His heart leaped into his throat and he stopped and held his breath. His back crawled, waiting for a bullet. But the thunder of his step sounded only in his own ears. They still hadn’t noticed him.

  His breath came in shallow gasps he couldn’t control as he bent and untied his boots and slipped them off. He tied their laces together and draped them around his neck. He tried again. Sharp stones bit through his ragged socks, but it didn’t matter. He moved as softly as the night breeze. Once he stepped on something soft and yielding and nearly fell. It was only Rodolfo, who could no longer protest. After that he felt ahead with his toes before he put any weight down.

  The sentries had posted themselves just outside Tres Santos where the road began to narrow and rise up into the pass. One of the guards was asleep, snoring softly. The other lounged against a rock, smoking and gazing at the stars. The sky was full of them, silent witnesses to Spain’s agony.

  He could have killed the sentries easily. Perhaps he should have, but it only occurred to him later, long after he was away from there. He had a knife and more than enough motive, but his feet had a will of their own. He passed them by.

  He couldn’t remember the journey. Just as well, he already remembered too much. They told him later that he was still going on like that, boots strung around his neck, knife clutched in his bruised hand. The bottom of his socks were worn away and he was leaving bloody footprints behind him in the dust. That was how he entered the village of Los Gatos.

  Los Gatos might have been a prosperous place once, but not when J.D. reached it. It was too close to the front. Most of the population had left, and the few dozen homes and businesses that hadn’t been destroyed by the regular bombing runs had been claimed by Ortiz and his band.

  It they took him to see Ortiz when he arrived, he didn’t remember that either. He didn’t even remember finding the village. After the sentries, the first thing he remembered was waking in the night screaming. It was something he would do for quite a while.

  A burly man whose hair hung over his forehead in greasy locks brought a lamp into his room and told him everything was all right, he was safe. The man needed a bath even worse than J.D. did, but he had a soothing voice. They shared a cigarette, then he left the lamp on the table and J.D. slept again. In the morning they took him to see Ortiz.

  Ortiz had made his headquarters in the local cantina. But for the kitchens, the building remained untouched by the bombs. Ortiz sat behind a table in the back corner and in the dim interior it was hard to make him out. He was tall and gaunt, his clothes hanging loosely on him as if they had been made for a bigger man. His eyes burned with an inner fire. Perhaps he consumed himself from within and that was why he was shrunken, why his clothes no longer fit. He wore a hat that would have been fashionable in any metropolitan capital, but it was filthy. J.D. had the feeling he could tell how long Ortiz had owned it, dating it by counting the rings of salt about the band the way one counted a tree’s rings.

  Ortiz asked him who he was, where he came from. How he happened to come to Los Gatos with bare, bloody feet and a wound cut into his chest. It was the first J.D. realized he’d damaged his feet. He looked down and saw them swathed in bandages, painless thanks to someone’s ministrations.

  J.D. told him about Saturnino Martinez, of whom Ortiz had heard. He told him about their defections and how their supplies dried up as the last of their contacts with the local population left. He told Ortiz about the peasant and the aerodrome, and he told him about the trap.

  He told it as if he’d witnessed it from a safe distance, not as a man to whom it had done the things it had. When he told them about Questas, Ortiz’ lieutenants began to mutter among themselves and their leader emerged from behind the table. That was when J.D. discovered Ortiz had given a leg to the cause. A filthy pant leg was neatly folded and pinned not far above the knee. Ortiz grabbed his crutches in great knobby hands and swung himself across the room. There was a table there with a map under the remains of someone’s supper dishes.

  “They might still be there,” Ortiz muttered. His lieutenants gathered around the map, and the ones who’d brought J.D. returned him to his room. Rest, they told him, recover. J.D. promised to do his best. Try not to think of it, they told him. He tried that too, but it didn’t work. He woke the camp regularly with the echoes of Questas’ screams.

  For several days the camp was almost vacant. Those who remained came to comfort him less and less. J.D. felt them watching him cautiously from the corner of their eyes as he sat in the shade of the olive tree in front of his room. It was as if they feared his dreams were contagious.

  One morning J.D. was roughly awakened by a pair of men. They told him Ortiz wanted him. He was still lost in the webs of nightmare. Questas voice called from beyond the veil of sleep. J.D. moved too slowly to suit them. One of them gave him a hard shove and he stumbled and fell.

  “Wait,” the other said. “Time for that later.”

  J.D. didn’t understand. The one who pushed him was the same man who had comforted him that first night and brought the lamp.

  The sun was just peeking over the hills east of th
e village when they led him into the cantina. The place looked the same as it had before, only this time most of Ortiz’ band lined the walls. Ortiz sat behind his favorite table, his missing leg hidden and his eyes burning so bright that J.D. wondered briefly why anyone had bothered to light the room’s lamps.

  “Tell it again,” Ortiz demanded. “Tell me what happened to Martinez and the others and how you got away.”

  J.D. wasn’t healed yet. His feet and the cut across his chest were doing nicely, but his soul still held a wound that festered and wept and required treatment. He should have understood that something was wrong. He should have asked. Instead, he answered, like an automaton. He had relearned the habit of doing what people told him—not of thinking, reasoning for himself. Thinking was dangerous. Thinking took him back to the road outside Tres Santos. He avoided thinking. He did as he was told and recited it again. He may have even used the same words.

  By the time J.D. finished, the thing that burned within Ortiz had drawn him erect. As J.D. spoke, Ortiz paced, tripedally, across the open floor. When J.D. stopped, so did he. He waved a crutch toward the door that had once led to the kitchens and now led to a jumble of rubble and the alley beyond.

  “Bring him in,” he shouted.

  Two men carried in a stretcher. On it lay a form as fully bandaged as the contents of an Egyptian sarcophagus. Once it had been a man. Now it lay there and fought for air. It moaned slightly as they set it down, and J.D. knew who it was.

  “Questas,” he said. The horror that washed over him made his voice not much louder than a whisper. He tried to go to the shattered remnant. He wanted to beg its forgiveness, to make it understand why he had left it behind. He’d thought Questas as good as dead. Still, he should have done something. He should have killed the ones who sat beside him. He should have brought Questas out with him, or ended his suffering. The men who’d brought J.D. to the cantina continued to hold him by his arms. J.D. didn’t have the strength to break free. They probably didn’t even realize that he tried.